Male separatism is a wrong turn

You have to be very careful when you adopt political first principles. Inevitably, the logic of these principles gets played out.

That's why I'm concerned that a wing of the men's rights movement has decided on a separatist politics. The aim of these separatists is to reject relationships with women in general and Western women in particular.

Where does a politics based on separatism lead to? First, it encourages the idea that all women are so unworthy that relationships are simply impossible. Which then leads to the kind of attitude expressed by one MRA commenter here at this site:

Women of generation y are sadistic whores who want to make men slaves. I refuse to be a part of it. Every generation y woman is a feminist who hates men even the ones who believe they aren't feminists.

Your daughters are all sadistic man hating whores but you believe them to be pure virgins. And you attack men for doing nothing but defending themselves...

I have no doubt that the feminist order will collapse. Western Civilization will die and the Chinese and Muslim hordes will give Western women what they deserve by raping and slaughtering them. I will be watching this in 2160p with 10.2 surround sound safe in the Chinese empire since I will be able to purchase a place in the Chinese empire. Until then I will play Xbox.

And what are men who reject relationships with women to do? The commenter above intends to spend his life playing computer games while waiting for foreigners to violently punish Western women. Other separatist MRAs have discussed the possibility of the Japanese improving the technology of female robots. And in a recent post at the separatist site The Spearhead, a commenter suggested the following:

Just a thought, guys keep talking about male pill how about libido suppressant? Are there any drugs out there that will suppress a man’s libido so much he would be a functional eunuch (oxymoron i know)?

Imagine never even thinking about sex, means you can without effort treat every hot chick without that mild inner bias to her goodlooks. Possible with game but this time, you wont be feinging dis-interest, with the utlimate aim of getting in her pants.

You would genuinely not be interested in chicks. We might be surprised how many guys would actually go on such pills if they were available.

Nor are separatists going to be at all sympathetic to social conservatives. In fact, at sites like The Spearhead, social conservatives are often considered a worse enemy than feminists. They see us conservatives as being supportive of men marrying (which is true). But given that they see no possibility of marriage being in men's interests, they assume that we support men marrying as a male sacrifice on behalf of women (i.e. out of "chivalry" or "white knighting").

And so you get a theory that the real cause of men's problems is not the pursuit by feminists of liberal autonomy, but the sacrifice of men by social conservatives in the cause of chivalry or white knighting.

Which leads to some odd assumptions. For instance, there was a case recently in which a man, Leon Walker, was charged with computer hacking because he went into his wife's emails and found out that she was cheating on him.

It turns out that Walker had married a twice-divorced woman, who cheated on him with her second husband, the one who had beaten her up in front of her son. To a social conservative it all sounds dysfunctional, an example of social decline.

But that's not how it's read at The Spearhead. Why would the man marry such a woman in the first place? It must be, the reasoning goes, a product of social conservatives pushing men to sacrifice themselves as white knights for women:

He must have felt like the hero as he said his vows to her. It’s a role tailor-made for female fantasy – the white knight who sweeps in to save the day for a wayward woman. Finally, the right man to get her back on the right track and provide for her and her child. The Social Conservative types just eat this sort of sh*t up.

The same commenter then links to another example of white knighting that we social conservatives supposedly can't get enough of. It's the story of an American man who met a woman just after she'd had her first abortion. This woman was highly promiscuous and had approached six members of the football team to try and establish paternity of the child, but had failed to do so. The woman was last on the list of our white knight's possible list of marriage partners, but all the rest were already taken so he married her. After marrying, she cheated on him, hit him and lived an extravagant lifestyle, getting him into massive debt.

Does that sound like the social conservative vision of marriage to you? The fact is that it's about the opposite of what social conservatives would advise when it comes to marriage. But we're dealing with the logic of male separatism here. The logic of male separatism is that all women are unworthy of marriage; marriage cannot be in the interests of men; therefore, if social conservatives support marriage it's because of a chivalrous, white knighting desire to sacrifice men in order to rescue wayward women.

That's how a conservative nightmare is transformed by male separatists into a classic conservative marriage scenario.

But if separatism leads to such distortions, what's the alternative? The alternative is to understand that the Western political elite is a liberal one; that liberals believe in equal autonomy as the overriding aim of politics; and that feminists have campaigned to have equal autonomy applied to the lives of women.

How can women's lives be made autonomous? By allowing women to raise their children independently of men (through state welfare, no fault divorce laws, alimony and child support, paid maternal leave, assumption of female custody etc.); by female careerism (affirmative action, changes to school curricula, state subsidised childcare etc.); by delaying a commitment to marriage and children (a single girl lifestyle of casual relationships, travel and career); by promoting sexual "liberation" (women selecting for sex alone, just as men supposedly do, rather than for marriage or romantic love, which then "liberates" women to select hypergamously or crudely on the basis of markers of testosterone, such as risk-taking, thuggishness, violence).

All of this makes life more difficult for the average man seeking a long-term relationship in his 20s.

Therefore, the ultimate aim of a men's movement ought to be to successfully challenge the idea that autonomy is the ultimate aim of politics rather than, say, healthy relationships or an attractive ideal of womanhood and manhood.

Male separatism doesn't challenge the political orthodoxy. It responds to a female attempt to be autonomous of men with a male attempt to be autonomous of women. It makes the pursuit of autonomy less one-sided than it currently is, but it doesn't attempt to promote healthy, functional, interdependent, complementary relationships between men and women.

I don't believe that what most young men really want are Japanese robots or libido suppressing drugs. Nor is a politics based on the idea that there are absolutely no women worth having a relationship with likely to have great appeal. Separatism is a wrong turn for the men's movement.