Thank you, Janice. The focus on "masculinitjes" gives feminists another platform to attack men from, and also deflects attention from focusing on the real issues impacting men and boys.
I'll never quite understand how such 'researchers' with high verbal intelligence can be so delusional. Part of the problem I've noticed is that they lead with their own buzzwords which they wield as weapons. For example, "misogyny" to them covers such a broad swath that it really means any view that doesn't toe their line, anything that challenges their orthodoxy.
Of course going by that definition (which is no definition at all) it's a foregone conclusion they'll find misogyny wherever they want to. Then it's game over, debate is shut down.
Verbal intelligence, high. Actual intelligence = judgement, very low. This is the cancer now fully metastasized in our Universities. It beggars belief.
I used to listen to Peterson, but with his daughter's behavior & his turning to man-shaming on jewish daily wire, I put him down there with simping mangina Richard Reeves and cross-dresser Scott Galloway
there are only two reasons all of these artificial, irrational, fantastic, alternate universes are being entertained in any way
1) massive propaganda towards an inorganic agenda
2) mass mental illness
at least this is all providing wonderful exposure of the lies to the real world & to more young men ... eventually the globalist misandrist agenda will have to retreat or they will have to double down and use more communist tyrannical & authoritarian force
The Guardian - Mar 19, 2025 - Beyond Andrew Tate: the imitators who help promote misogyny online.
"Alongside Tate, the conservative Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson is one of the more established names seen to be promoting sexist and anti-feminist ideas on YouTube as part of …"
You see Janice, the manosphere has been decoded...
Indeed! And although not a fan of Lex Fridman you can hardly accuse him of being 'simplistic' - especially when compared with the academic blobspeak you quote.
High verbal intelligence??? You must be joking!!! It's called BLOVIATION: "Bloviation is the act of speaking or writing in a pompous, wordy, and lengthy manner that is largely empty of meaning. Often associated with political rhetoric, it means talking at length to sound important, despite having nothing substantial to say."
Many people cannot even think or write in complex sentences. That's not the case with most of these looney tunes academics, yet something in them intellectually is way off - basic judgment. You have a name for it; I have another.
They are dull minded people who spend hours constructing those turgid sentences, then they memorize them so they can regurgitate them in interviews. If you saw them interviewed you would see how dull minded they are, they can only respond to questions with patently rehearsed answers. That's why they're so rarely interviewed!
Agreed. See the CBC interview of "Professor" Rebecca Sullivan regarding the release of The Red Pill movie. Beyond a face palm interview, in a sane world she would have been fired and exiled from academia over that.
Yeah this is simply attention holding behavior. They try to use as many words as possible to pretend they have important stuff to say and if you need a dictionary to decrypt, that’s a feature for them (takes longer for you to figure out they are full of shit).
You can readily observe this behavior in real life as well, where this type of person will go on and on about some random shit even though they have absolutely nothing of value to say. Those people love meetings. I let you conclude why there is so many bullshit jobs…
Thank-you, Janice, for your continuing work uncovering the ideology driven, hate fuelled, misandrist nonsense of the modern feminist movement, part of the general nonsense of Frankfurt School critical theory .
I agree, although I cannot really call it "verbal intelligence" - there is no intelligence there, not the way I see intelligence. And come to think of it, this work - although I have not read it - might well be something modern AI programmes can produce. I say this because you an find some well written essays, that somehow just do not feel right (repetitions at the wrong place, missing out on aspects of the argument because there was little to find on this in the Internet texts they where trained on, etc). resumé: "sounds good when you skim over it quickly, lacking content when you start looking closely"
Amathia is the word for it, but it isn't an explanation for it. The explanation, I believe, is that group identity and group coherence was critical to survival in the clans of the Pleistocene. Individualism was punished severely because it could destroy the unity of the clan. There were tremendous pressures to conform to the tribe, to row in the same direction even if the direction was sub-optimal. Thus the desire to go along with the tribe became entrenched in human psychology. Once you identify with a tribe - a cult, a religion, a nation, a political party, and ideology - it becomes very difficult to think in any way contrary to the tribal mantras. The self-deception of believing ridiculous things while believing them to be profound is one of the most pervasive flaws in human nature as a result.
"Individualism was punished severely because it could destroy the unity of the clan."
Yes, and punishment is particularly severe in academia for anyone who breaks ranks. They quickly find themselves out of a job, ostracised, blacklisted, cancelled, friendless, their whole life collapsing around them. We've seen it time and again, and very few recover their status and reputation. Male feminist academics would be acutely aware of the dangers of crossing the sisterhood, and careful to toe the line, even if they have occasional doubts. They all have families to feed.
I think women are FAR more prone to being conformist. Being the nail that sticks out in the sisterhood means almost certainly getting hammered down. If not punished then just shunned.
Men as the builder class have had to solve real world problems for millenia, and that caused men to value diversity of opinion. When the Mongol army is over the next hill you want to pool various ideas on how to defeat them. Conformity for the sake of conformity often meant death with men's work. That evolutionary pressure, natural selection, was not absent but was FAR less among the women safely back in camp around the warm fire. To agree and not rock the boat was the surest path to survival for the women.
So here we are. They all agree they are oppressed by us men, and there's no arguing it.
"I think women are FAR more prone to being conformist."
Orwell certainly thought so: "It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy." - George Orwell, 1984.
I'm sure you're right in pointing to different evolutionary pressures as the source of this difference between men and women. As a general rule I would say men crave freedom while women crave security, and it manifests as individualism versus conformity. It's the main reason I believe women should not hold power in the adult world - they simply do not understand the crucial importance of individual freedom for the success of human society. Their instincts are to control us like children, because that's been their evolutionary role.
The late Z Man had a running gag on his blog entitled “Xirl Science”. He’d read scholarly PhD dissertations from gender studies programs…and these “ladies”… would spew goggledeegook and made up words with gay abandon, and sometimes even implement their own punctuation methods. Often the articles included pics of the authors… and as you might expect, the stereotypes held. Fat black sheboons. Neurotic white women with bad haircuts and green hair. Purple faced rage heads.
I still communicate occasionally with some of my ex-wife's Leftie friends, including one "Victoria," whom I find particularly entertaining. I try to remain above the fray, but sometimes I just CANNOT resist having a bit of fun with her. A fairly decent author of "erotica," nee "mommy-porn," but a lunatic feminist of the highest order, her lack of a college degree has always been a sore point, and last week she told me that she had decided to go back to school at the ripe old age of 56.
"Really? What's your major?"
"Gender Studies."
I couldn't have stopped myself if the Sword of Damocles itsownself hung over my head.
"No kidding? Why would you do that, Victoria? You already hate men."
Great stuff Janice. I loved the idea that the real grifters are the gender studies profs! That is so true and of course reinforces what we all know, that most of what they do is simply a projection of their own hatred onto others.
In my day, it was possible to believe that the anti-male academics actually believed most of what they published. But there has been so much extensive debunking of the standard gender paradigm since I was a graduate student that that is no longer a reasonable assumption. Grifting, along with some kind of psychological issue, is the most likely explanation these days.
This proves that academics is a cartel, or collection of cartels, and no sector is more desperate to protect its monopoly than "gender studies". When Viktor Orban refused government support for George Soros' Central European University in Hungary, mostly on the basis of gender studies (as Vaclav Klaus had already done in the Czech Republic) -- effectively kicking it out of the country, since they could not survive on its merits -- the gender studies types in particular claimed "censorship" and violation of "academic freedom" (https://www.academia.edu/38988699/Academic_Freedom_and_Central_European_University). But everyone saw through the ploy. Perhaps that is the solution for the West?
It would be far more useful if it incorporated disciplines like biology and psychology and aimed to understand men and women more accurately, so that interventions and policies could be designed with both male and female needs in mind. In short, it would need to become science rather than political activism.
Unfortunately, as you pointed out, the field seems cartel-like. That makes the chances of genuine reform pretty low.
The likelihood that it could be reformed in the useful and beneficial way you describe is essentially nil.
These are far left or left-compliant ideologues. They rail against any hint of what they consistently dismiss as biological essentialism. They are not at all interested in understanding men and women, only in transforming them according to a globalist and technocratic utopian blueprint.
I understand your position in that the current powers in place wouldn’t allow a proper reform of the field.
But if you think about it with some form of naive idealism, as if it would start over with zero preconceptions and completely different people, it could definitely be useful to some extent.
We could study gender behaviors in very much the same way we study animals behaviors. But it would basically require a « men’s approach » (as in, rational/logical) and they definitely can’t have that, because patriarchy or something something…
Good point. Increasingly over several generations now (including my own) we have been growing up without deep understanding of the complexities of marriage, family, kinship, romance, sexuality, childrearing, and connected topics, and their place in the social and civilizational order. In fact, some of the best rediscoveries of these things have been taking place in the very Manosphere that these ideologues are trashing and that they refuse to explore. Janice names some and others are hardly known: A Male Space, This is Shah, Alexander Grace, and I am sure many more. A Male Space and I just interviewed with Howard Schwartz, author of The Pristine Self and a brilliant psychologiest who has almost zero internet presence, and we plan to interview Roger Devlin, author of Sexual Utopia in Power. The problem is that it is hard to find the serious voices amid all the noise, and some from the past are in danger of being forgotten, like Amneus. So perhaps we should be applying for all the gender studies jobs and the suing when we do not get them.
I highly respect Alexander Grace, and I have been bowled over by Howard Schwartz's books. I am so glad you're in contact with them. Agreed about David Amneus. I think he started out as a Shakespeare scholar.
"In short, it would need to become science rather than political activism."
Yes, it should be a branch of Psychology, where it could be studied with scientific rigour and evidence based methods. However, the very fact that gender has become so politicized makes it impossible to approach objectively. Some years ago an academic sought to understand rape in evolutionary terms - he was promptly removed amid outrage and death threats.
I'd go further than you, Orr, because I doubt that even the most scholarly psychologists can encompass a universal phenomenon (gender) that urgently requires attention not only to biology but also to fields such as cultural anthropology, history, religion, the arts--and, ultimately, moral philosophy. Scientists (including evolutionary psychologists) and "social scientists," alone, cannot effectively "reimagine" human dignity (which includes male dignity) or even explore the universal human search for meaning.
Now that many Western states have signed up to the Istanbul Convention (Turkey itself withdrew), feminism is both protected and funded by law. That makes it very hard to kick the Gender Studies indoctrination centres out of universities.
I think Australia is more feminist-insurrection-insane at this point than America.
One big difference in America is our singular Constitution that codified what other countries didn't. Especially the ancient, natural right to freedom of speech and the right to keep and bear arms.
Well I was put in a cage and in chains for that supposed 'right' to free speech. Turns out some women didn't like what I was speaking. Also speaking the truth turned out not to be 'free'.
BTW this was in a supposedly 'conservative' county of America. There is no conservative or liberal, there is only feminism. But hey, a copy of the Constitution would be great if I run outta toilet tissue.
Australia, like N.Z., learned her feminist tyranny from her momma England.
I haven't been to Australia but based on what I've learned and read I gotta agree with you . . . your women are even more totalitarian than the United Sisterhood. Must be a lot of geldings in Australia backing up the Grrls and enforcing their commands.
What is being defended here is not merely a critique of a few genuinely pathological online subcultures. It is an institutional right to classify ever-wider zones of male behaviour as suspect.
Once explicit misogyny, anti-feminist argument, stoicism, fitness culture, traditional family norms, self-help, and ordinary male grievance are all placed on one sliding continuum of “harm,” the category becomes politically useful precisely because it is so elastic.
That elasticity is the point. It allows academics, NGOs, and regulators to convert moral disapproval into expert authority, and expert authority into intervention, censorship, and curricular management.
The deepest issue is not whether bad actors exist. Of course they do. It is whether “harm” language is being used as a governance technology to pathologize male nonconformity in general while protecting the status of an expert class that is steadily losing its monopoly over meaning.
Excellent article as usual. Reminds me of the ubiquitous overuse of the term 'Far Right'. Broad brush smears can't survive the scrutiny of the wider public forever (as is becoming apparent in the shifting of the Overton Window). It seems unlikely that this type of toxic and lazy (dare I say hysterical) scholarship will change of it's own accord. Funders and trustees of public Institutions need to clean house and be accountable to their founding principles.
The UK wants to establish before any court hearing that domestic abuse has occurred in family court cases, without the accused being able to cross-examine or contest. The determination of domestic abuse will be made by the accuser and the court (someone's missing, but I. can't think who) without right of rebuttal because that would be too hard on the women, er, uh, complainants.
The sort of people writing these papers pretend academic objectivity, but are mostly fanatics. So it is impossible for them to see any merit in the views they critique, or any flaws in their own. As the Marxist-Feminist future is by definition good, anyone opposing it can only have terrible motives, or be acting in 'bad faith' as they put it.
They can't conceive of concepts like female privilege or gynocentrism. Such ideas threaten their whole belief system. No wonder they see the so-called manosphere as a threat.
These people are the ones controllng what is said in Gender Studies courses. If only those courses also contained some videos from Karen Straughan or the Fiamengo Files, at least there would be some balance. But of course that will never happen.
Their real problem is they are looking in a mirror and what they see reflected is simply their own fragility and anxiety. The hysterical tone is simply their fear showing. As you say they project the "manosphere" onto what are in fact wildly different things unconnected except by not being "feminist". They do this because they are a rag tag of different ideas that are connected by a misandrism that links these sometimes completely contradictory sects with a religious style belief in the inherent baseness of boys and men and their responsibility for all that is "bad".
It is laughable that they have any strategy to connect with boys and men, because they cannot concieve of even pretending to like them let alone be able to empathise. As you say their sole tool is censorship because in reality they realise,deep down, they're running put of trump cards.
In a way I'm quite sanguine about their huffing and puffing. I think it was "Girl Writes What" whonsaid something about anti feminism needed to become "cool". Well to me in my youth and I'm sure for my contemporaries, what was "cool" was most anything our parents generation thought was dreadful, Whatever music the BBC banned, whatever grey haired politicians condemned, which ever films were banned or censured, Mao's Little red book, Castro's Cuba. What these academics don't see is now they are the fuddy ruddy old farts pontificating to young people who thing being over 30 is "old". I'm sure the authors thing themselves as "cutting edge" "radical" etc. But their preaching looks like boring old kill Joy's. In this country they go on and on about Andrew Tate and somehow I'm sure he's had far more "clicks" as a result! So let them huff and puff with their moral panic.
I agree that these academics absolutely don't get the vibe of young men, many of whom are reflexively anti-feminist, thank goodness. And they are kill joys through and through, absolutely outraged that people on the internet get to discuss and explore, and laugh about, a variety of subjects outside of the so-boringly predictable feminist framework.
Karen always struck me as very grounded and knowledgeable. I don't know why she hasn't had more of a presence in my social media explorations. The algorithms should be feeding me this stuff. Same with Diana Davison.
This is why I'm optimistic. Each new generation will reject something their parents embrace so every generation is another chance for anti-feminism to become cool. Given that every facet of feminism is dishonest/bad when properly examined the potential is huge as the generation that 'discovers' it is all lies can truly feel heroic. "Grandma, why were you part of a hate group against men?"
This strikes me as wishful thinking based on a dynamic that disappeared generations ago. My observation is that each generation since the hippies of the 1960s has tried to out-do their parents in the direction of leftist virtue-signaling. I've even seen some recent polls claiming that university-aged kids hold a more favourable view of socialism / communism than capitalism.
I really have to stress your point that basically nobody reads these papers. While working on my master’s thesis, I went through a number of papers on “hegemonic masculinity,” and I was appalled by the way these “scholars” portrayed men and masculinity. It was pure contempt, dressed up in anecdotal evidence and Marxist concepts.
I kept thinking that if more people, especially men, actually read this stuff, they’d revolt. But nobody does. All they see is the “nice” HR lady talking about diversity.
Lot in what you say. I think more men have to 'get their hands dirty' and read this drivel and answer back. It will require persistence and hard work but it will be worth the effort because the influence of this 'scholarship' extends beyond the academy.
having had a couple of "nice" HR ladies as a boss, they were like yapping little dogs and once one sees this, then it is hard to use the word 'nice' anymore.
Thanks for sharing, Janice. You're polite and patient, but this is just a good reminder that some of the loudest voices in academy longhouse are batshit crazy. I'm no longer surprised by their, um, "scholarship", but I remain baffled by the weak leadership that tolerates them.
I suppose this is part and parcel of the feminization of the academy. Once women began to dominate it, this was the inevitable outcome. Helen Andrews (and others) likely hit the nail on the head with their diagnosis.
"...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.”
Ontological racketeering and threat proliferation? Isn't that what feminist and gender studies "scholars" do? Seems like projection
<ontological racketeering,’ which consists of ‘threat proliferation,’ affirming and extending in viewers a sense of crisis,>
Feminist texts, books and articles constantly convey a 'sense of crisis",, for example, books like "Against Our Will", "Backlash", and "The Beauty Myth."
On F/B and Instagram, there is a bombardment of posts claiming a crisis, justifying their hatred towards the male gender.
The manosphere, like any mass movement, has its grifters and jesters and embarrassments. When I came upon it in the early 2000s, it was just men comparing notes on shitty women they were trying to cope with. Coping strategies included stoic acceptance, keeping distance and self reflection. Get in shape. Read. Acquire skills, improve yourself… these are ways that mend broken hearts. I remember our collective shock, when we shared our stories, that the patterns of female behaviour emerged. Most of us didn’t understand women in those days. When we finally saw what was going on, we were enraged. Women had played us for fools… and that’s when the clowns came tumbling out.
The war of the sexes became a stupid fight for stupid people. It remains so today.
“Men’s resistance to feminist indoctrination may be overcome, they suggest, with more indoctrination”. The prevalence of this mindset is one of the reasons I stopped subscribing to The Globe and Mail after 20 plus years of doing so. This happened nine years ago this month after yet another of their opinion writers was engaging in more brazen man-bashing. And when intelligent people tried to push back against this toxic swill, no matter how well-reasoned or well-expressed their comments were, other commenters would resort to, “See? That’s why we need more feminism.”
Thank you, Janice. The focus on "masculinitjes" gives feminists another platform to attack men from, and also deflects attention from focusing on the real issues impacting men and boys.
I'll never quite understand how such 'researchers' with high verbal intelligence can be so delusional. Part of the problem I've noticed is that they lead with their own buzzwords which they wield as weapons. For example, "misogyny" to them covers such a broad swath that it really means any view that doesn't toe their line, anything that challenges their orthodoxy.
Of course going by that definition (which is no definition at all) it's a foregone conclusion they'll find misogyny wherever they want to. Then it's game over, debate is shut down.
Amathia is the word. Why smart people can be dumb.
Verbal intelligence, high. Actual intelligence = judgement, very low. This is the cancer now fully metastasized in our Universities. It beggars belief.
And then claiming that Jordan Peterson, for example, is simplistic and extreme! The mind boggles.
especially when he promotes feminists like Louise Perry ... though maybe she's considered a temu feminist
https://youtu.be/nKWYiGSytlA
https://youtu.be/873SGJYfp6s
I used to listen to Peterson, but with his daughter's behavior & his turning to man-shaming on jewish daily wire, I put him down there with simping mangina Richard Reeves and cross-dresser Scott Galloway
there are only two reasons all of these artificial, irrational, fantastic, alternate universes are being entertained in any way
1) massive propaganda towards an inorganic agenda
2) mass mental illness
at least this is all providing wonderful exposure of the lies to the real world & to more young men ... eventually the globalist misandrist agenda will have to retreat or they will have to double down and use more communist tyrannical & authoritarian force
Manosphere Myths EXPOSED, Rollo Tomassi
https://www.youtube.com/live/p1VsXVhUS-Q
It astounds me when they use Jordan's name in the same sentence as Andrew Tate.
It's like saying chalk is the same as cheese.
what is your issue with Andrew Tate?
That's a strange question.
The Guardian - Mar 19, 2025 - Beyond Andrew Tate: the imitators who help promote misogyny online.
"Alongside Tate, the conservative Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson is one of the more established names seen to be promoting sexist and anti-feminist ideas on YouTube as part of …"
You see Janice, the manosphere has been decoded...
Lord help us.
Indeed! And although not a fan of Lex Fridman you can hardly accuse him of being 'simplistic' - especially when compared with the academic blobspeak you quote.
LOL ;-D
High verbal intelligence??? You must be joking!!! It's called BLOVIATION: "Bloviation is the act of speaking or writing in a pompous, wordy, and lengthy manner that is largely empty of meaning. Often associated with political rhetoric, it means talking at length to sound important, despite having nothing substantial to say."
Many people cannot even think or write in complex sentences. That's not the case with most of these looney tunes academics, yet something in them intellectually is way off - basic judgment. You have a name for it; I have another.
They are dull minded people who spend hours constructing those turgid sentences, then they memorize them so they can regurgitate them in interviews. If you saw them interviewed you would see how dull minded they are, they can only respond to questions with patently rehearsed answers. That's why they're so rarely interviewed!
Agreed. See the CBC interview of "Professor" Rebecca Sullivan regarding the release of The Red Pill movie. Beyond a face palm interview, in a sane world she would have been fired and exiled from academia over that.
Yeah this is simply attention holding behavior. They try to use as many words as possible to pretend they have important stuff to say and if you need a dictionary to decrypt, that’s a feature for them (takes longer for you to figure out they are full of shit).
You can readily observe this behavior in real life as well, where this type of person will go on and on about some random shit even though they have absolutely nothing of value to say. Those people love meetings. I let you conclude why there is so many bullshit jobs…
Thank-you, Janice, for your continuing work uncovering the ideology driven, hate fuelled, misandrist nonsense of the modern feminist movement, part of the general nonsense of Frankfurt School critical theory .
I agree, although I cannot really call it "verbal intelligence" - there is no intelligence there, not the way I see intelligence. And come to think of it, this work - although I have not read it - might well be something modern AI programmes can produce. I say this because you an find some well written essays, that somehow just do not feel right (repetitions at the wrong place, missing out on aspects of the argument because there was little to find on this in the Internet texts they where trained on, etc). resumé: "sounds good when you skim over it quickly, lacking content when you start looking closely"
Amathia is the word for it, but it isn't an explanation for it. The explanation, I believe, is that group identity and group coherence was critical to survival in the clans of the Pleistocene. Individualism was punished severely because it could destroy the unity of the clan. There were tremendous pressures to conform to the tribe, to row in the same direction even if the direction was sub-optimal. Thus the desire to go along with the tribe became entrenched in human psychology. Once you identify with a tribe - a cult, a religion, a nation, a political party, and ideology - it becomes very difficult to think in any way contrary to the tribal mantras. The self-deception of believing ridiculous things while believing them to be profound is one of the most pervasive flaws in human nature as a result.
"Individualism was punished severely because it could destroy the unity of the clan."
Yes, and punishment is particularly severe in academia for anyone who breaks ranks. They quickly find themselves out of a job, ostracised, blacklisted, cancelled, friendless, their whole life collapsing around them. We've seen it time and again, and very few recover their status and reputation. Male feminist academics would be acutely aware of the dangers of crossing the sisterhood, and careful to toe the line, even if they have occasional doubts. They all have families to feed.
I think women are FAR more prone to being conformist. Being the nail that sticks out in the sisterhood means almost certainly getting hammered down. If not punished then just shunned.
Men as the builder class have had to solve real world problems for millenia, and that caused men to value diversity of opinion. When the Mongol army is over the next hill you want to pool various ideas on how to defeat them. Conformity for the sake of conformity often meant death with men's work. That evolutionary pressure, natural selection, was not absent but was FAR less among the women safely back in camp around the warm fire. To agree and not rock the boat was the surest path to survival for the women.
So here we are. They all agree they are oppressed by us men, and there's no arguing it.
"I think women are FAR more prone to being conformist."
Orwell certainly thought so: "It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy." - George Orwell, 1984.
I'm sure you're right in pointing to different evolutionary pressures as the source of this difference between men and women. As a general rule I would say men crave freedom while women crave security, and it manifests as individualism versus conformity. It's the main reason I believe women should not hold power in the adult world - they simply do not understand the crucial importance of individual freedom for the success of human society. Their instincts are to control us like children, because that's been their evolutionary role.
That's a very interesting perspective. Thank you for that.
Excellent and apt Greek word.
I was randomly watching short clips, and a clip popped up about that word.
The late Z Man had a running gag on his blog entitled “Xirl Science”. He’d read scholarly PhD dissertations from gender studies programs…and these “ladies”… would spew goggledeegook and made up words with gay abandon, and sometimes even implement their own punctuation methods. Often the articles included pics of the authors… and as you might expect, the stereotypes held. Fat black sheboons. Neurotic white women with bad haircuts and green hair. Purple faced rage heads.
Articulation does not equal intelligence.
Wiktionary tells me fat and black are redundant with sheboons. Had to google that, what a word.
I miss the Z Man and his excellent commentariat.
America does not deserve men of his quality, and soon, she will not have them.
Epistemic closure, essentially--in a leftist monoculture environment.
It's because it isn't really about men being the enemy. It's a politics and power cult that seeks total control..
I still communicate occasionally with some of my ex-wife's Leftie friends, including one "Victoria," whom I find particularly entertaining. I try to remain above the fray, but sometimes I just CANNOT resist having a bit of fun with her. A fairly decent author of "erotica," nee "mommy-porn," but a lunatic feminist of the highest order, her lack of a college degree has always been a sore point, and last week she told me that she had decided to go back to school at the ripe old age of 56.
"Really? What's your major?"
"Gender Studies."
I couldn't have stopped myself if the Sword of Damocles itsownself hung over my head.
"No kidding? Why would you do that, Victoria? You already hate men."
We're not speaking for the time being.
LOL ;-D
😂😂
Great stuff Janice. I loved the idea that the real grifters are the gender studies profs! That is so true and of course reinforces what we all know, that most of what they do is simply a projection of their own hatred onto others.
Thank you, Tom. As always, you hit on the part I was most satisfied with in my essay.
In my day, it was possible to believe that the anti-male academics actually believed most of what they published. But there has been so much extensive debunking of the standard gender paradigm since I was a graduate student that that is no longer a reasonable assumption. Grifting, along with some kind of psychological issue, is the most likely explanation these days.
This proves that academics is a cartel, or collection of cartels, and no sector is more desperate to protect its monopoly than "gender studies". When Viktor Orban refused government support for George Soros' Central European University in Hungary, mostly on the basis of gender studies (as Vaclav Klaus had already done in the Czech Republic) -- effectively kicking it out of the country, since they could not survive on its merits -- the gender studies types in particular claimed "censorship" and violation of "academic freedom" (https://www.academia.edu/38988699/Academic_Freedom_and_Central_European_University). But everyone saw through the ploy. Perhaps that is the solution for the West?
I think gender studies could be valuable.
It would be far more useful if it incorporated disciplines like biology and psychology and aimed to understand men and women more accurately, so that interventions and policies could be designed with both male and female needs in mind. In short, it would need to become science rather than political activism.
Unfortunately, as you pointed out, the field seems cartel-like. That makes the chances of genuine reform pretty low.
The likelihood that it could be reformed in the useful and beneficial way you describe is essentially nil.
These are far left or left-compliant ideologues. They rail against any hint of what they consistently dismiss as biological essentialism. They are not at all interested in understanding men and women, only in transforming them according to a globalist and technocratic utopian blueprint.
I understand your position in that the current powers in place wouldn’t allow a proper reform of the field.
But if you think about it with some form of naive idealism, as if it would start over with zero preconceptions and completely different people, it could definitely be useful to some extent.
We could study gender behaviors in very much the same way we study animals behaviors. But it would basically require a « men’s approach » (as in, rational/logical) and they definitely can’t have that, because patriarchy or something something…
Good point. Increasingly over several generations now (including my own) we have been growing up without deep understanding of the complexities of marriage, family, kinship, romance, sexuality, childrearing, and connected topics, and their place in the social and civilizational order. In fact, some of the best rediscoveries of these things have been taking place in the very Manosphere that these ideologues are trashing and that they refuse to explore. Janice names some and others are hardly known: A Male Space, This is Shah, Alexander Grace, and I am sure many more. A Male Space and I just interviewed with Howard Schwartz, author of The Pristine Self and a brilliant psychologiest who has almost zero internet presence, and we plan to interview Roger Devlin, author of Sexual Utopia in Power. The problem is that it is hard to find the serious voices amid all the noise, and some from the past are in danger of being forgotten, like Amneus. So perhaps we should be applying for all the gender studies jobs and the suing when we do not get them.
I highly respect Alexander Grace, and I have been bowled over by Howard Schwartz's books. I am so glad you're in contact with them. Agreed about David Amneus. I think he started out as a Shakespeare scholar.
Daniel Amneus, not David.
Schwartz came through when called on. Props.
"In short, it would need to become science rather than political activism."
Yes, it should be a branch of Psychology, where it could be studied with scientific rigour and evidence based methods. However, the very fact that gender has become so politicized makes it impossible to approach objectively. Some years ago an academic sought to understand rape in evolutionary terms - he was promptly removed amid outrage and death threats.
I'd go further than you, Orr, because I doubt that even the most scholarly psychologists can encompass a universal phenomenon (gender) that urgently requires attention not only to biology but also to fields such as cultural anthropology, history, religion, the arts--and, ultimately, moral philosophy. Scientists (including evolutionary psychologists) and "social scientists," alone, cannot effectively "reimagine" human dignity (which includes male dignity) or even explore the universal human search for meaning.
Now that many Western states have signed up to the Istanbul Convention (Turkey itself withdrew), feminism is both protected and funded by law. That makes it very hard to kick the Gender Studies indoctrination centres out of universities.
The Western world -- with a few exceptions -- is comprehensively feminist, and has been for decades.
America and Britain are the leaders of the evil.
I don't know.
I think Australia is more feminist-insurrection-insane at this point than America.
One big difference in America is our singular Constitution that codified what other countries didn't. Especially the ancient, natural right to freedom of speech and the right to keep and bear arms.
Well I was put in a cage and in chains for that supposed 'right' to free speech. Turns out some women didn't like what I was speaking. Also speaking the truth turned out not to be 'free'.
BTW this was in a supposedly 'conservative' county of America. There is no conservative or liberal, there is only feminism. But hey, a copy of the Constitution would be great if I run outta toilet tissue.
Australia, like N.Z., learned her feminist tyranny from her momma England.
I haven't been to Australia but based on what I've learned and read I gotta agree with you . . . your women are even more totalitarian than the United Sisterhood. Must be a lot of geldings in Australia backing up the Grrls and enforcing their commands.
Yeah, I don't know what your individual case is.
I despise the entire injustice system, from tyrannical anti-Constitution cops all the way up to the corrupt anti-Constitution 'judges.'
But it doesn't change our Constitution. I'm American.
And I don't care about parties or ideologies or titles. As you say, that's all distracting bs and is used to divide and weaken The People.
Please let it be! Thanks for this info Stephen.
The whole identity politics "us v them" stance is just so facile, tiring and ultimately boring.
Dangerous too, but that's another story.
What is being defended here is not merely a critique of a few genuinely pathological online subcultures. It is an institutional right to classify ever-wider zones of male behaviour as suspect.
Once explicit misogyny, anti-feminist argument, stoicism, fitness culture, traditional family norms, self-help, and ordinary male grievance are all placed on one sliding continuum of “harm,” the category becomes politically useful precisely because it is so elastic.
That elasticity is the point. It allows academics, NGOs, and regulators to convert moral disapproval into expert authority, and expert authority into intervention, censorship, and curricular management.
The deepest issue is not whether bad actors exist. Of course they do. It is whether “harm” language is being used as a governance technology to pathologize male nonconformity in general while protecting the status of an expert class that is steadily losing its monopoly over meaning.
You said it better than I. That's exactly what is going on.
Excellent article as usual. Reminds me of the ubiquitous overuse of the term 'Far Right'. Broad brush smears can't survive the scrutiny of the wider public forever (as is becoming apparent in the shifting of the Overton Window). It seems unlikely that this type of toxic and lazy (dare I say hysterical) scholarship will change of it's own accord. Funders and trustees of public Institutions need to clean house and be accountable to their founding principles.
The UK wants to establish before any court hearing that domestic abuse has occurred in family court cases, without the accused being able to cross-examine or contest. The determination of domestic abuse will be made by the accuser and the court (someone's missing, but I. can't think who) without right of rebuttal because that would be too hard on the women, er, uh, complainants.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/mar/22/family-courts-in-england-and-wales-not-good-enough-for-women-and-children-minister-says
Horrible. Thanks for this.
The sort of people writing these papers pretend academic objectivity, but are mostly fanatics. So it is impossible for them to see any merit in the views they critique, or any flaws in their own. As the Marxist-Feminist future is by definition good, anyone opposing it can only have terrible motives, or be acting in 'bad faith' as they put it.
They can't conceive of concepts like female privilege or gynocentrism. Such ideas threaten their whole belief system. No wonder they see the so-called manosphere as a threat.
These people are the ones controllng what is said in Gender Studies courses. If only those courses also contained some videos from Karen Straughan or the Fiamengo Files, at least there would be some balance. But of course that will never happen.
Their real problem is they are looking in a mirror and what they see reflected is simply their own fragility and anxiety. The hysterical tone is simply their fear showing. As you say they project the "manosphere" onto what are in fact wildly different things unconnected except by not being "feminist". They do this because they are a rag tag of different ideas that are connected by a misandrism that links these sometimes completely contradictory sects with a religious style belief in the inherent baseness of boys and men and their responsibility for all that is "bad".
It is laughable that they have any strategy to connect with boys and men, because they cannot concieve of even pretending to like them let alone be able to empathise. As you say their sole tool is censorship because in reality they realise,deep down, they're running put of trump cards.
In a way I'm quite sanguine about their huffing and puffing. I think it was "Girl Writes What" whonsaid something about anti feminism needed to become "cool". Well to me in my youth and I'm sure for my contemporaries, what was "cool" was most anything our parents generation thought was dreadful, Whatever music the BBC banned, whatever grey haired politicians condemned, which ever films were banned or censured, Mao's Little red book, Castro's Cuba. What these academics don't see is now they are the fuddy ruddy old farts pontificating to young people who thing being over 30 is "old". I'm sure the authors thing themselves as "cutting edge" "radical" etc. But their preaching looks like boring old kill Joy's. In this country they go on and on about Andrew Tate and somehow I'm sure he's had far more "clicks" as a result! So let them huff and puff with their moral panic.
I agree that these academics absolutely don't get the vibe of young men, many of whom are reflexively anti-feminist, thank goodness. And they are kill joys through and through, absolutely outraged that people on the internet get to discuss and explore, and laugh about, a variety of subjects outside of the so-boringly predictable feminist framework.
Karen Straughn was prescient, as always.
Karen always struck me as very grounded and knowledgeable. I don't know why she hasn't had more of a presence in my social media explorations. The algorithms should be feeding me this stuff. Same with Diana Davison.
The internet is a blessing in disguise.
Without it, many of us would have no idea that there are other people who share the same level of scepticism regarding feminism.
To bounce ideas, opinions and concepts off of each other.
I remember the early 2000's, a Canadian Feminist group wanted the activities of "Men's rights groups" monitored.
I think I was on their watch list.
This is why I'm optimistic. Each new generation will reject something their parents embrace so every generation is another chance for anti-feminism to become cool. Given that every facet of feminism is dishonest/bad when properly examined the potential is huge as the generation that 'discovers' it is all lies can truly feel heroic. "Grandma, why were you part of a hate group against men?"
Haha, exactly. I am similarly somewhat optimistic about the eventual death of feminism.
This strikes me as wishful thinking based on a dynamic that disappeared generations ago. My observation is that each generation since the hippies of the 1960s has tried to out-do their parents in the direction of leftist virtue-signaling. I've even seen some recent polls claiming that university-aged kids hold a more favourable view of socialism / communism than capitalism.
I view it more like a slingshot. The further the victim Olympics movement gets stretched to absurdity the more potential energy for opposite reaction.
I tend to center left, but these crazies who've commandeered the narrative not only don't represent me, they terrify me and make my stomach churn.
Thanks for the sane based rational response to this pernicious ideology disguised as academic research.
Thank you, Janice!
I really have to stress your point that basically nobody reads these papers. While working on my master’s thesis, I went through a number of papers on “hegemonic masculinity,” and I was appalled by the way these “scholars” portrayed men and masculinity. It was pure contempt, dressed up in anecdotal evidence and Marxist concepts.
I kept thinking that if more people, especially men, actually read this stuff, they’d revolt. But nobody does. All they see is the “nice” HR lady talking about diversity.
Lot in what you say. I think more men have to 'get their hands dirty' and read this drivel and answer back. It will require persistence and hard work but it will be worth the effort because the influence of this 'scholarship' extends beyond the academy.
Fascinating point.
I notice you put nice in ""
having had a couple of "nice" HR ladies as a boss, they were like yapping little dogs and once one sees this, then it is hard to use the word 'nice' anymore.
Yeah, thats why I put it in ““. I totally get your experience.
Thanks for sharing, Janice. You're polite and patient, but this is just a good reminder that some of the loudest voices in academy longhouse are batshit crazy. I'm no longer surprised by their, um, "scholarship", but I remain baffled by the weak leadership that tolerates them.
I suppose this is part and parcel of the feminization of the academy. Once women began to dominate it, this was the inevitable outcome. Helen Andrews (and others) likely hit the nail on the head with their diagnosis.
"...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.”
Ontological racketeering and threat proliferation? Isn't that what feminist and gender studies "scholars" do? Seems like projection
Absolutely!
Can you give me an example of feminist rhetoric that is not a projection?
Sorry I was guilty of using English understatement
<ontological racketeering,’ which consists of ‘threat proliferation,’ affirming and extending in viewers a sense of crisis,>
Feminist texts, books and articles constantly convey a 'sense of crisis",, for example, books like "Against Our Will", "Backlash", and "The Beauty Myth."
On F/B and Instagram, there is a bombardment of posts claiming a crisis, justifying their hatred towards the male gender.
The manosphere, like any mass movement, has its grifters and jesters and embarrassments. When I came upon it in the early 2000s, it was just men comparing notes on shitty women they were trying to cope with. Coping strategies included stoic acceptance, keeping distance and self reflection. Get in shape. Read. Acquire skills, improve yourself… these are ways that mend broken hearts. I remember our collective shock, when we shared our stories, that the patterns of female behaviour emerged. Most of us didn’t understand women in those days. When we finally saw what was going on, we were enraged. Women had played us for fools… and that’s when the clowns came tumbling out.
The war of the sexes became a stupid fight for stupid people. It remains so today.
Brilliant description of manosphere beginnings. There are still a lot of broken hearts out there, striving to mend and to find dignity and connection.
“Men’s resistance to feminist indoctrination may be overcome, they suggest, with more indoctrination”. The prevalence of this mindset is one of the reasons I stopped subscribing to The Globe and Mail after 20 plus years of doing so. This happened nine years ago this month after yet another of their opinion writers was engaging in more brazen man-bashing. And when intelligent people tried to push back against this toxic swill, no matter how well-reasoned or well-expressed their comments were, other commenters would resort to, “See? That’s why we need more feminism.”
I hear you!