The story is now a common one: an older man disgraced and punished for a “sexist” offence. In an instant, his reputation is shattered. Previously respected in his work, he becomes a target of contempt and hatred. Few defend him in his hour of need, and abundant sympathy is expressed for his alleged victim(s), whose harms are often imaginary.

Last weekend, it was Canadian hockey scout Terry Bonner who was put in the stocks. Bonner is the head scout for the Vancouver Giants, a Canadian junior hockey team that is part of the Western Hockey League, with 23 member clubs that develop talent for the National Hockey League.

Bonner is 85 years old, with over two decades with the Giants. His offence was to tell a pretty young female reporter, Cami Kepke, that she was good-looking. His exact words were (as seen in the clip here, which has now been viewed over 2.5 million times), “Well thank you very much, you good-lookin’ girl.” After that, he chuckled and sat back in his chair, whether in embarrassment or satisfaction it was hard to say, and continued with his answer.

For that moment of indiscretion during an interview—Kepke was congratulating him on the Giants’ third-round draft pick and asking what the player in question, Eli Vickers, would bring to the team—The Giants have been fined $5000 by the Canadian Hockey League for “conduct detrimental to the League.” Meanwhile, unctuous apologies, statements of feminist rectitude, and exultant finger-pointing have broken out all around Bonner. This moment of humiliation may well be Bonner’s last public appearance.

Harsh Punishment

The reaction beggars belief.

Women are now being shoe-horned into every possible position in professional ice hockey, from commentating to coaching and from on-ice reporting to officiating. But their protected status as delicate (yet always valiant) victims can never, it seems, be surrendered, no matter how trivial the incident.

One commentator has called Bonner’s remark to Kepke “workplace harassment,” recommending that Kepke “sue him for every penny he has.” “Gas this dusty old dude,” wrote another, “and kudos to the young lady for keeping focused.”

Bonner’s compliment was deemed “grossly unprofessional and disrespectful,” “inappropriate and creepy,” “shameful” and “f---ing gross.” “What a sick f---. Time to dox this pedo,” enthused one observer, while another anticipated his and other old men’s deaths: “This generation needs to just kick the bucket already.”

Commenters also mocked Bonner’s name (with puns aplenty on boner) and gave free rein to insulting references to his age, allegedly ghoulish smile, and yellowing teeth.

While a few professional writers deplored the pile-on (two good examples are here and here), most seemed eager to sit in judgement. YouTuber Rick Strom put on a long face as he explained that Bonner’s comment was “toxic and wrong” in “objectifying” Kepke and proving that “hockey has a culture problem.” Hockey writer Jonathan Larivee explained primly that “many felt it was inappropriate for a man in Boner’s [sic] position to be making comments of that nature during an on-air segment.”

The Commissioner of the Western Hockey League, Dan Near, lost no time in putting out a press release claiming that “Accountability is a cornerstone value of our League” and brandishing his feminist compliance by asserting that “In this instance, regardless of intent, the remarks are not reflective of the organization’s standards of respect and inclusion.”

Fainting-Couch Victims

It was an exaggerated reaction to a goofy (not ghoulish, ghastly, or creepy) moment of male admiration for female beauty.

I doubt it’s the first time that Ms. Kepke has been made aware of her good looks, and it’s an experience she is sure to survive with self-confidence intact. Even squinting one’s eyes and putting on one’s feminist thinking cap, it is impossible to find anything “detrimental” in a compliment neither threatening nor harassing, by an elderly man with no power over the woman in question.

At age 85, Bonner is reportedly the longest serving scout in franchise history, recipient of a WHL Distinguished Service Award for 2014-15, and certainly entitled, one would have thought, to a modicum of tolerance.

But even in the he-man world of ice hockey, feminist domination of public opinion is now near-total, such that any remark at all, no matter how kindly or innocuous, can and will be used against a formerly well-regarded man.

If she had wanted to, the reporter at the center of the controversy might have issued a public statement on social media, making clear that she held no grudge against Bonner, was not bothered by his remark, and did not think that a formal sanction was appropriate. This would, at least, have been some comfort to Bonner and might have influenced the Canadian Hockey League. Instead, she has maintained silence. At least she hasn’t (yet) played the victim.

In a case I covered years ago, a 28-year-old female graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley claimed that she struggled to get out of bed for a year after a professor in her department confessed that he found her attractive. She claimed that after Professor Blake Wentworth grabbed her hand and said “I’m so attracted to you,” she experienced “extreme fatigue, unexpected body aches and debilitating anxiety.” Wentworth was eventually fired for sexual harassment.

In another extraordinary case, a biology professor who had endowed buildings and scholarships at UC Irvine, giving over ten million dollars of his own money to help the school, was barred from campus and had his name removed from all the research facilities and fellowships he had funded after a group of women complained that his Old World style of kissing them on both cheeks and giving them lavish and sexually-tinged compliments had made them feel disrespected and demeaned.

“I just learned that women don’t like to be told they’re beautiful,” he was reported to have said to one of his victims, “But I know you don’t mind.” He was 84 years old when he was informed that he was no longer welcome at the university he had supported.

Shaming Older Men

Sexual shaming is practiced with particular fury against older men, and not only because men like Bonner, born around the time of Pearl Harbor, raised in the pre-feminist 1950s, and working in the relatively sheltered world of high-level ice hockey, may not have been aware of rapidly hardening feminist orthodoxies.

Older men make satisfying targets. They are hated for having lived at a time when men were not as cowed before women as they are today; and they sometimes, as in Bonner’s case, speak out of that older tradition when men complimented women and women accepted with good grace. The good grace can no longer be depended on, and the men’s obliviousness maddens some ideologues, who can hardly believe that such dinosaurs still roam the earth.

Moreover, the evident physical frailty of older men arouses the killer instinct in some men and women, perhaps not unlike the manner in which wolves will turn on a wounded or ailing pack leader. For women, the feeling is exacerbated by a conviction that the man deserves his come-down, that there is poetic justice in seeing a once-mighty patriarch brought low.

Simone De Beauvoir wrote extensively, in The Second Sex, of women’s contempt for aging men, noting that women who hold stereotyped views of men do not forgive signs of male vulnerability. “A fallen god,” she declared, “is not a man; it is an imposture” (p. 695). A persecuted weak man becomes a stand-in for the woman’s vengeance against all men, against the world, and against herself. Speaking of women’s dislike of their often older husbands, Beauvoir noted how “[the wife] witnesses his decline with silent complacency: it is her revenge” (p. 637).

At least some of the bitter vindictiveness expended on Harvey Weinstein (with admittedly more serious accusations) may be related to the scorn heaped on Bonner and other aging men. Women who had once been eager to hang on Weinstein’s arm and shower him with affection, whether real or feigned, later lined up to denounce him when they perceived weakness. In interviews and in court, they were merciless in detailing his physical deformities and sexual inadequacy.

Many #MeToo casualties (Matt Lauer, Garrison Keillor, Al Franken, Leon Wieseltier, and Michael Oreskes, to name only a few) were in their 60s or 70s when, though not charged or investigated by police for any crime, they were publicly denounced and ousted from prestigious positions on the basis of years- or decades-old claims of sexual misconduct. Disgust at masculine weakness is a feature of anti-male bigotry that is almost never acknowledged, but the results are often remarkably cruel.

Feminism is nowhere uglier than in its blithe dehumanization of those it deems oppressors, especially at the moment when the once powerful and respected are recognized as vulnerable. Advocates on both the political Left and Right are often easily summoned to assist in their destruction.

Cases like Terry Bonner’s show that the more assiduously feminists’ complaints and demands are complied with, the more pitiless and maniacal they become.

I had to scrap an earlier essay I’d written once I actually looked at the data.

News media have been abuzz with the alleged results of a survey of young people in the United Kingdom, ages 18-30, that found a growing gap between men and women, including in their perception of the opposite sex. While a super-majority of men said they had a positive view of women, only a minority of women said the same about men.

Pollster Scarlet Maguire, whose research company conducted the survey for the New Statesman, explained in interview that “72% of young men have a favorable view of young women. Only 50% of women under 30 have a favorable view. Under 25, it’s just 35% of young women who have a favorable view [of men].”

Indoctrinated young women really do, it seems, prefer the bear.

Or perhaps news- and opinion-makers want us to believe that to be so.

The Doomer Outlook

In a video with a classic question-begging title (“Why do young women hate men?”) Maguire discussed her findings with New Statesman reporter Anoosh Chakelian and author Emily Lawford, who had interviewed young women for a related article.

If not exactly ecstatic over the alleged findings, the three women certainly did not seem distressed. They called the findings “surprising” and “fascinating.” Langford laughed as she described how many of the young women she interviewed had been influenced by online content declaiming against “toxic masculinity” and jeering about “manufactured male victimhood.” She smiled in quoting young women’s conviction that “Men can be so horrible and you can’t trust them.”

None of the pundits expressed concern about the effects on young men—or society generally—of such mistrust or dislike. None of them called out the pervasiveness of feminist hatred in so many op/eds, news items, government reports, academic articles, books, movies, public advertisements, political slogans, influencer statements, online debates, and works of anti-male propaganda. None of them offered a prescription for the women’s negativity, resentment, intolerance, or self-pity.

The implication was that men and society at large would have to work harder to win these women back.

Within a few days, a flood of articles trumpeted the findings. “Only a third of young women hold positive view of men,” blared The Independent, alleging ungrammatically that “Findings show women under 30 are three times as likely to hold a negative view of men compared to the other way around.”

Others exaggerated the data for a more dramatic message: “New Poll Finds British Women Largely Unsatisfied with Men,” claimed Inside Success magazine, explaining that “Only 11% of women in the UK hold a positive view of men. What does this mean? And can the younger generation set a better tone?”

At least one article sought a silver lining, claiming that some young men were turning to older women for sexual companionship—or, at least, fun and non-condemnation. The Revolver argued that “Angry young women are driving Gen Z men straight into the arms of ‘cougars’…”. Noting that “a whole lot of young women have turned into miserable little grievance mongers,” the article alleged that “Young men are turning their attention toward women who are less hostile and more open to actual affection.”

Joseph Cotto at American Thinker (“Young, Angry Leftist Women are Destroying Britain and America”) was equally concerned with the political and social effects, noting women’s far-left opinions on issues such as censorship, slavery reparations, and income redistribution. He also highlighted the troubling implications for family formation:

“Just 18 percent of women under 30 feel very positive about men, compared with 38 percent of men who feel very positive about women. More than 40 percent of young women say men do not share their understanding of consent, while only 25 percent of men say the same about women.

Young women are twice as likely as young men to say they do not want children: 15 percent versus 8 percent. Among white women under 30 the number rises to 20 percent. One in four young women call differing political views a red flag in a partner. Sixty percent would struggle to date someone who disagrees on Israel-Palestine or on Donald Trump. Seventy-four percent say they could not stay with someone who rejects their views on social justice.”

He summed up a gloomy forecast: “Women feel profoundly unhappy, distrust men, loathe their country, and view motherhood as optional at best.”

All in all, the women so widely reported on from the survey seem to have become the perfect foot soldiers for intersectional feminism, consumed by grievance, incapable of male-positive empathy, stewing in self-pity and love for the oppressed ‘other,’ and outraged when their view of the world is not sufficiently affirmed.

What the Data Actually Show

But there was a problem with the barrage of commentary.

Though it did capture signs of political radicalization, the spreadsheet data supplied by the Merlin Strategy Polling Company simply did not support the bombshell claim that young women hate men.

For one thing, the survey didn’t ask whether women hate men. It asked whether their view of men was positive or negative.

I know a lot of men who have a somewhat negative view of women in general but who don’t hate them in the least. Being dissatisfied with the opposite sex, wanting them to be different, or feeling unappreciated by them: all these are quite common among young people and do not equate to hatred.

Moreover, women’s opinions, rather more than men’s, are profoundly shaped by media, peer group, and influencers. In our current anti-male environment, in which feminist leaders regularly disparage and excoriate men, presenting them as both threat and nuisance, it makes sense that at least some women would claim a negative view of men.

Given that context, the numbers from the poll are actually rather mild.

The percentage of women in the survey who claimed to have a “very negative” view of men was 3%. Another 18% claimed that their view of men was “quite [i.e., less than “very”] negative.” That is 21% of women reporting a negative view. Nearly 4 out of 5 women did NOT report a negative view.

Maguire said in the New Statesman interview that women under 25 had a much more negative view than the slightly older (25-30) cohort, but the spreadsheet data for this younger group is not available on the Merlin Strategy website (see “Polling For the New Statesman”).

Overall, exactly half of the women surveyed reported a “very positive” (18%) or “quite positive” (32%) view of the opposite sex. 26% said that their view was “neither positive nor negative.” 3% said they were not sure.

Given what young women continually read or hear about male prejudice and violence, this result (76% positive or neutral view) is hardly terrible. Imagine if we could turn off the spigot of hateful feminist misrepresentation. Imagine if “gender studies” was a genuine social science that saw men as human beings deserving of understanding. Imagine if the leaders of churches, schools, political organizations, newspapers, corporations, and media companies spent half as much effort portraying men positively as they do women.

But they don’t, and a remarkable asymmetry does exist between men’s declared view of women (72% “very positive” or “quite positive”) and women’s reported views, with men nearly 50% more likely to have a positive opinion.

That finding is open to a variety of interpretations. Women know that having a negative view of men is normal and even expected in our society. Men know that having a negative view of women can lead to a police visit. Perhaps the surveyed men decided not to risk a hate crime charge.

Or perhaps men interpreted the question based on an idealized concept of womanhood rather than actual personal interactions. Perhaps men are simply more generous and forgiving than women, more desirous and hopeful. The survey language is too simplistic to allow for more precise conclusions.

Suffice it to say that the survey does not support a claim of sweeping anti-male female hatred.

Other responses by women involving attitudes toward men were also not catastrophic.

A significant majority of women (59%) thought that “most” or a “reasonable amount” of men shared their values and political views.

A majority (51%) felt at least “somewhat” or “very safe” around men. A quarter more were neutral on the issue.

A majority (52%) “somewhat” or “strongly” agreed that they could trust men. Nearly a quarter more (24%) were neutral on trust.

A majority of women (51%) felt “understood” by men. Another 24% were neutral.

A large majority (66%) felt they could speak with men about politics. Another 24% were neutral.

A majority (53%) felt that men respected them. 24% were neutral.

On all of these subjects involving female attitudes and feelings, only about one in five women had a negative view of male peacefulness, companionability, respectfulness, trustworthiness, and understanding.

According to the survey, near-equal numbers of young women and men are interested in getting married (or being in a civil partnership), and high numbers want children. 82% of women would like to find a life partner, and 75% said they would like to have children. The number of men wanting children (80%) was somewhat higher, but the difference does not seem staggering.

Overall, the picture of the sexes that emerged from the survey is quite positive: a majority expressed interest in each other, believe they hold shared values, look forward to a life together, want to have children, and feel respected and understood by the other. Only a minority of young women have chosen negativity.

Clearly, the survey results should lay to rest any notion that men have been radicalized into extreme or hateful views of women.

A minority of women, on the other hand, do have regressive and dangerous views of men, and these should be addressed with government-funded programs, public outreach, social media campaigns, and male-positive statements by leaders. Unfortunately, such a productive response is unlikely.

**

Why wasn’t this more positive view of gendered responses and beliefs at least part of the story that the New Statesmen pundits chose to tell and the rest of the media to broadcast?

Clearly, many feminists are emotionally and ideologically attached to the idea that women dislike men and don’t see a future with them, that they are angry and alienated. Some feminists want this to be true and try to make it true.

Female anger and unhappiness assure a basis for feminist careers, advocacy, reporting, social activism, and demands of government; they guarantee abundant future funding for hundreds of feminist groups. Feminist lawyers, journalists, advocates, social workers, teachers, academics, and corporate leaders all profit from female bitterness and discontent.

Men’s advocates and anti-feminists are not equally attached to the idea that women dislike men: to the contrary, most of us want men and women to work together in fruitful partnerships. Some of us, however (yours truly included), may suffer from confirmation bias and gloomy prognostication.

The truth, if the survey results can be trusted, is that despite everything wrong with our cultural messaging, social policies, and laws today, especially around sexuality, marriage, divorce, and child custody, men are still overwhelmingly positive in their attitudes toward women, and women are less intransigently negative than contemporary phenomena often make it seem.

Imagine how much better things could be if leaders of our society would work consistently to help women see all the reasons for respect, care, admiration, fellow feeling, gratitude and love for men. Imagine how much stronger our social fabric would be if expressions of anti-male hostility were condemned as ugly and wrong instead of celebrated as bold and progressive.

We could be looking forward to a future that even the feminists couldn’t spoil. Until then, let’s not jump to the worst possible conclusion.

**

The case of Matt Taylor and #Shirtstorm was the last straw for me.

In 2014, a chorus of angry women and their male enablers roasted British astrophysicist Matt Taylor for wearing an “inappropriate” shirt for a historic occasion. Taylor was part of a European Space Agency team, the Rosetta Mission, that sent a probe four billion miles through space to land on a comet, a journey of ten years.

But that achievement was overshadowed by Taylor’s alleged masculine insensitivity. To discuss his team’s success, he had worn a bowling shirt decorated with images of scantily-clad gamer-style female characters. The shirt had been made for Taylor as a birthday present by a female friend.

The doyennes of social media went berserk, charging that the shirt was a symbol of sexism in science, with men like Taylor living emblems of the not-so-subtle hostility that was keeping women out STEM research.

The outrage grew until the comet was essentially forgotten amidst the frenzy of hysteria.

At one point, Verge magazine published a headline emphasizing the infantile equivalency: “I don’t care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet, your shirt is sexist and ostracizing.” The sub-heading drove the point home: “That’s one small step for man, three steps back for humankind.”

A number of the commentators hadn’t even looked closely enough at the shirt to see its design.

“The fact that a scientist of any gender, but especially a man, would think it’s a good idea to wear a shirt covered in naked women while representing a major space agency and a significant research project is appalling,” wrote one, failing to realize that none of the characters was naked, “and clearly, he had no idea that he was engaging in exactly the kind of casual sexism that drives women away from STEM.”

Astrophysicist Katie Mack was adamant that “a shirt featuring women in lingerie isn’t appropriate for a broadcast if you care about women in STEM.” I don’t know about Mack, but most women do not wear leather for their night’s sleep.

Even after Taylor issued a tearfully contrite apology, Verge’s gender whiner was not satisfied, criticizing the European Space Agency for allowing Taylor to wear a shirt that “demean[ed] 50 percent of the world’s population.”

When a brilliant man’s accomplishment can be eclipsed by poor-me grandstanding of such embarrassing proportions, we are witnessing a profoundly destructive phenomenon. And there was no backlash of women telling their crazy sisters to leave the man alone.

Unfortunately, Matt Taylor was not the first and has certainly not been the last. Why are so many women drawn to indulge in this kind of nonsense? We already know why men allow it.

Female Power and the End of Innovation

Recent studies and discussions have raised the alarm about female power. Pundits such as Helen Andrews, Cory Clark, and Bo Winegard (see my discussion and links here) have made the evidence-based case that women in general are not as committed as men in general to objective excellence and the pursuit of truth. Women overall prefer equity, inclusion, and compassion for victims.

When women are the majority in an organization, the values of the organization shift away from meritocracy and toward group consensus, the suppression of dissent, and protection of the vulnerable.

These trends strongly suggest that women are not likely, as a group, to uphold and maintain the traditional foundations of civilizational flourishing: equality before the law, free speech, truth-seeking, competitive excellence, and rigorous debate. All of these, in fact, are already in evident decline—undermined, attacked, flouted and fought against by feminist lawyers, advocates, academics, judges, journalists, teachers, social workers, political leaders, legislators, and CEOs.

The concerns raised by Andrews and others are important, but behind that discussion lies a more fundamental question about women’s role in civilization, namely: do women build civilization?

Do women as a sex—leaving aside a relatively small number of extraordinary individuals—have it in them to compete and innovate at the same level as men?

Are women driven to master nature and solve intricate technical, logistical, structural or methodological problems?

Are they obsessed with the minutiae of numbers, systems, and abstract ideas to the extent that many men are?

Are they willing to sacrifice decades of their lives in order to become the first or the best in a scientific, philosophical, or artistic endeavor?

The answer is no.

Men as System-Builders

Social psychologist Roy Baumeister explored the relevant research in Is There Anything Good About Men (2010), a cautiously non-feminist book in which the author readily asserted that he, like most everyone else, prefers women to men. Women are more lovable, he claimed, and more pleasant to be around.

But he was not quite willing to accept the now-mainstream thesis that women can replace men in all areas of society.

His thesis is summed up in the book’s sub-title: How Cultures Flourish By Exploiting Men. Men are the foot soldiers of civilization as well as its leaders. They are the ones who make things work or make new things.

Men are the ones who must prove their utility to society. Their drive to be useful has powered centuries of back-breaking work, risk-taking, tool-building, self-sacrifice, and outstanding performance of a sort that has never been expected of women (and still isn’t).

Women in the main tend not to work as hard as men to succeed because they don’t have to. Women developed different strengths and tendencies.

Women’s strength, for good and ill, is in the inter-personal arena: not only in caring for those who are weaker but also in being cared for by those who are stronger. Women are good at reading people’s emotions and desires, and at expressing their own.

Men are not rewarded for expressing emotions and desires; men are oriented to acting, often under pressure to perform competently, in large groups and systems.

“The female brain,” according to Baumeister, “tends to be geared toward empathy, which includes emotional sensitivity to other people and deep interest in understanding them and their feelings. In contrast, the male brain is oriented toward understanding systems, which means figuring out general principles of how things operate and function together, and this applies to inanimate objects as much as social systems” (p. 85).

Baumeister supports his argument in a book-length exploration of men’s system-building. He shows how men are driven to work with, and in competition with, other men to make it possible for large numbers of human beings to live together in complex, efficient networks. The large social institutions that have characterized western cultures, from the army to churches, from corporations to unions, and from market places to police forces, give evidence of men’s system-building.

Women can work well within the systems that men devise, but they rarely devise new systems on their own. This is not because women are, on average, less intelligent than men (except at the very highest levels). It is because women’s motivations and sources of satisfaction are generally different from men’s.

Women’s contribution to culture in nurturing children, providing companionship, and looking after the family home has been a crucial one. But it does not drive innovation or invent new technologies.

Even the most intelligent women are rarely compelled, as highly intelligent men often are, to pursue scientific and other breakthroughs with the single-minded focus necessary for greatness. Often, as in the case involving Matt Taylor discussed above, many women do not seem to value or understand the nature and importance of such breakthroughs.

Women’s main contribution in the male civilizational sphere has been to lobby for admission and then to complain about, and work to undermine, the male culture of competitive excellence.

Innovators Do Not Need Encouragement and Special Advantages

Conservative author Kenneth Minogue addressed this subject more than two decades ago in his still-relevant essay, “How Civilizations Fall” (2001), in which he contended that feminism has constituted a potent assault on western civilization in its insistence that representation matters more than achievement, inclusiveness more than merit.

For Minogue, the feminist assumption that women are owed (at least) 50% of all desirable positions has fundamentally damaged the meritocratic ideal at the core of western culture. Western culture distinguished itself historically through its appreciation for achievement.

For centuries, despite some restrictions, brilliant women were able to make contributions to their societies. These were never on the scale of men’s contributions. As Minogue puts it, “Women can do marvelous things with a house, but they do need the house to be there in the first place.”

Minogue considers and rejects the feminist claim that western women were less innovative than men because, historically, they had fewer opportunities. He points out that the special pleading of that argument is itself a kind of refutation.

“It may be, of course, that as the feminists sometimes claim, this [lesser female innovation] is because [women] were never encouraged to engage in these activities. But to need encouragement, to depend on models to follow, is precisely not to have a capacity to innovate.”

The endless feminist demand for encouragement—as well as for special workshops, male mentoring, material assistance, role models, the hectoring and exclusion of any man who steps out of line or offends a woman, loads of government funding, media cheerleading, and more than half a century of propaganda attesting to female brilliance and male oafishness—is itself proof that women are not, generally, inclined to innovate. Persons who are driven to create do not need special grants and non-stop media propaganda . They will create if given the chance.

Worse than inability is the deep resentment that seems to characterize many women’s response to male greatness. Minogue reports, “I once heard a feminist put it this way: ‘There’s no such thing as a great mind.’” Contempt for the achievements of men—and lack of understanding of their significance—is one of many toxic features of feminism.

Finally, Please Stop

How many more decades are we willing to wait to see if women’s civilization-building capacities develop? How much more encouragement, confidence-building, and taxpayer-funded financial assistance—while many able men are forced to sit on the sidelines, or worse—are we willing to give to “equality”? And what kind of equality requires such a long-term relinquishing of male opportunity and fair return?

A society that is willing to forego the ingenuity and obsessive pursuit of excellence that have been the primary domains of men is a society that will steadily lose its competitiveness. It will collapse under the weight of non-productivity and exploitation.

For centuries, women were assumed to be the nurturers of the world, praised for their tenderness and ability to create spaces of emotional comfort and renewal. These enabled men to do their work well. Now, large numbers of women have withdrawn these qualities from the home, attempting to apply them to the outer worlds of business, politics, social work, academic research, and the law. They lavish care on those that feminism deems worthy while withholding it from those deemed privileged or oppressive.

Many feminist women’s indifference to the achievements of western civilization and outright preference, in some cases, for the west’s enemies may be an intuitive recognition of the civilizational vulnerability that their sex exploited and furthered.

Whether those who love the west will have the will and wherewithal to curtail the damage remains to be seen. But let us at least stop deluding ourselves.

It’s a version of the standard Jewish joke:

Woman #1: “Men in this country are TERRIBLE!”

Woman #2: “And there are so few of them to date!”

The Free Press Interview

Dr. Debra Soh is the author of Sextinction: The Decline of Sex and the Future of Intimacy (2026). Last month, she discussed her findings with Rafaela Siewert of The Free Press in a wide-ranging interview that touched on men’s and women’s experiences of dating apps, social media, AI companions, OnlyFans, online pornography, and sex dolls.

The conversation begins as a general discussion of what Soh calls the sex recession.

Rather quickly, however, a predictable bias begins to show: the main focus is male romantic and sexual failure, and what this means for women. Almost nothing is said about female behaviors and feminist policies that have affected men.

Neither Soh nor Siewert seems consciously or heartlessly anti-male. Aside from a few giggles at men’s expense, both women express some sympathy for men’s dating plight. But both women are so much more comfortable talking about male inadequacies than female ones that the conversation can do little more than rehearse a familiar catalogue of complaints about modern guys, who are allegedly taking the easy route to sexual release. Their silence on the subject of women is deafening.

The Sex Recession

The discussion begins from two rather tenuous premises. The first is that both men and women are having less sex than in previous times (though men significantly less than women), a decline that is causing loneliness, depression, and social anomie. The second premise is that the sex drought has come about unintentionally because of new technologies and circumstances. Soh explains that men have been discouraged by the experience of dating app rejection. In consequence, they have turned to various substitutes, all of them potentially harmful.

But are people really having less sex than in the past, and how could such a contention be measured? It’s certainly true that a number of feminist commentators have, often censoriously and smugly, warned that men should have less (lustful, degrading, and coercive) sex. But do we know how much sex people had one hundred, or two hundred, years ago? Roy Baumeister, for one, has argued that it was the norm for most men of the past to lack sexual opportunity and that modern men generally are better off than their (sex-starved) forefathers (Is There Anything Good About Men? pp. 268-269).

Further, Soh draws a straight line between sex and intimacy. Does more or less sex necessarily correlate to more or less intimacy? Given the great difficulty in knowing the sexual experiences of ordinary people even in the fairly recent past, let alone centuries ago, it’s a large claim without substantial support. In the end, though, it probably doesn’t matter: it’s enough that some people feel the lack.

The second contention, however, about the deep reasons for modern loneliness and social isolation, is more consequential. For Soh and Seiwert—and for many other pundits across the ideological spectrum—what has happened in the past few decades has involved structural changes in the economy and society for which no one is to blame, and which no one would think of trying to change.

DEI hiring and the advancement of women into corporate, academic, and professional positions have put men at an economic disadvantage in relation to women, who continue to seek successful and wealthy men for mates. Too many men find themselves largely shut out of opportunities for sex with choosy, high-status women, and these men have withdrawn into hopelessness and, in some cases, misogynistic bitterness or laziness.

Male laziness, in fact, is a frequently sounded theme in the discussion, often with the claim that it is bad for women. As Soh phrases it, “If you’re watching porn regularly, especially as a man, it’s going to affect how you view women.”

This is a standard feminist charge that has never been, to my knowledge, satisfactorily proven. More importantly, the entire causal explanation is inadequate—though useful in mentioning the rank unfairness of DEI hiring (something feminists denied for decades). Not a word is said about the massive feminist assault on the male psyche that has been ongoing for the past century, increasing in tempo and viciousness in the past sixty years: fishes and bicycles, bathing in male tears, men not dying fast enough from Covid, heterofatalism, and many more. To rephrase Soh, if you’re consuming feminist propaganda regularly, especially as a woman, it’s going to affect how you view men.

Consequences of Feminist Revolution

It’s not just attitudes that have undergone a tectonic shift. Laws and policies have profoundly changed relations between the sexes. The meaning of sexuality itself has been altered by feminist theory and legal practice. To a degree never possible before, sexual relations—whether casual or marriage-traditional—have become fraught with existential danger for men, potentially involving social ostracism, job loss, intolerable financial burden, the judicial theft of one’s children, and incarceration.

A woman can put a pin in a condom (or collect sperm from a discarded one) and force an unsuspecting man to pay support for a child he never intended to father and whom he may barely be allowed to know (if at all). Many men end up financially supporting children who aren’t theirs as a result of a paternity fraud colluded in by state governments. They can and do regularly have their children taken from them, as Stephen Baskerville has eloquently explained, through no fault of their own. They can be and regularly are fired from their jobs or expelled from college for vague or non-existent gendered transgressions. Despite all this, they are expected to “acknowledge” their privilege and make amends by contributing their tax dollars to more and more programs to advantage and empower women.

These conditions did not appear out of nowhere. They were driven by the so-called women’s movement, implemented and enforced by western governments, harped on ad nauseum by feminist journalists, and accepted as necessary and good by large numbers of people.

#MeToo demonstrated the willingness of millions of women (and men) to watch men’s lives destroyed on the basis of (often decades-old) accusations. The Brett Kavanagh hearings showed how a vaguely-remembered or hallucinated long-ago teenage escapade could be turned into a reputation- and career-imperiling slander. The Harvey Weinstein scandal showed how women can turn on a man once he is no longer useful to their careers.

Countless other high-profile allegations have demonstrated how easy it is for a woman to destroy a man’s reputation by accusing him of harassment, assault, or rape. The cases are constantly before our eyes while, at the same time, women lament their lack of power and demand that men be held more stringently to account for their alleged misdeeds.

Whether powerful or powerless, rich or poor, married or single, celibate or playboy, any man who has been paying attention knows that his life is not his own. If a woman wishes, she can summon the power of the state to interrogate, investigate, arrest, hold, charge, try, convict, and imprison him, and there is very little he can do to save himself. Due process of law, bodily autonomy, and parental rights have all been eroded by the feminist juggernaut in a world in which male sexuality is assumed to be abusive; and female malfeasance is both denied and encouraged.

No wonder some men are wary of sexual or even friendly involvement.

Lazy Men and the Dolls Who Love Them

But such issues are barely addressed or even acknowledged by Siewert and Soh. The main import of the Free Press interview is the failure of men: their hapless loss of status and, it seems, of will. The thing that women demanded men offer—to work with women as equals, to assist women to enter and rise in various professions—is now pointed to as men’s undoing: unfortunate but irreversible. The modern woman finds, understandably according to Soh, that low-income men have little to offer in terms of material and emotional security.

At the same time, men are retreating from women, failing to make the required effort, falling back on the alternatives possible in a technologically-sophisticated, sex-saturated culture. They masturbate to porn rather than try to find a girlfriend. They pay for OnlyFans access or for an (alarmingly realistic) AI companion.

Such artificial outlets offer the man everything he wants, according to Soh, with no effort required: he need not get a good job, keep himself clean, learn the social graces and other behaviors that are pleasing to women. Moreover, looking at naked women online makes his view of women unrealistic. He expects too much of potential female mates and offers too little himself.

On the subject of women’s behaviors, we learn little. What about women who use sex toys that mimic the shape and action of a penis? Are they not also getting what they want without putting in the work of being a good partner? What about women who allow themselves to become grotesquely obese? What about women who refuse sex to their husbands or boyfriends? Are they also selfish and lazy?

As usual, men are the ones criticized in the discussion, the ones whose behaviors are named as ill-advised, damaging, or dangerous to women. Female porn consumption—not to mention female porn creation—never comes up. From the discussion, one would hardly know that women too are interested in viewing pornography or in AI companions or sexual aids. Women are not criticized for any failures, sexual manipulation, or mercenary desires. They want what they want, and that’s the end of it.

To be fair, Siewert and Soh are less condemnatory of men than many other pundits. They recognize some men’s lack of options. But they have difficulty maintaining a focus on men’s needs and desires; women’s needs and demands keep moving to the fore. Men’s choices are repeatedly discussed not as evidence of male pain or of their rational decision-making, but as signs of male irresponsibility, or worse.

On the subject of sex dolls, Soh claims that research shows that a man who imagines a relationship with his doll is a public safety risk, with a significant likelihood of participating in “violence against women and girls.” I have no idea how evidence could possibly confirm this thesis.

What is clear is that a conversation that seemed to begin as an unbiased attempt to understand how sexual intimacy is changing for men and women quickly drifted into a standard series of criticisms of male behavior in which everything men do is potentially damnable.

It’s not hard to think of reforms that would make work life, dating, marriage, and parenting less hazardous for men and could contribute to a renaissance of male-female trust: an immediate end to all DEI measures; a public reckoning around #MeToo’s ongoing witch-hunts; the dismantling of weaponizable sexual harassment policies in the workplace and universities; the return of due process and the presumption of innocence to claims of sexual assault; the reform of divorce and child custody to remove bias against men and fathers; the removal of feminist propaganda and advocacy from all schools, universities, newsrooms, and media, to be replaced by rational discussions of sexual etiquette and female accountability; and the encouragement of a culture of love and respect for men both in the bedroom and at large.

But that would be an entirely different kind of conversation.

Siewert and Soh don’t have any of the foregoing on their radar not because they are anti-male—I assume they like men generally—but because woman-centered and feminist-compliant assumptions are deeply embedded in mainstream thought. Until that changes, men are right to protect themselves and seek their best interests in whatever way they see fit.

Popular perception has it that just over a century ago, women in the Anglosphere fought long and hard for the right to vote. To gain that right, according to the prevailing story, they battled contempt and misogyny from entitled men.

An examination of the history of this period in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries shows that both the villains and the heroines of the story are false constructs employed to whip up anger at men and faith in the goodness of feminism.

The reality, as always, is more interesting and fraught.

Did Women Know Enough of National Affairs to Vote on Them?

In brief, it is true that some men did not believe that women should vote at the federal level, and some of their arguments sound condescending to a feminist ear.

Brian Harrison’s Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain (1978), published at a time when it was still just possible, with some careful hedging and pro-feminist protestation, to write a fair historical overview, has chronicled the primary anti-suffrage contentions.

Opponents of women’s right to vote argued that most women lacked even rudimentary knowledge of national and international affairs, usually too preoccupied with domestic life to give politics the attention it required. They also lacked, it was alleged, the calm practical-mindedness and rational outlook necessary for political decision-making. One anti-suffragist claimed that “The point of hysterical emotion and unreason is always nearer with women” (quoted in Harrison, Separate Spheres, p. 80)

Some anti-suffragists worried that women’s much-touted emotionalism would lead them to vote for social policies that would massively expand the size of government, increasing both government debt and legislative interference in citizens’ private lives (Separate Spheres, pp. 80-84). Others believed that the women who led the suffrage campaigns were motivated primarily by antagonism towards men, and that the entire campaign for the vote was designed to drive a wedge between the sexes.

These assessments were hardly inaccurate. As British journalist Wilma Meikle pointed out in Towards a Sane Feminism, which she published in 1917, many of her fellow suffragists’ were filled with an all-consuming anti-male fury: “These were the women who regarded the majority of men as conscious and willful oppressors” (pp. 84-85). Some such as Theosophist Frances Swiney developed theories of men as deficient non-females: in her 1907 book Bar of Isis, Swiney castigated “a selfish, lustful, diseased manhood” that “sought in woman only a body,” and she characterized semen as a type of pollution.

In response to feminism’s rampant animus (see Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments [1848] and Christabel Pankhurst’s The Great Scourge and How to End It [1913]), anti-suffrage societies formed in the years prior to the First World War, attracting many active members.

They promoted the complementarity of men and women, alleging that women’s interests were already well represented by male voters and would not be furthered by forcing women into electoral politics. Their perspective was based not on dislike of women or contempt for their properly-directed abilities, but on a particular vision of the social good.

Significantly, many of those who warned against the consequence of female enfranchisement were women themselves. For these women, domestic responsibilities were a deep source of self-respect. They claimed emphatically that most women did not want the vote and that involvement in political life would harm women’s ability to make their most important contribution to family and national well-being. Long suppressed by historians, their views remain relevant a century later.

The Narrow Historical Window of Alleged Male Privilege

Viewed historically, woman suffrage was not the clear-cut issue of universal male privilege and universal female disenfranchisement that feminists then and now would have us believe. It was not the case that men had been able to vote throughout history simply because they were male or that women had never been able to vote simply because they were female.

Many American states, for example, allowed women to vote for state legislators in the years or decades before the ratification of the 19^th Amendment. Some even allowed them to cast their ballot for President. Depending on the state, some women were able, in the later 19^th century, to vote in local, particularly schoolboard, elections.

On the other side, men’s right to vote had been limited for various reasons. Property requirements restricted white American men’s ability to vote federally until 1856. Black men were not eligible to vote until 1870. A majority of British men lacked the right to vote until the later nineteenth century, and even at the start of the First World War in 1914, when feminist women were making their angriest demands, approximately 40% of British men, poor and property-less, still did not have the right to vote.

In brief, the nineteenth century was a period of rapidly expanding democratic reforms that saw increasing numbers of men enfranchised. Voting rights would, in time, almost certainly have been extended to women even without the massive displays of feminine fury and wounded self-love of suffrage activists.

Women’s Arguments Against the Vote

Arguments against extending the vote to women were most often based on the claim that women were in general less suited to politics by temperament, interests, and experience, and that women’s most important contribution to their society—and to their own interests, ultimately—was made through care for family and non-partisan social advocacy, a set of “trusts,” that were, as one anti-suffrage organization put it, “as important and sacred as any that exist on earth.”

Historian Julia Bush, in Women Against the Vote (2007) has shown that anti-suffragist women believed with good reason that they spoke for the vast majority of women (exact figures on women’s suffrage views being impossible to determine, see pp. 3-4). After polling women across neighborhoods, anti-suffragists insisted that most women were not interested in partisan politics, preferring to direct their energies to areas of long-standing feminine concern such as child-rearing, public health, and public morality.

The Illinois Association Opposed to the Extension of Suffrage to Women phrased it in the following manner in its 1909 petition:

We feel that our present duties fill up the whole measure of our time and ability, and are such as none but ourselves can perform. Our appreciation of their importance requires us to protest against all efforts to infringe upon our rights by imposing upon us those obligations which cannot be separated from suffrage, but which, as we think, cannot be performed by us without the sacrifice of the highest interests of our families and our society.

At a time when most women were occupied in the domestic realm, often pregnant, often caring for children and dealing with household duties, electoral politics was an enervating and unwelcome distraction.

According to this anti-suffrage view, it was simply not true that non-voting women lacked political representation. On the contrary, women’s interests were vigorously upheld by the men in their families and by male politicians generally.

Liberal party member and British ambassador to Washington James Bryce concurred: “There can be no more baseless assumption than that the polling-booth is the main source of influence in politics. Women already enjoy greater influence in other ways, both public and private, than the franchise would give them” (quoted in Separate Spheres, p. 81).

Some anti-suffragists argued that women had more influence in their societies precisely because their advocacy was seen as non-partisan. The National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage wrote, “Because women now stand outside of politics, they therefore are free to appeal to any party in matters of education, charity and reform.” As Brian Harrison noted, it was “difficult to think of reforms for which late Victorian women energetically campaigned and which they were not granted” (Separate Spheres, p. 73).

Anti-suffragist women also believed that politics was ultimately, and should remain, a male contest because national governance rested on the use of force. To extend the ballot to those without the obligation or ability to enforce law and sovereignty was to introduce a falseness into the political system that would ultimately weaken whatever nation implemented it.

The Illinois Anti-Suffrage Association represented the argument as follows:

Because the basis of government is force, its stability rests upon its physical power to enforce its laws; therefore it is inexpedient to give the vote to women. Immunity from service in executing the law would make most women irresponsible voters.

Ultimately, the anti-suffragist position rested on a vision of mutual respect between the sexes, in which the qualities and duties of one sex rested on and supported the qualities and duties of the other. To quote again from the Illinois Anti-Suffrage Association,

Our fathers and our brothers love us; our husbands are our choice and one with us; our sons are what we make them. We are content that they represent us in the corn-field, on the battle-field, and at the ballot-box, and we them in the school room, at the fireside, and at the cradle, believing our representation even at the ballot-box to be thus more full and impartial than it would be were the views of the few who wish suffrage adopted, contrary to the judgment of many.

If the anti-suffragists were wrong, it was certainly not because they hated women. Their vision of respectful complementarity was designed to honor the different strengths of women and men, as well as to protect women from the corrosive effects of public life.

Were the Anti-Suffragists Right?

As we know, the anti-suffragists’ arguments did not succeed.

The First World War ultimately decided the matter of women’s voting rights. Women’s service on the war’s home front—their work in munitions factories and farms—highlighted female duty and public-mindedness, provoking strong public approval. The war might have confirmed the anti-suffrage view that physical force and massive male combatant deaths were still a factor in world affairs, and that, unable to fight on frontlines, women should not be empowered to direct national decisions. But it didn’t.

Women thus won the right to vote on the backs of hundreds of thousands of men dead in the trenches of Europe. That debt, of course, has never been acknowledged by feminists.

Although it is now difficult to imagine a world without women voting in national elections, it is at least as difficult to dismiss the anti-suffragists’ concerns. A female electorate has made politics increasingly emotion-based, with an ever-expanding state bureaucracy catering largely to women’s social concerns, fears, and easily-triggered outrage.

Over a century after women began voting, research has repeatedly found that men express far more knowledge about and interest in political affairs than women do. A 2019 article about gender differences in Britain reported a 20-point gender gap in expressed political interest amongst 15-year-olds and a 30-point gender gap amongst 25-year-olds.

A Pew Research Poll of Americans found women consulting newspapers for stories primarily about “weather, health and safety, natural disasters, and tabloid news.” Men were more interested in “international affairs, Washington news, and sports.” According to another report that criticized news organs for failing to attract female readers, women prefer local stories, accessible graphics, and an engrossing narrative rather than fact-based news.

The stereotypes that some suffrage activists raged against have turned out to be true.

Moreover, female political power has not made politics kinder or more efficient, wiser or less corrupt. It has driven a wedge between men and women, massively increased the size of government, increased bureaucratic regulation of private life, and left many children without motherly love and attention—and without their fathers at all.

Anti-suffragist’s professed gratitude for men and faith in gender balance stand in stark contrast to feminists’ continual complaints, accusations, and demands. As a minority of feminist radicals hijacked the political process, the worst fears of the anti-suffragists were realized.

What is perhaps most interesting about the historical debates concerning women’s voting rights is that they occurred at a time when it was still possible to discuss what was best for society from a perspective that included everyone: men, women, and children. Women’s suffrage has made it nearly impossible, finally, to talk about any good other than a feminist one.

Nothing beats a threat narrative for a gender studies academic in search of relevance, and what more urgent than the dark corners of the internet where men (and the women who love them) allegedly spread misogyny and male supremacism.

Many academics now claim expertise in this area of gender studies, probing the volatile fragility and violent anxieties of manosphere men, and calling to repentance all who resist the feminist future. Many of these academics are women, making a sweet living warning about male “hate,” but there are plenty of male feminists as well, crusaders against others’ toxicity .

In “Mapping the Neo-Manosphere(s): New Directions for Research,” four scholars of masculinity survey the latest research on digital media and violent extremism. Vivian Gerrand, Debbie Ging, Joshua Roose, and Michael Flood claim to have read hundreds of studies of the manosphere, which they call an “online ecosystem of anti-women actors.”

According to them, the manosphere is brimming over with grievance-mongering, grift, and gynocidal fantasy. Nothing in it is good or sincere or well-intentioned. Various sub-genres of online content, including fitness advice, stoicism, and the tradwife lifestyle, are presented as outgrowths of misogynistic extremism from which millions of men and boys require rescue, by force if necessary.

A Roll Call of Buzzwords

The researchers make no distinction between manosphere content generally and what they call male supremacy—or, indeed, between those terms and a host of others, all pejorative. Their introductory paragraph alone provides a roll call of buzzwords that link any dissent from Marxist-feminist orthodoxy to misogynistic violence.

The manosphere, we’re told, is “bound by the belief that mainstream society is a misandrist conspiracy that disadvantages men.” Manosphere groups “frame contemporary gender politics as a ‘war against men.’” These groups also “frequently engage in misogynistic abuse as well as inciting violence against women,” thus creating an “online environment of accelerating harms.”

None of these statements is ever supported with evidence, but it is likely too much to expect evidence: the direct equation between male-positive advocacy and murderous misogyny is no longer a subject of academic debate, if it ever was. It is an axiom.

In one short paragraph, then, we move from non-feminist perspectives to “misandrist conspiracies,” and from belief in a “war against men” to “inciting violence” and “accelerating harms.” Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with anti-feminist content will recognize the definitional sleights of hand. Are any of these academics genuinely familiar with the subject they are writing about? It seems more likely that they have taken a shortcut to a politically-approved position.

What about the mass of anti-feminist and male-positive content creators—Rick Bradford at The Illustrated Empathy Gap, Tom Golden at Men Are Good, Alison Tieman and company at Honey Badger Radio, Bettina Arndt at Bettina Arndt, Hannah Spier at Psychobabble, just to name a few—who come nowhere near “inciting violence against women”? On the contrary, they pursue a vision of mutual cooperation and accountability between the sexes by rejecting female privilege and paranoia. Is this manosphere content, or not?

Many men’s rights advocates—researchers like Stephen Baskerville, Paul Nathanson, James Nuzzo, David Shackleton, Gerard Casey, Helen Smith, and Grant Brown, just to name those I’ve been consulting most recently—simply document male disadvantage with evidence. They do not assert conspiracies or stoke grievance.

As for the “war against men,” have our researchers read any of the voluminous feminist writings that celebrate male death and openly advocate a world without them? When feminist leaders—many of them university professors—are not only allowed but actually celebrated for declaring their anti-male hatred and calling for a “decontamination of the earth,” what are sensible people to conclude about anti-male animus?

A PUA, a MGTOW, and a Christian conservative walk into a bar …

But sensible investigation is not at issue here, as is evident from the following howler about the alleged origins of the manosphere:

“The early manosphere was a conglomeration of communities, including men’s rights activists, involuntary celibates (or incels, who are men unable to access sex with women), dating coaches known as Pick Up Artists, male separatists and Christian conservatives.”

There were also a significant number of anti-feminist women (Karen Straughan, Judgy Bitch, Shoe On Head, Diana Davison, and Hannah Wallen, to name a few) who were shocked by the viciousness and dishonesty of the feminist project—not that women’s participation matters to the researchers, who dole out equal-opportunity excoriation. But the point is that these “communities” that allegedly “conglomerated” at the dawn of the manosphere had nothing in common, whether in their general worldview or in their specific action plans, and it is ridiculous to pretend that they were united in misogyny.

Christian conservatives tend to counsel men to abstain from sex before marriage and to pursue marriage as a sacrament. Dating coaches counsel men to pursue sex, period. Incels counsel men to despair over their lack of sex. Male separatists, or MGTOW, counsel men to abstain from marriage and from any woman-centered entanglements, sometimes including sex.

Their ideologies—if they can even be called that—could hardly be more different. Their attitudes toward women range from worshipful idealization and friendly interest through wary indifference and active dislike. A few manosphere denizens do hate women, though with nowhere near the single-minded fervor one finds in much of the received feminist literature that these academics fail to criticize.

**

“Mapping the Neo-Manosphere(s)” makes dozens more tone-deaf claims in prose of extraordinary banality. The authors are so frequently unable to communicate a precise meaning that one can only conclude that precise meaning was not their object.

For example, the authors inform readers that “This identification of the manosphere as grift is an important new development in the scholarship, which demonstrates how many facets of the neo-manosphere exploit existing vulnerabilities and monetize them in a cycle of ‘ontological racketeering,’ which consists of ‘threat proliferation,’ affirming and extending in viewers a sense of crisis, and alternately promising to deliver solutions to such threats.”

!!!

Having waded through the turgid academese, the reader is to conclude, presumably, that online entrepreneurs are wrong to identify a problem and offer solutions that men and women are interested in enough to pay for.

How is this a “grift”? One could just as easily, and with more cause, identify many gender studies researchers as grifters who, at enormous taxpayer expense and with far less factual basis, persuasive power, wit, or ingenuity, hype an alleged crisis of female victimhood and male brutality that the rest of us are forced to endorse or at least (unwillingly) fund.

“Unqualified but Highly Influential Entrepreneurs”

Content creators who monetize their work are a major target in this study, repeatedly portrayed as predatory hustlers, “digital evangelists,” who exploit the gullible.

The fact that no one is forced to pay them seems only to increase the researchers’ ire. A few of the alleged swindlers are singled out by name. Ryan Holiday, Jordan Peterson, Lex Fridman, David Goggins and Jocko Willink are condemned for their “simplistic, extreme, and polarizing content.” Also in the research team’s crosshairs are Myron Gaines and Walter Weekes, the Tate brothers, Sneako, Pearl Davies, Estee Williams, Hannah Neeleman, and Nara Smith.

Others are more generally excoriated. Tradwives are disparaged because they “uphold hierarchical essentialist understandings of gender seen elsewhere in the manosphere.” Black “Pick-Me” women are wrong to encourage other women “to find an apparent refuge […] in serving their husbands.” Black men come in for condemnation if they espouse the traditional family and are “homophobic and transphobic, believing too that welfare policies disrupt their patriarchal roles as leaders within Black families.” Muslim content-creators allegedly “draw on stereotypes about Islam as patriarchal, stoic and intolerant of progressive agendas.”

Even those who offer relatively apolitical content concerned with wellness, fitness, weight loss, strength training, self-help, stoicism, or wealth-building are viewed negatively and linked to “anti-feminism/misogyny” because they promote self-reliance and individualism, “self-help hacks” under guise of “an ostensible concern for men’s wellbeing.”

Here the authors’ authoritarian elitism is particularly evident. They criticize content-creators for a host of ideological errors, including “promulgating the myth that anyone can get rich if they work hard enough” and “encouraging boys to stop taking medication and turn to diet and fitness instead.” Men of all races are castigated for choosing “individualized solutions” to life’s problems. Some manosphere content-creators promote the apparently blasphemous idea “that taking care of one’s body and mind is the best strategy for navigating crisis conditions.”

For any readers who might not see why some or all of the above are wrong, the researchers fall back on the gateway thesis: once you’ve watched a couple of videos about positive thinking or financial management, you may develop an aversion to the 19^th Amendment or a preference for a barefoot woman in your kitchen. Some women may even get into the kitchen of their own accord.

“The shift towards health, wellness and stoic paradigms is a significant new development in the neo-manosphere and calls for deeper scholarly investigation, in particular regarding its efficacy as a strategy for drawing men into male supremacist spaces.” If it’s not male supremacist in itself, it is probably allied with male supremacism.

Also of concern to the authors are psychotherapists who prefer treatment options for boys that “eschew structural analyses of power, insist on immutable sex differences and claim that encouraging boys to express emotion is treating them as ‘defective girls.’” In other words, there are therapists out there who refuse to affirm the idea that masculinity is a damaging “construct.”

The Experts’ Crisis of Relevance

Ultimately, the authors’ determination to condemn men and women for pursuing their individual interests betrays a deep frustration on the part of these and other academics.

The simple truth is that it is galling for gender studies experts to recognize that millions of men and women are more interested in what “unqualified but highly influential entrepreneurs” in the manosphere are offering than what the academics themselves have to offer, and their angry frustration is palpable in every line.

Most online academic presentations are rarely viewed more than a few dozen or hundred times and often receive tepid or negative responses (see here, here, and here). Most academic publications are read near-exclusively by newly hired professors and graduate students in the field, those under pressure to accrue citations for their own conformist treatises. Academics such as these manosphere authors make an easy, secure salary to fulminate against male supremacism, but almost nobody freely chooses to read their fear-mongering verbiage.

Masculinity Experts to the Rescue

After thousands of words condemning right-wingers, Christian conservatives, incels, exercise therapists, MGTOW advocates, alternative health promoters, lovers of women, proponents of Stoicism, black traditionalists, trad wives, self-help gurus, wellness influencers, men’s rights advocates, and traditionalists of various stripes, the manosphere researchers conclude by recognizing the need to engage with these reprobates to lead them out of their extremism and into the community of the acceptable: “The scale of the problem calls for urgent educational interventions in both gender equality and critical digital media literacy.”

Men’s resistance to feminist indoctrination may be overcome, they suggest, with more indoctrination, perhaps more effectively carried out as a result of “a deeper understanding of boys’ and men’s motivations for joining and leaving such misogynist groups.”

How one is to engage with people for whom one holds such undisguised contempt is not addressed in the paper; there seems little chance that the “deeper understanding” might involve empathizing with and recognizing truth in manosphere concerns.

Hard on the heels of the call for “educational intervention” comes the predictable resort to censorship: “Against this context, the regulation of online platforms must be brought to the fore.” If you can’t win through the strength of your ideas, get Big Daddy government to silence those who disagree.

Despite their educational status, large salaries, and unfettered access to hundreds of thousands of young people every year, gender studies academics likely know they can’t defeat the manosphere except by shutting it down. Given their inability and unwillingness to empathize with those whose beliefs differ from their own, censorship will likely remain the option they endorse and, if they can, enforce in the years to come.

“Mapping the Neo-Manosphere(s)” strongly suggests that gender studies academics need to confront their own anxieties and irrational hatreds before they turn their attention to others.

Some commentators have expressed disappointment at the relative silence of feminists on the situation of Iranian women. “Isn’t feminism supposed to be about women’s liberation?” asked Iranian-born Sheila Nazarian, a Beverly Hills doctor and media personality.

Nazarian expressed shock that “with Iran, a country where women are governed by absolutist religious law that hardly treats them as human, so many Western feminists either maintain their silence or end up supporting the regime.”

Annabel Denham, columnist and senior political commentator at The Telegraph, recently expressed similar astonishment, asking “Where is the support for [Iranian women’s] glorious defiance? The Instagram carousels, the breathless declarations of ‘solidarity’ from former Harry Potter stars and pouting influencers?”

Others have noted the lack of outcry by feminist athletes, including the normally-vociferous Megan Rapinoe, over the request for asylum by members of the Iranian women’s soccer team.

The questions expose two premises: that women are Iran’s primary victims, and that the feminist movement cares about women. Both premises are false.

Tens of Thousands of Men Killed by the Islamic Regime of Iran

Iran is a bloody dictatorship that treats all of its citizens harshly, employing cruel punishments such as flogging, stoning, amputations, and blinding that decades of international condemnation have done nothing to mitigate. Focusing on the misogyny of the regime, as some pundits do, creates the false impression that men live well under the Islamic theocracy.

Male lives are cheap in Iran. Although the exact number of victims will probably never be known, we can assume that young men are the vast majority of those who have been imprisoned, tortured, and executed in the tens of thousands since January of this year. A report by the BBC noted that BBC Persia had identified “more than 200 of the thousands of people killed during Iran’s brutal crackdown.” The report focused, predictably, on female victims, but its own photo montage showed that at least 85% of those killed were male.

The Hengaw Organization for Human Rights issued a special report on Iranian human rights violations for 2025, finding that at least 1858 prisoners, probably a significant under-estimation, were executed in 2025, of whom 55 were reported to be women. The unstated reality: 97% of those executed were male.

In September of 2025, the Death Penalty Information Center reported that “In the three years since Ms. Amini’s death [Mahsa Jina Amini, whose death in police custody sparked widespread protest], Iran has exe­cut­ed at least 2,910 peo­ple, includ­ing 83 women.” That leaves at least 2,827 male victims in three years—again, 97% of the martyred. In an uprising sparked by a woman’s death and characterized by its focus on women’s freedoms, most of the victims were male.

Even a cursory glance through the Islamic Penal Code shows that punishments for various transgressions are just as harsh, or harsher, for men than for women. The punishment for a first-time offence of sodomy is execution while that for lesbianism is 80 lashes.

Punishment for fornication focuses on the male offender, as in the following description in a Death Penalty report: “According to Article 224 of the IPC: “A death sentence shall be imposed on the male party in cases of incest, fornication with their stepmother, fornication of a non-Muslim man with a Muslim woman and fornication by force or reluctance. The punishment for the female party shall be decided by other provisions concerning fornication.”

Hundreds of men have had fingers and hands amputated for theft in the past two decades, a punishment carried out using a hideous guillotine-like device that is employed without anesthetic. I could find no documented cases of a woman having a hand or fingers amputated. Men are more regularly flogged and given electrical shocks for various offences, including petty theft and peaceful protest.

It is safe to say that life is hard for both men and women in Iran, especially for those who fall afoul of the regime’s rules.

Doesn’t Feminism Support Women’s Liberation?

Yet the persistent lament about feminism is worth noting. Over decades, feminism has postured as a movement for female well-being, and most people are still surprised when feminists do not speak out clearly about women’s mistreatment by barbaric regimes.

Such commenters do not realize that while feminism does advocate for female power over men globally, it has other ideological commitments—particularly the mobilization of political hatreds and the destabilization of democratic societies—that are equally if not ultimately more important.

Annabel Denham gets at some of the truth in “This is why Western feminists are silent on Iran.” She notes that while Iranian women have been tearing off their hijabs in the streets and defying the regime, “much of the Western progressive commentariat has been out to lunch.”

Her diagnosis is that feminists gradually lost their way over the decades, focusing on easy targets at home and maintaining a simplistic ideology of western malfeasance. She argues that “The progressive instinct to avoid [Muslim] cultural offence has trumped the need to defend women’s autonomy.” For most feminist pundits, it is satisfying to agitate about “boardroom quotas, pay gaps and microaggressions.”

Further, she notes, “To acknowledge out loud and repeatedly the Islamic Republic’s misogyny, brutality and sponsorship of violence abroad would disturb their belief that all injustice stems from Western imperialism.”

In conversation with Brendan O’Neill, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has also addressed the issue of feminist evasion, explaining that western feminists are so wedded to their neo-Marxist commitments that they cannot fully sympathize with Iranian women’s demands, which tend to focus on individual rights and economic opportunities. She joined with O’Neill in condemning feminist “cowardice.”

Denham’s and Ali’s diagnoses are powerful, but the truth is even more shocking. Modern feminism is not merely keen to “avoid cultural offence.” It is not merely repulsed by so-called “choice feminism.” It is so genuinely committed to anti-western agitation that it would rather fight Trump and American conservatism than condemn the mullahs of Iran.

Feminists feel such profound revulsion for the west that they claim there is little to choose between a culture in which women are allegedly “objectified” in their bikinis and one in which they are forced to cover themselves in cloth from head to toe on penalty of police beating.

In fact, there is amongst many feminists a covert preference for the vigor, determination, and death-daring fervor that expresses itself in wanton executions and chants of death to America. Some feminists seem to revel in Islamists’ single-minded devotion to totalitarian purity.

If cornered, these ideologues will admit that some Iranian atrocities have been unfortunate, but they will quickly shift the blame to the United States, which should bear full moral accountability, they believe, for the Iranian regime’s fanaticism.

Feminism’s Anti-Western Turn

Denham notes that there was a time in the past when western feminists stood shoulder to shoulder with their female compatriots around the world. “In March 1979, as Ruhollah Khomeini seized control after the Iranian Revolution, the American feminist Kate Millett travelled to Tehran to protest against the regime’s plan to make the hijab compulsory. She marched beside Iranian women against the tyranny of pitiless old men with beards.”

Denham admires this gesture by Millett, not realizing, perhaps, that Millett suffered from mental illness most of her life and was not representative even back then of the holier-than-thou feminists who would shape the movement in her day. In her landmark Sexual Politics, Millett had been adamant that western patriarchies were significantly less intolerable than non-western ones. She condemned non-western patriarchies with relish, angrily enumerating the evils they had done and continued to do:

“The history of patriarchy presents a variety of cruelties and barbarities: the suttee execution in India, the crippling deformity of footbinding in China, the lifelong ignominy of the veil in Islam, or the widespread persecution of sequestration, the gynacium, and purdah. Phenomenon [sic] such as clitoroidectomy, clitoral incision, the sale and enslavement of women under one guise or another, involuntary and child marriages, concubinage and prostitution, still take place—the first in Africa, the latter in the Near East and Far East, the last generally” (Sexual Politics, 1970, p. 46).

Millett might then have been shocked to understand how quickly American feminists like herself would learn to refrain from criticizing African, Islamic, or other non-western cultural practices. As feminism became increasingly fervent and utopian, it became less interested in the practical conditions of real women and more interested in ideological purity inspired by Marxist and Maoist anti-westernism.

The Shame of White Feminists Before Their Third-World Compatriots

As early as 1979, when feminist leaders Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan co-authored an article objecting to the practice of removing the clitoris in women and girls, a practice carried out in many Islamic and African countries, these two canny feminist leaders were well-attuned to the racial sensitivity of the subject. They went out of their way to stress how fully they empathized with non-western peoples, including the African and Arab men and women who preferred to continue the practice.

“The situation is further complicated,” they wrote, “by the understandable suspicion on the part of many African and Arab governments and individuals that Western interest in the matter is motivated not by humanitarian concerns but by a racist or neocolonialist desire to eradicate indigenous cultures” (“The International Crime of Genital Mutilation,” Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, p. 336).

Steinem and Morgan were quick to accept that previous Western concern over clitoridectomy must have been racist and neocolonialist—why? Because a Kenyan leader had said it was. They wrote,

“As Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first president, noted in his book, Facing Mount Kenya, the key mobilization of many forces for Kenyan independence from the British was in direct response to attempts by Church of Scotland missionaries in 1929 to suppress clitoridectomy. Patriarchal authorities, whether tribal or imperial, have always considered as central to their freedom and power the right to define what is done with ‘their’ women” (pp. 336-37).

Without providing any evidence or explaining the logic of their conclusion, Steinem and Morgan accepted that the Christian missionaries who objected to cutting off little girls’ clitorises—which was, after all, the feminists’ own position—were motivated by western patriarchal arrogance rather than compassion or principle. They thus agreed that the missionaries who sought to end clitoridectomy were at least as objectionable as those who wished it to continue.

This was not moral relativism, as it is sometimes assumed to be. It was the acceptance of the moral inferiority of western culture, specifically its Christian inheritance and individualist ethos.

Soon it became forbidden for feminists to admit that white men had created freer and better societies, including better for women, than existed in other parts of the world. In Looking White People in the Eye (1998), feminist academic Sherene Razack let white women know that preferring the rights, affluence, and culture of western societies was a form of white supremacism. White men were responsible for imperialism, racism, capitalist oppression, homophobia, and Islamophobia, and unless white women denounced these in turn, they too would be classed as imperialists, racists, oppressors, homophobes, and Islamophobes.

Razack’s words dripped with angry sarcasm as she described white women’s bias and treachery in recognizing the goodness of white men:

“Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh men confirm handily the superiority of Western men …. White women’s responses to articles on Muslim women and the veil include the sentiment that in comparison to Eastern women, Western women should consider their own men as gems of enlightenment and kindness” (83).

In other words, white women were wrong to be grateful to live in a western country or to trust their own fathers and brothers more than they trusted foreigners. Because white women could not bear to be accused of complicity in racism and imperialism, they found themselves willing to agree that white male systems were the ultimate origin of all suffering and injustice.

That is why Narges Bajoghli, assistant professor at John Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies, writing in 2023 about the women’s movement in Iran, made direct parallels between Iranian women’s resistance to the Islamic regime and the #MeToo and LGBTQ+ movements in the United States. All were named as protests against “patriarchal control and domination,” allegedly rampant and resurgent, unvaryingly and indistinguishably, across the globe.

Bajoghli made no distinction between the treatment of women and homosexuals in Iran and in the United States, retreating into vagaries and historical misrepresentation in order to pretend that women and sexual minorities in the United States are harshly persecuted.

In the same manner, author Andrea D’Atri, a writer for Left Voice and founder of the Argentinian women’s group Bread and Roses, refused to say that the defeat of the Islamic regime by American and Israeli forces could be a good thing for the Iranian people. While admitting that the Iranian regime is repressive and harsh, D’Atri still called on feminists to “fight for the defeat of Trump and Netanyahu in Iran” and claimed preposterously that women’s and LGBTQ+ rights are equally under threat by “Far Right” forces in America and elsewhere.

“Trump, the Far Right, and their allies, such as Milei in Argentina, attack women’s and LGBTQ+ rights every day in their respective countries; they spew hate against feminism and exude misogyny in their government policies while displaying crude machismo in their public and private lives.”

**

Clearly, we should stop expecting that feminists will be reasonable in their assessments of national or international affairs. They feel as their political masters direct them to feel, with little energy left over for independent thought. They will certainly never express any appreciation for a country that tolerates and protects them.

These are not mistakes or confusion. Feminism really does support the enemies of the west, believing that these enemies may ultimately help to bring about the fall of an abhorred western patriarchy. Feminists may not agree on the precise outlines of the new utopian collective, but they are keen to try the experiment. Ordinary men and women’s suffering pales before their ruthlessly perfectionist vision.

“Most of the men I interviewed started out as liberals. Some still are. But to feel the weight of society’s disfavor can be disorienting.”—Jacob Savage

It can also be clarifying.

The fur is flying after the publication of Jacob Savage’s “The Lost Generation,” which Matt Walsh called a permission piece, a signal that cultural leaders can or must now admit, within carefully circumscribed limits and without accountability, of course, what the rest of us have known most of our lives: that discrimination against white men has been rampant in North America, with the result that at least one generation of such men were prevented from contributing their talents to key fields such as law, medicine, science, policing, popular culture, media, academia, reporting, Big Tech, business, and many more.

The fallout in substance abuse, screens addiction, nihilism, anger, loss of trust, and self-destruction has been massive, and is even now not being publicly confronted. Whether anything will be done remains an open question. Savage has little to suggest in this regard, putting emphasis on his own lack of anger at women and racial minorities. Only the older white men who allegedly engineered his exclusion—the safely demonizable Boomers—come in for direct criticism in his essay.

**

For years I have marveled at the patience of young men and wondered why a backlash didn’t come. I have spoken with many men about their sadness and anger at being passed over for opportunities and recognition. The whole of it can never be captured in raw numbers of the sort that Savage and others have supplied. It was relentless and exhausting, both subtle and crude. It was in the little and the big things that were consistently withheld: the letters of recommendation, school-leaving prizes, university admissions, apprenticeships, bursaries, scholarships, speaking engagements, opportunities for collaboration, appointments, public recognition, job offers, promotions, distinctions, workshop invitations, and many more; it was in what one could write about, what one could research, what counted as significant, whose lives mattered, what stories could be told. It was reflected in how attention was or was not paid, the casual misandry, the allowable jokes, the manner in which the entire culture turned against an agreed-upon target.

I vividly remember a small example, a talk by Milo Yiannopoulos that was disrupted at DePaul University back in 2016, as so many such talks were. Some black protesters surged onto the stage, taunting Yiannopoulos and flaunting their righteous victim-power. The camera panned over the audience members, who were almost entirely young white men, sitting in the hundreds while the speaker they had assembled to hear was harassed and silenced. Later, the President of DePaul condemned the disruption, but not before making clear that he hated Yiannopoulos, disagreed with every single one of his puerile utterances, and blamed him for the ruckus. The slap in the face to the students couldn’t have been clearer. I wondered then where they found their patience.

These are the same young men who would go on to find doors to employment and opportunity closed in the name of fairness and progress, who were lectured on their bigotry and privilege.

The Savage essay is shocking only in that anyone could pretend to be shocked by it. All those who worked in the fields he mentions—the publishing industry, Hollywood, academia—were perfectly aware. Many of them participated willingly, purchasing their moral righteousness on the backs of the men whose dreams they destroyed. These men had it made clear to them that social justice would be achieved at their expense, so that others in comfortable, highly paid positions could hold their anti-racist and anti-sexist heads up high. The few white men who complained were scorned and excoriated. Cry me a river, white boy! Equality feels like oppression to those who are accustomed to privilege. And so on. It was a con of massive proportions, smug and triumphant, leveled at men who were not privileged, and often leveled by those, women of all races, who had repeatedly been given special advantages, some of whom never legitimately earned anything.

I used to post academic job advertisements on Twitter that were women-only or Indigenous-only, etc. (for a partial list, see here). Always there would be a flurry of responses asking if they were legal. In the academic departments where I worked, there was no pretense of hiding what was going on because there was no question of any illegality. Universities and other government-funded corporations and enterprises in Canada were encouraged to practice so-called equity hiring.

Excluding white men didn’t require any subterfuge; the difficulty was in hiring any white men at all. (Usually, one had to explain in writing to one’s higher administrator why a woman or minority ethnic had not been selected.) The white man had to be demonstrably head-and-shoulders better even to have a shot, and even being much better didn’t guarantee success. Those involved in the hiring weren’t always honest about what they were doing either. I heard the rationales many times: how this female applicant with her very thin track record and unfinished dissertation was actually doing better work—more innovative, more cutting-edge, more in line with our department’s interests—than the male academic with a prestigious book and a dozen peer-reviewed articles in top-ranked scholarly journals.

I raised objections repeatedly to no avail. Most of my colleagues, if pressed, admitted that it wasn’t quite right. But what could they do? They didn’t want to go to war with the acknowledged leaders of their workplaces. A few did go to war, and lost. This was, as I’ve already said, established policy. It wasn’t a whim, an occasional outburst of intersectional feminist zeal. And once a hiring practice is instituted, there is no longer any need for those in favor to defend it.

The truth was that many people—even including a lot of young white men—were staunchly in favor. The policy didn’t come out of nowhere. It was the result of decades of anti-white and anti-male propaganda that made it clear to white men that they were in polite society at all only by the grace of the formerly victimized. As white men, they were the inheritors of an oppressive world, and a better one would be forged only through extensive power sharing and diversity of experience, which had to be gerrymandered into existence as quickly as possible. They would need to take a big step back and let the formerly marginalized, those possessed of moral purity and the capacity to empathize, take the helm. Many white men accepted this platform; some were enthusiastic about it, some grudging.

It would be satisfying to take Savage’s article and rub it in the noses of every single person, almost always a pious feminist woman, who made a career of claiming that she had to work twice as hard as any man even to have a chance at a career, poor-wonderful-me. These always pooh-poohed our pointing out the reality of the intolerable injustice, and the harm to merit-based structures, that was being done by decades of ham-fisted, closed-minded, smugly self-congratulatory equity hiring. Of course, it wouldn’t make any difference. The capacity of these people for self-delusion and their determination not to see the damaging consequences of the policies they championed is fathomless.

**

Most people who have discussed Savage’s essay accept his time frame: that the exclusion of white men took place mainly over the past ten to fifteen years. But this is not true. It has been going on for much longer than that, as Nathan Glazer made clear in his comprehensive Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy, first published in 1975 and updated in 1987. Government initiatives to provide jobs for women and racial minorities, particularly blacks, were rooted in the equal rights legislation of the 1960s, implemented later that decade and aggressively expanded in the 1970s and 1980s. The National Organization for Women under the leadership of Betty Friedan, for example, brought a lawsuit against the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to force it to comply with federal legislation, and sued the country’s 1300 largest corporations for alleged sex discrimination.

Anyone wishing to read a detailed prehistory of what Savage has chronicled can also consult Martin Loney’s extensively documented The Pursuit of Division: Race, Gender, and Preferential Hiring in Canada (1998), which shows how what was called equity hiring in Canada spread across areas such as the police force, firefighting, the civil service, crown corporations, law, teaching, academia, and elsewhere, beginning in the 1980s. What Glazer’s and Loney’s research shows is that discrimination against white men in employment is far more deeply embedded than most people realize and has affected many more men than is currently recognized.

It is ridiculous to castigate Boomer white men, as it seems popular now to do, for allegedly implementing and benefiting from diversity policies. The last thing that should be encouraged is for younger white men to turn their anger on older white men. Many of these older men themselves faced active discrimination, psychological warfare, divorce-rape, and immiseration. Every organ of the culture told them it was time to change, get with it, stop being Archie Bunker, recognize the superior merits of the women and racial minorities their people had allegedly oppressed for so long. White women were by far the majority and most enthusiastic architects and proponents of equity hiring, bullied in turn by the black and brown women with whom they originally formed their alliance against white men (and all men, with a few exceptions).

Older white men may have secured (tenuous) positions of power, but they had no power in themselves as white men. Most of them knew they could find themselves disgraced, friendless, and jobless as the result of an unpopular decision or an unguarded statement. Accusations of sexual misconduct to take such men out of their positions were not confined to millennial males.

I was in the academic job market in 1997, and diversity hiring was already commonplace then. Everyone knew it was going on, and it was signaled both explicitly and implicitly in the advertisements that encouraged applications from women and visible minorities. My friend Steve Brule remembers when affirmative action was brought in at the large chemical company where he worked in 1984. At the beginning, it was said that these programs would be time-limited, lasting only for a short season. Instead, they lasted for well over 40 years and are still going strong.

It is foolish to imagine that such discrimination is now going to lie down and die. There have been a number of occasions over the last few years in which that was confidently predicted (remember Claudine Gay?) and did not occur. Already the diversity advocates, who are legion, are marshalling their counter-arguments and nit-picking the evidence, finding (or lying about) the ways in which what Savage described hasn’t really happened, recalibrating numbers, rationalizing and justifying them. Thousands of academics will spend years joining forces to discredit claims about discrimination, recasting them as a MAGA or Groyper lament and a dangerous attack on the legitimate (but still inadequate!) gains made by valiant women and long-oppressed racial minorities. Recently for The Washington Post, Megan McArdle, in an ostensibly critical article, is still playing with false justifications and outlandish untruths, saying the following about the rationale for equity hiring:

“ … One could say of course it’s unfair, but repairing the legacy of slavery and sexism is a hard problem, and sometimes hard problems have unfair solutions. It wasn’t fair to round up huge numbers of men born between 1914 and 1927 and send them off to fight the Nazis, but that was the only way to win.

One might argue that, but I haven’t seen anyone do so. No one seems brave enough to state baldly that we should penalize White men born in 1988 for hiring decisions that were made in 1985 by another White guy who was born in 1930. Instead what I’ve seen is a lot of deflection.”

What bizarre nonsense, what spurious claims even if her point is that such logic is ugly. Discrimination in favor of white men has been illegal since 1964, and affirmative action/equity hiring was already fully in place by the mid-1980s when the “white guy who was born in 1930” was allegedly discriminating in his hiring practices. As McArdle inadvertently shows, we’ve been operating on the basis of deliberately-perpetrated false beliefs for years, beliefs that the intelligentsia adhered to and promulgated.

**

I don’t know Jacob Savage, so I don’t want to impute motives or political allegiance. But there is a tone of resignation and do-gooder acceptance in the essay that is unwise and self-defeating. White men have every right to be furious about what has been done to them in the countries their forefathers built: not only the employment discrimination, though that is bad enough, but the entirety of the belittlement, mockery, defamation, demonization, and dehumanization; the steady marshalling of hate speech, dishonest claims, unfair policies, fake research, and false representations that have justified and mandated their degradation and dispossession.

It has mostly been done by intersectional feminist leaders and their so-called anti-racist allies. The attack on white men has not been, as we were so often told, a necessary sacrifice for the greater good, but a disastrous waste and warping of human dignity. White men should not go quietly into the night—the loss to the larger society in talent, energy, intelligence and leadership potential is inestimable—and I don’t think they will.

Their forefathers built North America, and North America needs them.

In the wake of the grudging admission of what has been done, there is the possibility of a more concerted resistance than has yet been marshalled. John Carter, for example, mentions various possibilities in his analysis, including grassroots public education, community organizing, political activism, large-scale investigations, class action lawsuits, the dismantling of DEI programs and university sinecures, repeal of unjust laws, and continued (digital) guerrilla warfare. All of these are worth pursuing. We must also correct falsehoods with facts and call out bigotry when we see it at every opportunity.

What is most urgently needed is a larger cultural renaissance in which the extraordinary achievements of white men will be fully recognized and honored, including by the women who have so often been the beneficiaries of their hard work, ingenuity, intellectual curiosity, individual enterprise, collaborative genius, humanity, and self-sacrificing generosity. This is a signal opportunity for white men to become aware of their identity as white men, despite the predictable arguments that will be launched against that. What is clearer than ever is that we cannot rely on those who dislike white men and made a living slandering them to correct the injustices white men have suffered.

A friend wrote a couple of days ago to say that he had seen shiny new copies of works by feminist author Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005) in Munro’s Books, one of Canada’s premier independent bookstores. One of the books was positioned on a shelf with the cover facing out to indicate that it was being showcased.

It is both shocking and unsurprising that Picador Books decided to reprint three of Dworkin’s texts in the past year, calling her a “prescient and visionary writer” who was “ahead of her time.” Anti-male paranoia is a sanctioned, cultivated taste more popular now, perhaps, than ever before, and Andrea Dworkin is its most notorious propagandist.

Known for her physical bulk, impassioned rhetoric, unkempt hair, and lesbian-identified overalls, Dworkin was a feminist icon in the 1980s and 90s, loved and hated in equal measure. No one did more to outline and consolidate the modern feminist understanding of sex than she, writing on the subject obsessively and with unparalleled fervor in books with titles such as Woman Hating (1974) and Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981). The MeToo movement is almost unimaginable without the influence of Dworkin’s pronouncements.

Like other radical feminists, Dworkin wrote about rape, pornography, and prostitution, but her special focus was the degradation for women of sex itself: regular sex, the commonly accepted, normalized indignity that men allegedly inflict on women every day. Tempering her words in the white-heat of her revulsion, Dworkin became feminism’s anti-sex evangelist.

**

Sex, Dworkin believed, embodied nothing less than men’s hatred of everything female: “Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women” (p. 175). This is the thesis of her most representative book, Intercourse, which was first published in 1987 when Dworkin was 41 years old. Dworkin’s characterization of heterosexual sex as the ultimate enactment of misogyny has had an enduring impact on North American culture.

Intercourse set out to illuminate, through select readings of literary texts, what Dworkin believed to be a constant of male culture: the “hatred of women, unexplained, undiagnosed, mostly unacknowledged, that pervades sexual practice and sexual passion” (pp. 175-76). The phrase she most often used in the book to refer to intercourse was “the fuck,” which was meant to signify the raw dehumanization that supposedly characterized it.

Dworkin nominated herself the expert on male contempt for women because she had been its victim. “Specifically, am I saying that I know more than men about fucking?” she asked defiantly in the book’s preface, and answered, “Yes, I am […] the way anyone used knows the user” (p. xxxi).

While she also claimed in the preface that the book “does not say that all men are rapists or that all intercourse is rape” (p. xxxii), she does essentially say that, if not in quite those words. As she asserted only a page after the denial, “Intercourse conveys […] what it means that men—and now boys—feel entitled to come into the privacy of a woman’s body in a context of inequality” (p. xxxiv).

In another segment, she clarified that most, even the vast majority, of men were sexually abusive. She charged that men object to feminist criticism of pornography and prostitution because “So many men use these ignoble routes of access and domination to get laid,” that “without them the number of fucks would so significantly decrease that men might nearly be chaste” (p. 61). The implication was that men who objected to her arguments about the omnipresence of sexual exploitation were themselves sexual abusers who didn’t like the thought of their exploitation being curtailed.

This was the Dworkin who made feminists swoon with admiration: bombastic, hyperbolic, and incandescent with accusatory rage.

**

Where did the rage come from? In middle age, Dworkin made a bizarre allegation about having been drugged and raped in a Paris hotel room; even devoted admirers found it difficult to believe—and it capped a lifetime in which Dworkin claimed to have been frequently abused by men. She said she had been molested or raped at around 9 years of age, later abused by New York City prison doctors at age 18 after her arrest during a Vietnam War protest, and then badly beaten and sexually tortured many times by a man she had married in Amsterdam in the early 1970s. There are no records to substantiate her claims.

Though she escaped the allegedly abusive husband and carried on a life of writing and advocacy in the United States, where she became closely associated with feminist leaders such as Susan Brownmiller, Gloria Steinem, and Catharine MacKinnon, Dworkin’s feminist advocacy was always distinguished from these other leaders’ by its unmitigated anti-male animus.

Most feminist leaders have been undisturbed by Dworkin’s fury, justifying it as understandable and necessary, even inspiring. “People who […] raised their eyebrows at her supposed extremism or her intransigence or her fire took secret glee from that,” feminist activist Robin Morgan has stated, adding that, like Malcolm X, Dworkin’s was “the militant voice, […] the voice that would dare say what nobody else was saying . . . and it can’t help but say it because it is speaking out of such incredible personal pain” (quoted in the foreword, Intercourse, pp. xix-xx).

That Dworkin had pain seems undeniable—she was eating to fill some kind of emotional void—but whether its sources were as she claimed has never been ascertained.

**

Many of Dworkin’s friends and admirers were surprised to discover upon her death, in 2005, that for 30 years, she had lived with and eventually married a man, John Stoltenberg. Stoltenberg claimed that Dworkin’s gender radicalism saved his life and allowed him to be the man he didn’t want to be. He published a book in 1989 called Refusing to Be a Man, which he dedicated to Dworkin. In turn, she often spoke of herself as a lesbian.

As an antipornography activist, Stoltenberg used to offer college workshops in which he would encourage men to assume the positions in which women were posed for pornography in order to make the men feel the women’s alleged humiliation (Intercourse, p. xxiii). The very fact of Stoltenberg’s masculinity-evacuating adoration undermines much of what Dworkin claimed about male nature but that, of course, hasn’t diminished her reputation as a truth-teller.

In the foreword to Intercourse, feminist journalist Ariel Levy claimed that “Dworkin’s profound and unique legacy was to examine the meaning of the act most of us take to be fundamental to sex.” Levy hedged that, “If you disagree with her answers, you may still find yourself indebted to her for helping you discover your own” (p. xv). This was Levy’s attempt to distance herself from Dworkin’s anti-male generalizations while still praising the author’s insights.

But Dworkin never examined anything: on the contrary, she pontificated, hectored, accused, eviscerated, and damned from her self-chosen pulpit as the excoriating prophet of inherent male sin, and her encouragement to thousands of other women to hate with equal passion remains her most destructive legacy, one that is as disabling and poisonous as it is patently false.

In Intercourse, Dworkin broke every rule of responsible literary and cultural analysis, reading works of literature as if they directly reflected the author’s life or opinions. If the author described a character who hated women, that must mean that the author hated women and endorsed such hatred. If the author described a character who hated men, that showed how despicable men were.

Women were never admitted to be capable of sadism, cruelty, callous indifference, or selfishness. “Women have a vision of love that includes men as human too,” she bragged (p. 162). Men couldn’t even manage a negative virtue: “When will they choose not to despise us?” (p. 177).

Throughout Intercourse, Dworkin always employed the most reductive explanation possible for all male attitudes and responses, as for example when she claimed that “Most women are not distinct, private individuals to most men; and so the fuck tends toward the class assertion of dominance. Women live inside this reality of being owned and being fucked” (p. 83). And, “The hatred of women is a source of sexual pleasure for men in its own right” (p. 175). And so on and on.

The writing is occasionally witty, but more often erratic, repetitive, and feverish, with chains of assertions carried along by Dworkin’s exultant, self-perpetuating anger. It is testimony to the delusional bitterness of feminist ideology that such ranting has been taken as perceptive, and one need only read testimonials upon her death and glowing commendations of her legacy to see how many feminists are still unashamed to admire Dworkin’s openly expressed hatred.

At times in Intercourse, Dworkin suggested that a loving sexuality between men and women might be possible. But the only concrete example she was willing to provide was self-admittedly female-supremacist: it was a model imagined by 19^th century American feminist Victoria Woodhull, whom Dworkin called “the great advocate of the female-first model of intercourse” for whom “women had a natural right—a right that inhered in the nature of intercourse itself—to be entirely self-determining, the controlling and dominating partner, the one whose desire determined the event, the one who both initiates and is the final authority on what the sex is and will be” (p. 171).

Here we see the deliberately asymmetrical logic of feminist advocacy: only when women control sexuality entirely can it approach “equality.” At other times in the book (see especially pp. 156-158), Dworkin seemed to assert that the physical reality of intercourse—which involved an alleged violation of the integrity of the female body—made it innately unequal, and therefore always to some degree an indictment of male power over women.

**

In 1983, 500 men gathered in St. Paul, Minnesota, to hear Dworkin give a speech at the Midwest Regional Conference of the National Organization for Changing Men (now the National Organization for Men Against Sexism). The speech was called “I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There is No Rape.” As the men might have expected, Dworkin pulled no punches, granted them no exemptions as pro-feminist men who wanted to “change” men.

She ripped into them, telling them that if they thought the problem of misogyny, abuse, and exploitation was “out there,” they were wrong. It was “in you,” she told them. “The pimps and the warmongers speak for you” (“I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce,” p. 165). And she told them that as men they were full of “contempt and hostility in [their] attitudes towards women and children” (p. 166).

She harangued them, derided them, and threatened them that if they couldn’t end rape at least for one day they could never claim to believe in equality or to care about women. They had not ended rape thus far because they clearly did not really want to. And therefore, she said, “The shame of men in front of women [was] an appropriate response both to what men do and to what men do not do” (p. 170). Until they could “end rape” and call off their side, as she called it, their shame and guilt “were not good enough” (p. 170).

That was what Dworkin had to offer men: shame and guilt, endless denunciation, and the impossible task of ending rape, which she claimed was “so little” to ask.

**

Male followers of Dworkin could also live like her self-declaredly gay husband, writing articles and books about how they had renounced manhood, encouraging other men to do the same. Even then, they would have to look every day, metaphorically, at least, as Stoltenberg had actually looked, at the words “Dead men don’t rape” (Intercourse, p. xxii), the poster that Dworkin had placed above the desk where she wrote her furious fulminations.

No wonder Stoltenberg could not bear to be a man. Even renouncing manhood was not enough for Andrea Dworkin and the legions of her followers.

I am sorry, but satisfied, to see Dworkin’s books reprinted. They offer a powerful revelation of feminism’s black heart.

“Even today most people will refuse to believe that one of feminism’s main aims is, and always was, to give women the power to rid their families of men.”—William Collins, The Empathy Gap (2019)

“‘The person who is least likely to abuse a child is a married father,’ notes Canadian Senator Anne Cools. ‘The person who is most likely is a single, unmarried mother.’” — quoted in Stephen Baskerville, Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage and the Family (2007)

**

Reaction in North America has so far been muted to what is being hailed as a significant victory for anti-father groups in Britain.

As reported by The Guardian newspaper in almost giddily triumphant prose, “The family courts will no longer work on the presumption that having contact with both parents is in the best interests of a child.”

Only time will tell how the new law, not yet formalized, will impact the family courts, where discrimination against fathers is already rampant. The government announcement is, at the very least, staggeringly symbolic of a new phase in the anti-father onslaught, with judges now to be directed, so it seems, to exclude fathers from their children’s lives in as many cases as the mothers wish. A simple accusation will suffice. The Guardian declares that,

“The move has been heralded as ‘groundbreaking’ by family lawyers and campaigners who have long argued that the ‘pro-contact culture’ in the family courts places the rights of abusive fathers over the safety and wellbeing of children.”

Naturally, not a single non-feminist advocate for fathers or children is quoted in the article, the wording of which doesn’t even attempt to hide its misandrist bias. The article alleges that “Abusers have long used the family courts as a way of retaining control over their ex-partners, while women who raise domestic abuse in the courts have often been subject to counter allegations that they are attempting to ‘alienate’ the child from the father.”

The article does not admit the well-documented fact that mothers are the most frequent perpetrators of child abuse and child homicide (see, for example, p. 65, perpetrators of child fatalities). Neither does the article acknowledge that women do indeed lie about abuse , precisely as a means to sway custody outcomes in their favor. Moreover, women do alienate children from their fathers, often with the assistance of family court orders. Alienation is a recognized form of child abuse.

Feminists quoted in the article admit that this is merely an important “first step” in their long march to total father-exclusion.

**

It is a truism that feminists seek to destroy the father-led family and have long worked to do so through anti-father propaganda, legal chicanery, and evidence-free allegations of abuse.

Those who have not read feminists’ own words on this subject may have difficulty appreciating the depth of their desire to deny fathers any legally- or socially-recognized familial role.

Elizabeth Gould Davis’s The First Sex (1971) provides a compelling example. Written at the height of the Second Wave of feminism, and published three years before the author’s death by suicide, it was a popular female-supremacist treatise. In it, Davis rhapsodized about goddess worship and female power in the ancient world, detailing a time when societies allegedly recognized and revered women as the superior sex.

In these societies, according to mythographer Robert Graves, “Men feared, adored, and obeyed the matriarch” (quoted p. 121). In thrall to women, men were peripheral, their roles as fathers non-existent: “[The woman] took lovers, but for her pleasure,” writes Davis, “not to provide her children with a father, a commodity early woman saw no need for” (p. 121). In this matriarchal sexual utopia, “Sexual morals were a matter of personal conscience, not of law” (p. 116), and the sole familial bond was between the mother and her offspring.

A chapter on “Mother-Right” made the case for a return to such a system, explaining that fathers contribute nothing good to their children’s lives. “The father is not at all necessary for a child’s happiness and development” (p. 117). Even children allegedly know this to be so: “In nearly every child’s experience, it is the mother, not the father, who loves all the children equally, stands by them without regard to their worth or lack of it, and forgives without reservation” (p. 118).

The father’s irrelevance is rooted, Davis explained, in men’s inability to love. “Maternal love was not only the first kind of love. For many millennia it was the only kind” (p. 119). Man has merely “learned to appreciate and be grateful for woman’s love, even though he was not emotionally equipped to return it in kind” (p. 119). She quoted Freudian psychoanalyst Theodor Reik to support her view that when men speak of love, they are actually speaking of a mere ‘scrotal frenzy’” (p. 119).

This rhapsody to female power and assertion of male uselessness continues for hundreds of pages in Davis’s ludicrous yet impressively-detailed book. Many feminists at this period made similar claims, attacking fatherhood and calling for the destruction of the patriarchal family. Author and activist Kate Millett, for example, argued in Sexual Politics (1970) that women’s oppression could not be ended without a transformation of “patriarchy’s chief institution […] the family” (p. 33).

In the same year, feminist radical Shulamith Firestone excoriated the patriarchal nuclear family as the “most rigid class/caste system in existence” (The Dialectic of Sex, p. 15). Two years earlier, would-be killer Valerie Solanas had expressed the sentiment crudely in her SCUM Manifesto: “The effect of fathers, in sum, has been to corrode the world with maleness. The male has a negative Midas touch—everything he touches turns to shit” (p. 45).

These were not simply sad cranks penning screeds in cat-piss-scented rooms (though many of them were mentally ill). They were acknowledged leaders of a movement that would, within a few decades, shape and control the core institutions of western civilization.

**

Elizabeth Davis’s encomium to the mother as “the origin of all culture, of every virtue, of every nobler aspect of existence” (p. 119)—with men as, at best, occasional vehicles for female pleasure—is reflected less acerbically but no less emphatically in many popular representations today. We find it in the romping ABBA-tribute musical Mamma Mia (2008), in which three men, prior suitors to matriarch Donna and each a potential father to Donna’s daughter Sophie, are summoned by Sophie to her wedding in the hope that she will recognize her father when she sees him.

At the comic climax of the movie, with each man in attendance to assert his paternity in front of the assembled wedding guests, Sophie’s mother admits that she doesn’t know (and doesn’t care, it seems) which man made her pregnant. Yes, she slept with all three over a period of a few days, and never told any of them about the pregnancy.

The men accept this disappointing news without protest. “Being a third of your dad is great by me,” declares one, and the others concur. All three will do their surrogate part to love Sophie, staking no claim and expressing no further interest in their actual paternity. This is how good men should be, the movie suggests. After all, Sophie doesn’t truly need a father (and neither did her mother need a husband); a previous outburst (“I don’t want my children growing up not knowing who their father is!”) is quickly forgotten.

The men return to their comic roles as past—or continuing, as in Sam’s case—lovers of Donna, offering sexual and affectional tribute (“You were the first girl I ever loved”) with no legal or personal claim on her child. Here is Davis’s matriarchal fantasy in the form of a much-loved modern musical.

It need hardly be said that there would never be a movie, comic or otherwise, in which a normal daughter did not feel a deep need to know which of three women was her real mother. It is also impossible to imagine any—fictional or otherwise—mother being willing to share a claim to motherhood with two other women. Only fatherhood is regularly treated with such jocularity and indifference.

**

Against such father-dismissive and, indeed, father-eliminationist voices, many lone men and organizations of men have fought to assert the reality of paternal love.

These are the men who slept in their cars for months because they had spent every penny and more fighting to see their kids. These men defended themselves in court, often for years, against baseless claims of violence or “coercive control.” They paid exorbitant child support, facing prison time if they fell behind. They endured their ex-wives’ contempt and avarice, and saw them allowed to break the law with impunity. They experienced overwhelming stress and sadness.

I know a Colorado man who lived for two years without hot water in his house because his spare money paid his lawyer and his (remarried) ex-wife so that he could be granted one overnight visit every second weekend with his two young daughters, whom he hadn’t seen unsupervised for five years. I knew an Ontario man, a collector of antique guns, who was ejected from his home and barred from re-entering (except for one half hour to gather belongings under police supervision) because his wife claimed gun-induced terror, despite none being operational. I knew a California man who committed suicide after he was unable to reconnect with his adult daughter, alienated through divorce. His most bitter memory had been being barred from the funeral of the grand-daughter he had never met.

Nearly everyone now knows at least one man like this. The machinery of the judicial kidnapping of their children and their court-ordered exclusion, helplessness, immiseration, criminalization, and incarceration has been magisterially detailed by Stephen Baskerville.

Many fathers’ groups have lobbied for decades to secure fathers’ legal right to be involved with their children, amassing peer-revied data showing that children do better with both parents present: they are less likely to experience mental illness and juvenile delinquency, less likely to commit crimes or join gangs, more likely to finish school, less likely to abuse alcohol and drugs, and less likely to commit suicide or self-harm. Against fierce opposition, such organizations have achieved significant success in the United States in helping to shepherd statutes through state legislatures that encourage judges to award shared custody to parents after divorce.

They have done this in spite of the mythic power of motherhood in our culture, which feminists have ably exploited.

**

It is a popular belief that until quite recently, children were legally considered the “property” of their fathers, with mothers left powerless and bereft. Some of feminists’ boundless animus may even be justified by that belief.

In Sexual Politics, Millett alleged that throughout history, fathers had “nearly total ownership over wife or wives and children” (p. 33). Professor of theology Mary Daly attacked fathers’ alleged totalitarian power, claiming that the image of God as a heavenly father sanctified men’s malign possession of women and children: “If God is male; then the male is God” (p. 19).

Many took as gospel-truth feminist leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s assertion in the Declaration of Sentiments (written at the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention in 1848) that, amidst various other crimes, men exercised a cruel power over their wives in divorce, denying them custody of their children. Stanton wrote that Man “has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes of divorce; in cases of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given; as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women—the law, in all cases, going upon the false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands.”

But it is not so.

As attorney Tom James demonstrates in his must-read The History of Custody Law (2014), assertions about fathers’ historical paternity rights, though almost universally believed, are simply untrue. For centuries, mothers have had the upper hand in child custody.

American courts never recognized a father’s paternity right as primary. In fact, some of the earliest American court decisions regarding child custody were resolved in the mother’s favor (see p. 127). Father’s rights language predominated only in cases of dispute between parents and non-parents, when custody suits were pursued in the name of the father.

In cases between a separating father and mother, courts always weighed issues related to the “best interests” of the child. In theory, as James explains, courts pursued a “general preference for the spouse who was not at fault for the breakdown of the marriage” (p. 115), yet in cases involving young children, courts almost always preferred to award custody to the mother.

A father could be denied custody even for offences that were not of his making, such as being unable to financially support his family (p. 129). A father’s having expressed doubt about a child’s paternity “was regarded as paternal misconduct so egregious and vile as to justify stripping him of custody—apparently even if he had valid reasons for his doubts” (p. 129). One father was denied custody merely because “he had made the assertion, in his petition, that as a father he had a superior right to custody of his children” (p. 130).

Many states enacted “tender years” statutes in the 19^th century, which formalized what had already been the guiding assumption. Tender years doctrine held that

“Maternal sole custody was in the best interests of children of tender years, i.e., young sons [usually of 10 years or less], children of any age who were in poor health, and, in some states, daughters of any age. For older children, courts generally regarded the child’s preference as controlling. In some states, paternal custody was assumed to be in the best interests of an older, healthy male child of married parents, provided he had not expressed a preference to reside with the mother” (p. 121).

It is evident from this definition that there were many cases in which a mother was assumed to be the most appropriate parent. There were far fewer in which the father was assumed to be.

Even when the mother was the one at fault for the breakdown of the marriage—as, for example, if she had committed adultery—many courts overlooked the marital indiscretion (p. 138) and “regularly denied fathers custody of their young children on the basis that caring for young children was the exclusive province of mothers” (p. 143).

Such maternal preference was only strengthened by the rise of the nineteenth-century feminist movement, which under cover of remedying women’s legal disadvantages actively sought female legal “primacy” (p. 152). Stanton and other feminist leaders worked to enshrine married women’s rights in law, including their right to their children (see pp. 153-55). The tender years doctrine remained in effect for most of the twentieth century, and even once formally revoked, continued to be the main influence in custody decisions, even in cases where the mother was shown to be both abusive and immoral.

So much for the father’s “ownership” of his children.

**

There was a relatively brief period in the 1970s and early 1980s when some feminist activists supported the removal of maternal preference, advocating gender neutrality in divorce proceedings.

Most feminist advocates at that time saw the maternal preference as a cultural restriction that put a brake on women’s professional opportunities. Moreover, father involvement was thought by some feminists to be necessary to socialist-style parenting. Radical feminist Robin Morgan, for example, advocated a “communal family, where children are raised by men as well as women, and by more than one pair; where parenthood is perhaps a biological fact but not a property-defined relationship” (Going Too Far, p. 105).

Movies such as Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), in which Ted learns what it means to be Billie’s father after his wife leaves him, gave expression to the ideology of gender equality. In the movie’s pivotal courtroom scene, the once-insensitive and career-obsessed but now empathetic and self-aware Ted acknowledges that women should not be discriminated against in their search for professional fulfillment. But by the same logic, he insists, men should not be discriminated against in their quest to be involved fathers. “I’d like to know what law it is that says a woman is a better parent simply by virtue of her sex,” he states. Then he speaks directly to his ex-wife about his love for Billie: “We built a life together. If you destroy that, it may be irreparable. Don’t do that, Joanna. Don’t do it again.”

Partly feminist-compliant, partly feminist-critical (“How much courage does it take to walk out on your kid?” Ted asks early on), the movie delivered a fairy-tale ending in which the bias of the family court judge, who awards sole custody to Joanna, is countered by Joanna herself, who realizes just in time that her son needs his father. “I came here to take my son home, and I realize he already is home,” she tells Ted. Even as it championed fathers’ rights, the movie pulled its punches about the lengths to which women would be enabled to go in their quest for maternal freedom.

Ultimately, parenting equality did not long remain in favor with feminists, likely because of the enormous financial incentives that came with sole custody. Before the end of the century, mothers’ rights had come roaring back into custody discussions. Feminists once again portrayed fathers as at best expendable and often toxic. Academic articles such as Joanna L. Radbord’s “Equality and the Law of Custody and Access” (2004) routinely claimed that fathers seek custody to control and abuse—or simply to reduce their child support payments (as if not wishing to pay their ex-wives to take away their children is evidence of malignancy).

National women’s groups in America (including the National Organization for Women) have been vehement opponents of bills to encourage shared parenting, claiming that a presumption of father involvement empowers male abusers. Such advocates reject any implication that women owe anything to the fathers of their children (Radbord is incensed that a woman might be prevented from moving out of state by a father’s petition), and refuse to acknowledge the sincerity of fathers’ parenting aspirations.

The demand for maternal preference and the move to deny a father’s right to see his children at all, as in the British government’s recent decision, have come inexorably to the fore.

**

Perhaps it is good to know that there never was a prior period in which fathers in the Anglophone world had uncontested or even secure claim to their own children. We have been too ready to endorse feminist fantasies, whether with shame or wistfulness.

Fathers’ rights have always been partial and tenuous, always subject to the sway of mother-right. Where we’ve come to now, in an admittedly Sisyphean battle for shared parenting as the norm in at least some jurisdictions, is a remarkable achievement attesting to father advocates’ unwavering dedication and love.

In the face of predictable exaggerations and misrepresentations by well-funded feminist organizations and the corrupt legal establishments they control, fathers’ rights will always have to be vigorously defended. The British decision will not be the last word on the matter.

Chris Williamson: “It’s very hard to try and put forward something that doesn’t sound like putting the brakes on women. And I don’t think that’s what either of us …”

Here is the problem in a nutshell. We must never say No to a woman, no matter the social atrophy and misery she and her sisters are causing. Carlson, in turn, gives the only permissible response: “Are women happier than they were?”

A conversation about men’s lives quickly becomes a conversation about what women want.

**

Men’s issues have long been the purview of a tiny group of outliers who gained traction in the early days of the internet and were popularized in Cassie Jaye’s The Red Pill.

Following in the footsteps of iconoclasts like Ernest Belfort Bax (The Legal Subjection of Men, 1896), Esther Vilar (The Manipulated Man, 1971), and Warren Farrell (The Myth of Male Power, 1993), they questioned standard feminist wisdom, focusing on male disposability (see also here) and the empathy gap. For years, they were voices crying in the wilderness.

Now, decades into our Female Future, it’s becoming harder to ignore the suffering and plummeting fortunes of men and boys—and their knock-on social effects. But what happens when the red pill begins to go mainstream?

As the recent discussion between former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and happiness coach Chris Williamson makes clear, most hard truths get leached away, and we’re left with half-hearted calls for a compassion that the influencers themselves seem unable to maintain.

Spoiler Alert: “Chris Williamson’s Guide to Being Happy, and Debunking the Feminist Lies Sabotaging You” doesn’t debunk any feminist lies. Even the MeToo movement, which harmed or destroyed thousands of men’s lives through unproven accusations (some of them almost inconceivably ridiculous and trivial), is accepted as an attempt to “sanitize the toxic elements of male behavior.” Accusers’ falsehoods, ‘Poor-me-I’m-so-desirable’ showboating, manipulations, and blithe indifference to evidence are all passed over in feminist-compliant silence.

Sadly, the discussion is full of feminist lies.

**

Near the beginning of the discussion, Williamson expresses frustration that in order to acknowledge any of the troubles of men and boys in the modern world, it has become obligatory first to rehearse women and girls’ (always at least equal, if not greater) suffering. Unfortunately, Williamson is a prime example of such gynocentric genuflecting, visibly uncomfortable every time the conversation seems to be moving into non-feminist territory.

In order to talk about the drastic decline in men’s higher education attainment, for example, Williamson seems to think it necessary to point out that women were at some point in the past discouraged from getting university degrees. Both Williamson and Carlson refer to men’s diminishing earning power, but pivot immediately to stressing how hard this is on professional women looking for marriageable men.

The sexual revolution is alleged to have mainly benefited men who can now, with impunity, “use and abuse women”; nothing is said about women’s rampant OnlyFans activity or their exploitation of men in divorce.

It goes on and on like this: for every male suicide, divorce-raped father, falsely accused or incarcerated man, there must be at least one woman somewhere who felt at some point that she wasn’t encouraged to do something.

There is a small amount of criticism directed at women, but only when women act badly towards other women, as is the case, according to Carlson, with female bosses. But about female cruelty to men or children (over half of child maltreatment, for example, is female-perpetrated), we do not hear anything.

There is a good deal said about women as a civilizing force, how much women bring to family life, how women are better with social cues, how they are “unbullshittable.” Carlson even gushes about how kind women are to their hubbies: “They wash your underwear. They listen to you snore,” he rhapsodizes. For the considerable number of men who have rarely had a kind word from any woman or who have gone through a hellish marriage and/or divorce with a vindictive shrew, the adulation seems quite unhelpful.

**

More seriously, the material inequities that men face today are almost always discussed as if they have simply come about in the course of nature rather than been engineered by feminist activists and their allies in governments and law courts. Williamson tells us with assurance that over time, “We’ve moved from a brawn-based to a brain-based economy” (an absurd misrepresentation). We are to conclude, it seems, that women have greater brain power than men and have thus inevitably overtaken their male peers in academia, teaching, healthcare, psychology, law, publishing, and business.

According to Williamson, it was women’s capacity to sit and take notes, along with their greater conscientiousness, that caused them to outpace young men in higher education. In the workplace, women allegedly have qualities that make them less disruptive employees and better administrators.

It all sounds like an unavoidable evolutionary process that has brought women to the fore with nothing to be done about it, least of all “putting the brakes” on women’s advancement and forcing them “back into the kitchen” (yes, Williamson actually does say that, and doesn’t laugh when Carlson points out that such would be a disaster given that so few American women know how to cook).

Williamson is partial to platitudes about how empathy is not a zero-sum game. Actually, when it comes to institutional initiatives and policies to advantage women and disadvantage (white) men, it definitely is. If we’re not willing to stop creating jobs and opportunities specifically for women (and some racial groups), men will continue to fall behind. Men don’t primarily need, as Williamson seems to want, government programs to help them with their mental health problems. They need the feminist boot lifted off their necks.

When Carlson tries to raise the fact of overt discrimination against men—in various anti-male policies, assumptions, and practices carried out deliberately and systematically over the past 40 years precisely to deny deserving men opportunities, which common justice demands be reversed—Williamson doesn’t seem interested.

Amongst a stock of pat answers and theories, Williamson claims that male withdrawal can largely be blamed on fatherlessness, which affects boys more severely than girls, and on men’s susceptibility to pacification through porn, video games, and computer screens. Both Williamson and Carlson agree in deploring these phenomena. But neither will dig into what is causing the fatherlessness (in a stats-enamored discussion, the 75% of women initiating divorce do not get a mention) or the measurable policy and legal choices that have made men susceptible to hopelessness, lassitude, and screen-induced withdrawal.

Almost nothing is said about men’s systemic disempowerment in relation to hiring, promotion, workplace policies, divorce, child custody, parental alienation, sexual assault allegations, and many other areas that men’s rights advocates have been talking about for decades

**

It is particularly horrible to see that even in a discussion specifically focused on men’s pain and alienation, women’s demands and presumed needs remain central. Bad men are those who “use and discard women.” But women who won’t marry a man unless he makes more money than they do, and who are willing to divorce a man, take his children, and live off his money once they’re tired of him, do not come in for any condemnation.

At exactly the one hour point, Williamson points out that men’s suffering should not concern other men only (alas, it rarely does). Women, too, he claims, should care about men. Why? Here we get to the nub of the matter. The answer is: because male decline affects women’s ability to find suitable providers. “The very fact that men are being sedated out of being more useful,” he says, “is creating precisely the dearth of eligible male partners that you [women] are probably conscious of.” The naked instrumentalism is gob-smacking.

Earlier, Williamson had spoken repeatedly of men who have become “useless.” It’s a harsh, dehumanizing word that neither man would use about women (though surely if men hiding out from their social responsibilities are useless, then women who fail to support (or actively harm) men and remain childless are equally so), but Carlson doesn’t even blink. He accepts with Williamson that if there were a war, these men would not fight well. Williamson concedes that because of changes in society brought about through technology, we’re in a “luxurious position where we don’t really need the usefulness of men all that much.” Again, the myopia staggers.

Warren Farrell’s observation about men as human doings rather than human beings could not be clearer. Men exist, according to Williamson and Carlson (even in a conversation about male suffering and feminist lies), to be of use, particularly to women. Men’s pain matters not because it is pain but because it causes them to withdraw their labor, their attention, and their sacrifice. There is an even greater danger: that men’s pain might one day cause them to rebel (which Carlson ventures to hope they will, causing Williamson to recoil). Whether through withdrawing or rebelling, however, the issue is that they are failing women.

Both Williamson and Carlson encourage men to take up their true responsibilities (marrying a woman, providing for her, and bringing children into the world), with nary a word said about how feminist policies and laws—particularly the atrocious family court system—have made that a self-sabotaging endeavor. “What is the best way to raise your son?” Williamson quotes Arthur Brooks: “Love his mom.” In an environment in which it is women more often than men who initiate divorce and prevent their children’s father from being a dad, the opposite advice (“Love your son’s dad”) would seem more urgently needed. Giving advice to women, however, is not something either man is inclined to do.

Carlson and Williamson both seem to expect that men can be encouraged or badgered or exhorted or shamed into continuing their sacrificial role in society with no reciprocal safeguards on women’s behavior. Williamson’s most stirring defense of men consists of noting that they will die to save women; he mentions the shooting at an Aurora, Colorado movie theater when three men used their bodies to shield their girlfriends as the bullets rained down, and died in consequence. We need more of that kind of (useful) masculinity, he suggests.

Naturally, he doesn’t say why women—despite their many talents and gifts, which he and Carlson have touted ad nauseum—never dive on top of men to protect them. Heck, many won’t even make men a sandwich.

The conversation is a master-class in what men’s advocates have long called blue-pill thinking. So long as women are never held to account for any of their cruel or irresponsible actions—so long as our primary concern remains not “putting the brakes” on any of their demands or desires—men like Carlson and Williamson will fail to reach the heart of things.

Communist propaganda, arguments for lesbianism, accusations of white supremacy, and conspiracy theories about rape culture: perhaps not what the average 19-year-old (or tax-paying parent thereof) was expecting when she registered for Philosophy of Sexual Politics at Paterson State University in Wayne, New Jersey c. 1974. But that’s what she got.

The class was taught by Professor Paula Rothenberg, a prominent feminist leader who called for the “radical transformation of all our institutions.” With Alison Jaggar, Rothenberg would go on to co-author one of the first women’s studies textbooks (Feminist Frameworks: Alternative Theoretical Accounts of the Relations Between Women and Men [1978]). Later, she published White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism (2002).

Her New Jersey classroom became the laboratory in which young women were encouraged “to rethink every aspect of our lives.”

This was anti-male consciousness-raising masquerading as a legitimate college elective. Any female student who entered Rothenberg’s classroom not seeing herself as a victim would be trained to perceive things differently. She would be told as a founding fact of the course that she was part of an oppressed class.

She would read Betty Friedan’s landmark The Feminine Mystique (1963), which claimed that a married woman’s home in the American suburbs was “in reality a comfortable concentration camp” where she was “suffering a slow death of mind and spirit” (p. 369).

She would read impassioned selections from the anthology Sisterhood is Powerful (1970), edited by Robin Morgan. Morgan encouraged women to hate men, having declared “man-hating” “an honorable and viable political act” because “the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them” (Going Too Far, 1977, p. 178).

In reading Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970), another assigned text, Rothenberg’s student would be presented with a horrifying picture of the deformed lives of early American feminists, who, according to Firestone, were “not taught even to read, let alone admitted to college” (p. 17, emphasis mine). (As I’ve shown in my video series about nineteenth-century American and British feminists, this is ludicrously untrue.)

The student of feminist philosophy would read about the omnipresence of rape in American society. In Susan Lydon’s “The Politics of Orgasm” (1970) she would learn that men view sex “as conquest and ego-enhancement” (p. 205). In Susan Griffin’s “Rape: The All-American Crime” (1971), she would learn that mainstream American culture actually approved of rape (p. 33).

Imagine being taught as scholarly fact that men were committed to “making [women] sexually as well as economically, socially, and politically subservient” (“The Politics of Orgasm,” p. 201).

Imagine sitting in a classroom filled with other young women who amplified the paranoid message, speaking at length of their rapes and their abortions, the sexual double standards and abuse they suffered, their fear and rage—all the while one’s professor, a PhD in Philosophy, affirmed women’s second-class status as fact, never offering an alternative view, never cautioning about the need to weigh evidence or avoid emotion-laden conclusions.

Emotion-laden conclusions were the point.

One cannot fully understand the sexual revolution—and the generations of pathologically furious women it spawned—without examining the extraordinary feminist takeover of North American universities.

In Feminist Academics’ Own Words

Were all women’s studies courses exactly like the one taught by Paula Rothenberg (about which more later)? Probably not, but most were.

In 2008, Palgrave Macmillan, a prestigious publisher, brought out The Evolution of American Women’s Studies: Reflections on Triumphs, Controversies, and Change.

The book contains chapters by a dozen feminist academics, including Rothenberg. These were the leaders in the movement, the pioneers who taught the first courses and established the feminist journals that now largely control what passes for knowledge about women.

They make clear that women’s studies always had a radical agenda, percolating its grievance-based theories throughout the halls of the ivory tower, and not content to let them stay there.

“From the beginning, the goal of women’s studies was not merely to study women’s position in the world but to change it” (The Evolution, p. 10). So wrote the volume editor, Alice Ginsberg, a specialist in feminist education. Ginsberg did not hide the fact that women’s studies was never committed to the dispassionate pursuit of knowledge that would have made it a genuine academic field. Her words are echoed throughout the volume.

“I remain convinced,” wrote black feminist academic Beverly Guy-Sheftall, “that teaching antiracist, antihomophobic, anti-capitalist, cross-cultural, transnational women’s studies courses […] is still the most important and pleasurable work that I do” (The Evolution, p. 111).

Ann Russo, a women’s studies program director, stressed the incendiary mishmash of unproven premises at the heart of her teaching: “I struggle in my classes to cultivate a sustained and simultaneous focus on the forces that shape how privilege, access, and power shape identities and experiences of oppression and resistance, as well as complicity in others’ oppression” (The Evolution, p. 135).

This was typical academic mumbo-jumbo, but it’s meaning is clear enough. The primary subject of women’s studies was the oppression of women by men as well as some (white) women’s complicity in the oppression of other women. Women’s studies demanded that its students accept and adhere to an extremist ideological dogma.

Marxism, the Social Construction of Gender, and Lesbian Superiority

In one of the book’s chapters, titled “Women Studies: The Early Years,” the afore-mentioned Professor Rothenberg presented an outline of her early-1970s feminist philosophy course that highlights the revolutionary rage at the heart of the so-called discipline.

Anyone who still thinks that women’s studies started out with the moderate aim of introducing women’s history and perspectives into a primarily male educational environment will be quickly disabused of that notion by glancing at the intemperate, reductionist, anti-scientific, hate-filled agit-prop theories that made up the entirety of the curriculum.

For those with a strong stomach, I offer a summary here of some of the readings (for the full text list, see Rothenberg’s chapter in The Evolution of American Women’s Studies, pp. 76-78).

Like much of Second Wave feminism, Rothenberg’s reading list was heavily Marxist. A required text was Friedrich Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) which argued that the family was the primary site of women’s oppression. In his chapter on “The Family,” Engels linked the position of women in marriage with the position of oppressed workers under capitalism, asserting that “The modern individual family is based on the open or disguised domestic enslavement of the woman,” and specifying that “In the family, [the man] is the bourgeois; the wife represents the proletariat” (p. 80).

This text inaugurated the long-standing feminist tradition of discussing family life—including sexual intimacy, mothering, caregiving, and home-making—in economic terms, often referring, for example, to women’s “burden of reproduction,” “emotional labor” “caregiving cost” and so on, thus reducing much of what makes life meaningful to an economic calculus. (Men, of course, also participate in unpaid and emotional labor, but few men can be bothered to tally it and broadcast it to the world.)

[I had the pleasure of discussing many of these loosely Marxist-derived feminist terms here, with my friends Tom Golden, James Nuzzo, and Hannah Spier, including jaw-dropping clips from viral feminists expounding on them.]

For any student naïve enough to believe that biology plays a role in male and female experience, Evelyn Reed’s “Is Biology Woman’s Destiny” (1971), from the International Socialist Review, answered with a resounding negative. References to biology, Reed suggested, were little more than sexist ploys to protect an unjust status quo. She excoriated the “male supremacists who pose as scientists” for claiming that women’s “inferiority” was decreed by nature. On the contrary, she asserted, patriarchy was only a recent historical phenomenon whose man-made inequities were cast into stark relief by Indigenous societies in which women exercised power and rape was unknown. Reed’s pamphlet made up in conviction what it lacked in evidence.

Texts such as these advanced a conspiracy view of history, in which everything in western culture was deliberately aimed at limiting female life possibilities. Nowhere in Rothenberg’s assigned readings can one find any defense of the free market or of the heterosexual family. Nowhere is it suggested that masculine and feminine roles developed organically over time in response to the exigencies of survival. It is certainly not stated that loving a man and raising children with him are what many women want most in their lives.

The course even had a preposterous section on female sexuality, already touched on above, to demonstrate that heterosexuality is exploitative of women and that women are better off as lesbians.

This section included the afore-mentioned Susan Lydon’s essay “The Politics of Orgasm” (1970). Lydon used Sigmund Freud’s theory of the vaginal orgasm, as distinct from the clitoral orgasm, as evidence that (all) men “defined feminine sexuality in a way as favorable to themselves as possible” (p. 200-201). Men were allegedly uninterested in or even put off by the clitoris because it made women’s sexual pleasure “independent of the male’s” (p. 201). According to Lydon’s jaundiced analysis, men did not care about women’s pleasure and were exclusively concerned with “coopting feminine sexuality for their own ends” (p. 203).

Grim sexual antagonism emerged even more luridly in Susan Griffin’s “Rape: The All-American Crime” (1971) published in Ramparts, another Marxist magazine. Advancing the idea of rape culture before that was a recognized term, Griffin alleged that far from being a hated crime, rape was a socially-approved means by which men controlled women. “The fact that rape is against the law,” she scoffed, “should not be considered proof that rape is not in fact encouraged as part of our culture” (p. 27). Rape was “beneficial to the ruling class of white males […], a kind of terrorism which severely limits the freedom of women and makes women dependent on men” (p. 34). Her account of white male malevolence could hardly have been more totalizing.

Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love’s “Sappho was a Right on Woman” (1973) completed the all-out attack on heterosexuality by advocating lesbianism.

As Rothenberg summarized, “In addition to focusing on the politics of the orgasm and female sexual alienation, my students began to explore the possibilities of sex between women and many found radical feminism attractive” (p. 80).

There were more titles in Rothenberg’s list, but there is no need to go further. We see here all the core elements of the radical feminism that transformed our societies in the decades to follow.

**

In her introduction to The Evolution of American Women’s Studies, editor Alice Ginsberg had mocked conservative Christian political commentator Pat Robertson’s description of feminism: “The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women,” Robertson had observed. “It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians” (qtd. on p. 6).

With the possible exception of the witchcraft (in fact, Robin Morgan, for one, declared herself a witch in Going Too Far, p. 174) every element named by Robertson is evident in Rothenberg’s syllabus.

A Revolution Without a Fight

Within a few years, feminism went from a fringe social movement to a centerpiece of North American higher education, where tens of thousands of students were affected by it every year. According to Ginsberg (The Evolution, p. 15), in the 1970s alone, 300 women’s studies programs were founded in the United States, followed by an even greater proliferation in the 1980s.

With little debate and even less resistance, academia surrendered to feminist dogmatism.

Multiple surveys (see, for example, with thanks to James Nuzzo, here, here, here, here, here and here) suggest that when women hold power, they pursue typically feminine preferences and policies. Female-led institutions become more oriented to social justice than objective truth. Feelings matter above facts, context above law, and victimhood above expertise.

Protecting and promoting the allegedly vulnerable—through censorship, shaming, coercion, or lawbreaking/lawfare—becomes a greater priority than excellence or impartiality. Truth-tellers find themselves cancelled, Nobel prize winners reduced to tears, laws and policies applied unequally, white men accused and vilified, criminals cossetted, mental illnesses affirmed, and destructive policies embraced. No one who has paid attention over the past 20 years can be surprised by the findings.

Moreover, our ability to discuss this feminine revolution in values is hampered by the very logic of the revolution, as I will show. Both women and men, deeply disinclined to “harm” women, fail to confront the problem adequately.

Two discussions of the subject—an essay by two social psychologists at Quillette and, more recently, a conference speech by a feisty conservative woman—draw a line under the seeming inevitability of the west’s collapse. Even faced with that alarming prospect, most pundits cannot bear to imagine an alternative to the female-led assault on our core institutions.

**

Cheering on Women’s Empowerment

A 2022 article in Quillette, “Sex and the Academy,” provides a stark illustration of my thesis. The subtitle rules out the very conclusion the data supports, with the authors emphasizing that “The inclusion of women in higher education is a great achievement for Western liberal societies. How is this changing academic culture?”

The “great achievement,” as it turns out, will almost certainly be a lethal one.

The article was written by two academics, Cory Clark and Bo Winegard, both PhDs in social psychology. Winegard, a male scholar, had an unfortunate run-in with academic orthodoxy that led to his loss of employment; Clark, a female scholar, has a secure academic position. Both authors express enthusiasm for the takeover of academia by women even as they point out its damaging consequences. Neither one advocates any form of resistance, no matter how mild, to feminine academia’s assault on truth.

Summarizing the results of many surveys, Clark and Winegard demonstrate that while a majority of men favor free speech and the advancement of knowledge over emotional comfort, a majority of women prefer conformity, safety, and the protection of victim groups’ feelings. Not all women are indifferent to the traditional underpinnings of western civilization (and not all men support those underpinnings), but the general trends are clear.

Women are significantly more likely than men to support the cancellation of controversial speakers or the suppression of controversial research.

Women also tend to favor the existence of snitch lines to report people who cause offence. Women are more supportive than men of diversity quotas that exclude white men from consideration for prizes, positions, and promotions. (It would be interesting to know how many white women support diversity quotas that exclude white women from consideration for prizes, positions, and promotions.)

But rather than summon readers to the barricades over such findings, the Quillette authors fail to express even moderate misgivings; instead, they present a genial overview that emphasizes female moral commitment.

“The overall theme of these differences,” they write, “is that men are more committed than women to the pursuit of truth as the raison d’être of science, while women are more committed to various moral goals, such as equity, inclusion, and the protection of vulnerable groups. Consequently, men are more tolerant of controversial and potentially offensive scientific findings being pursued, disseminated, and discussed, and women are more willing to obstruct or suppress science perceived to be potentially harmful or offensive. Put more simply, men are relatively more interested in advancing what is empirically correct, and women are relatively more interested in advancing what is morally desirable.”

Asserting that both sides are pursuing worthy goals, the authors downplay the shock value of the findings, which show that women are, overall, less interested in truth and accuracy than men are. Imagine assessing such a finding as anything but catastrophic. Imagine calling the disregard for truth moral.

In place of truth, women value a utopian ideology that they perceive—usually without any consistency or adherence to fact, but nonetheless granted by Clark and Winegard—as “morally desirable.” But morally desirable for whom, and to what end? The use of the phrase, a misnomer, demonstrates how thoroughly the authors themselves are in thrall to the corrosive feminine culture they examine.

There is nothing moral (or generally desirable) about the suppression of truth-seeking research when it conflicts—or is perceived to conflict—with an allegedly emancipatory social goal. There is nothing morally desirable or indeed “protective” about shouting down an academic speaker because of the alleged harm of the speech. Naturally, social justice proponents would be outraged if their speeches were shouted down or their research blocked and censored.

The Quillette authors’ willingness to place truth and morality in opposition to each other, as if men are merely empirical while women are (loftily) moral, concedes illegitimate ground to that which is ruining academia by denying truth.

The pro-feminist perspective of the authors is magnified in their conclusion, in which they vigorously disavow any need to halt or reverse the effects they have chronicled. It would be wrong, they assert, to oppose women’s predominance in academia or elsewhere. Why it would be wrong they decline to say:

“The point here is not to lament or celebrate these changes, but simply to identify and try to understand them, and to note that they will lead to predictable downstream consequences. Institutions are not independent of the people who populate them, and altering the characteristics of those people will inevitably change them. Those who believe that the purpose—the lodestar—of science should be the pursuit of truth might find these trends worrisome. But it would be unethical and futile to attempt to roll back the enormous social gains women have made. The ‘men’s club’ era of academia is over. A new and more female-oriented era is here for the foreseeable future.”

It’s hard to imagine a more timorous, mealy-mouthed ending. If the purpose of scientific research is to pursue truth—which only the insane would deny—then how can it be “unethical” to oppose those who mistakenly (or viciously, cravenly) support untruth? Are women’s “social gains” a genuine benefit when they rest on manipulation, bigotry, illegality, and dishonesty? Academia has not been a so-called men’s club for at least the past 80 years, but it accomplished a great deal when it was male-led. The women’s club of today, in contrast, becomes more academically irrelevant every year.

**

The Great Feminization

It is refreshing to turn from Quillette’s faint-hearted observations to Helen Andrews’ shibboleth-busting short lecture (well worth watching) at the National Conservatism conference, recently published on YouTube. Unlike Clark and Winegard, commentator and author Andrews does not shy away from proclaiming the civilizational threat embodied by female predominance in many spheres of society, which she dubs, after economist Tyler Cowen, The Great Feminization.

With women now a majority of college faculty, associates at law, and the white-collar workforce generally—not to mention a super-majority in the publishing industry and the field of psychology, among others—feminization is not merely, Andrews argues, an unprecedented new development in human affairs; it is also a profound menace to western societies’ traditions of rationality, competitive excellence, and the rule of law.

“A thoroughly feminized civilization,” Andrews declares, “will set itself on the road to collapse.” Despite the existence of talented and intelligent women who do uphold western values, Andrews does not believe that it is possible to have demographic feminization (an increase in women’s numbers) without substantive feminization (a profound shift in values).

Just when one begins to hope for an uncompromising call to action by the forthright Andrews, however, she disappoints. “I hasten to make clear,” she says at the start of her finale, “that I do not propose to ban women from any field or even to discourage them.”

Why not? The future of the west is in peril—but apparently we must not do anything so “crazy,” as Andrews calls it, as “discourage” women from entering the fields they are destroying!

Andrews does make some reasonable suggestions for restoring our institutions, but they are all, alas, inadequate.

Her primary suggestion is that all forms of equity hiring and affirmative action, all special incentives, programs, and perquisites for women, should be removed. Businesses and institutions must be allowed to hire and fire, promote and distinguish, on the basis of merit alone, with no regard for gender equity and no fear of lawsuits. Unfortunately, Andrews does not indicate how this is to be done. Equity measures are now enshrined in western law and enthusiastically promoted in the very bastions of feminization that are her deepest concern: getting rid of them will be far easier said than done.

But even if equity hiring and the many associated measures to promote and privilege women could, with enormous effort, be halted, the female favoritism and ideological corruption they enable and embody will certainly continue.

As Andrews well knows, feminization has already taken place. Values have been transformed; free inquiry and objectivity are, in many cases, long gone. Female and feminist managers, academics, judges, and lawyers will continue to hire women (and their “marginalized” intersectional allies) because such hiring is their badge of faith. Andrews’ trust in the resilience of our institutions, given what she has already recognized, seems somewhat misplaced. She must know that the enemies of innovation, excellence, and objectivity are already firmly ensconced and will not remove themselves.

So here we are, once again: with a dire warning and no adequate proposed solution.

Is there really, then, NOTHING to be done? Must we simply hope for the best as the worst unfolds? Do these pundits not believe what they are saying, or are they simply too ideologically captured or cautious to follow through?

**

It seems clear that, at the very least, women should be discouraged: for their own good and the good of our societies.

Girls should have it made clear to them from an early age that only the extremely talented and driven should even consider careers in politics, law, high tech, or academia. They should be warned about the moral character, inner strength, and self-discipline needed to occupy positions of public responsibility. The sacrifices required should be vividly outlined. The civilization-damaging realities of feminine propensities should be widely discussed, and female ingratitude, over-confidence, narcissism, vengefulness, and vainglory should be exposed, criticized, and damped down by teachers, mentors, and supervisors.

I would go further to say that women should be hindered, by law or at least by popular consensus, from leadership roles in key cultural domains. True, such an action would be discriminatory. It would mean that the talents of some able and public-minded women would not reach their full flourishing (though I would not bar women from lesser positions, operating under male leadership). It would mean frustration and a justified sense of injury for a few truly worthy women. But that would be a price well worth paying to reduce further feminization and to restore crucial bulwarks of our civilization.

This is all fantasy, of course: it’s not at all likely, in the foreseeable future, that any legislator anywhere will act even on Andrews’ extremely moderate (and entirely inadequate) proposals. No one is going to do anything to roll back the dramatic expansion of women’s political power, and it is not at all likely that women on their own initiative will exempt themselves or develop more traditionally-masculine values. Men themselves are also becoming more feminine, more feminist, and more ideologically fantastical, too often embracing paralyzing guilt, victimhood, resentment, and utopian radicalism.

Regardless, any serious plan to reinvigorate civilizational values will need to consider a strategy of de-feminization that has some teeth. When survey after survey shows that female predominance contributes to institutional and cultural decay, I can’t think of any rationale for not acting.

A few years ago, I started hearing that women, before feminism, couldn’t have their own credit cards. Or they couldn’t get one without a man’s signature. Or married women couldn’t have one in their own name. Divorced women, apparently, couldn’t get credit at all. Men conspired to keep women powerless and dependent.

THANK THE GODDESS FOR FEMINISM!

Just last June, on the podcast Diary of a CEO (in an episode viewed by nearly two million people), three feminists debating feminism agreed that, in the words of one of the panelists, “None of us could get a credit card a few decades ago …. We couldn’t have anything ….” (see 1:50:37).

Before correcting herself, in fact, the panelist had started to say, “None of us could get a credit card a couple of decades ago ….”

The statement struck me with the full force of the ludicrous. I started school in 1970. My teachers were nearly all women, at least half of them unmarried. They certainly seemed to live full, normal lives in obeisance to no man. They were paid a salary; they had bank accounts; they owned cars; they bought things and went on vacations.

My mother had worked in an insurance office for years both before and after she married my father in 1956. She had purchased appliances and paid her own rent, helped my father buy his first commercial fishing boat, and handled all the household expenses when my dad was away fishing for months every summer.

My friends’ mothers were similarly active and self-determining. Were all these women actually hobbled by the patriarchy, cut off from the economy?

Received knowledge would have us believe so. Last year, The Globe and Mail published a paid advertisement for Women’s History Month titled “50 Years Ago: Women Got the Right to Have Credit Cards.” Written by a financial services company seeking to drum up business, the article repeated the popular story that women in North America could not get their own credit cards until 1974.

A search for the truth led me to a voluminous compilation of documents called Economic Problems of Women, prepared for the United States Congress in 1973, when extensive hearings and investigations were being conducted into the matter. Far from wishing to deny women credit, the authors of the compilation and the members of Congress for whom it was produced were determined to ferret out any form of unfair treatment, no matter how occasional or case-specific. A report on “Equal Credit Legislation” found that difficulties in acquiring credit, where they existed, stemmed from the particularities of marriage and divorce (see a summary on p. 446 of Economic Problems of Women). While real, such difficulties were not based in misogyny and, once identified, they were quickly remedied through protective legislation.

**

The fact that hearings were held, and widely reported, on the question of whether women’s credit applications were being fairly handled demonstrates either that the nascent women’s movement had, by the early 1970s, already transformed America into a feminist-compliant society or—less bombastically—that the country had always been, and remained, attentive to women’s declared needs.

Let’s return to the substance of the false feminist claim. The item in The Globe and Mail begins, typically, with a dramatic untruth:

“Credit cards might seem like an inescapable part of everyday life, but it wasn’t long ago that half the population wasn’t allowed to have one. That’s right: until 1974, women did not have the right to open their own credit cards.”

The statement is an outright lie. The only truth it tells is how easily women’s anger and men’s guilt are regularly manipulated in our post-truth world.

The reality is that from the 1950s on, credit cards were a new invention being aggressively marketed to both men and women. Advertising from the era shows how keen credit card companies were to target female customers, how eager to tap into women’s spending power.

Originally introduced as a convenience for travelers on business, credit cards began to expand their purview in the late 1950s. Bank Americard (later Visa) became the first consumer credit card in 1958. A network of banks formed the Interbank Card Association, originally named Master Charge (later Mastercard), in 1966.

Yet we are somehow to believe that half the population was deliberately excluded from this new consumer venture for no other reason than that they were female?

“It wasn’t until 1974 that women were allowed to open a credit card under their own name,” the Globe article states emphatically. “Before 1974, if women wanted to open a credit card, they would be asked a bunch of intrusive questions, like if they were married or whether they planned to have children. If a woman was married, she could (hopefully) get a credit card with her husband. But single, divorced, or widowed women weren’t allowed to get a credit card of their own—they had to have a man cosign for the credit application.”

The explanation is dramatic and incoherent, undoing its own logic from the beginning. It backtracks to allege that women were in fact “allowed” to have a credit card so long as they answered “a bunch of intrusive questions” or found a co-signer. Even this lesser claim is false, but it is rather different from the prior assertion about women “not having the right” to a card.

At a time when many married women either did not work outside the home or worked only part-time and on a temporary basis, there would have been nothing unreasonable about a woman’s husband co-signing her credit card application. Many married women were happy to purchase what they wanted on the assurance that their husbands would pay the bill when it came in, and credit card issuers saw joint accounts as a way of ensuring payment.

But what about unmarried women, or married women who wanted their own cards separate from their husbands’ accounts?

They could get cards too, so long as they showed the ability to pay. Here is Mr. Norman Lee, credit supervisor for Bank Americard at the Commerce Bank in Kansas City, Missouri, testifying for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1975, just one year after the anti-discrimination bill went into effect. Admitting that he wasn’t familiar with all the details of the new law, he stressed his and others’ eagerness to market credit cards to as many consumers as could afford them. “What I am trying to say [is that] age, sex, and this is not relevant to our decision,” he told the Committee:

“Remember here again, as I have said before, we are in business to make money, as most banks are, and any time we have a chance to put on a customer to increase our potential income—that application is going to be approved if creditworthy” (Advisory Committee, p. 23).

Is it possible that Norman Lee was lying to protect himself and his bank? That’s what the feminists would say. But why? Did he harbor a desire to prevent as many women as possible from having credit cards, even if it cost him his job and the bank’s profits? Was he willing to sacrifice his own professional advancement in order to pursue a hopeless misogynistic commitment? More likely, he was telling the simple truth about the business interests of the bank he worked for and of other banks he knew. If women were at times denied credit, it was most likely because they had not adequately demonstrated their credit-worthiness. There was certainly no general prohibition on credit cards for women.

Over the past few days, I’ve been reading through a series of reports (Economic Problems of Women) prepared for the 93^rd Congress of the United States in 1973, the year that the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed. I also read a (mercifully, shorter) report prepared by the Kansas Advisory Committee for the U.S. government’s Commission on Civil Rights, titled The Availability of Credit to Kansas Women, which quotes from advisory committee hearings in other states as well.

I’ve read the testimony of bank managers, bank employees, credit bureau employees, and women’s advocates. The result is a mixed bag of claims and attestations, many of them unverified and unverifiable, at least some of them by feminist advocates pursuing their agenda. The committees heard from branch managers of banks and lending institutes, many of whom denied discriminating based on sex while, in some cases, acknowledging that they preferred granting joint credit to husband and wife. Most of the specific evidence I quote below is drawn from the Kansas Advisory Committee report.

What that report most clearly reveals is that in the early 1970s, within a decade of credit cards becoming widely used, feminist advocates launched a campaign to make it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sex or marital status, and American lawmakers eagerly complied. One might even conclude that the lawmakers went out of their way to publicize their willingness to correct a problem that could not definitively be shown to exist. In a few short years after credit cards were introduced into America, legal limits were placed on creditors’ ability to decide for themselves how they ran their businesses.

The hundreds of pages of testimony and findings do not indicate that women were unfairly discriminated against as women. In fact, the Kansas Advisory Committee, which advertised for women to testify and clearly expected to find examples of discrimination, admitted that they did not find a single unmarried woman who reported being denied a credit card for any reason (Advisory Committee, p. 57).

The cases in which credit issues were reported related specifically to married life. Some women complained that joint marital credit accounts, in both husband’s and wife’s names, were created when they married, without their asking for such to be done. Joint accounts could become a problem following a divorce, when the credit history associated with the account would follow the husband and not the wife under the assumption that he had been the one paying the card’s debt. (As the Advisory Committee report notes at p. 19, there was a live question as to whether a man was legally responsible for his wife’s debts in any case.)

If joint credit was assigned to the husband after divorce, a divorced woman could find herself having to re-establish (or establish) credit on her own. “Jaimie Ritchie, of Topeka, told the Advisory Committee that she had worked 4 years during the 5 1/2 year period of her marriage. During that time, she and her husband held several joint charge accounts and paid two car loans. Following her divorce, she said, she could not claim any of this credit history since it had all been reported in her husband’s name to credit bureaus in cities where they had lived” (Advisory Committee, p. 34).

Without specific information on this case, it is not possible to know how severely Jaimie Ritchie was shortchanged after divorce. She seems to have believed herself entitled to claim credit for any amount she had paid into a shared account; but she did not acknowledge how much her husband had paid. She admitted that she hadn’t worked for the full period of the marriage; her husband most likely had. Did she shoulder half the couple’s financial burden? One third? One tenth? Her husband, meanwhile, had all the legal responsibility for the debt in his name; and it is quite possible that Jaimie Ritchie would not have lived nearly so well, or been able to pay back so much borrowing, by herself. Having to establish credit from scratch after the divorce may have been difficult for her, but it was not clearly a case of sex discrimination.

It was possible for a married woman to ask for a credit account in her own name in order to avoid this type of problem; many women didn’t know, or didn’t choose, to ask. The Kansas Advisory Committee heard that the Credit Bureau of Lawrence, Kansas would separate files of married couples upon request at no charge. Not all women wanted their accounts separated.

“Mr. Wesley Fitzgerald told the Advisory Committee: I have encouraged it [married women establishing their own credit files]. I have talked to several groups. Well, let me put it this way--I don’t encourage them to separate it or not separate it because there are many women who don’t want to separate files and· there are many who want separate files. That’s their privilege. All I encourage is if a woman wants a separate file, that she come down and go over it with us and separate the files. In fact, I had ads on the radio--I ran ads 9 months last year encouraging people to go down and look over their credit reports” (Advisory Committee, p. 35).

Again, it is impossible to know how many married women, if any, were discouraged from taking out credit cards in their own names, and how many actually had the capacity to pay for them. Many credit managers were adamant about their policy of non-discrimination. Mr. J.H. Sinnard, the credit manager of J.M. McDonald Company in Hastings, Nebraska submitted to the Advisory Committee that “Based upon the character and capacity of the applicant, the financial position of the applicant, information received from credit bureau checks which will set forth the satisfactory paying habits of the applicant, personal knowledge of the applicant and the credit interview, we will grant credit to any qualified adult.”

He also submitted that the company’s policy pertaining to names on accounts was that “If a woman wishes to open an account in her name, her maiden name or her married name, we will do so. […] In no instance do we require the signature of the spouse before opening an account” (Advisory Committee, p. 53).

More extensive research would be required to unearth all the details behind the many allegations and anecdotes collected in the volumes I consulted. One can certainly conclude, however, that women were not denied credit cards across the board. At worst, some lenders believed married men a more reliable credit risk than married women, and some women had trouble (re-)establishing a credit history after divorce.

**

Sympathy for women permeated the Kansas Advisory Committee report, which concluded that “Credit-worthy women who have been denied credit often find that they must make persistent efforts to obtain the credit to which they are entitled” (p. 65). Whether they were denied due to sex prejudice, bureaucratic mistake, employee carelessness, or simple over-caution is very difficult to determine. Regardless, having to make a “persistent effort” to obtain something is not at all the same as being unable to obtain it at all.

By the time of the hearings and the passing of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in the early 1970s, women were active members of America’s consumer society. They found a ready and willing ear in a majority-male government for complaints about their difficulties. Fifty years on, feminists should at last stop fabricating an organized oppression that didn’t exist.

Nowhere is feminism’s assault on our civilization so clear as in the domain of sexual assault law. It is now routine, even among those who don’t call themselves feminists, to refer to female accusers as victims rather than complainants. High profile cases are frequently discussed as if the fact of male transgression is almost beyond doubt. In cases where a not guilty verdict ensues, feminist advocates are given abundant opportunity—usually without any rebuttal—to complain about the result and make catastrophizing predictions. Most seriously, perhaps, feminist activists no longer hide their desire to change the law so that fewer men, in future, can mount a successful legal defense.

**

Following Jian Ghomeshi’s 2016 acquittal on four counts of sexual assault and one count of choking (more on this case later), two feminist law students, Samantha Peters and Naomi Sayers, wrote in the Huffington Post to propose scrapping the current legal system altogether. It too obviously “prioritize[d] the rights of an accused over the rights of survivors” and thus needed to be “reimagined” so as to be “accountable to sexual assault survivors.” Given that it is not, in most cases, possible to know who is an actual “survivor” without a properly-conducted trial, their assertion was an example of question-begging at its finest.

The two writers, identifying themselves as “Black and Indigenous feminists,” proposed special sexual assault courts that would operate on a different basis from other courts of law. Feminist training would be mandatory for judges in those courts, and a “trauma-informed foundation” would govern judges’ decisions. Trauma theory, which was frequently referenced in Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 New York trial, explains away inconsistencies, gaps, or untruths in complainants’ testimony as owing to their traumatic experience. “We believe all survivors of violence, especially sexual violence,” Peters and Sayers affirmed.

Though the article was perhaps more mawkishly written and incoherent than most, it was in line with many feminist declarations following high-profile sexual assault trials in North America. No matter the trial’s outcome, but especially in cases where an accused is found not guilty, feminists have made clear over the past two decades that they reject the foundational principles of western jurisprudence, including the role of a trial to seek truth through rigorous cross-examination of witnesses and close study of the evidence.

A vivid example was recently provided by the vociferous outcry this past July over the long-running Hockey Canada sexual assault saga, in which five professional hockey players, formerly with Canada’s National Junior Hockey Team in an incident from 2018, had their careers and reputations destroyed by a woman who could barely keep her story straight on the witness stand. After years of media characterizations that assumed the guilt of the accused and shrugged off the accuser’s inconsistencies, the trial ended with a full acquittal. Judge Maria Carroccia exonerated the five men in a 91-page judgement, and detailed the many untruths of the complainant that made her evidence unreliable. (I summarized and commented on the judgement here and was interviewed about it here.)

Undeterred by the volume of the judge’s meticulously-chronicled evidence, feminist legal scholars and advocates, their voices amplified by feminist-compliant journalists, continued to express their unshaken belief in the complainant’s victimhood. In the days following the verdict, they combed through the judge’s ruling (see The Globe and Mail’s “Analyzing Justice Maria Carroccia’s Hockey Canada Verdict”) not to examine her arguments and reasoning, but to find places where her sympathy for the accuser could be criticized as insufficient and where she allegedly relied on victim stereotypes.

For example, University of Ottawa law professor Daphne Gilbert alleged that, in focusing so squarely on the complainant’s inaccuracies and misrepresentations, the judge had engaged in “victim blaming” of E.M., the (still anonymous) accuser. The possibility that the accused men—their lives on hold and their reputations besmirched for years, through two police investigations, a sensational civil suit, and a tortuous trial—were the true victims is simply not conceivable in Gilbert’s worldview. “Given [the complainant’s] grueling nine days on the stand,” she scolded irrelevantly, “that is an incredibly damning indictment of E.M.” Gilbert offered no evidence for why the indictment was unjust, and seemed unconcerned about the problems with E.M.’s testimony.

Another University of Ottawa law professor, Constance Backhouse, even went so far as to instruct the judge on how she should have written her ruling to meet feminist approval. “It is true that judges must weigh evidence carefully, and make a judgement call about whether the offence has been proven,” Backhouse hedged, perhaps coming as close as she could to admitting that she couldn’t disagree with the judge’s verdict on its merits. “But a wiser decision would have left it at that—simply making the point that the Crown did not prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.” Even in a case where the evidence to acquit was, in the judge’s view, insurmountable, it was apparently not acceptable to impugn the truthfulness of the “victim.” Better to let the taint of the accusation forever stain the accused men.

Did it matter to these law professors whether the accuser had been telling the truth or not? E.M. had changed her story over the years in order to make the accused seem more culpable, directly contradicting earlier statements she had made to police. She had collected an undisclosed sum in a settlement with Hockey Canada, the sport’s governing body, based on a narrative that was ultimately disproved—in many cases with video evidence—at trial. That evidence included two video recordings in which E.M., smiling and not evidently inebriated, explicitly consented to the sex she later said the players should have known she didn’t want. It also included video evidence from Jack’s Bar where, contrary to what E.M. had claimed in her statements, the accused had not plied her with drinks, caused her to become inebriated, cut her off from her friends, and began sexually assaulting her on the dance floor (on the contrary, the video evidence showed E.M. touching the accused).

One might have thought that professors of law would be embarrassed to demonstrate such partisan disregard for facts and such indifference to the fate of the falsely accused. But this is how it is today with sexual assault trials. No matter how often the accuser is shown to have lied or to have clearly indicated consent, feminist pundits insist that an acquittal is a profound miscarriage of justice. They allege, as in a typical article published immediately following the Hockey Canada verdict, that the trial outcome “could have a chilling effect on all victims of sexual assault” because it allegedly creates a “dynamic” in which “sexual assault is de facto decriminalized.”

**

Hostility to the law has always been a plank of feminism, and is now remarkable only in its wide acceptance. “If you’re a rich, white guy with powerful friends, it seems you can get away with anything,” as feminist journalist Arwa Mahdawi phrased it crudely in The Guardian when Christine Blasey Ford’s “brave and moving” Senate testimony failed to scuttle Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation.

A century and a half earlier, women’s rights leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton had written of a convicted female baby killer (later pardoned, as women usually were for such crimes) that “Men have made the laws cunningly, for their own protection; ignorantly, for they can never weigh the sorrows and sufferings of their [female] victims” (1868, qtd in The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, p. 191). In typical feminist style, the victim in Stanton’s telling was the female murderer, not the newborn infant whose life she had ended.

Well-known feminist theorist and philosopher Simone De Beauvoir, herself accused of sexually abusing her under-age female students, alleged that hatred of women had been codified into patriarchal law over the centuries: “Afraid of woman, legislators organize her oppression” (The Second Sex, p. 88). Feminist law professor Catharine MacKinnon dedicated her career to the proposition that the legal notion of consent was inadequate to the realities of women’s inequality, with the result that “consent to sex, or failure of proof of nonconsent, is routinely found in situations of despairing acquiescence, frozen fright, terror, absence of realistic options, and socially situated vulnerability.” These and many similar pronouncements have led feminists to side reflexively with accusers and to regard due process in sexual assault cases as a barrier to justice.

**

The paradigm was the 2006 Duke University rape hoax, in which three lacrosse players were falsely accused of rape by stripper and prostitute Crystal Mangum, a convicted felon with a history of abuse allegations who was eventually convicted (years after the Duke case) of assaulting one boyfriend and murdering another. (She recently confessed to fabricating the entire Duke incident.) Before the accused lacrosse players were even charged, the scandal became a pageant of exultant finger pointing and racial denunciation in which a corrupt district attorney, a craven university president, and hundreds of ideologically-motivated journalists and campus activists—including a large group of Duke faculty members calling themselves, in approved Communist style, the Group of 88—sanctified the alleged victim and excoriated the players.

Within days, Wanted posters blanketed the campus, players were singled out for condemnation in their own college classrooms, and protestors gathered to bang pots and chant slogans outside the team captains’ rented house. News headlines showcased the unapologetic ease with which the players’ guilt was assumed and promoted: “Is Jock Culture a Training Ground for Crime?”; “Sex, drink, rape: the fall of college sport”; and “Ugly stereotypes surface in Duke rape case.”

The latter article, by Lynne Duke (no relation) in the Los Angeles Times, made it clear that it didn’t matter whether the legal case against the players was ever proven; they had already been found guilty not only as privileged white boys but even as repugnant symbols of the slave owners of old: “Whatever actually happened the night of March 13 at Duke University,” the author announced, “it appears at least that the disturbing historic script of the sexual abuse of black women was playing out inside that lacrosse team house party.” Fully aware that the players had protested their innocence, the writer nonetheless insisted that the incident was “in some ways reminiscent of a black woman’s vulnerability to a white man during the days of slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow.”

Even after the players had been exonerated through DNA evidence and the district attorney disbarred for his lies, the febrile atmosphere of denunciation remained, and none of those who engaged in moral posturing at the players’ expense was ever held to account. Fervent feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte did not restrain her fury when charges against the players were withdrawn, fulminating that “I had to listen [on a CNN news program] to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and fucked her against her will—not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out.” For Marcotte, there was no possibility that the players were not guilty: “This is about race and class and gender in every way, and there’s basically no way this woman was going to see justice.”

In 2010, feminist professor Michael Kimmel of Stony Brook University was still eager to name the Duke lacrosse incident in his hit piece “Lacrosse and the Entitled Elite Male Athlete” as an example of how masculine privilege allegedly leads to sexual violence:

“Yes, yes, I know,” he defended himself for using falsely-accused innocents as an example of male predation: “The woman who accused them turned out to be a lying schemer; the guys were exonerated. But it's interesting that their friends and classmates found the story utterly plausible, as they told countless reporters. And the team did, after all, hire strippers for their team party in violation of all team and university rules.”

Kimmel writes poorly and with hollow moral condemnation, but he provides a useful window on the feminist need to demonize white men. Kimmel’s allegation that “friends and classmates” were willing to slander the young men at the height of the Duke mobbing would seem to invalidate his thesis about the “code of silence” that enables male sexual cruelty, but the professor is clearly less interested in making a logical argument than in condemning any man unlucky enough to find himself accused of a sexual crime. (Kimmel was later denounced in turn for sexual harassment and exploitation by two former graduate students, one of whom wrote a detailed account of his alleged sexism.)

**

At least Kimmel was willing to admit—sort of—that Mangum was not actually the men’s victim. In later cases, feminist pundits have not even been willing to go that far. They have insisted instead that dubious behavior or outright lies by accusers do not invalidate the central truth of their victimhood and that every man acquitted represents an insult to victims everywhere. Yelps of outrage in the years since the Duke rape hoax have been predictable and unremitting, as in the following select examples:

“How Rolling Stone’s campus rape story could discourage victims from speaking out”; “Advocates fear Jian Ghomeshi verdict will cause survivors to suffer in silence”; “Overturning of [Mustafa Ururyar] conviction signals need for mandatory judicial education in sexual assault”; “Bill Cosby’s Release Could Have a Silencing Effect on Victims, Advocates Say”; “The Depp verdict could bring a chilling effect for domestic abuse survivors”; “Harvey Weinstein’s quashed rape conviction sends disturbing message to women survivors of sexual violence”; “Trump administration full of abusers sends a message that violence against women is acceptable”; “Kevin Spacey’s acquittal on sexual assault charges will have ‘chilling effect’ on other victims coming forward, legal expert says”; “Sex trafficking survivor says Diddy verdict sends a chilling message”; “Advocates concerned about effects of sex assault acquittals on victims everywhere”; “Hockey Canada trial ruling could send chilling message to victims, say advocates”; “Hundreds of stayed sexual assault cases send chilling message to victims, advocates warn.”

It not clear whether any of these feminists think investigations and trials are necessary in sexual assault cases, given that failures to convict are always, for them, a “chilling” travesty of justice.

Disregard for the presumption of innocence is commonly expressed by feminist advocates, including, in a particularly striking example, Ottawa writer Julie Lalonde, who was interviewed at length for a news article about another rush to judgement. This one was at the University of Ottawa in 2014 when, amid abundant anti-male grandstanding by the university president and chancellor, two varsity hockey players were accused of raping a woman in their hotel room after a game in Thunder Bay, Ontario. The entire hockey team was suspended following the incident, and there was much breast-beating about rape culture and sexual harassment on campus. When both players were at last acquitted in 2018, an emotional Lalonde was bombastic about the damage, saying “Every time we see a high-profile sexual assault trial result in an acquittal, it sends women back 50 years.”

Feminist theory has been spectacularly successful in seeding contempt for legal principles. It argues that western jurisprudence has been and remains biased against women, unwilling to believe their testimony or care about their suffering. Feminist author Kate Millett claimed falsely in her blockbuster Sexual Politics (1970), that “a woman convicted of a crime is awarded a longer sentence” than a man—allegedly to keep women acquiescent and afraid (p. 56). Radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin wrote thousands of words about the male justice system’s inability to believe that rape victims don’t want to be raped: “She wanted the force, the hurt, the harm, the pain, the humiliation,” Dworkin assured readers in 1979. “Why did she want it? Because she is female and females always provoke it, always want it, always like it [….] yes, the lawyers and the legislators […]. To this day, men believe the pornography and men do not believe the women who say no” (“The Lie,” Letters From a War Zone, p. 10).

The Stanford Encyclopedia’s entry for “Feminist Philosophy of Law” outlines various feminist objections to the western legal system, including that the judicial concept of the “reasonable person” “reflects male norms,” and that “a woman’s testimony may be discounted in allegations of rape if she does not fit the stereotype of an innocent victim.” Susan Brownmiller argued in her bestselling Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (1975) that American and other western societies do not prosecute rape vigorously because rape is condoned and even celebrated as a way of maintaining male power (see my detailed analysis of Brownmiller’s book here).

No wonder, then, that the default feminist position is to seek changes to the law on behalf of sexual assault complainants.

**

Following the unsuccessful prosecution of Canadian media personality and CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi in 2016, new rules were introduced to Canadian law to change an accused’s ability at trial to make use of private records such as emails and text messages—documents that were crucial in securing Ghomeshi’s acquittal. According to the new legislation (Bill C-51, upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2018 and defended by various legal theorists, as here), such messages can no longer be introduced at trial without the complainant’s prior knowledge.

The significance of the change cannot be overstated. Ghomeshi had been publicly accused in 2014 of multiple sexual assaults long before his case made it to court. Sensational stories about his allegedly vicious conduct were given extended media coverage and prompted Ghomeshi’s firing from the CBC as at least a dozen women told of violence and violation. His guilt seemed incontrovertible.

A different picture emerged at trial, when his three accusers were shown to have lied to the police and on the witness stand. Two of the accusers, while claiming to have had no personal interaction with Ghomeshi after the alleged assaults, had in fact sent friendly messages to him. All three had been willing to see him after the claimed violence, with two pursuing him enthusiastically. Many embarrassing communications (a picture in a bikini, a message, “I love your hands,” a selfie of one accuser fellating a beer bottle), initially hidden from police and the court, made the women look less like the appalled, fearful victims they had said they were and more like jealous girlfriends who cooked up allegations to punish Ghomeshi for being a playboy. They had either forgotten about the messages from over a decade earlier or assumed that Ghomeshi no longer had them in his possession.

Without the email evidence—but especially the ability it provided to surprise the complainants on the witness stand with their lack of truthfulness—it is quite possible that Ghomeshi would now be sitting out a long prison sentence. Judge William B. Horkins, in finding Ghomeshi not guilty, went out of his way to say that it wasn’t the behavior of the complainants—the sending of flowers after the rape, the repeated invitations for post-assault hookups—that cast doubt on their allegations (in fact, he wrote that “The expectation of how a victim of abuse will, or should, be expected to behave must not be assessed on the basis of stereotypical models” [pp. 7-8]). What harmed accusers’ credibility was their “willingness to ignore their oath to tell the truth” (p. 24, read the whole, so-carefully worded judgement here).

Under the new Canadian legislation, which makes it necessary for documents to be cleared by the trial judge and disclosed to the complainant and the prosecution before trial, accusers will know from the trial’s start what records the defense team has in its possession, and can shape their stories to conform to that evidence. It will be considerably more difficult for an accused man to prove his accuser(s) to be lying.

In a legal article about the new legislation, law professor Elaine Craig admits that the disclosure rules will in some cases reduce the effectiveness of defense cross-examination by allowing accusers to tailor their evidence; she admits that the cross-examination in the Ghomeshi trial would have been different under the new rules. But she reasons that such an impact must be set against the right of complainants to “equality and dignity” (p. 804) as well as “the public interest in encouraging sexual assault victims to report” (p. 801). Neither complainants’ dignity nor the public good of reporting are secured, she reasons, by allowing complainants to be “ambushed” on the witness stand.

Examining one part of the Ghomeshi transcript, Craig argues that there would have been “a relatively modest impact” on the defense strategy if Ghomeshi’s accusers had known beforehand of the email and text evidence Ghomeshi’s team had. Her explanations are characteristic of feminist special pleading:

“If we accept that sexual assault complainants are no more inclined towards lying than other types of witnesses,” she writes at one point, “then the question is straightforward. Which poses a greater threat to the truth-seeking function of the trial: a process which plays on a complainant’s understandable fear and distrust of the criminal justice system by attempting to catch her in lies and omissions about private records or prior sexual activity in a high-stress, anxiety-provoking, and potentially humiliating cross-examination, or one that puts her on notice that she is rightly going to need to explain to the court any gaps and inconsistencies in her evidence demonstrated by the contents of such records? Presumably, in most cases, it is the latter” (pp. 796-797).

Craig’s own word choice reveals her faulty reasoning. Sexual assault trials are about sexuality, not car theft or bank fraud. Sex and sexual assault are replete with emotion, ambiguity, shame, and anger, involving “potentially humiliating” admissions and details. Often with no evidence other than her own testimony, the accuser has strong reason to suppress, omit, or exaggerate details in her testimony.

Even if one accepts that sexual assault accusers are generally no more likely to lie than other witnesses—an untenable claim (see Rick Bradford’s analysis of the incidence of false allegations here)—it is not at all obvious that revealing defense strategy ahead of time is the best approach to truth-seeking at trial. In cases where the complainant is lying, mistaken, or deluded (for even a feminist like Craig cannot deny there are such cases), it is highly damaging to the search for truth to allow a malicious or wrong-headed witness to rehearse, with the assistance of her legal counsel, a plausible narrative to fit defense evidence. Such may gut an accused man’s ability to demonstrate the dishonesty of his accuser. Craig provides an elaborate justification for why Canadian men will simply have to live with that. Securing sexual assault convictions, she makes clear, is a top feminist priority.

**

What would an ideal feminist judgement look like? We need seek no further than that delivered by Justice Marvin Zuker in 2016 (notably after the much-criticized Ghomeshi judgement), in which Zuker found Ontario graduate student Mustafa Ururyar guilty of raping fellow graduate student Mandi Gray. The guilty judgement was rendered despite the fact that Gray had texted Ururyar, her casual boyfriend, promising him “hot sex” on the night in question if he joined her and fellow graduate students at a bar—and then never told him that she had changed her mind.

Far from changing her mind, in fact, Mandi consumed plenty of alcoholic drinks, fondled Ururyar throughout the evening, went home with him to his apartment, and got into his bed in a state, as she afterwards claimed, of silent non-compliance. In a word-perfect application of feminist thinking, Zuker declared that it didn’t matter that Mandi hadn’t conveyed her lack of consent to Mustafa: consent “must be ongoing throughout a sexual activity” [394] and, furthermore, “Silence or lack of resistance […] does not demonstrate consent” even when, as in this case, the woman was the one who had initially invited the man for sex, went to his home for sex, and appeared to be an active participant.

Zuker’s decision reads more like a stream-of-consciousness work of fiction than a logic-based legal argument, and that seems to have been the point. Zuker was pioneering a new style of verdict: unabashedly feminist, partisan, engaged, and enraged. Quoting from feminist icons Maya Angelou, Virginia Woolf, and Susan Brownmiller, he railed against rape myths and affirmed his belief in “counter-intuitive victim responses to trauma” [393].

Parts of the judgement sounded as if they might have been lifted from Valerie Solanas’s rage-filled 1967 SCUM Manifesto: “For much of our history,” Zuker fumed, “the ‘good’ rape victim, the ‘credible’ rape victim has been a dead one. When someone takes control of you and pushes their penis into your mouth, what can you do? It is frightening and shocking. That was Mr. Ururyar. Mandi Gray was intoxicated on January 31, 2015 and typically could have been disassociated from herself as she stated. This I accept. Who can, who should remember the details of a rape?” [514].

Zuker’s words expressed a near-complete identification with Gray, calling her ordeal “A nightmare” and alleging that “Asking her to remember the details is ridiculous” [516]. “And often there is a desperate wish by the victim to please the rapist,” he speculated, “a desperate hope that the rape will end and maybe, just maybe, I will survive.” He also expressed disgust at her abuser, whom he fulminated against as “the ultimate game player, pushing to Ms. Gray and then pulling from Ms. Gray” [521]. For Zuker, it seemed, each rape trial is an opportunity for the many horrors of patriarchal history to be partially avenged. Zuker sentenced Ururyar to 18 months in jail and an $8,000 payment toward Gray’s legal fees.

Fortunately, the conviction was overturned on appeal, and prosecutors decided not to re-try Ururyar, at least partly because Gray indicated lack of interest in another go-round. Gray continued to posture as a victim, and her advocates continued to complain about the justice system’s failures. One feminist wrote bitterly of the overturning of the conviction: “And now Mandi Gray is rendered unraped, I suppose, and the lesson to others in her position is ‘don’t come here.’” The possibility that Mandi Gray simply didn’t have a legitimate legal case against Ururyar does not seem to have occurred to the author, as it rarely does to any feminist who discusses a rape trial.

**

So far, feminists have not been consistently successful in gaining convictions—and they’ve made their dissatisfaction clear.

But just as advocates in Canada moved to close off one avenue of legal defense after the Ghomeshi verdict, so they will likely be active now to promote further changes to sexual assault law (with their sisters across the English-speaking world watching closely).

In the days before the Hockey Canada verdict last July, some pundits were already forecasting one new direction for legal activism. An article in The Globe and Mail predicted hopefully that the Hockey Canada verdict could “break new ground on the question of what constitutes voluntary consent in cases of an apparent power imbalance.” It is already a part of Canadian law that the simple absence of a No is not sufficient to signal consent. With further refinement, however, even Yes may no longer be sufficient.

Professor of Law Janine Benedet was quoted in the article that genuine consent may not be present if the woman feels intimidated or fearful. Sometimes the only “reasonable” action by a man in such a case is not to be sexual at all.

A post-verdict article in the journal Policy Options took up the same line of reasoning, beginning from the premise that “The Hockey Canada judgment and acquittal is a missed opportunity to advance the understanding of consent.” The author concluded that “The circumstances described at trial by E.M., many corroborated by the hockey players themselves, were nowhere near conducive to voluntary agreement to sexual activity.” According to this view, no matter how many times E.M. signaled her agreement, the situation could never have been anything but sexual assault if she later judged it to be.

Can things really go so far? Given feminist willingness to say out loud that every acquittal “sends women back 50 years,” added to the fact that women are now the majority in Schools of Law, with feminist perspectives becoming ever more aggressively anti-male, who can say no?

The distinctive legal protections of western law have perhaps never been more imperiled.

I have been hesitant to write about Charlie Kirk’s assassination. I have been filled with anger, sadness, revulsion, and incredulity over the past few days.

I did not follow Kirk extensively, but I watched a good number of his pro-life debates and, like many people on the right, I admired his reason-based arguments, passion for the unborn, general kindness even to those who ridiculed him, and insistence on political tolerance and non-violence. When he was killed, I was sickened not only at what had happened, but also by the malicious glee and pleasure that I knew would be the response of his enemies.

The left has surprised me in being even more disgusting and unashamed than I had expected.

**

On the day after Kirk’s assassination, Ms. magazine decided to join in the exultation, re-publishing a heartless essay reflecting on how Kirk had allegedly brought his death on himself. The essay is not by any means the worst of what has been written—not even close. It is an example of the dreary average.

“Dying To Be Men: American Masculinity as Death Cult” was written by Emily Taylor, a self-described “intersectional feminist” who teaches literature and women’s and gender studies in South Carolina.

Taylor’s article pretends to care about Kirk’s death while pointing out how richly he deserved it. A picture of Kirk with his arms spread wide at a Trump rally accompanies her outline of “how white supremacist, misogynist and homophobic ideals of manhood fuel violence in America—and put men themselves at risk.”

Yes, you heard that right: according to this feminist college professor, it was white supremacy, misogyny, and homophobia that killed Charlie Kirk.

It is a good bet that Emily Taylor has never watched a whole video of Kirk debating students on a college campus. Like so many commentators over the past few days who have slandered and reviled the conservative activist, she presents no evidence for her claim that he was “white supremacist, misogynist and homophobic.” These terms have become little more than emotion-laden place-holders to be deployed against any white conservative whose ideals offend feminist ideologues. Taylor is satisfied to allege that “the violent discourse espoused by Charlie Kirk and many others has resulted in his murder in front of a crowd of thousands of students” and that “Kirk built his career on racism and misogyny.”

One would think that such heavy judgements would not be offered without a single reason.

But Taylor’s article isn’t really about Kirk. Her purpose is mainly to assure feminist readers that they need feel no compunction about the targeted assassination of a speaker on a college campus who advocated moral and social dialogue. It is an axiom of feminism, and a not-particularly marginal view generally, that white Christian conservatives are vile people whom the enlightened would prefer to live without.

In her article, Taylor repeats all the usual emetic and bigoted reasons why men like Kirk are allegedly “violent.” It is because they are afraid of the greater wisdom and strength of women and people of color, etc. “What they are most afraid of is their own irrelevance and mortality, but instead of seeking a place in communities of care, these men grope for ways to lash out with violence and dominance.” There is nothing good about traditional masculinity: “Because there is such deep insecurity, men who otherwise might have a moral compass instead go along with the death cult [of hegemonic masculinity] to prove that they, too are men.”

This is Feminism 101, smug and asinine, remarkable only in the extraordinary insensitivity and tone-deafness of categorizing Kirk as a death-cultist allegedly lacking a moral compass.

There is not a moment’s pause in the hatred, no hesitation in expressing such arrogant condemnation.

Taylor’s main fear in the essay is that the millions of Americans who admired Kirk and appreciated his verbal jousting with academic feminism may decline to fund more academic feminism. “It is no surprise,” she reports bitterly, “that [Trumpian Republicans] are desperate to attack the very academic fields that lay their weaknesses bare: women’s and gender studies, sociology, the humanities, and public health.” She and her allies feel free to justify Kirk’s murder, but still expect those who loved him to pay for the justification.

In Taylor’s view, men like Kirk dislike gender studies because it exposes unsettling truths about sex and gender. Taylor is particularly insistent on the link between “hegemonic masculinity” and “white supremacy,” as well as on heteropatriarchy’s failure to affirm alternatives such as homosexuality and non-binary identity. “Trans people pose the biggest threat,” she asserts, “because they show that biological sex and gender are distinct categories, and that gender identity is constructed. This takes all of the power away from having a penis—again, unacceptable.”

It may be interesting to see how Taylor will attempt to explain the fact that Kirk’s killer hated white Christian conservatism and was just the sort of “anti-fascist,” trans-loving, furry-allied, non-heteronormative and sexually transgressive young person she celebrates.

Taylor ends her article by reminding readers that “We have to keep up the fight to protect these very disciplines that help us to understand how violent, white American masculinity poses one of the country’s biggest threats.” This is what is being taught in thousands of gender studies classrooms across North America.

Taylor’s final paragraph repeats her fake sorrow over Kirk’s death, striking a note of maternal care for America’s (though not, it seems, Kirk’s) children:

“I’m sorry for Charlie Kirk and all the other men like him that have been raised in this America and with these ideals of masculinity. I’m sorry that he decided to adopt this hateful ideology and to profit from it. And as the mother to a boy and a girl, my heart breaks for the America these children are growing up in. Here’s hoping we can save ourselves.”

**

I’d love to have been a fly on the wall for the conversation by Ms. editorial staff about re-publishing this item on the day after Kirk’s blood was spilled on a college campus. Was it considered an important message that grieving Americans needed to hear? Were the editors concerned that too much sorrow over a conservative white man’s murder might defuse or delegitimize feminist anger, even for one day?

For the record, I don’t think Taylor should lose her job for her vacuous moral posturing; but I see no reason why her position should get one penny of public funding.

I could keep on doing this, finding other feminist commentary and itemizing feminism’s hollow claims of moral superiority—but it is beside the point.

**

Feminists have nothing to offer to prevent political violence, and neither do women in general. Feminism blames violence on the wrong causes and advocates solutions, such as the further feminization of society, that will be useless or will worsen the violence.

When the bullets start to fly, women can do little but run for cover.

Men will, in the main, have to deal with whatever violence breaks out in our societies, and men will be the ones who bring it under control. That is why most women should have supportive and subordinate roles in government, security, policing, and so on. Only good and strong men can make our societies safe.

The best that women can do is support the good men to help them win; and pray against the bad ones.

I don’t know what to do about the thousands of North Americans, many in teaching, administrative, and healthcare positions, who are so full of righteous hatred against white conservative Christian men that they are gleeful to see one killed in front of his wife and children—and then have the gall to act as if they could create a better world. In actuality, their godless and vengeful beliefs lead to endless bickering, jockeying for victim credentials, societal degeneration, and hatred.

Charlie Kirk articulated an age-old vision of the good that we discard at our peril. It is a vision in which men and women work together in heterosexual families and communities—with men in the major positions of power—to create a stable social order conducive to the raising of healthy children. We will either have a patriarchy that conserves our Christian and European inheritance, or we will lose it all.

One can disagree about economic systems and foreign policy, but Kirk’s primary vision is, in my view, indispensable. The sterile narcissism of women’s sexual empowerment, gay pride, transgenderism, and so on, are secondary at best and in the main useless or destructive. In its near-200-year existence, feminism and its intersectional and Marxist offshoots have never offered any viable blueprint for a flourishing, productive society.

**

Kirk’s ideals and practice were particularly attractive to young men because young men, above all others, want and need the opportunity to develop and contribute their talents, take pride in themselves and their country, pursue justice, stand for the good, protect the weak, and govern their lives with courage and reason. Sexual excess, victim rhetoric, anti-Americanism, and perpetual grievance offer them nothing good. Charlie Kirk became the symbol of their rejection of the noxious nonsense being preached on college campuses and more broadly.

So far, good men have shown extraordinary patience, generosity, forbearance, and willingness to listen as, over the past 50 years, their views have been marginalized and the society their forebears built has been undermined. Men have been told that their day is over and all that is left is for them to be ashamed and obedient. They’ve been encouraged to mutilate their consciences and their bodies.

They have suffered and endured; Charlie Kirk and others inspired them with the possibility of reasoned resistance. His death will harden their resolve to resist, reasonably or not.

A few weeks ago, feminist journalist Faith Hill published an emotional account of how men ruined the Tea app, a woman-centered platform where women could share information, including criminal background checks, about men they had dated. Thousands of women’s selfies, ID cards, and private messages were exposed in a data breach last month. Here is Hill’s concluding paragraph in The Atlantic:

“In more than 1.1 million private messages, women had told one another about rapes, opened up about abortions, identified cheaters. (“I am his wife,” one user wrote after saying she saw her husband being discussed on the app.) Some shared their phone numbers because, I imagine, they had made connections—because they needed support. When women realized they couldn’t rely on the men in their lives, they tried instead to rely on other women. In the end, misogyny got in the way of that too.”

Hill is telling a familiar story. There are evil men: raping, cheating, forcing women to have abortions. And there are victimized (yet strong and caring) women: reaching out to one another, “identifying cheaters,” and forging connections.

It’s hard to square Hill’s sentimental picture with women’s actual comments in the app, which are often remarkably trivial and unhelpful. (As a Canadian, I cannot access the app; my analysis is based on leaked and secondary information.) More than a few of the messages, many focused on penis size or effeminacy, are written in pidgin English, demonstrating the infiltration of ghetto culture and its vulgarities into the feminine mainstream. Here is a small sample:

Ain’t nobody tryna get with him, he’s too female centered.

He looks like he barks like he want it lmao

He a hoe & it’s little

Tried to talk to me and my roommate, willingly begging to eat her pussc

Major faggot but a TRICK. Shrimp dick. Coke head like a MF. Stays fucking raw that’s why he stay getting tested. Major hoe. Dreads stink.

Dummy community dick like exposing ppl but his thumb bigger than his dick?! Be aware n be scared.

For this and much more (depressingly) like it, the Tea Dating Advice app (Tea for short) became the #1 app in Apple’s Store, amassing over 4.6 million “community” members according to the app’s promotional material.

“Tea is more than an app; it’s a sisterhood,” its webpage enthuses.

Men are identified on Tea by their pictures, full name, phone number, marital status, street address, and any other information users want to share. Evaluations are made anonymously, and men aren’t allowed on the app to see what has been said about them or to respond in self-defense. Women can “red flag” men they consider dangerous, and alerts can be set to notify users if anyone posts about a particular man anywhere in the country. It’s essentially a nation-wide version of the “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” Facebook groups.

Made clear in the app’s promotional material and by the name (taken from Spill the tea, a possible corruption of Spill the beans or a reference to T for truth), information is not limited to verifiable data, encompassing a range of subjective opinion and rank gossip. Even accepting that much of what is said is true, it is an ugly revelation of female meanness and crudity.

Then came the data breach in late July that saw tens of thousands of women’s selfies, IDs, and messages shared on 4chan. An AP report on the breach warned women that “Because of the nature of the app […], users may be particularly vulnerable to malicious actors who try to expose their real-life identities.”

It’s not clear just how many real-life identities have been exposed, but pictures and IDs did circulate, often with snide and disparaging comments by the men circulating them. At least one website was set up to enable men “to rate the leaked selfies,” while another linked the photos to women’s “approximate locations.” Some women are now suing the makers of the app for inadequate privacy protections, with one of the plaintiffs citing “anxiety and increased concerns for loss of privacy.”

Feminist commentators, in turn, have been indignant about the exposure. Arwa Mahdawi, one of The Guardian’s multitude of female-chauvinist pundits, titled her article, “There are no secrets on the internet. Just ask the women who entrusted their data to Tea.” The afore-mentioned Faith Hill at The Atlantic described the breach as “humiliating for the women who had to see their images passed around, and grim given the number of men making fun of those images with such open, gleeful cruelty.”

The irony needs no elaboration: women were happy to say nasty things and post men’s personal information and pictures FOR YEARS. Now that a small fraction of women’s pictures and messages have been exposed—and a small fraction of men have made fun of the uglies—it is considered a national scandal worthy of an expedited class-action lawsuit and thousands of words of sympathetic commentary about the “emotional harm” to (female) “survivors.”

The recent fuss hasn’t yet caused the app to be shut down, but its messaging function has been disabled and the company’s future is said to be in question—as well it should be.

Commentary on the Tea episode shines a bright light on contemporary social norms, in which female vindictiveness is given free rein, and men’s concerns with privacy or defamation are dismissed and distorted.

**

The official story is that the Tea app was all about female safety. With women’s rights in America under assault, allegedly by far-right fascists, the app offered necessary, crowd-sourced protection. But even a generous interpretation would have to recognize many other motives and uses.

Some of the men featured on Tea almost certainly did nothing worse than fail to meet expectations. A woman’s complaints about such a man could well be designed not to honestly warn other women, but to reduce the man’s likelihood of finding future dates.

A good friend speculated that the notable unattractiveness of many of the app’s users, as revealed in the data breach, suggests that Tea fostered intrasexual competition in which women discourage other women from dating men they themselves desire. Another friend was simply struck by the “ogre-like appearances” of many of the users.

The site was created by a gay man, Sean Cook, who claims to have been horrified by the (in some cases criminal) men his mother encountered through dating apps. Freudians could have a field day with this explanation, in which a neglected boy whose mother chose loutish lovers avenged his (perhaps unconscious) sense of her betrayal of him by coming to the aid of women not unlike her. Mapping his own psychic scars onto them, he created a venue for women to destroy the reputations of men they unwisely pursued.

The vast majority of commentary about Tea promotes feminist theories of female innocence and male guilt. In “First Came Tea. Then Came the Male Rage,” Faith Hill assured readers that the app was created with “good intentions.” She was convinced that men’s jeering responses proved the app’s necessity. “The men so hell-bent on revenge [sic] against Tea’s users are illustrating that hatred of women is alive and well,” she asserted melodramatically, lamenting women’s “potential danger.”

Gina Cherelus in The New York Times (“Women Have Always Looked Out For One Another. It’s Never Been Risk-Free”) went even further, gushing about the allegedly valiant women who committed themselves to “sharing information about nefarious men.” The tragedy was that “the impulse to protect frequently comes at a cost”—a cost not to falsely accused men but to the women themselves, who may be blamed or even sued for civil damages. With Tea’s data breach, she claimed, “women were handed a sharp reminder of the personal risks of […] protecting other women from cheaters and abusers.”

Side note: it did not seem to occur to Cherelus that many women prefer cheaters and abusers, or, indeed, that many cheaters and abusers are women. I would love to know how many of the women who signed up for Tea have criminal records or a history of choosing men with criminal records.

Amidst all the teeth-gnashing about threats to women’s safety, not a single mainstream commenter mentioned that men are under potential physical threat as a result of the posting of their personal information, including their home addresses. Though most so-called journalists don’t care to discuss it, men are the victims of stalking, harassment, violent attacks, and murder, often by ex-girlfriends. Recent examples that made headlines can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Even the most feminist-compliant of commenters did have to admit, if only briefly and slightingly, Tea’s potential to harm men’s reputations. The Guardian’s Mahdawi acknowledged in a single sentence, before quickly returning to the female victims, the “numerous ethical issues with apps such as Tea […] that allow people to share unverified and potentially defamatory information about men.”

In “The Tea app lets women review their dates. Men are worried,” The Washington Post’s Tatum Hunter provided a somewhat more substantial discussion of Tea’s “potential” “to descend into gossip.” “Some men say the groups have spread false accusations, upending their lives and careers,” she reported. But she gave only general examples, choosing not to investigate. Instead, she quoted Professor Douglas Zytko of the University of Michigan who, though recognizing that “interpersonal conflict” can become “viral fodder,” wasn’t convinced that the ruined lives of some men justified banning an app that some women like:

“Even valid criticisms might not outweigh the benefit of tools that let people crowdsource safety information, Zytko said. And calls to ban the Tea app based on some men’s experience don’t hold water within the broader discussion of dating and safety, he said. “There are multiple studies now showing that around 10 percent of overall cases of sexual assault are attributed to a dating app now,” he said. “And we don’t see similar calls for dating apps to be wholly banned on that basis.”

One can only shake one’s head at the tortuous illogic.

River Page at The Free Press (“Reviewing Men? There’s an App for That”) sympathized more overtly with men who “don’t want to conduct their dating lives under a vast grassroots surveillance state where they might be disparaged in a public forum they can’t access, simply because they fall short of female expectations in one way or another.” Page was the most opposed to Tea of all the writers cited here, calling it a “creepy stalking app,” but even he failed to offer a thoroughgoing critique of its assault on male well-being. In fact, his conclusion downplayed harms to men: “This [men’s justified resentment at the app’s capacity for surveillance] hurts men, but it harms straight women just as much, because they are conditioning themselves and each other to expect perfection from men.”

While men are publicly libeled as cheaters, drug addicts, ineffectual lovers, abusers, and rapists, we should remember that women are hurt in expecting too much.

**

In reality, the risks for men everywhere—even the most gentlemanly—are far greater than any of the experts acknowledge. We already know that women lie about men, even in cases where it would seem unwise and unappealing: to government bodies, police, prosecutors, and judges, in contexts where lying is explicitly discouraged and punished at least in theory (as we know, few women expect to be punished for their lies, and few women are punished). They lie to flatter their egos, satisfy their hatreds, bond with other women, and fill up their vacant lives. The last thing needed is yet another forum for such lies.

With Tea in the news, some men have been discussing how to have one’s name removed from the app, which is not necessarily a simple process. A Reddit page to discuss men’s legal options is notably short on solutions, with brusque comments about male anger. One person identifying himself or herself as a Federal Prosecutor advised that “If someone writes libelous things about another person and then publishes it to the public, you already have the ability to sue under existing law.”

Such is of little comfort to men being trashed on the app. The process of suing for libel is extremely expensive and time-consuming, as I know from personal experience in advising defamed men. Many men simply don’t have the thousands of dollars necessary to attempt to compel the Tea app to disclose the names of the women who have written about them, and then to prove that the women knowingly lied and caused damage. Even if men manage to have their information removed, the harm may have already been done.

Like most people in our societies, the lawyers (or people pretending to be lawyers) on Reddit expressed very little empathy for accused men, seemingly unaware of the enormous psychological, social, financial, and material damage they can suffer. Most of them lectured men that if they haven’t done anything wrong, they have nothing to worry about. And if they really are clingy and their breath really does stink and they really did post something positive about Andrew Tate, they’ll simply have to live with the consequences. There’s no law against gossip, some pointed out, and men have the whole internet, after all, to gossip about women.

Such typical responses miss the point. First, the gossip targets something deeply personal and fundamental: a man’s pursuit of love and his ability to hold up his head in his community. These should not be dismissed in a flippant manner. Second, there is a huge difference between personal gossip, harmful as it often is, and a coordinated reporting system designed to disseminate degrading personal slurs, in which users can be notified every time a new post is made about a particular man. The potential to cause misery and induce self-harm, even if none of the gossip rises to the level of defamation, is an integral part of the app. Millions of women’s participation in such a contemptible and destructive enterprise should be denounced by decent people, not justified with anti-male platitudes.

Would it matter to anyone defending the app if some number of targeted men committed suicide as a result of being accused and belittled? I don’t suppose so. This is how deep the hatred and dehumanization of men have been allowed to go. A sane society should not accept, and certainly should not defend and celebrate, an app that facilitates female cruelty on such a scale; it is uncivil and destructive of social trust.

The Tea kerfuffle is about far more than ruining the dating market or showing the lengths to which embittered women are willing to go in the name of faux empowerment. It is a public admission, repeated ad nauseum and loudly acclaimed by pundits across the political spectrum, that scorning and despising men while doxxing them are not only commonly accepted in American society but are actually considered defensible and laudable as part of the movement for women’s rights. The clear implication is that to make women feel safe, any price in male suffering is worth paying—even to the point of male suicide.

Anyone who wonders why men today feel alienated need look no further than the double standards so dramatically on display in the Tea app controversy.

If some men exhibited “gleeful cruelty” toward the doxing women, I can’t blame them one bit.

The acquittal, last week, by Justice Maria Carroccia of five former members of the Canadian World Junior Hockey Team charged with sexual assault has provoked the usual exaggerations and question-begging from feminist advocates.

A common theme has been the alleged negative impact of the verdict on “survivors.” Canada’s state broadcaster, the CBC, titled an article “Hockey Canada trial outcome a ‘crushing day’ for sexual assault survivors, says prof.” The Globe and Mail had the same focus: “After the Hockey Canada verdict, advocates fear survivors will fall silent.” For CTV News, also, “Advocates worry about message to survivors following Hockey Canada sex assault trial.” It seems that any not-guilty finding—no matter the accuser’s proven lies and venality—is said to constitute an assault on rape victims everywhere.

Our era’s motto: Better 100 innocent men go to prison than one potential accuser hesitate to come forward.

Many commentators also gushed about the courage of the woman, still identified only as E.M., who took the witness stand to proclaim her truth. E.M.’s lawyer, Karen Bellehumeur, called her “a remarkable person and truly a hero.” Professor Daphne Gilbert credited E.M. with provoking important public conversations at enormous personal cost. Supporters on the courthouse steps carried signs saying “We believe E.M.”

It’s hard to fathom that those declaring their anguish at the verdict and their admiration for E.M. have actually read Judge Carroccia’s 90-page judgement.

That judgement, far from revealing the judge’s failure to understand E.M.’s fear, as one feminist organization alleged, should cause any unbiased observer to question how the case was ever allowed to go to trial in the first place.

It had been found to be a loser when police first looked into it back in 2018. The story was that E.M. had met a hockey player, Michael McLeod, at Jack’s Bar in London, Ontario; McLeod was in town with his team to celebrate their World Junior Championship victory at a ring ceremony and gala dinner. E.M. agreed to go back to McLeod’s hotel room, but once there, he invited many other players to the room, where they took turns sexually assaulting her. She went home crying, and when her mother asked her what had happened, she told her. Her mother called the police.

The problem was that the complainant’s story was full of holes. Questioned by investigators in the days following, she couldn’t say she hadn’t consented, confessed that she may have enjoyed the sexual attention of the players, admitted she could have left the hotel room at any time, and never mentioned fear or intimidation as factors in her actions. London police closed the case in early 2019 without laying any charges. Over time, it seems, E.M. constructed a more compelling story to explain herself in a way that would be acceptable to her mother and to E.M.’s boyfriend.

In 2022, a police investigation was reopened after it was reported that Hockey Canada, the sport’s national governing body, had paid out millions in settlement money to women like E.M. who had alleged sexual misconduct on the part of players. E.M. herself received an undisclosed settlement amount in 2022 after suing for 3.5 million dollars.

Charges were ultimately laid, in early 2024, against five men, all of whom had by then launched careers in the National Hockey League: Dillon Dubé, Alex Formenton, Carter Hart, Callan Foote and Michael McLeod. Their NHL careers are now in tatters while their accuser has enriched herself with a false accusation.

**

Most sexual assault trials involve he said/she said grey areas. This one did not. What happened in that hotel room seven years ago was a tawdry spectacle in which the accuser admitted playing the part of a porn star. All page references below are to Carroccia’s must-read judgement.

According to witnesses, E.M. repeatedly demanded that the players have sex with her, mocked those who wouldn’t as “pussies” (p. 30) and masturbated, naked, in order to entice the yet-unconvinced. She demanded of the young men, “Can one of you guys come over and fuck me?” (p. 30), “Can I suck your dick?” (p. 34), and “Is anyone going to do anything to me or do I have to do it all?” (p. 40). The judge found that evidence for E.M.’s sexual aggressiveness was “overwhelming.”

Many players testified to their shock at her words and actions, having never seen a woman behave in such a feral manner. Some found it exciting but also uncomfortable. Carter Hart testified that he accepted the invitation for a blow job from E.M. but gave up after about 30 seconds, unable to maintain an erection because he felt so awkward (p. 37). When he drew back, she said something like, “Oh, you guys are being pussies” (p. 30).

There was hard evidence on McLeod’s phone camera, not once but twice, that E.M. had unreservedly consented (“You’re okay with this? Ya, I’m okay with this” and “You are so paranoid … holy. I enjoyed it. It was fine. It was all consensual”). There was no reliable evidence that she had not. All of the players, whether accused or witnesses, were consistent in their statements, including to police during the initial investigation in 2018. They testified that no one asked or instructed E.M. to masturbate or to perform sexually. Tyler Steenbergen, a prosecution witness, said she was “quite vocal” about what she wanted. Another witness, Brett Howden, said that E.M. was “chirping” guys and “trying to egg them on because no one would take her up on her offer [of sex]” (p. 32).

E.M.’s repeated claims that she was on auto-pilot, too drunk and detached from reality to do what a non-inebriated person would have done (such as leave the hotel room or even merely put her clothes on), and that the players should have known that she was incapacitated and unwilling, were contradicted by a plethora of video evidence from Jack’s bar showing no signs of intoxication. Near the end of the night at the bar, she was still sober enough to notice that she had been short-changed on a drink. One witness remembered seeing her “hanging off” Michael McLeod, not being pursued by him as she had claimed.

E.M. had admitted to police in 2018 that McLeod frequently asked her if she was okay with the sexual activity throughout the night, and she had said she was (p. 16). Years later, she said that she had no choice but to say that.

In short, it was a case in which all the key planks of the complainant’s story were undermined either by her own prior statements to police, her admissions under cross-examination at trial, or by video or witness evidence. Her claims about being separated from her friends at Jack’s Bar, plied with drinks until intoxicated, forced to touch players’ genitals while dancing, and followed closely around the bar in a predatory manner—all were proven false. E.M.’s friend had texted her more than half a dozen times that night to ask if she wanted to be rescued from McLeod, and E.M. had declined the offer.

**

Why reopen a case in which all the trustworthy evidence, including by the complainant herself, demonstrated that far from being a victim, she was actually the sexual aggressor, taunting the young men in the room and not taking No for an answer?

Perhaps the thinking was that, win or lose, the trial would demonstrate how seriously the Canadian justice system takes women’s claims of sexual abuse—and even, perhaps, how very up-to-date the Canadian legal theory of consent has become. The strangeness of this aspect of the case was admitted by the assistant prosecutor Heather Donkers in opening remarks to jury members that the trial would “challenge [their] preconceptions.”

“The case is not about whether [the complainant] said no or removed herself from an unwelcome situation when she had the opportunity. This case is about whether [she] voluntarily agreed to engage in each and every sexual act that took place at the time they happened.”

We have traveled a long way from Yes means yes and No means no, that old chestnut of 1970s and '80s feminist activism. In the brave new world of Canadian feminist legal theory, it is not reasonable to expect a woman of 20 years old to say No to sex she doesn’t want or to leave a room no one is preventing her from leaving. Even emphatic declarations of consent (in this case, recorded at 3:25 am and 4:26 am on the morning in question) need not be taken at face value if the complainant says, years afterwards, that she didn’t mean them.

Crown attorney Meaghan Cunningham dismissed the two consent videos, saying during the trial that they could be considered “‘token lip service box checking’” and not evidence of any reasonable steps by the defendants to sincerely ascertain valid consent.” What exactly would have constituted “reasonable” proof of “valid consent” to “each and every sexual act” was not, of course, stipulated. We can conclude that whatever might have been produced, it could never be good enough for E.M.’s champions, who now claim that merely being in a room with men she didn’t know was enough to render all of her actions and statements coerced.

In closing arguments at trial, the prosecution actually argued that not only did the consent videos not prove consent, but they showed lack of consent because Michael McLeod “knew [the complainant] was not consenting to the activity and that is the reason for making the recording” (p. 48). In other words, proof of consent should be seen as proof of non-consent.

The five players, and even to some extent the non-accused teammates called as witnesses, all became collateral damage in this exercise in feminist rectitude, this search for a pristine record of consent. It was surely appropriate that all of the accused were white men playing elite hockey, a game closely associated in the feminist mind with toxic sexual entitlement (see my essay on the smearing of NHL player Jake Virtanen here). The public scandal unleashed by the trial, which occupied news sites for years, brought a punishment that the legal process alone, with its rules of evidence and burden of proof, couldn’t guarantee.

Many of the accused players were were dropped from NHL teams, their contracts not renewed, after charges were laid in early 2024. All had their reputations tarnished and lived under threat of substantial prison terms. Even upon acquittal, the taint will last. Thousands who hear about the case, exposed to the feminist bleating and not bothering to learn details, will assume they did something terrible—an impression that will never be fully erased because very few with the power to do so will put effort into erasing it. A full week after the acquittal, the Montreal Gazette published an article with the five players’ pictures, “Sexual assault trials involving hockey players raise questions about locker-room bro culture.” Even after being fully exonerated by the judge, they are still declared guilty.

Cases parallel to this one—in which accusers played fast and loose with the truth—are not unusual in Canada. The most famous case occurred in 2016 when popular radio host Jian Ghomeshi was acquitted amidst a feminist uproar after three women testified that he had sexually assaulted them, including choking, slapping, and punching them. Fortunately, he had kept affectionate emails and text messages from each of his accusers, enabling his defense team to expose the lies they told both to the police and on the witness stand about their desire to continue seeing him. Ghomeshi was acquitted, but his reputation never recovered and, nearly ten years later, he has not worked in his field again. His accusers, who were revealed to have conspired together to pervert the course of justice, were never charged.

Accusers in sexual assault trials, even when exposed as liars, have their identities protected by law. Accused men do not. It is far from clear why E.M., who defrauded Hockey Canada with a bogus victim story and was willing to see five men go to prison for her actions, should have her name shielded, while the men she accused must live under the long shadow of her false allegations.

**

Not every commentator, of course, expressed disappointment that the accused men escaped prison; a fair number applauded the verdict. But few failed to condemn the players for allegedly boorish, insensitive, or immoral behavior. I have yet to find a single mainstream commentator who condemned E.M. for her behavior.

In “Why Carter Hart and other acquitted players should get another chance in the NHL,” David Staples was painstaking in giving an account of the judge’s reasoning, citing extensive examples of E.M.’s vagaries, self-contradictions, and falsehoods. He seemed to be squarely on the players’ side—and yet ended his essay with the following condemnation:

“I don’t think the five hockey players handled themselves well that night. Who does think that? No one.

They are not heroes. But they’re not monstrous villains either. They’re young men who made a mistake in not treating E.M. with greater care. She, as well, will have to live with the consequences of her own decisions that night.

But the five accused players did nothing criminal. They’ve already paid a huge price for what turned out to be iffy allegations against them. They should not lose their NHL careers because of E.M.’s proven false narrative.”

Not “monstrous villains,” eh? Yet castigated for their failure to treat E.M. “with greater care.” What kind of “care” did this woman deserve? I’m drawing a blank. Especially given that some of the players were as young as 18 years old, why is E.M. not criticized for her failure to attain their consent to the sexual activity? Did she not owe it to them not to sexually harass, berate, and shame them while they were inebriated and vulnerable? Did she not owe them the basic “care” of not lying about them, persistently and criminally over years, to Hockey Canada investigators, police, lawyers, and the judge?

In his article, Staples would go no further than to say that E.M. “will have to live with the consequences of her own decisions that night.” Nonsense: she is not living with any consequences. If she were, she’d be being criminally investigated for perjury or obstruction of justice. In a world of consequences, she would be civilly tried for defamation and required to pay to the players the money she extorted from Hockey Canada.

No matter whether some of the falsely accused players can now regain their NHL opportunities (so far, the NHL itself says that, even if not criminal, their behavior remains “unacceptable”) a grave injury has been done to them that they are helpless, in our present cultural climate, to remedy. In future, they’ll likely feel fortunate not to be condemned to their faces as immoral abusers.

Meanwhile, the woman who thought to destroy them with lies has been met with an outpouring of sympathy. With enough financial incentive and while held to such a low standard of behavior, she might possibly do something similar to another young man or young men. And if so, feminists would once again salute her courage and integrity.

An Australian woman, Corbie Jean Walpole, who burned 23-year-old Jake Loader almost to death because she didn’t like his teasing, is appealing the sentence she received in May. That sentence was for seven years and six months, with a non-parole minimum of four years and six months.

Is it possible that a different judge will give Walpole something closer to the 25-year maximum?

News reports about Walpole’s sentence have not shown pictures of her victim’s burns. Jake Loader suffered third-degree burns to 55% of his body over his back, chest, arms, legs, and face, and had to undergo 10 surgeries after Corbie Walpole deliberately set him on fire.

After eight days in an induced coma and months in hospital, he is now unable to be in the sun and has trouble regulating his body temperature because his sweat glands were burned off in the attack. He can no longer carry on his work of mustering cattle in the Queensland outback. His financial future is uncertain, and his emotional as well as physical suffering have been immense.

What did Loader do that caused Walpole to pour a can of petrol over him and set it ablaze? He told her, while partying with friends at her house, that she would be better off in the kitchen making scones than drinking and drugging with the boys.

Because of that allegedly “misogynistic” remark (a silly term used by nearly every news site covering the story), Walpole was overcome with fury, which she described at her pre-sentencing hearing as feminine helplessness. “I was feeling overwhelmed by his presence and I didn’t know what to do,” she is reported to have said in explanation of her assault. “He was antagonizing me. He told me to go to the kitchen where I belong because I’m a girl. I gave it back to him and called him a misogynist.”

Here is a woman well tutored in womanly rage. Feminists have lectured us for years that men’s words directed at women can rightly be understood as “violence,” especially when they purportedly humiliate, objectify, or sexualize. In self-defense, then, Walpole poured a jerry can of fuel over her erstwhile friend and held her cigarette lighter near; when he challenged her to carry out her threat, she lit the inferno.

She then watched as other friends dragged the screaming man into a swimming pool to extinguish the flames. “What the f--- have I done, he just wouldn’t stop,” she reportedly said at the time, still engaged in self-justification. If Loader’s fate had been in her hands, the man would almost certainly be dead, and Walpole would still be playing the victim, claiming, as she did at her hearing, that she had meant no harm.

Now she hopes to avoid further prison time. A hearing date for her appeal to shorten her sentence has not yet been announced.

**

We’ve long known that women are given significantly lighter sentences than men for criminal wrongdoing. Law professor Sonja Starr published a definitive study in 2012, which found “large gender gaps favoring women” in such punishments. Women’s sentences are on average more than 60% less severe than men’s for the same types of crimes. As Starr demonstrated, women were also “significantly likelier to avoid charges and convictions entirely, and twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted.”

Our society’s far greater empathy for women causes female wrongdoers to be viewed as victims rather than perpetrators, more deserving of compassion, less responsible for bad deeds, less of a danger to society, and more likely to be rehabilitated than men.

Starr codified what many had already observed: that women expect to get away with deviant behavior, and often do.

In his 1913 book The Fraud of Feminism, British barrister Ernest Belfort Bax told how frequently juries and judges responded with leniency to women’s transgressions. In the case of murder, he alleged that “The evidence even to secure conviction in the case of a woman must be many times stronger than that which would suffice to hang a man. Should a conviction be obtained, the death penalty, though pronounced, is not given effect to, the female prisoner being almost invariably reprieved. In most cases where there is a conviction at all, it is for manslaughter and not for murder, when a light or almost nominal sentence is passed” (p. 37).

Bax described the women themselves as full of defiance and self-exoneration: “Female criminals are surrounded by a halo of injured innocence,” he quipped, “convinced of the maliciousness of [their] accusers” and of their own lack of responsibility (p. 51-52).

**

Walpole’s case perfectly fits the patterns Bax identified, in which violent women justify themselves and are rewarded with sympathy. At Walpole’s pre-sentencing hearing, inordinate emphasis was placed on her mental suffering, almost as if she were one of the innocent injured. She produced plenty of tears in court, portraying herself as dealing with depression at the time of her attack, answering “I wasn’t thinking” to many of the questions, and claiming she didn’t know that a cigarette lighter would be enough to set a petrol-soaked man ablaze.

Her legal representative went so far as to argue that jail time was inappropriate because she had been “provoked” by her old friend and because she was remorseful (though it’s difficult to find evidence that pity for her victim came near to competing with pity for herself).

The judge heard that Walpole continues to relive the horror of what happened, having developed post-traumatic stress disorder and an aversion to the smell of gasoline. She is allegedly haunted by the bewildered look on her victim’s face when he got out of the pool covered in burns.

(In fact, Walpole sent a tone-deaf text message to Loader’s girlfriend on the afternoon after the “mistake,” in which she seemed hardly worried about what had happened, saying she had “made a really stupid decision and I own that” and hoping Jake was “okay.”)

Judge Jennifer English did not accept the defense argument for a non-custodial sentence, but she did, ludicrously, characterize Walpole as one of those harmed in the tragedy, saying “This is a tragic case in so many ways for the victim and his family and for the offender and her family.” She also expressed her sorrow at having to incarcerate Walpole. “It’s never easy to send a young person, particularly a young woman, to jail,” she stated regretfully before giving Walpole a sentence that would make her eligible for parole by November of 2029.

Why was the judge reluctant? Walpole is a vicious adult who was unable or unwilling to control a murderous temper in response to teasing. Her statements of alleged remorse did not sound particularly contrite. “I find it very hard to believe the injuries that were caused were from my doing,” she is quoted as saying. She doesn’t seem to have recognized her responsibility for the attack or to have moved past shock and self-sorrow into genuine empathy and repentance.

It is also significant that Walpole’s horrific act (why wasn’t she charged with attempted murder?) is not her first assault. In 2021, news reports note, she was convicted of assault causing bodily harm in an attack on a (female) bouncer. Overall, she is a woman prone to violence and perhaps encouraged in it by the softness she has thus far encountered.

It goes without saying that if a man had hideously attacked a young woman, “provoked” by nothing more than cheeky jibes, absolutely no one would be interested in hearing about his PTSD, and the judge would not have had any second thoughts or regrets about putting him behind bars. His violence would have been widely reported—probably as a misogynistic hate crime (why was Walpole not charged with a hate crime? Stupid question)—and he would have been given significant prison time, especially if he had had a previous conviction for assault.

Feminist advocates would have seized on the story as evidence of the random terror men unleash on women to keep them in a state of fear. About Walpole’s violence, of course, feminists have nothing to say. No advocacy group is outraged at her lenient sentence or keen to express support for her victim. Some feminists have even used the case as a springboard to highlight sexual violence against women by sarcastically commenting that Jake Loader must have “asked” for the violence (get it?).

I hope that Jake Loader will sue Walpole in civil court over the financial and other hardship he and his family have suffered as a result of her brutality.

In an ideal world, the judge who openly admitted that she prefers not to put young women in prison should also be sanctioned, having impugned her own capacity for fairness.

**

For decades, feminist advocates have ignored or even encouraged female violence against men and boys by pretending that only men are violent and that a world with fewer men would be peaceful and just.

In a 1982 anthology of writings on women and non-violence (Reweaving the Web of Life), radical lesbian-feminist academic Sally Miller Gearhart recommended a gradual reduction in men’s numbers, through new reproductive technologies, to 10% of the human population (“The Future—If There Is One—Is Female,” p. 280), firm in her belief that with men reduced to a small minority, women would live together in harmony. Philosophy Professor Mary Daly, asked about Gearhart’s notion in interview, said it was “not a bad idea at all,” alleging that a “decontamination” of the earth would necessarily involve a “drastic reduction of the population of males.”

Recently, Professor of Law Mary Anne Franks has explicitly called for an increase in women’s (“justified”) violence against men in order to counteract an alleged gender imbalance. Law enforcement agencies, courts, civil authorities, and media should all support women’s quest for “optimal violence” (read the article if you can stomach it). Both the hypocritical double standards and the bloodlust are on vivid display.

These women are not twisted oddballs, reviled outcasts, penning their hate-filled screeds in dank basements on the margins of society. These are university professors and thought leaders, esteemed individuals holding prestigious positions that enable them to influence thousands. Mary Daly taught her unashamed female supremacism for over three decades at Boston College. Mary Anne Franks is a conference speaker and published academic. As feminist ideologues, they are not only allowed to argue for the literal worthlessness of male lives, but are paid to do so.

What do feminists want: recognition of women’s equal or superior moral capacity, or special exemptions when they break the law? Both, of course.

As Ernest Belfort Bax noted, “While what we have termed Political Feminism vehemently asserts its favorite dogma, the intellectual and moral equality of the sexes—that the woman is as good as the man if not better—Sentimental Feminism as vehemently seeks to exonerate every female criminal, and protests against any punishment being meted out to her approaching in severity that which would be awarded a man in a similar case” (The Fraud of Feminism, p. 46).

No one should be surprised at the result: violent women as self-absorbed and remorseless as Corbie Jean Walpole, who think the sickening gift of a four and a half year minimum sentence is too harsh and who fully expect, undoubtedly with an attorney’s blessing and perhaps some ego-stroking by family and friends, to have it reduced. Perhaps she imagines a future book deal and lecture tour about how valiantly she turned her life around following her (“tragic”) prank-gone-wrong. Perhaps she will discover a history of sexual and other abuse to explain her frenzied attack and secure her legal innocence.

It is to be hoped that Australian men will save themselves from her future temper tantrums by giving her a wide berth.

The question of where men have gone, in the title of Rachel Drucker’s New York Times op/ed, is surely disingenuous. Drucker thinks she knows: men have disappeared into social media posting, digital lurking, uncommitted sexting, and porn. Allegedly afraid of emotional intimacy, they are no longer “showing up” for women. Drucker addresses men directly, diagnosing their feelings: “You’ve retreated—not into malice, but into something softer and harder all at once: Avoidance. Exhaustion. Disrepair.”

Well, maybe. Maybe not.

Drucker’s article is part social lament, part personal ad, and like many statements by modern women about men, it is notable for its presumption. Drucker seems to think she can call off the sex war simply by saying she’s had enough. Men were never supposed to stop being available to women. Drucker mourns a lost time when men “asked questions and waited for the answers,” when they “listened—really listened—when a woman spoke.” It doesn’t seem to occur that men have been listening and have heard women’s messages, loud and clear.

Drucker goes so far as to express nostalgia for a time of male sexual pursuit, when having a woman on one’s arm was a way for a man to prove himself and impress other men. “It wasn’t always healthy,” she says in one of her many massive understatements (ignoring the barrage of condemnation leveled against such men) “but it meant that men had to show up and put in some effort.”

Drucker produces no evidence of men’s lack of effort, and it is not clear that her personal anecdotes—all culled, it seems, from her monied Chicago milieu—are representative. I know many men, including young men, who are still willing to pursue romantic relationships with women; many put in a lot of time and thought. But it does ring true that at least some portion of men are far more wary than in previous eras, unwilling to risk the potential hell of divorce or of a false accusation in a culture that believes women and belittles men.

Some men have simply come to the conclusion that modern women aren’t, in general, all that likable—neither marriage material nor viable candidates for motherhood.

As far as female pronouncements about men go, Drucker’s piece is not the worst. It does not hector or accuse (at least, not much), and Drucker expresses some genuine liking for men. But it’s not clear how much that is worth when she is so oblivious to men’s points of view and unaware that at least some of the onus for re-engaging men must fall on women. Drucker’s blind spots and unearned certainty turn her wistful dirge into a tone-deaf commentary on contemporary sexual politics.

**

The article begins with a restaurant, where Drucker notes the absence of men. There are women together, doing what women do, but almost no coupled men. And in her own life, Drucker notes, there has been retreat. It isn’t just her, she’s sure: it’s a collective act in which men are removing themselves from women’s lives, no longer “trying to connect.”

Drucker is part of the problem, though she doesn’t seem to recognize it. She admits that she “spent over a decade” working for Playboy and more hardcore sites to get men addicted to digital pornography. Part of her job was “to understand exactly what it took to get a man to pay for content he could easily find for free.” She does not seem to regret this work or recognize its damage; on the contrary, she exults that it helped her understand men’s deepest selves.

Her characterization is simplistic and contemptuous: “We knew what worked,” she boasts. “It wasn’t intimacy. It wasn’t mutuality. It was access to stimulation—clean, fast and frictionless. In that world, there’s no need for conversation. No effort. No curiosity. No reciprocity.”

If this is what men fundamentally are to Drucker—sex bots without emotion or desire for reciprocity—why is she so disappointed that they are no longer around?

Drucker doesn’t seem to consider that her certainties about male sexuality might be apparent to some of the men she meets, and might be a turnoff. Most men, I would wager, don’t seek intimacy with a woman who thinks she is doing them a big favor by educating them, sexually, out of their bovine inclinations.

She also tells us that, at age 54, she has a mass of abandoned or failed relationships behind her: “I’ve been dating since the mid-80s,” she notes casually, “been married, been a mother, gotten divorced, had many relationships long and short.” She thinks that this experience qualifies her to pronounce on men with a hard expertise, even telling us of the bygone etiquette of one-night stands. I hate to say it, but age and mileage may well be less attractive than Drucker seems to realize.

The key to her argument is refusal to admit that in any instance or manner, a woman might be responsible for anything. Certainly Drucker is determined not to be. She mentions more than once that what she’s naming is not “personal failure.” Of course not!

In her account, men are simply “disappearing behind firewalls, filters and curated personas.” They are engaging in “directionless orbiting.” She recounts how she reached out to a man she had met on a dating app, telling him clearly that she was interested. He never responded, and now she alleges that there are “thousands” just like him: men giving up on the chance for a gratifying relationship. According to Drucker, the phenomenon is exclusively male. Women never ghost or play the field, teasing with lack of commitment. Women are not entitled or untrustworthy. They are never mercenary or unworthy; not liars or cheats. Women’s emotional lives and behaviors are above reproach. (In reality, plenty of research suggests otherwise.)

**

Drucker claims that her article has nothing to do with “blaming men,” but every omission and assumption reinforces a logic of female moral superiority and male inadequacy. In her telling, women are the good ones, the ones who “haven’t stopped hoping.” Her few explanations of men’s experiences and state of mind are laughable and trite. “Maybe no one taught you how to stay,” she offers (thinking of dog training?), “Maybe you tried once, and it hurt. Maybe the world told you your role was to provide, to perform, to protect—and never to feel.”

We’ve heard this talk about male emotional immaturity many times before, and it takes us nowhere but into the achingly familiar territory of anti-male contempt. Who makes up this “world” that allegedly told men how to be? Are women not part of it? Does Drucker have any inkling of the kinds of “hurt” men have experienced: not because of a failed love affair, the least of their problems, but in the family courts and everywhere that men have been falsely accused, discriminated against, wrongfully convicted, defamed, financially destroyed, imprisoned for debt, deprived of their children, and robbed of their dignity?

It is extraordinary that a woman who grew up in the 1970s can write a substantial reflection on the fracturing of trust and affection between the sexes without once mentioning the change in women’s declared attitudes towards men, attitudes that have grown louder and more vicious with every passing decade. She claims near her conclusion that “We never needed you to be perfect. We needed you to be with us.”

But this is monumentally untrue and is contradicted by masses of feminist and anti-male punditry so voluminous and unrelenting over the past 50 years that Drucker must surely be aware of at least some of it: the encouragement to female rage, the celebration of women-only communities, the calls for violence against men, the remorseless denunciations and unashamed expressions of anti-male hatred, the itemization of every way men have failed, persecuted, and terrorized women, the weaponization of HR, of DEI, of the APA, of #MeToo; and the endless demonization of men in popular culture.

Is Drucker truly unaware of “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” “The Future is Female,” “Yes, All Men,” “Men Are Obsolete,” “Women Make Better Leaders,” and “Women Don’t Owe You Shit” For years, women have told men that everything is wrong and damaging about the way they are with women, from their pickup techniques to their creepy ways, from their “benevolent sexism” to their alleged inability to cry, from their paucity of strong friendships to their tendency to use power and control in relationships, from their mansplaining and manspreading to their alleged emotional neediness, and everything in between.

Decades of feminist theory, advocacy, and biased studies have convinced lawmakers, police, prosecutors, researchers, therapists, social workers, and policy makers that only men are violent, women their primary victims. In divorce, men are stripped of their assets, criminalized, and have their children judicially stolen.

The surprise is not that some men have pulled back, but that they haven’t done so far more definitively and bitterly.

Drucker addresses none of these. She doesn’t even signal a remote awareness of the legitimate reasons for some men’s wariness and dislike of women, neither of which will change while anti-male laws remain in place and anti-male bigotry is respectable. Of course, not all women are on board with feminist hatred; some even oppose it. But in general, women have remained indifferent to the millions of men run over by the feminist machine, harried out of jobs, denied opportunities, discriminated against in law, and made to feel toxic and inferior. More precisely, most women haven’t even noticed.

Fifty years in, it’s not enough for a few surprised women to claim, quoting Drucker again, that “We are not impossible to please.” It has certainly seemed that way for well over half a century. Like the vast majority of women who comment on the current relationship climate, Drucker tells men that the way to repair the breach is to do what women say they want, regardless of how self-contradictory and destructive their demands. What about what men want? Perhaps it’s time for women to ask questions and “really listen” (and act) when men speak. Barring that, invitations and promises like Drucker’s deserve to fall on deaf ears—and largely will.