Why does it seem that American society is in decline, that fairness and decorum are receding, that socialism and tyranny are becoming malignant despite the majority of the public being averse to such philosophies, yet the true root cause seems elusive? What if everything from unsustainable health care and social security costs, to stagnant wages and rising crime, to crumbling infrastructure and metastasizing socialism, to the economic decline of major US cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore, could all be traced to a common origin that is extremely pervasive yet is all but absent from the national dialog, indeed from the dialog of the entire Western world?
Today, on the first day of the new decade of '201x' years, I am going to tell you why that is. I am hereby triggering the national dialog on what the foremost challenge for the United States will be in this decade, which is the ultimate root cause of most of the other problems we appear to be struggling with. What you are about to read is the equivalent of someone in 1997 describing the expected forces governing the War on Terror from 2001-2009 in profound detail.
This is a very long article, the longest ever written on The Futurist. As it is a guide to the next decade of social, political, and sexual strife, it is not meant to be read in one shot but rather digested slowly over an extended period, with all supporting links read as well. As the months and years of this decade progress, this article will seem all the more prophetic.
Executive Summary : The Western World has quietly become a civilization that undervalues men and overvalues women, where the state forcibly transfers resources from men to women creating various perverse incentives for otherwise good women to conduct great evil against men and children, and where male nature is vilified but female nature is celebrated. This is unfair to both genders, and is a recipe for a rapid civilizational decline and displacement, the costs of which will ultimately be borne by a subsequent generation of innocent women, rather than men, as soon as 2020.
The Cultural Thesis
The Myth of Female Oppression : All of us have been taught how women have supposedly been oppressed throughout human existence, and that this was pervasive, systematic, and endorsed by ordinary men who presumably had it much better than women. In reality, this narrative is entirely fabricated. The average man was forced to risk death on the battlefield, at sea, or in mines, while most women stayed indoors tending to children and household duties. Male life expectancy was always significantly lower than that of females, and still is.
Warfare has been a near constant feature of human society before the modern era, and whenever two tribes or kingdoms went to war with each other, the losing side saw many of its fighting-age men exterminated, while the women were assimilated into the invading society. Now, becoming a concubine or a housekeeper is an unfortunate fate, but not nearly as bad as being slaughtered in battle as the men were. To anyone who disagrees, would you like for the men and women to trade outcomes?
Most of this narrative stems from 'feminists' comparing the plight of average women to the topmost men (the monarch and other aristocrats), rather than to the average man. This practice is known as apex fallacy, and whether accidental or deliberate, entirely misrepresents reality. To approximate the conditions of the average woman to the average man (the key word being 'average') in the Western world of a century ago, simply observe the lives of the poorest peasants in poor countries today. Both men and women have to perform tedious work, have insufficient food and clothing, and limited opportunities for upliftment.
As far as selective anecdotes like voting rights go, in the vast majority of cases, men could not vote either. In fact, if one compares every nation state from every century, virtually all of them extended exactly the same voting rights (or lack thereof) to men and women. Even today, out of 200 sovereign states, there are exactly zero that have a different class of voting rights to men and women. Any claim that women were being denied rights than men were given in even 0.1% of historical instances, falls flat.
This is not to deny that genuine atrocities like genital mutilation have been perpetrated against women; they have and still are. But men also experienced atrocities of comparable horror at the same time, which is simply not mentioned. In fact, when a man is genitally mutilated by a woman, other women actually find this humorous, and are proud to say so publicly.
It is already wrong when a contemporary group seeks reparations from an injustice that occurred over a century ago to people who are no longer alive. It is even worse when this oppression itself is a fabrication. The narrative of female oppression by men should be rejected and refuted as the highly selective and historically false narrative that it is. In fact, this myth is evidence not of historical oppression, but of the vastly different propensity to complain between the two genders.
The Masculinity Vacuum in Entertainment : Take a look at the collage of entertainers below (click to enlarge), which will be relevant if you are older than 30. All of them were prominent in the 1980s, some spilling over on either side of that decade. They are all certainly very different from one another. But they have one thing in common - that there are far fewer comparable personas produced by Hollywood today.
As diverse and imperfect as these characters were, they were all examples of masculinity. They represented different archetypes, from the father to the leader to the ladies man to the rugged outdoorsman to the protector. They were all more similar than dissimilar, as they all were role-models for young boys of the time, often the same young boys. Celebrities as disparate as Bill Cosby and Mr. T had majority overlap in their fan bases, as did characters as contrasting as Jean-Luc Picard and The Macho Man Randy Savage.
At this point, you might be feeling a deep inner emptiness lamenting a bygone age, as the paucity of proudly, inspiringly masculine characters in modern entertainment becomes clear. Before the 1980s, there were different masculine characters, but today, they are conspicuously absent. Men are shown either as thuggish degenerates, or as effete androgynes. Sure, there were remakes of Star Trek and The A-Team, and series finales of Rocky and Indiana Jones. But where are the new characters? Why is the vacuum being filled solely with nostalgia? A single example like Jack Bauer is not sufficient to dispute the much larger trend of masculinity purging.
Modern entertainment typically shows businessmen as villains, and husbands as bumbling dimwits that are always under the command of the all-powerful wife, who is never wrong. Oprah Winfrey's platform always grants a sympathetic portrayal to a wronged woman, but never to men who have suffered great injustices. Absurdly false feminist myths such as a belief that women are underpaid relative to men for the same output of work, or that adultery and domestic violence are actions committed exclusively by men, are embedded even within the dialog of sitcoms and legal dramas.
This trains women to disrespect men, wives to think poorly of their husbands, and girls to devalue the importance of their fathers, which leads to the normalization of single motherhood (obviously with taxpayer subsidies), despite the reality that most single mothers are not victims, but merely women who rode a carousel of men with reckless abandon. This, in turn, leads to fatherless young men growing up being told that natural male behavior is wrong, and feminization is normal. It also leads to women being deceived outright about the realities of the sexual market, where media attempts to normalize single motherhood and attempted 'cougarhood' are glorified, rather than portrayed as the undesirable conditions that they are.
The Primal Nature of Men and Women : Genetic research has shown that before the modern era, 80% of women managed to reproduce, but only 40% of men did. The obvious conclusion from this is that a few top men had multiple wives, while the bottom 60% had no mating prospects at all. Women clearly did not mind sharing the top man with multiple other women, ultimately deciding that being one of four women sharing an 'alpha' was still more preferable than having the undivided attention of a 'beta'. Let us define the top 20% of men as measured by their attractiveness to women, as 'alpha' males while the middle 60% of men will be called 'beta' males. The bottom 20% are not meaningful in this context.
Research across gorillas, chimpanzees, and primitive human tribes shows that men are promiscuous and polygamous. This is no surprise to a modern reader, but the research further shows that women are not monogamous, as is popularly assumed, but hypergamous. In other words, a woman may be attracted to only one man at any given time, but as the status and fortune of various men fluctuates, a woman's attention may shift from a declining man to an ascendant man. There is significant turnover in the ranks of alpha males, which women are acutely aware of.
As a result, women are the first to want into a monogamous relationship, and the first to want out. This is neither right nor wrong, merely natural. What is wrong, however, is the cultural and societal pressure to shame men into committing to marriage under the pretense that they are 'afraid of commitment' due to some 'Peter Pan complex', while there is no longer the corresponding traditional shame that was reserved for women who destroyed the marriage, despite the fact that 90% of divorces are initiated by women. Furthermore, when women destroy the commitment, there is great harm to children, and the woman demands present and future payments from the man she is abandoning. A man who refuses to marry is neither harming innocent minors nor expecting years of payments from the woman. This absurd double standard has invisible but major costs to society.
To provide 'beta' men an incentive to produce far more economic output than needed just to support themselves while simultaneously controlling the hypergamy of women that would deprive children of interaction with their biological fathers, all major religions constructed an institution to force constructive conduct out of both genders while penalizing the natural primate tendencies of each. This institution was known as 'marriage'. Societies that enforced monogamous marriage made sure all beta men had wives, thus unlocking productive output out of these men who in pre-modern times would have had no incentive to be productive. Women, in turn, received a provider, a protector, and higher social status than unmarried women, who often were trapped in poverty. When applied over an entire population of humans, this system was known as 'civilization'.
All societies that achieved great advances and lasted for multiple centuries followed this formula with very little deviation, and it is quite remarkable how similar the nature of monogamous marriage was across seemingly diverse cultures. Societies that deviated from this were quickly replaced. This 'contract' between the sexes was advantageous to beta men, women over the age of 35, and children, but greatly curbed the activities of alpha men and women under 35 (together, a much smaller group than the former one). Conversely, the pre-civilized norm of alpha men monopolizing 3 or more young women each, replacing aging ones with new ones, while the masses of beta men fight over a tiny supply of surplus/aging women, was chaotic and unstable, leaving beta men violent and unproductive, and aging mothers discarded by their alpha mates now vulnerable to poverty. So what happens when the traditional controls of civilization are lifted from both men and women?
The Four Sirens : Four unrelated forces simultaneously combined to entirely distort the balance of civilization built on the biological realities of men and women. Others have presented versions of the Four Sirens concept in the past, but I am choosing a slightly different definition of the Four Sirens :
1) Easy contraception (condoms, pills, and abortions): In the past, extremely few women ever had more than one or two sexual partners in their lives, as being an unwed mother led to poverty and social ostracization. Contraception made it possible for females to conduct campaigns to act on their urges of hypergamy.
2) 'No fault' divorce, asset division, and alimony : In the past, a woman who wanted to leave her husband needed to prove misconduct on his part. Now, the law has changed to such a degree that a woman can leave her husband for no stated reason, yet is still entitled to payments from him for years to come. This incentivizes destruction because it enables women to transfer the costs of irresponsible behavior onto men and children.
3) Female economic freedom : Despite 'feminists' claiming that this is the fruit of their hard work, inventions like the vacuum cleaner, washing machine, and oven were the primary drivers behind liberating women from household chores and freeing them up to enter the workforce. These inventions compressed the chores that took a full day into just an hour or less. There was never any organized male opposition to women entering the workforce (in China, taxes were collected in a way that mandated female productivity), as more labor lowered labor costs while also creating new consumers. However, one of the main reasons that women married - financial support - was no longer a necessity.
Female entry into the workforce is generally a positive development for society, and I would be the first to praise this, if it were solely on the basis of merit (as old-school feminists had genuinely intended). Unfortunately, too much of this is now due to corrupt political lobbying to forcibly transfer resources from men to women.
4) Female-Centric social engineering : Above and beyond the pro-woman divorce laws, further state interventions include the subsidization of single motherhood, laws that criminalize violence against women (but offer no protection to men who are the victims of violence by women, which happens just as often), and 'sexual harassment' laws with definitions so nebulous that women have the power to accuse men of anything without the man having any rights of his own.
These four forces in tandem handed an unprecedented level of power to women. The technology gave them freedom to pursue careers and the freedom to be promiscuous. Feminist laws have done a remarkable job of shielding women from the consequences of their own actions. Women now have as close to a hypergamous utopia as has ever existed, where they can pursue alpha males while extracting subsidization from beta males without any reciprocal obligations to them. Despite all the new freedoms available to women that freed them from their traditional responsibilities, men were still expected to adhere to their traditional responsibilities.
Marriage 2.0 : From the West to the Middle East to Asia, marriage is considered a mandatory bedrock of any functioning society. If marriage is such a crucial ingredient of societal health, then the West is barreling ahead on a suicidal path.
We earlier discussed why marriage was created, but equally important were the factors that sustained the institution and kept it true to its objectives. The reasons that marriage 'worked' not too long ago were :
1) People married at the age of 20, and often died by the age of 50. People were virgins at marriage, and women spent their 20s tending to 3 or more children. The wife retained her beauty 15 years into the marriage, and the lack of processed junk food kept her slim even after that. This is an entirely different psychological foundation than the present urban feminist norm of a woman marrying at the age of 34 after having had 10 or more prior sexual relationships, who then promptly emerges from her svelte chrysalis in an event that can best be described as a fatocalypse.
2) It was entirely normal for 10-20% of young men to die or be crippled on the battlefield, or in occupational accidents. Hence, there were always significantly more women than able-bodied men in the 20-40 age group, ensuring that not all women could marry. Widows were common and visible, and vulnerable to poverty and crime. For these reasons, women who were married to able-bodied men knew how fortunate they were relative to other women who had to resort to tedious jobs just to survive, and treated their marriage with corresponding respect.
3) Prior to the invention of contraception, female promiscuity carried the huge risk of pregnancy, and the resultant poverty and low social status. It was virtually impossible for any women to have more than 2-3 sexual partners in her lifetime without being a prostitute, itself an occupation of the lowest social status.
4) Divorce carried both social stigma and financial losses for a woman. Her prospects for remarriage were slim. Religious institutions, extended clans, and broader societal forces were pressures to keep a woman committed to her marriage, and the notion of leaving simply out of boredom was out of the question.
Today, however, all of these factors have been removed. This is partly the result of good forces (economic progress and technology invented by beta men), but partly due to artificial schemes that are extremely damaging to society.
For one thing, the wedding itself has gone from a solemn event attended only by close family and friends, to an extravaganza of conspicuous consumption for the enjoyment of women but financed by the hapless man. The wedding ring itself used to be a family heirloom passed down over generations, but now, the bride thumbs through a catalog that shows her rings that the man is expected to spend two months of his salary to buy. This presumption that somehow the woman is to be indulged for entering marriage is a complete reversal of centuries-old traditions grounded in biological realities (and evidence of how American men have become weak pushovers). In India, for example, it is normal even today for either the bride's father to pay for the wedding, or for the bride's family to give custody of all wedding jewelry to the groom's family. The reason for this was so that the groom's family effectively had a 'security bond' against irresponsible behavior on the part of the bride, such as her leaving the man at the (Indian equivalent of the) altar, or fleeing the marital home at the first sign of distress (also a common female psychological response). For those wondering why Indian culture has such restrictions on women and not men, restrictions on men were tried in some communities, and those communities quickly vanished and were forgotten. There is no avoiding the reality that marriage has to be made attractive to men for the surrounding civilization to survive. Abuse and blackmail of women certainly occurred in some instances, but on balance, these customs existed through centuries of observing the realities of human behavior. Indian civilization has survived for over 5000 years and every challenge imaginable through enforcement of these customs, and, until recently, the Christian world also had comparable mechanisms to steer individual behavior away from destructive manifestations. However, if the wedding has mutated into a carnival of bridezilla narcissism, the mechanics of divorce are far more disastrous.
In an 'at will' employment arrangement between a corporation and an employee, either party can terminate the contract at any time. However, instead of a few weeks of severance, imagine what would happen if the employer was legally required to pay the employee half of his or her paycheck for 20 additional years, irrespective of anything the employee did or did not do, under penalty of imprisonment for the CEO. Suppose, additionally, that it is culturally encouraged for an employee to do this whenever even minor dissatisfaction arises. Would businesses be able to operate? Would anyone want to be a CEO? Would businesses even form, and thus would any wealth be created, given the risks associated with hiring an employee? Keep these questions in mind as you read further.
So why are 70-90% of divorces initiated by women (she files 70% of the time, and the other 20% of the time, she forces the man to file, due to abuse or adultery on the part of the woman)? Women have always been hypergamous, and most were married to beta men that they felt no attraction towards, so what has changed to cause an increase in divorce rates?
Divorce lawyers, like any other professional group, will seek conditions that are good for business. What makes attorneys different from, say, engineers or salespeople, is that a) they know precisely how to lobby for changes to the legal system, bypassing voters and the US constitution, that guarantees more revenue for them, and b) what benefits them is directly harmful to the fabric of society in general, and to children in particular. When they collude with rage-filled 'feminists' who would gladly send innocent men to concentration camps if they could, the outcome is catastrophic.
The concept of 'no fault' divorce by itself may not be unfair. The concepts of asset division and alimony may also be fair in the event of serious wrongdoing by the husband. However, the combination of no-fault divorce plus asset division/alimony is incredibly unfair and prone to extortionary abuse. The notion that she can choose to leave the marriage, yet he is nonetheless required to pay her for years after that even if he did not want to destroy the union, is an injustice that should not occur in any advanced democracy. Indeed, the man has to pay even if the woman has an extramarital affair, possibly even being ordered to pay her psychiatric fees. Bogus claims by 'feminists' that women suffer under divorce are designed to obscure the fact that she is the one who filed for divorce. Defenders of alimony insist that a woman seeking a divorce should not see a drop in living standards, but it is somehow acceptable for the husband to see a drop even if he did not want a divorce. I would go further and declare that any belief that women deserve alimony on a no-fault basis in this day age is utterly contradictory to the belief that women are equals of men. How can women both deserve alimony while also claiming equality? In rare cases, high-earning women have had to pay alimony to ex-husbands, but that is only 4% of the time, vs. the man paying 96% of the time. But it gets worse; much worse, in fact.
Even if the woman chooses to leave on account of 'boredom', she is still given default custody of the children, which exposes the total hypocrisy of feminist claims that men and women should be treated equally. Furthermore, the man is required to pay 'child support' which is assessed at levels much higher than the direct costs of child care, with the woman facing no burden to prove the funds were spent on the child, and cannot be specified by any pre-nuptial agreement. The rationale is that 'the child should not see a drop in living standards due to divorce', but since the mother has custody of the child, this is a stealthy way in which feminists have ensured financial maintenence of the mother as well. So the man loses his children and most of his income even if he did not want divorce. But even that is not the worst-case scenario.
The Bradley Amendment, devised by Senator Bill Bradley in 1986, ruthlessly pursues men for the already high 'child support' percentages, and seizes their passports and imprisons them without due process for falling behind in payments, even if on account of job loss during a recession. Under a bogus 'deadbeat dads' media campaign, 'feminists' were able to obscure the fact that women were the ones ending their marriages and with them the benefit that children receive from a two-parent upbringing, and further demanding unusually high spousal maintenence, much of which does not even go to the child, from a dutiful ex-husband who did not want a divorce, under penalty of imprisonment. So the legal process uses children as pawns through which to extract an expanded alimony stream for the mother. Talk about a multi-layer compounding of evil. The phony tactic of insisting that 'it is for the children' is used to shut down all questions about the use of children as pawns in the extortion process, while avoiding scrutiny of the fact that the parent who is choosing divorce is clearly placing the long-term well-being of the children at a very low priority.
So as it stands today, there are large numbers of middle-class men who were upstanding citizens, who were subjected to divorce against their will, had their children taken from them, pay alimony masked as child support that is so high that many of them have to live out of their cars or with their relatives, and after job loss from economic conditions, are imprisoned simply for running out of money. If 10-30% of American men are under conditions where 70% or more of their income is taken from them under threat of prison, these men have no incentive to start new businesses or invent new technologies or processes. Having 10-30% of men disincentivized this way cannot be good for the economy, and is definitely a contributor to current economic malaise, not to mention a 21st-century version of slavery. Sometimes, the children are not even biologically his.
This one-page site has more links about the brutal tyranny that a man can be subjected to once he enters the legal contract of marriage, and even more so after he has children. What was once the bedrock of society, and a solemn tradition that benefited both men and women equally, has quietly mutated under the evil tinkering of feminists, divorce lawyers, and leftists, into a shockingly unequal arrangement, where the man is officially a second-class citizen who is subjected to a myriad of sadistic risks. As a result, the word 'marriage' should not even be used, given the totality of changes that have made the arrangement all but unrecognizable compared to its intended ideals. Suicide rates of men undergoing divorce run as high as 20%, and all of us know a man who either committed suicide, or admits seriously considering it during the dehumanization he faced even though he wanted to preserve the union. Needless to say, this is a violation of the US Constitution on many levels, and is incompatible with the values of any supposedly advanced democracy that prides itself on freedom and liberty. There is effectively a tyrannical leftist shadow state operating within US borders but entirely outside the US constitution, which can subject a man to horrors more worthy of North Korea than the US, even if he did not want out of the marriage, did not want to be separated from his children, and did not want to lose his job. Any unsuspecting man can be sucked into this shadow state.
Anyone who believes that two-parent families are important to the continuance of an advanced civilization, should focus on the explosive growth in revenue earned by divorce lawyers, court supervisors, and 'feminist' organizations over the past quarter-century. If Western society is to survive, these revenues should be chopped down to a tenth of what they presently are, which is what they would be if the elements that violate the US Constitution were repealed.
Marriage is no longer a gateway to female 'companionship', as we shall discuss later. For this reason, as a Futurist, I cannot recommend 'marriage', as the grotesque parody that it has become today, to any young man living in the US, UK, Canada, or Australia. There are just too many things outside of his control that can catastrophically ruin his finances, emotions, and quality of life.
At a minimum, he should make sure that having children is the most important goal of his life. If not, then he has insufficient reason to enter this contract. If this goal is affirmed, then he should conduct research by speaking to a few divorced men about the laws and mistreatment they were subjected to, and attend a few divorce court hearings at the local courthouse. After gaining this information, if he still wants to take the risk, he should only marry if he can meet the following three conditions, none of which can substitute either of the other two :
1) The woman earns the same as, or more than, he does.
2) He has a properly done pre-nuptial arrangement with lawyers on each side (even though a pre-nup will not affect the worst aspect of divorce law - 'child support' as a cloak for stealth alimony and possible imprisonment).
3) He is deeply competent in the Venusian Arts, and can manage his relationship with his wife effortlessly. More on this later.
There are still substantial risks, but at least they are somewhat reduced under these conditions. If marriage is a very important goal for a young man, he should seriously consider expatriation to a developing country, where he ironically may have a higher living standard than in the US after adjusting for divorce risk.
So, to review, the differences between Marriage 1.0 and Marriage 2.0 are :
- a) No fault asset division and alimony, where the abandoned spouse has to pay if he earns more, even if he did not want a divorce, and even if he is a victim of abuse, cuckolding, or adultery. There are rare instances of high-earning women getting caught in this trap as well.
- b) Women marrying after having 5 or more sexual partners, compared to just 0-1 previously. This makes it harder for the woman to form a pair bond with her husband.
- c) Women marrying at an age when very few years of their peak beauty are remaining, compared to a decade or more remaining under Marriage 1.0.
- d) Child custody is almost never granted to the man, so he loses his children on a 'no fault' basis.
Traditional cultures marketed marriage with such punctilious alacrity that most people today dare not even question whether the traditional truths still apply. Hence, hostility often ensues from a mere attempt to even broach the topic of whether marriage is still the same concept as it once was. Everyone from women to sadistic social conservatives to a young man's own parents will pressure and shame him into marriage for reasons they cannot even articulate, and condemn his request for a pre-nup, without having any interest in even learning about the horrendously unequal and carefully concealed laws he would be subjected to in the event that his wife divorces him through no reasons he can discern. But some men with an eye on self-preservation are figuring this out, and are avoiding marriage. By many accounts, 22% of men have decided to avoid marriage. So what happens to a society that makes it unattractive for even just 20% of men to marry?
Women are far more interested in marriage than men. Simple logic of supply and demand tells us that the institution of monogamous marriage requires at least 80% male participation in order to be viable. When male participation drops below 80%, all women are in serious trouble, since there are now 100 women competing for every 80 men, compounded with the reality that women age out of fertility much quicker than men. This creates great stress among the single female population. In the past, the steady hand of a young woman's mother and grandmother knew that her beauty was temporary, and that the most seductive man was not the best husband, and they made sure that the girl was married off to a boy with long-term durability. Now that this guidance has been removed from the lives of young women, thanks to 'feminism', these women are proving to be poor pilots of their mating lives who pursue alpha males until the age of 34-36 when her desirability drops precipitously and not even beta males she used to reject are interested in her. This stunning plunge in her prospects with men is known as the Wile E. Coyote moment, and women of yesteryear had many safety nets that protected them from this fate. The 'feminist' media's attempt to normalize 'cougarhood' is evidence of gasping desperation to package failure as a desirable outcome, which will never become mainstream due to sheer biological realities. Women often protest that a high number of sexual partners should not be counted as a negative on them, as the same is not a negative for men, but this is merely a manifestation of solipism. A complex sexual past works against women even if the same works in favor of men, due to the natural sexual attraction triggers of each gender. A wise man once said, "A key that can open many locks is a valuable key, but a lock that can be opened by many keys is a useless lock."
The big irony is that 'feminism', rather than improving the lives of women, has stripped away the safety nets of mother/grandmother guidance that would have shielded her from ever having to face her Wile E. Coyote moment. 'Feminism' has thus put the average woman at risk in yet another area.
The Venusian Arts (Game) : The Four Sirens and the legal changes feminists have instituted to obstruct beta men have created a climate where men have invented techniques and strategies to adapt to the more challenging marketplace, only to exceed their aspirations. This is a disruptive technology in its own right. All of us know a man who is neither handsome nor wealthy, but consistently has amazing success with women. He seems to have natural instincts regarding women that to the layperson may be indistinguishable from magic. So how does he do it?
Mars is the God of War, while Venus is the Goddess of Love. Study of combat is thus known as the Martial Arts, while the study of attraction, seduction, and romance is known as the Venusian Arts, as coined by Mystery, a pioneer in the field. Detractors with a vested interest in the present status quo are eager to misrepresent what the Venusian Arts are, but as a definition :
The traits that make a man attractive to women are learnable skills, that improve with practice. Once a man learns these skills, he is indistinguishable from a man who had natural talents in this area. Whether a man then chooses to use these skills to secure one solid relationship or multiple brief ones, is entirely up to him.
The subject is too vast for any description over here to do it full justice, but in a nutshell, the Internet age enabled communities of men to share the various bits of knowledge they had field tested and refined (e.g. one man being an expert at meeting women during the daytime, another being an expert at step-by-step sexual escalation, yet another being a master of creating lasting love, etc.). The collective knowledge grew and evolved, and an entire industry to teach the various schools of 'Game' emerged. Men who comprehended the concepts (a minority) and those who could undertake the total reconstitution of their personalities and avalanche of rejections as part of the learning curve (a still smaller minority) stood to reap tremendous benefits from becoming more attractive than the vast majority of unaware men. While the 'pick-up artist' (PUA) implementation is the most media-covered, the principles are equally valuable for men in monogamous long-term relationships (LTRs). See Charlotte Allen's cover story for The Weekly Standard, devoted to 'Game'.
Among the most valuable learnings from the body of knowledge is the contrarian revelation that what women say a man should do is often quite the antithesis of what would actually bring him success. For example, being a needy, supplicative, eager-to-please man is precisely the opposite behavior that a man should employ, where being dominant, teasing, amused, yet assertive is the optimal persona. An equally valuable lesson is to realize when not to take a woman's words at face value. Many statements from her are 'tests' to see if the man can remain congruent in his 'alpha' personality, where the woman is actually hoping the man does not eagerly comply to her wishes. Similarly, the 'feminist' Pavlovian reaction to call any non-compliant man a 'misogynist' should also not be taken as though a rational adult assigned the label after fair consideration. Such shaming language is only meant to deflect scrutiny and accountability from the woman uttering it, and should be given no more importance than a 10-year-old throwing a tantrum to avoid responsibility or accountability. Far too many men actually take these slurs seriously, to the detriment of male rights and dignity.
Success in internalizing the core fundamentals of the Venusian Arts requires an outside-the-box thinker solidly in the very top of Maslow's Hierarchy, and in my experience, 80% of men and 99.9% of women are simply incapable of comprehending why the skills of the Venusian Arts are valuable and effective. Many women, and even a few pathetic men, condemn the Venusian Arts, without even gaining a minimal comprehension for what it truly is (which I have highlighted in red above), and how it benefits both men and women. Most of what they think they know about the Venusian Arts involves strawmen, a lack of basic research, and their own sheer insecurity.
For anyone seeking advice on the Venusian Arts, there is one rule you must never break. I believe it is of paramount importance that the knowledge be used ethically, and with the objective of creating mutually satisfying relationships with women. It is not moral to mistreat women, even if they have done the same to countless men. We, as men, have to take the high road even if women are not, and this is my firm belief. Nice guys can finish first if they have Game.
'Feminism' as Unrestrained Misandry and Projection : The golden rule of human interactions is to judge a person, or a group, by their actions rather than their words. The actions of 'feminists' reveal their ideology to be one that seeks to secure equality for women in the few areas where they lag, while distracting observers from the vast array of areas where women are in a more favorable position relative to men (the judicial system, hiring and admissions quotas, media portrayals, social settings, etc.). They will concoct any number of bogus statistics to maintain an increasingly ridiculous narrative of female oppression.
Feminists once had noble goals of securing voting rights, achieving educational parity, and opening employment channels for women. But once these goals were met and even exceeded, the activists did not want to lose relevance. Now, they tirelessly and ruthlessly lobby for changes in legislation that are blatantly discriminatory against men (not to mention unconstitutional and downright cruel). Not satisfied with that, they continue to lobby for social programs designed to devalue the roles of husbands and fathers, replacing them with taxpayer-funded handouts.
Despite my acute ability to detect and deconstruct leftists, I was unprepared for the level of unhinged lunacy that 'feminism' had sunk to, which revealed itself in late 2008 when Sarah Palin emerged onto the national scene. Here was a woman who actually achieved all the aspirations that feminists claim to value : a highly successful career as a Governor and VP candidate, a large number of children, a loving marriage to a supportive yet ruggedly masculine husband, and an attractive appearance despite being in her 40s. If anything, she should be hailed as a superb role model of a woman from modest origins who has managed to 'have it all'. Yet, the feminist reaction to her was quite the opposite, as she attracted far more hate from lefto-feminists than the woman-stoning Taliban, or child-raping Roman Polanski ever could. What is a parody so outlandish that even The Onion may not write it is actually true. In one shot, 'feminism' was revealed as being not just different from its stated goals, but perhaps the most extreme pillar of leftism in existence today. This is because it is far less challenged than any other subsect of leftism.
As it is profitable to claim victimhood in this age, a good indicator is whether any condemnation by the supposedly oppressed of their oppressor could be similarly uttered if the positions were reversed. We know that what Rev. Jeremiah Wright said about whites could not be said by a white pastor about blacks, and we see even more of a double standard regarding what women and men can say about each other in America today. This reveals one of the darkest depths of the human mind - when a group is utterly convinced that they are the 'victims' of another group, they can rationalize any level of evil against their perceived oppressors.
Go to any major 'feminist' website, such as feministing.com or Jezebel.com, and ask polite questions about the fairness of divorce laws, or the injustice of innocent men being jailed on false accusations of rape without due process. You will quickly be called a 'misogynist' and banned from commenting. The same is not true for any major men's site, where even heated arguments and blatant misandry are tolerated in the spirit of free speech and human dignity. When is the last time a doctrinaire 'feminist' actually had the courage to debate a fair woman like Camille Paglia, Tammy Bruce, or Christina Hoff Somers on television?
Ever-tightening groupthink that enforces an ever-escalating narrative of victimhood ensures that projection becomes the normal mode of misandrist thought. The word 'misogynist' has expanded to such an extreme that it is the Pavlovian response to anything a 'feminist' feels bad about, but cannot articulate in an adult-like manner. This reveals the projected gender bigotry of the 'feminist' in question, which in her case is misandry. For example, an older man dating women 10 years younger than him is also referred to as a 'misogynist' by the older bitterati. Not an ageist, mind you, but a misogynist. A man who refuses to find obese women attractive is also a 'misogynist', as are gay men who do not spend money on women. The male non-compliance labeled as 'misogyny' thus becomes a reaction to many years of unopposed misandry heaped on him first, when he initially harbored no such sentiments. Kick a friendly dog enough times, and you get a nasty dog.
There are laws such as the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), that blatantly declares that violence against women is far worse than violence against men. VAWA is very different from ordinary assault laws, because under VAWA, a man can be removed from his home at gunpoint if the woman makes a single phonecall. No due process is permitted, and the man's Constitutional rights are jettisoned. At the same time, half of all domestic violence is by the woman against the man. Tiger Woods' wife beat him with a blunt weapon and scratched his face, only to be applauded by 'feminists' in a 'you go girl' manner. Projection can normalize barbarism.
Rape legislation has also bypassed the US Constitution, leaving a man guilty until he proves himself innocent, while the accusing woman faces no penalty for falsely sending a man to prison for 15 years, where he himsef will get raped. The Duke Lacrosse case was a prominent example of such abuse, but hundreds of others occur in America each year. The laws have been changed so that a victim has 1 month to 'decide' if she has been raped, and such flexibility predicatably leads to instances of a woman reporting rape just so that she does not have to tell her husband that she cheated on him (until it becomes profitable to divorce him). 40-50% of all rape accusations are false, but 'feminists' would rather jail scores of innocent men than let one guilty man get away, which is the exact opposite of what US Constitutional jurisprudence requires.
But, unimaginably, it gets even worse. Polls of men have shown that there is one thing men fear even more than being raped themselves, and that is being cuckolded. Men see cuckolding as the ultimate violation and betrayal, yet there is an entire movement among 'feminists' to enshrine a woman's right to commit adultery and use the resources of her husband to dupe him into thinking the child is his. These misandrists even want to outlaw the right of a man to test the paternity of a child.
So, to review, if a woman has second thoughts about a tryst a few days later, she can, without penalty, ruin a man financially and send him to prison for 15 years. 'Feminists' consider this acceptable. At the same time, even though men consider being cuckolded a worse fate than being raped, 'feminists' want to make this easier for a woman to do, by preventing paternity testing. They already have rigged laws so that the man, upon 'no fault' divorce, has to pay alimony, to a woman who cuckolded him.
This is pure evil, ranking right up there with the worst tyrannies of the last century. Modern misandry masking itself as 'feminism' is, without equal, the most hypocritical ideology in the world today. The laws of a society are the DNA of that society. Once the laws are tainted, the DNA is effectively corrupted, and mutations to the society soon follow. Men have been killed due to 'feminism'. Children and fathers have been forcibly separated for financial gain via 'feminism'. Slavery has returned to the West via 'feminism'. With all these misandric laws, one can fairly say that misandry is the new Jim Crow.
Shaming Language and Projection as a Substitute for Rational Debate : As discussed previously, any legitimate and polite questions about the fairness of anti-male realities in the legal system and media are quickly met with Pavlovian retorts of 'misogynist' and 'loser'. Let us deconstruct these oft-used examples of shaming language, and why misandrists are so afraid of legitimate debate.
Contrary to their endless charges of 'misogyny' (a word that many 'feminists' still manage to misspell), in reality, most men instinctively treat women with chivalry and enshrine them on exalted pedestals. Every day, we see men willing to defend women or do favors for them. There is infinitely more chivalry than misogyny exhibited by the male population. On the other hand, we routinely see anti-male statements uttered by 'feminists', and a presumption that all men are monsters guilty of crimes committed by a small number of people of the same gender. When well-known 'feminists' openly state that 90% of the male population should be exterminated, the unsupported accusation of 'misogyny' is a very pure manifestion of their own misandric projection.
On the second charge of being a 'loser who cannot get laid', any observation of the real world quickly makes it obvious that men who have had little experience with women are the ones placing women on pedestals, while those men who have had substantial sexual experience with women are not. Having sex with a large number of women does not increase respect for women, which is the exact opposite of the claim that 'feminists' make. Again, this charge of 'loserdom' is merely the psychosexual frustration of 'feminists' projected outwards, who express surprise that unrelenting hatred by them towards men is not magically metabolised into love for these particular 'feminists'.
That misandrists are so unchallenged is the reason that they have had no reason to expand their arsenal of venom beyond these two types of projection. Despite my explanation of this predictable Pavlovian response, the comments section will feature misandrists use these same two slurs nonetheless, proving the very point that they seek to shout down, and the very exposure they seek to avoid. My pre-emption will not deter them from revealing their limitations by indulging in it anyway. They simply cannot help themselves, and are far from being capable of discussing actual points of disagreement in a rational manner.
Men, of course, have to be savvy about the real reason their debate skills are limited to these two paths of shaming language, and not be deterred. Once again, remember that this should be taken no more seriously than if uttered by a 10-year-old, and there is no reason to let a 'feminist' get away with anything you would not let a man get away with. They wanted equality, didn't they?
'Feminism' as Genuine Misogyny : The greatest real misogyny, of course, has been unwittingly done by the 'feminists' themselves. By encouraging false rape claims, they devalue the credibility of all claims, and genuine victims will suffer. By incentivizing the dehumanization of their ex-husbands and the use of children as pawns, they set bad examples for children, and cause children to resent their mothers when they mature. By making baseless accusations of 'misogyny' without sufficient cause, they cause resentment among formerly friendly men where there previously was none. By trying to excuse cuckolding and female domestic violence, they invite formerly docile men to lash out in desperation.
One glaring example of misandry backfiring is in the destruction of marriage and corresponding push of the 'Sex in the City/cougar' fantasy. Monogamous marriage not only masked the gap between 'alpha' and 'beta' men, but also masked the gap between attractiveness of women before and after their Wile E. Coyote moment. By seducing women with the myth that a promiscuous single life after the age of 35 is a worthy goal, many women in their late 30s are left to find that they command far less male attention than women just a decade younger than them. 'Feminism' sold them a moral code entirely unsuited to their physical and mental realities, causing great sadness to these women.
But most importantly, 'feminists' devalued the traditional areas of female expertise (raising the next generation of citizens), while attaching value only to areas of male expertise (the boardroom, the military, sexual promiscuity) and told women to go duplicate male results under the premise that this was inherently better than traditional female functions. Telling women that emulating their mothers and grandmothers is less valuable than mimicking men sounds quite misogynistic to me, and unsurprisingly, despite all these 'freedoms', women are more unhappy than ever after being inflicted with such misogyny.
So how did the state of affairs manage to get so bad? Surely 'feminists' are not so powerful?
Social Conservatives, White Knights, and Girlie-Men : It would be inaccurate to deduce that misandrists were capable of creating this state of affairs on their own, despite their vigor and skill in sidestepping both the US Constitution and voter scrutiny. Equally culpable are men who ignorantly believe that acting as obsequious yes-men to 'feminists' by turning against other men in the hope that their posturing will earn them residual scraps of female affection.
Chivalry has existed in most human cultures for many centuries, and is seen in literature from all major civilizations. Chivalry greatly increased a man's prospects of marriage, but the reasons for this have been forgotten. Prior to the modern era, securing a young woman's hand in marriage usually involved going through her parents. The approval of the girl's father was a non-negotiable channel in the process. If a young man could show the girl's parents that he would place her on a pedestal, they could be convinced to sanction the union. The girl herself was not the primary audience of the chivalry, as the sexual attraction of the girl herself was rarely aroused by chivalry, as the Venusian Arts have shown.
Hence, many men are still stuck in the obsolete, inobservant, and self-loathing notion that chivalry and excess servility are the pathways to sex today, despite the modern reality that a woman's sexual decisions are no longer controlled by her parents, and are often casual rather than locked in matrimony. Whether such men are religious and called 'social conservatives', or effete leftists and called 'girlie men', they are effectively the same, and the term 'White Knights' can apply to the entire group. Their form of chivalry when exposed to 'feminist' histrionics results in these men harming other men at the behest of women who will never be attracted to them. This is why we see peculiar agreement between supposedly opposed 'social conservatives' and 'feminists' whenever the craving to punish men arises. A distressingly high number of men actually support the imprisonment of innocent men for false rape accusations or job loss causing 'child support' arrears merely because these 'men' don't want to risk female disapproval, incorrectly assuming that fanatically vocal 'feminists' represent the official opinion of all women. These men are the biggest suckers of all, as their pig-headed denial of the Venusian Arts will prevent them from deducing that excess agreeability and willingness to do favors for the objects of their lust are exactly the opposite of what makes women sexually attracted to men. No woman feels attraction for a needy man.
For this reason, after lunatic 'feminists', these pedestalizing White Knights are the next most responsible party for the misandry in Western society today. The average woman is not obsessively plotting hate crimes against men, she merely wants to side with whoever is winning (which is presently the misandrists). But pedestalizing men actually carry out many dirty deeds against other men in the hopes of receiving a pat on the head from 'feminists'. Hence, the hierarchy of misandric zeal is thus :
Strident 'feminist' > pedestalizer/white knight > average woman.
For reasons described earlier, even a declaration that many men are bigger contributors to misandry than the average woman will not deter 'feminists' from their Pavlovian tendency to call articles such as this one 'misogynist'.
Lastly, the religious 'social conservatives' who continue their empty sermonizing about the 'sanctity of marriage' while doing absolutely nothing about the divorce-incentivizing turn that the laws have taken, have been exposed for their pseudo-moral posturing and willful blindness. What they claim to be of utmost importance to them has been destroyed right under their noses, and they still are too dimwitted to comprehend why. No other interest group in America has been such a total failure at their own stated mission. To be duped into believing that a side-issue like 'gay marriage' is a mortal threat to traditional marriage, yet miss the legal changes that correlate to a rise in divorce rates by creating incentives for divorce (divorce being what destroys marriage, rather than a tiny number of gays), is about as egregious an oversight as an astronomer failing to be aware of the existence of the Moon. Aren't conservatives the people who are supposed to grasp that incentives drive behavior? An article worthy of being written by The Onion could conceivably be titled 'Social conservatives carefully seek to maintain perfect 100% record of failure in advancing their agenda'.
Why There is No Men's Rights Movement : At this point, readers may be wondering "If things are this bad, why don't we hear anything about it?". Indeed, this is a valid question, and the answer lies within the fundamentals of male psychology. Most beta men would rather die than be called a 'loser' by women (alpha men, of course, know better than to take this at face value). White Knights also join in the chorus of shaming other men since they blunderously believe that this is a pathway to the satiation of their lust. So an unfairly ruined man is faced with the prospect of being shamed by women and a large cohort of men if he protests about the injustice, and this keeps him suffering in silence, leading to an early death. We have millions of fine young men willing to die on the battlefield to defend the values enshrined in the US Constitution, but we don't see protests of even 100 divorced men against the shamefully unconstitutional treatment they have received. The destruction of the two-parent family by incentivizing immoral behavior in women is at least as much of a threat to American safety and prosperity as anything that ever could have come out of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, or Saudi Arabia. Men being too afraid to be the 'squeaky wheel' even when they have lost their children and their present and future assets is a major contributor to the prevailing status quo. Alpha men have no incentive beyond altruism to act as they benefit from the current climate, and thus my altruism will be limited to putting forth these ideas.
Any serious movement has to start a think tank or two to produce research reports, symposiums, and specific policy recommendations, and the few divorce lawyers who were compelled by their conscience to leave the dark side have to be recruited as experts. Subsequently, televised panel discussions have to be conducted at top medical, business, and graduate engineering schools (where young men about to embark on lucrative careers are approaching marriage age, but know nothing about the law), documentary films have to be produced, prominent victims like Mel Gibson, Paul McCartney, Hulk Hogan, and Tiger Woods have to be recruited as spokesmen, and visibly powerful protests outside of divorce courts have to be organized. In this age of Web 2.0 tools and with the Tea Party protests providing an excellent template, all this should be easy, particularly given how quickly leftists groups can assemble a comparable apparatus for even obscure causes.
Instead, all that exists are Men's Rights Authors (MRAs) that run a few websites and exchange information on their blogs. 'Something is better than nothing' is the most generous praise I could possibly extend to their efforts, and this article I am presenting here on The Futurist is probably the single biggest analysis of this issue to date, even though this is not even a site devoted to the subject. Hence, there will be no real Men's Rights Movement in the near future. The misandry bubble will instead be punctured through the sum of millions of individual market forces.
The Economic Thesis
Ceilings and Floors of Glass : Misandrists shriek about a supposed 'glass ceiling' of pervasive sexism that explains why 50% of the CEOs of major corporations are not women. What is never mentioned is the equally valid 'glass floor', where we see that 90% of imprisonments, suicides, and crippling occupational injuries are of men. If these outcomes are the results of the actions or choices of men who suffer from them, then is that not the same reason that determines who rises above the 'glass ceiling'? The inability of misandrists to address these realities in good faith tells us something (but not everything) about the irrational sense of entitlement they have.
One of the most dishonest myths of all is the claim that 'women earn just 75% of men for the same job'. Let me dispense of this myth, in the process of which we will see why it is profitable and seductive for them to broadcast this bogus belief.
It is true that women, on average, earn less per year than men do. It is also true that 22-year-olds earn less, on average, than 40-year-olds. Why is the latter not an example of age discrimination, while the former is seized upon as an example of gender discrimination?
If women truly did earn less for doing exactly the same job as a man, any non-sexist CEO could thrash his competition by hiring only women, thus saving 25% on employee salaries relative to his competitors. Are we to believe that every major CEO and Board of Directors is so sexist as to sacrifice billions of dollars of profit? When the 'Director of Corporate Social Responsibility' of a nun congregation wrote to TJ Rodgers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, that his company should have more women in its Board of Directors, Rodgers replied with a letter explaining why the pursuit of profit could not accommodate such political correctness. That a nun congregation pays a recession-proof salary to someone as a 'Director of Corporate Social Responsibility' is itself an example of a pampered existence, and I was unaware that convents were now advancing secular Marxist beliefs.
Furthermore, women entrepreneurs could hire other women and out-compete any male-dominated business if such a pay gap existed, but we do not see this happening in any country in the world. Market forces would correct such mispricings in female compensation, if they actually existed. But they do not, and those who claim that they do are not just advertising an extreme economic illiteracy, but are quite happy to make similarly illiterate women angry about an injustice that does not exist. I notice that women who actually are/were CEOs of publicly traded companies never claim that there is a conspiracy to underpay women relative to their output.
I am willing to pass laws to ensure that 50% of all Fortune 500 CEOs are women (despite the accelerated turnover this would create in the ranks of the Fortune 500), if we also legally mandate that 50% of all imprisonments are of women, and 50% of the jobs that involve working with heavy machinery, being outdoors in inclement weather, inhaling toxic fumes, or apprehending dangerous criminals are also occupied by women. Fair is fair. Any takers?
The 'Mancession' and the 'Sheconomy' : I would be the first to be happy if the economic success of women were solely on the basis of pure merit. For many of them, it is. But far too much has been the result of not market forces or meritocracy, but political graft and ideology-driven corruption.
In the recent recession and ongoing jobless recovery, the male unemployment rate continues to be much higher than the female unemployment rate. If this was simply due to market forces, that would be fine. However, 'feminist' groups have lobbied hard to ensure that government stimulus funds were steered to boost female employment at the expense of assistance for men. The leftist Obama administration was more than eager to comply, and a forcible transfer of wealth was enacted, even though it may not have been the best deployment of money for the economy.
Maria Shriver, a woman who has the most fortunate of lives from the vast wealth earned first by her grandfather and then by her husband, recently published 'A Woman's Nation : The Shriver Report', consisting of gloating about how women were now outperforming men economically. The entire research report is full of all the standard bogus feminist myths and flawed statistics, as thoroughly debunked here, as well as the outright sexism of statements like 'women are better managers' (imagine a man saying the reverse). Furthermore, the report reveals the typical economic illiteracy (evidenced by, among other things, the ubiquitous 'women are underpaid' myth), as well as belief that businesses exist to act as vehicles of social engineering rather than to produce a profit.
All of this bogus research and organized anti-male lobbying has been successful. As of today, the male unemployment rate is worse than the female unemployment rate by an unprecedented chasm. The 'mancession' continues as the US transitions to a 'sheconomy', and among the millions of unemployed men, some owe prohibitive levels of 'child support' despite not being the ones wanting to deprive their children of a two-parent household, landing in prison for lack of funds. Furthermore, I emphasize again that having 10-30% of the US male workforce living under an effective 70% marginal tax rate will kill their incentives for inventing new technologies or starting new companies. It is petty to debate whether the top federal income tax bracket should be 35% or 39.6%, when a slice of the workforce is under a 70% tax on marginal income. Beyond the tyranny of this, it also costs a lot of taxpayer money to jail a growing pool of unemployed men. Clearly, moving more and more men out of a tax-generating capacity and into a tax-consuming capacity is certainly going to do two-fold damage to governmental budgets. The next time you hear someone say that 'the US has the largest prison population in the world', be sure to mention that many of these men merely lost their jobs, and were divorced against their will. The women, in the meantime, are having a blast.
The Government Bubble : While public sector vs. private sector workforce distribution is not highly correlated to gender, it is when the focus is on women earning over $100,000 or more. 
This next chart from the Cato Institute shows that when total compensation (wages + benefits) are taken into account, the public sector has totally outstripped the private sector this decade. Has the productivity of the typical government employee risen so much more than that of the private worker, that the government employee is now paid twice as much? Are taxpayers receiving value for their money?
It goes further. The vast majority of social security taxes are paid by men, but are collected by women (due to women living 7 years longer than men on average). That is not troubling by any means, but the fact that women consume two-thirds of all US healthcare, despite most of this $2.5 Trillion annual expenditure being paid by men, is certainly worthy of debate. It may be 'natural' for women to require more healthcare, since they are the ones who give birth. But it was also 'natural' for men to finance this for only their wives, not for the broader community of women. The healthcare profession also employs an immense number of women, and not just in value-added roles such as nursing, but even in administrative and bureaucratic positions. In fact, virtually all government spending except for defense and infrastructure, from Medicare to Obamacare to welfare to public sector jobs for women to the expansion of the prison population, is either a net transfer of wealth from men to women, or a byproduct of the destruction of Marriage 1.0. In either case, 'feminism' is the culprit.
This Cato Institute chart of Federal Government spending (click to enlarge) shows how non-defense expenditures have steadily risen since 1960. The decline in defense spending, far from being a 'peace dividend' repatriated back to taxpayers, was used to fund more social programs. No one can seriously claim that the American public receives better non-defense governance in 2010 than in 1960 despite the higher price, and as discussed earlier, most of this increase is a direct or indirect result of 'feminism'. When state and local government wastage is added to this, it would appear that 20% of GDP is being spent just to make the government a substitute for the institution of Marriage, and yet still has not managed to be an effective replacement. Remember again that the earnings of men pays 70%-80% of all taxes.
The left has finally found a perfect Trojan Horse through which to expand a tyrannical state. 'Feminists' can lobby for a transfer of wealth from men to women and from private industry to the government, while knowing that calling any questioner a 'misogynist' will silence him far more effectively than their military fifth columnist, environmentalist, and plain socialist brethren could ever silence their respective opponents. Conservatives are particularly vulnerable to such shaming language, and most conservatives will abandon their stated principles to endlessly support any and all socialism if it can be packaged as 'chivalry', the opposition to which makes one a 'misogynist'. However, there is reason to believe that tax collection in many parts of the US, such as in states like CA, NY, NJ, and MA, has reached saturation. As the optimal point has already been crossed, a rise in tax rates will cause a decrease, rather than an increase in revenue, and the increase in Federal tax rates exactly one year from today on 1/1/2011 is likely to cause another recession, which will not be so easily transferred to already-impoverished men the next time.
When men are severed from their children with no right to obstruct divorce, when they are excluded from the labor market not by market forces but rather by social engineering, and when they learn that the society they once believed in and in some cases joined the military to protect, has no respect for their aspirations, these men have no reason to sustain such a society.
The Contract Between the Sexes : A single man does not require much in order to survive. Most single men could eke out a comfortable existence by working for two months out of the year. The reason that a man might work hard to earn much more than he needs for himself is to attract a wife amidst a competitive field, finance a home and a couple of children, and ultimately achieve status as a pillar of the community. Young men who exhibited high economic potential and favorable compatibility with the social fabric would impress a girl's parents effectively enough to win her hand in marriage. The man would proceed to work very hard, with the fruits of his labor going to the state, the employer, and the family. 80-90% of a man's output went to people other than himself, but he got a family and high status in return, so he was happy with the arrangement.
The Four Sirens changed this, which enabled women to pursue alpha males despite the mathematical improbability of marrying one, while totally ignoring beta males. Beta males who were told to follow a responsible, productive life of conformity found that they were swindled.
Men who excelled under the societal rules of just two decades ago are often left totally betrayed by the rules of today, and results in them refusing to sustain a society heavily dependent on their productivity and ingenuity. Women believed that they could free themselves from all their traditional obligations (only to find, amusingly, that they are unhappier now than they were then), while men would still fulfill all of their traditional obligations, particularly as bankrollers of women and protectors of women. Needless to say, despite the chivalry ground into men, eventually, they will feel that chivalry requires a level of gratitude that is not forthcoming.
To see what happens when the role of the husband and father is devalued, and the state steps in as a replacement, look no further than the African American community. In Detroit, the average home price has fallen from $98,000 as recently as 2003 to just $14,000 today. The auto industry moved jobs out of Detroit long before 2003, so the decline cannot be attributed to just industrial migration, and cities like Baltimore, Oakland, Cleveland, and Philadelphia are in scarcely better shape. For those who believe that this cannot happen in white communities, have a look at the white underclass in Britain. The lower half of the US white population is vulnerable to the same fate as the black community, and cities like Los Angeles are perilously close to 'Detroitification'.
Additionally, people seem to have forgotten that the physical safety of society, particularly of women, is entirely dependent on ratio of 'aggressor' men to 'protector' men staying below a certain critical threshold. As more men get shut out of the labor market, crime becomes an alternative. Even highly educated men who feel betrayed can lash out, and just about every shooting spree and every recent terrorist attempt in the West was by men who were educated and had good career prospects, but were unloved.
While professional men will certainly never resort to crime, what they could resort to is an unwillingness to aid a damsel in distress. More men will simply lose interest in being rescuers, and this includes policemen who may also feel mistreated by the prevailing misandry. Safety is like air - it is only noticed when it is gone. Women have a tremendous amount to lose by creating a lot of indifferent men.
Patriarchy works because it induces men and women to cooperate under their complementary strengths. 'Feminism' does not work, because it encourages immoral behavior in women, which eventually wears down even the durable chivalry of beta men, making both genders worse off. It is no secret that single motherhood is heavily subsidized, but it is less understood that single spinsterhood is also heavily subsidized through a variety of unsustainable and unreciprocated means. The default natural solution is for the misandric society to be outcompeted and displaced.
Population Displacement : So we have arrived at a society where 'feminists' feel that they are 'empowered', 'independent', and 'confident', despite being heavily dependent on taxes paid mostly by men, an unconstitutional shadow state that extracts alimony and 'child support' from men, an infrastructure maintained by men, technologies invented by men, and a level of safety that men agree to maintain. So exactly what has society received from this population of women who are the most privileged class of humans ever to have lived?
Now, let me be clear; I believe a woman should get to decide how many children she bears, or even whether or not to have any children at all. However, a childless old woman should not then be able to extract resources from the children of other women. Fair is fair, and the obligation of working-age people to support the elderly should not be socialized in order to subsidize women who chose not to reproduce.
Let us take a hypothetical example of three 20-year-old single women, one who is an urban lefto-'feminist', one who is a rural conservative, and one who is a devout Muslim. The following table charts the parallel timelines of their lives as their ages progress in tandem, with realistic estimates of typical life events. When people talk about falling birth rates in the West, they often fail to account for the additional gap caused by having children at age 23 vs. at age 33. As the table shows, a 1:1:1 ratio of three young ladies takes only 40 years to yield a 12:4:0 ratio of grandchildren. Consider, also, that we are already 20 years into this 40-year process, so each of these women are 40 years old today.
So how do we estimate the value society will ultimately receive from organizing itself in a manner that young women could choose a life of bar-hopping, shopping for $300 purses, and working as government bureaucrats to make the government a more complete husband substitute? If the sight of a pitiful 60-year-old Code Pink harpy lecturing 12 Muslim adolescents that 'gender is a social construct' seems amusing, then let us move on to the macro chart. This world map(click to enlarge) shows how many children under the age of 15 existed in the major countries of the world in 2005 (i.e. born between 1990 and 2005), in proportion to the country with the most children. Notably, Mexico and the US have the same number of children, while Pakistan and Bangladesh each have about as many as all of Western Europe. While developing countries are seeing their fertility rates converge to Western levels, the 1990-2005 births already seal certain realities. Needless to say, if we move time forward just 15 years, the proportions in this chart reflect what the proportions of adults aged 20-35 (the female reproductive years) will be per nation in the year 2025. Even the near future belongs to those who show up.
Lefto-'feminists' will be outbred and replaced very quickly, and rural American conservatives will be the only resiliently youthful population among all the world's white ethnicities. The state that lefto-'feminists' so admire will quickly turn on them once the state calculates that these women are neither producing new taxpayers nor new technologies, and will find a way to demote them from their present 'empowered' position of entitlement. If they thought having obligations to a husband was such an awful prospect, wait until they have obligations to the husband-substitute state.
The Four Horsemen of Male Emancipation
We earlier examined how the Four Sirens of Feminism unexpectedly combined and provided women with choices they never could have dreamt of before. Some women made positive contributions to society, but quite a few let misandry and unrestrained greed consume them, and have caused the disastrous situation we presently see. Technology always causes disruption in the status quo, always creating new winners and losers with each wave. In centuries past, Gloria Steinem would be a governess and Mystery would be a court jester.
The title of this article is not the 'Misandry Crisis' or even 'The War on Misandry'. It is 'The Misandry Bubble', because the forces that will ensure the demise of the present mistreatment of men are already on the horizon. So allow me to introduce the Four Horsemen of Male Emancipation as a coalesence of many of the forces we have discussed, which will shred the present, unsustainable hierarchal order by 2020 :
1) The Venusian Arts (Game) : Learning the truth about how the female mind works is a precious and transcendant body of knowledge for any man. Whether he uses it to become a fully immersed pick-up artist, to create a soulmate bond in a lifelong monogamous marriage, or even to engage in only infrequent yet efficient trysts with women, a man is free from the crushing burdens that uninitiated beta men are capitulating under.
When a man learns that there is no reason for him to buy a $50,000 car, $20,000 ring, $50,000 bridezilla festival, overpriced house contrary to any logical financial analysis, or a divorce lawyer to save him from ruin even though he was the victim of spousal abuse, there is no greater feeling of liberation and jubilation, equating to a windfall of $2 Million for all objective and subjective purposes. When a man realizes that reducing his income by half will now have little detriment to his sexual prospects, he can downsize to an easier job with a shorter commute and lower stress. When a man learns that appeasing a woman is the exact opposite of what he should be doing during the process of romancing and seducing her, that entire humiliating gauntlet of rituals can be jettisoned.
The ecstasy of two or even three concurrent relationships with women of substantially above average beauty are quite attainable to a man who has scaled the summit, which further deprives the hapless betas (again, male attractiveness to women is zero-sum in a way that female attractiveness to men is not). Thus, while 80% of men have no intellectual capacity to grasp and master the Venusian Arts, if the number of solid practitioners even begins to approach 20%, multiple parasitic beasts, from female moochers to the tax-swilling state to the corrupt real-estate and divorce lawyer industries, can be effectively starved.
2) Adult Entertainment Technologies of 2020 : What of the 80% of men who cannot conceptualize the Venusian Arts? Won't they be condemned to live a life of frustration, humiliation, and near-slavery as second class citizens? Thankfully, these poor souls will experience a satisfactory release through technology, just like women did through technologies such as contraceptive pills, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners.
For a number of reasons, Internet pornography is substantially more addictive to the male brain than the VHS cassette or 'Skinimax' content of the 1990s. When yet another generation of technology diffuses into the market, the implications will be profound enough to tear the current sexual market asunder.
I have written in the past about how haptic, motion sensing, and graphical technologies would elevate video games to the premier form of entertainment by 2012. 3-D/holographic images with haptic interfaces and sufficient AI will make rudimentary 'virtual sex' a technology available to many men well before 2020, but by 2020 we will see this cross certain thresholds that lead to a dramatic market impact far greater than contraceptive pills and Internet pornography combined. A substantial portion of the male population will drift into addiction to virtual sex without even realizing it.
For those (mostly women) who claim that the VR sex of 2020 would not be a sufficient substitute for the real thing, that drawback is more than superceded by the inescapable fact that the virtual woman would be made to be a 10/10+ in appearance, while the real women that the typical beta male user has access to would be in the 4-7 range. Real 10 > VR 10 > Real 7, making irrelevant the claim that a virtual 10 is not as good as a real 10 (under 1% of all women), when the virtual 10 is really competing with the majority of women who are 7s and lower. Women are largely unaware how vastly different the male reaction is to a 10 relative to a 7, let alone to women of even lower scores. As single men arrive home from work on Friday evening, they will simply default into their VR immersion, giving a whole new meaning to the concept of 'beta testing'. These sequestered men will be conspicuously absent from the bars and nightclubs that were the former venues of expenditure and frustration, causing many establishments to go out of business. The brains of these men will warp to the extent that they can no longer muster any libido for the majority of real women. This will cause a massive devaluation in the sexual market value of most women, resulting in 8s being treated like 5s, and 35-year-old women unable to attract the interest of even 55-year-old men. The Wile E. Coyote moment for women will move a few years ahead, and the alphas with Venusian Arts competence will find an even easier field of desperate women to enjoy.
Another technology making advancements in Japan is that of lifelike female robots. While I do not believe that 'sexbots' will be practical or economical relative to software/gaming-derived solutions, the Japanese nonetheless continue to make surprising progress. Competition between technologies is always productive for the consumer.
Some 'feminists' are not blind to the cataclysmic sexual devaluation that women will experience when such technologies reach the market, and are already moving to seek bans. Such bans will not be possible, of course, as VR sex technologies are inseparable from broader video game and home theater technologies. Their attempts to lobby for such bans will be instructive, however.
Another positive ramification of advanced adult entertainment technologies is that women will have to sharpen the sole remaining attribute which technology cannot substitute - the capacity to make a man feel loved. Modern women will be forced to reacquaint themselves with this ancient concept in order to generate a competitive advantage. This necessity could lead to a movement of pragmatic women conducting a wholesale repudiation of misandry masquerading as 'feminism' that has created this state of affairs, and thus will be the jolt that benefits both men and women.
3) Globalization : The Third Horseman is a vast subject that contains many subtopics. The common theme is that market forces across the world eventually find a way around legislative fences constructed in any one country :
a) Islam : Aside from the higher birthrates of Muslims living in the same Western cities that 'feminists' reside in, an Achilles heel of leftists in general and misandrists in particular is their unwillingess to confront other cultures that actually do place restrictions on women. In Britain, Islamic courts are now in operation, deciding cases through Sharia principles. British divorce laws are even more misandric than US divorce laws, and so many British men, in desperation, are turning to Sharia courts in order to avoid the ruin that British law would inflict on them. The Islamic courts are more than happy to accomodate these men, and 'feminists' dare not protest too loudly. By driving British men to Sharia courts, misandry is beautifully self-defeating. The irony is that the group that was our enemy in the War on Terror will be indirect yet valuable allies in the 'War on Misandry'.
b) Expatriation : While America continues to attract the greatest merit and volume of (legal) immigrants, almost every American man who relocates to Asia or Latin America gives a glowing testimonial about the quality of his new life. A man who leaves to a more male-friendly country and marries a local woman is effectively cutting off a total of three parasites in the US - the state that received his taxes, the potential wife who would take his livelihood, and the industries he is required to spend money on (wedding, diamond, real estate, divorce attorney). Furthermore, this action also shrinks the number of available men remaining in America. The misandrists who project their pathology outward by calling such men 'misogynists' are curiously troubled that these same men are leaving the US. Shouldn't 'feminists' be happy if 'misogynists' are leaving? We thus see yet another example of 'feminists' seeking to steal from men while not providing them any benefit in return.
The more unfair a place becomes, the more we see talented people go elsewhere. When word of US divorce laws becomes common in India and China, this might even deter some future taxpayers from immigrating to America, which is yet another reason the government is losing money to misandry.
c) Medical Tourism : The sum total of donor eggs + IVF + surrogacy costs $150,000 or more in the US, but can be done in India for just $20,000 at top-quality clinics that are building a strong track record. While most customers of Indian fertility clinics are couples, there have been quite a few single men opting to create their own biological babies this way. While this avenue is not for everyone, the ability to have a child for $20,000 (and even two children in parallel with two different surrogates in a two-for-one bundle deal for $35,000) now exists. The poor surrogate mother in India earns more than she could earn in 10 years in her prior vocation of construction or housecleaning. It is a win-win for everyone involved, except for the Western woman who was priced out of the market for marriage to this man.
Medical tourism also prices the US healthcare system out of contention for certain procedures, and the US healthcare system employs a large number of women, particularly in administrative and bureaucratic roles that pay them over twice what they could make in the private sector. Such women will experience what male manufacturing workers did a generation earlier, despite the increasinglly expensive government bubble that has kept these women's inflated salaries safe for so long.
So as we can see, the forces of globalization are far bigger than those propping up the current lop-sided status quo.
4) Male Economic Disengagement and Resultant Tax-Base Erosion : Earlier passages have highlighted how even the most stridently egomaniacal 'feminist' is heavily dependent on male endeavors. I will repeat again that there will never, ever be a successful human society where men have no incentive to aspire to the full maximum of their productive and entrepreneurial capabilities.
The contract between the sexes has been broken in urban America (although is still in some effect in rural America). The 'progressive' income tax scale in the US was levied under the assumption that men who could earn 10 times more than they needed for themselves would always do so, for their families. A man with no such familial aspirations may choose an easier job at lower pay, costing the state more than he costs himself. Less tax revenue not just means fewer subsidies for single mothers and government jobs for women, but less money for law enforcement. Less tax revenue also means fewer police officers, and fewer court resources through which to imprison men. The 'feminist' hypergamous utopia is not self-financing, but is precariously dependent on every beta man working at his full capacity, without which the government bubble, inseparable from the misandry bubble, collapses. Misandry is thus mathematically impossible to finance for any extended period of time. A state with a small government is far more sustainable than a state seeking an ever-expanding government, which then cannot be financed, and descends into a mass of contradictions that is the exact opposite of what the statists intended. See the gangster capitalism that dominates contemporary Russia.
These Four Horsemen will all converge at the end of this decade to transfer the costs of misandry from men onto women, and on 1/1/2020, we will assess how the misandry bubble popped and the fallout that women are suffering under for having made the mistake of letting 'feminists' control their destiny. Note that I did not list the emergence of any Men's Rights Movement as one of the Four Horsemen, as this is unlikely to happen for aforementioned reasons.
For those who dispute the Four Horsemen (I'd like to see their track record of predictions to compare against my own), women had their Four Sirens, and now it is men's turn to have theirs. Keep the Four Horsemen in mind throughout this decade, and remember what you read here on the first day of 2010.
Who Should Care?
As we leave a decade where the prime threat to US safety and prosperity was Islamic terrorism and enter a decade where the prime threat is misandry, anyone concerned with any of the following topics should take heed :
- Anyone with a son, brother, nephew, or mentee entering marriage, particularly without the partial protection of a pre-nuptial agreement. As described earlier, he can be ruined, separated from his children, and jailed in a manner few would suspect could happen in any advanced democracy. The suicide rate of divorced men is shockingly high.
- Anyone who agrees that a civilization where most adults are part of two-parent families will always outcompete and displace a civilization where a large portion of adults are not leading two-parent families.
- Anyone with minor grandchildren, nieces and nephews, or great-grandchildren. The divorce laws incentivize using children as pawns during divorce, and no serious thinker can dispute the trouble that haunts the children of divorce for years thereafter. 'Feminists' concoct bogus research about the role of the father being superfluous, but observation of real-world examples proves otherwise.
- Anyone who owns an expensive home in a community of families. The growing aversion of men for marriage will create fewer new families, and thus fewer buyers for those homes. I remind everyone that if they have 20% equity in their home and an 80% mortgage, even a 20% decline in home prices is a 100% decline in your equity, which might be all of your net worth. Detroit, the first major US city to see a loss of beta male employment prospects, saw the average home price drop from $98,000 as recently as 2003 to just $14,000 today. A decline smaller than this would devastate the net worth of remaining home owners, and can happen in any community of single-family homes. If you own a home, your net worth is inseparably tied to the formation and preservation of two-parent families.
- Anyone concerned about rising crime. 70% of African American children are born to single mothers, and the number among white children is approaching 30%. Furthermore, the 'mancession' will eventually ensure that the only means of survival for many men is to form gangs and take valuables by force. Unloved men, who in the past would have been paired with wives, are easy for both gangs and terrorist organizations to recruit.
- Anyone concerned about the widening federal and state budget shortfalls and medicare/healthcare costs, for which the state continues to insist on raising taxes rather than cut spending. Fewer men choosing to work the long hours needed to earn high incomes will break the model of the top 10% paying 75% of taxes, and more men being jailed for alimony arrears, not being good enough in bed, or defending himself from spousal violence will drain tax coffers. It costs $60,000 a year to maintain a prisoner.
- Anyone who thinks the US Constitution is a valuable document. 'Innocent until proven guilty' does not apply in many areas of feminist-heavy law. The previously discussed shadow state is using 'feminism' to conduct all sorts of horrible tyranny against innocent men, which greatly compromises America's ability to claim that it is still the land of the free.
- Anyone concerned about national security. As more men feel that this society is betraying him, fewer will risk their lives in the military only to find that divorce lawyers have been persuading his wife to leave the marriage while he is deployed. Coming home from one battlefield only to be inserted in another is a shameful betrayal of our finest young men. Furthermore, I have already mentioned how British men are turning to Islamic courts in the hopes avoiding ruin at the hands of British misandrist laws. Quite a few men may conclude that Islam offers them more than their native society that has turned against their gender, and will act towards self-preservation.
- Any woman who is appalled by the treatment of any woman who deviates from 'feminist' doctrine, and who is troubled by the words and actions of self-proclaimed 'feminists' today. If you believe that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, you should worry about what 'feminists' are courting by kicking a friendly dog too many times.
- Lastly, anyone with a young daughter or sister, who is about to enter a world where it is much harder for all but the most beautiful women to marry, where the costs of crazed 'feminism' are soon going to be transferred away from men and onto women, even if she had no interest in this doctrine of hate. As stated in the Executive Summary at the start, 'feminists' are leading average women into the abyss.
I could list even more reasons to care, but the point is clear. The biggest challenge of the decade is summarized before us.
Update (7/1/2012) : On this day, July 1, 2012, exactly 25% of the decade described in this article has passed. I did not include a poll on the original launch date of 1/1/2010, as the concepts described here were too radical for the majority of readers. But now that these ideas have become more mainstream, I can include a simple poll on the subject of whether we are indeed in a Misandry Bubble.
Conclusion
I am just an observer, and will not become an activist of any sort, although, as described earlier, being an 'inactivist' in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi is also powerful. As a Futurist, I have to predict things before they become obvious to everyone else. Regular readers know of my track records of predictions being accurate, and heed my words when I say that the further inflation and subsequent precipitous deflation of the misandry bubble will define the next American decade. So here, on the first day of the '201x' decade, I am unveiling the article that will spawn a thousand other articles.
As mentioned at the top, what you have just finished reading is the equivalent of someone in 1997 predicting the entire War on Terror in vivid detail, including the eventual victory in key fronts and situation in 2010 where America is sufficiently in control that the War on Terror is no longer nearly the threat it was during the recently concluded decade. The level of detail I have provided about the collapse of the Misandry Bubble will unfold with comparable accuracy as when I predicted the real estate bubble two years beforehand, and the exact level the stock market would bottom at, 6 months before the fact. I know a bubble when I see one, and misandry will be the, um, 'mother' of all bubbles. Bet against my predictions at your own risk.
I have maintained that the US will still be the only superpower in 2030, and while I am not willing to rescind that prediction, I will introduce a caveat that US vitality by 2030 is contingent on a satisfactory and orderly unwinding of the Misandry Bubble. It remains to be seen which society can create economic prosperity while still making sure both genders are treated well, and the US is currently not on the right path in this regard. While I had no doubt that the US would eventually gain the upper hand in the seemingly unwinnable War on Terror, I am less confident about a smooth deflation of the Misandry Bubble. Deflate it will, but it could be a turbulent hurricane. Only rural America can guide the rest of the nation into a more peaceful transition. Britain, however, may be beyond rescue.
I personally am an Indian-American, and have lived in India for a few years. My exposure to India helped me see an alternative view, however flawed, of ancient societal structure, which made it easier to deduce exactly what is ailing America. If my views on gender dynamics are unwelcome in the country of my birth (the US), and if the costs of misandry asphyxiate the US economy to the extent that India is a greener pasture, I will leave my homeland and immigrate to India, where a freedom of speech exists that may no longer exist in America. Remarkably, the reverse was true just 20 years ago. For those misandrists who say 'good riddance' with great haste, remember that blogging can still be done from overseas, and your policy of making the top 1% of earners pay 40% of all taxes that your utopia requires depends on that top 1% agreeing to not take their brains and abscond from Western shores.
I want to extend my thanks to Instapundit, Dr. Helen, Kim du Toit, The Spearhead, and many others for their support of this article.
Required Reading :
Democrats and Republicans Unite to Form Misandry Party
The Sixteen Commandments of Game
The Cultural Devastation Wrought by Misandry
Where Have All the Good Women Gone?
No Country for Burly Men
Patriarchy Works, Part I and Part II
Self-Control : A Masculine Quality
How 'Feminism' Will Consume Itself
The Medicalization of Maleness
Strategy and Tactics (for the Emancipation of Men)
We Are All Misogynists Now
The Feminist's Guide to Debate Avoidance
Globalization and the Future State of Men
Feminist Gulag : No Prosecution Necessary
Decivilizing : Human Nature Unleashed
Lust Story
How Mainstream Dating Advice Harms Women
F Roger Devlin articles
Wedded Abyss
Love
Note on Comments : Just because I linked to a particular blog does NOT mean that I endorse all of the other views of that author. Are 'feminists' all willing to be responsible for all of the extremism that any other feminist utters (note that I have provided links to 'feminists' openly calling for slavery, castration, and murder of men without proving him guilty of anything)? Also, you will see Pavlovian use of the word 'misogyny' dozens upon dozens of times, so remember what I wrote about the importance of not taking that at face value, as it is merely a manifestation of projected misandry, as well as a defense mechanism to avoid taking responsibility for genuine wrongdoings of 'feminists'.
The Pew Research Center has presented a simple linear chart
