Quotulatiousness

December 29, 2025

The war against white men didn’t start in 2015

Filed under: Business, Economics, Education, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Janice Fiamengo responds to Jacob Savage’s essay on the “lost generation” of young white men who have been subject to open and explicit discrimination in education, employment, and loudly denounced for noticing this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the City Journal Substack, Renu Mukherjee argues that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts is correct that “The best way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is stop discriminating on the basis of race”:

First, public opinion is clear: Americans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds have long opposed the use of racial and identity-based preferences. While this trend extends to employment, I’ve studied it extensively in the context of college admissions. The data underscore Americans’ strong support for colorblind meritocracy.

One year before the Supreme Court struck down the use of racial preferences in college admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Pew Research Center asked Americans whether an applicant’s race or ethnicity should be a factor in the college admissions process. 74 percent of respondents said that it should not, including 79 percent of whites, 59 percent of blacks, 68 percent of Hispanics, and 63 percent of Asian Americans. By way of comparison, 93 percent of Americans said that high-school grades should be a factor in college admissions, and 85 percent said the same about standardized test scores. Several surveys since then have produced similar results.

A May 2023 study that I co-authored with my Manhattan Institute colleague Michael Hartney reinforces this point. Through an original survey experiment on the 2022 Cooperative Election Study (CES), we asked Americans to play the role of an admissions officer and decide between two competing medical-school applicants. While the applicants’ accomplishments were randomly varied, the specific pair of applicants that respondents saw always consisted of an Asian American male and a black male.

Our objective was to determine whether, and when, Americans believe diversity should take precedence over merit in medical-school admissions. We found that even when respondents were informed that the medical school lacked diversity, the vast majority made their admissions decisions based on merit — in this case, college grades and MCAT scores — not race.

A few months prior to the publication of that paper, for a separate report, I reviewed hundreds of survey questions on affirmative action stored on the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research’s online database. I found that Americans are most likely to say that they oppose “affirmative action” when survey language explicitly describes the policy as providing “preferential treatment” or “preferences” for a given group. This suggests a deep American aversion to racial and gender-based favoritism — which is why Democrats, when pushing policies rooted in such ideology, tend to rely on euphemisms. Republicans should not do what even Democrats know doesn’t work.

Unfortunately, over the last few weeks, they have sounded like they might. Several prominent Republicans have taken to the social media platform X to argue that “Heritage Americans” — those who can trace their lineage to the Founding era — are inherently superior to more recent arrivals. In doing so, they suggest that the former are entitled to preferential treatment on the basis of ancestry. Here, the logic is that “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”.

Republican leaders, such as Vice President JD Vance, should reject such grievance-based politics. These ideas were unpopular when Democrats pushed them, and they will be unpopular when Republicans try them, too.

December 20, 2025

Ours is a culture that actively conspires against and sabotages its own children

Filed under: Business, Economics, Education, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Following up on yesterdays post (here) on the viral essay about the Millennial “lost generation”, John Carter enumerates the extent of damage done to Millennials in general and Millennial men in particular:

A Bloomberg report from 2023 tracked reported hiring by 88 Standard & Poor’s 100 companies and of 323,094 reported hires from 2018-2021, only 6% were white.

The response to the essay has been an outpouring of suppressed rage that has been simmering for years in an emotional pressure cooker of silenced frustration. The author, Jacob Savage, provides a ground-level view of the DEI revolution’s human cost, beginning with his personal experiences as an aspiring screenwriter, and then widening the reader’s perspective via interviews with would-be journalists and academics. Every subject described a similar pattern of frustrated ambitions in which, starting around the middle of the 2010s, their careers stalled out for no other reason than their melanin-deficiency and y-chromosome superfluity. Young white men were systematically excluded from every institutional avenue of prestige and prosperity. Doors were closed in academia, in journalism, in entertainment, in the performing arts, in publishing, in tech, in the civil service, in the corporate world. It didn’t matter if you wanted to be a journalist, a novelist, a scientist, an engineer, a software developer, a musician, a comedian, a lawyer, a doctor, an investment banker, or an actor. In every direction, Diversity Is Our Strength and The Future Is Female; every job posting particularly encourages applications from traditionally underrepresented and equity-seeking groups including women, Black and Indigenous People Of Colour, LGBTQ+, and the disabled … a litany of identities in which “white men” was always conspicuous by its absence.

The Lost Generation does not rely only on the pathos of anecdote. Savage includes endless reams of data, demonstrating how white men virtually disappeared from Hollywood writing rooms, editorial staff, university admissions, tenure-track positions, new media journalism, legacy media, and internships. He shows how, after the 2020s, they even stopped bothering to apply, because what was the point? The comprehensive push to exclude young white men from employment wasn’t limited to prestigious creative industries, of course. The corporate sector has also adopted a practice of hiring anyone but white men, as revealed two years ago by a Bloomberg article which gloated that well over 90% of new hires at America’s largest corporations weren’t white.

The Bloomberg article was criticized for methodological flaws, but judging by the outpouring of stories it elicited (just see the several hundred comments my own essay got, the best of which I summarized here) it was certainly directionally accurate.

The real strength of Savage’s article isn’t the cold statistics, though, but the heartrending poignancy with which it highlights the emotional wreckage left in the wake of this cultural revolution.

Hiring processes are opaque. If an employer doesn’t extend an offer, they rarely explain why; at best one receives a formulaic “thank you for your interest in the position, but we have decided to move forward with another applicant. We wish you the best of luck in your endeavours.” They certainly never come out and say that you didn’t get hired because you’re a white man, which is generally technically illegal, for whatever that is worth in an atmosphere in which the unspoken de facto trumps the written de jure. Candidates are not privy to the internal deliberations of hiring committees, which will always publicly claim that they hired the best candidate. Officially a facade of meritocracy was maintained, even as meritocracy was systematically dismantled from within.

The power suit-clad feminists who body-checked their padded shoulder into C-suites and academic departments in the 1970s flattered themselves that they were subduing sexist male chauvinism by outdoing the boys at their own game and forcing the patriarchy to acknowledge their natural female excellence. Growing up I would often hear professional women say things like “as a woman, to get half as far as a man, you have to be twice as good and work twice as hard”. [NR: usually with a smug “fortunately, that’s not difficult” tacked on] The implication of this was that women were just overall better than men, because the old boy’s club held the fairer sex to a higher standard than it did the good old boys. Of course this was almost never true, these women were overwhelmingly the beneficiaries of affirmative action programs motivated by anti-discrimination legislation that opened up any corporation that didn’t put a sufficient number females on the payroll to ruinous lawsuits. Moreover, a fair fraction of them were really being recruited as decorative additions to the secretarial harems of upper management. Nevertheless it helped lay the foundation for the Future Is Female boosterism that stole the future from a generation of young men.

There was a time, not so long ago, where I naively assumed that my own situation was simply the inverse of the one women had faced in the 70s and 80s. I was aware that I was being rather openly discriminated against, but imagined that this simply meant that I had to perform to a higher standard, that if I was good enough, the excellence of my work would shatter the institutional barriers and force someone to employ me. It took me several long and agonizing years to realize that this just wasn’t true. The crotchety patriarchs of the declining West may have been principled men capable of putting stereotypes aside to recognize merit; in fact, the historical evidence suggests that they overwhelmingly prized merit above any other consideration (just as the evidence suggests that their stereotypes were overwhelmingly correct). The priestesses of the present gynocracy hold themselves to no such standard. They don’t care about your promise or your performance, at all. If anything, performing well is a strike against you, because it threatens them. Nothing makes them seethe more than being outperformed by men. They champion mediocrity as much to punish as to promote.

Young white men had been raised to expect meritocracy. They’d also been raised to be racial and sexual egalitarians. People in the past, they believed, had been bigoted, believing superstitious stereotypes about differences of ability and temperament between the sexes and races that had no foundation in reality, pernicious falsehoods that were developed and propagated as intersectional systems of oppression with the purpose of justifying slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and genocide. Naturally they were appalled to have such charges laid at their feet, and so they they agreed that we were all going to try and correct this injustice, and we’d do it by carefully eliminating every potential source of racial or sexual bias, eliminating all the unfair barriers to advancement within society, in particular although not certainly not exclusively via university admissions and institutional hiring. That was the original official line on DEI: that it wasn’t about excluding white men, heaven forbid, no, it was simply about including everyone else, widening the talent pool so that we could ensure both the fairest possible system of advancement, and that the best possible candidates were given access to opportunity. In practice, we were told, this wouldn’t be a quota system: everything would still be meritocratic, but if it came down to a coin flip between two equally qualified candidates, one of whom was a white man and the other of whom was not, the not would win. Fair enough, the young white men thought at first: we’ll all compete on a level playing field, in fact we’ll even accept a bit of a handicap in the interests of correcting historical injustices, and may the best human win.

But the DEI commissars had absolutely no interest in a level playing field. That the playing field wasn’t already as level as it could be was, in fact, one of their most infamous lies. The arena has always been level: physics plays no favourites in the eternal struggle for survival and mastery. If some always end up on top – certain individuals, certain families, certain nations, certain races – this is invariably due to their own innate advantages over their competitors. An interesting example of this was provided by the Russian revolution. The Bolsheviks cast down the old Czarist aristocracy, stripping them of land, wealth, and status, and then discriminated against them in every way possible; a century later, their descendants had clawed their way back to power and prominence. The only possible conclusion from this is that the Russian aristocrats were, at least to some degree, aristos – the best, the noblest – in some sense that went beyond inherited estates.

The young white men did not think of themselves as aristocrats with a blood right to a certain position in life, but as contestants in a fair competition, who would rise or fall on their own merits and by their own efforts. They then abruptly found themselves competing in a system in which it was simply impossible for them to rise, but which also lied to them about the impassable barrier that had been placed in their way. If you noticed the unfairness, you were told that this was ridiculous, that as a white man you were automatically and massively privileged, that it was impossible to discriminate against you because of this, and that in addition to being a bigoted racist you were also quite clearly mediocre, a bitter little man filled with envy for the winners in life, the brilliant beautiful black women who had obviously outcompeted you because they were just so much smarter, so much more dedicated, and so much better because after all they had succeeded in spite of the deck being stacked against them whereas you had failed despite having been born with every unearned advantage in the world.

An entire generation had their future ripped from their hands, and were then told that it was their fault, their inadequacy. They were gaslit that there was no systemic discrimination against them, that their failure to launch was purely due to their individual failings … while at the same time being told that those who were so clearly the beneficiaries of a heavy thumb on the scale were the victims of discrimination, that the oppressors were the oppressed, and that to cry “oppression” yourself was therefore itself a form of oppression.

Do you see how cruel that is? How sadistic? It is more psychologically vicious by far than anything the Bolsheviks did to the Russian aristocracy. At least the Bolsheviks were honest. Although, it must be said, the psychological sadism of the gay race commissars is part of a tradition, communists have often been noted for their demonic cruelty.

December 19, 2025

“2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life”

Filed under: Business, Education, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Compact, Jacob Savage talks about the “Lost Generation” … not a reference to the group before the “Greatest Generation” who fought and died in their millions in the trenches of World War One … but a much more recent group who are still becoming living casualties of a war fought without weapons and uniforms, but just as bitter and unnecessary:

In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life.

In industry after industry, gatekeepers promised extra consideration to anyone who wasn’t a white man — and then provided just that. “With every announcement of promotions, there was a desire to put extra emphasis on gender [or race],” a former management consultant recalled. “And when you don’t fall into those groups, that message gets louder and louder, and gains more and more emphasis. On the one hand, you want to celebrate people who have been at a disadvantage. On the other hand, you look and you say, wow, the world is not rooting for you — in fact, it’s deliberately rooting against you.”

As the Trump Administration takes a chainsaw to the diversity, equity, and inclusion apparatus, there’s a tendency to portray DEI as a series of well-meaning but ineffectual HR modules. “Undoubtedly, there has been ham-fisted DEI programming that is intrusive or even alienating,” explained Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in The New Yorker. “But, for the most part, it is a relatively benign practice meant to increase diversity, while also sending a message that workplaces should be fair and open to everyone.”

This may be how Boomer and Gen-X white men experienced DEI. But for white male millennials, DEI wasn’t a gentle rebalancing — it was a profound shift in how power and prestige were distributed. Yet practically none of the thousands of articles and think-pieces about diversity have considered the issue by cohort.

This isn’t a story about all white men. It’s a story about white male millennials in professional America, about those who stayed, and who (mostly) stayed quiet. The same identity, a decade apart, meant entirely different professional fates. If you were forty in 2014 — born in 1974, beginning your career in the late-90s — you were already established. If you were thirty in 2014, you hit the wall.

Because the mandates to diversify didn’t fall on older white men, who in many cases still wield enormous power: They landed on us.

[…]

Institutions pursuing diversity decided that there would be no backsliding. If a position was vacated by a woman or person of color, the expectation was it would be filled by another woman or person of color. “The hope was always that you were going to hire a diverse candidate,” a senior hiring editor at a major outlet told me. “If there was a black woman at the beginning of her career you wanted to hire, you could find someone … but if she was any good you knew she would get accelerated to The New York Times or The Washington Post in short order.”

The truth is, after years of concerted effort, most news outlets had already reached and quietly surpassed gender parity. By 2019, the newsrooms of ProPublica, The Washington Post, and The New York Times were majority female, as were New Media upstarts Vice, Vox, Buzzfeed, and The Huffington Post.

And then 2020 happened, and the wheels came off.

[…]

There are many stories we tell ourselves about race and gender, especially in academia. But the one thing everyone I spoke to seemed to agree on is it’s best not to talk about it, at least not in public, at least not with your name attached. “The humanities are so small,” a millennial professor nervously explained. “There’s a difference between thinking something and making common knowledge that you think it,” said another.

So it came as a bit of a shock when David Austin Walsh, a Yale postdoc and left-wing Twitter personality, decided to detonate any chance he had at a career with a single tweet.

“I’m 35 years old, I’m 4+ years post-Ph.D, and — quite frankly — I’m also a white dude,” he wrote on X. “Combine those factors together and I’m for all intents and purposes unemployable as a 20th-century American historian.”

The pile-on was swift and vicious. “You are all just laughable,” wrote The New York Times‘ Nikole Hannah-Jones. “Have you seen the data on professorships?” “White males are 30 percent of the US population but nearly 40 percent of faculty,” tweeted a tenured professor at GWU. “Hard to make the case for systemic discrimination.”

It didn’t matter that as far back as 2012 women were more likely to be tenure-track across the humanities than men, or that a 2015 peer-reviewed study suggested that STEM hiring favored women, or even that CUPAHR, an association of academic DEI professionals, found that “assistant professors of color (35 percent) and female assistant professors (52 percent) are overrepresented in comparison to US doctoral degree recipients (32 percent and 44 percent respectively).”

As in other industries, what mattered were the optics. When people looked at academia, they still saw old white men. Lots of them.

“A big part of why it’s hard to diversify is the turnover is really slow,” a tenured millennial professor explained. “And that’s become worse now, because Boomers live a long time.” Many elite universities once had mandatory retirement at 70. But in 1994, Congress sunsetted the academic exemption for age discrimination, locking in the demographics of the largely white male professoriate for a generation.

White men may still be 55 percent of Harvard’s Arts & Sciences faculty (down from 63 percent a decade ago), but this is a legacy of Boomer and Gen-X employment patterns. For tenure-track positions — the pipeline for future faculty — white men have gone from 49 percent in 2014 to 27 percent in 2024 (in the humanities, they’ve gone from 39 percent to 21 percent).

November 25, 2025

“So what?”

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Spaceman Spiff makes the case for the two simple words in the title being the most powerful words in the English language:

The two most powerful words in the English language are, so what? We do not use them enough.

A “so what?” is a rebuff, a rejection of some cherished belief. It confronts the promoter of an idea with the worst form of disagreement, indifference.

In a narcissistic world where attention is often the goal of agitators, genuine disinterest is difficult to manipulate. It disarms anyone intent on destroying established norms.

A “so what?” forces a reconsideration. It has the strongest effect on the issues we care most about.

Nobody enjoys their precious cause being dismissed. That is why we must use it more.

Who cares?

Many of today’s moral crusades are imposed on us against our will. We are told we must attend to issues most of the world ignores.

Here are a few to consider.

Racism and diversity

Accusations of racism are now endemic in Western nations. The underlying drive is one of punishment. Natural wariness of alien peoples is recast as a moral failing, the antidote to which is enforced mixing to demonstrate the backwardness of one’s social inferiors. A policy unique to Western countries.

The promotion of diversity quotas rests upon tacit acceptance of the idea that homogeneity is undesirable. This requires our participation to succeed, especially the consequence of this belief, that the mass importation of foreigners is needed to improve society.

The response to accusations of a lack of diversity should be, so what? It needs to be laughed at. Who cares if we are too homogenous? Says who?

No rational group seeks to dilute their numbers. This is a perverse affectation confined to a handful of ethnomasochists who think racism is unique to Western societies.

A robust rejection of this helps recalibrate to the global norm, a useful reminder to anyone steeped in woke catechisms. Much of the world views out-group preference as either treason or mental illness, a perspective easily observed simply by travelling.

Sexism and gender equality

There is a mismatch between the sexes. Men win the prizes, dominate their fields and invent the inventions.

We are told this is a disgrace. Such patriarchal domination will not do.

A key flashpoint is the “gender wage gap” that unwittingly illustrates the insincerity of feminism. There is no wage gap. There is a lifetime earnings gap. This is a consequence of decisions women voluntarily make such as spending more time with family or choosing less risky employment closer to home.

This is firmly established and supported with unimpeachable data, often produced by the very governments pursuing gender pay gap legislation.

Polite counterarguments against feminist talking points like this fail despite their thoroughness because facts are dismissed as they are inconvenient to a lucrative narrative.

Therefore the response to accusations of gender imbalances should be met with a robust so what? If they don’t care about engaging with established facts why should we care about the issue at all? Energetic indifference is the only way to deprive feminism of its momentum.

Much of the “argument” for gender equality is emotional manipulation. It abuses men’s protective instincts in a shameless way.

A firm “so what?” arrests this natural urge in men. It provides a small space for us to escape manipulation and examine the facts.

Who cares if women are underrepresented or have less money? This is a result of decisions women themselves make, so solve the problem yourself. Stop begging men for special favours.

Update, 26 November: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

October 20, 2025

The real reason we’re suddenly discussing “The Great Feminization” now

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Clifton Duncan offers an explanation for why “The Great Feminization” is a hot topic of discussion, and I think he has a valid point:

The only reason people are talking about “The Great Feminization” now is because it’s affecting women.

Men young and old have been talking about it for decades.

For decades boys and men have had their desires dismissed; had fathers denigrated and denied them; had their spaces, interests and hobbies invaded; had primary and higher education weaponized against them; had jobs and promotions unjustly denied them; had reputations ruined by false allegations; watched pop culture fester with anti-male slop; had wealth and progeny stripped away by prejudiced family courts.

What happened when they voiced these complaints?

They were called misogynists, resentful of their inability to match women’s success as they seethed over the dismantling of the patriarchy.

They were called losers, whiners and complainers who should shut up, grow up, man up and get married.

But now —

As men avoid women at work, or withdraw from the labor force altogether; as men leave the church; as men abandon dating and marriage; as men reciprocate women’s embrace of modernism and rejection of traditionalism; and as womanhood faces erasure, ironically (but predictably) at the hands of the very liberals and progressives women celebrate for hatcheting away manhood and masculinity —

Only now, as the consequences of treating women’s needs as all that matter and men’s needs as superfluous (and offensive) are evident,

Only now, as men usher in a new sexual revolution by unapologetically focusing on themselves and their own happiness, refusing to serve a society that’s signaled repeatedly that it no longer values them and prompting more and more women to wonder “Where Have All the (Good) Men Gone?”

Only now has it become safe for *women* to broach the topic of “The Great Feminization” and be lavished with acclaim for making the exact same points men have been chastised for making for over 25 years.

Symbolic.

Update: Francisco at Small Dead Animals posted this video of Camille Paglia talking about what women have lost through Feminism:

October 12, 2025

QotD: Male privilege revealed

Filed under: Books, Health, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent documents the author’s 18-month experiment living as a man named Ned. She decided to embark on this experiment to explore gender dynamics from “the other side”, so to speak. Vincent, a liberal journalist with a strong feminist background, decided she wanted to understand men’s lives and social roles from within. She recognized, accurately, that men change their behavior when a woman is present, and she was curious to see how they were when no women were around.

Vincent described herself as a “bull dyke” and held strong feminist views. She expected, throughout the course of the experiment to uncover the secrets of male privilege and the societal advantages that, she was sure, are afforded to men. She anticipated that living life as a man would validate her beliefs that men lead easier lives and wield unchecked power. She figured that, at the very least, she could enjoy a couple of years as a powerful male.

Vincent disguised herself as a man by getting a new hair style and giving herself a fake five o’clock shadow, among other things. She had always been considered rather masculine in her usual feminist and lesbian circles, so she figured she could pass rather easily as a man, if perhaps a slightly effeminate one. She was right.

Her initial assumptions changed when Vincent discovered that men, contrary to her expectations of power and privilege, face their own unique set of pressures and struggles. Men, she discovered, were expected to suppress any signs of vulnerability. This quickly led to feelings of extreme isolation that she did not expect. Nobody “had her back” because, as far as they knew, she was just a man, and should “man up”. She quickly realized that men do not have inherently easier lives. Her preconceived notions of in-born male advantage evaporated. She was getting worried.

She realized that women do not have empathy for the struggles of men.

Norah, as Ned, experienced the behavior of women toward men firsthand. At one point, she tried dating women as a man. She figured this would be incredibly easy for her. Not only was she a woman herself and knew how women think, but she was also a lesbian and already liked women. She worried at first that she’d be too good at it and would have to tell interested women that she was a woman to stop them from pursuing her.

The reality was sharply different from her expectations. Her apparent femininity came across as her simply being an effeminate man. This caused women to be disinterested in her and their rejections were dismissive, cold, and often extremely brutal. Women would sometimes treat her with suspicion or outright hostility as they assumed her intent was negative.

These interactions eventually led Vincent to start developing misogynistic thoughts. That’s right: women treated her so poorly when they believed her to be a man that she started to develop misogynistic thoughts.

Interestingly, many of the supposedly straight women she had attempted to date, even those who had been brutal and cold toward her, immediately expressed interest in a lesbian “hook-up” when she told them she was a woman who had been disguised as a man for the sake of journalism.

Perhaps there’s no such thing as a “straight woman”. Is there even a such thing as a lesbian?

CTCG, “UNDERCOVER: A Feminist’s Year Living as a Man”, Codex Trivium Cosmic Genesis, 2025-06-16.

August 3, 2025

“Even when accused men win, they lose”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media, Politics, Sports — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Janice Fiamengo on the recent court decision that acquitted five former junior hockey players of sexual assault charges in a London, Ontario court:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

February 28, 2025

QotD: A jaundiced view of the feminist movement

Filed under: Government, History, Law, Liberty, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The idea of the suffragettes was that women should share in the political business of the menfolk voting on leaders whose main task was deciding matters of crime, taxation, and war, on the grounds that they share in the outcomes and burdens of any bad decisions in that area.

Note that governments, back in the day, did not attempt to act as a nanny, warding off daily harms from unsafe commercial products, or was government in the business of educating the young, nursing the sick, or managing the personal lives of all the children of all ages inhabiting the nation.

The idea of the men who invented feminism was that propelling women into the workforce would increase the tax base, break apart the nuclear family, and increase sales of expensive drugs to promote temporary sterility.

Breaking the family in turn would make women more dependent on the government than on their menfolk, and draw the unreasoning admiration women typically bestow upon their protectors and breadwinners onto the Powers That Be. The fanatical devotion that mothers of convicts show, when they insist forever that their child is innocent, would then be channeled into the ballot box toward whatever demagogue with a vacant smile promised to remove dangerous liberty from the hands of the children, regardless of age, inhabiting the nation.

Pornographers like Hugh Hefner encouraged feminism on the grounds that it would increase vice, and hence the monetary gain from the public sale of vice.

Then, once women were in the workforce, excluding them from the military and other areas where men are better qualified was said to be a sign of hidden bigotry against them. The idea of this bigotry was so stupid that a new word had to be coined to hide its meaning, and that word is “sexism”.

The word “racism” — which at the time had a meaning — was decapitated and the word “sex” — and at the time this word also had a meaning — was sutured onto the neckstump, to produce a new word intended to denounce a nonexistent hatred and contempt felt by men against women.

There have been wars between races and tribes since time immemorial, and hatred between races and tribes. But the war between the sexes is not really a war, because both sides keep flirting with the other, and settling down, and having babies and suchlike.

John C. Wright, “No More Lads”, John C. Wright’s Journal, 2020-01-28.

February 25, 2025

QotD: Identity politics as a secular religion

Filed under: Books, Politics, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Tom Holland, in his book Dominion, The making of the Western Mind, identifies the “trace elements” of Christianity in the woke world. The example he used was the intersectional feminists in the #MeToo movement offering white feminists the chance to “acknowledge their own entitlement, to confess their sins and to be granted absolution”.

But the problem with identity politics as a secular religion is precisely its failure to allow for absolution. The faith that Saad espouses is utterly bleak, even cloaked as it is in words of love. It utterly fails to allow for redemption, and its most direct religious antecedent is found in Calvinist predestination.

Under this doctrine, God has predetermined whether you are damned or elect. From the second that the right sperm hit it lucky with the most fecund egg, your place in the woke hierarchy was decided. In the modern progressive world, informed by intersectional feminists, it does not matter what you say or do, the only defining factor in your state of grace is your skin, gender and sexuality.

This is a profoundly depressing outlook for three main reasons. The first is the essential nihilism in the creed. Your intent? Irrelevant. Your deeds? Likewise. The sum of your experience, desires, longings, beliefs? Your humanity itself? Nah, not relevant.

The second dispiriting message is that the problems its aims to address are insoluble. White people are racist by their nature, and inherently incapable of seeing their own racism or addressing it. Men are misogynists, by default, witting or unwitting bulwarks of the patriarchy. If they don’t believe they are individually at fault they are in denial. And if they try to say, actually, I’m not sure the patriarchy exists, they are mansplaining misogynist bastards. This is the politics of perpetual antagonism, of a kind of bleak acceptance that all relationships between different categories of human are necessarily fractious.

[…]

The third problem with Puritan wokeness is that it [has] sinister echoes in the history of predestination. When the creed reached its zenith in the seventeenth century, the logical hole at its centre became insanely obvious. If it does not matter to God how you behave, because your salvation was pre-determined at birth, why not behave however the hell you want to?

Antonia Senior, “Identity politics is Christianity without the redemption”, UnHerd, 2020-01-20.

February 11, 2025

Many young white men are choosing to “own the insult” when accused of being a fascist

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Lorenzo Warby points out that some — even many — young white men are reacting to repeatedly being called “Nazi” or “fascist” by embracing the slur:

Still from Pink Floyd: The Wall

For the fuel of the contemporary networked authoritarians are angry young men. Angry young men who have a great deal to be angry about.

In so many modern schools, universities, and much of social media, if you are a low melanin count, heterosexual male you are absolutely at the bottom of the “woke” oppression-bingo hierarchy. You will be implicitly, or explicitly, held to be somehow tarred with every bad thing any person “like” you has done in history, no matter how long — even how many generations — before you were born that it happened, nor how dubious an historical characterisation it might be. There is no identity open to you that you can celebrate, or feel positively attached to, without potential or actual denigration.

If you do any reading, you can quickly work out that this is a ludicrously one-sided — and deeply unfair — way to look at history. Even in its own terms, it is nonsense, as “folk like you” — i.e., low melanin count heterosexual males — voted for every single legal advance any of the celebrated-as-oppressed groups made. “Folk like you” built the Scientific Revolution, Parliamentary Government, mass prosperity.

Of course, this was a matter of culture, institutions, the happenstance of history, not melanin content. The trouble with the racialisation of history and identity is that it is, indeed, the racialisation of history and identity. As Jews are currently (re)discovering.

Nor can many of these angry young men take much refuge in the good life, work or entertainment. Online dating has turned into a hypergamous nightmare that excludes most guys, in-person connections are fraying and migration-plus-restrictive-land-regulation has shot rents up and made home-owning unattainable.

In entertainment, masculine heroes are being replaced and degraded. Online games are being systematically “wokified”. There are systematic attacks on their heritage. Sport and advertising is also being wokified, is “bending the knee”. Where to go?

If folk systematically tar or denigrate someone’s identity, a natural response is to say “no, my identity is great, it is wonderful”. There will be certainly a market for such a response. The natural response to systematic denigration is some form of “fuck you!” and the politics of “fuck you!“.

In the contemporary world, what is the most dramatic way of saying “fuck you!“? To take the racist!, fascist! abuse and go “right on!“. Even more so if you take the ideas they invoke and turn them back against them.

Of course, if you just reverse what left-progressivism — in its “woke” iteration — stands for, you are still dancing to their tune. But rage can easily work like that.

So, these angry young men look at the folk who treat them with such continual, institutionalised, contempt — who stack everything they can against them — and decide “we hate you”. If you are going to abuse us anyway no matter what we do — the seductive logic goes — then why not simply embrace the identity you impose on us if we put our heads up? There is, after all, no more in-your-face way to shriek their anger and rejection back at those who are abusing, denigrating and excluding them than to embrace racism and fascism.

They look at ordinary conservatives, at ordinary liberals, they look at Boomers, and think “you did not stop it, you did nothing to protect people like me”, so they — and their politics — get no respect.

Instead, they go to the politics of using the operational tactics used against them — the operational politics of “wokery” — in support of politics that most completely expresses their rage. This is the updated version of what happened with 1920s Fascism in Italy and 1930s Nazism in Germany. Like the original versions, they are using — and so helping to legitimate — the operational methods of the left-progressivism.

Not that left-progressives, the “woke”, will see it. They are way too full of the stupidity of arrogance, of the blindness of moral narcissism, to pick what is happening, still less take any responsibility for it. They utterly fail to see themselves; to understand how much they come across as smug, arrogant, condescending, self-righteous, shits whose politics again and again ends up favouring people like them and whose recurrent response to disagreement is to de-legitimise, denounce and censor. Their entire view of themselves is they are the oh-so-clever, oh-so-moral people. Nothing they do is ever seriously counter-productive or fundamentally mistaken.

Faced with the rise of actual racism and actual fascism, they will shriek racist! and fascist! even harder. But they are in the situation of the boy who cried wolf! Except worse, as the boy in the story neither created, nor trained, the wolf.

They have so debased that currency, so debased historical analogy, that fascism has lost its rhetorical, or even its warning, power.

Besides, how many people will say: these folk against whom you are shrieking the same terms of abuse you have shrieked at people for decades. Are they making excuses for the mass sexual predation on young girls by migrants we did not want? Are they supporting the hormonal and surgical mutilation and sterilisation of minors? Are they teaching folk to despise their own countries and heritage? Are they pushing the narrative lies of the moment? Have they proved to be incompetent at elementary things, such as fighting crime and managing fire risk?

No? Then they sound good to me.

Left-progressives: so good at finding new ways to make the same mistakes. It is almost as if they have a pathological relationship with information. Oh, wait, they do.

January 16, 2025

The allegations against author Neil Gaiman

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I haven’t read the article in question, but it certainly looks ugly if even a few of the allegations turn out to be true:

New York magazine has just published a very long investigative piece on alleged sexual misconduct by the author Neil Gaiman, both contextualizing previously-known allegations and introducing new ones. Writer Lila Shapiro, who clearly did an awful lot of legwork, found several new women who allege various forms of bad sexual behavior against Gaiman. It’s all very serious and disturbing, obviously. I have nothing to contribute and no one cares what I think about such things, so we can leave that story there.

But I’m afraid that Shapiro’s piece does again force me to think about New York‘s story last year about Andrew Huberman. You could be forgiven for thinking “New York‘s SIMILAR story last year about Andrew Huberman,” but this would not be a correct characterization; where Gaiman is accused of many acts that, if true, rise to the level of sexual misconduct, including rape, the Huberman piece contains no such allegations. Huberman is accused of dating multiple women at the same time without the knowledge of all involved, of infidelity generally, and there’s a bizarre fixation on his regular tardiness. It is not a MeTooing piece. And the trouble, I’m afraid, is that the piece was written, edited, packaged, and promoted in a way that inevitably gave audiences the impression that such allegations were included — that Andrew Huberman had been MeToo’d.

The fact that the piece contains no allegations of that type, but seems to have been very deliberately associated by New York, its author Kerry Howley, the magazine’s social media channels, and their many media kaffeeklatsch allies with MeToo stories, was a terrible error in editorial judgment. The Gaiman story helps underline why: this shit is so serious that we can’t afford to play around with these types of narratives. The Rolling Stone University of Virginia gang rape fraternity initiation story, a narrative that fell apart under the barest scrutiny and should never have survived even an amateur journalistic investigation, did a lot of damage in our ongoing efforts to take sexual assault on campus seriously. There’s a higher bar to clear with this stuff for that reason, and the Huberman story utterly failed to clear it.

The story’s presentation in the magazine was draped with innuendo, with as many leading terms and dark implications as can be stuffed in. The image on the cover is styled and colored to make him look sinister. People associated with New York tweeted about the piece as if it was a nuclear bomb, using the kind of language that we’ve grown accustomed to when a MeToo story is published and kills a career. I would argue that the story is deliberately written in the slow-burn reveal style that is typically deployed in MeToo stories — that’s deployed, in fact, in the Gaiman story. (There it makes sense, because the slow burn leads to actual accusations.) At every opportunity, the story exaggerates the implication of a man who, yes, was a shithead to some women he dated. The article is forever presenting quotidian-if-unfortunate behaviors and acting as though we should interpret those behaviors as worthy of the kind of censure that has been brought to bear by men guilty of sexual misconduct in the MeToo era. “I experienced his rage,” says one of Huberman’s exes, suggesting some sort of domestic violence situation, when in fact that’s a reference to a verbal argument — again, maybe unfortunate, but simply not in the world of misconduct.

The magazine’s internal references to the piece, and their social media, played up the usual teasing manner of such publicity, broadly hinting at bad behavior in the realm of sex and romance. The repeated phrase used was “manipulative behavior, deceit, and numerous affairs”. I don’t need to tell you that many people, trained by six-plus years of reading about sexual misconduct, are going to assume that a vast cover story in one of the country’s biggest magazines about a man’s bad behavior and deceit towards his partners is going to be a MeToo story. As many would go on to say, the fanfare and length and publicity about the piece themselves implied that it was a MeTooing. After all, what else would justify that level of attention?

October 25, 2024

Diversity at all costs

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Health, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Harry Rakowski explains why Toronto Generic University — sorry, I mean “Toronto Metropolitan University” — is reserving 75% of available enrolment in their new medical school for more diverse candidates, even if they wouldn’t normally qualify by their grades:

We have a critical shortage of doctors and nurses in Canada. Almost a quarter of our population can’t find a family doctor. Wait times for seeing a specialist, getting medical imaging and surgical dates continue to climb, with only Band-Aid solutions being proposed by the federal and provincial governments. We desperately need to expand medical schools and the licensing of highly qualified foreign medical graduates.

So it was welcome news to hear that 94 undergraduate medical students and 105 postgraduate students (residents) will be entering the newly established Toronto Metropolitan University School of Medicine when it opens in September 2025. The city of Brampton, Ont. donated a former civic centre along with $20 million in funding for renovations in order to make the school happen.

However, it was highly disturbing to learn that admissions to the new facility will be driven by a culture-war philosophy that will dilute the quality of medical practice.

There’s no doubt that diversity in medicine helps to optimize care and provide better outcomes for the differing needs of Canada’s highly diverse population, which includes many individuals disadvantaged by their geography as well as racial and economic inequality. But TMU is going about it the wrong way. Its admissions policy will focus on DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) rather than quality.

TMU’s plan is to reserve 75 per cent of its enrolment slots for “equity-deserving” students — Black and Indigenous applicants and others who meet “equity-deserving” criteria including students who identify as members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community, those who are “racialized” and individuals “with lived experiences of poverty or low socio-economic status.” It will accept a minimum grade point average (GPA) of 3.3 (B+) — or even less for select Black and Indigenous applicants — and then use GPA only as an application criterion, not as a selection criterion. By comparison, the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine requires a minimum GPA average of 3.6 for undergraduate applicants (although average acceptance is now 3.95).

QotD: The treason of the music critics

Filed under: Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This is what I was saying above: everything in music criticism and music culture has changed, except music poptimist perceptions of music criticism and music culture. That is what refuses to mutate. And I think it’s ugly and toxic and has left us in this bizarre place where people who write about music for large audiences think their sacred duty is to affirm the legitimacy of what the audience already likes, instead of championing something entirely new and totally different. But then, that’s what happens when you tell a lot of mostly white and mostly male taste makers that a particular set of tastes is inherently sexist and racist — they sprint in the opposite direction as fast as they can. Because aging white men are almost as afraid of being called racist and sexist as they are of being old.

Freddie deBoer, “A Few Indisputable Points About Poptimism and Then I Give Up”, Freddie deBoer, 2024-07-22.

October 19, 2024

Changing gender balance in occupations and in higher education

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Education, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Postcards from Barsoom, John Carter ruminates on the likely downward path of many institutes of higher learning as current gender balance changes continue:

An occupation that flips from male to female dominance invariably suffers not only diminished prestige, but also a decline in wages … which, once again, makes sense in the context of sexual psychology. A man’s income is one element (and a big element) of a woman’s attraction to him, but the reverse is not true; if women are paid less, this does not really hurt their value in the sexual marketplace at all, and so they will push back against it much less than men would. This is probably what lies behind the tendency of women to be less forceful when negotiating salaries.

To the point: ever since the 1970s, women have overtaken and gradually eclipsed men within higher education. There is a gap in enrolment, consistent across racial groups:

[…]

Across all programs, at all academic levels, American universities recently reached the threshold of 60% of the student body being female.

This will be a disaster for academia.

Indeed, it’s already a disaster. About a year ago, I analyzed a Gallup poll which revealed that the confidence of the American public in the trustworthiness and overall value of the academic sector had declined precipitously over the course of the 2010s.

In that article I examined several factors contributing to this DIEing confidence in the academy: the explosive growth in tuition fees, even as continuous relaxation of academic standards dilutes the actual value of a degree; the deplorable state of scholarship, with endless revelations of fraud, a seemingly irresolvable replication crisis, and the torrent of psychotic nonsense that passes for ‘research’; the increasingly frigid social environment enforced by the armies of overpaid, sour-faced administrators. Almost all of these, however, are related in some way or another to the feminization of academia.

And it is probably going to get much worse before it gets better.

As discussed in this recent article by Celeste Davis of Matriarchal Blessing, research on male flight indicates that a 60% female composition represents the tipping point beyond which men perceive an environment as feminine, which then leads to a precipitous decline in male participation. Davis appears to be some sort of feminist3, but I want you to look past that and give her article a read; it is very thorough, well-researched, and thought-provoking (and also the direct inspiration for this article).

[…]

Universities are belatedly starting to notice that male enrolment is dropping fast, particularly among white men (I wonder why…), and are starting to make noises about maybe thinking about perhaps looking into ways of trying to recruit and retain more men (albeit, not specifically white men).

This seems unlikely to succeed.

Even if universities are successful in setting up programs to increase male recruitment, they will be fighting an uphill battle against the sexual perception that has already set in. Once something is coded as being a feminine hobby, it is extremely difficult to change that code. While it’s very easy to list examples of professions that have switched from male to female dominance, off the top of my head I have a hard time coming up with examples of the reverse. This suggests that female dominance tends to be sticky. There’s no reason to expect this will be any different with academia, either within individual programs, or across the sector as a whole.

This is an entirely different problem from the one faced by female entryism. In the initial phases of female entry, the primary difficulty faced by women is that it is simply more difficult to compete with men – in the case of athletics, effectively impossible. Women must therefore either work extremely hard, or the work must be made easier for them. In practice, since the 1970s we’ve seen both of these, with “working twice as hard as the boys” predominating in the early years, and assistance from special programs predominating later on.

By contrast, the central obstacle faced by anyone trying to attract men to a female-dominated environment is that men are deeply reluctant to enter. As a third of young men told Pew when asked why they didn’t attend or complete university: they just didn’t want to. It isn’t because they can’t compete with women. They can, usually with ease, but competition is pointless because it will gain them nothing. Special programs to assist men are beside the point; if anything, they work against you, because the implicit message with any special program for men is that they need help to compete with women … thereby making competition even more pointless. “You beat a girl but you needed help to do it”, is going to impress the girls even less than beating a girl unaided.

September 18, 2024

Sexual objectification … is it okay when you do it to yourself?

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On her Substack, Janice Fiamengo talks about the “Curious Case of the Self-Objectifying Feminist”:

Not long ago, a British campaign for affirmative consent legislation featured images of women paired with the slogan “I’m asking for it“. The whole point, of course, is that they’re not asking for “it”. The phrase is meant to evoke men who justify their sexual assaults of women by claiming that the victim wanted to be raped. What the women are asking for is legislation to make it a criminal offence for a man to have a sexual encounter with a woman without eliciting an explicit “Yes” from her at every stage (how far we have moved from the relatively simple “No means no”).

The most striking of the ads features the face of Charlotte Proudman, the well-known feminist barrister and zealous anti-male advocate who once denounced a fellow lawyer for complimenting her LinkedIn photo. In the picture, Proudman confronts the viewer with a sexy, smoldering look and a slight half-smile. Her face is carefully made up to accentuate her feminine sexuality, with dark-tinted eyelashes and gleaming red lips outlined in vivid lip gloss. In order to object to men’s sexualization of women, Proudman has sexualized herself.

We are told that the campaign was “deliberately bold and intentionally provocative”. It was designed to “stop viewers in their tracks“, so that we would think about how women are mistreated under the law. Male viewers whose minds stray to sex are, one can only assume, to be brought up short, ashamed and convicted of sin.

The double messaging is deliberate — but confusing. Most people looking at Charlotte Proudman’s sex-kitten face will not, in my opinion, contemplate misogynistic attitudes or the scourge of sexual violence. On the contrary, most viewers will be “stopped in their tracks” by the overtness of Proudman’s sensual self-display. It seems odd that an ad claiming that women should not be seen to invite sexual advances features a woman who seems to be inviting sexual advances.

Feminists have for decades claimed that such sexualization has been forced on women to their detriment. In the fashion industry, in movies, and in daily life, according to feminist philosophers like Sandra Lee Bartky, men compel women to advertise their sexuality as their primary power, to redden their lips, assume sexual poses and flatter the voracious male gaze, becoming “object and prey for the man“.

For centuries, we’re told, patriarchal societies denied women the opportunity to do anything with their lives but live out male sexual fantasies, whether as virgin or whore, Madonna or muse. A male-defined culture made the woman accentuate her youth, shave her legs, remain svelte, and present herself for visual consumption, “living her body as seen by another, an anonymous patriarchal Other“: a degrading spectacle from which all women would be better off free.

Yet here is a campaign designed by feminists to support alleged rape victims, with the same (objectionable) self-presentation by the ad’s primary subject, who is obviously not posing against her will and obviously has many choices about how to present herself. The only difference, it seems, is that in this case, the woman’s self-display is entirely of her own defiant volition.

One wouldn’t think that would be sufficient for a diehard feminist like Proudman, or for any equality-minded modern woman with a thousand choices about what to do with her life.

When I was a little girl in the early 1970s, I took it for granted that self-respecting women wanted to be appreciated for the qualities of their minds and characters. One of the first slogans I remember was the somewhat puzzling “Love me for my mind, not my body”. At the time, around six or seven years old, I thought it would be nice to be loved for any reason. Only later did I understand the implication: to be loved for one’s body was not truly to be loved at all, for the body was a superficial, mutable aspect of the self, destined to deteriorate with time. Moreover, according to the general feminist perspective, the body was all that sexist men cared about, especially the sexual parts. This was objectification, the reduction of the whole woman with all she had to offer (her kindness, her wit, her unique thoughts) to a thing. It was shameful and degrading.

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