Peter Wright is an Australian researcher and writer who has published research and analysis on the history of Gynocentrism since 2007. Wright has written books, interviews, and academic research articles on chivalry, gynocentrism, human attachment, and cultural mythologies. In addition to being the unofficial historian of the Men’s Rights and MGTOW movements, he’s also a contributor and editor of A Voice For Men.
In 2017, Mr. Wright agreed to publish my first series of 5 articles entitled, “There’s a Flaw in All Men, We’re Doomed and Only Women Can Save the Day”, in their entirety and unedited.
The criticism and feedback from that community has been invaluable to my writing ever since.
OUR INTERVIEW
How many years have you been writing about Gynocentrism?
Around 15 years.
How many books and articles have you written, edited, published?
150 or so articles and ten books.
What was it that gave you the motivation to start writing this work?
Like most men I’ve experienced various forms of anti-male bias, personally. However my interest in gynocentrism resulted more from observations of a cultural over-valuing of all things female, and the devaluing of all things male, which raised the question of which social tropes might be contributing to this mindset.
While feminist derogation of men was an obvious provocateur, the roots of the problem seemed to go much deeper and prior to feminism. After a survey of European history it became apparent that a quixotic version of male chivalry was responsible for the evolving fetishization of women, and not the usually-cited bogeymen such as Marxism or feminism, which only compounded the trend. Having discovered cultural roots for this tendency I thought it might be helpful to document a history of sexual relations starting from the period of romantic chivalry, providing a kind of road-map for how we got here and, in theory, a road-map for how we might walk back some of the more malignant outcomes.
In the nearly 5 years since my first article, you and I have had some lively, private debates.
I think we agree that men have been devalued to the point where it’s beginning to hurt women. I think that we also agree we’re witnessing an incredible mass hysteria. We have some different points of view on how we got here and what might be done about it.
I’d like to see if I can state my argument and steelman your argument. Correct me where I’m wrong.
My General Argument (80% Nature | 20% Nurture)
I’ve posited that 50 years of propaganda, ideological class war and social movements, exploiting biases and human group and valuation has a tendency to increase stress. That stress is exploiting evolutionary biases and rendering the humanity of men invisible behind the enforcement of cross-cultural taboos.
This has been made possible by effective Class War propaganda, State force, and benefits replacing men within the family, combined with increasing stress from social media/technology.
I have found most of your arguments compelling, arguments that you previously published as a series to a large readership who were both bemused by their novelty and genuinely intrigued by their potential explanatory power. With a plethora of one-dimensional explanations on offer for the deteriorating relations between men and women, many people hunger for something more substantial – and your series provided precisely that; depth.
You took findings from evolutionary psychology and biology and repackaged them for a mainstream consumption, and gave them your own twist. For example your work on female ingroup preference, parasite stress, and associated disgust mechanisms has helped to highlight how biological reflexes are exploited by nefarious actors who aim to stir up social panics – of which the final result is, too often, a form of male outgroup derogation.
As you mentioned a moment ago, all of this ends up hurting women too as they find their own lives and intimate interactions with men become paranoid, stifled, and essentially poisoned.
Me Steelmanning Your General Argument (80% Nurture | 20% Nature)
Beginning in roughly the Middle Ages, the concepts of Chivalry and Courtly Love began to shape the moral and legal landscape to advantage women and to disadvantage men. Through a man made process, incremental changes in the cultural, media and legal systems have led us to where we are now.
As evidence you present different cultures that still value masculinity and appreciate men for their inherent strengths, complexity management and boundary maintenance attributes and skills.
Obviously, you have an enormous body of research and work that doesn’t fit comfortably in a paragraph.
Where am I Wrong? And What Am I Missing?
That’s a fair synopsis of my position, with the only quibble being with your characterization of ‘80% Nurture | 20% Nature.’ I appreciate that your percentages here refer to a relative influence I’m ascribing to cultural signifiers (nurture), vs. the influence of unmodulated biological reflexes (nature) over our moral views about men and women today – a.k.a. the skewed gynocentric worldview of the Anglosphere.
In that sense, the 80/20 description reflects that biological imperatives as expressed by an individual will always be subject to customs of the body politic, along with being subject to punishments for transgressing norms – even to the point where an individual can be put to death for taboo expressions of sexuality, hypergamy, unacceptable expressions of disgust and the like. In such cases we see a win for cultural conventions, and a loss for the selfish contrarian-gene impulse expressed by a given individual or individuals.
More broadly speaking, I prefer to characterize my position as 100% nature and 100% nurture – you’ll never see a human environment without biology, and you’ll never see biology without a facilitating environment, even if it’s hard to know where the center of gravity lies between the two forces.
What was the most unexpected discovery or set of discoveries you’ve made in your research?
Being somewhat of a reductive biological-determinist in my former outlook, I was surprised to learn just how wildly human cultures and associated human behaviors changed from era to era, and from place to place. In one culture you can see sexual licence, in another sexual repression; or in one culture you can witness a parasitic-disgust response toward men’s grizzled beards, and in another you witness the exact opposite disgust for the smooth-skinned faces of men who don’t sport beards – beards which are seen as pure and divine features gifted by God. Such flexibility of human behavior forced me to make big adjustments in my thinking.
What is the most disturbing discovery or set of discoveries you’ve made in your research?
I’m in awe of how human societies display a kind of organic flow, possessing inbuilt homeostatic mechanisms that steer us in the correct direction when societies go a little bit wacky.
The disturbing thing I’ve noticed is that owners of mass media such as newspapers, radio, television, and now internet tech, can censor the organic voices calling for homeostasis.
That action takes us into a mechanistic and anti-human direction that I think is soul destroying, both for the individual and for the culture. I think some of your work touches on examples of this in action, particularly in the State of Minnesota.
My target audience are lawyers, Intellectual Dark Web types, and Unwoke Minnesotans. What message would you like to send to them?
I would encourage Minnesotans to read your work and follow you to get up to speed on the tendency of Minnesota to be a generator of global panics. The choice you offer between being woke and awake is critical.
What message would you send to your fellow Australians?
Count your blessings that you live on a massive island with no border crises to suffer.
What gives you hope?
What gives me hope is to remember that culture always changes.
