Women Are Wonderful, Men Can Be Useful

Tucker Carlson and Chris Williamson nibble on, but don’t swallow, a red pill

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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.