A STRUMPET'S FOOL: ANTONY, CLEOPATRA, & THE SEEDS OF GYNOCRACY

William Wheelwright

Whence emerges gynocracy? Now that we find ourselves in the midst of it, this is a painful question to ask, because it forces us to question the legacy of our forefathers. Like Homer’s Nestor, who spoke of the men he knew as a boy who were twice as strong as his contemporaries in old age, man naturally tends to imagine the great progenitors who populate his lineage with heroic nostalgia. But, since the processes by which contemporary forms of gynocracy (matriarchy, the Longhouse, etc.) came into being were already irretrievably in motion by the time any of us came of age, the question looms: how did those men, from not many generations before our own, whom we prefer to think of as great, allow these shrieking, unlubricated wheels to start spinning?

First, what exactly do we mean by gynocracy? Rule by women (perhaps, if we want to be etymologically precise, then ‘rule by ovary’ or ‘rule by estrogen’ are apter definitions) is insufficient, because gynocracy as we know it is, by its very nature, always and everywhere advanced, in some inverted manner, by the negative power of the absence of manliness, or virtú, and by the weak men who personify this absence. In Bronze Age Mindset, BAP depicts the ‘haughty Department Motor Vehicles sheboon’, the obese kind who opens by calling you ‘shugah’ in an endearing manner, but later informs you that, despite having brought your passport, birth certificate, most recent bank statement, and framed high school diploma, your documentation is insufficient and that her break is starting now and you’ll have to come back tomorrow with all the right information in order to get your license renewed. Indeed, a world government run by such creatures is a terrifying premonition. But in reality, most of us undergo this experience only on a semi-annual basis, and, for now, can pay to avoid it entirely by accumulating beyond a certain threshold of wealth. Gynocracy proper is something more pervasive, something much more subtle and nebulous, something that cloaks itself in its ubiquity.

A more accurate anthropomorphization than the ‘haughty DMV sheboon’ is the side-eying girlfriend or wife who manages her romantic relationship through intermittent withholding and access-granting to her sex, on the basis of what she has come to regard as ‘positive male behavior’, which is the opposite of ‘toxic masculinity.’ By threatening to withhold sex, she ensures that her boyfriend or husband will only express the opinions that she has come to understand as ‘regime-approved’, osmotically absorbing them as her own from the shows she likes to watch, the HR seminars she administers and/or participates in, or, in the worst case scenario, by reading the opinion section of the New York Times. Outside of this central hub is an outer ring, where men who are not in relationships dwell. By observing the center, the average man here comes to the understanding that certain behaviors and modes of thought are guaranteed to close him off from future sexual access. Women are here, too, receiving scores of dating app messages a day, to none of which they will respond, and in the evenings watching the same shows and reading the same articles as the women in the center, preparing for the possibility of a future management project (read: boyfriend). And outside of that exists the whole structural apparatus that keeps the entire arrangement from collapsing, the two earthbound pillars of which are hormonal birth control and pornography.

With her libido shot half to hell by a cocktail of SSRIs and IUD or birth control pill exudates (the likes of which are regularly prescribed to teenage girls by Mengele-esque witchdoctors for a laundry list reasons that are totally unrelated to preventing pregnancy), for a woman to deny sex to a man requires no effortful exercise in self-restraint on her part. Under the pharmaceutical regime, the female sex drive is relocated from the body to the mind: female arousal is brought about not by the cyclical flow of natural reproductive hormones but by the verification of one’s own desirability that comes with being the object of pursuit. Since the pursuit is enough to satisfy this latter objective, the act itself becomes a treat that the male receives in recompense for words and deeds of which the gynocracy approves.

On the other side of things, men are subjected to not just a nigh-constant stream of sexual stimulus, but also to the cultural insistence upon the inverted notion that a man’s social capital is pegged to his sexual prowess. Pornography and its widespread use, contrary to popular misunderstanding, are the culmination of these effects: the dark corners of the internet to which men involuntarily sojourn in order to finally silence, if only for a transient moment of jouissance, the shrieking demons, loosed upon man by his gynocratic matrons, constantly reinforcing the idea that sex is the most important thing in his life and that he should care about getting it more than anything else. In short, man is made ever hornier, while women are increasingly desexed. The outcome is what we have: an inverted social power structure, in which femaleness, with its attendant instincts and neuroses—safetyism, inclusivity, ‘equitable’ distribution of resources (i.e. wherein the malformed, or special, ‘magical’ children get extra care and affection), takes precedence as the prevailing social doctrine.

If we want to discover what measures will be necessary to reverse these unfortunate developments, we must take pains to understand the psychology of the men who lived during the transitory centuries. The true perplexity comes in considering just how far away we are from where we started as a civilization. An aristocratic military theocracy is reduced with little notable resistance back into the primitive mamzer muck that it easily conquered millennia before? What disaster struck in the interceding years? What was the silver with which they were bought off? What Lorelei exposed her flawless but phantasmic form above the cliffs before the shipwreck, and what song was she singing? How did it come to this?  

The process is relatively easy to understand, both practically and emotionally. Gynocracy enters ascendency when a critical mass of a society’s men become simps. Who and what is a simp? A simp is any man, no matter how elevated his station or pristine his reputation for manliness, who lacks the basic ability to deny women sex. Whether this denial actually takes place or not is another question. What determines simpery is the potential: could he, in the moment of the most elevated precoital tension, abandon the situation with total nonchalance, set about making himself an espresso, or go out indifferently onto the balcony for a smoke with the latest copy of The Asylum magazine, leaving his lovely, half unclad paramour to writhe and stew powerlessly at the foot of the chaise lounge? If not, then he is a simp. Do not misunderstand, the above is not an example, it is the literal definition. This might strike you as a rather high bar. Yes: very few men today are not simps, which is why we live in the most advanced and most metastasized form of gynocracy ever to exist.

How does simpery lead to gynocracy? It was by Providence that shortly after I had the intuition that these two phenomena are inextricably linked, I decided, on the recommendation of my friend T.S. Eliot, to read Shakespeare’s Antony & Cleopatra for the first time. Antony’s character demonstrates very clearly how a man can go from world-conquering warrior to someone for whom sex, and the woman who represents its accessibility, become the sole object. Antony becomes what might be called sexually incontinent—the condition of the lack of sexual self-control in a man—and shows us how, on an individual level, this disordered condition leads directly to the gynocratic social dynamic. We need only project Antony’s narrative onto a collective scope to understand how this change was undergone in societies where gynocracy now rules, and, it follows, how it can be reversed. Shall we examine what the text says?


Antony & Cleopatra is a sequel, of sorts, to Julius Caesar. The common thread connecting the two is the character Marc Antony, famous in the earlier play for his “friends, Romans, countrymen” speech. Before reading or hearing the opening verse of A&C, it is assumed that the audience understands Marc Antony to be The Biggest Gigachad In the Nascent Roman Empire. Caesar’s top guy, conqueror of a quantity of kingdoms second only in countlessness to the innumerable Germanic and Judaic tribeswomen babes he has banged and left alphawidowed in his turbulent wake as he ranged back to Rome to drink unfathomable quantities of undiluted, honeyed wine, consorting with senators’ daughters by night and proto mafia dons by day. And now, alongside his old boss’s adopted son, Octavius, as well as some irrelevant old loser named Lepidus, he is a triumvir of Rome, one of the three “pillars of the world”, as he is described in the opening lines of the play.

But as we will soon learn, that pillar now has a hairline fracture running up the length of its mighty column, threatening to yawn open at any moment and cause the exsanguination of the embryonic imperial order into the flaccidity of collapse. Where did this fissure originate? Let’s look at Antony’s words, spoken to Cleopatra in their boudoir, as a envoy from Rome, bearing word from Octavius, summoning Antony back to Rome, waits outside the door:

Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch

Of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space!

Kingdoms are clay! Our dungy earth alike

Feeds beast as man. The nobleness of life

Is to do thus [embraces], when such a mutual pair

And such a twain can do’t, in which I bind,

On pain of punishment, the world to weet

We stand up peerless. (1.1.34-41)

Translation: Marc Antony has become the Tommy Lee of his day. Had he but had the cinematographic equipment, he would have surely made a sextape with Cleopatra and sent it to Octavius in response to his orders. In short, Cleopatra’s sex has mounted on top of Antony’s… er, list of priorities. As his men remark, this is a most novel arrangement for the formerly undefeated general:

…His captain’s heart

Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst

The buckles of his breast, reneges all temper

And is become the bellows and the fan

To cool a gipsy’s lust. (1.1.6-10)

At this early stage, you may be unwilling to assent to my critique of Antony: after all, his inclinations seem altogether sound. The minutiae of administration, the ennui of managing the peasantry, having to endure the endless prattling of heralds from Rome delivering unwelcome messages, these, you are surely thinking to yourself, are each enough in themselves to drive a vital man into the arms of a beautiful woman purely for the purposes of respite. To you, beloved reader, I say: YOU ARE A SEXUALLY INCONTINENT SIMP WHO PINES FOR THE LONGHOUSE IN HIS HEART…!

Just kidding… but not really. The man who claims that that Antony’s sentiments here are innocent, understandable or permissible has Gynocratia for his muse. To seek respite or relief from the tedium of life is not the same as to cede one’s role as a male, which Antony, enslaved by his sexual incontinence, clearly has. Indeed, Shakespeare takes specific pains in his language to demonstrate this to us. Behold Cleopatra’s retort to Enobarbus, who has just advised her that she must not be present at the Battle of Actium:

Sink Rome, and their tongues rot

That speak against us! A charge we bear i’th’ war,

And, as president of my kingdom, will

Appear there for a man. Speak not against it! (3.7.15-19)

(Emphasis my own)

Antony, appearing onstage shortly after these words are spoken, is obliged by the authority vested in him as a man to inform Cleopatra that she will not be present at Actium. But there’s the rub: Antony has no authority when it comes to Cleopatra, because of his being on the receiving end of the most basic power dynamic there is: she has something he wants. And he wants it real bad. The result of this domestic lawlessness is nothing short of total catastrophe at the maritime battle. We hear of what transpires from Scarus, one of Antony’s followers, who gives the battle report to Enobarbus. First he tells of Cleopatra’s flight, and then of Antony’s reaction:

She once being loofed,

The noble ruin of her magic, Antony,

Claps on his sea-wing and, like a doting mallard,

Leaving the fight in height, flies after her.

I never saw such an action of shame.

Experience, manhood, honour, ne’er before

Did violate so itself. (3.10.18-24)

As a result of his overwhelming sexual desire, which has made him spiritually dependent on Cleopatra’s sex, Antony loses the basic ability to deny his woman what she should obviously be denied (presence on the battlefield). (I hasten to remind you, dear reader, that the question of whether women should be allowed in combat has become a subject of debate under the gynocratic umbrella in the United States.) This inability to say no to the woman for fear of losing access to her sex, leads directly to not only Antony’s own ruin, but to the ruin of his entire army. And it is not merely the ruin of his flesh, but, as Scarus reports, the ruin of his male spirit: “never did manhood so violate itself.” We are to understand Antony has spiritually raped himself, putting himself the in the role of the subordinate, receptive female, while Cleopatra is bephallused as the domineering, penetrative male.

This reality is born out in the final acts, in Antony’s attempt, and failure, to do what to the Romans was the only honorable thing left in such a situation: to fall on his sword or have a loyal servant run him through. The servant at hand to carry out the task of ending Antony’s life goes by the appropriate name of Eros. But before he can do his duty, Antony’s will to end his own life is briefly stayed by a Shakespearean plot twist. Cleopatra, having schemed to lure Antony to her “monument”, sends a messenger to inform Antony that she has already killed herself. After hearing this, Antony instructs Eros to stand at ease, reasoning, perhaps, that her death is payment enough for his shame: “Unarm, Eros, the long day’s task is done.” But, shortly afterwards, he doubles down on his original plan, embarking on a reverie of what the afterlife with Cleopatra would be like:

I will o’ertake thee, Cleopatra, and

Weep for my pardon. So it must be, for now

All length is torture; since the torch is out.

Lie down and stray no farther. Now all labor

Mars what it does—yea, very force entangles

Itself with strength. Seal then, and all is done.

Eros!—I come, my queen. —Eros!—stay for me.

Where souls do couch on flowers we’ll hand in hand

And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze.

Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops,

And all the haunts be ours. Come Eros! Eros!

It is only at this point, realizing that, she being dead (or so he believes), his only possibility for reunification is through his own death, that he re-intends to kill himself. As the source of his motivation for suicide descends netherward, the honor of the action is totally snuffed out. We see here how, just as at the battle, Cleopatra’s sex is the North Pole to Antony’s never-flaccid compass. He recommits to suicide not out of a sense of honor, but out of his sexual desire for her alone, his pursuit overriding all other considerations. Having re-resolved, on the basis of his new reasoning from the false premise that Cleopatra is dead, to end his life, he assigns to Eros the task of running him through (here I reëmphasize the richness of the nomenclature). But Eros, erotic as he is, cannot bring himself to do it, killing himself with the sword instead. This leads us to Antony’s final shame: that, unlike his servant Eros, he is only half-able to fall on his sword. We are led to imagine that he sort of pussies out of doing it at the last second, because he doesn’t die for another several scenes:

…My queen and Eros

Have by their brave instruction got upon me

A nobleness in record. But I will be

A bridegroom in my death and run into’t

As to a lover’s bed. Come then! And, Eros,

Thy master dies thy scholar. To do thus

[falls on his sword.]

I learned of thee. How? Not dead? Not dead?

(4.14.98-104) 

...bleeding out slowly as he ranges to the monument and has his tragic final reunion with Cleopatra.

So, to review: Marc Antony, formerly the world’s top soldier, finds himself head-over-heels in love with the most beautiful woman anyone has ever seen. Her allure renders him sexually incontinent, such that access to her sex becomes his number one priority. Fear of the loss of that access leads him to defer to her natural, feminine rashness in decision-making, thereby putting himself in a position where he must choose between the aforementioned access and the very essence of his manhood. With sexual access as his deity, he opts for it over his own maleness. Having forsaken his manhood–his virtue, his essence–it is only logical that he should become unable to embrace death in an honorable way. Rather than a clean death, he, the man who in his lifetime spilt countless flagons-worth of other men’s blood, is only able to self-wound. And again, his half-hearted entreaty to death is only fueled by the promise of Cleopatra’s company–no doubt he imagines a heavenly ravishing like that between Zeus and Hera in Homer’s Iliad–in the afterlife. The wound ultimately proves mortal, but not quick enough to prevent his reunion with his lover, in whose arms he finally dies.


The great paradox of gynocracy is that female social power is unable to exist of itself. It only ever coalesces in the void of weak men’s derelictions. Even when it reaches unprecedented heights of influence, as it has in the Current Year, it still relies, as ever, on the ongoing power source of male sexual incontinence—on the presence of a critical mass of simps—to be actuated. As a reminder, simps are those for whom sex with women—whether it be any woman, or one in particular—is life’s top priority. With this hierarchy of aims in place, fear of not getting laid becomes a man’s primary source of motivation, both indirectly and directly—sex becomes the telos of all his behaviors. Under these, and only these, circumstances, all of a sudden, female social power emerges. It does not come into existence because women asked for it, fought for it, campaigned for it, or went on sex strike for it. These tendencies are merely the sharks circling after they have smelt blood. The blood is drawn when man, abandoning the pursuit of virtú, the cultivation of courage, honor, strength and truth—-ultimately, the perfection of his very soul—makes instead the getting of sex his raison d’être.

What happens next is something that you have almost certainly observed, or perhaps experienced firsthand (and hopefully escaped or rectified). The woman, whether as an individual or “women” in some collective spiritual sense, moves to wield this newfound simpery to her advantage. How many current year relationships are managed by the female partner on the subtle, undiscussed basis of the withholding of sexual access in the event of insubordinate behavior? Anxiety over this potential loss animates modern man’s actions, just as it did Marc Antony. And the simp is no safer outside of the relationship, because this dynamic is at play even when the sexual access is purely abstract or hypothetical. The widespread acceptance and mouthing of egregious lies and false regime platitudes, to which one can bear witness in virtually every normie conversation that approaches any issue of controversy, owes itself to the assumption that to not accept and to not mouth these mendacities is to cut oneself off from sexual access in general. And so, accepted and mouthed they will continue to be, unless and until men can learn to become, in their hearts of hearts, totally sexually indifferent, which, not paradoxically, is what has always been the disposition that women find the most attractive anyway.

Here we arrive at the heart of the matter: how and why does this spiritual degeneration happen in men? The answer to that is simple: because it is natural, or at least it appears to be. Gynocracy and matriarchy are mankind’s social state of nature: the base denominator to which glorious achievements can and will be reduced without autistic degrees of care and attention. It is the elevation to patriarchal standards which is the exception, made possible by the confluence of a specific set of spiritual circumstances in only particular populations during limited periods of their histories. It is for this reason that I feel I must underscore this point of indifference, and warn you briefly against the mirror-imaged dangers of prudishness. For just as the capitalist and the communist share the worship of coin as the most powerful force in the world, so too are the hedonist and the puritan alike in their total obsession with the fuck. Neither a borrower nor lender be, anon.

In some sense, I’d prefer to end this essay here, with the basic observation that I’ve made, that female social power cannot exist in the absence of male sexual weakness, as a matter of physics; and that the only solution is the cultivation of male sexual indifference, capable of being broken only by the allure of a truly remarkable woman; and that all beneficent patriarchal structures carry this indifference in their hearts; and that the sexual weakness through which they sometimes degenerate comes about because it is in man’s nature for it to come about; and that (I hastily supplement you, beloved Reader, with this addendum) the purpose of man’s existence is to perfect his nature. This is because the territory that lies ahead is a narrow strip of land, which borders Prescriptiveness to the north and, even worse, Moralization to the south. Furthermore, were I to careen suddenly into normative statements, they would all inevitably be conditioned a large number of very big Ifs. For instance: “if enough men reclaimed the power of their sex, rather than ceding it indefinitely and willlessly to women, then gynocracy as we know it would wither and die with ‘nary a whimper.” And while the content of this sentence is true, statements structured in this way are inherently of the enemy from a spiritual perspective, and for this reason I prefer to avoid issuing them. In conclusion, what I will say is this:

There are several canonical examples of the female sex strike. Perhaps most notable is Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. What modern man does not realize about such comedies is that they are funny because they invert the ideal reality. What is historically and naturally normal, at least in the stable and productive societies of the West (the situation in Africa, Arabia and Asia is a topic for another essay, but a pertinent one given the mass migratory trends of recent decades), is for men to be on a kind of permanent sex strike, viewing women as childish and silly at best, and the source of the evils of weakness and distraction at worst. The men of the best societies in history have always been animated by an obsession with the pursuit of a beautiful death… it is only within a very narrow set of cultural circumstances that a woman can be of assistance in this aim. It would appear that Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, and Medieval Christian Europe managed to cultivate such women en masse, and, for those brief, shimmering moments, all things were good, beautiful, plumb, fair and true. But “life is not a work of art” and these moments did not last. “Come back with your shield, or on it.” Of course, it is not to say that no such women exist at all. On the contrary, they are out there, but hidden and quickly snapped up by the Hyperborean Gigachads of the Underworld. If you can find a wife like Gorgo, then God bless. But until then, until society returns to producing such women on average, it is for men to withhold sex from women, as has always been the case wherever and whenever the inevitable primordial flood of gynocracy has been held at bay. The inverse, which we have been memed into understanding as ‘normal’ or ‘status quo’, that women should be the agents of ‘selection’, that male sexual attention is always and everywhere available to virtually anything with (or without) a pulse, is mamzer propaganda that simply does not hold up under historical scrutiny; it is gynocracy manifest.

Consider, in closing, the noble ram. He spends almost the whole day minding his own business, in a state of total nonchalance and aristocratic leisure. When it comes time for sex0rz, it is the ewe’s involuntary pheremonal exudations and exercised bleatings that call him, almost reluctantly, to the act. Flirtation and foreplay are beneath him. And five months later, a fine lamb emerges, unassisted, slick as a button, walking and nursing within minutes with no instruction from the shepherd. My beloved reader, consider the ram, with utter confidence of the content and potential extent of his nature, he makes himself impervious alike to nag and shrew.