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.