The Hatriarchy, the Machismosphere, and Misbehaving Anons

Introduction

In order to be able to conduct an analysis such as this, I must first review my bona fides with regard to my position within the patriarchy. I refer to the one that the feminists have so desired to smash. I do this to prevent some of my adversaries from saying anything silly about my supposed creeping feminism.

I believe everything the apostle Paul ever wrote about headship and submission in marriage. I believe this marital relation has ramifications outside of marriage, out in broader society, such that a healthy society is one in which men generally are willing to assume their responsibility to lead, provide, and protect. I believe that Christian wedding ceremonies must include the promise “to obey” in the bride’s vows. I hold that women are more readily deceived than men—always excepting, of course, the stupid men. I hold that feminism is made up of an odd combination of spiritual rebellion, snarking envy, emotional instability, and mental illness, none of which is helped or remedied in any way by the pink pussy hats. Sarah called her husband lord, setting an example for Christian women who want to be her daughters. I believe that women should be excluded from combat roles in the military by law, and I also believe that they should be excluded (by social consensus) from combat roles in stupid action movies. You know, the kind where a petite little bit of nothing who, through her knowledge of the martial arts and some clever camera work, kicks the butts of half a dozen 200-pound bruisers. I believe “the girlboss” to be a singularly unattractive figure, and I also believe the 19th Amendment disenfranchised families and households, thus degrading true masculine and feminine authority at one go. There . . . I think that should do it. If I forgot something, do please write in.

So I think it safe to say that I write as one who represents the patriarchy. But I do not represent, as shall soon be evident, any kind of hatriarchy. Yes, yes, I know. The feminists will say that all of us represent the hatriarchy. But we don’t listen to them because they are not stable, remember? We don’t take our cues from them at all. And besides, they didn’t think of the word hatriarchy—and I really can’t believe that they failed to do so—and I did, so I get to define it.

But I can’t say that without going on to provide definitions, so let me start there. The hatriarchy is where men try to establish or reinforce their masculine authority by means of despising and disparaging women. The hatriarchy doesn’t want to encourage men to stand tall when making women cower will do. And the maschismosphere is when they elevate women to cartoon levels of femininity, and then in a corresponding way they elevate men to cartoon levels of masculinity—a trad Ken for every trad Barbie. These two approaches to weirdness sometimes overlap in a confused jumble, and sometimes they go their separate ways. Either way, we need separate names for them.

The Incident That Got Me Thinking About All of This

I am writing in the aftermath of the revelation that a certain online presence called Patriarchy Hannah was a catfishing fraud. I won’t go into all the ins and outs, but she had something of an online presence on the right as a cartoon tradwife. Fourteen kids and she always kept her figure, that kind of thing—but it turns out she was to actual tradwives what Jessica Rabbit was to film noir.

Now some will say, and perhaps are already saying, that the descriptions I will be using in the course of this cool and dispassionate analysis (e.g. “cartoon tradwife”) simply reveals the contempt that I have for good old-fashioned Americana tradlife. As the apostle Paul might say, were he here, me genoito. May it never be. I have a front row seat when it comes to watching the blur of activity that surrounds real women doing the real stuff, including the sourdough. The real thing is a marvel. Fraud is never a marvel.

Objecting to the caricature of something, or the distortion of something, is not to reject that something itself. To disparage women who are pretending is not—and please follow me closely here—the same thing as disparaging women who are not pretending. And in the same spirit, to object, as I do, to the Machismosphere or to the Hatriarchy is no objection at all to genuine masculine leadership and robust patriarchy. I really do think fathers should rule, which is what the word patriarchy means. But I also think—and this part has become somewhat more controversial—that while ruling fathers ought not to comport themselves like meatheads.

He who lives by the anons will die by the anons. Quite apart from the original content of the sourdough dispute between Allie Beth Stuckey and some of the Brittle Bros, I think it is self-evident that Allie Beth did in fact win this round. You can see her taking her victory lap there off to the upper right, and who is going to tell her she can’t? This set-up happened because of a confirmation bias on the hard right that too readily accepted the testimony of an anon. And the problem was that of accepting the testimony of anons.

There is nothing wrong with following the arguments of an account posted by someone with the pseudonym Cato, because you can work the arguments out yourself. The argument stands on its own feet. Say Cato posts a thread showing how minimum wage laws hurt the poor. Go ahead, track with him. Let him teach you. But if instead his argument goes something like, “I worked in a welfare office for 35 years, and I can tell you . . .” and you take his word for it, this is where the chumpiness comes in.

Personal testimony from anons is worthless. Anonymous credentials are worthless. Anonymous life experience is worthless. Anonymous accusations against others is worthless. Snarky insults from anons are worthless.

Now as I said above, I really do believe that women are more susceptible to deception than men are. But catfish victims are not really in a position to make that point. I really do believe it, and teach it on God’s authority (1 Tim. 2:14). But I also think that if Samson had ever mentioned this valuable biblical insight to Delilah, she might have chuckled silently to herself.

I periodically get text messages out of the blue that say something like, “Are we still having lunch today?” I reply, “Sorry, who is this?” The answer comes back . . . “Alicia . . . isn’t this Jessica?” I say, “Sorry, wrong number. This is Douglas from Idaho.” At this point, I never get “Apologies. Oops. Bye.” What happens is more like this: “Oooo, I have heard that Idaho is a beautiful place. I have always wanted to visit.” Then comes a photo of an attractive woman in a business suit, standing next to a fancy car.

Men who fall for this kind of thing are in the same category as those who try to help out that Nigerian prince who got stranded that time in the Manila airport.

The Collected Works of Anonymous, Man of Many Moods

Misbehaving anons bait their hooks according whatever pond they are fishing in. They are always catfishing, but different ponds have different kinds of catfish, with different tastes, and so the hooks are baited differently. Every pond—meaning every social group—has things it values and things it rejects. One of the things that an anon will do, if he (or she) is up up to no good, is accentuate elements in his or her profile in light of those values in order to get a positive response from that social group. This accentuation can get to pretty cartoonish levels of high caricature and still not be noticed because of the confirmation bias. The anon is saying things that this audience wants to hear, and really wants to believe, and so suspicions are instinctively quelled. As things go out there in this gnarly world, some hooks are baited with sex, some with get-rich-schemes, and some with sun bonnets and calico sun dresses. And berries for the warrior king’s breakfast.

In this case, as Patriarchy Hannah’s story was first unraveling, Ethan Holden took the extraordinary step of vouching for someone he said he didn’t know, saying that the claims being made about Hannah were “false allegations” and “not true,” adding that the charges were “incorrect . . . and majorly so.” He has since said that this is not what he meant—to which an insightful observer will reply, “oh, but he did.” He might not mean it now, but he is on record as having given one of his credit card number to the Nigerian prince.

And this was not the first time he was fooled, actually, Ethan Holden was the gent who a year or two ago posted a soupy quote about the undying love between two individuals, and attributed the quote to “The Iliad, Homer.” He also added that it was not even about the love between a man and a woman, but between Achilles and Patrocles, and said he thought it was a shame that bros nowadays couldn’t figure out a way to bond like that. My daughter, who knows her Homer, recognized immediately that Homer never wrote any such treacle like that, and so she googled it. It turned out to be a quote from a homo-erotic book about Achilles and Patrocles, published in 2011. My son-in-law notified Ethan, who then disappeared his post immediately. It turns out that some bros today do know how to bond like that. It also turns out there is more to discernment than being based and online a lot.

Anons and the Friend/Enemy Distinction

Anyone who believes in the biblical antithesis that God established between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent understands that there really is a true friend/enemy distinction (Gen. 3:15), one that runs down through all human history, and indeed it is a distinction that defines all human history. But when men grasp that distinction in a wooden or clunkity clunkity way, all it does is make them vulnerable to lies, flattery, bribery, treachery, and other forms of deception from the enemy.

Tell me, frens, how do you apply the friend/enemy distinction to anons? Give me a list of anons who are really busy being Based and Laser-eyed online. Let us say the list has 100 accounts on it. If you apply the friend/enemy distinction to that list in any kind of thoughtful way, you will quickly realize that you cannot apply the friend/enemy distinction at all. This is because enemies include false friends, and under the cloak of anonymity being a false friend is extraordinarily easy.

How many of these accounts are out-and-out frauds? How many are under lawful church discipline? How many are FBI agents? How many are mere opportunists? And how many are legit Christians who just don’t want to be doxxed? The answer to all such questions is that you have no idea. Any person who relies on personal and authoritative testimony from this sort of source is a fool.

One of the principles of war is security, and those who rely on or trust anons have incredibly lax security, and this means they don’t understand the friend/enemy distinction. And so this means that as they clean up the egg that Patriarchy Hannah left on their faces, it will soon be replaced by eggs from somebody else. This is bound to happen again, in other words.

“No enemies whatever to the right” simply tells the devil what flank of yours to attack. In the same way, a stance that assumes no enemies among the anons tells the devil that he had better activate his sleeper cells among the anons, and to do so first thing. Why, look . . . he appears to have done so.

Now false friends have always been with us. Demas was a good guy in Colossians (Col. 4:14), and a worldly-wise flake later on (2 Tim. 4:10). But this is a lot harder to pull off in person, and the truth will come out sooner rather than later. In order to conduct ministry in a fallen world, you do have to function in a world where friends can let you down. But to rely on anons is to guarantee that this will happen. And moreover, it guarantees that the person who trusted them is complicit in the problem when it erupts, and in a way that Paul was not complicit in the apostasy of Demas.

You’re So Bwaave . . .

One last thing. Let me conclude by referring to the image above, the one of the young woman with a bowl of berries.

Nature denied and insulted will at some point be avenged. Women need to be loved, and men need to be respected. Now of course both men and women need to be loved and respected. Love your neighbor as yourself includes both sexes (Lev. 19:18), and honor all men includes both sexes (1 Pet. 2:17). But when Scripture singles men out, telling them how to treat their wives, it says that they are to love them as Christ loved the church (Eph. 5:25). And when Scripture singles women out, telling them how to treat their husbands, it says that they are to respect and honor them (Eph. 5:33). Men and women run on different kinds of fuel, like regular and diesel.

Now change the metaphor. If you were crawling across the desert, parched and about ready to die of thirst, and you came across an oasis with water, but there was a sign posted that warned that the water was radioactive, toxic and dangerous, depending on how thirsty you were, you would still be tempted to drink it.

We live in a generation that has despised true masculinity. Instead of respecting men, we routinely and regularly lampoon or revile them. This has had many destructive effects, but one of those results has been that many men have grown up in a desert, and they can’t remember the last time they had a refreshing drink. They are that much more susceptible to flattery—the contaminated oasis with the warning sign taken down.

And the seductions of such flattery can even work second-hand. If an online AI gal says that she gets up every morning a 5 am so that she can go out to the garden to pick berries for her warrior king, that kind of thing can have a real impact on a man who is desperately thirsty for respect. It can really mess him up. Nobody calls him a warrior king.

And depending on how desperate he is, the whole thing can be glaringly obvious to any dispassionate observer. The cringe levels might be up to 11, and yet he does not know because he doesn’t want to know. He is so thirsty for the water that he refuses to look at the sign, which was probably put up by a boomer anyhow.

She can even come after him with baby talk—”you are so bwave, so intewwigent . . .”—and depending on how many buttons on her blouse are undone, she can be pretty sure of getting him.