Damn Janice! This short paragraph almost brought me to tears!
"What we need now is a frank acknowledgement of the perils of female leadership and of feminist precepts. Most women don’t want this conversation, and most men are afraid to raise it, but it’s long past due."
2020+ is the era when the animals looked up and saw "...but some animals are more equal than others" scrawled on the barn. But happening in real life to us humans. Progressivism is blatantly anti-egalitarian and has basically become a revanchist movement led by oligarchical cliques who "self-flagellate others" of their kind to avoid having to suffer anything themselves.
We’ve heard a lot lately about the courage of children’s book author J.K. Rowling, who has taken on the hate speech law of her homeland, Scotland.
Before being thrown out of the intersectionality cult, she bowed down to the woke communists by making Dumbledore gay, making another character a lesbian, promoting trans ideology, and bashing men.
It's only because she realizes a threat to women that she's now trying to defend women.
She has a long history of massive funding the Domestic Violence "industry" and the "all men are rapists" school of feminism. All fueled by her accounts of her very brief marriage to a Portuguese Journalist when very young (both). Needless to say his version of their split never gets an airing.
Well I'd say because she knew that Male protagonists are the most interesting, precisely because we are used to the idea males are flawed and struggle, perfect for the classic hero's journey, coming of age story. It's why the most talked about character and actor from Barbie is Ken and Ryan Gosling, when I eventually saw it it was obvious because Ken is the one character that goes on a literal and psychological journey and ironically is the most emotionally interesting in his unrequited love and unsuccessful "revolution". Even Rowlings crime books have a flawed Male protagonist.
True. The heroine of the Star Wars reboot didn't have to grow or mature or undergo training because she already knew everything. Sadly, this was the conclusion when the Jedi library burned. So I guess female protagonists don't undergo character development.... that trash is for men only.
No doubt she also hates capitalism, but was commerce savvy enough to make her hero a male. Or was Potter a reflection of a deeper realisation that it's the courageous male who will save civilisation?
Thank you for covering this topic. I would stand up and cheer, but people would look at me funny.
About this part: "She objects to trans ideology, it turns out, not primarily because it is false to biological reality but because it involves men accessing women’s spaces and identities."
This is true, but we can go even further, and see that virtually all feminist resistance to transgender ideology comes from a belief that men are transitioning SPECIFICALLY to infiltrate women's areas. In this view, men who claim to be women are spies sent by *the patriarchy* to mess with women, especially feminism. See, for instance, "The Transsexual Empire" by Janice Raymond. It's a special kind of paranoia.
Your essay ostensibly has great insight and clarity, as does Notorious P's comment, but - as an ordinary Joe, I have mused and cogitated over these very issues for many years so, I conclude, it doesn't take a genius to see the logical flaws in the feminist and transgender ideological arguments, and yet, it seems like it does.
It's not difficult to see that if women claim they are oppressed by men then they can't simultaneously claim equality and even superiority. If men are oppressors of women then who made them that way, Nature? Evolution demands domination doesn't it? And if not evolution then the Grand Designer, but then who are we to question his authority and omnipotence, and woe betide those, and those societies and nations who do. Whichever way you present it the feminist and transgender/intersectionality/critical theory (wokism) arguments make no sense and only serve to reinforce each other's nonsense, and once you allow nonsense then there is no valid basis to support the theories except for the ideological principle that only those statements that support the ends goals are true and good, and those that don't are false and evil, therefore it is justified to exclude, vilify and penalise those that speak them - for the common good. The common good ideology with a self referencing moral imperative is, and has been, the justifier of oppression and death of millions.
But having said that, I didn't previously see the main point of your article, that Rowling is not quite the anti woke warrior she painted to be - so thank you!
Thank you, David. I agree with you that the insights here, such as they are, about feminism's contradictions, are not at all original. If women are morally superior to men, then why would women need to keep pointing it out to each other, and aping men's qualities to claim it? If women are morally superior, why are we more lenient on women's crimes than on men's (infanticide, one of the most horrific of crimes, is often not punished at all when women commit it--in fact, only women *can* commit infanticide; when men do it, it's plain old-fashioned murder). Feminism has an answer for these and many other contradictions, but it's never a good answer, which is why no feminist should be hailed as a leader of men.
Thanks - it is indeed a special kind of paranoia. Feminists often claim that MRAs are driving trans ideology. It's a typically ludicrous claim, I don't know any MRAs with the slightest interest in driving it. That said, we DO enjoy the spectacle of feminist infighting that has resulted from this feminist-originated ideology.
Thanks Phillip, agreed - feminist projections at their finest! Likewise women who see male misogynists everywhere, when they're vanishingly rare - surely a projection based on their own visceral misandry.
I remember years ago when feminist icon Greer was being interviewed and she asked the question "Why do men hate us?" It puzzled me for years, until I realised what she was saying is that she hated men.
Exactly! Men are hard wired to cherish, protect and self sacrifice for women. To accuse men of hating women/ oppressing women is a form of psychological torture of men. It is the most vicious, cunty (and effective) form of exploitation imaginable.
It is like a spoilt brat daughter constantly saying, "Daddy I know you hate me, and nothing you can do will ever change my mind about that!"
Yes indeed pas the pop corn. But on a serious note it also highlights the inconsistencies and idiocies of feminism. Judith Butler has been writing for years but her word salad books are pure University fodder in the small world that is Gender Studies. Without the surfacing of the the "trans" issuecand with it the multiple "gender identities" into the mainstream the logical end points of feminist theory would have remained hidden from public view. As it is we see all sorts of contradictions exposed. If even testosterone deprived males are still so much stronger and more able than females in all forms of sport (even Chess apparently) how can it be that women are as capable as men in jobs demanding physical capability? If gender roles are socially constructed and biology a minor influence surely any human can indeed "perform" successfully as Male or female without any physical changes ? If indeed gender roles are fluid and performative how come heterosexual males have an innate and inalienable character that renders them always bad? And on and on. These and many other "problems" have always existed (think for instance of the demand that fathers do more hands on childcare yet oppose any presumption of shared parental responsibility in family law) but mainly hidden by public feminism concentrating on doing nice things for women. I'm certain that the obsessive way some TERFs try to implicate MRAs is because they have clocked how damaging this airing of feminisms feet of clay, that the chipping away of those feet may bring their idol down.
Yup. Almost all feminists are fanatically resistant to having any of their own leaders' disgusting theories and self-deluded arguments played back to them. I'm always told if I try to point out any feminist tenet that "You're cherry picking," "Those didn't speak for all feminists," "Those were marginal figures who had no influence on feminism," or even, "Naturally, the movement encompasses different views." Actually, the contradictions are central to all feminisms, especially the constant deflection of criticism and the insistence on having it both ways: women are always gloriously capable; and always horrifically vulnerable. Oppression excuses all.
Not only is it a fact that only 5% of chess grandmasters are female, but of the top 500 esports players, year after year, zero are women. This suggests to me that women, even bright women, rarely have the kind of strategic thinking that men do as a matter of course. This also makes me think that if our society is going to counteract the terrible effects of gender ideology, gender surgery & hormone butchery, we will need men in roles developing and implementing strategy.
“Is the construction of the category of women, as a coherent and stable subject, an unwitting regulation and reification of gender relations?”
Is it? - Or ‘could it be that the biological reality of what constitutes a woman have the (un) - surprising outcome of creating a coherent universal idea of what we know women to be'?
Butler suggest that we only know and categorise women as women because of language we use to communicate what we know and so if we deconstruct language we deconstruct its meaning and what we mean by it.
But it is ridiculous to imply that language defines or rather actualises the reality that we know rather than language communicates the reality that we know
That is saying that order and information comes out of nothing, they just emerge from an incoherent language - sounds with no form or a priory meaning suddenly describe and create a coherent and logical reality
The only way that could happen would be if there was an eternal omniscient being who imagined the reality and spoke the words to create it and gave the creation the ability to understand and communicate that understanding with language and speak it.
That particular idea may be erroneous (though its prevalence needs verification); but the Trans Industrial Complex is clearly a sick and dangerous project, massively deployed by the same Mainstream that gave us Covid batshit, Critical Race Theory nonsense, Climate hysteria, Ukraine horseshit; not to mention more directly related LGBTQ+ sexualization of children. So I hope this focus on how pernicious Feminism is won't somehow blind us to those attendant evils as well.
Agreed, but I don't see them as separate. I see feminism as the author of all of these. Feminists promoted critical race theory from the beginning, back in the 1980s; they delighted in eco-feminist theories about how women were more suited to protecting the natural world and how 'climate change' hurts women more than men; they promoted nonsensical ideas about women and peace; their mania for security led to fanatical Covid-related masking, locking down, vaccine-promotion, and shaming as a killer anyone who expressed skepticism; and many feminist mothers promote gender transitioning and the sexualization of children. The feminist attack on the family has led to untold social damage, especially for children. That's why the movement against all of these must be led by men with the support of principled women.
What baffles me is how often I see critics/opponents of trans who still profess feminist beliefs that women are marginalized and not valued in our society. The spaces that MtFs invade aren't the products of natural forces, they were created by MEN. White western men created a civilization where women can roam freely without bodyguards or male relatives. Western men created the separate accommodations that trans are demanding to use, including women's restrooms (often better appointed than the men's - even if the numbers of stalls tend to be insufficient in many cases), women's sports & locker rooms, beauty pageants, all girls schools (which still exist, though any boys' schools I knew of went co-ed long ago) and more.
A society that hated a group of people wouldn't create all these spaces and opportunities for the hated group.
Exactly. In fact "sex based rights" really means a host of privileges and protections for the "fairer sex". Such as in our Army the single men bunk down in dorms and single women get their own room and facilities. Just one of a myriad of examples where additional resources and protections are applied to girls and women on the grounds that they are more fragile (physically and mentally) more fearful and emotional. Paradoxically all things that the Victorians would have thought.
That certainly is baffling. I'll often see someone calling transgenderism "misogyny" and if I ask them why the answer is usually something absurd, such as "those men are making a mockery of women". Which seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through. One sure doesn't need to become Russian to mock Vladimir Putin, for instance.
There may be mockery in some few, but it is not the first thing that comes to my mind when I imagine a man deciding to go through all the trouble (the hormones, the meticulous and laborious body alterations, the mutilation) of presenting as a woman.
I think MtFs do mock women, and that's because they don't so much want to *be* women as replace women as the sexual partners of straight men. MtFs view women as hated rivals, not as friends.
What you describe also applies to the modern post feminist 'empowered' woman.
MTF's (the narcissistic ones who gain notoriety on social media) are just copying the kind of women that 3rd wave 'sex positive', 'ladette culture', 'Sex in the City' feminism created. A woman who is almost entirely detached from her biological role (and responsibilities that come with that role), and who constructs a kind of parody of womanhood with makeup, fashion and endless parading about seeking attention and validation just for existing.
Feminism helped to promote the super empowered 'fake woman' (fake nails, fake hair, fake tan, fake eyelashes, fake virtue etc) who puts her eggs into a freezer in order to have a 'career', and who then produces a baby with the aid of technology and then hands it over to strangers to look after so she can carry on competing with men in the workplace.
That's an incredibly masculine approach to being a woman.
These plastic women opened the doors for literally anyone to be a woman, and social media created the perfect virtual space where your artificially constructed caricature of a woman could be paraded without having to ever show the less flattering reality of an insecure woman with no real sense of self or self worth (nothing to contribute except being a very expert consumer).
These 'aspirational' women lowered the bar of what a woman is. We used to define women (and men) by their MOST sex specific traits. A woman nursed babies and pushed them along the pavement in prams. That was the essence of being a woman (as distinct from a man). Feminism came along and defined women as astronauts, fighter pilots, stockbrokers, action heroes, politicians and CEOs. All gender neutral (and decidedly masculine) identities. What did they think was going to happen?!
Feminism stopped using the term 'birth canal' and started to use the term 'vagina'. You can make a vagina out of any old bit of skin, but not a birth canal.
I think we can get too hung up on ideology and psychoanalysis though.... I suspect environmental factors (hormones, EMF pollution etc) have played a huge role in all this (along with technology like social media). Feminist/ gender ideology may be itself a consequence (an effect) of environmental factors. The history of feminism (the history of the angst-ridden society) aligns with the electrification of the planet (everyone should read Arthur Firstenberg's 'The Invisible Rainbow').
For example, studies on white storks have found changes in behaviour linked to proximity to cell towers. The closer to cell towers (microwave radiation) they are, the more dysfunctional (and more 'feminist'/ 'leftist') they become. Storks closest to cell towers don't bother building nests, don't pair bond, don't lay eggs and just spend all day long fighting with each other or staring into space.
Storks furthest away from cell towers get married, build a nice nest, lay lots of eggs and get along just fine.
I don't like all of the gymnastics you employ to say that feminism actually degrades women.
Feminism is a female supremacist movement completely.
Does it hurt women? Of course, all supremacist movements hurt the character of those who are sucked into them. The way that women are hurt by feminism, Germans were hurt by nazism. The character is harmed.
How did they "lower the bar" of what a woman is? They hurt women for sure because women simply aren't cut out for workplace success. They haven't the competitive edge for it, but they also don't have the masculine stoicism and sense of fair play for it. But to say they "lowered the bar" for women is to placate women's feelings as far as I can tell.
Misogyny is definitely over-claimed overall but it is clearly inherent to the behaviour of AGPs - the reason they enjoy "humiliation" etc is because hey believe women are lesser. I'm not as convinced about the HSTS types as their behaviour is largely driven by homosexuality and although they exploit women and "steal" their identity and culture I don't think their prime mover motivation is anti-women.
In general it seems to me that misogyny (real or exaggerated) is the resultant outcome rather than the motivation for MTFs.
In both cases AGP/HSTS the source is sexuality. This is the contrast to FTMs who seem to be reacting to misogyny (real or exaggerated) by denying their female identity or homosexuality.
Seems to me that this comment is gynocentrism galore.
APPS aren't misogynists. Maybe they mock women, but they also objectively Hate and identify as feminists. They believe in the patriarchy mumbo jumbo.
No, they dont believe women are lesser. This sounds like it was written by haggy bitch jk Rowling herself.
I would argue that MTFs are reacting to misandry and deciding to become women because they simply haven't the stomach to live in a fem world as a man, which I'm honestly sympathetic towards.
FTMs aren't reacting to misogyny. What misogyny? Women are doted on quite literally at every possible fucking turn. I mean, what misogyny could they possible be reacting too?
They are really just neurotic girls who have come up with some crazy fuckin ideas. Just like astrology, bulimia, witchcraft, or any other crazy nonsense teen girls get into.
I think there may be another element to FTM--which is that it's no longer enough, in the intersectional victim hierarchy, to be female. True, one can claim to be cat-called, harassed, discriminated against. But if one becomes gender-queer or non-binary or trans, the sympathy and attention are even more abundant. Especially if you are a white girl, now hearing that you are 'cis-gender' AND privileged by your race, having to apologize and feel guilty for those, being trans or gender queer are escape routes from the intolerable shame and responsibility. Just a hunch. When every discussion has to do with one's position on the victim hierarchy, even 'cis' girls may not be happy with their lot.
The phenomena you just described are absolutely real - but they are very recent developments. The power given to "crybullies" by wokeism is less than a decade old. They are an adjunct riding upon it, not the principal phenomenon. Transvestism (the true name actually) has been around forever, but only described systematically by Blanchard & co from the 1980s+. IE men have been dressing as women for sexual reasons basically as long as civilization. Homosexuality has always been around as have paraphilias. Its only in 2020 that Western society decided to accord the practice of a paraphilia rights that directly impinge on the majority's - under the false pretense there is such a thing as gender identity.
The teen girl phenomenon is however new (ROGD) and yes it does have a heavy element of "escaping normativeness". As a causative I do agree in that case current conditions are at fault. (Its not your hunch at all, the evidence clearly shows this is the case). Its a different phenomenon however, it just shares the superficially similar symptoms. Traditional trans/sexuality/genderism/whatever is at foundation sexually centred. It predates feminism so you can't blame feminists for its base existence - although you certainly can critique how feminist ideology opened the doors to normalising and legalising it. Which you have indeed done.
You use the term "haggy bitch" in a tract trying to refute misogyny...? Your language betrays your own prejudices more than debunks JKR.
My understanding of transgenderism is based on the Blanchardian model, mainly because it provides the most plausible and evidence based explanation of the phenomenon.
Where FTMs are concerned the traditional conjecture is that there isn't a converse AGP phenomenon (although that is controversial). There are basically two cohorts of FTMs - the traditional "butch lesbian on steroids" directly equivalent to HSTS men, and the modern phenomenon of HSTS and non-binarism. The latter is definitely a social contagion based fad, but it is fuelled by the same neuroses that drove eating disorders in the 80s & cutting in the 90s. These neuroses have a source and the highly sexualised mass media teen girls grow up in provides a plausible explanation.
This alone doesn't automatically imply misogyny per se but for women's welfare partisans to go there is within the ballpark of plausible argumentation - ie that these girls are reacting to such a culture.
As for MTFs using the explanation that their "transitions" are caused by men being treated like crap by modern political culture - this is a convenient rationalisation. The AGP phenomenon existed long before white male bashing became a mainstream sport in the West. The HSTS has also been attested basically forever. (Although I do accept manbashing is real and definitely responsible for many young men losing it)
The overall phenomenon going both ways is clearly causing massive suffering predominantly to women. Labeling it misogyny is within the bounds of reasonable argument.
Just Rowling says stuff worse than haggy bitch all the time.
Yes, it is a teen girl social contagion. It's still not misogyny. Just because something hurts women more it doesn't make it misogyny. Death in childbirth isn't misogyny its just circumstance. Misogyny doesn't make girls become trans. Girls don't face misogyny. They are doted on at every turn, privileged under the law, and revered as if we live in a pagan fertility cult.
Misandry causing men to become trans I think is definitely a thing, considering that MTFs have increased even if they use to be around somewhat. Of course, men still don't become trans as often as teen girls.
Also, ironic that the reason manbashing is bad is because it makes "young men lose it". Not that it's just bad because young men are entitled to respect like everyone else. Young men aren't losing it at all. They've just grown despondent and the more self assured ones hate feminism, which is good. They should hate feminism.
Maybe they end up being accidentally mocking, but I don't agree that they hate women.
Most transgender are feminists and hate men.
Maybe it's a frenemy dynamic, which is something that women do a lot of.
I think the whole term idea is a grift led by women who just love feelin bad for themselves. The fact that people get so up in arms over mtfs is just more gynocentric nonsense.
Transgender refer to men as "people with penises".
This has not been true for all of human history and is also not true in some places in the world today. I agree men have been victims of more attacks than women, but more is not the same as all.
Women fought for most of those sex-based rights. My mother, at one time, wasn't allowed to have a bank account in her own name. One can criticise aspects of feminism without painting everyone with the same man-hating brush.
Of course that isn't a sex based right but inclusion in a right and responsibility now shouldered by the two sexes and many genders. My father died suddenly in the mid sixties, although the requirement for women to have a Male guarantor for loans and some forms of accounts had been repealed a couple of years before my mother fell foul of Bank policy on this in trying to take over the mortgage. She had to move bank. A decade later as a student at university I researched this for personal interest. It turns out that this was a mid Victorian law, lobbied for by Charles Dickens and many other philanthropists of both sexes, designed to prevent women from being imprisoned for debt. The idea being that if something went really wrong it was the Male guarantor/s who'd be put behind bars. And of course it was very successful in this with the proportion of women in prison falling from about 20% in the eighteen hundreds to 6% in 1910. This made some sort of sense to me as at school we'd done Defoe's Moll Flanders, who gets herself into terrible debt and a brush with prison as a result. and of course in real life some aristocratic ladies, most famously the Duchess of Devonshire, hadcgot into immense debts which their spouses or relatives refused to be responsible for. All of course before the Victorian law. My point being that the past is often "another country".
This is interesting. Because it wasn't a law but a tradition in the hands of the employers . Like many other things the records of this begin in the Victorian era, in particular in skilled industries and then later in the growing administrative roles in a booming economy. The logic at the time was that married men were more "steady and loyal" and likely to remain with their employers because they'd be "settled", remembering that in this era almost everyone rented their home and there was huge movements in population.
The first is the Australian public service legally paid married men at a higher rate than single men.
The Second reference is "On the Buses" Syd James mentions about a bus driver who was being paid married man wages, while he wasn't married. I know that is a sit-com but it contained an actual fact.
Certainly in the UK it became more common in the 20th century due to the increasing power of the trades unions. So it certainly was a common feature for drivers of buses, trains and other jobs that were considered skilled. In fact in the UK it became much more widespread mid last century as industries were nationalised and administration expanded. In one of those ironies of history it was the Labour Party who really pushed this . I wonder if this was also when Australian public services did this. Of course it was "legal" in the UK from the point of view that there was no general Law controlling wages or wage rates. Things can be legal just because of the absence of a law. I'm an economist by education and interested in economic history, boring to most people but fascinating to me.
As a child, I first read about married men's and single men's wages in relation to farm workers in Australia. Just as there were married men's quarters and the single men's quarters or accommodation.
Some information as an adult I now check out to see if it was fact. In Australia, it was the conservative government who held the majority of the power throughout the 20th century.
Not only that, but a married woman who took a traditionally male job was not looked at favorably by other women, because that woman was essentially taking a family-supporting job away from a man and taking away support from the family of a man who could have filled that job.
Women were able to have credit cards all the time. If a married woman didn't have her own income, then obviously she could not have a credit card.
Women were able to have credit cards throughout history. This is simply not true what you're saying.
It's not aspects of feminism we are criticizing its the whole package.
Feminism is a bitch movement led by bitch women who do nothing but be bitchy and horrible and this is what feminism has always been throughout history.
It's fuckin nonsense and it's not the "aspects" we have a problem with.
How obtuse and gaslighting, yet it's something that women parrot on repeat. Geez Louise.
This is a holdover from coverture, an institution which has been dismantled incrementally, at least, in the ways that suit feminists with the conventions which favor women holding strong. It was once a husband's legal responsibility to assume all his wife's debts. This explains why a wife routinely in the 19th century assumed her husband's given and surname. She could walk into any business and engage in commerce, using her husband's credit. What? they don't teach this in university? So it's understandable that banks would be conservative in their giving credit to married women who might get themselves into debt that they weren't accountable to directly. At around the same time that women were allowed to open their own bank accounts, states also had to pass laws that didn't reflect the older conventions of coverture. And now women can get credit cards along with minor children and family pets! Oh, such a long way you've come, baby
Men should be the spiritual leaders of their households and not choose feminists to make a household with. It is easier to start at the beginning than to start at the end and work backward.
Yes it does. Janice is one of a number of women well able to do so. And as she points out women do occupy privileged ground in our society. And men are also hobbled by their own chivalry as well as the "silencing" techniques and discrimination by feminism. So in fact a good case for the pivotal role for female MRAs!
I've always believed that there are so many women in the MRM largely because men actually care more about what women have to say than other men. It's also true that women can say things about other women that men can' because of the oppression narrative and the whole 'punching down' thing.
Yes, women are applauded for saying things that men have been saying (carefully) for years. Whereas women in feminism are suspicious of feminist men, men tend to welcome anti-feminist women.
Well the psychology supports your observation. Men generally do not preference their own sex as women do. Unsurprisingly given that generally both girls and boys are nurtured, cared for and even educated by women until their mid teens when Male influences start to more regular, you are right generally males do care more about females (generally of course there are exceptions) but interestingly this doesn't necessarily translate to what they have to say. Hence the success of the feminist strategy of linking all their demand to "rape" "domestic violence " etc. Because these supposed threats to women hook into men's emotional urge to care for women. Logically these crimes which are in fact statistically very rare in our population of 66 millions have nothing to do with "gender pay gaps" female CEOs of FTSE companies, or any of the myriad of issuesthat get linked to them by feminists. On the plus side males are far more likely to be able to separate the content of message and who or how it is delivered. So there's hope.
It's not only that women occupy priviliged ground in our society. Many men have been too profoundly wounded by the stab at their hearts that is feminism to muster up the playfulness one needs to happily wield one's analytical sword. (Although to do that at Janice's level will always be beyond most of us, men or women.)
I would take her more seriously if she had the same supercilious disdain for people like Ellen "Elliot" Page pretending to be a man. But she obviously doesn't, nor has the thought even crossed her mind. Because she only cares about the invasion of female spaces, not men's.
Yes. If asked about Ellen 'Elliot' Page, she would say that she is a victim of misogyny, taught to despise her own femininity and therefore to seek an escape from it by transitioning. The answer is always misogyny for all these despicable egoists.
The modern take on 'trans' is not even (necessarily) about wanting to become or be accepted as the opposite sex. It is about grabbing certain aspects the opposite sex which happen to appeal to you, and retaining those aspects of your original sex that you don't want to give up.
I would argue it is not really 'trans' in the original sense, and should just be considered the latest wave of feminism. After all, feminists have been deconstructing 'gender norms' for decades and appropriating / caricaturing certain aspects of masculinity for the last 60+ years.
The main difference is that now cross sex hormones and surgeries have crossed over into the mainstream and are now being marketed as consumer products (much like cosmetic surgery which used to be for the war wounded only, and then A list Hollywood actresses and is now available to all).
Feminism deconstructed the notion that being a man or a woman was a responsibility, with a set of obligations to society and to the opposite sex (child care/ putting food on the table etc). And technology also enabled both sexes to live much more gender neutral lives.
TERF like Rowling are keeping the debate polarised and framing it exclusively in terms of 'men invading women's spaces' etc because they want to provoke as much outrage and generate as much sympathy as possible. The gender binary which they have been deconstructing for decades only reappears when they want to play the damsel, frame men as the villains and reclaim that coveted No. 1 spot in the victim charts.
But they are fighting a losing battle. The gender binary is being dismantled in favour of the Nu Gender which will be entirely pick'n'mix affair (with 100 utterly meaningless pseudo genders replacing the outdated male and female ones).
Already 'trans' (in the original sense) is being sidelined in favour of 'non binary' and 'gender queer' identities. People complain that Elliot Page or Dylan Mulvaney are just LARPing and wearing manface/ womanface.... but isn't that also a fair description of the post feminist modern empowered woman? Sex In The City marked the age when women were defined by makeup, designer shoes, endless shopping and not much else. Nobody complained that these types of women weren't pulling their weight in society or contributing anything of value.
TERF's haven't quite figured out yet that feminism was never their movement to begin with. It was always about deconstructing the family and gender roles, and then erasing gender altogether to pave the way for a genderless (transhuman) society. Artificial wombs are only a decade or two away.
Simply by demanding privileges and boundaries in the name of 'women', TERF's are literally taking up a conservative position. They are literally trying to 'conserve' womanhood, in an age when womanhood (and manhood) is being dismantled for being an 'outdated' concept.
You're correct. Women like JK Rowling will not free us. But it's not up to just men of courage, although they too are needed. We need women of courage, too. And there are already some other women working on it. It's not either/or, it's both/and. Not every woman is a feminist. And yes, we CAN roll back Affirmative Action. Already happening.
You do realise that such "benign sexism" , protecting the Professor from nasty words, simply compounds her oppression by the patriarchy. If you visit Scotland do add their Police service' s workload by reporting yourself for a hateful micro aggression.
Janice, thanks for another outstanding piece. I'd like to add on the issue of paternity fraud - a far more common phenomenon than most people realise - that the solution is obvious, simple and inexpensive, compulsory paternity testing of babies at birth. We've been campaigning for that since our launch (as a British political party) in 2013. The people who oppose compulsory testing would be aghast if a similar proportion of new mothers were (unknown to them) given other women's babies shortly after birth. The usual double standard.
In the UK two TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) have very high profiles in the mainstream media. One is JK Rowling, the other the radfem lesbian 'journalist' Julie Bindel. For years Ms Bindel complained about being 'cancelled', we know that because mainstream media titles carried articles by her on the matter (while never publishing anything by anti-feminists).
For a while now I've been posting some text in the comment streams on new articles on Ms Bindel's Substack, as well as outlets such as Unherd. It's usually some slight variation of the following:
"Here we go again. Why does [insert publication name] never publish articles by anti-feminists? Julie Bindel has made a long and lucrative career out of holding men accountable for everything bad and nothing good, and women unaccountable. Some uncomfortable (for feminists) truths bear repeating:
1. Trans ideology is the inevitable offshoot of feminists' "gender is a social construct". Professor Janice Fiamengo has written a number of excellent articles on feminism and trans ideology, including:
Meet the New Feminist Hate, Same as the Old Feminist Hate
Why does Bindel never write about women abused by women? Does she not care about these women, or does their existence undermine her career as a feminist propagandist?
3. The Partner Abuse State of Knowledge Project (PASK) https://domesticviolenceresearch.org/ was published in May 2013 in the journal Partner Abuse and is the most comprehensive review of domestic violence research ever carried out. This unparallelled three-year research project was conducted by 42 scholars at 20 universities and research centres. The headline finding of the PASK review was that:
"Men and women perpetrate physical and non-physical forms of abuse at comparable rates, most domestic violence is mutual, women are as controlling as men, domestic violence by men and women is correlated with essentially the same risk factors, and male and female perpetrators are motivated for similar reasons."
A key numerical result from the PASK review was:
“Among large population samples, 57.9% of intimate-partner violence (IPV) reported was bi-directional, 42.1% unidirectional, 13.8% of the unidirectional violence was male-to-female, 28.3% was female-to-male.”
The last point is worth emphasising. In the 42.1% of (heterosexual) couples in which one partner is always the perpetrator and the other the victim, the woman is TWICE as likely to be the perpetrator and (therefore) half as likely to be the victim.
Finally, a short video recommendation:
Adolf Hitler reacts to radical feminist Julie Bindel
You lay out an excellent proposal for the defense of men’s rights, men’s spaces, and men’s distinctive contributions to the maintenance of a decent society, and state. Feminists, by advancing the contention that sex is a social construct, are effectively declaring that feminism has no purpose. Should I declare that I am really a woman the mainstream of the feminist movement turns the meaning of masculinity, and femininity, into complete nullities.
Times and again, it is demonstrated that there are inherent biologically-founded differences between men and women beyond the obvious physical differences between the two sexes. Men and women think in different ways, create in different ways, and act in different ways regardless of the societies in which they live. For example, one of the negative qualities of men is a tendency to resolve conflicts or assert dominance via physical violence. Women, on the other hand, prefer to ostracize, act with cruelty, and use gossip as a means of promoting hostility.
That’s true whether we’re talking about North American society or West African society, to pick two very different sets of social, and institutional, structures. There are obvious qualities inherent to masculinity, and femininity that have developed over millions of years in the evolution of the great apes, and the hominins. They have promoted the survival of our species, and brought us to dominance over the planet.
Declarations that inherent qualities of the human sexes are meaningless, or even non-existent, are purely nonsensical. They are particularly so because we do not see claims that men are social constructs in the same way. I would argue that this is because women are the ones primarily responsible for socializing children, and feminists are not eager to see this pointed out as it is clearly contradictory to their claim that the socialization of men, and boys, is what has produced the toxic masculinity they decry.
At the same time, feminists are quite willing to claim that gender dysphoria, and sexual orientation, are inherent biological differences. That this contradicts the belief that identity is a purely social construct has yet to occur to most feminists. When feminists like, say, Erin Pizzey stumble across this, and challenge the mainstream of feminism, exclusion, and outright falsehood, is the response. When it’s pointed out that feminists are talking out of both sides of their mouths, we hear crickets.
BTW, I find Rowling’a telling us that Hermione is Black as absurd, and as dishonest, as her saying that Dumbledore is gay. That’s particularly so because the declarations came years after the books, and films, were completed. Since nothing was said about either sexual orientation or racial identity in the books, and films, and Rowling had no problem with the portrayal of Hermione by a White actress, we may conclude with that Rowling is somewhat less honest than the average grifter.
I think blaming women for postmodernist garbage (pronounced properly in French as "garbaaawge") is unfair. That they were sucked into it so deeply is their fault, but men invented most of it. The tragedy of it all is that so many, many of our young people are winning Darwin Awards from believing any of it. Our society will expire, and our most fecund immigrant cultures will replace us. OOOH? Did I say something bad???
The Cass Review here, really putting the lid on "puberty blockers" for under 18s in the UK NHS, also reminds us that most of the massive rise in demand for "transition" amongst the under 18s is from girls! Interestingly I have never seen anything in any media expressing any concern about "sex based rights" for boys or men being compromised by this "invasion" by "trans men". Which I take as proof that males do not have any sex based rights.
True. You bring that up to a typical feminist and they often literally can not understand what you mean. "But--but--but women are losing out!" Men don't count, as usual.
Nothing is more repulsive or frightening to many parents than having a gay son. These parents jump at the chance to believe their somewhat effeminate gay boy is really a girl. What a relief! For the parents, that is.
That's interesting. What do they say? In terms of trans women a number of prominent gay men in the UK describe it as a form of "gay conversion therapy" in that they contend the youngsters may be simply be gay or bisexual. I'm interested in the view of trans men ?
There's the gay conversion aspect (making a gay boy a "straight" girl, ditto for lesbians. Also trans men posing as gay men and infiltrating their spaces (It's much worse with trans women on lesbian dating apps, etc, but it does happen the other way round).
Thank you. I suppose gay men as a protected group have been able to have "safe spaces" in the way women have, and heterosexual men do not. I suppose the proliferation of genders also has the effect of diminishing the specialness of some identities in the "oppression olympics" . Interesting indeed.
Thank you, Janice, for identifying the massive size of the anti-male cultural iceberg. Hidden from view are the millions of men bashed for being a white male oppressor that they no longer speak up for themselves in normal conversations with women. Men shrink away, silent, frightened and resentful. Smart women realize they got very little transparency from the man, leaving both of them resentful. The unseen consequences of anti-male culture compromise all relationships.
To add to the list of proposed legal changes I would add mandatory DNA testing of all children at birth and the named father. This would at a stroke eliminate paternity fraud and provide men with the certainty women already enjoy. The only negative would be for women whose deceit is exposed but that would be a good thing.
The problem is, men acquiesced to decades of feminism to keep women happy.
Trans is the first issue that demands tha men decide which set of women (pro-trans or GC) to side with. As Matt Walsh has shown, men will be attacked for airing their opinions (and not just genuflecting before the billionaire children's author). Neither the trans or GC side will help a man who gets cancelled over this.
The habit of acquiescence, however, also means that men are less likely to take a stand.
Your list of the legislative changes we'll need before men's roles in marriage and family life can be restored (affirmative action programs, tilted entitlements, etc.) makes sense. But it's also improbable - a nice way of saying "impossible".
Perhaps a practical fallback alternative would be to build and strengthen social sub-communities with healthier cultural environments. The odds for success would probably be higher for religious frameworks, but anyone's free to try.
Yes, that seems the most practical option that can be started right away. Every man still knows, unfortunately, that the woman is legally master in the house (unless he goes to Thailand or the Dominican Republic or some such). As a friend of mine once said, even the happiest and most committed couple must know that the woman has a loaded gun in her bedside table. Only she can use it with impunity. It's quite a situation for the husband and father, for which no personal strength, virtue, or pre-nuptial agreement can compensate.
I think, going by the things I see posted on the internet, and hear in conversation, that right now we have a chance for these changes and restoration of family life. I think the trans activists, gay activists, race activists and the communist activists have so overplayed their hand that ideas like repealing gay marriage are getting a hearing, which I wouldn't have expected as recently as 2 years ago. The US supreme court upheld a state's law banning hormone blockers and genital surgeries for minors (unless for immediate danger to the life/health of the minor, e.g., an infant with a blocked urethra).
David, I like your reply but when you say 'religious framework' it seems maybe that you see it as a viable social model rather than a representation of a real God.
God is real, His order is the only way - to fight against it and suppose we can 'know' ourselves like He does, is the original deception and sin. And now we see and experience the folly of our hubris.
God will have His way - on earth as it is in Heaven - but not many will experience the beneficial and good side of that, unless and until we believe that He is who He says He is.
I meant it in the practical sense that religious communities are the ones that will have the greatest likelihood of success at this kind of self-organization.
JK Rowling seems to be a person of about average intelligence who went along with all the standard left / progressive ideas until this trans issue. Don't expect any great revolutions from her.
She's also a member, along with Taylor Swift, of the 'hugely privileged and successful-beyond-their-talent but still wanna complain about oppression' club.
Damn Janice! This short paragraph almost brought me to tears!
"What we need now is a frank acknowledgement of the perils of female leadership and of feminist precepts. Most women don’t want this conversation, and most men are afraid to raise it, but it’s long past due."
So true and so long overdue.
This whole piece was remarkable. Thank you.
Thanks, my friend!
I cannot help but think of aspects in George Orwell "Animal Farm".
2020+ is the era when the animals looked up and saw "...but some animals are more equal than others" scrawled on the barn. But happening in real life to us humans. Progressivism is blatantly anti-egalitarian and has basically become a revanchist movement led by oligarchical cliques who "self-flagellate others" of their kind to avoid having to suffer anything themselves.
It was written on the barn long before that, but hey, at least more people are noticing.
Tears? That one brought me to Cheers! 🥂
Amen brother.
We’ve heard a lot lately about the courage of children’s book author J.K. Rowling, who has taken on the hate speech law of her homeland, Scotland.
Before being thrown out of the intersectionality cult, she bowed down to the woke communists by making Dumbledore gay, making another character a lesbian, promoting trans ideology, and bashing men.
It's only because she realizes a threat to women that she's now trying to defend women.
She has a long history of massive funding the Domestic Violence "industry" and the "all men are rapists" school of feminism. All fueled by her accounts of her very brief marriage to a Portuguese Journalist when very young (both). Needless to say his version of their split never gets an airing.
Bettina Arndt has an excellent commentary on this very issue, if you haven't already read it: https://bettinaarndt.substack.com/p/feminists-never-shut-up
Wow! Bettina really shows them up.
I wonder why she chose a boy to be her hero.
Well I'd say because she knew that Male protagonists are the most interesting, precisely because we are used to the idea males are flawed and struggle, perfect for the classic hero's journey, coming of age story. It's why the most talked about character and actor from Barbie is Ken and Ryan Gosling, when I eventually saw it it was obvious because Ken is the one character that goes on a literal and psychological journey and ironically is the most emotionally interesting in his unrequited love and unsuccessful "revolution". Even Rowlings crime books have a flawed Male protagonist.
True. The heroine of the Star Wars reboot didn't have to grow or mature or undergo training because she already knew everything. Sadly, this was the conclusion when the Jedi library burned. So I guess female protagonists don't undergo character development.... that trash is for men only.
"I wonder why she chose a boy to be her hero."
So that Emma Watson could match his powers without any having to put in any effort? (I dunno I haven't read the books or sat through a whole movie).
No doubt she also hates capitalism, but was commerce savvy enough to make her hero a male. Or was Potter a reflection of a deeper realisation that it's the courageous male who will save civilisation?
Better late than never.
Thank you for covering this topic. I would stand up and cheer, but people would look at me funny.
About this part: "She objects to trans ideology, it turns out, not primarily because it is false to biological reality but because it involves men accessing women’s spaces and identities."
This is true, but we can go even further, and see that virtually all feminist resistance to transgender ideology comes from a belief that men are transitioning SPECIFICALLY to infiltrate women's areas. In this view, men who claim to be women are spies sent by *the patriarchy* to mess with women, especially feminism. See, for instance, "The Transsexual Empire" by Janice Raymond. It's a special kind of paranoia.
Thank you--you noticed something there that I hadn't put my finger on. That is exactly right.
Your essay ostensibly has great insight and clarity, as does Notorious P's comment, but - as an ordinary Joe, I have mused and cogitated over these very issues for many years so, I conclude, it doesn't take a genius to see the logical flaws in the feminist and transgender ideological arguments, and yet, it seems like it does.
It's not difficult to see that if women claim they are oppressed by men then they can't simultaneously claim equality and even superiority. If men are oppressors of women then who made them that way, Nature? Evolution demands domination doesn't it? And if not evolution then the Grand Designer, but then who are we to question his authority and omnipotence, and woe betide those, and those societies and nations who do. Whichever way you present it the feminist and transgender/intersectionality/critical theory (wokism) arguments make no sense and only serve to reinforce each other's nonsense, and once you allow nonsense then there is no valid basis to support the theories except for the ideological principle that only those statements that support the ends goals are true and good, and those that don't are false and evil, therefore it is justified to exclude, vilify and penalise those that speak them - for the common good. The common good ideology with a self referencing moral imperative is, and has been, the justifier of oppression and death of millions.
But having said that, I didn't previously see the main point of your article, that Rowling is not quite the anti woke warrior she painted to be - so thank you!
Thank you, David. I agree with you that the insights here, such as they are, about feminism's contradictions, are not at all original. If women are morally superior to men, then why would women need to keep pointing it out to each other, and aping men's qualities to claim it? If women are morally superior, why are we more lenient on women's crimes than on men's (infanticide, one of the most horrific of crimes, is often not punished at all when women commit it--in fact, only women *can* commit infanticide; when men do it, it's plain old-fashioned murder). Feminism has an answer for these and many other contradictions, but it's never a good answer, which is why no feminist should be hailed as a leader of men.
Indeed, never a good answer—just a large word salad with extra gaslighting on the side.
Thanks - it is indeed a special kind of paranoia. Feminists often claim that MRAs are driving trans ideology. It's a typically ludicrous claim, I don't know any MRAs with the slightest interest in driving it. That said, we DO enjoy the spectacle of feminist infighting that has resulted from this feminist-originated ideology.
Mike, in addition, feminists often claim that MRA's want to oppress women, while what is happening is that feminists are actively oppressing men.
or that
Men are angry at women, when it is the women who are angry at men.
Thanks Phillip, agreed - feminist projections at their finest! Likewise women who see male misogynists everywhere, when they're vanishingly rare - surely a projection based on their own visceral misandry.
I remember years ago when feminist icon Greer was being interviewed and she asked the question "Why do men hate us?" It puzzled me for years, until I realised what she was saying is that she hated men.
Exactly! Men are hard wired to cherish, protect and self sacrifice for women. To accuse men of hating women/ oppressing women is a form of psychological torture of men. It is the most vicious, cunty (and effective) form of exploitation imaginable.
It is like a spoilt brat daughter constantly saying, "Daddy I know you hate me, and nothing you can do will ever change my mind about that!"
Yes indeed pas the pop corn. But on a serious note it also highlights the inconsistencies and idiocies of feminism. Judith Butler has been writing for years but her word salad books are pure University fodder in the small world that is Gender Studies. Without the surfacing of the the "trans" issuecand with it the multiple "gender identities" into the mainstream the logical end points of feminist theory would have remained hidden from public view. As it is we see all sorts of contradictions exposed. If even testosterone deprived males are still so much stronger and more able than females in all forms of sport (even Chess apparently) how can it be that women are as capable as men in jobs demanding physical capability? If gender roles are socially constructed and biology a minor influence surely any human can indeed "perform" successfully as Male or female without any physical changes ? If indeed gender roles are fluid and performative how come heterosexual males have an innate and inalienable character that renders them always bad? And on and on. These and many other "problems" have always existed (think for instance of the demand that fathers do more hands on childcare yet oppose any presumption of shared parental responsibility in family law) but mainly hidden by public feminism concentrating on doing nice things for women. I'm certain that the obsessive way some TERFs try to implicate MRAs is because they have clocked how damaging this airing of feminisms feet of clay, that the chipping away of those feet may bring their idol down.
Yup. Almost all feminists are fanatically resistant to having any of their own leaders' disgusting theories and self-deluded arguments played back to them. I'm always told if I try to point out any feminist tenet that "You're cherry picking," "Those didn't speak for all feminists," "Those were marginal figures who had no influence on feminism," or even, "Naturally, the movement encompasses different views." Actually, the contradictions are central to all feminisms, especially the constant deflection of criticism and the insistence on having it both ways: women are always gloriously capable; and always horrifically vulnerable. Oppression excuses all.
Someone said to me, recently, " If Trump wins the 2024 election, it will be the end of democracy." Feminism is this level stupidity.
Not only is it a fact that only 5% of chess grandmasters are female, but of the top 500 esports players, year after year, zero are women. This suggests to me that women, even bright women, rarely have the kind of strategic thinking that men do as a matter of course. This also makes me think that if our society is going to counteract the terrible effects of gender ideology, gender surgery & hormone butchery, we will need men in roles developing and implementing strategy.
Judith Butler wrote
“Is the construction of the category of women, as a coherent and stable subject, an unwitting regulation and reification of gender relations?”
Is it? - Or ‘could it be that the biological reality of what constitutes a woman have the (un) - surprising outcome of creating a coherent universal idea of what we know women to be'?
Butler suggest that we only know and categorise women as women because of language we use to communicate what we know and so if we deconstruct language we deconstruct its meaning and what we mean by it.
But it is ridiculous to imply that language defines or rather actualises the reality that we know rather than language communicates the reality that we know
That is saying that order and information comes out of nothing, they just emerge from an incoherent language - sounds with no form or a priory meaning suddenly describe and create a coherent and logical reality
The only way that could happen would be if there was an eternal omniscient being who imagined the reality and spoke the words to create it and gave the creation the ability to understand and communicate that understanding with language and speak it.
yup metaphysics
That particular idea may be erroneous (though its prevalence needs verification); but the Trans Industrial Complex is clearly a sick and dangerous project, massively deployed by the same Mainstream that gave us Covid batshit, Critical Race Theory nonsense, Climate hysteria, Ukraine horseshit; not to mention more directly related LGBTQ+ sexualization of children. So I hope this focus on how pernicious Feminism is won't somehow blind us to those attendant evils as well.
Agreed, but I don't see them as separate. I see feminism as the author of all of these. Feminists promoted critical race theory from the beginning, back in the 1980s; they delighted in eco-feminist theories about how women were more suited to protecting the natural world and how 'climate change' hurts women more than men; they promoted nonsensical ideas about women and peace; their mania for security led to fanatical Covid-related masking, locking down, vaccine-promotion, and shaming as a killer anyone who expressed skepticism; and many feminist mothers promote gender transitioning and the sexualization of children. The feminist attack on the family has led to untold social damage, especially for children. That's why the movement against all of these must be led by men with the support of principled women.
I must repeat that...
"That's why the movement against all of these must be led by men with the support of principled women."
I suspect some of the transgender nonsense is deliberate to wind up the feminists to show the world how illogical they can be.
What baffles me is how often I see critics/opponents of trans who still profess feminist beliefs that women are marginalized and not valued in our society. The spaces that MtFs invade aren't the products of natural forces, they were created by MEN. White western men created a civilization where women can roam freely without bodyguards or male relatives. Western men created the separate accommodations that trans are demanding to use, including women's restrooms (often better appointed than the men's - even if the numbers of stalls tend to be insufficient in many cases), women's sports & locker rooms, beauty pageants, all girls schools (which still exist, though any boys' schools I knew of went co-ed long ago) and more.
A society that hated a group of people wouldn't create all these spaces and opportunities for the hated group.
Exactly. In fact "sex based rights" really means a host of privileges and protections for the "fairer sex". Such as in our Army the single men bunk down in dorms and single women get their own room and facilities. Just one of a myriad of examples where additional resources and protections are applied to girls and women on the grounds that they are more fragile (physically and mentally) more fearful and emotional. Paradoxically all things that the Victorians would have thought.
That certainly is baffling. I'll often see someone calling transgenderism "misogyny" and if I ask them why the answer is usually something absurd, such as "those men are making a mockery of women". Which seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through. One sure doesn't need to become Russian to mock Vladimir Putin, for instance.
There may be mockery in some few, but it is not the first thing that comes to my mind when I imagine a man deciding to go through all the trouble (the hormones, the meticulous and laborious body alterations, the mutilation) of presenting as a woman.
I think MtFs do mock women, and that's because they don't so much want to *be* women as replace women as the sexual partners of straight men. MtFs view women as hated rivals, not as friends.
What you describe also applies to the modern post feminist 'empowered' woman.
MTF's (the narcissistic ones who gain notoriety on social media) are just copying the kind of women that 3rd wave 'sex positive', 'ladette culture', 'Sex in the City' feminism created. A woman who is almost entirely detached from her biological role (and responsibilities that come with that role), and who constructs a kind of parody of womanhood with makeup, fashion and endless parading about seeking attention and validation just for existing.
Feminism helped to promote the super empowered 'fake woman' (fake nails, fake hair, fake tan, fake eyelashes, fake virtue etc) who puts her eggs into a freezer in order to have a 'career', and who then produces a baby with the aid of technology and then hands it over to strangers to look after so she can carry on competing with men in the workplace.
That's an incredibly masculine approach to being a woman.
These plastic women opened the doors for literally anyone to be a woman, and social media created the perfect virtual space where your artificially constructed caricature of a woman could be paraded without having to ever show the less flattering reality of an insecure woman with no real sense of self or self worth (nothing to contribute except being a very expert consumer).
These 'aspirational' women lowered the bar of what a woman is. We used to define women (and men) by their MOST sex specific traits. A woman nursed babies and pushed them along the pavement in prams. That was the essence of being a woman (as distinct from a man). Feminism came along and defined women as astronauts, fighter pilots, stockbrokers, action heroes, politicians and CEOs. All gender neutral (and decidedly masculine) identities. What did they think was going to happen?!
Feminism stopped using the term 'birth canal' and started to use the term 'vagina'. You can make a vagina out of any old bit of skin, but not a birth canal.
I think we can get too hung up on ideology and psychoanalysis though.... I suspect environmental factors (hormones, EMF pollution etc) have played a huge role in all this (along with technology like social media). Feminist/ gender ideology may be itself a consequence (an effect) of environmental factors. The history of feminism (the history of the angst-ridden society) aligns with the electrification of the planet (everyone should read Arthur Firstenberg's 'The Invisible Rainbow').
For example, studies on white storks have found changes in behaviour linked to proximity to cell towers. The closer to cell towers (microwave radiation) they are, the more dysfunctional (and more 'feminist'/ 'leftist') they become. Storks closest to cell towers don't bother building nests, don't pair bond, don't lay eggs and just spend all day long fighting with each other or staring into space.
Storks furthest away from cell towers get married, build a nice nest, lay lots of eggs and get along just fine.
I don't like all of the gymnastics you employ to say that feminism actually degrades women.
Feminism is a female supremacist movement completely.
Does it hurt women? Of course, all supremacist movements hurt the character of those who are sucked into them. The way that women are hurt by feminism, Germans were hurt by nazism. The character is harmed.
How did they "lower the bar" of what a woman is? They hurt women for sure because women simply aren't cut out for workplace success. They haven't the competitive edge for it, but they also don't have the masculine stoicism and sense of fair play for it. But to say they "lowered the bar" for women is to placate women's feelings as far as I can tell.
Misogyny is definitely over-claimed overall but it is clearly inherent to the behaviour of AGPs - the reason they enjoy "humiliation" etc is because hey believe women are lesser. I'm not as convinced about the HSTS types as their behaviour is largely driven by homosexuality and although they exploit women and "steal" their identity and culture I don't think their prime mover motivation is anti-women.
In general it seems to me that misogyny (real or exaggerated) is the resultant outcome rather than the motivation for MTFs.
In both cases AGP/HSTS the source is sexuality. This is the contrast to FTMs who seem to be reacting to misogyny (real or exaggerated) by denying their female identity or homosexuality.
Seems to me that this comment is gynocentrism galore.
APPS aren't misogynists. Maybe they mock women, but they also objectively Hate and identify as feminists. They believe in the patriarchy mumbo jumbo.
No, they dont believe women are lesser. This sounds like it was written by haggy bitch jk Rowling herself.
I would argue that MTFs are reacting to misandry and deciding to become women because they simply haven't the stomach to live in a fem world as a man, which I'm honestly sympathetic towards.
FTMs aren't reacting to misogyny. What misogyny? Women are doted on quite literally at every possible fucking turn. I mean, what misogyny could they possible be reacting too?
They are really just neurotic girls who have come up with some crazy fuckin ideas. Just like astrology, bulimia, witchcraft, or any other crazy nonsense teen girls get into.
I think there may be another element to FTM--which is that it's no longer enough, in the intersectional victim hierarchy, to be female. True, one can claim to be cat-called, harassed, discriminated against. But if one becomes gender-queer or non-binary or trans, the sympathy and attention are even more abundant. Especially if you are a white girl, now hearing that you are 'cis-gender' AND privileged by your race, having to apologize and feel guilty for those, being trans or gender queer are escape routes from the intolerable shame and responsibility. Just a hunch. When every discussion has to do with one's position on the victim hierarchy, even 'cis' girls may not be happy with their lot.
The phenomena you just described are absolutely real - but they are very recent developments. The power given to "crybullies" by wokeism is less than a decade old. They are an adjunct riding upon it, not the principal phenomenon. Transvestism (the true name actually) has been around forever, but only described systematically by Blanchard & co from the 1980s+. IE men have been dressing as women for sexual reasons basically as long as civilization. Homosexuality has always been around as have paraphilias. Its only in 2020 that Western society decided to accord the practice of a paraphilia rights that directly impinge on the majority's - under the false pretense there is such a thing as gender identity.
The teen girl phenomenon is however new (ROGD) and yes it does have a heavy element of "escaping normativeness". As a causative I do agree in that case current conditions are at fault. (Its not your hunch at all, the evidence clearly shows this is the case). Its a different phenomenon however, it just shares the superficially similar symptoms. Traditional trans/sexuality/genderism/whatever is at foundation sexually centred. It predates feminism so you can't blame feminists for its base existence - although you certainly can critique how feminist ideology opened the doors to normalising and legalising it. Which you have indeed done.
You use the term "haggy bitch" in a tract trying to refute misogyny...? Your language betrays your own prejudices more than debunks JKR.
My understanding of transgenderism is based on the Blanchardian model, mainly because it provides the most plausible and evidence based explanation of the phenomenon.
Where FTMs are concerned the traditional conjecture is that there isn't a converse AGP phenomenon (although that is controversial). There are basically two cohorts of FTMs - the traditional "butch lesbian on steroids" directly equivalent to HSTS men, and the modern phenomenon of HSTS and non-binarism. The latter is definitely a social contagion based fad, but it is fuelled by the same neuroses that drove eating disorders in the 80s & cutting in the 90s. These neuroses have a source and the highly sexualised mass media teen girls grow up in provides a plausible explanation.
This alone doesn't automatically imply misogyny per se but for women's welfare partisans to go there is within the ballpark of plausible argumentation - ie that these girls are reacting to such a culture.
As for MTFs using the explanation that their "transitions" are caused by men being treated like crap by modern political culture - this is a convenient rationalisation. The AGP phenomenon existed long before white male bashing became a mainstream sport in the West. The HSTS has also been attested basically forever. (Although I do accept manbashing is real and definitely responsible for many young men losing it)
The overall phenomenon going both ways is clearly causing massive suffering predominantly to women. Labeling it misogyny is within the bounds of reasonable argument.
Just Rowling says stuff worse than haggy bitch all the time.
Yes, it is a teen girl social contagion. It's still not misogyny. Just because something hurts women more it doesn't make it misogyny. Death in childbirth isn't misogyny its just circumstance. Misogyny doesn't make girls become trans. Girls don't face misogyny. They are doted on at every turn, privileged under the law, and revered as if we live in a pagan fertility cult.
Misandry causing men to become trans I think is definitely a thing, considering that MTFs have increased even if they use to be around somewhat. Of course, men still don't become trans as often as teen girls.
Also, ironic that the reason manbashing is bad is because it makes "young men lose it". Not that it's just bad because young men are entitled to respect like everyone else. Young men aren't losing it at all. They've just grown despondent and the more self assured ones hate feminism, which is good. They should hate feminism.
You really are a gynocentrist honestly.
Maybe they end up being accidentally mocking, but I don't agree that they hate women.
Most transgender are feminists and hate men.
Maybe it's a frenemy dynamic, which is something that women do a lot of.
I think the whole term idea is a grift led by women who just love feelin bad for themselves. The fact that people get so up in arms over mtfs is just more gynocentric nonsense.
Transgender refer to men as "people with penises".
It's just JK Rowling style gyno fluff.
I mean, women can roam freely without bodyguards or male relatives all over the world.
The perception of women as people in constant danger is,
Strange, to say the least.
Men have always been victims of more attacks than women anyway.
Yes, women can roam freely without bodyguards, but they're subjected to the "male gaze". Can't you imagine how terrifying that must be!
This has not been true for all of human history and is also not true in some places in the world today. I agree men have been victims of more attacks than women, but more is not the same as all.
Women fought for most of those sex-based rights. My mother, at one time, wasn't allowed to have a bank account in her own name. One can criticise aspects of feminism without painting everyone with the same man-hating brush.
Of course that isn't a sex based right but inclusion in a right and responsibility now shouldered by the two sexes and many genders. My father died suddenly in the mid sixties, although the requirement for women to have a Male guarantor for loans and some forms of accounts had been repealed a couple of years before my mother fell foul of Bank policy on this in trying to take over the mortgage. She had to move bank. A decade later as a student at university I researched this for personal interest. It turns out that this was a mid Victorian law, lobbied for by Charles Dickens and many other philanthropists of both sexes, designed to prevent women from being imprisoned for debt. The idea being that if something went really wrong it was the Male guarantor/s who'd be put behind bars. And of course it was very successful in this with the proportion of women in prison falling from about 20% in the eighteen hundreds to 6% in 1910. This made some sort of sense to me as at school we'd done Defoe's Moll Flanders, who gets herself into terrible debt and a brush with prison as a result. and of course in real life some aristocratic ladies, most famously the Duchess of Devonshire, hadcgot into immense debts which their spouses or relatives refused to be responsible for. All of course before the Victorian law. My point being that the past is often "another country".
Did you know that single men were once paid less than married men?
This is interesting. Because it wasn't a law but a tradition in the hands of the employers . Like many other things the records of this begin in the Victorian era, in particular in skilled industries and then later in the growing administrative roles in a booming economy. The logic at the time was that married men were more "steady and loyal" and likely to remain with their employers because they'd be "settled", remembering that in this era almost everyone rented their home and there was huge movements in population.
There are two references:
The first is the Australian public service legally paid married men at a higher rate than single men.
The Second reference is "On the Buses" Syd James mentions about a bus driver who was being paid married man wages, while he wasn't married. I know that is a sit-com but it contained an actual fact.
Certainly in the UK it became more common in the 20th century due to the increasing power of the trades unions. So it certainly was a common feature for drivers of buses, trains and other jobs that were considered skilled. In fact in the UK it became much more widespread mid last century as industries were nationalised and administration expanded. In one of those ironies of history it was the Labour Party who really pushed this . I wonder if this was also when Australian public services did this. Of course it was "legal" in the UK from the point of view that there was no general Law controlling wages or wage rates. Things can be legal just because of the absence of a law. I'm an economist by education and interested in economic history, boring to most people but fascinating to me.
As a child, I first read about married men's and single men's wages in relation to farm workers in Australia. Just as there were married men's quarters and the single men's quarters or accommodation.
Some information as an adult I now check out to see if it was fact. In Australia, it was the conservative government who held the majority of the power throughout the 20th century.
Not only that, but a married woman who took a traditionally male job was not looked at favorably by other women, because that woman was essentially taking a family-supporting job away from a man and taking away support from the family of a man who could have filled that job.
Yes.
Did your mother have her own source of income?
Women were able to have credit cards all the time. If a married woman didn't have her own income, then obviously she could not have a credit card.
Women were able to have credit cards throughout history. This is simply not true what you're saying.
It's not aspects of feminism we are criticizing its the whole package.
Feminism is a bitch movement led by bitch women who do nothing but be bitchy and horrible and this is what feminism has always been throughout history.
It's fuckin nonsense and it's not the "aspects" we have a problem with.
How obtuse and gaslighting, yet it's something that women parrot on repeat. Geez Louise.
This is a holdover from coverture, an institution which has been dismantled incrementally, at least, in the ways that suit feminists with the conventions which favor women holding strong. It was once a husband's legal responsibility to assume all his wife's debts. This explains why a wife routinely in the 19th century assumed her husband's given and surname. She could walk into any business and engage in commerce, using her husband's credit. What? they don't teach this in university? So it's understandable that banks would be conservative in their giving credit to married women who might get themselves into debt that they weren't accountable to directly. At around the same time that women were allowed to open their own bank accounts, states also had to pass laws that didn't reflect the older conventions of coverture. And now women can get credit cards along with minor children and family pets! Oh, such a long way you've come, baby
Excellent social critique, as always: incisive logic, backed up with evidence.
Although... the strength of this essay itself does mildly undercut your lede, that only men can generate the necessary pushback to radical feminism.
The anti-feminist movement cannot succeed without the support of women; but it should be led by men.
Men should be the spiritual leaders of their households and not choose feminists to make a household with. It is easier to start at the beginning than to start at the end and work backward.
Yes it does. Janice is one of a number of women well able to do so. And as she points out women do occupy privileged ground in our society. And men are also hobbled by their own chivalry as well as the "silencing" techniques and discrimination by feminism. So in fact a good case for the pivotal role for female MRAs!
Thank you. I'll defer to Alison Tieman, Hannah Wallen, Karen Straughan, and Bettina Arndt for leadership roles! I'll fire the water guns behind.
Water cannons can be good...hehe!
I've always believed that there are so many women in the MRM largely because men actually care more about what women have to say than other men. It's also true that women can say things about other women that men can' because of the oppression narrative and the whole 'punching down' thing.
Yes, women are applauded for saying things that men have been saying (carefully) for years. Whereas women in feminism are suspicious of feminist men, men tend to welcome anti-feminist women.
Well the psychology supports your observation. Men generally do not preference their own sex as women do. Unsurprisingly given that generally both girls and boys are nurtured, cared for and even educated by women until their mid teens when Male influences start to more regular, you are right generally males do care more about females (generally of course there are exceptions) but interestingly this doesn't necessarily translate to what they have to say. Hence the success of the feminist strategy of linking all their demand to "rape" "domestic violence " etc. Because these supposed threats to women hook into men's emotional urge to care for women. Logically these crimes which are in fact statistically very rare in our population of 66 millions have nothing to do with "gender pay gaps" female CEOs of FTSE companies, or any of the myriad of issuesthat get linked to them by feminists. On the plus side males are far more likely to be able to separate the content of message and who or how it is delivered. So there's hope.
I believe I have seen a YouTube video where Karen Straughan claims to be a feminist. Is this correct?
Oh gee, I can't imagine it unless it was done ironically. Karen is an MRA par excellence.
It wasn't Paglia, it was Summers.
It's not only that women occupy priviliged ground in our society. Many men have been too profoundly wounded by the stab at their hearts that is feminism to muster up the playfulness one needs to happily wield one's analytical sword. (Although to do that at Janice's level will always be beyond most of us, men or women.)
There are certainly a lot of broken hearts out there. Horrible to know it.
I would take her more seriously if she had the same supercilious disdain for people like Ellen "Elliot" Page pretending to be a man. But she obviously doesn't, nor has the thought even crossed her mind. Because she only cares about the invasion of female spaces, not men's.
Yes. If asked about Ellen 'Elliot' Page, she would say that she is a victim of misogyny, taught to despise her own femininity and therefore to seek an escape from it by transitioning. The answer is always misogyny for all these despicable egoists.
"Misogyny" is the chess piece played when your opponent wants to checkmate you!
The modern take on 'trans' is not even (necessarily) about wanting to become or be accepted as the opposite sex. It is about grabbing certain aspects the opposite sex which happen to appeal to you, and retaining those aspects of your original sex that you don't want to give up.
I would argue it is not really 'trans' in the original sense, and should just be considered the latest wave of feminism. After all, feminists have been deconstructing 'gender norms' for decades and appropriating / caricaturing certain aspects of masculinity for the last 60+ years.
The main difference is that now cross sex hormones and surgeries have crossed over into the mainstream and are now being marketed as consumer products (much like cosmetic surgery which used to be for the war wounded only, and then A list Hollywood actresses and is now available to all).
Feminism deconstructed the notion that being a man or a woman was a responsibility, with a set of obligations to society and to the opposite sex (child care/ putting food on the table etc). And technology also enabled both sexes to live much more gender neutral lives.
TERF like Rowling are keeping the debate polarised and framing it exclusively in terms of 'men invading women's spaces' etc because they want to provoke as much outrage and generate as much sympathy as possible. The gender binary which they have been deconstructing for decades only reappears when they want to play the damsel, frame men as the villains and reclaim that coveted No. 1 spot in the victim charts.
But they are fighting a losing battle. The gender binary is being dismantled in favour of the Nu Gender which will be entirely pick'n'mix affair (with 100 utterly meaningless pseudo genders replacing the outdated male and female ones).
Already 'trans' (in the original sense) is being sidelined in favour of 'non binary' and 'gender queer' identities. People complain that Elliot Page or Dylan Mulvaney are just LARPing and wearing manface/ womanface.... but isn't that also a fair description of the post feminist modern empowered woman? Sex In The City marked the age when women were defined by makeup, designer shoes, endless shopping and not much else. Nobody complained that these types of women weren't pulling their weight in society or contributing anything of value.
TERF's haven't quite figured out yet that feminism was never their movement to begin with. It was always about deconstructing the family and gender roles, and then erasing gender altogether to pave the way for a genderless (transhuman) society. Artificial wombs are only a decade or two away.
Simply by demanding privileges and boundaries in the name of 'women', TERF's are literally taking up a conservative position. They are literally trying to 'conserve' womanhood, in an age when womanhood (and manhood) is being dismantled for being an 'outdated' concept.
Well said!
You're correct. Women like JK Rowling will not free us. But it's not up to just men of courage, although they too are needed. We need women of courage, too. And there are already some other women working on it. It's not either/or, it's both/and. Not every woman is a feminist. And yes, we CAN roll back Affirmative Action. Already happening.
Wow, Janice. I don't want to diminish your words with praise, but, holy living fuck.
Eric, that's no way to speak in front of a lady! I hope Janice has her fainting couch nearby when she reads your words!!!
You do realise that such "benign sexism" , protecting the Professor from nasty words, simply compounds her oppression by the patriarchy. If you visit Scotland do add their Police service' s workload by reporting yourself for a hateful micro aggression.
No need for Mike to visit Scotland. He may well fall under the auspices of the legislation by virtue of his surname.
Janice, thanks for another outstanding piece. I'd like to add on the issue of paternity fraud - a far more common phenomenon than most people realise - that the solution is obvious, simple and inexpensive, compulsory paternity testing of babies at birth. We've been campaigning for that since our launch (as a British political party) in 2013. The people who oppose compulsory testing would be aghast if a similar proportion of new mothers were (unknown to them) given other women's babies shortly after birth. The usual double standard.
In the UK two TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) have very high profiles in the mainstream media. One is JK Rowling, the other the radfem lesbian 'journalist' Julie Bindel. For years Ms Bindel complained about being 'cancelled', we know that because mainstream media titles carried articles by her on the matter (while never publishing anything by anti-feminists).
For a while now I've been posting some text in the comment streams on new articles on Ms Bindel's Substack, as well as outlets such as Unherd. It's usually some slight variation of the following:
"Here we go again. Why does [insert publication name] never publish articles by anti-feminists? Julie Bindel has made a long and lucrative career out of holding men accountable for everything bad and nothing good, and women unaccountable. Some uncomfortable (for feminists) truths bear repeating:
1. Trans ideology is the inevitable offshoot of feminists' "gender is a social construct". Professor Janice Fiamengo has written a number of excellent articles on feminism and trans ideology, including:
Meet the New Feminist Hate, Same as the Old Feminist Hate
https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/meet-the-new-feminist-hate-same-as?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Single-Sex Spaces for Me, But Not for Thee
https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/single-sex-spaces-for-me-but-not?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Anti-trans Feminists Are Now Reaping the Whirlwind
https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/anti-trans-feminists-are-now-reaping?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Lia Thomas is the Child of Feminism
https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/lia-thomas-is-the-child-of-feminism?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
2. Women are more likely to be abused by female partners than by male partners, the most violent couples are lesbian couples:
https://j4mb.org.uk/2022/12/09/are-women-more-likely-to-be-abused-in-lesbian-or-heterosexual-relationships/
Why does Bindel never write about women abused by women? Does she not care about these women, or does their existence undermine her career as a feminist propagandist?
3. The Partner Abuse State of Knowledge Project (PASK) https://domesticviolenceresearch.org/ was published in May 2013 in the journal Partner Abuse and is the most comprehensive review of domestic violence research ever carried out. This unparallelled three-year research project was conducted by 42 scholars at 20 universities and research centres. The headline finding of the PASK review was that:
"Men and women perpetrate physical and non-physical forms of abuse at comparable rates, most domestic violence is mutual, women are as controlling as men, domestic violence by men and women is correlated with essentially the same risk factors, and male and female perpetrators are motivated for similar reasons."
A key numerical result from the PASK review was:
“Among large population samples, 57.9% of intimate-partner violence (IPV) reported was bi-directional, 42.1% unidirectional, 13.8% of the unidirectional violence was male-to-female, 28.3% was female-to-male.”
The last point is worth emphasising. In the 42.1% of (heterosexual) couples in which one partner is always the perpetrator and the other the victim, the woman is TWICE as likely to be the perpetrator and (therefore) half as likely to be the victim.
Finally, a short video recommendation:
Adolf Hitler reacts to radical feminist Julie Bindel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZjcPaBrGqI
Mike Buchanan
JUSTICE FOR MEN & BOYS http://j4mb.org.uk
CAMPAIGN FOR MERIT IN BUSINESS http://c4mb.uk
LAUGHING AT FEMINISTS http://laughingatfeminists.com
You lay out an excellent proposal for the defense of men’s rights, men’s spaces, and men’s distinctive contributions to the maintenance of a decent society, and state. Feminists, by advancing the contention that sex is a social construct, are effectively declaring that feminism has no purpose. Should I declare that I am really a woman the mainstream of the feminist movement turns the meaning of masculinity, and femininity, into complete nullities.
Times and again, it is demonstrated that there are inherent biologically-founded differences between men and women beyond the obvious physical differences between the two sexes. Men and women think in different ways, create in different ways, and act in different ways regardless of the societies in which they live. For example, one of the negative qualities of men is a tendency to resolve conflicts or assert dominance via physical violence. Women, on the other hand, prefer to ostracize, act with cruelty, and use gossip as a means of promoting hostility.
That’s true whether we’re talking about North American society or West African society, to pick two very different sets of social, and institutional, structures. There are obvious qualities inherent to masculinity, and femininity that have developed over millions of years in the evolution of the great apes, and the hominins. They have promoted the survival of our species, and brought us to dominance over the planet.
Declarations that inherent qualities of the human sexes are meaningless, or even non-existent, are purely nonsensical. They are particularly so because we do not see claims that men are social constructs in the same way. I would argue that this is because women are the ones primarily responsible for socializing children, and feminists are not eager to see this pointed out as it is clearly contradictory to their claim that the socialization of men, and boys, is what has produced the toxic masculinity they decry.
At the same time, feminists are quite willing to claim that gender dysphoria, and sexual orientation, are inherent biological differences. That this contradicts the belief that identity is a purely social construct has yet to occur to most feminists. When feminists like, say, Erin Pizzey stumble across this, and challenge the mainstream of feminism, exclusion, and outright falsehood, is the response. When it’s pointed out that feminists are talking out of both sides of their mouths, we hear crickets.
BTW, I find Rowling’a telling us that Hermione is Black as absurd, and as dishonest, as her saying that Dumbledore is gay. That’s particularly so because the declarations came years after the books, and films, were completed. Since nothing was said about either sexual orientation or racial identity in the books, and films, and Rowling had no problem with the portrayal of Hermione by a White actress, we may conclude with that Rowling is somewhat less honest than the average grifter.
It's nuts how the trans movement claims biological sex is irrelevant but the womaculus the MtF believes to inhabit his body is of utmost importance.
So’s the homunculus that the FtM perceives in her body.
Pretty much. Although a lot of the adolescent girls claim not to want to be men, but nonbinary.
I think blaming women for postmodernist garbage (pronounced properly in French as "garbaaawge") is unfair. That they were sucked into it so deeply is their fault, but men invented most of it. The tragedy of it all is that so many, many of our young people are winning Darwin Awards from believing any of it. Our society will expire, and our most fecund immigrant cultures will replace us. OOOH? Did I say something bad???
The Cass Review here, really putting the lid on "puberty blockers" for under 18s in the UK NHS, also reminds us that most of the massive rise in demand for "transition" amongst the under 18s is from girls! Interestingly I have never seen anything in any media expressing any concern about "sex based rights" for boys or men being compromised by this "invasion" by "trans men". Which I take as proof that males do not have any sex based rights.
True. You bring that up to a typical feminist and they often literally can not understand what you mean. "But--but--but women are losing out!" Men don't count, as usual.
I've seen quite a few gay men talk about it.
Nothing is more repulsive or frightening to many parents than having a gay son. These parents jump at the chance to believe their somewhat effeminate gay boy is really a girl. What a relief! For the parents, that is.
That's interesting. What do they say? In terms of trans women a number of prominent gay men in the UK describe it as a form of "gay conversion therapy" in that they contend the youngsters may be simply be gay or bisexual. I'm interested in the view of trans men ?
There's the gay conversion aspect (making a gay boy a "straight" girl, ditto for lesbians. Also trans men posing as gay men and infiltrating their spaces (It's much worse with trans women on lesbian dating apps, etc, but it does happen the other way round).
Thank you. I suppose gay men as a protected group have been able to have "safe spaces" in the way women have, and heterosexual men do not. I suppose the proliferation of genders also has the effect of diminishing the specialness of some identities in the "oppression olympics" . Interesting indeed.
Thank you, Janice, for identifying the massive size of the anti-male cultural iceberg. Hidden from view are the millions of men bashed for being a white male oppressor that they no longer speak up for themselves in normal conversations with women. Men shrink away, silent, frightened and resentful. Smart women realize they got very little transparency from the man, leaving both of them resentful. The unseen consequences of anti-male culture compromise all relationships.
To add to the list of proposed legal changes I would add mandatory DNA testing of all children at birth and the named father. This would at a stroke eliminate paternity fraud and provide men with the certainty women already enjoy. The only negative would be for women whose deceit is exposed but that would be a good thing.
Indeed. Much needed.
The problem is, men acquiesced to decades of feminism to keep women happy.
Trans is the first issue that demands tha men decide which set of women (pro-trans or GC) to side with. As Matt Walsh has shown, men will be attacked for airing their opinions (and not just genuflecting before the billionaire children's author). Neither the trans or GC side will help a man who gets cancelled over this.
The habit of acquiescence, however, also means that men are less likely to take a stand.
It was a brilliant piece of entrapment actually, or maybe a protection racket - support feminism and you'll get more sex! Biology wins again.
Your list of the legislative changes we'll need before men's roles in marriage and family life can be restored (affirmative action programs, tilted entitlements, etc.) makes sense. But it's also improbable - a nice way of saying "impossible".
Perhaps a practical fallback alternative would be to build and strengthen social sub-communities with healthier cultural environments. The odds for success would probably be higher for religious frameworks, but anyone's free to try.
I've seen it work.
Yes, that seems the most practical option that can be started right away. Every man still knows, unfortunately, that the woman is legally master in the house (unless he goes to Thailand or the Dominican Republic or some such). As a friend of mine once said, even the happiest and most committed couple must know that the woman has a loaded gun in her bedside table. Only she can use it with impunity. It's quite a situation for the husband and father, for which no personal strength, virtue, or pre-nuptial agreement can compensate.
I think, going by the things I see posted on the internet, and hear in conversation, that right now we have a chance for these changes and restoration of family life. I think the trans activists, gay activists, race activists and the communist activists have so overplayed their hand that ideas like repealing gay marriage are getting a hearing, which I wouldn't have expected as recently as 2 years ago. The US supreme court upheld a state's law banning hormone blockers and genital surgeries for minors (unless for immediate danger to the life/health of the minor, e.g., an infant with a blocked urethra).
David, I like your reply but when you say 'religious framework' it seems maybe that you see it as a viable social model rather than a representation of a real God.
God is real, His order is the only way - to fight against it and suppose we can 'know' ourselves like He does, is the original deception and sin. And now we see and experience the folly of our hubris.
God will have His way - on earth as it is in Heaven - but not many will experience the beneficial and good side of that, unless and until we believe that He is who He says He is.
I meant it in the practical sense that religious communities are the ones that will have the greatest likelihood of success at this kind of self-organization.
JK Rowling seems to be a person of about average intelligence who went along with all the standard left / progressive ideas until this trans issue. Don't expect any great revolutions from her.
She's also a member, along with Taylor Swift, of the 'hugely privileged and successful-beyond-their-talent but still wanna complain about oppression' club.
Yes, their both formulaic and formula is all they got.