Had it not been for alpha-eyed Joe, I'd have been married a long time ago

In the previous post, Thursday left a comment stating that it doesn't make sense to assign all the blame for the current sexual dystopia to alpha males, but we shouldn't place all the blame on women either.

This got me thinking about what I think is a fatal flaw in the Roissysphere so far. It holds two mutually contradictory propositions--OK, these may never have been stated explicitly in these words anywhere, but one can definitely detect their undercurrent in the posts of Roissy et al.--namely:

1. Men are moral agents capable of choosing deliberate actions based on rational thought processes (e.g., choosing to run game and succeed with women or wallow in loneliness), while women are animals who are totally incapable of doing anything but blindly obeying their genetic programming to seek out and mate with the highest-status male they can find.
2. Women are to blame for our current situation.

Obviously, these cannot both be true. When an unruly dog bites the mailman, we don't blame the dog; we blame the owner for failing to keep the dog fenced in or on a leash. The stronger the first proposition, the weaker the second, and vice versa. If it is solely up to men to control and lead women, then women can have no responsibility for the current situation. If women are to blame, on the other hand, they must possess at least as much moral agency as men, if not more.

Interestingly, this is an idea the Roissysphere shares with some of the social conservatives they so despise. There's a conservative Reformed pastor and author named Douglas Wilson who wrote a book called Her Hand in Marriage in which he apparently says this:

When a couple comes for marriage counseling, my operating assumption is always that the man is completely responsible for all the problems. [Italics original.] Some may be inclined to react to this, but it is important to note that responsibility is not the same thing as guilt. If a woman has been unfaithful to her husband, of course she bears the guilt of adultery. But at the same time, he is responsible for it. To illustrate, suppose a young sailor disobeys his orders and runs a ship aground in the middle of the night. The captain and the navigator were both asleep and had nothing to do with his irresponsible actions. Who is finally responsible? The captain and navigator are responsible for the incident. They are career officers, and their careers are ruined. The young sailor will be getting out of the Navy in six months anyway. It may strike many as being unfair, but is is indisputably the way God made the world. The sailor is guilty; the captain is responsible.

Without this understanding of responsibility, authority becomes meaningless and tyrannical. Husbands are responsible for their wives. They are the head of their wives as Christ is the head of the church. Taking a covenant oath to become a husband involves assuming responsibility for that home. This means that men, whether through tyranny or abdication, are responsible for any problems in the home. If Christian men loved their wives as Christ loved the church, if they had given direction to their wives, if husbands had accepted their wives' necessary help with their God-ordained vocation, there never would have been room for any kind of feminist thinking within the church.

Yes, those italics are Wilson's. The man is completely responsible for all the problems. If your wife cheats on you, it's because you didn't lead her properly. As a Christian and a social conservative who, as Ferdinand Bardamu would say, "gets it," I completely disavow this kind of thinking. Yet you've got to hand it to Wilson: he at least gets the fact that if you assume the wife is a mere untrained dog, then it is completely the owner-husband's fault when she misbehaves.

I bring this up because I think there is a gaping hole in the burgeoning school of thought that melds MRA/MGTOW with the PUA/seduction community. I think it's great that more and more men are being clued into the realities of female psychology and that we're proposing solutions to the current mess in which we find ourselves. But right now, it seems like the only solution being proposed is slut-shaming, with no thought to the idea that in a sexually sane society there will have to be restraints on alpha males as well. This is true if only as a simple matter of supply and demand: it is often said that the cads we will always have with us. But if we succeed in slut-shaming all women into total chastity (i.e., no sex before marriage and total faithfulness to their husbands thereafter,) then assuming an equal sex ratio, whom will the cads fool around with? Yet in a traditional society, restraints on alphas go much further: polygamy has never been permitted in the Christian West, and as far as I know bigamy is still a crime in every state in the USA. Think also of the common occurrences in traditional society I mentioned in my last post: shotgun marriages, prison sentences (for men) for adultery, juries routinely nullifying charges against a vengeful wife out of sympathy. Would such a society consider a man like Silvio Berlusconi "an inspiration for men everywhere"?

I would hope it would be obvious that I don't blame either men or women exclusively. I believe both sexes are capable of being moral agents, and thus both are to blame. And perhaps my personal biases are showing through here; as a natural provider beta, I suppose I could be accused of being a little too eager to find ways to sock it to the alphas. However, one can't deny that alpha males willingly allowed the current sexual dystopia to develop, and benefit enormously from it. And when talking about the kind of society we should have, however true it is that restraints on women are necessary, we can't neglect the moral requirements and limitations that must be placed on men as well.

Our real enemies: alpha males

A few weeks ago, someone calling himself Anonomega left the same comment on both In Mala Fide and Half Sigma, in response to the George Sodini incident. This comment intrigued me, though it was poorly formatted and a little obscene. I'm going to take the liberty of editing it slightly and reposting it here, in hopefully more readable form:

After pondering on Omega rage and pain, I realise it would do the Sodinis of the world good to, to paraphrase Sinead O'Connor, Fight The Real Enemy.

Gammas, Omegas, lend me your ear: your misogyny is, at worst, understandable; of this I will not argue. But stay your hand at those with the XX chromosome and heed... Yes, women ought stop having such high standards, settle more for lower males, appreciate nice guys, give them chance etc., since this is what men have to do. But consider: we can be pretty damn content with a 5, heck, even a 4.5. But what if there were many 10s not only making themselves available, but AGGRESSIVELY SEDUCING us? Would we bother with those 5s? Is it reasonable to expect us to? So in this alternate reality, if a 5 is deprived the joys of sex, romance, marriage, and motherhood, who should she really blame? The men, or a bunch of bitchy, slutty 10s who already have plenty of men, but still run around rubbing up against every halfway attractive man, simply because they CAN?

Do the "math".

Fight the Real Enemy: the ALPHAS.

All alphas have to do is pick one or two of the hottest ass they can get and f***ing MAKE DO with it, and it will trickle down to some come hither stares in Sodinis direction. But with each just-because-I-can extra lay, they brutally SNATCHED away Sodini's one chance at meager sexual contentment.

And many alphas know this! Look at Roissy's blog! They know this and they're laughing their sick f***ing asses off about it!! "Trix are for kids, motherf***er!" May I remind you these are the guys who TORMENTED YOU IN SCHOOL?! REMEMBER THAT, OMEGAS?! And when we learn how the mating game is really played, we realise they destroyed us far more than we thought they were when we were young. By beating us down, crushing our self-esteem, they were wringing out of us something PRECIOUS: our confidence, something ESSENTIAL to securing a mate, though we did not realise it at the time! Wake up and smell the locker insides and toilet water!

Alpha's, higher Betas, the Real Enemy, have always been our oppressors, their cruelty fueled by nothing other than their vile despising of the weak. Yet so many Gamma-Omegas wanna lash out at the c*nts. Why? The reasons are obvious. when your beaten down and SCARED--SO TERRIFIED--of your oppressors, it is expected to direct your bitterness and hurt at softer, easier targets. I walked the path of misogyny too, and I'm not suggesting going back to women-are-angels bullsh*t. It's just that upon simple thinking, reflection, analysis, whatever, I realise that misogyny is the easier path, yet it is ultimately the more cowardly.

To any future, budding, wanna-be, halfway, or neo-George Sodinis out there: I don't, ahem, support the sort of bloodshed he was about or anything... but I'm JUST SAYING.... IF YOU HAVE TO SHOOT SOMEBODY, IF YOU HAVE TO KIDNAP AND TORTURE SOMEBODY... think on my words and ask yourself: WHO DESERVES IT MORE?! Ahem... of course, in the name of decency and morality and all that good sh*t, I would have to advocate less psychotic means. Vengeance on alphas will be a lot harder and scarier than c*nt-hatred: you may have to discipline yourself, make yourself combat ready, and ultimately become that which you hate. Heck, I can't practice what I preach! But if you put down the "Stupid Sluts Take It Up The Ass Like they Deserve" porn and pick up the barbell, it will be potentially more rewarding, for yourself and (I think) society. And Alphas will learn the one downside rule of the alpha life:

Watch Your F***ing Back.

I have to admit that, while morbid, what this commenter said really resonated with me. I, too, was a frustrated teenage boy, with no clue about how to even begin interacting with these strange alien creatures called girls, impotently looking on with envy as the more popular boys somehow won their affections effortlessly, seemingly without doing anything, as if by magic. I wasn't exactly tormented by the bad boys in school; for the most part, they just ignored me, though this was doubtless due to the fact that I didn't even try to insert myself into their world. But those about whom I entertained sadistic fantasies of torture, murder, and worse (perhaps a bit too much disclosure, but I'm assuming most of us go through such a phase as a teenager) were not the girls, they were the cooler boys who were getting those girls. It was they I wanted to hurt.

And I'm sure Anonomega articulates the thoughts of many a frustrated teenage boy/young man with his observation that all an alpha has to do is pick a woman and make do with her. Just pick one! How many betas, at the nadir of their despair, have thought, "my God, he doesn't know how lucky he is! If I could be with just one of the countless girls he could get, I'd feel like the king of the world!"

I believe this tendency to view the man who is getting the woman as the problem, rather than the woman, is deeply embedded in the human psyche. After all, in lower animals, such as wolves, how does a male gain the privilege of mating with a female? Not by doing anything to the female herself, but by physically defeating the higher-status male who would stop him.

The problem is made complicated by the fact that today, alphas have been divided into two groups: as Ferdinand Bardamu of In Mala Fide has been calling them, male alphas and female alphas. ("Female alphas" referring not to females who are alpha, but males who are alpha in the eyes of females.) As Thursday has pointed out elsewhere, some of the men who are best with women have almost nothing else going for them. In modern society, where women don't need providers, you can have a dead-end job, be up to your eyeballs in debt, and have no future to speak of, yet be a world-class ladies' man. But it wasn't always this way. In traditional society, male alphas--leaders of men--more often got the girl, and it was hard to be a player. You were universally reviled, and the lack of contraception and abortion made multiple sexual conquests extremely impractical. In the past, naturals usually did have to just pick one and make do with her.

As Half Sigma recently wrote:

When pre-marital and extra-marital sex was very strongly discouraged by society, being able to talk a girl into bed didn’t mean spreading your genes as much as it meant being forced to marry her at the end of a shotgun (or crossbow or sword or whatever weapon was used back then), or even worse, killed by her angry relatives, put in jail for the crime of adultery, etc.

Examples of this sentiment--that it's not the ladies, but the ladies' men, who are the problem--abound. It's is captured well in the lyrics of country singer Vince Gill's song, "Pocket Full of Gold," about the life of the cad:

Some night you're gonna wind up
On the wrong end of a gun
Some jealous guy's gonna show up
And you'll pay for what you've done
What will it say on your tombstone?
"Here lies a rich man
With his pocket full of gold."

And remember the ending of Mozart's Don Giovanni: the seducer is depicted, quite literally, burning in hell.

And just today, Lawrence Auster at View from the Right referred to a sordid tale from his ancestry, in which his grandmother shot and killed his grandfather during an argument about an affair he was having with an another woman, and the jury let her off out of sympathy with her. In other words, they believed the philanderer deserves what he gets.

This tendency to blame and hate women that arises in some segments of the MRA/MGTOW community appears to be a relatively recent phenomenon. I'm not sure why this is. It could be that traditional society carried an implicit recognition that women were fallen creatures too, but was also resigned to the fact that women were going to do what they were going to do, and given the necessity of men leading and women following, thought it more important to discipline men. (Incidentally, this would contradict the Roissysphere's description of men as keys who will adapt themselves to whatever shape women choose their locks to take, but that is a topic for another entry.) And it could be that in modern society, even MRAs/MGTOWers have unconsciously absorbed the belief in female equality, so they expect women to make decisions on the same basis as men do, and become angry at them when they don't.

Whatever the case, like Anonomega, I don't advocate going out and shooting anyone, but I'm sure we can all agree that George Sodini didn't accomplish any good with his choice of targets.