The Religious Right and Feminism

Why RedHawk's Recommendations are Birdbrained

Here are some thoughts on this provocative and worthwhile article, ‘The Good Feminism: How The Right is Unequipped to Fight Feminism.’ I encourage you to read it. ‘My goal above all else’, the author says, ‘is for men to reclaim their authority in the world.’ I approve of this goal, but RedHawk’s recommendations are ultimately birdbrained.

The first problem is a misunderstanding of the roots of feminism:

You’ll hear constant discussion on how men need to “man up,” take more responsibility, return to the church, stop watching porn, and step up to save the West. While these are all valid, you’ll notice one thing lacking in this laundry list of points: ACCOUNTABILITY AMONG WOMEN.

Men founded feminism. Bachofen’s vision of an imaginary matriarchal society as a promiscuous commune was developed by the Utopian Socialists Robert Owen and Charles Fourier, both of whom influenced Marx and Engels. Following the failure of classical economic Marxism, Marcuse then saw women as the primary revolutionary tool, calling women ‘the most important and potentially the most radical movement that we have.’

But the ultimate appeal of feminism to men, as Charles Fourier’s vision of orgies showed, was easier sex. Ironically, however, despite claiming to combat feminism, RedHawk’s article advocates promiscuity for young men, which is what underpins feminism:

Men and women are different, right down to our brain waves and muscle fibers. It is ridiculous to suggest that men are ruined for marriage in the same way women are if they have had many sexual partners. It’s not true.

Given that men prize chastity in women highly because they do not want to be providing for someone else’s child, it is true to say pre-marital sex does not ruin men ‘in the same way’. But that is not to say it doesn’t ruin men also.

Pre-marital sex is bad for many reasons. To list just a few,

1. Sex is primarily directed to the child. Its point is the propagation of the human race. It takes great cunning and ingenuity to avoid sex resulting in children.

2. Parents have the duty of caring for the child, and this takes about twenty years.

3. This duty falls on both parents jointly; the father owes active help.

4. This means natural law requires marriage: a permanent and exclusive union guaranteed by contract.

5. Procreation outside marriage violates nature's provisions for the child.

So why is it being recommended?

It is simply IMPOSSIBLE for a man to understand his own nature and woman’s nature without getting in the trenches and finding out firsthand.

Capital letters aren’t an argument, and countless men have understood themselves and women without fornication. In fact, the traditional view is that lust blinds. A man who cannot master his sexual impulses is weak. He is also easy to control, and E Michael Jones explores this mechanism in Libido Dominandi.

Samson

‘Virtue’ derives from vir, ‘man’, but the tone of this article is boyish:

Have young men go out into the world and cut their teeth on the vast number of promiscuous women that modernity has created in order to level up and take a right-wing woman as a bride.

Right-wing men do not ‘cut their teeth’ on women because to do so is to disrespect not only femininity but also masculinity. Chivalry, which included chastity, ultimately existed for the sake of men, not women. Men who degrade women also degrade themselves.

‘Level up’ suggests RedHawk is a gamer, probably childless, and this advice to young men is treating sexual relations as a game. Only contraception or abortion, for example, could make what he advocates here possible without these women giving birth - unless these guys are firing blanks.

And yet this is precisely the attitude to sex that has produced the flaws of feminism that the article aims at remedying. In fact, if RedHawk is expecting these young men to use contraception, this is wrong for the reason that homosexuality is wrong. It's an attempt to get sexual satisfaction while evading the responsibilities nature attaches to it.

‘Modernity’ is an abstraction, and weak men created this ‘vast number of promiscuous women’ by giving them increased political and economic power so that they would rely less on bargaining for resources with sex. Unwilling to meet the high standard Darwin’s ‘choosy female’ sets for sexual access, men simply lowered it.

We need incentives for top men to join our ranks, and sex is the greatest motivator for men there is.

This is precisely why J. D. Unwin spent over six-hundred pages in Sex and Culture (1934) documenting evidence to show that enforcing pre-nuptial chastity and strict post-nuptial monogamy advances civilisations. Civilisational regression occurs when these strictures are relaxed. Sex outside marriage was rife in falling Rome.

Why? Because if men can get sex too easily, their primary motive for contributing to civilisation is removed. Why bother subjecting yourself to rigorous education and training for years to get a job that functions as a proxy to signal your ability to provide and therefore gain sexual access if you can already get sex without all that? Free love, baby.

Raise your hands if you want no-strings sex

For RedHawk, men are the victims of feminism:

Feminism has destroyed male-female relationships that have lasted for thousands of years. There is no way around it. We are going to have to break some eggs to make this omelet, despite the screams of the religious Right.

But feminism is an abstraction. And remember: its founding thinkers were men dreaming of orgies and relinquishing the responsibility to provide that comes with sex. The underlying cause is right under RedHawk’s nose in his own article. His hawk eyes should have seen it:

Feminism has always been an ideology of revenge and supremacy. It was never about equality…Feminism and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. We have the highest divorce rates and the lowest marriage rates ever. We have the highest rates of single motherhood, the highest rates of sexless men, and the highest rates of anti-depressant use among women. We have women who have been forced into the workforce and political institutions…

Who sent these women into work and politics? Men. And why? To give women access to the resources they would normally bargain for using sex. A lot of right-wing, self-described ‘based’ or ‘Alpha’ guys claim they want a trad wife, but they aren’t man enough for the trad life. Instead, they recoil in horror at the idea of paying for the entirety of their wives’ lives. Buy your own car, babe: I’ve got computer games to buy.

The provider role is too much for these man boys, and main cause of sexlessness is simply, as the Institute for Family Studies has shown, the increasing delay of marriage:

incels are right to see themselves as part of a novel and fairly extreme change in our society’s sexual behavior, with a growing share of sexless young men. But the big change isn’t a growing share of alpha males hoarding all the sex, nor women suddenly becoming far more choosey amid rising promiscuity; rather, it’s just that marriage is being delayed, which means that rates of marriage-status-controlled celibacy that aren’t historically extremely  unusual result in very unusual rates of total population-wide sexlessness.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and feminism results from the male abdication of authority. This was the case in Rome with the weakening of the paterfamilias. Feminism is a symptom of cultural decline, not a cause. The Amish don’t have any problems with feminism.

Many famous feminist leaders, for example, had weak fathers who failed as protectors and providers. Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan: all watched their mothers suffer and resented their fathers. But RedHawk, however, sees male authority as having been taken rather than abdicated:

Men have not held power in the West for three, if not four, generations. The sexual revolution has given Western women total control of the mating process…What we need now is a new generation of men to break their gynocentric programming and to take back what is ours.

Yet the research is clear that women regret the results of the sexual revolution more than men do. Men like it - you know, cutting their teeth on the hoards of the promiscuous women while using contraception, taking advantage of abortions and not having to support families. It’s fun.

Another misconception here is the idea that men ever had ‘control of the mating process’. Basic biology means this is impossible: women are the limiting factor in reproduction. Since sex is something women have that men want, women necessarily control the mating process - hence the existence of monogamy as the preferred female strategy.

Pair-bonding originates in protection. It stops lusty brats rampaging through women. But monogamy also stabilises society because polygyny creates a large proportion of involuntary sexless men incentivised to rape and pillage. There are no large, stable non-monogamous societies.

The top men trade quantity for quality because pair-bonding leads to assortative mating: what you get is related to what you can provide. They secure the top women for themselves and forgo - for the benefit of society - the many women they could have. I am reminded of a profound image from Chesterton’s essay on Robert Louis Stevenson,

A thoroughly strong man swinging a sledge-hammer can tap the top of an eggshell. A weaker man swinging a sledge-hammer will break the table on which it stands into pieces.

If Stephen Fry is a stupid person’s idea of an intellectual, RedHawk has a weak man’s idea of a strong man. To defeat feminism - with pre-marital sex, contraception and abortion, remember - requires, he says,

an unapologetic and unleashed form of masculinity that has been absent in the West for generations. This will require a return of Alpha men — to use Vox Day’s socio-sexual hierarchy — to the institutions of power. What we have today is a society ruled by Gammas, or in other words male feminists and white knights. And historically, the way Alpha men gain power is by crushing their enemies, seeing them driven before them, and hearing the lamentations of their women. There needs to be a return of strong Alpha men to crush the Gammas into submission.

How, pray tell, did these majestic Gammas dethrone the formidable Alphas? The answer should now be clear: the abdication of authority. The Alphas are all swiping right on Tinder.

RedHawk blames the churches for not enforcing chastity in women or telling women it’s their duty to have sex with and listen to their husbands. But Catholic doctrine, for example, is clear on both these points — as well as on male chastity. If the other churches — including the Eastern Orthodox Church attracting many men on the right — have caved on contraception and abortion, it’s because of human frailty.

He finishes by saying,

The NUMBER ONE reason men are on this Earth is sex. The whole economy runs on the male sex drive. Christians can argue all they want that it should be God as number one, but that simply isn’t cutting it for most men.

This is odd. In Christianity, sex is sacred, and man is commanded ‘be fruitful and multiply’ - not just the economy (a revealingly reductive point) but Creation runs on it.

Red Hawk’s concluding call is ‘encourage men to take back our civilization that has been stolen from us.’ But it wasn’t stolen. It was squandered, and it won’t be recovered with Conan fantasies that appeal to adolescents of all ages.