Patriarchists should shun The Spearhead

There are two positions from which to attack feminism.  First, there is patriarchy, the consensus of Christianity, Islam, and pagan antiquity.  The patriarchist opposes the liberal’s project of smashing social roles and norms in the name of individual autonomy.  Our roles and duties give meaning and dignity to our lives, none more so than our gender roles.  Masculinity finds its meaning in fatherhood, femininity in motherhood.  Through these ideals, men and women find written on their very flesh the calling to a distinct form of self-sacrificial love.  The “men’s rights movement” (MRM), on the other hand, accepts liberalism’s philosophical premises, but criticizes feminists for not weighing men’s wills and desires equitably with women’s.

MRM spokesmen have often criticized, and more often just rudely insulted, holders of the patriarchal position, most recently in The Spearhead’s attack on Laura Wood.  Ignoring the moment the rudeness of the post and comments (which should never be directed at any lady, much less one of the foremost champions of the patriarchal movement), notice what it was that provoked their ire.  It was Wood’s advice to a young man to preserve his honor before all other things, both because it’s most important, and because it’s the one thing wholly under his control.  That the MRM finds this—and any other summons to masculine virtue—offensive shows how deep is the separation between the MRM and us.  Also on The Spearhead, I see, have been articles trying to win over homosexual men to their movement, because of the common interests all men allegedly share.  Of course, anyone who cares about maintaining normative gender roles knows that we have no more fanatical enemy than the male sodomites, who work tirelessly to destroy the patriarchal family so that they can gratify their obscene lusts without social censure.  Anyone who wants sodomites on his side isn’t on our side.

I do realize that The Spearhead publishes work from some worthwhile authors, such as The Elusive Wapiti, a patriarchist for whom I have great respect, but they certainly do not set the dominant ideology of the site.

Why is The Spearhead’s ideology evil, and why should all right-thinking men shun it?  Let me count the ways:

Juvenile name-calling

MRM’s usual modus operandi is to dismiss criticism by hurling insults.  The most common insults they use to make good seem evil, and evil good:

“mangina”:  any man who criticizes the MRM

“shaming”: any appeal to morality or masculine virtues

“white knight”: a chivalrous man, his commitment to protecting women and children being an object of ridicule

Consequentialism and Hostility toward Virtue

Being liberal at heart, the MRM sees men primarily as interest and desire-bearing subjects, rather than duty and virtue-bearing subjects.  Therefore, appeals to virtue and the importance of maintaining one’s integrity are dismissed (“shaming”) as sneaky ways of keeping men from pursuing their interests rationally.  As mentioned above, chivalry, the ethos of a protector, receives their particular scorn.  Most of them also despise chastity, going so far as to endorse the abominable practice of onanism.  (For a defense of the traditional view of the solitary vice, see here and here.)  Here they do a great disservice to men, helping them become enslaved to sexual sins from which it can be very difficult to free oneself.  Of those who discourage marriage, few ask men to embrace the life of celibacy that chastity demands of the unmarried.  Rather, they encourage men to seduce women using “game” and then discard them, that is when they don’t simply have recourse to their own hands.

The more sympathetic and intelligent MRM advocates, such as Novaseeker, will sometimes express respect for traditional morality, but think it impractical in today’s world.  Of course, the very idea that morality must be practical is a consequentialist error:  the moral law must be obeyed regardless of the consequences for our own happiness.  The “impracticality” argument is also short sighted, ignoring the fact that in the long run, we will all die, and our pleasures and aspirations will be dust, no matter what we do.  To gratify our desires has not been given us, but we can have honor.  This is not, as some Spearhead commenters suggested, exclusively a matter of Christian doctrine; no Stoic would have said differently.

An Unmanly Misogyny

Outrageous claims are often made by MRM advocates, that all women are stupid, or selfish, or sexually promiscuous.  They actually discourage men from trusting their wives, saying that any woman will discard her vows if a higher-status man becomes available.  This unwarranted libel of half the population is grossly unjust.  Consider also the monstrous impiety of these men who say such things about a class of people that includes their own mothers!  Most women are not adulterous, and most do assume the self-sacrificial role of motherhood.  The assumption of uniform female perfidy certainly does not match my experience.  A patriarchist can have no court with woman-bashing.  The role of mother, to which femininity is ordered, is noble and holy.  Furthermore, our calling as men is to protect the weaker sex, and this carping against those we are made to protect is unmanly and contemptible.

Hostility to Western Christianity

The MRM despises the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, saying that Western Christianity was corrupted and sissified during the Middle Ages by its focus on the Good Friday suffering of Jesus at the expense of his Easter victory, and through veneration of the Blessed Virgin.  Particular blame for “feminizing” Christianity is assigned to Bernard of Clairvaux—an odd accusation to  lay at the feet of the founder of the Knights Templar!  MRMers sometimes say that the Eastern Churches have avoided this fate, but I think Eastern Orthodox Christians would reject any compliment that implies that they ignore the Cross or fail to venerate the Theotokos.  That medieval Catholicism innovated in these regards does not withstand scrutiny.  Saint Paul it was who preached Christ crucified, and the first prayer of veneration to Holy Mary was spoken by the angel Gabriel.  Nor does Jesus’ suffering compromise his masculinity; rather it calls into question the MSM idea of masculinity as power and self-assertion.  Our Lord gives a more impressive image of manliness:  the hero who courageously exposes himself to danger and death to save his loved ones.

The Marxist Pseudoscience of “Game”

The MRM advocates using “game” to manipulate their way into women’s pants.  If it were only an aid to fornication, game would not be nearly as wicked as it actually is.  What their art of seduction actually does is to teach them to think of women as biological machines, without conscience or freedom, thus crippling a man’s ability to relate to women in a normal, personal way.  Game is, in my opinion, most dangerous when its advice is most innocent.  For example, for as long as I can remember, I’ve subjected my younger sisters to friendly teasing, joking, and pestering.  Now my wife is the main object of my mischief.  It amuses them.  We have a good time.  The normal human way to think about this is that I have what I think are amusing ideas, and so I share them with other people so that they can enjoy them too.  A student of game, though, would say that what’s really going on is that I’m carrying out a sort of psychological warfare against my wife, with the goal of destroying her self-confidence so that she’ll be open to my sexual domination.  So a warm, human thing is reduced to a cold, alien thing.  This is just one application of the unhealthy Marxist distinction between “base” and “superstructure”, according to which the normal world of human interaction is somehow unreal, a mask behind which work the “true”, impersonal forces.  They will say that their view is more “scientific” than mine, but how can this be, given that we agree about the empirical facts, and disagree only on their interpretation?  Game claims to be applying the legitimate science of evolutionary biology, but that’s as bogus as New Age charlatans who invoke the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

A strategic alliance?

Given that patriarchy and MRM are utterly incompatible, some nevertheless say that the two should form an alliance against their common enemy, the feminists.  This would be pointless, however, because MRM is a marginal, utterly powerless movement; strategically, we gain nothing from such an alliance.  In fact, they would have far more to gain.  Patriarchy holds the allegiance of one billion Muslims strong, millions of traditionalist Catholics, and others.  MRM is mostly the hobby of a few socially maladapted masturbators.