Feminism can’t function without the widespread support by men, and that support can only be maintained if the people who shape the beliefs of men remain ardent feminists.
The most notable success of feminists in the United States has been the establishment of nationwide no-fault divorce laws, along with the enormous family court system that supports it.
This system is becoming more unstable as fewer people elect to go through with a feminist marriage. Feminism has always had trouble with marriage, equating it to a form of prostitution, but the financial relevance that feminism has, the thing that creates an enormous incentive for most women to cooperate with the ideology, is the institution of feminist marriage with all of the impressive privileges that it grants to women.
Dalrock coined the most salient term for describing the new female power: threatpoint. Women in marriage have a permanent advantage in negotiation with their husbands, in that they can unilaterally dissolve the partnership and be financially rewarded for it. With the help of a halfway competent lawyer, they can use all manner of libel and defamation to gain lifelong alimony, child support, and a share of the assets held in common and the husband’s assets as well.
What this tends to mean is male deference, supplication, and submission in marriage. It is not so much that the husband is supplicating to the wife, but supplicating to the wife’s ability to call down the might of the state upon the man and on the marriage. He lives as a free man only at her whim, and should her whims change, her will can be enforced by the state.
This is rather like a single employee at a shareholder owned firm being able to loot the company whenever, and renegotiate shareholder rights upon the arbitrary decisions of a government judge.
Men have increasingly reacted by opting out of marriage entirely, because it’s become a legal arrangement that uniquely disadvantages them, creating a shadow liability. The wife has a permanent option to buy the marital assets that she can exercise at the expense of her legal fees.
Since marriage-looting has become more difficult to pull off, as men either slack or just don’t pursue marriage, we see in the press attempts to scare up false rape accusations and other methods by which a woman could secure legal rights to men’s assets through the use of her sex and her wiles.
Again, men don’t have to even provide this opportunity: they can avoid women entirely, take a flight overseas to enjoy foreign women, visit professionals, or otherwise find alternative occupations than having anything to do with a woman who will demand deference while preserving a uniquely privileged option for herself.
This sort of change does not even have to be consciously pushed: feminists themselves are doing an excellent job selecting for men who hate, distrust, and fear the feminist state. The men who trust the system get looted in a systematic fashion. This sort of method selects for men who shirk marriage.
The key question is how long that feminists can enjoy their positions of influence. The answer is, didactically, stupidly, is as long as men permit them to enjoy their positions of influence, and not one second longer.
The idea behind the contractual family, the quick-dissolve family, is that it makes for greater happiness, that people should be permitted to pursue their own ends, and that permanent relationships of any kind are somehow oppressive, because they are inherently egalitarian.
This was a good post.
Henry I am curious: do you think that the emergence of 1950s sex culture had any impact on this sort of thing? I mean stuff like Marilyn Monroe and Playboy magazine and such. It seems to me that much of post-suffrage feminism has been a panicked response to the devaluation of the housewife. As if a whole bunch of women were thinking, “Well apparently Johnny values these imaginary mistresses more than he values me,” and then female intellectuals seized on these concerns to try and make for huge political power grabs.
The situation now with rape legislation seems to mirror the same sort of thing, except the female justification seems to be something along the lines of: “Well, Johnny *certainly* doesn’t value me for motherhood because he’s oggling some new skank every day, so I might as well try to get in on the polymorphous perversity free-for-all by maximizing my own sexual decision-making power and minimizing his.”
Nope. Most of the feminist program was conceived of before even abolition, but especially afterwards.
I encourage people to take other groups at face value, based on what they write in their own documents.
So while feminists way downstream of the leaders may have thought processes like you describe, leaders created the framework for that to happen many decades previously.
Yeah, my question was more about the conditions that led average women to become warmer to extremism.
This sort of method selects for men who shirk marriage.
Or for men who have non-feminist marriages.
In the long run, this is good for us who are natalists and have traditional marriages, because we’ll soon be the only ones who have any marriages or kids at all. Unfortunately, the long run may be very long.
Sure. I can see that.
But then again the long-run ensues that our enemies remain the unaware gradually boiling frog until they are cooked.
The problem with the whole “natural selection” argument is that Feminism does not reproduce organically. It is a memetic virus that gets transmitted and nurtured by diligent and constant indoctrination. No Feminist, no matter how devout, was born that way.
No matter how old-fashioned and wholesome a family is, it won’t prevent their daughters (and sons even) from turning to the dark side if they are raised in a culture (and later academic environment) saturated with cultural Marxism. The only way to stop the disease and turn back the tide is to strike at the actual vectors of infection. Those vectors are the two powerful and heavily infested social institutions of popular media and academia, from which culture and ideology respectively flow.
It has often been remarked that the work of the reactionary blogosphere is nothing more than a useless circle jerk of wasted keystrokes. The thinking is that the only way out of this morass lies with the path of tangible actions such as starting families and taking stock of one’s health and finances.
Knowing how our opponents have succeeded, I would beg to differ.
While those aforementioned tangible actions are beneficial, they would be isolated and ultimately ineffectual without a strong cultural and ideology underpinning them. The reason, is that in order for a group of people to effectively defend their interests, they must unite and work together. In order for that united effort to occur, there must be a clear emotional and logical pretext for that organization, as well as a specific and agreed-to definition of the organization’s structure. These can only be provided by culture (emotion) and ideology (logic).
The work of creating that backbone of culture and ideology falls to the writers and intellectuals of the reactionary blogosphere.
In an age where other outlets are either disused or under the direct and tight control of our adversaries, the internet provides a parallel and virtual alternative to both contemporary media and academia (an occupied institution we often refer to as The Cathedral).
It is here, online, where the organizing principles of the the new right are being formed and disseminated, It is also here where the reactionary counterculture produces its art and message. From the work developed online, a corpus of guiding principles, emotional and intellectual precepts, is giving birth (rebirth?) to a viable alternative to the postmodern globalist sludge pit.
Our method of defeating Feminism, therefore, is creating an environment in which it cannot thrive, both in society and the individual. We cannot outbreed it out of existence any more than we can outbreed a cholera epidemic. We must create the ideological equivalent of proper sanitation (society) and vaccination (individual) by developing messages that short circuit Feminism’s mechanism of action, and spreading them into popular use.
The most interesting aspect is that women and the State desperately need the output of highly productive men. (And I don’t mean just money movers.) At the same time they are creating enormous disincentives for men to become highly productive. I don’t think they will ever “learn their lesson” because that would require that they accept that almost everything they “know” is wrong. But it will be interesting to see what happens when there is simply not enough productive output to sustain the current system. I think that point is coming sooner than we think.
The top 1% in earners provides something like half of all the tax income.
>But it will be interesting to see what happens when there is simply not enough productive output to sustain the current system. I think that point is coming sooner than we think.
That point is actually some years in the past; the government just papers over it with printing and debt issuance.
Again, it doesn’t take too many John Paulsons deciding to shelter their income or just trade from overseas to really hurt tax receipts even further.