Feminine surrender as emotional dominance

The first in the V-leaks series: Uncovering the Feminine Codex.

This series is going to focus on an examination of how women develop and employ power in a feminine way. And by feminine I mean as a manifestation of some combination of feminine biology and socialization.

Just a note to stem off the inevitable charges of misogyny: If you consider this series misogyny, then by extension the entire body of work looking at men’s use and abuse of power—including my own vlog on male power structures called apexuality—is an ocean of misandry sufficient to drown the entire world.

A while back there was a domestic terrorist in Canada who was targeting infrastructure related to gas processing and transportation. He was doing this because he felt this infrastructure was responsible for illness in his family. He was a survivalist and a very religious man.

At some point they interviewed one of his daughters. She explained that she had been taught that “women were weaker than men.” The news obviously included this particular bit in order to vilify her father as a horrible misogynist. But I picked up on a very different dynamic. She expressed this sentiment in the exact same way a young man might arrogantly proclaim his ‘pimp skills.’

Now, why is that?

To explain the origin of her smugly superior attitude let’s dissect the related concept of the surrendered wife. For those not in the know, a surrendered wife is a woman who has decided, usually unilaterally, to abdicate all agency and responsibility in a relationship. She simply responds to whatever her husband does by enduring it without comment and enjoying a god-gasm over being a good Christian at his expense.

An example of a ‘surrendered wife’ is a woman who, when her husband made a wrong turn off a freeway, never informed him of his mistake and let him drive for half a day in the wrong direction.

Getting the picture?

How is this related to female emotional domination, you might ask… that is, if you’re not picking up on it already.

Well, I’ll explain what’s really going on.

Human beings have an extremely strong instinct to take care of creatures that are helpless. We have this instinct because our offspring are the most helpless and dependent in the entire animal kingdom. Our instinct to help the helpless is therefore the most highly developed on Earth.

It is capable of superseding our survival instinct. There are plenty of examples of people (mostly men) sacrificing their lives to save others. Our instinct to take care of the helpless also supersedes our sexual instinct, which explains why paternal caretaking in the human species is so involved and common. Instinctively, human men will focus on taking care of their offspring preferentially over courting further sexual options (there are exceptions to this, of course, but these exceptions prove the rule.)

This protection instinct can be taken a step further in men. Not only do men have it but they are also socialized to see their gender identity revolving around exercising it. The implicit assumption of ‘women and children first’ is that it is men who provide the ‘first’ and if they don’t, they aren’t men.

To coin a phrase, a man’s social body, his positive social or spiritual identity–thus his connection to human society–is made up of his ability and willingness to fulfill the needs of those perceived to be more helpless than himself. So not only do men have an instinct to help the helpless, they also have a strong social compulsion on top of that instinct.

Remember this. The very survival of a man’s social body—his positive spiritual identity–is contingent upon sacrificing for the needs more helpless then himself.

Now let’s take a closer look at how someone can exploit this instinct in an aggressive manner.

Everybody understands that when person A puts a gun to the head of person B and makes demands, that person A is placing enormous pressure on person B to do whatever Person A wants.

What people don’t understand is that Person A can easily point the gun at her own head, and by pointing it at herself put the same or more pressure on person B to do whatever she wants.

In the first scenario Person A is triggering Person B’s survival instinct; in the second she’s triggering his protection instinct. Functionally, both actions are about bringing to bear tremendous coercive pressure on a target by triggering a powerful instinct. The second action has the added benefit of allowing person A to remain ‘a victim’, ‘powerless’ and ‘not harming anyone’ since she’s just threatening herself.

The reality is that she is covertly harming person B through the use of coercive force.

So, while you read the rest of this article, remember that triggering a person’s protection instinct is as coercive a force as triggering their survival instinct. If you need to, every time I refer to a woman triggering a man’s protective instinct by presumptively submissive behavior, imagine, instead, her putting a gun to her own head. Or if that still doesn’t clarify the coercive nature of triggering his protection instinct enough, imagine she’s putting a gun to his head instead. This image is not far fetched, because when a man fails to protect a woman, his social body is in jeopardy, therefore every instance of her triggering his protection instinct is also an instance of her threatening the continued existence of his social body, his positive connection to his community.

When a woman engages in the ‘surrendered’ lifestyle (in any of its forms, including secular ones), she is, in essence, inflating her helplessness in order to parasitize both her mate’s protection instinct and the connection between the survival of his social body and him providing for the helpless. The more helpless she is, the more his instinct is triggered and the more implied threat she is directing towards his social body if he does not provide for her needs.

If she does it right, she can attain a level of apparent helplessness that can supersede even that of an infant. This is because she is in possession of a relatively adult level of agency (even if she isn’t going to allow her husband to benefit from its existence) and is capable of avoiding an infant’s kneejerk communication of discomfort. Thus she can appear even more inert and uncommunicative and thus more completely helpless than an infant.

Think how thrilled new parents would be to not only have to deal with the all-consuming needs of a newborn, but to have a newborn that had absolutely no way of communicating those needs. The child is completely silent  and unable even to cry.  This sounds, on the surface, like it might be a relief not to have a fussy child but take a moment to imagine how much worse it is to be a new parent gripped with the endless fear of not knowing if they’re doing anything right or wrong or not enough or too much.

Not only does the surrendered wife want her husband to find her needs as all encompassing as those of a new born baby, she encourages a terrifying level of uncertainty in him that he’s actually fulfilling them.

It’s sort of like her not only putting that gun to his head, but not even explaining the actions she wants him to take to avoid having his brains blown out.

This leaves no room in the relationship—and I use the word loosely—for the man’s needs and vulnerabilities. Just ask any parent of a three-month year old child how parenting an infant has affected their sense of self and being able to take care of their own needs. In fact in the ‘surrendered wife’ model because the infant is man’s presumptive partner, not only is there no time to address his needs but there exists no other adult in the relationship to address his needs. (And just a note, addressing your male partner’s needs is not synonymous with giving him fifteen minutes of uninspired ‘godly’ sex every two months. I know this will come as a shock but each man, being human, has his own unique tapestry of fears, insecurities, things that make him sad, you know, vulnerabilties.)

Since this isn’t a relationship of emotional equals—it’s a relationship of mistress and emotional slave–a woman has to look elsewhere to get her adult emotional needs met. That’s why all people recommending the surrendered wife model insist that a surrendered wife have female friends.

The surrendered wife, on the other hand, is likely her husband’s primary or only emotional relationship, his only real connection to humanity. Likely this assists in the process of hijacking his agency like a body-snatching alien pod since he has no other outlet for getting his emotional needs met. Or even an outside perspective on what’s happening to him.

Another clue to the real nature of the surrendered wife phenomena is how often women engaging in it talk about it achieving their aim of getting their husbands to do exactly what they want them to.

As a very intelligent MRA noted, a women’s limitations are a man’s obligations. The more helpless a surrendered wife is, the more he has to revolve his life around sacrificing for her. Until there is no autonomous life left in him.

The end result of this is emotional emeshment is that he becomes no more than a vehicle of her needs. In that context telling her that she must ‘obey’ her husband becomes a sort of farce. There is no autonomous being to obey.

It’s also interesting how people evangelizing the ‘surrendered wife’ model seem to assume that a woman emotionally dominating her partner—either through overt verbal abuse or through invasion-of-the-body-snatchers style emotional emeshment—is just a given. Either you’re an abusive harridan or an all-consuming waif.

But there exists a third possibility that is opposite to both: a mutually respectful adult relationship in which a woman is grateful for her husband’s strengths and respectful of his vulnerabilities.

We often misunderstand the nature of the ‘surrendered wife’ model as somehow beneficial to men because we are locked into seeing dominance on male terms. We think that the dominant partner in a relationship is the one making all the decisions, when in fact the dominant partner is the one those decisions are being made for. The partner who’s in the driver’s seat, so to speak, is the one whose needs have been prioritized over the others’. And the one who’s needs have been prioritized is always the one who has co-opted the other’s protective instinct. The one who is seen as the weaker party. That’s also the partner who’s deriving the primary benefit from having the relationship.

Conversely when a wife respects her husband’s vulnerabilities, by definition she will take the lead when he is vulnerable. But it’s his needs that are the driving force behind the decisions she makes while in the lead.

This is why the husbands of surrendered wives are the subordinate partners in the relationship. Their wives never take the lead, thus they never take the lead in making decisions driven by their husband’s vulnerabilities. In every equal relationship each partner gets some ‘me’, in the surrendered wife relationship there is only she.

This is how you end up with a woman who will let her husband turn off the wrong exit on a freeway and say nothing while he humiliates himself by driving for hours the wrong way. She would rather see him suffer than expose her own agency and risk lessening her own power over him. Alternatively she doesn’t even see him as an autonomous person; his mistakes are just a disaster, like a flood or a tornado, that she endures in order to rack up her god-points.

Now not all surrendered wives are going to take this toxic dynamic to the extreme of complete emotional domination of their husbands. What I’m saying is that this dynamic provides no protection for the man from a wife who will.

Particularly in a Christian community where the husband is held strictly liable for all of his wife’s behavior. ‘Why are you complaining? Isn’t your wife’s godly supplication to you sufficient?’

And men are particularly vulnerable because they don’t pick up on the subtle cues that indicate a woman is practicing this sort of psychological aggression against them. When a man ‘surrenders’ it’s the end of his power; whereas when a woman ‘surrenders’ it’s just the beginning of hers.

Further you can see this dynamic in a lot of secular, non religious relationships as well. The harridan wife is just a subset of the surrendered wife, except like a fussy infant she’s more vocal about her requirements. And you see the same coercive dynamic in some political ideologies: Make yourself look like a victim to appeal to men’s instinct to protect you. It’s just the ‘surrendered’ wife lifestyle distills the dynamic to it’s clearest essence.

And no, I’m not saying it’s impossible for a male partner to exploit his female partner by triggering her protective instincts, I just don’t see an entire subculture dedicated to it or ubiquitous cultural expectations supporting it.

So in conclusion, why was the daughter of the survivalist telling the viewer that she was taught that ‘women are weak’ with such a palpable air of smug self-satisfaction?

Let me translate her words from female dominance language to dominance language men are more likely to recognize. ‘Weakness is my pimp hand, yo. And you boy-bitches better fall in line, because my pimp hand be strong.’

 

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