Women’s Capacity for Moral Agency

This is a follow-up to my recent article Game Versus the Reactosphere, and my video The White Knight, as well as an expansion on the concepts in another video, Men Are Responsible for Feminism; Esoteric Trad has written a response to my first article here, and Free Northerner published a similar piece to this one titled The Slut Event Horizon.

Women’s capacity for moral agency (or lack thereof) is seldom a question which is specifically addressed; neither here in the Neoreactionary/Manosphere circles, and certainly not in the culture at large.

In our case there are several reasons that it doesn’t come up: for one thing, it’s the Manosphere – a respite from the ceaseless mainstream maudlin over women’s issues.  Another reason is that the Red Pill embraces that old wisdom to try and “Change what I can, accept what I can’t, and know the difference.” Women are as women do, and crying about it isn’t going to fix it.  Ultimately all you can do is try and develop coping strategies to get the best result out of a bad situation, and when it comes to women these coping strategies are known as “Game” (this is what leads to allegations that Game is manipulative and “bad”, incidentally).

Further occulting this question is the fact that when women do behave morally, it usually manifests as submission to their husbands, making it very hard to pinpoint.  With men, our virtues and vices are out there in the open, pink and dangling; with women, they’re neatly tucked away.  As above, so below, and all that.

As for why the mainstream maudlers never address female moral agency… well, we’ll get to that.

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Goodness and Virtue are interesting things; everybody says that they want them, but their actions speak otherwise: upon encountering a Vir, the typical response from the vulgate is loathing and wrath.  What people actually want are dumbed-down imitations of virtue, despite the fact that the results are schizophrenic.

Just look at how they treat Humility – not a Virtue itself, but as St. Augustine argued, the foundation of all the Virtues.

True Humility is when you stop trying to tell reality what it is, and accept that it’s bigger than you are.  It’s when you stop trying to dictate a narrative about who you want to be, and accept who you actually are.  It’s when you stop rebelling against Truth, even when it’s unpleasant, and – if you have the Virtue of Fortitude – it’s loudly declaring for the Truth, despite the the jeers of the offended masses.

The degenerate form of Humility – at least in its present form – is the Cult of Niceness.  It’s affirmation that every man’s opinion is valid, it’s the embrace of post-modernism, and it’s the acceptance of equality.

As a consequence, the truly humble are often called arrogant.

This twisting, this reversal, is something that plays out constantly.  Good is called Evil, and Evil is called Good.  Cause and consequence are swapped around, and the mobs obsess over symptoms, while glorifying the disease.

Let me tell you about an acquaintance of mine: he’s a man around the age of thirty who’s good looking, intelligent, charismatic, and physically healthy – and his life is in shambles.  Not too long ago he posted a twenty minute video on YouTube of himself crying over his broken heart – broken by a woman whom he’d only known online.  In his mind, his biggest challenge is that he works for minimum wage; his greatest blessing is a wide-circle of online friends who offer him emotional support.  On the rare occasions where he admits that he’s not living the life he wants to live (solipsism and pride seldom allow it) he’ll blame his lack of self-actualization on finances.

This man used to have a circle of real friends.  They actually did things to show that they cared about him (such as feeding him when he had no money) and they would have eventually helped him find a job where he wasn’t flipping burgers; but they also didn’t play into his pity-party, and despised the “Love of his Life” who broke his heart.  He chose to alienate them, in favour of his online codependence.  He still chooses to alienate them.  He was offered True Charity, and called it cruelty; he chose the false charity of lowered expectations, and it’s driving him into the gutter.

Poverty doesn’t cause degeneracy – degeneracy causes poverty.

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This swapping of cause and consequence – of perpetrator and victim – is what’s playing out currently with the “Game is immoral” crowd.  The root of this complaint is Christian in nature; namely, that pushing someone into sin is worse than the sin itself:

Luke 17:1-2

Then said he unto the disciples, It is impossible but that offences will come: but woe unto him, through whom they come!
It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.

And as far as that goes, I’m in full agreement: leading somebody into error is worse than making an error yourself… but who is it that’s “tricking” these women into sleeping around?

Given how heated this argument’s been growing, some emotional distance would serve us well; so instead of discussing Guy Game, let’s focus on its less contentious parallel – Stripper Game.

It should go without saying that Stripper Game is often used for the exploitation of men: it tricks them into the Provider role for a short period, causing them to spend several hundred dollars on lap dances, which they could have used to benefit themselves or their progeny.  It’s quite a racket these dames have got going for themselves, and while men like Paul Elam will argue that Stripper Game is easy – “Just get naked, go out and shake your butt.” – any experienced Lady of the Night will tell you that there’s far more to it than that.  While I can’t claim to know all the details, the specifics don’t really matter – not for our purposes. We’re concerned about the core.

Let’s take a page from Marcus Aurelius and ask “What is its nature?  What are its habits?  How does this creature act outside of the Strip Club environ?” To hear the Ladies giggle, they’re experts at manipulating their marks and going home with thick wallets, but does this Stripper Game work when it’s relocated to the marital bed?

The answer is a resounding Yes!  The flirtatious allure, the sexual display, the feminine affirmation of the masculine – all of these serve the immediate goal of baby-making, as well as the higher purpose of motivating a man into becoming a Provider and Protector.  There are variations in tactics, of course, minor differences in detail between the Strip Club and the bedroom, but the core of Stripper Game strategy remains the same: display the greatest  femininity possible, so as to inflame the masculine.  Stripper Game is itself amoral (rather than immoral), but at its core is a study of Feminine Submission – something which is, in itself, Virtuous.

Stripper Game is a tool-box – not a single tool (“When all you have is a hammer…”).  Whether its usage is good or ill depends upon the particular tool, and upon the situation where it’s employed.

So if Stripper Game itself isn’t wrong, but the Strip Club is, we then have to ask who is responsible for it – the strippers?  Or the marks?

Who is driving this behaviour?

To answer this question we need to don on our Economic Punching Daggers.

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That Economics must be called the “Dismal Science” says much about our race; for when Carlyle labelled it thus, he clarified that he meant it in the sense that “find[ing] the secret of this Universe in ‘supply and demand,’ and reducing the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone.” In other words: “How dare the Universe undermine our conceit!”

Like other forms of Natural Law, the Dismal Science is, more often than not, applied precisely in reverse.  The economy’s two sides are production and consumption – and it is the former which leads to the latter.  An economy without production cannot have consumption, and it is the productive side of the equation where all the hard work, talent, an infrastructure lie; wealth flows from production, to consumption.  And yet the knee-jerk reaction to an economic recession is to punish the productive classes, while subsidizing the consumers.

Vice flows in the opposite direction.

Vice is when the consumers demand a product which is bad for them, whether it’s drug addicts demanding drugs, or the obese demanding sugar water.  The productive side of the economy, with their massive brains and brilliant machines, respond to such demands, and gives the public what it wants.  The public then complains that they’re being sold poison.  The inevitable response is to pull a Bloomberg and levy a fine on the producers, while doing nothing to address the consumers who started this whole mess in the first place.

Production drives the economy, but demand determines the production.  Coca-Cola didn’t pump out a million bottles of soda, and then try and trick the public into buying them – the public demanded, and Coca-Cola produced.  Bottling soda may not be the noblest pursuit in the world, but it’s a far cry better than being an obese glutton!

The Strip Club would not be in operation were it not for the hordes of clientele who are desperate to throw away their hard-earned dollars on a lap dance.  Game would not be so popular if there weren’t massive numbers of women trying to sleep around.  You can attack the providers of Game – be they players or strippers – all you want, but this won’t make a dent in the demand.

Crack down on drugs, and new drugs come out.

Crack down on prostitution, and the prostitutes get uglier and dirtier.

Crack down on soda, and fat people will eat more cake.

The whole situation with the modern dating market is ugly, granted, but when you crack down on Game, you’re attacking the only people displaying any virtue in the first place!  You’re alienating the best of a generation, and pushing the sluts towards even seedier sex practices.

You’re doing it backwards.

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All of this wraps back around to the question I asked at the beginning: do women, fat people, and drug addicts have moral agency?”

In a certain sense, this is a matter of faith; a binary moral choice.  Are you a Human Being – or a Marxist?  It’s not a question of evidence – the choice between robotic meat on the one hand, and ensouled being on the other, is epistemological in nature – but assuming you picked the box marked “Good” we can at least look to what our ancestors wrote on the matter.

As I’ve written before, the Garden of Eden is a parable of our race and our biggest flaws: our tendency to get the sexual relationship backwards, and make fools of ourselves.

Genesis 3:13-19

And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.
And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:
And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

Eve, the hypergamous fool, always wanting something better, allowed herself to be misguided by the serpent; Adam, the weakling, allowed his wife to lead him, and ate the apple to please her, even though he knew it was folly.  And God punished both of them.

If Adam had led one of his beasts astray, would God have cursed its lineage?  Of course not; the beasts were his to name and own, at most it would have been destroyed.  Eve, though, was his wife – his to lead, but not to name or own.  Created – not of the earth – but of his flesh to be his helpmeet.

“The serpent beguiled me,” she said – the eternal excuse of woman.

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The real clincher on all of this is that – even though women are more than willing to proffer this excuse for their behaviour – “He tricked me into doing it, I’m a victim!” – if you pay attention to the context, they don’t actually believe it themselves.

A woman who goes by the handle Emashee – and who I’m sure is higher quality than most of the women out there – falls into Eve’s trap:

Notice [that the woman in the article I quoted said] ‘I can’t tell him I don’t want him on my own.’  This is a pattern you’ll see in all used and easy girls—they can’t stay away from the Alpha male, which is why they keep running back to the same abusive jerks, or, like this girl, continuously have sexual connections with guys who won’t remember them in a week or two. Women often don’t know what they’re doing and are frequently unable to make good decisions without a man’s help. All the men this girl has been with know what they’re doing, and do it again and again and again.

At first this all sounds sensible – after all, isn’t trusting a woman not to cheat on you like trusting a dog not to eat a steak you left lying out on the counter?  But there are two important differences: first of all, dogs don’t construct arguments about how you shouldn’t leave steaks out on the counter (and how if you do, it’s not their fault if they eat it) – and second, dogs can be trained to subsume their will into your own!

Women, on the other hand, cannot; they are always a wild card.

As I alluded to at the beginning, practising Game gives us tunnel vision; we become so accustomed to manipulating women, that we forget that this manipulation is premised upon their consent.  Like the Stripper who “manipulates” a man into paying for a lap dance, we’re “manipulating” a girl who’s already looking for casual sex.  It’s not brainwashing;, and it isn’t magic; at the end of the day, it’s nothing but salesmanship.  And while the top 1% of salesmen might be able to sell refrigerators to Eskimos, the smart money’s on selling them to Texans.

On the surface Emanshee is arguing that women lack moral agency, but she doesn’t truly believe this; if she did, she wouldn’t be writing in the first place.  If women lack moral agency, then the only reason Emanshee is writing is because a man told her to.

Which, I suppose, is a possibility.  If you’re a follower of Karl Marx.

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Let’s close out this piece by returning to the question, “Why doesn’t the mainstream address the issue of women’s capacity for moral agency?” It’s the same reason which underlies every other foolish thing we do; when the cart’s broken, we blame the horse.

Real Virtue involves accepting responsibility and moral agency; it’s admitting that “When you choose the behaviour, you choose the consequences.” It’s one thing to make mistakes due to a lack of information – there’s no way to avoid that – but most of the mistakes people make occur despite a gut feeling pointing the other way.  As soon as you accept moral agency, all of a sudden the fat man, the slut, the single mother, the welfare bum, and the career criminal are no longer victims to be lauded – they stand naked, suffering the cold gaze of Justice which they deserve.  It’s a humbling experience – and nobody likes people who are humble.

So instead we pretend to be victims of our own circumstances.  Eve was the victim of the serpent.  Adam was the victim of Eve.  Sluts are the victims of Game.  And Betas are the victims of Sluts.  On, and on, the Idiot Parade goes on, pointing fingers, and never looking in the mirror.

If you’ll forgive me one last Bible quote, my brothers:

Matthew 7:3

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

There are more productive uses of our time.