Memo No. 53 From The National Welfare Desk of Men
HOW THE CHURCH MADE SIMPS OUT OF MEN
AND WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT
{#Longpost alert: This is perhaps the most consequential Memo I have ever written}
A few years ago, I was going through a serious identity crisis. The fuel gauge of my confidence-metre was reading zero. Everyone around me knew about it. It bothered them a great deal. It worried me sick.
Every man at some point in life will undergo some sort of identity crisis, occasioned by loss of a job or his income dipping, your woman leaving you for a richer man, your unmet dreams and expectations, the boredom that comes with work or marriage. We all go through it. Some handle it better than others.
And I was holding on pretty badly. I believe in seeking help. The right kind of help. One of the people I normally reach out to is an old female friend, who is an unpaid shrink anytime I need some sort of therapy. We agreed to meet somewhere in Westlands, along Muthithi Road. There was this fancy restaurant with a sweet green theme that sold some really good doughnuts. We ordered sugarless beverages; coffee for her, tea for me, and the signature doughnuts for both of us. We got talking.
Do you sometimes hate those friends who at any given time seem to have their act together? My friend is one such kind. We shared a lot that day. She assured me that there wasn’t anything wrong with me, maybe some bit of frustration because of the toxic environment I was living in at the time. It was comforting enough, but she sensed the emptiness of her words and felt a need to offer more:
“If you really want to get out there and do something, my church runs this program called ‘Man Enough’. It is a good program of bonding with other guys, and they have some good activities and some training that can energize you…” she told me.
For some reason, I felt insulted. I hated myself for talking to a woman over a problem that needed me to talk to a man. I didn’t know much about ‘Man Enough’ but it sounded like a wrong idea. Because for some years leading to that date, I had grown cynical of the church, becoming a backbencher, as I felt the church had lost its spiritual and philosophical obligations and given precedence to crass materialism over saving of our souls. In my experience, there was nothing any church could offer a troubled modern man.
There was another reason. Before meeting my friend in Westlands, my editor at The Standard, Clay Muganda, had given me an assignment to write about the International Men’s Day of that year. Part of the assignment involved me talking to the guys running the ‘Man Enough’ or something similar, that I forget.
I had talked to them, and it turned out, it wasn’t entirely a bad idea. For sure, there was a growing need to create safe spaces for men, especially young men to be taught by older men the kind of stuff that they are never taught in school. I remember I attended a graduation ceremony of guys who had completed the program, and whereas, I was not overly critical, I felt something was off. I sent a text to a friend, an anthropologist, asking him about the whole idea, and in his characteristic humour, he shot back,
“Yaani, nowadays to be a man, you need to be trained for a month and be given a certificate?”
Anyway, I knew that there were those men who would benefit from such programs, but I was not one of them. Suffice to say, at the time, I was writing probably the only red pill column in the country, with no proper a name than The Retrosexual for The Nairobian, despite misgivings about my manhood at the time.
I have always believed that to be a man is not a soapy thing. You don’t become a man by attending some training or reading some books or watching a few videos and thumping your chest how you have become an alpha. To be a man is a lifelong training, learning from your mistakes, the mistakes of those who have gone before you, falling, rising, until you develop a personal philosophy. And if there is one training that all men deserve is military training: to toughen up, to learn discipline and to understand that the most difficult terrain one can go through is life. However, military training is not available for all of us. Thus, we must learn through other ways.
Thus, whereas, I deeply respect my friend and even grateful that on that day she even offered to pay for me to join the program, I declined the offer. I couldn’t tell her exactly what my objection was, but it had to do with what the church has done to men over the years: created the worst s!mps. The church has become a ‘simposium’ (sic)—pardon the pun from a friend. And now the simps the church made are paying the highest price for not knowing that women in church are reading from a totally different script. Men in church are holding the wrong end of the stick.
Indulge me.
And let us go back a bit.
Christianity is an odd religion. It is the only religion in the world that probably attracts more women than men. Other major world religions are very patriarchal, conservative and it is men who are in charge. Whereas some feminists have accused Christianity to be a male-centric institution, they get alot of stuff wrong.
If you go back in time, Before Christ, we can imagine the kind of world we had and how genders related. Women only married less than half of the male population. Reason being: Hypergamy. Only the wealthiest and the strongest men had access to women. Women have never had a problem sharing dominant
men at the top, whether in America or in Australia or in Africa. This biological and evolutionary quirk remains true to date.
Look at it this way. If you had 100 men and 100 women, this is how it played out. Ten of these men were very rich and each married like four women. That is 40 women off the market. The next ten men may have been rich enough to each get 3 women. That is another 30 women gone. That means 20 men controlled 70 women. Thus, you have 80 men remaining with only 30 women. Assuming the next 30 men are lucky to marry the remaining women, you still have 50 men without a mate. These men without a mate have the evolutionary imperative to propagate, don’t forget.
Do you notice at this point that polygamy is a natural response to women’s hypergamy? Some will say that men owned the property, so women had no choice.
Fair enough. Let us carry on.
The men left out of the mating pool were the original involuntary celibates (incels). They may be similar to the modern day incels, but these ones were not given a chance to express their frustrations such as their inability to marry or get laid, like their modern-day equivalent. Instead, they were sold as slaves. Slavery existed virtually in every society. Some were made eunuchs, servants
for the rich or sent to war to be killed. You name it. Remember that silly move
King David made on Uriah’s wife?
Multiple research studies have indicated that societies that are polygamous, tend to be violent. Think of Sudan, Chad and the sub-Saharan Northern part of Africa in general. It is believed that lack of access to female partners to reproduce with and start a family is the cause of the violent crime. Thus, it wasn’t sustainable, especially as the human population grew.
So, as societies settled more and more, certain acts of barbarism like slavery, rendering some men eunuchs could no longer be justified.
Enter Christianity.
You have two groups of people who don’t like each other that much: You have women who only want to date, sleep or marry the cream of men (the top 20 percent) and you have a majority of men who pose great danger to the society.
SIDE NOTE: See how feminism so bad wants the privileges of the 20 percent of the men, and holds the other 80 percent in the worst contempt possible?
Anyway, how do you solve this conundrum?
Well, since women only want or care about what a man can provide, why not make men provide? Works like magic. Men become providers and protectors in order to access a female mate. Polygamy is not sustainable, besides, not all women can access the cream of men as they would wish. They have to settle for the available men.
But women cannot cooperate. At least not naturally. That is why women fair worse in team sport and shine individual sports. How do you make them cooperate?
Introduce submission. And drum it down their throats if the civilization is to hold. Let men slave, let women raise the family. Apostle Paul who essentially spread the gospel to the rest of the world, talked a great deal about submission and ideal family life. Men had the obligation to love their wives like Christ loved
the church, and women were not given a similar obligation. Just Submission, which is contingent to the male provision.
So far, so convenient.
It worked. And for 2,000 years, it worked, however imperfectly, and it was even shipped to Africa, rapidly becoming the norm, especially in sub-Saharan Africa throughout the 20th Century.
Fast forward to 2021. But I have to take you back to 1995 in Beijing. Over the decades leading to the fateful Beijing Women Conference, we had started empowering our women. By 1995, women were grappling with their identity. They wanted to be free individuals, who could be themselves, do what they please, own property and exist without being ‘owned’ by men. The empowerment program has worked, and now more and more women can be independent, have a job or business, provide for themselves and they don’t necessarily need a man, least of all for provision.
This poses serious danger to the church establishment. Submission was conditional to male provision. But now, women can provide for themselves. For instance, divorce tends to be high among educated, working-class women. The more a woman is educated, the more advanced she is in her career, the more she earns, the more likely she is to be a divorcee, or never have married.
Now, the church is stuck in a place where it can no longer force submission on a certain class of women, because, hey presto, women ain’t buying that submission vibe. The bible was written starting 3000 years ago. There were no empowered women then. Now we are the first generation of men to deal with a completely empowered woman who is an equal and frequently who can surpass us.
Now, this is where men have been left holding the bag. And this affects men who are educated and working class. Naturally, they want women at their level; educated and working. But still, they still have to provide, still are expected to love their wives as Christ loved church. Women on the other hand are under no obligation to submit. Because male provision increasingly is complementary to what they can do for themselves. Besides, whether in church or out of the church, they have options in life. That is why some of the rudest, meanest, coldest people I know are church-going women. Very ruthless in mate selection. They are not beholden to teachings of the bible, certainly not anything that teaches submission.
Now, we back to Before Christ days. Educated, working class women only aspire to men who out-earn them, are dominant, tall, dark, handsome and all the other traits of alphas. But they too can’t have it both ways. The church enforced monogamy, where women traded their submission for the attention of one man. Now, they are in serious trouble. Their academic and economic position raises their hypergamic instincts that push them to seek the most successful men available in the pile. In other words, the top 10 percent of the men. But hypergamy is incompatible with monogamy or fidelity. The church can no more force a woman to submit, than it can force an alpha male into unconditional monogamy. Fair enough.
Now, for men who are not alphas, men who don’t make enough to attract a girl of their dreams, they are left with very stark choices: should they marry their level or marry down? If they marry their level, there is nearly a 50 percent chance that things will go South pretty fast. If they marry ‘down’, they risk living a life of dissatisfaction, even though those who embrace the idea and adjust accordingly end up living happier with their ‘down-to-earth’ wives.
Those who fail to accept the reality of hypergamy end up between a rock and hard place. If they are religious, they want to do everything in a godly way. But this is a game whose rules are rigged in favour of women. Because, every insult, every rejection, every bad thing the wife does, they have to turn the other cheek. Soak it in. Essentially simp in the hope that their wimen can come to their senses. This is tragic because, as we know, such wimen will do as they please and the men better get used to it.
The church sort of encourages humility and kindness, which women think are signs of weaknesses. It goes contrary to their hypergamous instinct that want a strong and dominant male.
Now, how do men navigate out of this mess?
I think it is possible to be religious, be strong, be ambitious, be firm and have the ability to draw the line. Nowhere does the bible tell men to simp. You can focus on your mission as a man and still serve God. Only that now, you have to look for a woman who understands submission and subscribes to it. Not those who perform submission for a period of time they are extracting a favour from you.
Maybe submission is a wrong word. I prefer cooperation. You want a woman who has spirit of cooperation, not competition.
Secondly, go for high value women. Not every woman in church is high value. Some of them have a long way to go. Granted, it is encouraging to see them in church in search of salvation but leave it to God to salvage them. Try and cast your net wider when looking for mate. There are a lot of good women out there, some maybe don’t go to church. Be open minded.
Lastly, change your mindset. Don’t be weak. Don’t show weakness. Don’t tolerate bad female behaviour, praying and hoping for the best. Prayer and hope are not strategies if not accompanied by action. If a woman is abusive or taking advantage of you, you pray but also, act. Do the right thing, by standing firm to your rights and what you believe in.