I last wrote about F. Roger Devlin in “Hypergamy and the Early Manosphere.” I didn’t find his pseudonymous Magnum Opus to be particularly amazing, to put it mildly. Well, Devlin (or someone claiming to be the person claiming to be Devlin) is back…. on Substack. So I thought I’d delve in and see if the “co-founder” (heh…) of the Manosphere has changed in 17 years.
I hope you enjoy it. It’s going to be a bit more tongue-in-cheek than my normal writings.
Women’s greater power over human mating is the reason sexual self-control has always been prized as an essential feminine virtue. It is, of course, also good for men to be continent, but the human race has always understood that the most practical way to enforce monogamy is to concentrate on getting women, specifically, to practice it, since this forces men to practice it as well.
Well, he isn’t starting well. Women have a market advantage when it comes to reproduction, as the scarce resource is the tiny resource known as a baby. Thanks to modern technology, when it comes to mating men and women are on equal footing.
At this point in history, with fertility at critical lows, focusing on the behavior of women over the behavior of men is…. rather stupid and archaic. Devlin must be more than 120 years old if he still thinks this.
Discouraging any undesirable practice must focus on cutting off the supply rather than the demand.
This was a dumb idea 17 years ago, and it is still a dumb idea today.
According to Devlin’s theory of hypergamy, most women are chasing a small number of men. Yeah, I know we refuted that belief, but bear with me. We’re just trying to point out the error in his reasoning.
If a large number of women are chasing a small number of men, then he’s completely reversed the supply/demand analogy. Top men are in high demand and women are in low demand (and non-elite men are effectively not market participants, so they are irrelevant to the supply/demand equation). If you want to solve the problem of hypergamy, you have to cut off the supply of high-tier men.
Logically, it’s much, much easier to alter the behavior of a relatively small number of high-tier men than the vastly huge numbers of low- to high-tier women.
But you and I both know that high-tier men can’t be controlled. There is no way to change their behavior. That’s the real reason Devlin wants to focus on women: deep down he knows that the high-tier men that women are going after have no character to speak of and are, essentially, irredeemable.
It’s far easier to try to change 80% of women than it is to change 20% of men. That’s how far gone modern men are. If only Devlin could be honest about how he is actually blaming men for the problem. His writings would be far more honest without all the smoke and mirrors if he stopped trying to argue that hypergamous women—that is, every last one of them—are the primary problem.
In any case, whoever fails to understand the fundamental reality that women represent the supply of sex while men represent the demand is bound to get everything else about sex wrong.
Hahahahahaha! Snort. Hahahahahaha!
And the common narrative that men have been freed to take advantage of helpless women represents a failure to grasp this basic biological fact about sex.
Oh, birth control is “a basic biological fact” now. Wait. Hold up a second. Does Devlin even know about birth control (and abortion, and “third car seat” contraception)? Is it possible that nobody told him? This could explain why he seems to be stuck 120 years in the past.
So what does happen when socially enforced monogamy breaks down? First of all, the result is never “promiscuity.” Promiscuity literally means a lack of discrimination, or random mating. Human mating can never be truly promiscuous or random because of a second unchangeable biological fact of life: Some people are more attractive than others.
Oh, my sweet summer child. If there is one thing that my series on Hypergamy showed, it was that promiscuity is absolutely a thing. The statistics we examined in the series on Hypergamy completely refute Devlin’s claim. No one seriously thinks that women are only hypergamous in practice. Well, except for the clueless 80/20 folk.
This serves a eugenic function. A good-looking young woman with clear skin and symmetrical features is likely to be low in mutational load, and therefore more likely to produce a lot of healthy, fertile offspring.
Actual human breeding has be dysgenic, not eugenic, for a century or two now. Maybe Devlin is actually 220 years old!
Woman may have harmful mutations that are undetectable in their pretty faces, while jet-setting men may not always make the best fathers. But other things being equal, this is how sexual selection works.
No, this is not how sexual selection actually works. This is what someone says who has only read about sexual selection in a biology textbook.
As Ed Dutton often points out, the highest human fertility is among those with the highest mutational load. The ugliest and “least” fit are having the most babies. Except that “fitness” is a descriptive term, so, by definition, the least pretty and worst quality men and women with the highest mutational load are the most genetically fit.
<insert chortle here>
Because of differential attractiveness, the pattern that emerges following the breakdown of monogamy is never random, but instead Darwinian.
This is mostly false.
Devlin doesn’t know what Darwinian means.
Mating is always Darwinian, by definition. No matter what happens, it is Darwinian. Whether monogamy breaks down or not, it is Darwinian. Whether sexual selection is based on attractiveness or its inverse, it is still Darwinian.
Whatever leads to sexual selection, that is Darwinian. It doesn’t matter what that selection actually is, as the selection is always for something, and that something need not—and cannot—be constant over time. It could be monogamy today or polygamy tomorrow, but it is still Darwinian.
It is essentially identical to what we observe in primate packs, where females compete to mate with the most dominant males, while males compete for dominance partly to get access to more females.
Oh dear. I feel bad for Devlin. He really does get his notions of sexuality from a biology textbook. I’ll make this simple: what primate packs do is not applicable to human mating. Humans are not primates, because when primates mate, they breed out the undesirable mutations. Human populations are doing the opposite.
Why? Because humans have agency and primates do not. Humans can choose and they are exercising their agency to do so.
If you want to compare humans to the animal kingdom, the better analogy is the Mouse Utopia.
A Darwinian mating system does not increase the total amount of sex available to men over what it is under monogamy. It merely distributes it differently, concentrating it heavily at the top of the hierarchy.
Over the last 17 years, the total amount of human sexual activity has measurably changed. It has declined. The current mating system has, in fact, altered the total amount of sex available. The decrease coincides precisely with the decline in monogamy, ergo, monogamy leads to an increase.
Meanwhile, the mating system has been, by definition, 100% Darwinian the whole time.
The Sexual Revolution did not, then, remove the constraints on male sexuality, as most traditionalists imagine. For most men, it made those constraints more onerous. Instead, it liberated female sexuality, freeing more women to pursue the highest-status men.
Except that women ultimately don’t pursue the highest-status men, so, sorry Devlin, you got this wrong. It’s time to move on to some other theory.
The idea that a woman who mates with three different men—a high-status man, a low-status man, and a matched-status man—would have been fine if only she hadn’t had the high-status man…. is absurd.
The obvious result of such freedom is the situation we have heard women complaining about for the past 50 years or more: the alleged impossibility of getting men to “commit.”
I hate to beat a dead horse, but this is because of promiscuity, not hypergamy (which is a myth).
Indeed, one of the most important functions of monogamy is to allow men with no understanding of female sexuality to find wives. In the absence of socially-enforced monogamy, men have to know how to seduce women, and most simply do not. This is another mistake the moralistic traditionalists make: portraying ordinary young men as master seducers. Most young men have no idea what they are doing with women.
Devlin is sooooo close, and yet sooooo far away. It isn’t monogamy, but arranged marriage, that accounts for this. That’s because both men and women are bad at finding mates. They have evolved, through natural Darwinian processes, to have no instincts for how to pick a mate. They need their mates to be picked for them by people who know what they are doing. This is true even in polygamous societies!
Hypergamy—or more properly promiscuity—is just assortative mating by trial-and-error rather than by arrangement.
Other things being equal, a monogamous tribe is likely to defeat a polygynous tribe on the battlefield.
…
And it creates stable family relations, which provide the healthiest and most predictable environment for children to grow up in.
Brother (or is it Sister?), that’s mistaking correlation for causation. Monogamous societies are better at selecting for intelligence because polygamous societies tend to involve cousin marriage (which suppresses intelligence). It has nothing to do with monogamy or polygamy itself.
As for stable family relations, polygamous societies have always had stronger family relations than monogamous societies, in large part because of all the inbreeding.
Normal women tend to be happiest when behaving in evolutionarily adaptive ways: marrying in their late teens or early twenties, bearing children, and devoting themselves to the well-being of their families. This is also, obviously, best for their children and the future of society as a whole. But the institutions that encouraged and supported such behavior have broken down. I understand that the average age of a Swedish woman at her first marriage is now over 30, and it is similarly high in much of northern Europe. Most of these women do not practice chastity before marriage, with the result that they fail to bond properly with their husbands once they do marry, and that is one reason divorce is so common.
We could quibble, but this is close enough.
The best way to conclude a talk about sexual dysfunction would be to tell you how to cure it, but this is not easy. In America, as I mentioned, critics of the Sexual Revolution usually have nothing better to propose than a religious revival. But this is not likely to work in a country whose Church is governed by lesbian bishops. The most recent news story I read about Christianity in Sweden involved such a bishop calling for the removal of crosses from Christian churches so as not to offend Muslim immigrants.
Accurate.
I do not have a cure for the Sexual Revolution, but I can make an educated guess as to how it will play out. In the long run, maladaptive behavior always comes to an end because it is maladaptive. Those who postpone marriage for too long or devote themselves to sterile sexual practices will fail to pass on their genes. The future belongs to those who procreate and raise children. They will be the founders of the civilization that replaces today’s exhausted and decadent world.
Accurate.
I might even be inclined to look toward the future with confidence if it were not for the fact of demographic replacement. Adaptive sexuality will return one way or another, because that is nature’s way. But there are no guarantees that our own descendants will be the ones practicing it. And I don’t care very much what sexual or family practices prevail in a future Muslim Swedistan. My concern is with my own people and civilization, of which the Swedish people are a part.
I have bad news for confident readers. The future will be more like the movie Idiocracy than anything else. It will be like the fall of the Roman Empire. It already is. There is no going back, and won’t be for a few hundred years at least.
The solution is actually quite simple. It does not require any effort, because like assortative mating, people do it automatically and instinctively: self-segregation. You’ll find a place and a group of people who match you, and you’ll experience the change with them.
Anyway, Devlin is back and he still doesn’t have much to offer.
Somewhat aside from the above – a general comment on the Manosphere.
It suddenly struck me the other day how much the Manosphere operates in accordance with the overarching PSYOPS of the past forty years – since the 80s especially, e.g. “second wave” feminism – of promoting inter-sex hatred, fear, and resentment.
In other words; psychologically, the Manosphere is a mirror of the Andrea Dworkin, Kate Millet, Margaret Atwood kind of stuff – as seen in the Very high proportion of movies, TV programmes and “news” stories that are continually sustaining the “Men are pigs” agenda, as Miles W Mathis terms it.
Of course, because men are different from women, the motivators are different; but it is obvious that those who engage with the Manosphere develop an “instrumental” attitude to women – ceasing to regard them as fellow humans, and instead regarding them as a group to be manipulated.
This is 100% in line with what the global totalitarians want – which suggests to me that, in various ways, and at various levels – both directly and by unwitting manipulation (“They” have become very good at this), it is near certain that the Manosphere is being promoted by the Establishment.
What do you think?
Sorry to interrupt. Back to topic!
Bruce,
It’s a small world. I was just thinking about that yesterday, because it was Mother’s Day.
The vilification of men (and fathers in particular) has been a trope for some time now. On Father’s Day here in America, pastors across the country praise single mothers and blame men. Once my wife asked me why I didn’t want to go to church on Father’s Day and I told her because they’ll praise single mothers and blame fathers. She was incredulous. Then we went to church and, lo, it came to pass. Sitting in the pews, she looked at me and we exchanged a knowing glance. I didn’t need to say a word.
(Whenever I consider switching to another church, I listen to the Father’s Day sermons in their archives: it’s the Litmus test for American churches)
All the Manosphere did was replace the villification of men with the vilification of women.
Your writings on negatively-defined ethics capture this. The Manosphere is fundamentally negatively defined, not positively. It’s about fighting evil, not doing good.
I see the Manosphere as just one part of the whole system. The end result of “fighting evil” is the same, no matter what “evil” is being fought, because it isn’t truly virtuous.
Peace,
DR
At our last assignment, we had a chaplain and the base chapel who was really good.
Great speaker, and he had 3 sons (a bit younger than ours).
On Father’s Day, he actually had a wonderful sermon celebrating fatherhood, and he distributed mugs at the end of the service in honor of fathers.
I took an image and put it on Twitter a while back.
Quote on the front was:
“”Justice, Kindness, Humility…it’s a guy thing”
This is rare in my experience with today’s churches.
My current church is one of those Father’s Day agnostic churches. It doesn’t attack men but it also doesn’t really dedicate a day to praising and uplifting them. Father’s Day is mostly a day to continue to the ongoing sermon series.
I live in an area surrounded by churches that I’m not enthusiastic about. It’s too far of a drive to find one I really want to go to.
In “Today’s Churches,” this is what passes for “Mennonite” these days (outside the split-off Lancaster Mennonite Conference).
Again off-topic! – Every time I read the title to this post I see:
“Is F. Roger Devlin Black?”
Someone on another forum was confused by your comment here, so I want to post this clarification.
If it is acknowledged (or believed) that top-down evil – purposive evil originating global, multinational, and national institutional level (“The Establishment”) – is a real and significant phenomenon – then various implications follow.
But it is clear that not many people, including not many Christians, really believe in top-down evil.
Or else regard it as insignificant – otherwise they would not think, speak, write and behave in the ways they do – all of which assume that the most powerful, wealthy, influential and high status levels of society are basically well-intended.
This is why the Litmus Tests mostly work as a method of discernment, and why they cluster – so that failure in one Test (including emerging Tests; such as the Birdemic, the peck, “AI”) is associated with – and leads to – failure in other Tests.
My opinion is that the weakness in Christians, their cumulative proneness to fail Litmus Tests as they emanate from The Establishment; is related to their faith being primarily in their church as an institution – in the 2025 context of a totalitarian world where all institutions are strongly inter-linked.
Thus, the Manosphere:
This is why men like Andrew Tate are so popular.
So I thought I’d delve in and see if the “co-founder” (heh…) of the Manosphere has changed in 17 years.
What about the founder who propelled the talk of game and being antifeminist into the spotlight?
https://heartiste.org/2017/07/20/ten-years-of-the-manosphere/
Ten Years Of The Manosphere
Jul 20th, 2017 by CH
I’m not given to retrospectives (mortality reminders are a buzzkill), but this reader’s email deftly describes the incredible cultural influence of the internet realtalk revolution collectively known as the manosphere, a loose affiliation of men who, cutting to the pith of it, were tired of pretty lies and wanted the ugly truths. The manosphere itself was a child of seduction forums, where men actively trying to crack the code of female attraction would share ideas, with all the SJW and PC window dressing stripped clean. They were the proto-shitlords of their day, uninterested in virtue signaling or status whoring for the benefit of admittance to polite company. The manosphere later expanded and fed a whole new vocabulary and theoretical framework to dissident factions like the alt-right, /pol/, Frog Twatter, and neoreaction. (Even MPC, no friend of the PUA life, has a thread titled “Examples of Beta Male Faggotry”. The lure of realtalk, no matter the source, is irresistible to iconoclasts and modern heretics).
What started as a get laid guild became the greatest unleashing of rhetorical and memetic testosterone in modern American history. Cucks, sh!tlibs, manlets, fatties, and feminists were swept aside by this tsunami of refocused and revitalized T, particularly of the White man’s T. The question remains whether the manosphere’s Frankenbeans monster — their testicular shiv of the bloated and sclerotic Lords of Lies — has achieved apotheosis in President Donald J Trump, or if there are bigger and ballsier reckonings to come.
Message I sent to someone that may be of interest:
One funny thing about the game guys. They are empiricists because they wanted to meet women and, as CH puts it, get love and sex. It is really wrong to say it is just about getting the rocks off. They really wanted girlfriends, too, but the girls of today are all too often damaged goods. But to do any of that they had to overcome a lot of lies and programming, and even learn new vocabulary, and be hardcore realists and empiricists. Only facing reality and facing the truth about men and women would get the girl back to the crib and get the panties off. No emotion-protecting lies will do it. And over the decade or so this conversation has been going on, the habit of being hardcore realists and empiricists has spread into all areas of thinking and acting. And also the guys involved in the conversation are maturing. Ten years is a long time in any human life, especially from the 20s into the 30s and beyond. So ingesting the red pill was like a magic potion that was supposed to make you into a mighty poon-slayer, and it worked! But the magic was far more powerful than anyone dreamed. And it kept working and all kinds of new powers kept emerging until the initial thing became secondary to the larger goal of living a life aligned with reality, which may even mean moderating the demand for female bodies, as nice as they can be, and as necessary as they sometimes seem to be.
Strange to have been watching this from the sidelines all these years.
No one would have predicted how it has played out so far.
“A life aligned with reality”. A government aligned with reality. A nation aligned with reality.
That is the manospherian Realtalk Revolution’s legacy, and it is as Beautiful as it is Truthful. Instructions for a life well lived inevitably became a warning and a remedy to a society rapidly draining its life force in the abattoir of anti-reality. The Virtue Snivelers can deny reality, but reality will always belie their denials.
And ironically, I don’t consider the Chateau a “manosphere” outpost. I don’t know what I’d label this place, but “manosphere” seems too constricting. I’ll call it what it has meant to its many guests and wanderers: A rejuvenating retreat from a mad world, and a beacon to those who feel like strangers in their own land and time. The best description may be in how you leave this place, rather than in how you came to it: as purposeful and impassioned men.
They really wanted girlfriends, too, but the girls of today are all too often damaged goods
That seems to correlate with
If there is one thing that my series on Hypergamy showed, it was that promiscuity is absolutely a thing. The statistics we examined in the series on Hypergamy completely refute Devlin’s claim. No one seriously thinks that women are only hypergamous in practice. Well, except for the clueless 80/20 folk.
&
F. Roger Devlin
The obvious result of such freedom is the situation we have heard women complaining about for the past 50 years or more: the alleged impossibility of getting men to “commit.”
I hate to beat a dead horse, but this is because of promiscuity, not hypergamy (which is a myth).
Our church doesn’t tailor messages to cultural holidays at all. No Mothers, Fathers, Memorial Day, etc. sermons. So women are not extolled on the 2nd Sunday in May, nor our fathers castigated on the 3rd Sunday in June.
Only Advent and Easter are given formal acknowledgement from the pulpit. We are very grateful for that.
As to the substance of the post, it is clear that many in the sphere (including Mr. Devlin!) have made the fatal mistake of becoming the thing they despise. Since we inevitably become what we behold, it makes sense.
Look for the devil, and you will find him. Seek the good, true, and beautiful, and find God. Even occasionally in the wretch that is woman, 😆
That was supposed to read, “women are not extolled,” instead of ‘extorted’, 🤦🏾♀️
Stupid autocorrect.
[Ed: Fixed]
Well said, Elspeth!
This is a strong observation.
This is a strong observation.
It is, and I stand by it. What I really want to know from our host is:
In your opinion, is it a strongly valid, or strongly invalid observation ?
Look for the devil, and you will find him. Seek the good, true, and beautiful, and find God. Even occasionally in the wretch that is woman, 😆
In your opinion, is it a strongly valid, or strongly invalid observation ?
I would say I agree wholeheartedly, but I fear that would be posturing or virtue signaling. The truth is that the implications of what you say are deeply uncomfortable, and I find myself viscerally wanting to not think about it. That’s why I said they are strong observations. Ultimately, while “we become what we behold” is a simple observation and description of the Manosphere, it is also a warning for all of us.
Perhaps that answers your question.
It does answer it (thank you!). As I thought of it, it was a very sobering thought. Convicting, even.
It’s one of the reason I severely limited the places I click online anymore. This is one of only four blogs I’ll read on a regular basis. I was beholding far too much negativity, and very little of what is Good, True, and Beautiful. This was an outright rebellion against what Scripture clearly tells followers of Christ that we should be doing.
Not only online, but movies, shows, books, all of it. I have become incredibly strident and narrow. And yet…I still find that my gaze is far too often on what is not true, not good, and objectively ugly.
We live in a fallen, sin-soaked world, so some of that cannot be helped, but to intentionally gaze upon it under the guise of “seeing the world as it is” (as if that’s ALL it is) is to deny that God is at work in the world even now.
So I had to stop it.
One of the most quoted passages of scripture in the Christian Manosphere is Ephesians 5. I’ve probably quoted it here a hundred times. But this particular passage isn’t typically included, although it is important context:
Therefore, do not participate with them in these sins, because at one time you were darkness, but now, in union with the Lord, you are light. Walk as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists of everything that is good and right and true), discerning what is pleasing to the Lord.
And do not participate in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them, for it is shameful to even speak of the things that they do in secret. But all things become visible when they are exposed by the light. For what makes everything visible is light.
This is why it says,
We can’t avoid interacting with evil in a fallen world, but we can work to avoid participating in evil. My post tomorrow alludes to this:
The last Officer (pastor) I witnessed at The Salvation Army on “Fathers Day” during his sermon said 2017:
*Women show up
*Women are more accountable than men
*Women by Gods design preserve our better cultural / societal institutions
*Women have been filling the “gap” left by men
As for men…
*You are not stepping up
*You are absconding your duties
*You would rather play video games and watch porn
*You are not putting Jesus first
*You refuse to be of helps and service to the church
*You are behaving like Adam by “blaming women” and therefore God for the problems you are having in your marriage
*You single men need to be masculine and lead
It was at this point I politely and quietly got up and left the service. I was still wearing a Uniform at that point.
As I was leaving, the CSM (Corps Srgt Major) a woman, stood up and said….I heard it as I was walking out. “And, today…on Fathers Day, this Corps needs to again acknowledge the women for being the father also in their households. Its a day when women who are doing a fathers role need to be appreciated for.”
Thunderous applause. No one cared that I left. No one asked me questions afterwards. It was shortly after that, I stopped going to church, and hung my uniform in my closet (where it hangs to this day)
Ugh. That sucks, Jason. I’m sorry.
Yeah, it was rough. And on the other side in another part of the Internet, we are told that “being a father” somehow makes you more of a man, and better and more respected for just that fact. Usually for the attention of women
They forgot that Jesus wasnt a father biologically here on earth, and its debated if Paul was a parent or not….and of course we have great examples of men who were pretty abysmal fathers in the Bible and did terrible things to their children and others…..
Ouch, that’s one of the more brutal examples of the Father’s Day meme that I’ve heard. Not that I’m surprised. Such stories are not hard to find.
Not long after that service, we left that church for good. But, as with you, my church attendance has not truly recovered since that Father’s Day many years ago.
These days, church is a social club. Church attendance is negatively correlated with being a devout Christian.
Indeed. Being a father or mother doesnt get you on a fast-track to heaven, or God, or Jesus. You will have different responsibilities and expectations as a parent in the eyes of Jesus but your sin isnt “excused” or “not as bad as” others. All are expected still to submit to the cross. Parent or not.
As for church being a social club….yeah, it is and has been for a long time now. We know that the only real churches are the ones that the men in the ‘sphere attend………and by their actions, words and comments 99% of men that would show up at their church on a random Sunday wouldnt be allowed “in”
I have mentioned it before………I saw Chuck Swindoll speak at a prayer breakfast (Fresno) about a decade ago, and he mentioned that a random man who moves to a new town would be more welcome in the local bar than the local church.
There were gasps and you could feel the “shock” from the crowd (about 1000 people). “Not their church!” But, as he explained why in his folksy way, it was a true statement.
It gave me stuff to think about…….I thought of my own journey at that time, and yes it was true but I also had to look at myself and think “do I behave like this at times?” And…yes, I have.
The vigilance that Jesus spoke of was not just for us to be “ready” for his return, but that includes who we are in relation to Him and to others about the Gospel and how we live and behave and treat others. Not saying its easy, but Jesus does have expectations for us for His kingdom.
If it was just to “profess” Jesus and “accept” Him as your “lord and savior” well, we wouldnt need church…and frankly wouldnt need to do anything else.
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