Somewhere on social media, I saw a couple tweets from Stefan Molyneaux that have given me great pause. The first tweet said something like a good way to destroy families and set men and women against each other is to make women dependent on the state for their survival, rather than husbands. The second tweet followed up by noting that young men will then vote for greater state powers because that is the only way they can protect their mothers and sisters.
It’s the second tweet I want to focus my attention upon: soy-latte-drinking beta males in onesie pyjamas with flimsy musculature and a propensity to erupt in tears while clutching a teddy bear and pouting is a caricature lobbed at modern young men that needs some justification.
Indeed, there are weak, ineffectual men whose only hope of moving up any kind of status hierarchy is to remove all physically-based masculinity from the hierarchy, but these creatures are not new to humanity. Indeed, all hierarchies need a bottom level, and generally speaking, weak men can’t up-end the entire structure, even as they find places to thrive. Popular music comes to mind as a place where weak men can thrive and find power. Mick Jagger is hardly a paragon of masculine physicality, yet he is undeniably powerful and charismatic. Ed Sheeran is the modern day equivalent. Artists, poets, writers, fine craftsmen – these are all places where the less physically gifted men find power, status, belonging and meaning.
My argument is not that brute physical strength is the only masculine virtue. Not at all. I’m struck by the thought that men are making themselves deliberately weak, accepting weakness and subjugation because that is the only way they can openly embrace the masculine ideal of protecting the women they love. Men will order soy-lattes not because they enjoy the experience of consuming estrogen rich milk substitutes, but because the soy latte signals to women that a man has accepted the state as the best means of protecting and cherishing women. Men have idealized women for as long as we have recorded history, and likely even before that – the Venus of Willendorf is a female figure likely meant to represent some sort of flattery or adulation.
Females are a precious resource, and men must protect them. The upsides to teaching this ethic are obvious. Women and children tend to survive, and thus the human genome survives. The downsides are also obvious. Men will tend to not survive, and then who will protect the women and children? It’s a circle in which men are utilities and women are resources. Almost all human societies are organized into family units that reflect exactly this reality of women as resources and men as utilities and some sort of mutual obligation is then imposed and enforced to keep bad actors from acting too badly. Feminist ideology has no problem acknowledging bad actors when they are men, but feminists have a very hard time accepting bad actors when they are women. Women as precious resource is a perfectly obvious reality, and feminism is an attempt to protect all women, no matter how horrible the women are, from all men, no matter how good the men are. The only way feminists can do this is by enacting a state, backed by men with guns – once again, violence is the only truth.
It’s not the state, in and of itself, that is bad – it’s the ends the state serves. A feminist state serves women, and only women. What then happens to the men who want to serve women?
Please note I am not claiming that men should serve women. Men should serve whomever they want, if they wish to serve at all. The right and the ability to determine that for himself is a pretty good definition of what it means to be a man. For men who decide they wish to serve, how will that service manifest itself?
In order to serve women, men must become the soy-latte drinking, liberal voters who accept the state as the best protector of women. These are not man-boys. They are not children. They are not emasculated, vanilla-scented eunuchs. Quite the contrary. It’s a bit of irony that feminism would have these men believe masculinity is toxic and undesirable in all its forms, but it’s a profoundly misguided sense of masculine obligation that enables the feminist state to begin with!
Soy-boys accept their obligation to protect women and then do exactly that, by voting for increasing state powers that protect women from most of adult life. The advantage here, I guess, is that men don’t have to marry any given woman and possibly get a shrew who ruins his life. Instead, men get to marry and support all women, shrews and vixens alike.
Those soy-lattes must be pretty delicious to accept that kind of deal, although I kind of doubt it.
Lots of love,
JB