Men Have Been Psychologically Abused by Feminist Ideology For Decades

Stop asking “Where are the feminists?” They’re where they always were, undermining a sane society.

Let me start with an example of everyday feminism, out of a dozen I could have chosen recently.

A week ago, I watched my friend Mike Buchanan, leader of the UK’s Children and Family Party, discuss proposed measures to counteract so-called misogyny and sexual harassment in Britain. He was one of three invited guests on a public affairs program called Real Britain with host Darren Grimes (the segment in question starts at 1:06:45, though a strong stomach is needed for its dispiriting glimpse into proposed feminist legislation).

The other two guests were both women, one a moderate feminist political commentator, Dominique Samuels—who despite sensible comments mentioned TWICE that she had been catcalled—and the other a doctrinaire feminist author, Amy Nickell.

The particular subject was legislation that has been proposed by two of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s potential replacements to criminalize cat-calling, wolf-whistling, and “down-blousing” (photographing a woman’s cleavage). Only Buchanan dared to say what should be evident to all sane people: that such legislation would be worse than useless, socially divisive, enormously insulting to men, and an instance of egregious state over-reach.

The subject is typical of feminism’s victim focus, which ignores the life difficulties of male Britons in order to emphasize the (often trivial, as in this case) alleged suffering of female Britons at men’s hands. 75% of suicides in the United Kingdom and Ireland are committed by men, with about 84 men killing themselves every week. Men are 95% of the UK prison population, make up 85% of homeless rough sleepers and 77% of alcoholics. Workplace deaths in the United Kingdom are 94% male. All the available data shows boys performing far worse than girls in the UK primary and secondary education systems; at the tertiary level, young men are outnumbered by young women at close to 2-1. Wouldn’t you think feminists might spend a few days at least pretending to care about men’s issues? Not on your life. They continue to hammer away at male entitlement.

In the course of the discussion, Buchanan read part of a statement written by his colleague, Elizabeth Hobson, objecting to the proposed legislation on the ground that women are capable of negotiating relationships at work and elsewhere without authorities regulating every interaction. “Another day, another absurd feminist grievance,” she had written in disgust. Hobson’s main point was that such nanny-state laws infantilize women.  

The feminist ideologue on the program, Amy Nickell, barely missed a beat, claiming that Hobson’s response, as well as Buchanan’s and Samuels’ comments, simply proved her feminist point about the damaging “normalization” of “toxic” harassment (which she falsely claimed “only happens to women”— though actually women harass men all the time).

Nickell’s rejoinder was classic feminism—consistent, if nothing else—and should remind us once again that feminists have no interest in engaging with the real views of women or men, including the many women who do not see men as their enemies.

Feminist interest is always, as here, in pursing an anti-male agenda that has nothing to do with fairness or equality, an agenda designed to increase rancor and suspicion between the sexes, massively expand the power of the state (increasing wrongful convictions of men without increasing community safety), and politicize even the most innocuous of men’s public and private interactions.

**

This example leads to my larger point.

Every time I hear a non-feminist person, especially a man, use the phrase “Where are the feminists?”—whether sincerely, with a dollop of male deference, or with angry Gotcha emphasis—I am reminded of why the feminist agenda has been so successful, having convinced even its many victims and fiercest opponents that at its heart, or at least somewhere on its many fringes, perhaps in the far reaches of the feminist cosmos, there is a genuine interest in promoting women’s well being.

Feminism has never desired women’s well-being, and the sooner we all stop pretending that any branch of it, anywhere, on any subject, was “noble” or “justified” or “well intentioned,” we will all be better off.

From the trivial griping about sexual harassment to the outrageous claim that catcalling and whistling are on a continuum with the murder of women (as Nickell alleged), from campaigns about manspreading to make men uncomfortable in their bodies to college workshops that teach them to apologize for their alleged “privilege,” from the abhorrent #MeToo movement with its anonymous complaints to the ever-more corrupt procedures now mandated in sexual assault investigations and trials, from the determination to push fathers out of families to men’s imprisonment for inability to pay child support, from the claim that abortion and the sexual revolution primarily harm women to the championing of yet more programs, set-asides, and “equity” initiatives to disadvantage men, from the feminist campaign against trans women as a patriarchal plot to erase women to the continual denial of female agency in wrong-doing and criminality —and on and on and on—feminism is the juggernaut that never slows up in its frontal assault on justice and common sense.

And yet we still pay it obeisance in assuring others that, whatever our disagreement with any particular feminist issue, we strongly “support women’s equality” (a meaningless phrase having nothing to do with feminism or reality—because men and women are not equal) or “believe in the goals of the original women’s movement.” Few of us know anything about the goals of the original women’s movement to justify our claim to believe in them.

In fact, as I am endeavoring to prove in a YouTube series on the history of feminism, the primary impetus of feminism in its early manifestations 170 + years ago was to create divisions between men and women, make women angry and resentful, and make men ashamed and depressed.

Feminism was always intended to make women see children as a burden. It was always intended to weaken the family and promote sex without commitment. It was always intended to promote a baseless female supremacism. To that end, it justified infanticide and demonized male authority and male sexual nature.

Why women accepted feminism is not very hard to understand. Using half-truths, outright lies and self-flattering stereotypes, it appealed to female resentment and envy, two powerful and destructive motivators. It encountered very little resistance from men; and today, even non-feminist women and men accept many feminist postulates.

Why men fell for it is the bigger question. Partly it was because feminism always appealed to male chivalry and inter-group rivalry. In general, men tend to want to prove to women that they are better and more deserving than other men; supporting women’s grievances allowed them a means to do that.

But the depth of men’s willingness to accept women’s hatred as their due points to something deeper, a fundamental complicity in men, a psychological wounding, an enthrallment to women that feminism still exploits and that threatens to destroy us all.

At Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, as the fruit of one of the first official women’s rights conventions in the United States, 32 men signed the Declaration of Sentiments, an angry document written primarily by feminist activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a virago now celebrated as an early feminist foremother.

The Declaration is filled with statements asserting the near-measureless brutality and injustice of the entire male sex towards the female, beginning with the document’s primary claim, astonishing in its vulgar malice, that “The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpation on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.”

That fire-breathing allegation is followed by a long list of dubious and often outright false claims, including that men have consistently persecuted women psychologically by “endeavor[ing] in every way that he could to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.” The statement was written at a time when many colleges had been established specifically for women’s education (contradicting another of the claims in the Declaration that “all colleges [were] closed against her”), when laws were being passed to protect married women’s property and other rights, and at a time when many women, with the full support of their fathers, husbands, and brothers, made respectable and lucrative careers for themselves as authors, educators, scholars, and businesswomen.  

There is nothing in the document to mitigate the mass condemnation of men or to suggest that biology or circumstances played any role in the social order of the time. There is nothing in the document to suggest that men ever acted justly or sacrificially to protect or provide for women, or to respond to their needs. The document launches an unmitigated smear campaign from first to last.

The fact that men signed this self-condemnation gives the lie to the document’s assertions about male tyranny and lust for power. The fact that the document is celebrated today as the laudable beginning of the women’s “equality” movement in America and that it spawned many later women’s conventions, as well as much adulatory commemoration, demonstrates that both men and women of the time, and later, approved public expressions of fanatical and false anti-male condemnation.

The impact of such a public assault on relations between men and women, signed by men themselves, has had untold practical as well as spiritual consequences that reverberate to this day, as many generations of men have been raised by women (with the complicity of men) to despise themselves as male and to believe that women owe them nothing but contempt and derision. Men have been taught for generations that they inherited a culture that privileges them and oppresses women, and that nothing they can do will ever fully obliterate their sin of being born male.

And despite the unshakeable taint of their maleness, men have been taught (and many men have complied) to attempt restitution by supporting women’s causes, “believing” women, castigating themselves, apologizing for their masculinity, and condemning other men publicly and privately.

Both men and women of good will need to recognize and affirm that feminism from the beginning—not in a later incarnation that was taken over by radicals or “went too far” in its “noble” aims—was built on the unjust and disastrous shaming of men with the design of disenfranchising, disempowering, and demoralizing them and driving them to the margins of society, weakening social foundations, and enabling craven and often pathological power-mongers to subvert the rule of law.

The complete destruction of feminism is indispensable to the restoration of sanity in our culture. Feminism in all its varieties (yes, even so-called equity feminism, even the Christina Hoff Summers variety) must be exposed as a hate movement built on lies. There are many steps in this process (please see my YouTube channel for more evidence!), but the first is to stop pretending that it was ever anything more than that.