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The value of masculinity to society and to the species is rarely acknowledged in our modern gynocentric culture. Masculinity is frequently portrayed as toxic and destructive and in need of reform or removal. At the same time, we are told that women “create life” and that if only women ran the world there would be peace. This culture has an embedded belief that women are superior and men are inferior. Everything wrong in the world is masculine and everything good in the world is feminine. Gynocentrism is based on a belief system in female superiority and so it becomes essential to debunk this belief system if gynocentrism is to be overcome. This article will be the first in one of a number of articles, that will focus on debunking the core foundational premise of female superiority.
The foundation of this belief system in female superiority is that the value of human life is primarily or exclusively based on its reproductive utility. Women have a uterus, women invest more in reproduction, women are the rate limiting factor of reproduction, so therefore women are biologically more valuable than men.
This is the core foundation of the belief structure in female superiority. Does this sound familiar? It should. Even in the manosphere this line of reasoning is promoted by some as an unquestioned truth and the moment you make any step to challenge this belief, you are labelled a denier of biology. In reality, the real deniers of biology are those that deliberately ignore areas of biology that do not fit their gynocentric narrative that the golden uterus is all the counts. These are the reproductive reductionists.
I knew even when I was writing my article “The Normalisation of Gynocentrism”1, and before it was even published, that there would be one specific area of that article that would trigger the reproductive reductionists and that was when I wrote about reductionism. They came out of the woodwork like clockwork as I predicted they would. I know their own arguments and the underlying biology better than they do, from my own experience in molecular genetics and general understanding of evolutionary biology and also most importantly because I have actually listened to what they have had to say for the last ten years. Their arguments have essentially become a form of unquestioned dogma and it is not just a problem I observed in the wider gynocentric culture, but also within the manosphere itself.
Their entire argument rests on an assumption that successful reproduction and evolutionary success are interchangeable. It is important to define terms to avoid confusion. Evolutionary success is the number of copies of the genome of a lineage left behind after a specific period of time has elapsed. If we take a set time period of two centuries for example, an unbroken cyclical chain of investment in survival, development, reproduction and parental investment must take place for copies of the genome of a lineage to be preserved after that passage of time.
Evolutionary success is far more complicated than just asserting that it all comes down to reproduction. Reproduction is merely one step in the cyclical and unbroken chain of events that must successfully take place to perpetuate the genome over time. Reproduction is certainly essential, but so are a multitude of other activities which must occur to ensure preservation of the genome of a lineage. Reproduction itself is often dependent on those activities successfully occurring as well. For example, an organism must survive to mate and reproduce, as it cannot find a mate and then reproduce when it is dead. This sounds obvious and yet some people will persist in maintaining reproduction is all that matters.
Before I debunk reproductive reductionism further, I want to discuss the groups of people I have noticed subscribe to reproductive reductionism. Reproductive reductionists come in three general flavours from my observation, some of which can overlap:
All three groups make the error in reducing evolutionary success to reproductive success. There are individuals who do not want men to realise their own value, because if they did the powerbase that women rely on to control men would be challenged. As I mentioned in my article “The Gynocentric Mob And Female Superiority”2, the gynocentric social power of women is based on cultivating an image of female superiority. Women only have power in society to the degree that men value what they have to say and what they do. The moment men question female superiority and in particular the moral superiority of women, suddenly women can be held accountable for their own behaviour.
The overvaluing of the female reproductive role and the pedestalisation of the “golden uterus”, is central to female superiority because the female reproductive function is not only essential to the continuation of society, but distinctly female. Challenging the importance of the “golden uterus” in our gynocentric culture is tantamount to questioning the existence of God in fundamentalist communities. You get the same reaction questioning the “golden uterus”, as questioning the basis of a religion. Even some people in the manosphere refuse to question the overvaluing of the female reproductive function, often through omission and ignoring the subject. They will discuss its importance, but never critique its overvaluing in the culture.
Questioning the basis of the gynocentric religion that women are divine beings or more biologically valuable by virtue of having a uterus, is exactly what I am going to do in this series of articles. Functioning as an incubator for nine months does not make someone a mother any more than depositing sperm makes someone a father. Having a uterus does not make you a more valuable human being and like men, women’s value as human beings biologically and otherwise, is not solely dependent on their reproductive functions either.
Maintaining the social fixation on sex and reproduction is key to maintaining female social power that is beyond reproach. In other words, glorifying the female role in reproduction is central to maintaining a belief in female superiority in society and by extension maintaining gynocentrism. Despite what some people in the manosphere think, feminism does not argue that men and women are the same. Feminism argues that women are superior. If men are better at something, then feminists argue this must be due to socialisation and the oppressive patriarchy. If women are better at something, then feminists argue it must be an innate female advantage. If men excel in STEM relative to women, then it is because women are being discriminated against. If girls are excelling in school relative to boys, then it is because girls are smarter than boys. If you want a clear example that feminists do not regard men and women as identical, look at their response to transgenderism and allowing transgender women into female spaces. Feminism is about female supremacy, not gender equality.
What Reproductive Reductionists Miss
So why are reproductive reductionists wrong? I could literally write a book on why they are wrong and I will be going into further and further detail in future articles. However at some point people need to think for themselves and critically evaluate facts by themselves instead of relying on other people’s argumentation. Beliefs like female superiority flourish in societies where people have lost the ability to think and critically evaluate information by themselves. People in such societies essentially become sponges that absorb whatever sets of ideas they find most emotionally appealing and useful pawns to manipulate to further an agenda.
There are three main flaws in the thinking of reproductive reductionists: 1. An ignorance of basic life history theory and that evolutionary success is reliant on a number of activities other than reproduction. 2. A lack of recognition and understanding of biological systems and systems in general. 3. Falling victim to the naturalistic fallacy.
The Optimisation Problem Of Life
Evolutionary success requires a whole sequence of activities to occur in optimum proportion and reproduction is just one of them. Life history theory3 describes the strategic investment that organisms make in their own survival, development, growth, reproduction and in the parental care of offspring over their lifespan to optimise evolutionary success. Maximising evolutionary success in a given environment is an optimisation problem that requires the strategic investment of resources by an organism in numerous activities over their lifespan and reproduction is merely one of them. These often involve trade-offs between investing in activities with limited resources available. For example, a species can invest in maximising the quantity of offspring produced over the quality of offspring they produce, but both cannot be maximised at the same time.
Of course the common retort is that survival leads to nowhere without reproduction. Yes reproduction is essential, but it is not the only essential activity required to propagate the genome. These same reductionists seem completely unaware that reproduction does not happen without survival. An organism or a population has to survive long enough to reproduce and even that alone is not enough. An organism must reproduce an optimal number of times and then raise the offspring to sexual maturity, whom also have to then survive, mate and then raise their offspring. If this does not occur to a sufficient degree then any reproduction that does occur is insufficient to perpetuate the lineage and it dies out.
Simply pumping out babies is not sufficient to ensure the lineage is preserved. Offspring that do not survive to sexual maturity or do not reproduce, are evolutionary dead ends. Organisms that do not invest in their own survival do not reproduce at all, or do not live long enough to reproduce a number of offspring sufficient to guarantee continuation of their lineage (as some of their offspring will die or fail to produce offspring themselves). Parents who do not provide sufficient parental care to their offspring fail to become grandparents because their children either die before adulthood or are in an underdeveloped condition where they are either infertile, cannot carry a child to term, or are unable to attract a mate. Consequently their lineage terminates despite producing children and there is evolutionary failure.
The role that men play in contributing to the perpetuation of their lineage is not just simply based on their contribution to reproduction either. Men make an enormous contribution to the survival of their families and their wider community and that does impact the evolutionary success of their lineage and the community they reside in. The reality is that just as women contribute a disproportionate amount of investment in reproduction, men contribute a disproportionate amount of investment in the survival of their partner, progeny and their community. This investment in survival does contribute to the evolutionary success of the lineage, by allowing more offspring to survive, by enhancing the physical and mental health and development of offspring, by better equipping offspring materially and intellectually for adulthood and by allowing more reproduction to occur etc.
This contribution to survival has been partly what men have been sexually selected for. Men have been shaped by female mate choice to carry the part of the load of perpetuating the species that women cannot, whilst women are temporarily disabled or partly limited by pregnancy and preoccupied with caring for infants and toddlers. Males in our species even directly invest in the raising of their offspring as fathers because of the cost of childhood and juvenile development in our species, unlike males from some of our primate relatives.
The selective advantage of a larger brain and the extension of our developmental period to allow for that larger brain, had a ratchet effect on our evolution. It put long term selective pressures in place that drove mate choice and sexual selection to select for traits and re-task existing traits in men and in women, that enabled a complementary division of labour to emerge. This complementary division of labour and the paternal investment of fatherhood in offspring, played substantial roles in providing the necessary support for the longer and far more costly developmental period of offspring.
The underlying evolutionary processes and the sex differences behind what I have described in the last two paragraphs is discussed in evolutionary psychologist Dr. David Geary’s brilliant book, “Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences, Second Edition”4. I am not suggesting that the traditional division of labour as we know it today is biological, I am saying it has biological underpinnings. These biological underpinnings are reflected in the sex differences in interests that feminists refuse to acknowledge5, because it does not suit their underlying agenda of female supremacy.
These sex differences in interests, traits and biological roles, do not make either sex superior to the other. Each sex is an interdependent component in a system that the genome encodes to perpetuate itself. That is the evolutionary context through which these differences emerged and that is the context through which we should be interpreting these differences. It has nothing to do with superiority or supremacy and everything to do with a dynamic adaptive system optimising the propagation of the genome that encoded it over time and across environments, by developing complementary components with complementary strengths and roles, that functionally serve a purpose greater than either component on their own.
Before modern technology and birth control, some gendered division of labour in one form or another was more or less an inevitability of historic and prehistoric populations. Oh and if female supremacists want to argue technology makes men obsolete, they might want to reflect on precisely which sex overwhelmingly develops, maintains and runs the technology first and then reflect on the reality that technology can replace all female functions and jobs, including gestation, and that the dignity of men and women is worth more than just their utility, but I digress. Men have had their space and role in the community and women had theirs. Even indigenous tribes of today have some segregation between the sexes and sites, customs and roles for men and sites, customs and roles for women. They might not have the same gendered traditions and social norms as in the West, but they have them nonetheless.
The fact technology and birth control which men have overwhelmingly been responsible for, has given each sex the personal freedom to expand beyond their past roles, does not negate the reality that biological sex differences remain. It does not negate the reality that there are going to be sex differences in interests and in the roles men and women undertake in society, when we consider males and females as a whole and look at the averages, regardless as to how much feminist social engineering is undertaken. It is not sexism, or entirely cultural, there are biological underpinnings to the differences in the roles males and females adopt in society. The mistake reproductive reductionists make, is ignoring the value of roles outside of the female reproductive function when it comes to their contribution to evolutionary success, or deliberately ignoring or downplaying innate male advantages that contribute to evolutionary success, usually by claiming they are the result of sexism rather than the result of a true male strength.
What I have just described is a very basic overview of biology that reproductive reductionists wilfully ignore or downplay, because it does not conform to their narrative in female superiority, or their narrow and fatalistic worldview. The real deniers of biology are the reproductive reductionists that cherry pick facts that suit their narrative and ignore the multitude of biological facts that don’t.
Systems
Biology is comprised of systems. Your cells are compromised of numerous molecular and subcellular systems. Your body is compromised of numerous systems- the nervous system, the reproductive system, the circulatory system etc. Numerous species live in ecosystems. Reproductive reductionists are incapable of acknowledging the complexity and interdependent nature of human biology. They are incapable of recognising gene culture coevolution and that biology and culture feedback on each other in a continuous loop. They will recognise that biology restricts and shapes culture (which I agree it does), but will ignore the facts and the evidence6 that culture itself introduces novel environments, alters selection pressures on genes and shapes biology. They will recognise that culture is a function of biology, but fail to acknowledge the influence of the environment and that biology expresses itself differently across different environments and timescales.
The human reproductive system requires other body systems to function properly. If the circulatory system fails, or the nervous system fails and the body dies, the reproductive system will fail and die with it. This is an example illustrating the interdependent nature of biological systems that reductionists fail to appreciate. The same interdependence can be observed with ecosystems. Just like the reproductive system in the human body is dependent on the proper functioning of other bodily systems, so is the successful reproduction of a population dependent on numerous other activities aside from reproduction, that are related to the survival, nourishment and growth of that population. Systems thinking is the kryptonite of reductionist thinking, because it forces people to think outside of the categories and the walls they throw up around their own thinking.
A common example that is used by reproductive reductionists is the argument that a tribe decimated by some calamity with a handful of men remaining and the majority remaining being women, will fare better than a tribe with the sex ratios reversed. The argument being that one man can fertilise the uteri of dozens of women and that as there are more women, there are more uteri and thus more offspring can be produced to replace the population in the immediate aftermath. The implied assumption to this scenario, is that all of the women in a tribe (or most of them) will be making full use of their uterus and maximising their reproductive output in the immediate aftermath.
There is no consideration given though for the food, water, resources, protection from predators and shelter that the community and these offspring will require to survive and develop and who will provide those necessities and protect the community, whilst substantial numbers of or all the women in the community are pregnant and/or caring for young helpless infants and toddlers and consequently less able to contribute to these activities.
There is no consideration given to the environmental conditions the population faces and the stresses they impose and the impact a loss of men would have on the community surviving in those conditions. There is no consideration given to the loss of genetic diversity in losing most of the men in a tribe and the impact that increased inbreeding and the subsequent accumulation of deleterious mutations will have on the fitness and fertility of future offspring. There is no consideration given as to whether the environment has the carrying capacity or the community has the adults to provide the shelter, protection and resources, to support such an intensive reproductive effort in the immediate aftermath and all of the offspring and the women raising and giving birth to them.
There is no consideration given to the possibility that a population that produces fewer but healthier, better developed, better equipped and more fertile offspring, with higher parental and alloparental investment and a lower mortality rate, might actually be a more efficient and effective investment of resources in certain environments and have greater evolutionary success, than a population that produces large numbers of offspring with few men around to provide and protect for the community.
Yes there is a minimum number of uteri required to sustain a community, but there is also a minimum level of investment in survival required to sustain a community and a minimum number of males required to achieve that investment through provision and protection and also produce sufficient numbers of offspring with an adequate level of genetic diversity. The minimum thresholds of investment in reproduction, survival and genetic diversity required to sustain a community, will vary across environmental conditions and habitat carrying capacities and the minimum number of males and females required to achieve those thresholds will also vary. In some environmental conditions, more males may be required than females to meet those minimum thresholds. A harsh geoclimatic environment for example may have completely different requirements to a lush jungle with an abundant food supply.
Little thought is given as to how the relative value of the contribution of males and females to sustaining a community may shift, once a community is above the minimum numbers of males and females required to sustain itself and how the relative value of those contributions may vary as a result of population size, environmental conditions and carrying capacity. A population with uteri above the minimum number required to sustain itself, may actually suffer more from losing men than women in certain contexts (provided the number of women lost does not drop below the minimum threshold required to sustain the community).
Little consideration is given to this duality in sustaining a community by reproductive reductionists. I can go on further with a list of omissions reproductive reductionists make when they use this scenario of a decimated tribe and I may write a separate article to discuss this further. The point that I am trying to make is that human communities are systems and like any system it has components that are interdependent. Reproduction itself is not just dependent on how many uteri you have. The value in producing offspring is only realised if those offspring survive and reproduce viable and fertile offspring themselves. A tribe can produce as many infants as it wants, but if they all die from starvation, predation or a harsh winter before reaching sexual maturity, the tribe is gone.
The male contribution to providing the food, water, resources, habitation and protection to sustain a community, whilst a number of women are temporarily disabled or limited from pregnancy and preoccupied with caring for young infants and children, has a value to the community. This is particularly the case in harsh, hazardous and resource scarce geoclimatic environments, with high levels of predation, brutal winters and summers, rugged terrain and a heavy reliance on physical labour to hunt food, find water, get resources, defend against predators and build shelter. Such environments require high levels of parental investment, which means someone must devote most of their time to directly caring for the young. They also require high levels of investment in survival and high degrees of physical exertion, risk taking, exposure to hazards and a heavy reliance on spatial ability, tool marking and hunting. Simply breeding in such environments is a recipe for death and evolutionary failure.
The ecology of human communities is extraordinarily complex and cannot simply just be reduced down to how many uteri you have. The somewhat amusing thing about this scenario that a tribe with the greatest number of uteri is automatically better off, is that you can put the comments of someone in the MGTOW or MRA community promoting this, right next to the comments of a female supremacist and you would not be able to tell the difference. All radical feminists have to do is point to the same reductive arguments some MRA’s and MGTOWs are putting forward to justify the righteousness and inevitably of their own gynocentric double standards to marginalise men. How long do you think you will be going your own way, before female supremacists use your own reasoning to justify your own subjugation? Just something for certain individuals (but certainly not all) in the manosphere to think about.
Let me finish off part one of this article by pointing to the reality that pedestalising women and pandering to female narcissism reduces your fertility rate. Women are naturally hypergamous and marginalising men to elevate women reduces your fertility rate. This is something both Stardusk and Paul Elam and Peter Wright have both discussed in videos linked here7 and here8, for the “reproduction enthusiasts”. The reality is that even if we just focus on reproductive success alone, treating women as superior and giving them undeserved respect for simply having a uterus and marginalising men, undermines the reproductive success of a community.
The remaining failings of reproductive reductionists will be discussed in part 2 of this article.
References:
SourceThe foundation of this belief system in female superiority is that the value of human life is primarily or exclusively based on its reproductive utility. Women have a uterus, women invest more in reproduction, women are the rate limiting factor of reproduction, so therefore women are biologically more valuable than men.
This is the core foundation of the belief structure in female superiority. Does this sound familiar? It should. Even in the manosphere this line of reasoning is promoted by some as an unquestioned truth and the moment you make any step to challenge this belief, you are labelled a denier of biology. In reality, the real deniers of biology are those that deliberately ignore areas of biology that do not fit their gynocentric narrative that the golden uterus is all the counts. These are the reproductive reductionists.
I knew even when I was writing my article “The Normalisation of Gynocentrism”1, and before it was even published, that there would be one specific area of that article that would trigger the reproductive reductionists and that was when I wrote about reductionism. They came out of the woodwork like clockwork as I predicted they would. I know their own arguments and the underlying biology better than they do, from my own experience in molecular genetics and general understanding of evolutionary biology and also most importantly because I have actually listened to what they have had to say for the last ten years. Their arguments have essentially become a form of unquestioned dogma and it is not just a problem I observed in the wider gynocentric culture, but also within the manosphere itself.
Reproductive reductionism is not just a problem I observed in the wider
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Evolutionary success is far more complicated than just asserting that it all comes down to reproduction. Reproduction is merely one step in the cyclical and unbroken chain of events that must successfully take place to perpetuate the genome over time. Reproduction is certainly essential, but so are a multitude of other activities which must occur to ensure preservation of the genome of a lineage. Reproduction itself is often dependent on those activities successfully occurring as well. For example, an organism must survive to mate and reproduce, as it cannot find a mate and then reproduce when it is dead. This sounds obvious and yet some people will persist in maintaining reproduction is all that matters.
Before I debunk reproductive reductionism further, I want to discuss the groups of people I have noticed subscribe to reproductive reductionism. Reproductive reductionists come in three general flavours from my observation, some of which can overlap:
- Female supremacists who believe women are superior and that gynocentric double standards are justified on the basis they reflect the natural order (as they see it). Biology essentially becomes a way of rationalising their own bigotry and persuading others to accept gynocentrism as something normal and good for society. Female supremacists operate on a naturalistic fallacy that what is natural is proper, right and just, and what is natural ought to be good for society.
- Fatalists who subscribe to the view gynocentrism is an immutable aspect of biology based on women being the rate limiting factor of reproduction. They dogmatically refute any argument to the contrary, or that anything can be done to reduce gynocentrism. Fatalists like to live in a world that is certain and where they can excuse themselves and others from taking responsibility for their actions. They generally like to ridicule those that dare to challenge the status quo as being delusional and not realists.
- Ideologues who support a worldview of absolute biological determinism and that anyone who disagrees with them is deluded or irrational. These individuals often hold themselves out as authority figures on evolutionary psychology and biology, often with little or no formal education in the subject. They cultivate an image of intellectual superiority over others who do not support their worldview. They exhibit a naïve realism bias, that objective reality fits their worldview and so people that disagree with their worldview must be deluded, irrational or biased. There is generally a high level of narcissism, combativeness and a lack of humility exhibited by such individuals when challenged.
All three groups make the error in reducing evolutionary success to reproductive success. There are individuals who do not want men to realise their own value, because if they did the powerbase that women rely on to control men would be challenged. As I mentioned in my article “The Gynocentric Mob And Female Superiority”2, the gynocentric social power of women is based on cultivating an image of female superiority. Women only have power in society to the degree that men value what they have to say and what they do. The moment men question female superiority and in particular the moral superiority of women, suddenly women can be held accountable for their own behaviour.
The overvaluing of the female reproductive role and the pedestalisation of the “golden uterus”, is central to female superiority because the female reproductive function is not only essential to the continuation of society, but distinctly female. Challenging the importance of the “golden uterus” in our gynocentric culture is tantamount to questioning the existence of God in fundamentalist communities. You get the same reaction questioning the “golden uterus”, as questioning the basis of a religion. Even some people in the manosphere refuse to question the overvaluing of the female reproductive function, often through omission and ignoring the subject. They will discuss its importance, but never critique its overvaluing in the culture.
Questioning the basis of the gynocentric religion that women are divine beings or more biologically valuable by virtue of having a uterus, is exactly what I am going to do in this series of articles. Functioning as an incubator for nine months does not make someone a mother any more than depositing sperm makes someone a father. Having a uterus does not make you a more valuable human being and like men, women’s value as human beings biologically and otherwise, is not solely dependent on their reproductive functions either.
Maintaining the social fixation on sex and reproduction is key to maintaining female social power that is beyond reproach. In other words, glorifying the female role in reproduction is central to maintaining a belief in female superiority in society and by extension maintaining gynocentrism. Despite what some people in the manosphere think, feminism does not argue that men and women are the same. Feminism argues that women are superior. If men are better at something, then feminists argue this must be due to socialisation and the oppressive patriarchy. If women are better at something, then feminists argue it must be an innate female advantage. If men excel in STEM relative to women, then it is because women are being discriminated against. If girls are excelling in school relative to boys, then it is because girls are smarter than boys. If you want a clear example that feminists do not regard men and women as identical, look at their response to transgenderism and allowing transgender women into female spaces. Feminism is about female supremacy, not gender equality.
What Reproductive Reductionists Miss
So why are reproductive reductionists wrong? I could literally write a book on why they are wrong and I will be going into further and further detail in future articles. However at some point people need to think for themselves and critically evaluate facts by themselves instead of relying on other people’s argumentation. Beliefs like female superiority flourish in societies where people have lost the ability to think and critically evaluate information by themselves. People in such societies essentially become sponges that absorb whatever sets of ideas they find most emotionally appealing and useful pawns to manipulate to further an agenda.
There are three main flaws in the thinking of reproductive reductionists: 1. An ignorance of basic life history theory and that evolutionary success is reliant on a number of activities other than reproduction. 2. A lack of recognition and understanding of biological systems and systems in general. 3. Falling victim to the naturalistic fallacy.
The Optimisation Problem Of Life
Evolutionary success requires a whole sequence of activities to occur in optimum proportion and reproduction is just one of them. Life history theory3 describes the strategic investment that organisms make in their own survival, development, growth, reproduction and in the parental care of offspring over their lifespan to optimise evolutionary success. Maximising evolutionary success in a given environment is an optimisation problem that requires the strategic investment of resources by an organism in numerous activities over their lifespan and reproduction is merely one of them. These often involve trade-offs between investing in activities with limited resources available. For example, a species can invest in maximising the quantity of offspring produced over the quality of offspring they produce, but both cannot be maximised at the same time.
Of course the common retort is that survival leads to nowhere without reproduction. Yes reproduction is essential, but it is not the only essential activity required to propagate the genome. These same reductionists seem completely unaware that reproduction does not happen without survival. An organism or a population has to survive long enough to reproduce and even that alone is not enough. An organism must reproduce an optimal number of times and then raise the offspring to sexual maturity, whom also have to then survive, mate and then raise their offspring. If this does not occur to a sufficient degree then any reproduction that does occur is insufficient to perpetuate the lineage and it dies out.
Simply pumping out babies is not sufficient to ensure the lineage is preserved. Offspring that do not survive to sexual maturity or do not reproduce, are evolutionary dead ends. Organisms that do not invest in their own survival do not reproduce at all, or do not live long enough to reproduce a number of offspring sufficient to guarantee continuation of their lineage (as some of their offspring will die or fail to produce offspring themselves). Parents who do not provide sufficient parental care to their offspring fail to become grandparents because their children either die before adulthood or are in an underdeveloped condition where they are either infertile, cannot carry a child to term, or are unable to attract a mate. Consequently their lineage terminates despite producing children and there is evolutionary failure.
The role that men play in contributing to the perpetuation of their lineage is not just simply based on their contribution to reproduction either. Men make an enormous contribution to the survival of their families and their wider community and that does impact the evolutionary success of their lineage and the community they reside in. The reality is that just as women contribute a disproportionate amount of investment in reproduction, men contribute a disproportionate amount of investment in the survival of their partner, progeny and their community. This investment in survival does contribute to the evolutionary success of the lineage, by allowing more offspring to survive, by enhancing the physical and mental health and development of offspring, by better equipping offspring materially and intellectually for adulthood and by allowing more reproduction to occur etc.
Men make an enormous contribution to the survival of their families
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The selective advantage of a larger brain and the extension of our developmental period to allow for that larger brain, had a ratchet effect on our evolution. It put long term selective pressures in place that drove mate choice and sexual selection to select for traits and re-task existing traits in men and in women, that enabled a complementary division of labour to emerge. This complementary division of labour and the paternal investment of fatherhood in offspring, played substantial roles in providing the necessary support for the longer and far more costly developmental period of offspring.
The underlying evolutionary processes and the sex differences behind what I have described in the last two paragraphs is discussed in evolutionary psychologist Dr. David Geary’s brilliant book, “Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences, Second Edition”4. I am not suggesting that the traditional division of labour as we know it today is biological, I am saying it has biological underpinnings. These biological underpinnings are reflected in the sex differences in interests that feminists refuse to acknowledge5, because it does not suit their underlying agenda of female supremacy.
These sex differences in interests, traits and biological roles, do not make either sex superior to the other. Each sex is an interdependent component in a system that the genome encodes to perpetuate itself. That is the evolutionary context through which these differences emerged and that is the context through which we should be interpreting these differences. It has nothing to do with superiority or supremacy and everything to do with a dynamic adaptive system optimising the propagation of the genome that encoded it over time and across environments, by developing complementary components with complementary strengths and roles, that functionally serve a purpose greater than either component on their own.
Before modern technology and birth control, some gendered division of labour in one form or another was more or less an inevitability of historic and prehistoric populations. Oh and if female supremacists want to argue technology makes men obsolete, they might want to reflect on precisely which sex overwhelmingly develops, maintains and runs the technology first and then reflect on the reality that technology can replace all female functions and jobs, including gestation, and that the dignity of men and women is worth more than just their utility, but I digress. Men have had their space and role in the community and women had theirs. Even indigenous tribes of today have some segregation between the sexes and sites, customs and roles for men and sites, customs and roles for women. They might not have the same gendered traditions and social norms as in the West, but they have them nonetheless.
The fact technology and birth control which men have overwhelmingly been responsible for, has given each sex the personal freedom to expand beyond their past roles, does not negate the reality that biological sex differences remain. It does not negate the reality that there are going to be sex differences in interests and in the roles men and women undertake in society, when we consider males and females as a whole and look at the averages, regardless as to how much feminist social engineering is undertaken. It is not sexism, or entirely cultural, there are biological underpinnings to the differences in the roles males and females adopt in society. The mistake reproductive reductionists make, is ignoring the value of roles outside of the female reproductive function when it comes to their contribution to evolutionary success, or deliberately ignoring or downplaying innate male advantages that contribute to evolutionary success, usually by claiming they are the result of sexism rather than the result of a true male strength.
What I have just described is a very basic overview of biology that reproductive reductionists wilfully ignore or downplay, because it does not conform to their narrative in female superiority, or their narrow and fatalistic worldview. The real deniers of biology are the reproductive reductionists that cherry pick facts that suit their narrative and ignore the multitude of biological facts that don’t.
Systems
Biology is comprised of systems. Your cells are compromised of numerous molecular and subcellular systems. Your body is compromised of numerous systems- the nervous system, the reproductive system, the circulatory system etc. Numerous species live in ecosystems. Reproductive reductionists are incapable of acknowledging the complexity and interdependent nature of human biology. They are incapable of recognising gene culture coevolution and that biology and culture feedback on each other in a continuous loop. They will recognise that biology restricts and shapes culture (which I agree it does), but will ignore the facts and the evidence6 that culture itself introduces novel environments, alters selection pressures on genes and shapes biology. They will recognise that culture is a function of biology, but fail to acknowledge the influence of the environment and that biology expresses itself differently across different environments and timescales.
The human reproductive system requires other body systems to function properly. If the circulatory system fails, or the nervous system fails and the body dies, the reproductive system will fail and die with it. This is an example illustrating the interdependent nature of biological systems that reductionists fail to appreciate. The same interdependence can be observed with ecosystems. Just like the reproductive system in the human body is dependent on the proper functioning of other bodily systems, so is the successful reproduction of a population dependent on numerous other activities aside from reproduction, that are related to the survival, nourishment and growth of that population. Systems thinking is the kryptonite of reductionist thinking, because it forces people to think outside of the categories and the walls they throw up around their own thinking.
Systems thinking is the kryptonite of reductionist thinking, because it forces people to think outside of the categories and the walls they throw up around their own thinking. |
There is no consideration given though for the food, water, resources, protection from predators and shelter that the community and these offspring will require to survive and develop and who will provide those necessities and protect the community, whilst substantial numbers of or all the women in the community are pregnant and/or caring for young helpless infants and toddlers and consequently less able to contribute to these activities.
There is no consideration given to the environmental conditions the population faces and the stresses they impose and the impact a loss of men would have on the community surviving in those conditions. There is no consideration given to the loss of genetic diversity in losing most of the men in a tribe and the impact that increased inbreeding and the subsequent accumulation of deleterious mutations will have on the fitness and fertility of future offspring. There is no consideration given as to whether the environment has the carrying capacity or the community has the adults to provide the shelter, protection and resources, to support such an intensive reproductive effort in the immediate aftermath and all of the offspring and the women raising and giving birth to them.
There is no consideration given to the possibility that a population that produces fewer but healthier, better developed, better equipped and more fertile offspring, with higher parental and alloparental investment and a lower mortality rate, might actually be a more efficient and effective investment of resources in certain environments and have greater evolutionary success, than a population that produces large numbers of offspring with few men around to provide and protect for the community.
Yes there is a minimum number of uteri required to sustain a community, but there is also a minimum level of investment in survival required to sustain a community and a minimum number of males required to achieve that investment through provision and protection and also produce sufficient numbers of offspring with an adequate level of genetic diversity. The minimum thresholds of investment in reproduction, survival and genetic diversity required to sustain a community, will vary across environmental conditions and habitat carrying capacities and the minimum number of males and females required to achieve those thresholds will also vary. In some environmental conditions, more males may be required than females to meet those minimum thresholds. A harsh geoclimatic environment for example may have completely different requirements to a lush jungle with an abundant food supply.
Little thought is given as to how the relative value of the contribution of males and females to sustaining a community may shift, once a community is above the minimum numbers of males and females required to sustain itself and how the relative value of those contributions may vary as a result of population size, environmental conditions and carrying capacity. A population with uteri above the minimum number required to sustain itself, may actually suffer more from losing men than women in certain contexts (provided the number of women lost does not drop below the minimum threshold required to sustain the community).
Little consideration is given to this duality in sustaining a community by reproductive reductionists. I can go on further with a list of omissions reproductive reductionists make when they use this scenario of a decimated tribe and I may write a separate article to discuss this further. The point that I am trying to make is that human communities are systems and like any system it has components that are interdependent. Reproduction itself is not just dependent on how many uteri you have. The value in producing offspring is only realised if those offspring survive and reproduce viable and fertile offspring themselves. A tribe can produce as many infants as it wants, but if they all die from starvation, predation or a harsh winter before reaching sexual maturity, the tribe is gone.
The male contribution to providing the food, water, resources, habitation and protection to sustain a community, whilst a number of women are temporarily disabled or limited from pregnancy and preoccupied with caring for young infants and children, has a value to the community. This is particularly the case in harsh, hazardous and resource scarce geoclimatic environments, with high levels of predation, brutal winters and summers, rugged terrain and a heavy reliance on physical labour to hunt food, find water, get resources, defend against predators and build shelter. Such environments require high levels of parental investment, which means someone must devote most of their time to directly caring for the young. They also require high levels of investment in survival and high degrees of physical exertion, risk taking, exposure to hazards and a heavy reliance on spatial ability, tool marking and hunting. Simply breeding in such environments is a recipe for death and evolutionary failure.
The ecology of human communities is extraordinarily complex and cannot simply just be reduced down to how many uteri you have. The somewhat amusing thing about this scenario that a tribe with the greatest number of uteri is automatically better off, is that you can put the comments of someone in the MGTOW or MRA community promoting this, right next to the comments of a female supremacist and you would not be able to tell the difference. All radical feminists have to do is point to the same reductive arguments some MRA’s and MGTOWs are putting forward to justify the righteousness and inevitably of their own gynocentric double standards to marginalise men. How long do you think you will be going your own way, before female supremacists use your own reasoning to justify your own subjugation? Just something for certain individuals (but certainly not all) in the manosphere to think about.
Let me finish off part one of this article by pointing to the reality that pedestalising women and pandering to female narcissism reduces your fertility rate. Women are naturally hypergamous and marginalising men to elevate women reduces your fertility rate. This is something both Stardusk and Paul Elam and Peter Wright have both discussed in videos linked here7 and here8, for the “reproduction enthusiasts”. The reality is that even if we just focus on reproductive success alone, treating women as superior and giving them undeserved respect for simply having a uterus and marginalising men, undermines the reproductive success of a community.
The remaining failings of reproductive reductionists will be discussed in part 2 of this article.
References:
- The Normalisation Of Gynocentrism
- The gynocentric mob and female superiority
- Life History Evolution
- Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences
- Direct evidence that feminists HATE facts
- CARTA: Culture-Gene Interactions: Peter Richerson-Culture-led Gene-culture Coevolution
- Chasing the Dragon
- The So Called Demographic Winter The Hypergamy Factor
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