Elam's separatist response

A couple of months ago I wrote a criticism of certain trends within the men's rights movement (MRM). This post has now been replied to at The Spearhead by Paul Elam.

Elam pushes a hyper-separatist line. According to Elam we have hit an apocalypse. He agrees with Hanna Rosin that the "end of men" is inevitable. He's not sure why it's happening, but he believes that female dominance and male subjugation is an inescapable destiny.

What does that mean for marriage? Women will choose to have sex with thugs and will coerce a few lapdog beta men for supplemental income. There will be just a handful of alpha men who might be able to support a woman in marriage in the traditional way.

So there's no room for marriage in the future and as for masculinity Elam declares himself to be unsure of what that term refers to.

What does Elam advocate? This:

What we need, assuming there is a “we,” is a chivalry strike, which is to say a total abdication and rejection of any responsibilities to women, individually, and as a group.

Elam doesn't seem too confident that men will heed this separatist call. He writes:

Most men, especially traditionalists, will do what men have done in the face of gender feminism for half a century now; that is, follow their instincts to please women and wait for Hannah Rosin to tell them what to think about their own lives, how to live them, and what their place is.

That's confusing. Elam had previously called traditionalists "patriarchs" who would be "intellectually culled" under future conditions. Now he is identifying us as lapdogs who follow along after feminist women doing their bidding.

Elam's approach is not uncommon in the MRM. He takes certain real trends and makes them absolute and inescapable. He does so because it fits his programme, which is a radical separatist one. Being a radical separatist he has to justify men having nothing to do with women.

Elam's justification is sophisticated compared to some others in the MRM. Sometimes what you hear are coarser claims such as "all women are whores" or "all women are gold diggers".

Radical separatists aren't going to like traditionalists like myself. Our aim is to return to the ideal of distinct, complementary relationships between men and women. Although such relationships have been made unnecessarily difficult in modern liberal societies, we don't hold them to be impossible. Our position, therefore, is incompatible with that of the separatists.

As for separatism, it's difficult to see what it's going to achieve. If a Western man drops out, there'll be someone else to take his place. By itself separatism doesn't challenge either the ideas or the institutions on which the current social order is based. This order will carry on whether or not Paul Elam and a few other MRAs decide to marry or not.