The only thing more striking than the adulation that has erupted in response to Lindsay Clancy’s admitted killing of her three children has been the torrent of anger and suspicion poured out against then-husband Patrick Clancy.

I can’t think of a single example, recent or historical, in which a bereaved mother, her children dead at her ex-husband’s hand, has been subject to anything other than profound sympathy.

It’s not uncommon for such mothers to become revered public figures, campaigning for changes in law or public opinion, and applauded for their “courage” in picking up the pieces of their lives.

One such is Claire Throssell, a British mother whose ex-husband killed their two sons and himself in 2014 by setting their house afire. No one has publicly speculated that Throssell drove her ex-husband to the deed. No one alleged that police should have more closely investigated her actions on the days leading up to the crime.

Throssell, in fact, was centrally involved in a successful feminist campaign to rewrite UK custody law in order to change the presumption that it is generally good for children to have contact with both parents after divorce. The new legislation, not yet formalized, will mean that even fewer divorced fathers will be able to maintain close contact with their children.

An article on Throssell’s role in the campaign pays tribute to Throssell as a loyal mother—not a vengeful or misguided one—and says not a word about the psychological state of her dead ex-husband, Darren Sykes. Readers are not informed whether he was suffering from unmet mental health needs, and most people will not wish to know.

In contrast, nearly everyone is sympathetically interested in Lindsay Clancy’s state of mind. If she is found not criminally responsible for her children’s deaths—or even if she is found responsible—she may well become a popular campaigner for post-partum healthcare, telling the world about what suffering mothers are owed.

A bereaved father is either ignored or placed under suspicion.

Comments on Patrick Clancy’s hours-long testimony at his ex-wife’s murder trial are filled with dislike, speculation, and fulmination, much of it either inaccurate, irrelevant, or both:

Him trying not to yawn the whole time is fkn annoying.

Did he even know his wife ? He️ didn’t know about any therapy sessions. He’s so aloof.

I DONT TRUST THIS GUY!! After such a major tragedy, he was able to recover and married in such a short time!!! I think she would not go through all these complications if he loved her and was supportive!!! He kept making babies knowing her struggles and he talks about it without any emotions! I don’t believe this guy!! I don’t think he was heart-broken about his wife and kids!!!

He drops her off at the psychiatric unit and then goes skiing....wtf

Lindsey’s increasing anxiety, inability to sleep, fear of returning to work ... ALL SIGNS OF NARCISSISTIC ABUSE.

There are many more like this, diagnosing Patrick’s state of mind or condemning his inadequacies, expressing disgust at his decision to divorce his murderous wife, and even more at his remarriage. At best, he is a cipher in a suit, an unsympathetic man who failed to love his wife as she deserved. At worst, he is an ice-cold monster who was likely having an affair while his wife was sick.

In the Greek myth of Jason and Medea, Medea the sorceress kills their two sons after Jason is unfaithful to her. The myth holds Jason at least partially responsible for Medea’s filicide because he repaid her loyalty with selfishness.

In the myth, Medea escapes with her sons’ bodies in a golden chariot, thus showing the favor of the gods, while Jason is disgraced and exiled from power, having brought his sons’ deaths—and his own humiliating demise (he is crushed to death by a piece of his ship)—upon himself. The myth is usually read as a warning about the consequences of male betrayal, not as a depiction of potential female viciousness.

Feminists have, unsurprisingly, interpreted Medea positively as a figure of liberatory resistance against patriarchal injustice. Her ruthlessness is fully justified because Jason failed her.

As if unconsciously following the Greek mythic script, Patrick’s detractors see him as having betrayed Lindsay. To them, he is an ogre who forced a mentally ill woman to return to work before she was ready, or who deliberately ignored her confession that she was having thoughts of harming the children.

Some go so far as to allege that he is the true killer, having strangled the children while pretending to be out of the house and then throwing his drugged wife out the window, informing her afterwards in his “male” voice, as she lay crippled in the snow, that she was the one to blame:

Cold as ice. Absolutely zero emotion. Chilling. He did it. A true psychopath. He dropped her off to get admitted then takes his kid skiing?! WTH??? Didn’t know where their bed was located in the room? Unreal. How could they not investigate him? Just terrible.

These critics also attack Patrick personally, calling out his dead eyes, lack of affect, and alleged sociopathy. Many have made him into a stand-in for the failure of all husbands to protect and care for their (always suffering) wives:

This “husband” doesn’t even realize that even when his wife was in the middle of postpartum depression SHE was still planning and trying to “show up”/ masking to make others feel comfortable... he doesn’t even know if they went to pick out a Christmas tree but supposes cause obviously she was the one making sure her children had memories.... MEN need to be better husbands!

It doesn’t matter to Patrick’s accusers that police and the defense team had years to investigate every aspect of his alibi and past life, and found nothing against him. All of the contradictory claims of the amateur sleuths are ultimately beside the point because the animus is the point, deep-rooted, archetypal, perhaps irresolvable. The man must be held responsible, and his innocent pathos is repugnant because it is an emblem of masculine impotence. As one commenter put it, pithily and unfairly:

She told him she was gonna hurt them and he didn’t protect them. Period.

This is the nub of the matter, the impossible paradox of modern manhood that leaves men like Patrick Clancy accused, powerless, hated, and unmourned.

Lindsay could have destroyed him in any of the more usual ways that women regularly destroy men, and he would have been equally blamed and/or ignored.

The fact is that even if Patrick had known that his wife was going to kill their children, he couldn’t have prevented it. At some point, he would have had to leave the house. He couldn’t keep her under watch. He couldn’t have her hospitalized if she didn’t wish it. He couldn’t have divorced her and taken the children, even if she had had a more worrisome psychiatric history than she had.

All he could do was what he did, believing his wife when she said she was feeling better, and then howl out his grief to the equally impotent authorities he called after discovering her monstrous act.

His failure is sickening because many of us recognize in it a paradigm of our female-dominated world, in which men are a prey to crazy women, unable to protect themselves or innocents. They are unable to restore our society or to set boundaries against the dangerous and the ill.

Every man is under sentence at marriage. No matter how he may try to test and assess beforehand, every man can find himself trapped.

Most do not end up with their children murdered, but many have them judicially stolen through divorce; many have their lives upended through false accusations; many suffer in silence while trapped with intolerable abuse.

Some of us are angry precisely because Patrick is not angry. He has made it clear that he believes that Lindsay was not criminally responsible for killing their children: “I wasn’t married to a monster—I was married to someone who got sick,” he told a feature writer for The New Yorker.

He is disturbed by the possibility that she might have deliberately sent him out so that she could kill their children, but he sees no point in dwelling on the thought.

Like many men, he seems to harbor no ill will toward the destroyer of his children, only sadness. In that, too, he seems a symbol of the too-compassionate compliance of many men today.

The headlines are standard: “Women in pink rally in support of Lindsay Clancy who is on trial for killing 3 children,’” “America’s saddest murder trial: mental health in focus in Lindsay Clancy case,” “Lindsay Clancy’s trial shows how badly the system fails mothers,” and “Everyone Failed Lindsay Clancy.”

The headlines look away from the actual victims in the case: the three helpless children who were strangled to death in early 2023. All the sympathetic emphasis is on their mother, portrayed as a tragic figure allegedly “failed” by others and not morally responsible for her horrific act.

As in many cases of mothers who murder their children (I discuss other recent cases here), Lindsay Clancy has defenders aplenty eager to cry for her and proclaim their solidarity (for one compilation, see here). Some are even willing to say that they have felt as she allegedly felt—eager to dispatch their children. Her grisly act has provoked masses of donations to a GoFundMe account (reportedly at one million dollars) as well as enthusiastic rallies of (mostly) women proclaiming her innocence.

Many pink-themed supporters insist on asserting, without logical or evidentiary foundation, that it was Patrick Clancy, Lindsay’s then-husband, who deserves the lion’s share of the blame, whether for failing to support his wife adequately during her post-partum depression or even, as some allege, for killing the children himself and then convincing his mentally fragile wife to take the blame.

The same supporters who rally for Lindsay would almost certainly call for the death penalty if it were Patrick on trial.

Do any of these advocates care about the principles of justice? Do they believe in equality before the law? Are they concerned with the possibility that a not guilty verdict in Clancy’s trial will encourage other unhappy mothers to kill their children? (Mother are already, according to U.S. government data, the most frequent perpetrators of child homicide, see p. 65).

It seems not. The primary impulse is to see Lindsay Clancy and, by extension, all unhappy mothers as the true victims now and forever, never to be held responsible for any bad act, deserving of boundless sympathy.

Perhaps there has never been a case that illustrated women’s incoherent morality so clearly.

But it is not, alas, a new thing, and men in the west have tolerated and furthered it for centuries. In his 1913 book The Fraud of Feminism, British barrister Ernest Belfort Bax described, with his characteristic wit, how the female criminal is “surrounded by a halo of injured innocence,” “convinced of the maliciousness of her accusers” and of her own lack of responsibility (89-90).

Bax showed that nineteenth-century criminal law had great difficulty conceiving of and punishing female violence. Where there was any doubt as to a woman’s guilt, juries were reluctant to convict; and even where there was no reasonable doubt, they were eager to find mitigating circumstances such as temporary insanity, victimhood, or male coercion to justify leniency.

A now-famous Philadelphia case involved a mother, Harriet Vaughn (variously spelled Vaughan), who had murdered her newborn baby within hours of its birth in 1868, and was championed by her feminist supporters as a wronged innocent. The severely beaten dead baby, which Vaughn had attempted to conceal under her bed after crushing its skull with a blunt instrument, was hardly mourned at all (for a full account, see Sarah Barringer Gordon, “Law and Everyday Death: Infanticide and the Backlash against Woman’s Rights after the Civil War” in Lives in the Law).

Although Vaughn was convicted of murder and sentenced to death by hanging—a highly unusual sentence in that no woman had been hanged in Philadelphia since 1737—her plight almost immediately became a cause célèbre, with advocates rallying to her defence. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, leader of the American feminist movement, spent months agitating on Vaughn’s behalf. In the pages of The Revolution, the feminist newspaper she ran with her associate Susan B. Anthony, Stanton portrayed Vaughn as a sexually-abused maiden, and a loving but desperate mother forced to kill her child because she had no other options. She described her as “a poor, ignorant, friendless and forlorn girl who had killed her new-born child because she knew not what else to do with it” (Stanton, “Infanticide,” The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, p. 158).

None of this was founded in fact—Vaughn herself did not claim she had been raped and there were many institutions for foundlings in Philadelphia where she might have left her baby—but it was a familiar sentimental narrative guaranteed to stir indignation against the sentence.

Members of the Working Women’s Association of Philadelphia held a mass rally on Vaughn’s behalf, visited Vaughn in prison, and petitioned the Pennsylvania Governor for her pardon, which was granted in May of 1869. Released from prison, Vaughn left Philadelphia for her birthplace of England and was heard from only once more, when she wrote some months later to request the $300 that she had heard feminists had raised for her.

Sympathy for infanticidal, especially unwed, mothers was widespread in nineteenth-century English-speaking countries, where the killing of babies was “an unsavoury but surprisingly common feature of life” (Constance Backhouse, Petticoats and Prejudice, p. 113). Law Professor Sarah Gordon reports that “In 19^th century Philadelphia, thousands of dead newborns were found in alleys, ash heaps, privies, rivers, and so on.” Professor of History Ann R. Higginbotham gives examples from 19^th century London to show that “juries were extraordinarily reluctant to convict women accused of murdering their illegitimate infants,” often out of sympathy for the women’s difficult circumstances (“Sin of the Age: Infanticide and Illegitimacy in Victorian London,” p. 329).

Infanticide was also a popular subject of sentimental novels, perhaps the most well-known being George Eliot’s 1859 bestseller Adam Bede, in which sympathy is consistently evoked for the child-killer Hetty Sorrel.

The idea that women’s lives were in general much harder than men’s, and that women deserved special accommodations for their mental and emotional fragility, was regularly used to deny maternal culpability. In 1888, the case of three-time murderess Sarah Jane Whiteling excited similar compassion, with one prominent female medical doctor rallying other doctors to the defence of the prolific killer. In this case, the defence was not successful and Whiteling was hanged for her crimes, but the elaborate justification offered for her brutal acts reveals much about American culture’s decidedly lop-sided empathy.

Sarah Whiteling was a 40-year-old American woman who murdered the three members of her family in the spring of 1888. (For an overview of the case, see Kenneth J. Weiss’s “Arsenic, Familicide, and Female Physiology in Nineteenth-Century America,” published in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, p. 384-92.)

She likely would have escaped detection were it not for the suspicions of the family doctor after the third death. He encouraged the local coroner to exhume the bodies to test them for poison, after which it was discovered that Whiteling had killed her husband, her 9-year-old daughter and her 2-year-old son by dosing them with arsenic-laced rat poison.

Unlike other mother killings, these murders could not be seen as one episode of derangement. Here were three murders spread over a two-month period and involving elaborate preparations, decision-making, concealment, lies, and sustained lack of remorse. The murders were pre-planned, took days to accomplish (each child took four days to die), and involved gruesome suffering that included agonizing pain, frequent vomiting, diarrhea, and death convulsions.

Despite the evidence of premeditation and deception, an influential female doctor, Alice Bennett, PhD, Chief Physician at the Women’s Division of the State Hospital for the Insane in Norristown, Pennsylvania, was active in Whiteling’s defence, claiming that Whiteling was a “kind and affectionate” woman who was not in her right mind when she killed her family, and proposing a special type of exoneration available only to women.

Women were far more easily unbalanced than men, Bennett argued, due to stress, especially at the time of their menstrual periods. Having acted (unsuccessfully) as a defence witness at Whiteling’s trial, Bennett then presented her analysis to members of the Medico-Legal Society of New York on March 13, 1889 in order to convince the body to approach the Board of Pardons on Whiteling’s behalf.

Her paper, “Periodic Insanity as Illustrated in the Case of Sarah J. Whiteling and Others,” with responses by members of the society, was published in the society’s journal and provides a fascinating window onto the beliefs of psychiatric and legal experts of the time, illustrating their widespread inclination to offer leniency to women who committed atrocious crimes.

A great deal of similar evidence emerges from other nineteenth-century trials. Professor of Social Policy Pauline Prior published a 2005 study of temporary insanity defences used in Ireland between 1850 and 1900, finding that a significant number of women who killed their children were acquitted under that defense. Many infanticidal mothers were sent not to prison but to Dundrum Lunatic Asylum in Ireland, where they often spent only a few years or less before being discharged and returning to their communities.

These included Margaret Rainey, a nineteen-year-old woman who in 1891 was found not capable to stand trial after she threw her newborn baby out of a window and was discharged into the care of her sister after spending close to three years at the asylum (Prior, p. 2). Hannah Sullivan was a seventeen-year-old girl who in 1895 killed her baby by cutting off the baby’s head, and who, while showing no signs of insanity at Dundrum, was discharged to her mother’s care just one year later (Prior, p. 3). Many other such cases testify to the willingness—even eagerness—of juries to believe in the temporary insanity of mother-murderers.

Comments by mental health authorities made clear that such women, especially if they were unwed mothers, were seen as victims of circumstance—and of male seducers—to be pitied rather than condemned for their crimes: “Great commiseration is, no doubt, due,” wrote one asylum inspector, “for we can fully imagine how shame and anguish must weigh on an unfortunate and betrayed female […] and what strong temptations induce her to evade the censure of the world […] by a crime that outrages her most powerful instinct, maternal love of offspring” (qtd in Prior, p. 3).

Notably, this authority did not hesitate to assert that a woman’s “most powerful instinct” was “maternal love,” even in cases where the alleged instinct had clearly failed to manifest or, if operative, had been brutally overridden. The circular reasoning of the insanity defence held that a mother’s murderousness did not disprove maternal instinct; rather, the non-operative maternal instinct proved insanity.

The aforementioned inspector was also typical in stressing the pain of women “betrayed” by men and shamed by a judgemental society. But what of the substantial number of married women who killed their children?

Prior explains that these were also frequently acquitted with an insanity plea. She describes the case of Sarah McAlister, a 33-year-old married woman who in 1892 murdered with poison the youngest two of her six children, and Catherine Wynn, a 35-year-old married woman who in 1893 drowned her three children in a bath of boiling water (p. 4). Despite or perhaps because of the deliberation involved in these multiple killings, juries chose to view the perpetrators as mentally incompetent rather than cold or cruel.

An insanity defense was not the only route to leniency. Prior reports that of the child-murderers who did not use an insanity plea, the vast majority received lessened sentences for their killings, with time spent in prison ranging between three and fifteen years.

Prior’s research is confirmed by history professor Kathy Callahan, who for a 2013 article “Women Who Kill,” analyzed the records of felony cases at London’s Old Bailey courthouse in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, finding that English society during this period had relatively little interest in punishing women for their violence. She notes that “Society did not feel threatened by female transgressions” (p. 1015) and confirms criminal law expert Gregory Durston’s work on female criminals in the 18^th century, which found that “Females were not held to the same standards of indictment and conviction as were males” (qtd in Callahan, p. 1016).

In her conclusion to the study, Callahan cites V.A.C. Gatrell in his study of criminal execution in England (The Hanging Tree), which argued that from 1770-1868, “The weaker sex became a vehicle through which men registered their potency, benevolence, and chivalric selves” (Gatrell, qtd in Callahan, p. 125). The feminist-compliant phrasing implies that women, being subordinate to men, were made a mere “vehicle” through which masculine agency was enacted. When stripped of feminist terminology, the plain truth in Gatrell’s statement is that laws made by men resulted in women being punished less harshly than men, or not at all, for the violence they committed.

**

The double standards we see today, then, have a long history. In The Fraud of Feminism, Ernest Belfort Bax mentioned with disgust that “We hear and read, ad nauseum, of excuses […] for every crime committed by a woman, while a crime of precisely similar a character and under precisely similar circumstances, where a man is the perpetrator, meets with nothing but virulent execration from […] British public opinion” (p. 94).

Bax’s contentions and the findings of modern researchers give the lie to the pendulum swing theory of gendered history, the idea that because women were harshly treated in the past, they are somewhat justified in demanding special privileges today and in treating men badly in their turn. The fact is that, at least for the past 200 years, women have exercised female privilege under law even to the extent of escaping standard punishment for murder.

It is long past time that our society consider the consequences of such leniency on women, including on the thousands of women now expressing their intense emotional solidarity with Lindsay Clancy. What but diminished moral capacity overall—or even a completely warped, psychopathic morality—can result from such sustained excuse-making? If feminists and others truly believe women morally equal to men, perhaps we should at long last be willing to hold them accountable for their violence.

[This is a slightly revised excerpt from the Foreword to my new book, published today by New English Review Press, The Goddess That Failed: Feminism’s Unending War Against Men, Families, and Civilization Itself]

Feminism poses a threat to everything good in western culture, perhaps especially to women’s capacity to love, reason, and exercise self-restraint.

I was an adherent of feminism before I became a critic. I have felt its euphoric exultation and its self-flattering conviction of moral purity. Later, I recognized its hubris and moral hollowness.

I am familiar with feminism’s core texts, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Mary Anne Franks, having studied them and believed in them for years. I understand the psychology and the history of the movement because I lived inside it for many years.

Unlike others who have criticized feminism’s excesses, I contend that although there are some moderate feminists, there was never a moderate feminism inspired by reasonable goals and untainted by anti-male fanaticism. Feminism did not go wrong at some point in history, whether after the Second Wave or before, whether in anti-sex or pro-sex zeal. It was always rooted in resentment and envy, warped by utopian longings and false notions of female moral superiority.

Decades of feminist grievance-mongering and accusation have led inevitably to our present time of ceaseless complaints, anti-western causes, hysterical accusation, rampant divorce, a declining birthrate, millions of abortions, and anti-male cruelty. Feminism has undermined and will continue to undermine the stability and viability of all western societies.

From the first occasions when I began to speak and write about feminism in 2012 and 2013, I encountered the same response from feminists: “What you are describing is not real feminism” or “Those feminists do not speak for all feminists,” and so on.

I am regularly accused of hating myself, of hating other women, and/or of seeking male approval. I am accused, by those who have never studied feminism, of not understanding feminism.

It’s true that not all feminists are as fervid as an Andrea Dworkin or a Sally Miller Gearhart. They do not all fantasize, as Gearhart did (to much congratulation and gushing praise), about how much better life would be if the number of males could be reduced to 10% of the human population. They do not rhapsodize, as Mary Daly did, about a decontamination of the earth through such a reduction. They do not make jokes about killing men as a public service, as Mona Eltahawy did.

But it’s also true that such vicious women, and the many others who have lent their malign energies to the movement, have never been disavowed by other feminist leaders. In fact, feminists’ lack of shame before bloodthirsty feminist pronouncements is remarkably consistent.

True, there are many varieties of feminism, not all of them agreeing on every point: radical feminism, socialist feminism, lesbian feminism, post-colonial feminism, intersectional feminism, eco-feminism, animal rights feminism, abolitionist feminism, trans-inclusive feminism, feminism for sex-based rights, maternal feminism, and even (most bizarrely) conservative or reactionary feminism. Some extend their compassion to victim groups other than women, such as trans women, illegal immigrants, Palestinians, or the environment.

Such distinctions do not concern me because none makes a real difference.

None escapes the victim mentality: the belief that the history of humanity up until the present moment has been a history of (privileged, white) men oppressing women and other innocent victims; and that because of their alleged greater suffering and moral innocence, particular care and attention must be paid to women and to their unique capacity for empathy and social justice.

No version of feminism escapes the binary logic whereby the world is divided up into (sometimes intricate, overlapping) categories of oppressor and oppressed, victim and victimizer, to be treated differently and valued differently according to their identity category.

Because it thinks in terms of groups and divides the world into innocent and guilty, feminism is incapable of devising universal principles or pursuing individual fairness or freedom. It is distorted by its victim thinking, incapable of extending empathy to those feminists see as oppressors, and incapable of demanding accountability from those feminists see as victims.

In my writings, I usually try to distinguish between feminists and women. Not all women hate men or take satisfaction in the thought of their suffering, and many do not identify as feminists. However, it is not always possible to maintain the distinction. Few women are alive today who haven’t been affected by at least some feminist assumptions.

Many women, even non-feminist ones, think of themselves as belonging to an historically oppressed group. Most accept as a matter of course that special legal protections, global recognition, government programs, annual celebrations, and cultural initiatives should promote women’s advancement and well-being. Many women, perhaps most, harbor some resentment against men, especially white men, for their alleged privilege.

One cannot easily live one’s whole life hearing about patriarchal oppression, white supremacy, male entitlement, and toxic masculinity as well as female victimization, heroic suffering, and valiant resistance without accepting that at least some of it must be true. When we apply the victimhood lens to look at the world, we see evidence to support it, ignoring the details that don’t fit.

The notion that men have always had a good time and women always suffered as a result of men’s actions is of long standing. Perhaps it is even embedded in female psychology as part of an ancient survival mechanism. Also baked into our cultural fabric is the tendency of women to sympathize more with other women than with men; and of men to sympathize more with women than with other men.

These natural proclivities on the part of both men and women provided fertile ground in which feminist ideas about blame and innocence could take strong root, stirring up women’s anger and resentment, provoking men to self-doubt and shame.

Beginning in the eighteenth century in the west, women spoke and wrote vehemently about how their men had betrayed them, and men turned against their fellow men in disgust, anxious to show that they were not a party to the betrayal.

In the nineteenth century and even more strongly in the twentieth, men were easily persuaded to support laws and programs to benefit women even when those programs disadvantaged men. The history of affirmative action tells of decades during which white men have accepted overt, unjust discrimination almost without a murmur.

Even today, over a century after women achieved full legal equality with men and half a century after the implementation of affirmative action hiring programs as well as ceaseless female empowerment campaigns, many women are still angry and many men are still trying to make amends.

It must be stopped. We will never reach a point where feminists of their own accord decide to call off the gender war, accepting that men have done enough for them. There will never come a point where the suffering of boys and men matters to feminists more than their own power and authority.

It’s unlikely that non-feminist women alone will be able to defeat their crazy feminist sisters. This will have to be a joint venture between men and women, firm in its resolve, clear-eyed about the stakes, unshaken by public shaming or self-doubt.

We must see feminism for what it is.

It’s difficult to be surprised by last month’s Report of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women, entitled “Confronting Antifeminist Ideologies in Canada”—but it is nonetheless remarkable that such tone-deaf anti-male pap continues to preoccupy the Canadian federal government.

The Standing Committee on the Status of Women is the bureaucratic arm of Canada’s radical feminist movement. Its grip on power, consolidated in 1991 with The War Against Women, produced after the Montreal Massacre, is now essentially unchallenged. The Committee is made up of feminist Members of Parliament who consult with feminist academics, organizers, and advocates to advise the Canadian government on its gender policies.

The title of the Report, “Confronting Antifeminist Ideologies in Canada,” tabled in June of 2026, suggests that the focus will be on intellectual engagement with antifeminist ideas, but that is the last thing actually proposed. Rather than “confronting,” the title might more accurately have read “fearmongering about …”, “deliberately mischaracterizing …” or—perhaps most accurately—“suppressing … (with government funding and state enforcement).”

So terrified is this Committee, it seems, of the legitimate skepticism, rancor, and distrust that feminist ideology and its gender-fascist policies have provoked that the Report can neither say what antifeminism truly is nor explain why it may be on the rise. Committee members can say only that it is “shaping public discourse in harmful ways.”

Antifeminism, the Radical Idea that Men Are Human

The report begins with reductive definitions. Antifeminism is “an extremist ideology based on gender.” “An antifeminist is someone who is against equality between men and women and the social progress that has been made.” Antifeminism is a “regressive” ideology “aimed at undoing gains made on women’s rights” and “blocking further change needed for the full realization of equality.”

The dishonesty of such statements should be obvious to anyone who has thought seriously about men’s lives today or about the truly extremist ideology that defines men as perpetrators and women as innocent victims. Beginning with such saccharine obfuscations, the Report ignores the obvious reasons why some men are antifeminist, reasons that include feminism’s repeated falsehoods, bigotry, female supremacism, anti-western animus, injustice, hatred, fanaticism, and incitement to violence, to name a few.

We could start with the obvious, the popular feminist slogan “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” What did feminists expect men to conclude from that? They said they didn’t need men; it’s a bit late now to express dismay that many men aren’t interested in their revolution.

But are men really the problem? A recent survey of young people claims that while nearly three-quarters of young men reported a positive or very positive view of women, only one-third of women under 25 reported a positive view of men.

When four high-profile feminist pundits agreed in 2013 to debate the proposition “Be it resolved: men are obsolete” (with only one of the pundits, Camille Paglia, seriously defending the negative), how did feminists think men would react? These were not slick “manosphere” grifters universally loathed by respectable society. These were “respectable society”—authorities, opinion-makers, authors—discussing with repugnant giggles and a lot of feminist chutzpah whether men as a group were still useful in the modern world.

The oft-repeated slogan “The Future is Female,” which every North American boy has surely heard dozens of times, conveyed the message that the time of men was over, that they had better shut up, step aside, and accept their nonentity. Professor Suzanna Walters blatantly said as much in 2018.

Do feminist pundits really think that men don’t notice the contempt and disdain directed at them—in movies, advertising, academia, politics, the online dating world—and that their moral sensibilities aren’t revolted when, for example, feminist journalist Clementine Ford tweeted that Covid-19 wasn’t killing men fast enough, or when feminist author Mona Eltahawy boasted publicly (and received warm congratulations) about beating a man who allegedly touched her bum in a nightclub?

When feminists approve the dismantling of men’s due process protections, openly discriminate against fathers in family courts, and publicly jubilate about, or at least condone and rationalize, men’s murder and sexual mutilation, are they arrogant enough to think that men don’t understand their intentions?

Do they think that endless talk about toxic masculinity and male privilege, while they ignore women’s violence and cruelty, won’t alert at least some men to feminism’s hypocrisy and double standards?

The wonder is not that some men are antifeminist but that any man at all would accept the non-stop shaming and denigration that feminism involves.

Now, feminists are upset that young men are not enthusiastic proponents of yet more decades of female advancement. Men have been told countless times, and again in this report, that “gender equality” will benefit everyone, but they can’t help but see that it is code for female supremacy in all the good jobs and coveted social roles—with endless cheerleading and self-congratulation—while men continue to do the world’s dirtiest and most dangerous work, almost entirely without thanks or even recognition.

“Confronting Antifeminist Ideologies in Canada” attempts once again to make the case that male disgruntlement, where it exists, is a vast misunderstanding having nothing to do with feminism: that all along feminism has been a righteous movement, and that bad men who lurk in the shadows of the internet, exploiting the youth and lying about women, are responsible for the misperception.

Antifeminism as the “gateway to violence”

The Report uses a standard feminist tactic to discredit antifeminism: everything not feminist, no matter how harmless or defensible—or TRUE—is linked with violence against women, even if it simply involves men looking online for dating advice, workout techniques, or tips for business success. A young man who pays an OnlyFans model is assumed to have embarked down a woman-hating path, as is one who dreams of owning a luxury Bugatti in order to impress a woman. The normal interests of men are made sinister by being associated with power, dominance, and control.

Why men should not seek power in their lives, should not pursue what they want, is never broached in the Report.

Even commonsense beliefs are tainted by association. The Report provides a list of what it calls “myths about gender equality” allegedly spread by antifeminists. These include that “gender equality has been achieved,” which is presented alongside the belief that “women should be subordinate or ‘deserve to be violated’”—all lumped together as if they form a unified antifeminist belief system. Apparently it is also antifeminist (and somehow misogynistic) to believe in “gender symmetry in violence,” a research finding well-documented by academics Murray Strauss and Don Dutton. That 30% of surveyed young people agreed with the statement “Feminism is a strategy to control society” is offered as an alarming indicator of male intransigence.

At times, the report’s claims are absurdly alarmist, as in the following paragraph:

The committee heard that antifeminist ideologies contribute to disinformation and misinformation about gender-based violence and are linked to increased levels of violence, including femicide; that “antifeminist ideology is not simply rhetoric, it is a gateway to violence.” Carignan further added: “Communities in the manosphere promote narratives that are sometimes very hateful and violent, and can lead to rape, suicide, murder, increased intolerance, a deterioration of togetherness and acts of terrorism. Kanojia noted that isolation within these communities “becomes reinforced,” making individuals more susceptible to harmful narratives where there are “no contrary perspectives.”

In offering such a jumble of sweeping assertions, unverified and unverifiable, the Report has obviously left the realm of sober analysis altogether, with the phrases “contribute to,” “are linked to,” and “can lead to” doing a great deal of rhetorical heavy-lifting.

Notably, the last section of the Report admits that its repeated assertions about antifeminist “harms” are without foundation. It quotes testimony acknowledging that “‘Significant data gaps make it hard to grasp the full scale of online hate, harassment, and radicalization.” Experts admit that “Canada lacks data on what types and how much antifeminist content occurs online, as well as how these beliefs translate into violence.” Notice the question-begging in that last clause: antifeminist beliefs “translate into violence,” despite the fact that no one can say how.

In plain English, the above statements are an admission that much of the Report’s verbiage is little more than anti-male grandstanding. Still, just a few pages later, the authors stress “the dangers that antifeminist rhetoric poses to everyone in Canada” and call for government action “to prevent further harm caused by antifeminism” (further harm where no harm has yet been shown).

In more than forty pages of expert opinion, not one person is on record defending freedom of expression or association. Not one person cautions that the federal government should not be involving itself in micro-managing men’s personal beliefs. Not one expert observes that having online spaces where men can discuss their problems, criticize feminist extremism, and express anger at (and yes, even hatred of) women and women’s behavior contributes to social and individual health, and is the hallmark of a free society.

Climate change-induced antifeminism?

Naturally, the report blames everything but feminism for the alleged rise in antifeminism.

“Many young men are feeling anxious,” one academic offers, “both because we’re in a climate crisis and in an economic crisis and also because they don’t necessarily have community; they think they have to bear that by themselves.” Here is a word-perfect feminist evasion that not only engages in environmental catastrophizing but also makes the familiar criticism of men’s social retardation. If they could only learn to cry with others, so this thinking goes, they might come to accept their emasculation.

Other experts identified “social isolation, a lack of meaningful community, and mental health challenges” as well as pornography, online subcultures, “social deprivation, emotional illiteracy, trauma histories, and unmet mental health needs”—an amorphous assortment of villains.

But lest any of the descriptions take the focus away from female victimhood, the section ended with a sternly pointed finger:

“Dupuis-Déri underscored the importance of men and boys taking accountability for their actions, noting that while they may experience significant challenges, women are not at fault nor the cause of their problems, contrary to narratives promoted within antifeminist movements.”

There it is: women are not at fault (even when they are violent, lying, abusive, murderous criminals).

For the men tired of hearing about all the ways they fall short, tired of being told to man up and step aside, tired of losing out in job competitions—or not even getting a look in—because of explicit or unwritten equity protocols, it’s a repugnant dose of feminist claptrap.

For the men falsely accused, harassed, bullied or beaten, for sons of abusive mothers or fathers exiled from their children’s lives, it is not only untrue but yet another mockery of justice.

Men who don’t like feminism will be given more feminism

Predictably, the Report recommends more feminism to combat antifeminism: more money for feminist organizations to purvey their propaganda, more money for taxpayer-funded media to present feminism disguised as objective reporting, more preferential hiring to get even more women into positions of influence that they didn’t earn, gender equity mandates for political parties to get more women into politics, more training for girls for economic advancement, and more stringent censorship to prevent antifeminist speech.

The likelihood that these measures, especially the further feminization of news reporting, politics, and public messaging, will confirm men’s perception that the culture is slanted against them is, of course, not a concern for the Committee.

But the Committee is concerned about feminism’s loss of narrative authority. One expert contended that “Without well-resourced media capable of ‘addressing substantive issues by finding the right experts and explaining the issues clearly to the public,’ Canadians increasingly turn to non-news sources on social media for information.” One could not ask for a clearer encapsulation of elitist contempt for the public and determination to do more of what has turned people off.

Another expert worried that the news is not yet propagandistic enough, alleging that “media coverage may perpetuate antifeminist views framed as ‘neutrality’” and advocating “accurate, survivor-centered, and gender-equitable coverage.” Another expert “echoed that journalists also require training to enable them to cover these issues more effectively.”

Recommended online “safety” (censorship) measures include removing user anonymity, penalizing platforms that fail to censor, removing content that promotes “disinformation,” enabling users to report “harmful content,” and mandating quicker response times for removal of “harmful” content.

Experts also emphasized the importance of preparing young people to confront the online world by “equipping [them] with the critical skills to identify what is misinformation and what isn’t.” “Overall, critical thinking and media awareness are important,” noted another expert.”

This call to media literacy comes in a Report, as I’ve tried to show, filled to the proverbial brim with inaccurate definitions, flabby generalizations, false equivalencies, non sequiturs, and outright falsehoods. The Report repeatedly advocates “engaging men and boys in advancing gender equality,” by which it really means persuading men and boys to ignore their own perceptions and experiences in order to pretend that only women’s (official) desires and demands matter.

For any of the ideologues involved in this Report to nominate themselves the guardians of critical thinking—all the while plotting how to shut down and punish their opponents, whose arguments they don’t even show themselves able to comprehend or logically counter—is the height of hypocrisy.

“Confronting Antifeminist Ideologies” is a good example of late-stage feminist dominance. It demonstrates how feminist power has enabled significant consolidation of resources—Canada’s federal government is now unashamedly partisan in its funding structure—while at the same time contributing to its intellectual arrogance and incoherence.

Hidebound, lacking in vigor, and perennially on the defensive, feminism can now do little more than call its adversaries bad names and appeal to Big Daddy government to shore up its brittle might. The academics, policy advisors, think tank leaders, advocates, and government employees featured in the Report rely on pompous feminist clichés and shop-worn fearmongering to bolster their positions. But their misdirection and accusations begin to look like a rear-guard action against a public that has for some time and with good reason stopped listening.

With apologies to Bettina Arndt, who has written more and better on this topic than I ever could

Over the past decade, studies and related articles have gushed about the connection between male domesticity and a satisfying sex life. The more housework a man does, we are told, the more and better sex he can hope for in his relationship. “Fair division of household chores can help your sex life,” trumpeted the CBC, Canada’s state-sanctioned and funded media outlet.

It’s difficult to believe.

Common sense and other social science research point to the qualities that attract women to men over the long term, including wealth, good looks, traditional masculinity, strength, competence, and a calm temperament, none of which have to do with mop and toilet brush. Personally, I can’t bear to see a man vacuuming.

Even some feminist women have admitted (for example, in this so-condescending essay) that they are primarily attracted to masculine men who take charge and don’t ask for permission. A much-decried 2013 study went so far as to allege that men who do women’s jobs in the home have less sex than other men.

The fact is that sexual desire (as distinct from grudging gratitude or whole-hearted thankfulness) is a subject with so many variables, dependent on the persons involved and the relationship they have made together, that responsible social scientists should refrain from blanket ideologically-loaded pronouncements.

All hail to the house-husband!

That, however, hasn’t stopped them. Recently, researchers have taken to enthusiastically singing the praises of the feminine man who picks up the kids’ toys and scours the bathtub. This man is allegedly keen to take on the domestic burdens that irritate his partner and destroy her libido. Commentators stress the feminist-compliant results.

“Some men may think it is not their job to help with housework,” explains Anna Matteo for a government-funded English-learning magazine, “But a new study shows that these men may want to think again. The study found that a man who helped around the house not only has more sex with his partner; he also has a really good sex life. It is time to face facts. Women find a man washing dishes very sexy.”

Actually, there is no evidence, scientific or otherwise, that women find dish-washing men “very sexy.” The study mentioned by the author posits general correlations only. But on this topic, commentators have felt free to embroider and embellish, usually focusing on the least sexy domestic chores to rhapsodize about their aphrodisiac effects.

Barrett Johnson, writing for a Christian family publication, pursued a similar narrative arc, citing popular psychotherapist John Gottman that the primary need is for the wife to feel “respected and understood.” “Nothing does this more effectively than when a husband serves and helps his wife.”

“It’s not a magic formula,” Johnson admitted, “but you can’t argue with the research. Your cleaning the kitchen, scrubbing a toilet, or making the bed may be the turn on your wife needs.” Notice how Johnson chooses the most emasculating chores possible, emphasizing tasks that require little strength or skill, are typically performed by women, and are often, in fact, of far greater interest to women than to men.

Pleasing the woman is the whole point. As the lead author of one of the frequently-touted studies summed it up, “The evidence shows that when men do a greater share of housework, women’s perceptions of relationship fairness and satisfaction are greater. And when couples are more satisfied with their relationships, they tend to get it on more often.” Here, the reference to “women’s perceptions” slides seamlessly into the statement about “couples” who are satisfied with their relationship. Happy wife, happy life.

Well, perhaps.

Or perhaps it’s the other way around: that when a woman is happy with her man (and with herself), she is far less inclined to dwell on who does what percentage of housework. When she’s unhappy with her man, all the scrubbing in the world will not be good enough.

Unfortunately, in a culture in which women initiate 70% of all divorces, and in which women’s self-reported happiness and satisfaction are the lowest they’ve been in decades (see also here), thanks in no small part, I’ve argued, to feminist theorizing and proselytizing, women’s tendency to feel aggrieved finds ample fuel, with discussion of housework inequity simply adding a source of ire.

Surely even a fully-indoctrinated university researcher doesn’t actually believe that the sight of a man elbows-deep in dish soap is a literal turn-on for most women? No. These are feminist studies and feminist commentary pushing an ideologically acceptable thesis based on findings that are, as we’ll see, far from robust. The primary aim is to lecture, browbeat, and mislead unwary men, and to put dissatisfied women ever more firmly in charge of heterosexual domestic life, with more of the unhappy results we already see around us.

What about the Man’s Libido?

Articles about male household duties tend to adopt a patronizing tone directed at the imagined male reader, who is assumed to need tutoring and finger-wagging. Do your part, men are scolded, and you might get a reward--though of course you are never to expect or demand it.

All will depend on whether your female partner decides you’ve done enough.

None of the academic research or accompanying commentary broaches what women should do to keep their partners satisfied, whether in bed or out of it, and I highly doubt that there is a single researcher at a single western university who is even considering such a study. It would be dubbed sexist and insulting, perhaps even an encouragement to abuse.

As we have so often been told, women don’t owe men anything. For men, of course—in a feminist-compliant academic and cultural environment—it’s a different story.

None of the housework studies addresses male desire, which is simply taken for granted. Do men get a libido boost from scrubbing the roasting pan or changing the bed sheets?

Where male desire might be lacking, it will surely be found to be the man’s fault and his responsibility to repair. No one in academia or the mainstream media suggests that women should cook a special meal or supply a back rub to lessen her husband’s work stress.

Similarly, no one suggests that women should take responsibility for their own desire or lack thereof, or that their perceptions, grievances, victim-mentality, or consumption of feminist propaganda (such as the studies themselves) might have any role to play.

Measuring (or not measuring) gender inequities and female desire

One aggressively feminist study is “Gender Inequities in Household Labor Predict Lower Sexual Desire in Women Partnered with Men.” Originally published, in 2022, in Archives of Sexual Behavior, a peer-reviewed medical journal, it is a long report filled with social-science jargon that alleges an unambiguous finding: if the man doesn’t do his fair share, according to his woman’s assessment, she will not desire him.

Parts of the article’s abstruse phrasing and complex methodological framing are beyond my competence to assess. Yet basic flaws in the thinking are glaringly evident even to a simple humanities academic.

The study, which actually comprised two separate studies, was intended to test whether there is a correlation between female desire and a woman’s sense of relationship equality and fairness as measured by how much she and her male partner contribute to housework and childcare. The results allegedly show that where a woman perceives inequality in her partner’s contribution, her desire decreases. The researchers call this “the heteronormativity theory of low desire in women.”

The findings are tailor-made for our feminist masters. Desire is not an issue of the woman’s body or mind; it is an issue of patriarchal unfairness. Like so much feminist academic work, the whole thing is slanted toward the conclusion sought.

Notably, only the women were asked to report on the contributions of each partner to housework. No men participated in the study as a counter-balance to the women’s self-reporting, and the researchers had no mechanism for assessing the accuracy of the women’s claims, either about their own work or about that of their male partners.

With only each woman’s word for how much housework she and her partner did, there is no reason for confidence in the results.

The study, then, should really be approached as a survey of women’s perceptions and/or claims about domestic equality, not about reality. But the researchers repeatedly speak of women’s “experiences of domestic inequality.”

From the start, then, readers should be skeptical about the conclusion that there is a “negative correlation” between female sexual desire and unequal housework. It is just as likely, or more likely, that a woman who is unhappy or bored with her man, for whatever reason, will misrepresent the amount of work she and her partner do.

Moreover, the study assumes, but never proves, a one-way relationship between the woman’s sense of household fairness and her desire. It’s a satisfying feminist contention, and a useful basis for the exhortations to men to take up their scrubbing brushes.

But it doesn’t equate to reality. In reality, a woman’s desire for her husband—along with, one hopes, the love, affection, pride, and affability that a good long-term partnership should involve—will influence her perception of fairness. Fairness, after all, cannot be calculated by mathematical equation. One hour with a snow shovel is not equal to one hour with the washing machine rumbling. Many women are grateful never to deal with car repairs or kill a bathroom spider, tasks for which hours of dishwashing might seem rightful recompense.

And again, a happy woman does not in general count up hours or care about them, while a woman alert to unfairness is probably already well past desire.

None of this is acknowledged in the researchers’ assessment. The study’s fundamental flaw connects to a host of other problems in how the study claims to measure housework “equality.”

Only women’s work is properly counted

As so often in feminist-minded investigations, the study is constructed so that men’s work is minimized by definition. Paid employment, for example, is completely elided from the calculation.

It turns out that a significant number of women in both studies reported that they work for pay outside the home only part-time or not at all. Their male partners’ hours of paid work are not mentioned.

In Study 1, 180 of 706 female participants (25%) reported that they were not employed at all while 252 of the 706 (36%) said that they were employed part-time. In Study 2, 81 out of 424 female participants (19%) were not employed outside the home at all while 139 of the 424 (33%) claimed to be engaged in part-time paid work.

In sum, over half of the women in each study reported that they were entirely or partially supported by the paid work of their male partners—a fact that does not factor in any way into the researchers’ theorizing.

Clearly, there is something wrong with a study that does not consider paid work a contribution to the household. A woman who is being entirely or partially supported by her partner’s paid work might reasonably be expected to do more than 50% of domestic tasks and childcare, given that her time at home and ability to do the work is far greater than that of her male partner.

Further contributing to the study’s bias is the fact that the household duties counted by participants are heavily slanted towards traditionally-female domestic work, showing little regard for or understanding of what men contribute.

Household tasks for Study 2 were divided into eight categories: Finance; Life and social planning; Cleaning; House and car maintenance; Childcare and development; Meal planning; Parenting logistics; and Household administration. These categories were then subdivided into subsidiary tasks, with Cleaning, Childcare, and Parenting logistics being most extensively broken down.

Many line items are devoted to parsing the varieties of traditionally feminine tasks such childcare, which includes listening to the child/children’s problems; encouraging and praising them; teaching/helping with homework; teaching life skills and monitoring progress; playing with/entertaining them; breaking up fights between children; comforting them; reassuring them when concerned/anxious; listening to/talking to child/children about everyday life.

Space is even allotted to such relatively pleasant and certainly non-essential tasks as organizing celebrations, planning social events, and planning date nights. It’s hard to see these as a legitimate part of “housework.”

Traditional male tasks and duties, on the other hand, are hardly represented at all.

A catch-all category of “House and car maintenance” is used to cover a host of time-consuming and physically-demanding activities such as mowing the lawn, seasonal maintenance, tree/bush trimming, watering, planting, and weeding.

Not mentioned here or anywhere are such forms of work as lawn fertilizing, hauling and unloading of soil or mulch, power washing, gutter cleaning, roof cleaning, roof repair, fence repair, shed maintenance, or cleaning and maintenance of outdoor implements such lawn mowers, leaf blowers, and power tools. Nowhere is mentioned the extremely heavy work of landscaping, hardscaping, tiling, grouting, building of retaining walls, or cutting down of trees or bushes.

True, not every man does all or perhaps even most of these activities—just as very few women do all or even most of the traditionally feminine activities listed—but some men certainly do. Yet they’re not even included in the list of household items that the female study participant is invited to count.

Automobile maintenance and repair are given no line items at all. Obliterated from mind are the extensive range of dirty, physically onerous, and technically demanding jobs that include but are not limited to changing tires, putting in new brake pads, installing a battery, changing the car’s oil, replacing a radiator or water pump, and a myriad of repairs to a car’s engine or body. Many of these tasks, depending on the age and condition of the car, can be demanding, stressful, and full of unexpected complexities and problems that can occupy hours, days, or weeks of a man’s time and energy.

Only a disgruntled feminist intent on finding grievance where none exists could imagine that two hours spent fixing a fuel line is in any manner equivalent to two hours spent planning a child’s birthday party or a couple’s “date night.” Naturally, if one never works on a car, which most women do not, one has no idea what is involved.

I could continue in this manner, but the point should be clear. This is an outrageously biased feminist study designed with a feminist conclusion already in mind, in which heterosexual partnerships are seen as a bad deal for women.

The study was so poorly thought out that it could not even indicate the range of house-related tasks that men and women typically perform because the researchers were unable to list what men do in house and yard. The data gathered, allegedly about women’s grievances and desire, is effectively useless except as yet another gauge of how ceaselessly academics assert female victimhood and seek to destroy heterosexual amity.

Alas, the premise and methods of the study are all too typical in a feminist culture in which many women do not even know what men do in the world—yet alone around the house—and don’t stir themselves to understand or appreciate it.

Many partnerships would be happier if they did. How productive it would be to live in a culture that encouraged women to value men and to make home a happy place through their exertions and cheerfulness. We don’t, in general, live in that kind of culture, though individual women are admirable.

In the meanwhile, men should not be hectored to feminize themselves in a desperate bid to get something that may not be worth getting in the absence of the woman’s free offer of love and desire.

Some feminists want to see more fat women in movies, advertising, and on the fashion runway.

Writing for Vox magazine in late 2023, culture correspondent Constance Grady expressed her dismay at Hollywood’s embrace of Ozempic and other weight loss drugs. Grady opposed Ozempic not primarily because it is a new drug whose long-term side-effects are unknown (though she does mention this concern), but because it exposes the hollowness of Hollywood’s seeming embrace of body positivity. After a short surge in proclaimed fat acceptance, Grady laments, thin has returned with a vengeance: “Plus-size models vanished from the runways.”

It turns out that Hollywood elites, along with most of the rest of us, don’t like fat and would rather be rid of it. Large-size Lizzo lost the lbs.

All the propaganda in the world instructing fat women to accept and even defiantly celebrate their adipose tissue has not significantly changed the cultural consensus; it has merely increased the number of obese women.

Grady, of course, puts a sinister feminist spin on the matter, concluding that “Ozempic seems to give our body-fascist culture permission to say the quiet part out loud […] Your body is not enough, you should hate your body […].”

Grady has created a false dilemma. Hating one’s (fat) body or hating oneself are not women’s only options. There is the possibility of rational acceptance, positive action, and wholesome self-restraint.

We can admit without self-loathing or scapegoating that it is better for the average woman to weigh 135 lbs than 215 lbs. We can recognize that obesity is “indisputably” associated with serious health problems that include infertility, pregnancy risks, cancers, diabetes, and heart disease.

We can recognize that it is better to combat compulsive eating with self-mastery; and better to find joy outside the self than to gorge on gooey desserts.

We can even admit that eating to extreme fulness is a self-defeating pleasure.

Grady’s exaggerated framing of the issue raises the question of why so many feminists are preoccupied with celebrating obesity.

Despite what fat acceptance says, the issue has never been about “acceptance.” It has been about pretending that being a fat woman is just as desirable as being a slim woman, and that rolls of puckered, sweaty adipose are at least as attractive as shapely, slim limbs.

Worse, it has involved pretending that nothing can be done about obesity and that obesity’s health consequences can and should be protested or legislated away.

Feminism wants to make and keep women fat. Why?

Beauty Standards and other Patriarchal Plots

Feminists aren’t entirely wrong about fat. There are probably few women alive today in the west who have not compared their own bodies and faces to the beautiful images promoted everywhere on billboards, in movies, and in magazines. Many if not most women, from childhood well into our senior years, have a thin physical ideal we would like to attain and a precise understanding of where we fail to measure up.

Some women, through no fault of their own, have a particularly difficult time maintaining a good weight. Preoccupation with female bodily perfection can lead to debilitating eating disorders and fanatical exercising. And some people are indeed cruel to those who are obese (to men too, of course, but that’s another story that feminism ignores).

Where feminist theory fails is in its insistence that the grip of beauty standards is purely cultural, not natural. Feminists allege that beauty standards are designed to keep women small, powerless, and anxious—at war with themselves and full of shame.

Such analyses tend not to admit that strict standards apply also to male bodies and actions. The analyses also downplay the fact that there is no culture on earth that does not venerate the signs of youth and sexual fertility in the female sex.

Like most feminist postulates—and resulting in trans ideology and other extreme—fat acceptance seeks to deny that there is anything natural in our attitudes and desires about bodies. Nature itself, including men’s admiring response to female beauty and women’s desire to provoke it, is presented as destructive.

In its most extreme forms, feminism stresses that the basis of male-female attraction should be remade according to unnatural ideals in which the ugly is to be seen as beautiful, and vice versa.

How did feminist theory arrive at its fat mandate?

The modern feminist approach to fat began with British psychotherapist Susie Orbach’s blockbuster Fat is a Feminist Issue, published in 1978. It was a weight-loss book that promised to help women break their obsession with food and body size.

The book offered various psycho-social theories to explain the meaning of fat. It alleged that fat could function variously as self-protection (with fat as a type of armor against a sexually predatory world) or self-sabotage (with fat as a fallback to explain lack of success in love or career).

Where Orbach’s book was most feminist was in its blaming of patriarchy for making women fat. “Fat is a response,” she argued, “to the many oppressive manifestations of a sexist culture” (p. 21). Over-eating was a self-soothing reaction to women’s stress, powerlessness, and excessive service to others; it could also be a way of indirectly expressing anger in a society that did not readily allow women to do so.

According to Orbach’s therapeutic program, once the individual woman recognized that her fat could have political meaning, as a “protest against the inequality of the sexes” (p. 193), it became possible to understand her fat in more positive terms, seeing it as related to strength and integrity. She could then begin to find peace with her body, preparing the way for “life at a lower weight” (p. 156).

Feminists spent the next two decades refining ideas about how patriarchy imprinted itself on women’s bodies. The writings of Susan Bordo (1986), Sandra Lee Bartky (1988) and Naomi Wolf (1990), among others, diagnosed patriarchal expectations in everything from the way girls and women learned to move (or not move) in space, their reliance on diet regimes, high heels, or girdles to reshape their bodies, and their conformist use of makeup, anti-aging creams, hair-styling, body depilation, deodorant, feminine hygiene, breast implants, liposuction, Botox, and facial reconstruction.

According to feminist interpretation, the female body was the physical and psychological arena where forms of hetero-patriarchal power and resistance were enacted. Extending Orbach’s argument in a more radical direction, such critics increasingly began to see women’s refusal to conform to feminine ideals as a pro-feminist act of defiance.

Fat Is a Feminist Issue thus began to fall from favor because Orbach had accepted that losing weight was a worthy goal (the full title included The Anti-Diet Guide to Permanent Weight Loss). She had been clear that compulsive eating was not good for women either physically or psychologically.

The fat acceptance/fat liberation movement—and its more mainstream twin, body positivity—upended Orbach’s position. A review of Orbach in 2014 complained of the book: “I get that it was ‘groundbreaking,’ but when I read it all I hear is the same old fat-hatred/fat-blaming.” Another wrote, in 2018, “Do not read this book. It is outdated and will probably just make you feel worse about yourself and your body.” This reader rejected Orbach’s premise that “overeating and overweight” are “always intrinsically linked.”

By the turn of the 21^st century, the connection between over-eating and being overweight was frequently denied. Fat advocates focused on weight stigma rather than weight itself. They stopped discussing fat women as unhappy people in need of therapy, instead portraying them as oppressed victims in need of liberation.

Bias against fat people—particularly against fat women—came to be seen not as a personal health matter but as a human rights issue.

This perspective took increasingly aggressive forms, both academic and popular.

Radical Fat Acceptance

Radical fat acceptance was the centerpiece of a 2016 academic article, “Scientific Weightism: A View of Mainstream Weight Stigma Research Through a Feminist Lens,” co-written by Rachel Calogero, Tracy Tylka, and Janell Mensinger. These were three American feminist academics with expertise in social psychology and health. Their article begins from the premise that stigma against obesity, rather than obesity itself, is the real problem.

The article adopts terms from other domains of social justice advocacy, using “thin privilege” to refer to the unearned advantages of those with a preferred body weight, and “weightist assumptions” to refer to false and bigoted ideas about weight, including the idea that weight has any causal relationship to health.

The authors go so far as to deny that there are any negative health consequences of obesity. They insist that although there are correlations between obesity and disease, correlation is not causation. They also deny that obesity is a condition within an individual’s power to control or modify. What can be controlled is the stigma.

“Weight stigma is a social justice issue,” the authors assert, “because people who are fat are denied their basic civil rights in every aspect of their lives, including their right to be fat and to live free of unfair treatment.” Merely to allege that obesity is harmful is an example of “unfair treatment” that the authors believe should be outlawed: “It is absolutely essential,” they conclude “that scholars campaign for formal legislation to protect against weight stigma and discrimination.”

Many popular discussions spread similar defiance. “Why is Fat a Feminist Issue?” by Gillian Brown argues that fat women experience discrimination because they unsettle the patriarchy: “Because we are seen as taking up more space than we should be, as being more bothersome than we should be, and as being uglier than we should be, fat women are an embodiment of exactly what patriarchal society does not want women to be: visible.”

Others went further to advocate for the sexual liberation of fat women, with Sydelle Barreto arguing, in “Fat and Forgotten: The Exclusion of Fat Women in Sexual Liberation and the Implications for Sexual Public Health,” that sexual prejudice against fat women is a significant form of misogynistic bigotry. “Liberation looks different when you are continually receiving the message that your body is less desirable and less valuable and that the decisions you make about your own body are less valid.”

“Why Fat is a Feminist Issue,” by Abigail Saguy, takes an intersectional approach to anti-fat sexual prejudice, claiming that black women and lesbians are better able than white heterosexual women to resist internalized fat phobia and less likely to judge other women. Saguy also claims that “there is evidence that dissatisfaction with body weight is a better predictor of health than actual weight.”

These and similar discussions, now ubiquitous on the internet, have exacerbated the accusatory resentment that feminism has fostered over the years. Fat women are encouraged to see themselves as in the vanguard of anti-patriarchal resistance while men who do not desire fat women are represented as bigots. Thin women are to feel (or at least to pretend) discomfort for conforming to oppressive body-ideals, with thin white heterosexual women particularly condemned.

Unhappy Women are Foot Soldiers for Feminism

Fat acceptance is a perfect outgrowth and amplification of feminism in its disruption of men and women’s natural attraction to one another.

Now a woman who wants to look pretty and shapely for men, or for one particular man, is told that she has internalized misogyny, while a man (or lesbian, for that matter) who prefers non-obese women is lectured about oppressive assumptions. White heterosexuals are targeted for accepting exclusionary body ideals more readily than others.

The ideology has significant real-world consequences that affect women’s longevity, quality of life, reproductive health, and emotional well being.

Ultimately, fat feminism lies to women by telling them they will be happier when they stop caring about their body size, reveling in their fat and forcing others to pretend to revel in it as well.

Alone at night, digging in to the second tub of ice cream and contemplating their excessive bulk, these women surely find the promised happiness to be illusory.

Enticing other women into the delusion—trapping them, too, into the cage of fat—may be their only, bitter, solace.

Marching in pussy hats, baring their breasts to save the earth, fighting with ICE agents, declaring themselves “nasty,” feminist women today are self-evidently the least contented and most rancorous women in America, preoccupied with victimhood, consumed by the politics of despair, and experiencing higher rates of depression (and corresponding anti-depressant use) than non-feminist women.

It is logical to conclude that feminism causes female unhappiness by encouraging ingratitude, paranoia, and reckless rage.

Feminists themselves have at times noted the excessive, often wretched, results of their gospel of discontent: the suicides, depression, violence, hysteria, and disordered lives of many of their luminaries.

Mary Wollstonecraft made two suicide attempts after her free-love liaison fell apart. Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst counseled and engaged in murderous political violence. Virginia Woolf drowned herself after suffering from severe mental illness for much of her life. Simone De Beauvoir lost her teaching license for sexual misconduct with a female student. Valerie Solanas attempted to murder at least three men after writing a tract recommending the murder of men. Betty Friedan based her entire public career on demonstrable lies. Elizabeth Gould Davis shot herself after completing a book on female moral superiority. Andrea Dworkin was almost certainly a rape fabulist. Shulamith Firestone became schizophrenic. Germaine Greer advocated sex with pubescent boys. Mary Daly would not allow male students to take her senior women’s studies courses. Phyllis Chesler (of whom more later) defended a female serial killer. Mona Eltahawy boasted about beating a man in a nightclub. These and many other feminist leaders are not what most people would recommend as models for their daughters.

Yet feminist commentators justify women’s tragic choices and destructive behaviors, blaming society. The temptation to see and yet not see, to blame anything other than a pathogenic ideology, has been irresistible for most feminist analysts.

Pioneers of Discontent

When British author Wilma Meikle published Towards a Sane Feminism in 1917, the title sounded a humorously rueful note. “Let us while there is still time for repentance,” Meikle wrote in the first chapter, “humbly and with tears confess that all that was done and undone by pre-war feminists was nothing but a prodigious crop of feminine wild oats” (p. 14). Here, it seemed, was a frank, unvarnished account of early feminism by someone who experienced it first-hand and was not inclined, despite being a committed feminist herself, to whitewash its aims or methods.

To a certain extent, the book lives up to its witty opening pages, exposing a side of First Wave feminism that most commentators—even the anti-feminist ones—rarely discuss. We tend to picture the feminists who fought for the right to vote as moderate women, civic-minded and reasonable, less given to anti-male bombast and performative outrage than later generations.

In Meikle’s telling, the outrage and bombast show themselves, at least in tantalizing glimpses. Meikle mentions, for example, Christabel Pankhurst’s popular pamphlet The Great Scourge and How to End It (1913), which wildly exaggerated the number of British households infected by venereal disease in order to blame British men for their allegedly depraved sexuality. “It would be hard to discover a more one-sided effusion,” Meikle noted dryly.

Too many suffrage militants, she admitted, “regarded the majority of men as conscious and willful oppressors” and “saw in sex nothing but degradation for women” (p. 88). At a time when poverty and economic dependency were the primary problems of women, as Meikle believed, the anti-male and anti-sex rhetoric spread needless fear and paranoia.

But these were not enough, for Meikle, to invalidate the movement, for she could not give up on the spirit of feminism, its exhilarating promise and passion. With more experience and opportunity, she alleged, a younger generation of feminists would learn from former leaders’ mistakes.

Meikle celebrated feminist heroism by comparing individual suffragettes, whatever their political blunders and misguided preoccupations, to British heroine Edith Cavell, a nurse in the Great War who was executed by German authorities in 1915 for helping hundreds of soldiers escape from German-occupied Belgium.

“Just as the memory of Edith Cavell’s death will always be treasured by her countrymen and held glorious to womanhood,” Meikle rhapsodized, “so future ages will hold it a small thing that militancy was ridiculous and useless when militants themselves were often so ennobling an example of feminine endurance and sacrifice” (p. 19).

In reality, the militant actions Meikle forgave were nothing like those of Edith Cavell. Cavell was a devout Christian who acted sacrificially to save others. The suffragettes, powered by a vicious martyr complex, put the lives and livelihoods of their fellow Britons at risk over years of an increasingly radical pre-war terror campaign that was worse than “useless.”

As detailed by Simon Webb in The Suffragette Bombers: Britain’s Forgotten Terrorists, members of the militant Women’s Political and Social Union smashed shop windows, fire-bombed mail-boxes, blew up buildings, and physically attacked politicians and police officers in self-dramatizing suffrage protest. Imprisoned in the hundreds for their lawbreaking, they gained notoriety and public sympathy through hunger strikes and resistance to forced feeding.

One of them, Emily Davison, gave her life to the insurgency and was memorialized as a suffrage shahid in 1913 after she ran out onto the race track at the Epsom Derby, where she was trampled under the hoofs of the king’s horse, Anmar. In doing so, she endangered the lives of numerous jockeys and their horses, causing long-lasting injury and mental anguish to Anmar’s rider, Herbert Jones.

No one is sure whether Davison intended to kill herself or merely to attract public attention by attaching a suffragette scarf or flag to the horse’s bridle. Either way, it was a reckless action. But rather than express regret at Davison’s foolish zeal, suffragette leaders painted her as a wronged heroine, accusing the British government of causing her death. According to Christabel Pankhurst, “The government’s refusal to grant the vote drove her to make her protest” (qtd in The Suffragette Bombers, p. 82).

Davison was not a wronged heroine, killed by the British patriarchy. She was killed by suffragette militancy. She had once been an ambitious and intelligent woman who had taken a degree at the University of London and supported herself as a teacher. She had lived a calm life until she converted, in her mid-30s, to the suffragette cause and had her mind fatally blighted. To this day, suffragettes’ romance with violence is surrounded by a halo of unearned saintliness.

Second Wave Pathologies

Most feminist advocates did not go so far as to throw bombs, but many of their lives were marked by unhappy rebellion and bitterness. They produced treatises full of bad advice, false histories, and fantastical predictions. Some had genuine insights, but on the whole their words and deeds were morally poisonous, productive of fathomless grievance.

It is now common to search feminists’ life histories for evidence of abuse or deprivation to explain their radical turn, but such an approach is not particularly helpful. Yes, some of these women had unhappy childhoods, experiences of betrayal or violation. Some had not. What the majority of feminists have had in common is an ideology of accusation and hatred that justifies their vengefulness and double standards.

In 2018, American feminist and psychotherapist Phyllis Chesler published a memoir of Second Wave activism, A Politically Incorrect Feminist: Creating a Movement with Bitches, Lunatics, Dykes, Prodigies, Warriors, and Wonder Women. Like Wilma Meikle a century before, she highlighted feminist lunacy in her title, and devoted substantial chapters to detailing the turbulent and chaotic personalities who made up the movement.

Chesler made clear that in the movement she knew, feminist “sisterhood” was an ideal beyond reach, zealously proclaimed and fought over, but rarely achieved. There were “petty jealousies and leaderless group bullying” (p. 183), “ideological disputes” (p. 183), jockeying for “victimhood primacy” (p. 184), accusations, betrayals, back-stabbing, and demands for conformity. She recalls how “mean girls envied and destroyed excellence and talent” while “Feminists who had left the Left brought with them its tactics of intimidation and interrogation” (p. 183).

A significant number of the feminist leaders Chesler knew personally had serious mental and emotional difficulties: some had breakdowns; not a few attempted suicide, or spent time in mental asylums. Chesler mentions Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, and Andrea Dworkin. Dworkin fought continually with her fellow feminists and styled herself a victim, always under siege by those less pure. On one occasion, furious at two feminist authors with whom she disagreed, she phoned in threats to the bookstore that was hosting them.

Chesler admits that “Many of the most charismatic and original of feminist thinkers were mentally ill” (p. 189), exhibiting behavior that included “nonstop talking, yelling, paranoid accusations, drinking, stealing, [and] pathological lying” (p. 190).

Yet Chesler couldn’t see the bad behavior as a problem of feminism. She explained it as owing to internalized sexism: “When a human being has been diminished by heartless prejudice daily and victimized by sexual, physical, economic, and legal violence, she can become disabled, just as veterans of combat and torture victims can” (p. 188). Here was the convenient excuse for abusive conduct.

After giving more examples of women who acted out and persecuted their colleagues, Chesler elaborated, with an abundance of clichés, her exculpatory theory:

“I can easily name twenty more feminist pioneers who were dear to me and produced extraordinary work but were disadvantaged, wounded by depression or other psychiatric afflictions. Were they depressed by how often they were on the losing end of ideological battles, by the everyday sexism that sapped their vital juices, by having to fight so hard to obtain so little because they were women? Were they at a perpetual disadvantage due to incest, rape, economic insecurity, overwork, or homophobia?” (p. 194).

Chesler stressed that feminist delusions and aggression should ultimately be blamed on the male-dominated world they were fighting against, not on the victim-obsessed ideology they had embraced.

The Victimhood Personality

In a 2020 article for the journal Personality and Individual Differences, a team of American and Israeli researchers outlined the “tendency for interpersonal victimhood,” a recognized personality type that manifests in those who are preoccupied by their own persecution. Such people insist on the centrality of their suffering. They ruminate continually on the wrongs done to them and are incapable of empathy for—and justify revenge on—those they regard as enemies.

The researchers note that it is not necessary for those with victimhood personalities to have experienced actual trauma or injustice. Victimhood is a powerful mindset quite distinct from measurable and documented wrongs.

Professor Mary Daly of Boston College was committed to purveying the mindset. In Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978), she explained, “Every woman who has come to consciousness can recall an almost endless series of oppressive, violating, insulting, assaulting acts against her Self. Every woman is battered by such assaults—is, on a psychic level, a battered woman” (p. 348).

When women did not live up to feminist ideals of fairness and empathy towards other women, Daly alleged, it was because they had so far not been able to “exorcise” “the specters of patriarchal presence,” and had not yet rejected “the pig in the head” (p. 342).

Other feminist leaders, admitting feminists’ abusiveness, made similar excuses.

Author Robin Morgan, in the introduction to her 1978 essay collection Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist, lamented, in echo of Allen Ginsberg, that she had “watched some of the best minds of my feminist generation go mad with impatience and despair” (p. 13).

She was appalled by the enthusiasm with which feminists went for one another’s throats, regretting “All that fantastic energy going to fight each other instead of our opposition! […] So much false excitement, self-righteousness, and judgmental posturing! Gossip, accusations, counter-accusations, smears—all leapt to, spread, and sometimes believed without the impediment of facts” (p. 13).

These were damning admissions, but Morgan didn’t seriously pursue them.

If many feminist leaders were mentally ill, or at least unwilling or unable to refrain from victim posturing, vengefulness, and fact-free accusations, does this not entirely discredit the movement they created?

Why should anyone take feminist women’s accusations against men and society seriously when it is admitted that their accusations against other women were so frequently baseless or unjust?

The Madwoman in the Feminist Attic

Chesler maintained her ideological faithfulness, insisting that “Feminism isn’t crazy, and feminist ideas aren’t crazy” (p. 189) even if many individual feminists were.

Morgan proposed more feminism to cure feminism’s civil wars and cruelties. “I’ve come to think,” she declared in the above-quoted essay, “that we need a feminist code of ethics, that we need to create a new women’s morality, an antidote of honor against this contagion by male supremacist values” (p. 13).

Women’s attacks on other women, then, were an expression of “male supremacist values,” not a reflection on the women themselves, whom Morgan was sure could concoct a superior “code of ethics.”

This notion became the lynchpin of feminist thought: no matter how often and how catastrophically feminism failed as a blueprint for personal and social liberation, the answer to the failure was always more feminism. Feminist projects failed not because they were feminist but because they weren’t feminist enough.

The many half-admissions and flimsy denials, evasions and self-contradictions would be amusing if not for the serious harm done both to the women themselves, in their eviscerated moral integrity, and to the targets of their delusions and rage: the men, women, and children who fall under their power.

Refusal of moral accountability is one of feminism’s most disturbing features, a fact that feminists themselves have recognized, if perhaps only subconsciously, for over a century. Contrary to what Wilma Meikle hoped in 1917, there is no sane feminism; and it is a mark of the ideology’s power over adherents that even feminists who see feminism’s harms keep insisting on the certainty of its redemption.

Feminists’ excuse for their anti-male hatred has always been disingenuous. When women hate men, feminists claim, it merely hurts men’s feelings. Men’s hatred of women, on the other hand, can be lethal. When men hate women, they kill them.

This would be nonsense even if men were the only sex that kills. Hatred has many damaging effects aside from bloodshed. Politicized hatred hurts its victims through social stigma, discrimination, and unjust laws and policies.

And, in fact, women do kill and harm men in significant numbers (see my previous Substack).

Yet when feminist hatred leads to violence against men, feminists are unashamed. They shrug their shoulders, claiming that the violence was not representative of feminism in general. Or they justify the violence, casting the killer as a would-be liberator.

The latter is what we get from Mary Harron, the co-writer and director of I Shot Andy Warhol, a 1996 bio-pic about radical feminist Valerie Solanas, who became famous for trying to murder pop artist Andy Warhol just months after completing her man-hating treatise, the SCUM Manifesto. SCUM referred to the Society for Cutting Up Men.

Interviewed by The Guardian about the re-release of her movie on June 12, Harron was pleased that Solanas would be receiving renewed attention. She claimed that our present moment, allegedly rife with “male dominance and authoritarian regimes”—which Solanas was allegedly “fighting against”—makes her film more pertinent than ever.

In fact, Solanas didn’t “fight against” anything in particular, lacking any coherent program or even a single useful strategy for social change. But Harron and The Guardian are invested in making Solanas more interesting and admirable than she actually was.

Anyone expecting at least pro forma expressions of dismay over Solanas’s violence will be disappointed by The Guardian feature, which touts the movie’s “triumphant return.” While confessing that Solanas had “deeply held prejudices” against trans women, Harron says not a word about Solanas’s overriding anti-male hatred.

In fact, Harron expresses sympathy for Solanas and praises her “comical precision and icy literary voice,” which she says hit her “like a lightning bolt” when she first read Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto in the 1980s. Harron, who was then working as a music journalist, claims that she immediately felt a connection to Solanas because of “all my years catering to the pathetic male ego.”

The Guardian guides readers to adopt Harron’s feminist view, describing Solanas’s “righteous anger towards patriarchal social control” and quoting Harron’s words: “I love Valerie, but you don’t have to turn her into a 100% hero.”

There’s moral rectitude for you. Do not sanctify the would-be murderer—at least, not entirely.

I Shot Andy Warhol made Solanas, instead, into an attractive anti-hero, a brilliant but troubled woman whose fanaticism is softened by vulnerability (scenes of her sleeping rough and selling her body for money), and whose mawkish writings are framed as counter-cultural art.

Many of the movie’s most memorable scenes depict Solanas, pugnacious and self-possessed in actor Lili Taylor’s rendering, reciting short SCUM passages. In these sepia-tinged tableaux, Solanas seems lifted out of the film’s present, her pithy and piquant words immortalized. Other romanticized scenes show her at the typewriter, cigarette on lip, undaunted by dingy circumstances; or hawking her mimeographed booklet like a one-woman standup routine on the streets of Greenwich Village.

Solanas’s murder attempt, in the opening and closing frames of the movie, is stylized and bloodless, with the camera focused mainly on Solanas’s compelling, defiant face. Warhol’s suffering is not depicted at all.

Eaten Up with Hate

In reality, Valerie Solanas was a misanthrope and misfit whose attempt to kill an innocent man was the only notable thing about her. Her SCUM Manifesto is worth reading only as a window into the black heart of her pathological narcissism.

The book anticipates many feminist claims about male violence and male inadequacy. Solanas wrote that “To be male is to be deficient” (p. 35). “To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo” (p. 37). Women didn’t have penis envy, she asserted: “men have pussy envy” (p. 38). “Every man, deep down, knows he’s a worthless piece of shit” (p. 39).

Men reduce women to objects, Solanas claimed, because “the male is a mere member of the species, interchangeable with every other male. He has no deep-seated individuality” (p. 46). “The male is just a bunch of conditioned reflexes, incapable of a mentally free response” (p. 45). “Although he wants to be an individual, the male is scared of anything in himself that is the slightest bit different from other men” (p. 50).

And on and on and on, relentless in accusatory iteration.

Solanas’s fundamental claim about men was that they hated themselves and wanted to be women, but knew they never could be. She described the male as “eaten up with frustration at not being female” and “eaten up with hate—not rational hate that is directed at those who abuse or insult you—but irrational, indiscriminate hate … hatred, at bottom, of his own worthless self” (p. 64).

Here was the enduring feminist tenet that women are right to hate men, who allegedly abuse and insult them, while men who hate women are reacting to their own awfulness. Men’s only reasonable response to their condition, according to Solanas, was to resign themselves to oblivion.

Some of Solanas’s SCUM writing, despite its banal content, has a certain aphoristic effectiveness. “Just as humans have a prior right to existence over dogs by virtue of being more highly evolved and having a superior consciousness,” Solanas declared, “so women have a prior right to existence over men” (p. 67). But even if one were to accept the double syllogism, her conclusion—“The elimination of any male is, therefore, a righteous and good act” (p. 67)—does not follow. It is not righteous to destroy a living being simply because it is not highly evolved.

Most of SCUM is dull and repetitive, showcasing a limited vocabulary, clichéd utterances, and vague vulgarities. Solanas’s radical vision for a better society, if it can be called that, was no more complicated than the childish desire, repeated ad nauseum, to “overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex” (p. 35).

How that was to be achieved, Solanas would say no more than that SCUM women “could acquire complete control of this country within a few weeks simply by withdrawing from the labor force, thereby paralyzing the entire nation. Additional measures, any one of which would be sufficient to completely disrupt the economy and everything else, would be for women to declare themselves off the money system, stop buying, just loot and simply refuse to obey all laws they don’t care to obey” (p. 69).

Such puerile pap might be attractive to a rebellious fifteen-year-old mind (and was certainly attractive to Mary Harron, who compared Solanas to Malcolm X and said her analysis of society was “really quite brilliant”), but it is embarrassing when presented as a quasi-serious, or rhetorical, call for revolution.

The reasons for Solanas’s obsessive hatred of men are never made clear, with various accusations and judgements appearing throughout. Early on, she described men as “psychically passive” because “completely egocentric, unable to relate, empathize or identify, and filled with a vast, pervasive, diffuse sexuality” (p. 37).

But she also expressed disgust at man’s invention of philosophy and religion, systems of moral thought she claims were created because “Being empty, he looks outward, not only for guidance and control, but for salvation and for the meaning of life” (p. 52). Surely “egocentric” people tend to look inward rather than outward, and “psychically passive” people are not the type to be fascinated by complex religious and philosophical structures, let alone to spend lifetimes elaborating, refining, and debating them, as men have done? The simple-mindedness of Solanas’s own thought, in contrast, is glaringly evident.

Even women, the superior beings who will inherit the earth, are not consistently portrayed. Woman is said to “know instinctively that the only wrong is to hurt others, and that the meaning of life is love” (p. 53). The sentimentality is cloying. Yet Solanas also railed against “Daddy’s Girls,” women who love and venerate men (p. 55), declaring that “All women have a fink streak in them, to a greater or lesser degree” (p. 74). In contrast to her point about women’s knowledge of love, she praised “hateful, violent bitches given to slamming those who unduly irritate them in the teeth, who’d sink a shiv into a man’s chest or ram an ice pick up his asshole as soon as look at him” (p. 61).

Many an angry fifteen-year-old could do as well as that.

There is no use in seeking a thought-provoking insight or pattern of themes. SCUM Manifesto does not deserve to be venerated for its audacity or wit, and certainly not for its word-smithing. Filled with bitter ravings, it is perhaps best understood as feminism’s junior Mein Kampf, especially Solanas’s excoriation of man for “needing scapegoats onto whom he can project his failings and inadequacies” (p. 53). Scapegoat-creator, heal thyself.

Feminists Justify Attempted Murder

As it happened, nobody on the funky streets of New York City was interested in joining SCUM or reading about its proposed exploits. Solanas was unable to sell many copies of the book or to find acolytes to listen to her ravings. Her focus turned to paranoia-inspired violence. On June 3, 1968, Solanas walked into Andy Warhol’s studio, The Factory, and shot him three times at point-blank range with a .32 caliber Beretta handgun, reportedly because she believed he was planning to steal the contents of a play she had been pestering him to produce.

She also shot art critic Mario Amaya, who was not seriously wounded, and attempted to shoot Warhol’s manager, Fred Hughes, who was saved by the gun’s not firing.

Warhol suffered near-fatal injuries, and never fully recovered. Two bullets pierced his stomach, liver, spleen, esophagus, and both lungs. He was briefly declared dead on the operating table, had to undergo various surgeries, and had to wear a surgical corset for the rest of his life to hold his organs in place.

His recovery was painful and traumatic. He became terrified of hospitals and eccentric people, preoccupied with thoughts of death. His art changed, becoming less playful, more macabre, and his open-door policy at The Factory was rescinded. He sought security through body guards and surveillance systems.

It’s possible to downplay Solanas’s murder attempts on the basis that she was mentally ill. Solanas was diagnosed as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and spent months in a psychiatric institution.

But the reaction to what Solanas did by allegedly sane feminist ideologues and advocates, including Mary Harron, is a different story. On the whole, feminists have been undisturbed—nay, gratified—by the obvious parallels between Solanas’s written justification for the murder of men as “a righteous and good act,” and her actual shootings of men.

The then-president of the National Organization of Women’s New York chapter, Ti-Grace Atkinson, championed Solanas at the time of the shootings as a symbol of women’s justified rage and enlisted a prominent attorney to handle her defense. One of Andy Warhol’s film stars (known as Ultra Violet) wrote a memoir (Famous for 15 Minutes: My Years with Andy Warhol) in which she praised Solanas as a visionary, saying “For in the beginning, beyond her overheated rhetoric, she had a truly revolutionary vision of a better world run by and for the benefit of women.”

The SCUM Manifesto took off, first published by Olympia Press shortly after Solanas’s arrest and eventually translated into a dozen languages. It has been widely taught in women’s studies courses, excerpted in feminist anthologies such as Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood is Powerful (1970), and reprinted by Verso Books, a boutique press, in 2004 with a lengthy, bombastic introduction by New York University philosophy professor Avital Ronell, later found guilty of sexually harassing a male graduate student. Ronell praised the book’s alleged prescience, stating of Solanas that “Maybe she was put here to speak the unspeakable or, less dramatically, to sound the wake-up call […] to encourage the dialectics of female empowerment” (24).

In 2014, Breanna Fahs published an admiring biography that cast Solanas as both abused innocent and resistance warrior. Fahs records an exchange between Solanas and friend Jeremiah Newton, who asked her if her manifesto was to be taken literally. “I don’t want to kill all men,” she had allegedly replied. “I think males should be neutered or castrated so they can’t mess up any more lives.”

In 2018, Julie Bindel gushed, “What I love about this book [SCUM Manifesto] is how it promotes straightforward man-hating.”

In 2020, a celebratory article calling Solanas “an important LGBTQ figure,” was published in The New York Times as part of a series called Overlooked, about “remarkable” people whose deaths had not been (but should have been) reported in the Times. The article noted her “daring arguments in SCUM Manifesto, her case for a world without men” and seemed to regret that the attack on Warhol had come to “define her life.”

It’s impossible to imagine the online manifesto of Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in Isla Vista, California, being read in university classrooms and published with a glowing introduction by a super-star academic.

**

Solanas is not alone, of course. Many other well-known feminist figures—including tenured academics, successful writers, and legal theorists—have either openly fantasized about or seriously recommended the murder of men or the significant reduction in their numbers. Such pronouncements have not damaged their reputations or led to their loss of employment.

San Francisco State University Professor of Women’s Studies Sally Miller Gearhart recommended the non-violent culling of men through new reproductive technologies. She proposed in her 1982 essay, “The Future—If There Is One—Is Female” (published in a volume ostensibly about feminism and non-violence!) that “The ratio of men to women must be radically reduced so that men approximate only ten percent of the total population” (p. 280).

Boston College Professor Mary Daly, asked about Gearhart’s contention in a 1999 interview for What is Enlightenment magazine, was enthusiastic in her agreement, prophesying an upcoming “decontamination of the earth” that would result in a “drastic reduction of the population of males.”

University of Miami Law Professor Mary Anne Franks has more recently argued for what she calls a “redistribution of violence,” alleging that “Society would be better off as a whole if more women were willing to engage in justified violence against men” and proposing that “To that end, women’s justified violence against men should be encouraged, protected, and publicized.”

Egyptian-American author Mona Eltahawy published The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls in 2019, fantasizing about vigilante killings of men in order to bring “the patriarchy” to its knees. In interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, she outlined her feminist-Jacobin program: “I ask people to imagine—now I’m using this word imagine, and I’m underlining it three times—a scenario in which we kill a certain number of men every week. How many men must we kill until patriarchy sits across the table from us and says, ‘Ok, stop.’”

These and more like them are celebrated throughout the west for their alleged commitment to women’s equality.

Feminism as Death Cult

Perhaps it is possible to find, somewhere on the internet, a lone voice or two advocating the random killing of women, or the near-elimination of the female sex.

But it is impossible to imagine a group of thought leaders in our society not only tolerating but in many cases actively promoting and praising the killing of women—for the good of the earth and of men.

The proposed killing of men is fully tolerated and praised. When confronted with the evidence, feminist advocates are disbelieving, defensive, and dismissive—ultimately annoyed, even outraged, to have the extremist tenets of their professed faith read back to them. Their belief in their own righteousness is unshaken.

21^st-century feminism remains one of the most popular death cults in the world, and Valerie Solanas will be its standard-bearer this summer.

“I have written before about the need for male accountability. I have said plainly that you do not get a cookie for not being a rapist—that basic human decency is the floor, not an achievement.

Because this is not sustainable. And the cost of our collective inaction is being paid, every single day, in the bodies, safety, and freedom of women and girls.”

--Qasim Rashid, Esq.

**

I’ve read a lot of male-bashing twaddle in my time, but nothing quite so audacious as Qasim Rashid’s recent screed on Substack, “Women Are Not Safe Around Men.” Here the author, a Pakistani-born American activist, attorney, and would-be Democratic congressman, argues in a widely-read essay that it is finally time to confront the fact that men are responsible for violence, and that only a prolonged period of taxpayer-funded “restitution” can begin to make things right. Women, he emphasizes, are not responsible for violence.

Keen as he is to tell everyone how very bad men are, Rashid seems willing to bend the truth to do it. In fact, his essay not only bends but repeatedly mangles, pummels, and pulverizes truth, all the while assuring readers that what he is presenting is merely “a documented, data-driven, legally and empirically supported fact.”

He claims that “The data is unambiguous and the solutions exist. The only thing missing is the will to act.” He promises to “lay out the full scope of this crisis, dismantle the myths that protect it, and propose the concrete solutions that could actually end it.” Under Rashid’s blueprint for social justice, men and boys will be properly shamed and brought low before women, forced to accept blame for the harms they have allegedly caused (over centuries), and made to foot the bill for a thoroughgoing, nation-wide program of feminist recompense.

To this end, Rashid lists a panoply of government-funded perquisites for women, ranging from free tampons and abortions to girls-only public schools, tax-free status for 40 years of their adulthood, free college tuition, yet more DEI hiring and promotion, and mountains more funding for feminist propaganda about male violence and female innocence. Women’s status as preferred citizens will be indelibly etched into American law and policy.

Any man who thinks of objecting—raising questions about male victims or male self-sacrifice—is instructed by Rashid to “get therapy” and stop “protecting predators.” He accuses men, “It is absolutely, unequivocally, entirely your problem.” Women, of course, come in for no such judgement. “At no point have I asked women to do better,” he boasts. “Women are not the problem.”

Well. Except when they are. Just last week, a Long Island woman slit a man’s throat while he was sleeping next to her at his parents’ home, causing him to bleed to death. A month before that, a Wisconsin woman (above) stabbed her boyfriend to death over an argument about dinner; she told police he had been “pushing her buttons.” In the same month, a woman in Arizona was charged with running over a man with her car, killing him after he tried to leave their date early. A few months before that, a Minnesota woman confessed to killing her boyfriend with a knife because he wouldn’t have sex with her. Rashid does not include these and other acts in his outcry against gendered atrocity.

But even if women were far more peaceable than they are (and more on this point later), Rashid’s central argument—that men as a group owe women recompense for a minority of men’s violence—would still be spurious. “I have said plainly that you do not get a cookie for not being a rapist,” Rashid sneers as he predicts the typical male response. “The men who rush to announce their personal non-violence the moment this conversation begins,” he alleges, “are doing exactly what this culture trained them to do—center themselves rather than confront the problem.”

Wrong. They’re responding to your false allegation. While it’s true that men cannot and generally do not expect praise for non-criminal behavior, they do have a moral right not to be blamed, discriminated against, insulted, and forced to pay for crimes they did not commit and which they are powerless to prevent. Rashid is engaging in repugnant scapegoating and collective punishment—and in most other contexts (Muslim terrorism? black crime?), I’m pretty sure he would recognize it as such. But his interest in human dignity and justice seem to dry up when it comes to blaming men as a group. He even proposes that little boys should be forced to take “consent classes” in school from “the earliest grades” so that they can learn of their inherited guilt.

Rashid’s contention that men are complicit in violence because they do not speak against it is unproven and unprovable, though heavy with feminist rectitude. “Male violence does not survive without male silence,” he recites glibly. This is pure bombast. The assumption seems to be that if enough men don their hair shirts, denouncing other men and ceding power to women with sufficient enthusiasm, violence will dramatically diminish. But such a belief profoundly misrepresents the reality of violence, including women’s central role in it.

Facts Are Not Safe with Qasim Rashid

In reality, Rashid’s thesis is not “a documented, data-driven, legally and empirically supported fact” but a cornucopia of exaggerations, half-truths, and outright misrepresentations far too numerous to cover here. For example, he twice mentions sixteen-year-old Timothy Hudson, who has been charged with the rape and murder of his stepsister, Anna Kepner, on a cruise ship last November. Rashid offers Kepner’s murder as dramatic evidence that “Women are not safe around men.” In fact, sibling and step-sibling homicides are extremely rare, providing scant backing for his anti-male tract.

What would Rashid say about the case, just a few years ago, of a nine-year-old boy who was stabbed to death by his twelve-year-old sister? Surely the boy cannot be made out the victimizer in the incident? Or why not refer to the indictment, last month, of a sixteen-year-old girl for the murders of her two parents and grandmother in order to claim that parents are not safe around their daughters?

“Women are Not Safe Around Men” is consistently weakened by similar lapses in logic and accuracy. Early on in the essay, Rashid asserts that the Laken Riley Act, which authorized mandatory detention for illegal immigrants charged with crimes—signed into law after a young woman jogging at the University of Georgia was murdered by a Venezuelan illegal—not only fails to protect women but “likely puts women in even more danger.” Come again? Rashid makes no attempt to defend this piece of bluster.

He also claims that encouraging women to protect themselves with a gun will leave them worse off than ever. He links to an anti-gun article allegedly proving that “when a firearm is present in a domestic violence situation, a woman is 100 times more likely to be killed by that firearm than to successfully use it in self-defense.” The article does not show what Rashid claims—it counts all gun murders of women, not only domestic homicides, and certainly doesn’t show that women are being killed by their own guns, as his statement suggests—but even if Rashid had been able to paraphrase the article accurately, it would prove nothing about the usefulness for women of owning and knowing how to use a gun in self-defense.

But these are relatively minor inaccuracies. Rashid’s central claim about women and men is far more outrageous. In order to make a sweeping assertion about “male violence,” Rashid draws catastrophizing conclusions from two main sources, neither of which proves what he presents it as proving.

The first is the WHO report on violence against women, which shows, according to Rashid, that “one in three women, at minimum, report experiencing sexual assault or rape by men.” In fact, the report “estimates” that 30% (3 in 10, not 1 in 3) of women worlwide have experienced “either physical and/or sexual” violence, “in their lifetime.” Moreover, the WHO’s “estimate” is impossible to take seriously.

Like the now-infamous Mary Koss survey that counted women as rape victims even when they themselves did not consider that they had been raped, the WHO report defines “violence” so broadly as to make the word virtually meaningless. The WHO website’s definition of intimate partner violence, for example, includes non-physical and highly subjective phenomena such as “psychological abuse and controlling behavior.” Sexual violence is also defined with extraordinary elasticity to include any unwanted “sexual act” or “attempt to obtain a sexual act” as well as any “unwanted sexual touching and other non-contact forms.”

When nearly any “act” at all, even one that does not involve touching or that merely constitutes an “attempt” at touching, can be classified as violence or sexual violence, the wonder is that well over 2/3 of women (70%!) have said they never experienced any of it. Even squinting one’s eyes as hard as Rashid invites us to do, it is impossible to see the survey results as proving a “crisis” of violence against women.

The other source is presumably less open to interpretation: government data on homicides—yet Rashid’s use of it is irresponsible and misleading. Rather than looking at the Bureau of Justice statistics himself, Rashid quotes from a feminist source, When Men Murder Women, that draws on the statistics to focus exclusively on women’s murders. Rashid makes much of the (quite unremarkable) fact that most women are killed by people they know. Yes, conflict can lead to violence, and the type of conflict in which women are most likely to be involved is domestic conflict. Men, in contrast, are vulnerable in a larger variety of settings, including domestic and public ones. Men’s homicide victimization rate is over three times that of women, but of course Rashid makes no mention of this fact.

Like all feminists, and consistent with the inflammatory report he cites, Rashid would have us believe that only women are killed in domestic violence incidents. This feminist canard has been repeated so often over the past 50 years that many people accept it unthinkingly. But the actual data tell a different story. In the year 2023, the year covered by the report Rashid cites, there were 1,560 women in America killed by their intimate partners. This is a sad and concerning number, certainly.

But in the same year, there were 896 men killed by their intimate partners, making men 36% of all intimate partner homicides in that year. Overall, there were 15,440 murders of men, whether by strangers, acquaintances, family members, or intimate partners, compared to 4,360 murders of women.

Why are the murders of women a national tragedy not only to be publicly acknowledged but also universally atoned for through men’s ritualized shame and forced restitution, while the murders of men—in significant numbers at women’s hands—are not worth even a mention?

We know why.

In a 2009 meta-study (“Gender symmetry in partner violence,”) American sociologist Murray Strauss debunked decades of feminist mythmaking about intimate partner violence, showing that most such violence was mutual, with women hitting, punching, and shoving as much or more than men (p. 2). (The US Center for Disease Control and the UK-based ManKind Initiative have also consistently found a high prevalence of intimate partner violence against men.) Murray included research showing that an important predictor of whether a woman would suffer abuse from her intimate partner was whether she herself engaged in violence, for “female use of aggression is an important precipitant of male aggression” (p. 15). This common-sense explanation is one that most feminists, including Rashid himself, are highly unlikely to mention as it detracts from the emphasis on helpless female innocence. Murray also found that only a minority of female violence against their intimate partners was defensive in nature (p. 5).

While Rashid makes much of the claim that many experiences of violence are not reported by female victims, he should know from one of his own favored sources, RAINN (the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), that it is men, not women, who are less likely to report abuse. Therefore, estimates of men’s and boys’ experiences of victimization are particularly inadequate; unfortunately, feminist opinion-makers like Rashid have a vested interest in downplaying men’s suffering in order to maintain the fiction of exclusive male culpability.

Are children safe around women?

On the subject of female culpability, one can find gruesome examples aplenty, particularly when it comes to the abuse and killing of children, about which Rashid has nothing to say. Thus his essay avoids the case of the twelve-year-old Ontario boy who was murdered by his two foster mothers, a lesbian couple who confined, tortured, and starved the boy for years while expressing their hatred and resentment of him in text messages to each other.

Has Rashid heard about the Georgia woman who, last fall, beat to death a four-year-old girl in her care, concealing the little girl’s body in the trunk of her car after she was dead? The autopsy revealed a multitude of bruises, lacerations, and scars, evidence of fresh violence and dozens of past injuries.

Was Rashid outraged after an Atlanta woman killed her boyfriend’s toddler son by fracturing his skull, having written to a friend about the boy, “He hates me, and I hate him.”

What are Rashid’s thoughts, if he has any, about the Long Island woman who, along with her adult daughter and mother, was charged with the months-long torture and murder of a seven-year-old girl in her care? The girl’s body had approximately 90 injuries following months of abuse documented by the three women.

How will shaming men and empowering women help the children and babies who are beaten, abused, and murdered by their mothers or other female predators?

To use Rashid’s words, these are documented cases. The data make clear that women are the primary killers and abusers of children. A US government report for the year 2023 (Child Maltreatment 2023, US Department of Health and Human Services) shows mothers as by far the most frequent perpetrators of child fatalities (p. 65).

Moreover, there is some evidence that male sexual violence is linked not to male power or cultural narratives about masculinity but to childhood sexual abuse by a female relative. Are these female abusers the women who are entitled to taxpayer-funded restitution and privileges? Are these the women who do not need “to do better”?

And this is not to mention the multitude of cases of female teachers recently convicted of sexual assault of the boys (and some girls) in their care, some as young as twelve and thirteen years old (see, for example, this New Jersey teacher who sexually assaulted two 14-year-old boys at her school and then aborted the baby she conceived with one of them). I have written on the subject here.

Let’s Stop Denying the Decency of Many Men and the Evil of Some Women

The simple truth, contrary to Rashid’s puerile proclamation, is that both sexes have the capacity to abuse, and it is dishonest to claim that only men constitute a danger and that all of society should be organized around a false narrative of male perfidy and female innocence. Men’s anger and disgust, where it exists, is perfectly justified in the face of the hateful disinformation being spread by Rashid.

It’s not possible to say why Rashid prefers his false narrative. Conviction of moral superiority is a powerful drug. So is the power that feminist posturing brings. Perhaps Rashid glories in the image of himself as the one good man, the man who holds other men accountable and refuses to be silent. Whatever his motive, Rashid’s willingness to caper on the feminist stage, adopting feminist falsehoods and declaiming against men, makes for an absurd, repugnant performance.

The case of Eric Richins, whose wife Kouri was recently convicted of his aggravated murder, is a case study of a man’s entrapment in an abusive and ultimately fatal marriage. Not surprisingly, however, his killing has not been discussed as an example of intimate-partner violence.

Hundreds of men—over one thousand in 2021—are murdered in the United States every year by their wives or girlfriends. But we are told repeatedly that because these murders are only a small percentage of domestic violence murders, they are of no importance.

Eric died in his bed on March 4, 2022, of a lethal dose of fentanyl that his wife Kouri had bought from her house-cleaner, Carmen Lauber. Eric was 39 years old, a successful businessman and father to three young boys. Kouri wanted Eric dead because she needed millions of dollars to save her house-flipping business, and killing him was the only way she could procure it. A pre-marital agreement had ruled out the usual method by which wives access husbands’ funds.

A year after Eric’s death, in 2023, Kouri promoted a children’s book, Are You With Me?, that told of how she was helping her sons grieve the loss of their father. It emerged later that she had hired a ghost-writer to put the book together, hoping to make money from it. She was charged with Eric’s murder two months after the book’s publication.

During her 2026 trial, prosecutors made the case that Kouri had unsuccessfully attempted to kill Eric a few weeks before his actual murder, on Valentine’s Day, 2022, by poisoning a sandwich she had bought for him, also using drugs obtained from her cleaner. When that attempt failed, she had asked her friend for stronger pills (“the Michael Jackson stuff”), claiming they were for a real estate client with back pain.

Various pieces of evidence, including the significant length of time it took Kouri to phone 911 after going into the room where Eric lay dead, her unwillingness to perform CPR (and subsequent lies about it), the many life insurance policies (totaling about $2 million) she had taken out on her husband without his knowledge, many other lies told to Eric and others, and the drastic indebtedness of her house-flipping business, pointed to her as the only viable suspect. She was having an affair with a man who worked for her, whom she had told she wished her husband gone.

She had likely been thinking about Eric’s death for some years.

A Black Widow

If Kouri had been killed by Eric, the usual narrative of gendered abuse, male violence, and women’s vulnerability in the home would almost certainly have been activated immediately. Feminist pundits would have spoken of how society failed an innocent woman; they would have outlined what might have been done to help her in escaping from her abuser. They would have emphasized that domestic violence is an unacceptable scourge.

But when it is a man murdered by a woman, the domestic abuse lobby goes silent—unless there are reasons to blacken the male victim’s name in order to excuse his killer. No domestic violence pundits lament the deaths of men killed by women. Most people have trouble believing that a woman can be a danger to those around them, and even when a woman shows herself a cold-blooded killer, people look for mitigating circumstances to excuse her.

The full picture of what happened to Eric Richins, and whether his death might have been prevented, may never be known. Kouri Richins continues to proclaim her innocence and is vowing to fight her conviction. It’s possible that her bid for a new trial will be successful.

From the little that is known now, it seems that Eric wouldn’t or couldn’t save himself from his wife because he couldn’t sacrifice his three sons to a self-aggrandizing and amoral woman willing to do nearly anything to get what she wanted. For years, it seems, Kouri got away with flagrant crimes because she was small and delicate-looking, and a persuasive advocate for her interests.

She sat through her trial with vivid facial expressions ranging from outraged disbelief to angry contempt, often staring balefully or smirking with performative disdain during testimony by former in-laws or statements by the prosecution or judge. It seems she could not or would not control her expressions for a sympathetic presentation. She has shown no sadness for her husband. The only time she shed tears was when her brothers paid tribute to her goodness in the pre-sentencing hearing.

Murder and attempted murder were not Kouri’s only crimes. She is charged with multiple counts of mortgage fraud, money laundering, issuing bad checks, forgery, communications fraud, and engaging in a pattern of unlawful activity. Part of the prosecution’s murder case involved a document Kouri wrote in jail (“Walk the Dog!”) in which she instructed her brother Ronnie to lie about her husband’s drug-taking and spoke of taking revenge against Eric’s sister Katie and her young daughters. Kouri’s former best friend testified that Kouri swindled her out of $45,000, leaving her penniless and homeless.

Like many manipulative women, Kouri appeared to act without empathy or conscience, and with ruthless determination.

Facts about Male Victims

Feminists like to emphasize the alleged disparity between female victims of intimate partner murder and male victims of intimate partner murder. They tell us that while men are the majority of homicide victims overall, women are the vast majority of intimate partner homicides.

But when one examines the numbers, the differences are not as stark as pundits stress. For example, a Bureau of Justice Statistics page on intimate-partner murder tells us that for the year 2021, “The percentage of females murdered by an intimate partner was 5 times higher than for males.” But speaking of percentages is misleading because there are so many more male victims of homicide generally than female victims of homicide. If one reads further, one can make a proper calculation:

“Of the estimated 4,970 female victims of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter in 2021, data reported by law enforcement agencies indicate that 34% were killed by an intimate partner. By comparison, about 6% of the 17,970 males murdered that year were victims of intimate partner homicide.”

According to these numbers, 1689 women were murdered by their intimate partners in 2021; while 1078 men were murdered by their intimate partners. The discrepancy no longer seems remarkable. Why should we minimize more than 1000 men dead in one year at the hands of their intimate partners simply because a larger percentage of men were killed by strangers, acquaintances, or other family members?

The Child Custody Trap

Eric Richins’ murder was a sensational instance of a crime that, as the above numbers indicate, is far from uncommon, yet is rarely lamented or even noticed.

Men who have reason to fear their wives or girlfriends have few sources of aid. A man who complains about his wife’s viciousness is usually considered a fabulist at best—or, more likely, an abuser himself. If he goes to the police or child welfare agencies about his concerns, he is likely to find himself in jail or undergoing a psychiatric assessment. His wife will almost certainly claim that he is the one endangering his family. He may find himself facing criminal charges and denied contact with his children.

His wife, on the other hand, will be largely insulated from suspicion and given plenty of opportunity to imagine herself a victim.

A writing sample by Kouri Richins, a mini life history, from a women’s retreat she attended in 2021, about a year before she killed Eric, showed her sense of grievance. She had married Eric, seemingly without loving him, in order to have what she had never achieved as a child: family stability and wealth.

She had grown up with a gambling-addict for a mother, who had divorced her alcoholic father (in prison for hitting a police officer with his car while drunk driving) when Kouri was a child. Eric seemed to offer the security and status she longed for. He had a successful stonemasonry business and came from a good family. He was ambitious and hard working. Together, they had three sons in quick succession.

But Kouri found that she wasn’t happy. She wasn’t happy being married, and she wasn’t happy being a mother. Eric apparently wasn’t pleased with her either; he had told her she was selfish. He had had what she called “an emotional affair.” He had also discovered that, over the years, she had stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars from him.

The only thing that seemed to provide satisfaction to Kouri was her real estate business, in which she bought and re-sold homes, eventually owning multiple properties in wealthy neighborhoods where she had once worked as a cleaner. But there was trouble here too because she had taken on far too much debt. Ridding herself of Eric seemed the surest route to freedom and wealth.

It’s not clear when Eric first realized that there was something seriously wrong with his wife. Like most men married to horrors, he was tight-lipped about his plight. He did not proclaim himself a victim. He built his business and took THC gummies to help him sleep at night.

But he did begin to take some action against Kouri. In 2020, after learning that his wife had taken out a $250,000 home equity line of credit on his house without his knowledge, he talked to a lawyer about a divorce, but he did not proceed. Even with evidence of her lies, financial double-dealing, and recklessness, he would never be able to convince a family court judge that Kouri was a danger to her sons, and he did not want to leave them in Kouri’s care even part- time.

He began to take steps to protect them in the event of his death, perhaps expecting that he would not survive the marriage. His sister Amy told police of his belief that Kouri would kill him. He created a living trust to protect his assets from Kouri, with his sister Katie as trustee, making sure that his money would be kept safe for his sons.

Katie said she begged her brother to divorce Kouri when he told her what he was doing. She quoted him that he would “live his life through hell every single day of his life until his youngest was 18 because he believed Kouri was the most evil person he had ever met.”

Eric’s concerns were partially realized. His three boys reported neglect, shaming, and abuse while they were living with their mother after their dad was killed. “You took away my dad for no other reason than greed,” wrote one in his victim impact statement, “and you only cared about yourself and your stupid boyfriends.”

The boys wrote that Kouri frequently locked them in their room or in the basement. She neglected their pets, many of which died due to inadequate care: rabbits and chickens froze to death; goats died without sufficient food and water; a kitten was left out at night to be killed by raccoons; the family dog was not allowed to be taken for walks and would be beaten by Kouri if he peed in the house; Kouri threatened to kill her son’s lizard because the son wouldn’t do something she wanted.

The boys’ victim impact statements paint a portrait of a raging woman indifferent to her children’s well-being; she even taunted one of them by saying he might die if he slept on his dad’s side of the bed. “I do not want you out of jail because I will not feel safe if you are out,” the child wrote. “You have never said sorry for anything you have done to me and my brothers.”

Most people, propagandized by our feminist and gynocentric culture, will continue to believe that women like Kouri are one in a million. But they are not. Other grisly cases of women who murdered husbands in cold blood can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

**

I am surprised that Kouri didn’t save herself from a long prison term by concocting a battered woman defense, which might well have convinced some jurors (or at least one) that she was acting under duress. She might have claimed to have been terrorized by Eric—threatened, bullied, psychologically victimized—claims that worked well for multiple-sex-murderer Karla Homolka, would-be killer Nicole Doucet, and convicted husband-killer Sally Challen.

Feminist advocates would have rallied to Kouri’s side, telling sad stories about female fear and desperation. Such advocates have often defended female killers to save them from prison time. With feminist help and public sympathy, Kouri might be free today, preparing to write another book about surviving trauma. She might devote herself to advocating for other female “victims,” as Lorena Bobbitt did. She might be living with her boys, seeing her new lover, and deciding what to do with the life insurance money.

Perhaps in her arrogance she did not realize where her advantage lay.

Fortunately, most sociopathic women do not murder their husbands, but they often in one way or another make their lives the living hell that Eric named. Our system regularly fails men who find themselves married to such women.

The truth is that we are comfortable with the fiction that only men cause harm. For the most part, we are even comfortable with the harm that women do, as is proved by our abundant willingness to do nothing about it.

Eric didn’t expect otherwise, and neither, alas, will most men who walk the same bitter, hazardous path.

The story is now a common one: an older man disgraced and punished for a “sexist” offence. In an instant, his reputation is shattered. Previously respected in his work, he becomes a target of contempt and hatred. Few defend him in his hour of need, and abundant sympathy is expressed for his alleged victim(s), whose harms are often imaginary.

Last weekend, it was Canadian hockey scout Terry Bonner who was put in the stocks. Bonner is the head scout for the Vancouver Giants, a Canadian junior hockey team that is part of the Western Hockey League, with 23 member clubs that develop talent for the National Hockey League.

Bonner is 85 years old, with over two decades with the Giants. His offence was to tell a pretty young female reporter, Cami Kepke, that she was good-looking. His exact words were (as seen in the clip here, which has now been viewed over 2.5 million times), “Well thank you very much, you good-lookin’ girl.” After that, he chuckled and sat back in his chair, whether in embarrassment or satisfaction it was hard to say, and continued with his answer.

For that moment of indiscretion during an interview—Kepke was congratulating him on the Giants’ third-round draft pick and asking what the player in question, Eli Vickers, would bring to the team—The Giants have been fined $5000 by the Canadian Hockey League for “conduct detrimental to the League.” Meanwhile, unctuous apologies, statements of feminist rectitude, and exultant finger-pointing have broken out all around Bonner. This moment of humiliation may well be Bonner’s last public appearance.

Harsh Punishment

The reaction beggars belief.

Women are now being shoe-horned into every possible position in professional ice hockey, from commentating to coaching and from on-ice reporting to officiating. But their protected status as delicate (yet always valiant) victims can never, it seems, be surrendered, no matter how trivial the incident.

One commentator has called Bonner’s remark to Kepke “workplace harassment,” recommending that Kepke “sue him for every penny he has.” “Gas this dusty old dude,” wrote another, “and kudos to the young lady for keeping focused.”

Bonner’s compliment was deemed “grossly unprofessional and disrespectful,” “inappropriate and creepy,” “shameful” and “f---ing gross.” “What a sick f---. Time to dox this pedo,” enthused one observer, while another anticipated his and other old men’s deaths: “This generation needs to just kick the bucket already.”

Commenters also mocked Bonner’s name (with puns aplenty on boner) and gave free rein to insulting references to his age, allegedly ghoulish smile, and yellowing teeth.

While a few professional writers deplored the pile-on (two good examples are here and here), most seemed eager to sit in judgement. YouTuber Rick Strom put on a long face as he explained that Bonner’s comment was “toxic and wrong” in “objectifying” Kepke and proving that “hockey has a culture problem.” Hockey writer Jonathan Larivee explained primly that “many felt it was inappropriate for a man in Boner’s [sic] position to be making comments of that nature during an on-air segment.”

The Commissioner of the Western Hockey League, Dan Near, lost no time in putting out a press release claiming that “Accountability is a cornerstone value of our League” and brandishing his feminist compliance by asserting that “In this instance, regardless of intent, the remarks are not reflective of the organization’s standards of respect and inclusion.”

Fainting-Couch Victims

It was an exaggerated reaction to a goofy (not ghoulish, ghastly, or creepy) moment of male admiration for female beauty.

I doubt it’s the first time that Ms. Kepke has been made aware of her good looks, and it’s an experience she is sure to survive with self-confidence intact. Even squinting one’s eyes and putting on one’s feminist thinking cap, it is impossible to find anything “detrimental” in a compliment neither threatening nor harassing, by an elderly man with no power over the woman in question.

At age 85, Bonner is reportedly the longest serving scout in franchise history, recipient of a WHL Distinguished Service Award for 2014-15, and certainly entitled, one would have thought, to a modicum of tolerance.

But even in the he-man world of ice hockey, feminist domination of public opinion is now near-total, such that any remark at all, no matter how kindly or innocuous, can and will be used against a formerly well-regarded man.

If she had wanted to, the reporter at the center of the controversy might have issued a public statement on social media, making clear that she held no grudge against Bonner, was not bothered by his remark, and did not think that a formal sanction was appropriate. This would, at least, have been some comfort to Bonner and might have influenced the Canadian Hockey League. Instead, she has maintained silence. At least she hasn’t (yet) played the victim.

In a case I covered years ago, a 28-year-old female graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley claimed that she struggled to get out of bed for a year after a professor in her department confessed that he found her attractive. She claimed that after Professor Blake Wentworth grabbed her hand and said “I’m so attracted to you,” she experienced “extreme fatigue, unexpected body aches and debilitating anxiety.” Wentworth was eventually fired for sexual harassment.

In another extraordinary case, a biology professor who had endowed buildings and scholarships at UC Irvine, giving over ten million dollars of his own money to help the school, was barred from campus and had his name removed from all the research facilities and fellowships he had funded after a group of women complained that his Old World style of kissing them on both cheeks and giving them lavish and sexually-tinged compliments had made them feel disrespected and demeaned.

“I just learned that women don’t like to be told they’re beautiful,” he was reported to have said to one of his victims, “But I know you don’t mind.” He was 84 years old when he was informed that he was no longer welcome at the university he had supported.

Shaming Older Men

Sexual shaming is practiced with particular fury against older men, and not only because men like Bonner, born around the time of Pearl Harbor, raised in the pre-feminist 1950s, and working in the relatively sheltered world of high-level ice hockey, may not have been aware of rapidly hardening feminist orthodoxies.

Older men make satisfying targets. They are hated for having lived at a time when men were not as cowed before women as they are today; and they sometimes, as in Bonner’s case, speak out of that older tradition when men complimented women and women accepted with good grace. The good grace can no longer be depended on, and the men’s obliviousness maddens some ideologues, who can hardly believe that such dinosaurs still roam the earth.

Moreover, the evident physical frailty of older men arouses the killer instinct in some men and women, perhaps not unlike the manner in which wolves will turn on a wounded or ailing pack leader. For women, the feeling is exacerbated by a conviction that the man deserves his come-down, that there is poetic justice in seeing a once-mighty patriarch brought low.

Simone De Beauvoir wrote extensively, in The Second Sex, of women’s contempt for aging men, noting that women who hold stereotyped views of men do not forgive signs of male vulnerability. “A fallen god,” she declared, “is not a man; it is an imposture” (p. 695). A persecuted weak man becomes a stand-in for the woman’s vengeance against all men, against the world, and against herself. Speaking of women’s dislike of their often older husbands, Beauvoir noted how “[the wife] witnesses his decline with silent complacency: it is her revenge” (p. 637).

At least some of the bitter vindictiveness expended on Harvey Weinstein (with admittedly more serious accusations) may be related to the scorn heaped on Bonner and other aging men. Women who had once been eager to hang on Weinstein’s arm and shower him with affection, whether real or feigned, later lined up to denounce him when they perceived weakness. In interviews and in court, they were merciless in detailing his physical deformities and sexual inadequacy.

Many #MeToo casualties (Matt Lauer, Garrison Keillor, Al Franken, Leon Wieseltier, and Michael Oreskes, to name only a few) were in their 60s or 70s when, though not charged or investigated by police for any crime, they were publicly denounced and ousted from prestigious positions on the basis of years- or decades-old claims of sexual misconduct. Disgust at masculine weakness is a feature of anti-male bigotry that is almost never acknowledged, but the results are often remarkably cruel.

Feminism is nowhere uglier than in its blithe dehumanization of those it deems oppressors, especially at the moment when the once powerful and respected are recognized as vulnerable. Advocates on both the political Left and Right are often easily summoned to assist in their destruction.

Cases like Terry Bonner’s show that the more assiduously feminists’ complaints and demands are complied with, the more pitiless and maniacal they become.

I had to scrap an earlier essay I’d written once I actually looked at the data.

News media have been abuzz with the alleged results of a survey of young people in the United Kingdom, ages 18-30, that found a growing gap between men and women, including in their perception of the opposite sex. While a super-majority of men said they had a positive view of women, only a minority of women said the same about men.

Pollster Scarlet Maguire, whose research company conducted the survey for the New Statesman, explained in interview that “72% of young men have a favorable view of young women. Only 50% of women under 30 have a favorable view. Under 25, it’s just 35% of young women who have a favorable view [of men].”

Indoctrinated young women really do, it seems, prefer the bear.

Or perhaps news- and opinion-makers want us to believe that to be so.

The Doomer Outlook

In a video with a classic question-begging title (“Why do young women hate men?”) Maguire discussed her findings with New Statesman reporter Anoosh Chakelian and author Emily Lawford, who had interviewed young women for a related article.

If not exactly ecstatic over the alleged findings, the three women certainly did not seem distressed. They called the findings “surprising” and “fascinating.” Langford laughed as she described how many of the young women she interviewed had been influenced by online content declaiming against “toxic masculinity” and jeering about “manufactured male victimhood.” She smiled in quoting young women’s conviction that “Men can be so horrible and you can’t trust them.”

None of the pundits expressed concern about the effects on young men—or society generally—of such mistrust or dislike. None of them called out the pervasiveness of feminist hatred in so many op/eds, news items, government reports, academic articles, books, movies, public advertisements, political slogans, influencer statements, online debates, and works of anti-male propaganda. None of them offered a prescription for the women’s negativity, resentment, intolerance, or self-pity.

The implication was that men and society at large would have to work harder to win these women back.

Within a few days, a flood of articles trumpeted the findings. “Only a third of young women hold positive view of men,” blared The Independent, alleging ungrammatically that “Findings show women under 30 are three times as likely to hold a negative view of men compared to the other way around.”

Others exaggerated the data for a more dramatic message: “New Poll Finds British Women Largely Unsatisfied with Men,” claimed Inside Success magazine, explaining that “Only 11% of women in the UK hold a positive view of men. What does this mean? And can the younger generation set a better tone?”

At least one article sought a silver lining, claiming that some young men were turning to older women for sexual companionship—or, at least, fun and non-condemnation. The Revolver argued that “Angry young women are driving Gen Z men straight into the arms of ‘cougars’…”. Noting that “a whole lot of young women have turned into miserable little grievance mongers,” the article alleged that “Young men are turning their attention toward women who are less hostile and more open to actual affection.”

Joseph Cotto at American Thinker (“Young, Angry Leftist Women are Destroying Britain and America”) was equally concerned with the political and social effects, noting women’s far-left opinions on issues such as censorship, slavery reparations, and income redistribution. He also highlighted the troubling implications for family formation:

“Just 18 percent of women under 30 feel very positive about men, compared with 38 percent of men who feel very positive about women. More than 40 percent of young women say men do not share their understanding of consent, while only 25 percent of men say the same about women.

Young women are twice as likely as young men to say they do not want children: 15 percent versus 8 percent. Among white women under 30 the number rises to 20 percent. One in four young women call differing political views a red flag in a partner. Sixty percent would struggle to date someone who disagrees on Israel-Palestine or on Donald Trump. Seventy-four percent say they could not stay with someone who rejects their views on social justice.”

He summed up a gloomy forecast: “Women feel profoundly unhappy, distrust men, loathe their country, and view motherhood as optional at best.”

All in all, the women so widely reported on from the survey seem to have become the perfect foot soldiers for intersectional feminism, consumed by grievance, incapable of male-positive empathy, stewing in self-pity and love for the oppressed ‘other,’ and outraged when their view of the world is not sufficiently affirmed.

What the Data Actually Show

But there was a problem with the barrage of commentary.

Though it did capture signs of political radicalization, the spreadsheet data supplied by the Merlin Strategy Polling Company simply did not support the bombshell claim that young women hate men.

For one thing, the survey didn’t ask whether women hate men. It asked whether their view of men was positive or negative.

I know a lot of men who have a somewhat negative view of women in general but who don’t hate them in the least. Being dissatisfied with the opposite sex, wanting them to be different, or feeling unappreciated by them: all these are quite common among young people and do not equate to hatred.

Moreover, women’s opinions, rather more than men’s, are profoundly shaped by media, peer group, and influencers. In our current anti-male environment, in which feminist leaders regularly disparage and excoriate men, presenting them as both threat and nuisance, it makes sense that at least some women would claim a negative view of men.

Given that context, the numbers from the poll are actually rather mild.

The percentage of women in the survey who claimed to have a “very negative” view of men was 3%. Another 18% claimed that their view of men was “quite [i.e., less than “very”] negative.” That is 21% of women reporting a negative view. Nearly 4 out of 5 women did NOT report a negative view.

Maguire said in the New Statesman interview that women under 25 had a much more negative view than the slightly older (25-30) cohort, but the spreadsheet data for this younger group is not available on the Merlin Strategy website (see “Polling For the New Statesman”).

Overall, exactly half of the women surveyed reported a “very positive” (18%) or “quite positive” (32%) view of the opposite sex. 26% said that their view was “neither positive nor negative.” 3% said they were not sure.

Given what young women continually read or hear about male prejudice and violence, this result (76% positive or neutral view) is hardly terrible. Imagine if we could turn off the spigot of hateful feminist misrepresentation. Imagine if “gender studies” was a genuine social science that saw men as human beings deserving of understanding. Imagine if the leaders of churches, schools, political organizations, newspapers, corporations, and media companies spent half as much effort portraying men positively as they do women.

But they don’t, and a remarkable asymmetry does exist between men’s declared view of women (72% “very positive” or “quite positive”) and women’s reported views, with men nearly 50% more likely to have a positive opinion.

That finding is open to a variety of interpretations. Women know that having a negative view of men is normal and even expected in our society. Men know that having a negative view of women can lead to a police visit. Perhaps the surveyed men decided not to risk a hate crime charge.

Or perhaps men interpreted the question based on an idealized concept of womanhood rather than actual personal interactions. Perhaps men are simply more generous and forgiving than women, more desirous and hopeful. The survey language is too simplistic to allow for more precise conclusions.

Suffice it to say that the survey does not support a claim of sweeping anti-male female hatred.

Other responses by women involving attitudes toward men were also not catastrophic.

A significant majority of women (59%) thought that “most” or a “reasonable amount” of men shared their values and political views.

A majority (51%) felt at least “somewhat” or “very safe” around men. A quarter more were neutral on the issue.

A majority (52%) “somewhat” or “strongly” agreed that they could trust men. Nearly a quarter more (24%) were neutral on trust.

A majority of women (51%) felt “understood” by men. Another 24% were neutral.

A large majority (66%) felt they could speak with men about politics. Another 24% were neutral.

A majority (53%) felt that men respected them. 24% were neutral.

On all of these subjects involving female attitudes and feelings, only about one in five women had a negative view of male peacefulness, companionability, respectfulness, trustworthiness, and understanding.

According to the survey, near-equal numbers of young women and men are interested in getting married (or being in a civil partnership), and high numbers want children. 82% of women would like to find a life partner, and 75% said they would like to have children. The number of men wanting children (80%) was somewhat higher, but the difference does not seem staggering.

Overall, the picture of the sexes that emerged from the survey is quite positive: a majority expressed interest in each other, believe they hold shared values, look forward to a life together, want to have children, and feel respected and understood by the other. Only a minority of young women have chosen negativity.

Clearly, the survey results should lay to rest any notion that men have been radicalized into extreme or hateful views of women.

A minority of women, on the other hand, do have regressive and dangerous views of men, and these should be addressed with government-funded programs, public outreach, social media campaigns, and male-positive statements by leaders. Unfortunately, such a productive response is unlikely.

**

Why wasn’t this more positive view of gendered responses and beliefs at least part of the story that the New Statesmen pundits chose to tell and the rest of the media to broadcast?

Clearly, many feminists are emotionally and ideologically attached to the idea that women dislike men and don’t see a future with them, that they are angry and alienated. Some feminists want this to be true and try to make it true.

Female anger and unhappiness assure a basis for feminist careers, advocacy, reporting, social activism, and demands of government; they guarantee abundant future funding for hundreds of feminist groups. Feminist lawyers, journalists, advocates, social workers, teachers, academics, and corporate leaders all profit from female bitterness and discontent.

Men’s advocates and anti-feminists are not equally attached to the idea that women dislike men: to the contrary, most of us want men and women to work together in fruitful partnerships. Some of us, however (yours truly included), may suffer from confirmation bias and gloomy prognostication.

The truth, if the survey results can be trusted, is that despite everything wrong with our cultural messaging, social policies, and laws today, especially around sexuality, marriage, divorce, and child custody, men are still overwhelmingly positive in their attitudes toward women, and women are less intransigently negative than contemporary phenomena often make it seem.

Imagine how much better things could be if leaders of our society would work consistently to help women see all the reasons for respect, care, admiration, fellow feeling, gratitude and love for men. Imagine how much stronger our social fabric would be if expressions of anti-male hostility were condemned as ugly and wrong instead of celebrated as bold and progressive.

We could be looking forward to a future that even the feminists couldn’t spoil. Until then, let’s not jump to the worst possible conclusion.

**

The case of Matt Taylor and #Shirtstorm was the last straw for me.

In 2014, a chorus of angry women and their male enablers roasted British astrophysicist Matt Taylor for wearing an “inappropriate” shirt for a historic occasion. Taylor was part of a European Space Agency team, the Rosetta Mission, that sent a probe four billion miles through space to land on a comet, a journey of ten years.

But that achievement was overshadowed by Taylor’s alleged masculine insensitivity. To discuss his team’s success, he had worn a bowling shirt decorated with images of scantily-clad gamer-style female characters. The shirt had been made for Taylor as a birthday present by a female friend.

The doyennes of social media went berserk, charging that the shirt was a symbol of sexism in science, with men like Taylor living emblems of the not-so-subtle hostility that was keeping women out STEM research.

The outrage grew until the comet was essentially forgotten amidst the frenzy of hysteria.

At one point, Verge magazine published a headline emphasizing the infantile equivalency: “I don’t care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet, your shirt is sexist and ostracizing.” The sub-heading drove the point home: “That’s one small step for man, three steps back for humankind.”

A number of the commentators hadn’t even looked closely enough at the shirt to see its design.

“The fact that a scientist of any gender, but especially a man, would think it’s a good idea to wear a shirt covered in naked women while representing a major space agency and a significant research project is appalling,” wrote one, failing to realize that none of the characters was naked, “and clearly, he had no idea that he was engaging in exactly the kind of casual sexism that drives women away from STEM.”

Astrophysicist Katie Mack was adamant that “a shirt featuring women in lingerie isn’t appropriate for a broadcast if you care about women in STEM.” I don’t know about Mack, but most women do not wear leather for their night’s sleep.

Even after Taylor issued a tearfully contrite apology, Verge’s gender whiner was not satisfied, criticizing the European Space Agency for allowing Taylor to wear a shirt that “demean[ed] 50 percent of the world’s population.”

When a brilliant man’s accomplishment can be eclipsed by poor-me grandstanding of such embarrassing proportions, we are witnessing a profoundly destructive phenomenon. And there was no backlash of women telling their crazy sisters to leave the man alone.

Unfortunately, Matt Taylor was not the first and has certainly not been the last. Why are so many women drawn to indulge in this kind of nonsense? We already know why men allow it.

Female Power and the End of Innovation

Recent studies and discussions have raised the alarm about female power. Pundits such as Helen Andrews, Cory Clark, and Bo Winegard (see my discussion and links here) have made the evidence-based case that women in general are not as committed as men in general to objective excellence and the pursuit of truth. Women overall prefer equity, inclusion, and compassion for victims.

When women are the majority in an organization, the values of the organization shift away from meritocracy and toward group consensus, the suppression of dissent, and protection of the vulnerable.

These trends strongly suggest that women are not likely, as a group, to uphold and maintain the traditional foundations of civilizational flourishing: equality before the law, free speech, truth-seeking, competitive excellence, and rigorous debate. All of these, in fact, are already in evident decline—undermined, attacked, flouted and fought against by feminist lawyers, advocates, academics, judges, journalists, teachers, social workers, political leaders, legislators, and CEOs.

The concerns raised by Andrews and others are important, but behind that discussion lies a more fundamental question about women’s role in civilization, namely: do women build civilization?

Do women as a sex—leaving aside a relatively small number of extraordinary individuals—have it in them to compete and innovate at the same level as men?

Are women driven to master nature and solve intricate technical, logistical, structural or methodological problems?

Are they obsessed with the minutiae of numbers, systems, and abstract ideas to the extent that many men are?

Are they willing to sacrifice decades of their lives in order to become the first or the best in a scientific, philosophical, or artistic endeavor?

The answer is no.

Men as System-Builders

Social psychologist Roy Baumeister explored the relevant research in Is There Anything Good About Men (2010), a cautiously non-feminist book in which the author readily asserted that he, like most everyone else, prefers women to men. Women are more lovable, he claimed, and more pleasant to be around.

But he was not quite willing to accept the now-mainstream thesis that women can replace men in all areas of society.

His thesis is summed up in the book’s sub-title: How Cultures Flourish By Exploiting Men. Men are the foot soldiers of civilization as well as its leaders. They are the ones who make things work or make new things.

Men are the ones who must prove their utility to society. Their drive to be useful has powered centuries of back-breaking work, risk-taking, tool-building, self-sacrifice, and outstanding performance of a sort that has never been expected of women (and still isn’t).

Women in the main tend not to work as hard as men to succeed because they don’t have to. Women developed different strengths and tendencies.

Women’s strength, for good and ill, is in the inter-personal arena: not only in caring for those who are weaker but also in being cared for by those who are stronger. Women are good at reading people’s emotions and desires, and at expressing their own.

Men are not rewarded for expressing emotions and desires; men are oriented to acting, often under pressure to perform competently, in large groups and systems.

“The female brain,” according to Baumeister, “tends to be geared toward empathy, which includes emotional sensitivity to other people and deep interest in understanding them and their feelings. In contrast, the male brain is oriented toward understanding systems, which means figuring out general principles of how things operate and function together, and this applies to inanimate objects as much as social systems” (p. 85).

Baumeister supports his argument in a book-length exploration of men’s system-building. He shows how men are driven to work with, and in competition with, other men to make it possible for large numbers of human beings to live together in complex, efficient networks. The large social institutions that have characterized western cultures, from the army to churches, from corporations to unions, and from market places to police forces, give evidence of men’s system-building.

Women can work well within the systems that men devise, but they rarely devise new systems on their own. This is not because women are, on average, less intelligent than men (except at the very highest levels). It is because women’s motivations and sources of satisfaction are generally different from men’s.

Women’s contribution to culture in nurturing children, providing companionship, and looking after the family home has been a crucial one. But it does not drive innovation or invent new technologies.

Even the most intelligent women are rarely compelled, as highly intelligent men often are, to pursue scientific and other breakthroughs with the single-minded focus necessary for greatness. Often, as in the case involving Matt Taylor discussed above, many women do not seem to value or understand the nature and importance of such breakthroughs.

Women’s main contribution in the male civilizational sphere has been to lobby for admission and then to complain about, and work to undermine, the male culture of competitive excellence.

Innovators Do Not Need Encouragement and Special Advantages

Conservative author Kenneth Minogue addressed this subject more than two decades ago in his still-relevant essay, “How Civilizations Fall” (2001), in which he contended that feminism has constituted a potent assault on western civilization in its insistence that representation matters more than achievement, inclusiveness more than merit.

For Minogue, the feminist assumption that women are owed (at least) 50% of all desirable positions has fundamentally damaged the meritocratic ideal at the core of western culture. Western culture distinguished itself historically through its appreciation for achievement.

For centuries, despite some restrictions, brilliant women were able to make contributions to their societies. These were never on the scale of men’s contributions. As Minogue puts it, “Women can do marvelous things with a house, but they do need the house to be there in the first place.”

Minogue considers and rejects the feminist claim that western women were less innovative than men because, historically, they had fewer opportunities. He points out that the special pleading of that argument is itself a kind of refutation.

“It may be, of course, that as the feminists sometimes claim, this [lesser female innovation] is because [women] were never encouraged to engage in these activities. But to need encouragement, to depend on models to follow, is precisely not to have a capacity to innovate.”

The endless feminist demand for encouragement—as well as for special workshops, male mentoring, material assistance, role models, the hectoring and exclusion of any man who steps out of line or offends a woman, loads of government funding, media cheerleading, and more than half a century of propaganda attesting to female brilliance and male oafishness—is itself proof that women are not, generally, inclined to innovate. Persons who are driven to create do not need special grants and non-stop media propaganda . They will create if given the chance.

Worse than inability is the deep resentment that seems to characterize many women’s response to male greatness. Minogue reports, “I once heard a feminist put it this way: ‘There’s no such thing as a great mind.’” Contempt for the achievements of men—and lack of understanding of their significance—is one of many toxic features of feminism.

Finally, Please Stop

How many more decades are we willing to wait to see if women’s civilization-building capacities develop? How much more encouragement, confidence-building, and taxpayer-funded financial assistance—while many able men are forced to sit on the sidelines, or worse—are we willing to give to “equality”? And what kind of equality requires such a long-term relinquishing of male opportunity and fair return?

A society that is willing to forego the ingenuity and obsessive pursuit of excellence that have been the primary domains of men is a society that will steadily lose its competitiveness. It will collapse under the weight of non-productivity and exploitation.

For centuries, women were assumed to be the nurturers of the world, praised for their tenderness and ability to create spaces of emotional comfort and renewal. These enabled men to do their work well. Now, large numbers of women have withdrawn these qualities from the home, attempting to apply them to the outer worlds of business, politics, social work, academic research, and the law. They lavish care on those that feminism deems worthy while withholding it from those deemed privileged or oppressive.

Many feminist women’s indifference to the achievements of western civilization and outright preference, in some cases, for the west’s enemies may be an intuitive recognition of the civilizational vulnerability that their sex exploited and furthered.

Whether those who love the west will have the will and wherewithal to curtail the damage remains to be seen. But let us at least stop deluding ourselves.

It’s a version of the standard Jewish joke:

Woman #1: “Men in this country are TERRIBLE!”

Woman #2: “And there are so few of them to date!”

The Free Press Interview

Dr. Debra Soh is the author of Sextinction: The Decline of Sex and the Future of Intimacy (2026). Last month, she discussed her findings with Rafaela Siewert of The Free Press in a wide-ranging interview that touched on men’s and women’s experiences of dating apps, social media, AI companions, OnlyFans, online pornography, and sex dolls.

The conversation begins as a general discussion of what Soh calls the sex recession.

Rather quickly, however, a predictable bias begins to show: the main focus is male romantic and sexual failure, and what this means for women. Almost nothing is said about female behaviors and feminist policies that have affected men.

Neither Soh nor Siewert seems consciously or heartlessly anti-male. Aside from a few giggles at men’s expense, both women express some sympathy for men’s dating plight. But both women are so much more comfortable talking about male inadequacies than female ones that the conversation can do little more than rehearse a familiar catalogue of complaints about modern guys, who are allegedly taking the easy route to sexual release. Their silence on the subject of women is deafening.

The Sex Recession

The discussion begins from two rather tenuous premises. The first is that both men and women are having less sex than in previous times (though men significantly less than women), a decline that is causing loneliness, depression, and social anomie. The second premise is that the sex drought has come about unintentionally because of new technologies and circumstances. Soh explains that men have been discouraged by the experience of dating app rejection. In consequence, they have turned to various substitutes, all of them potentially harmful.

But are people really having less sex than in the past, and how could such a contention be measured? It’s certainly true that a number of feminist commentators have, often censoriously and smugly, warned that men should have less (lustful, degrading, and coercive) sex. But do we know how much sex people had one hundred, or two hundred, years ago? Roy Baumeister, for one, has argued that it was the norm for most men of the past to lack sexual opportunity and that modern men generally are better off than their (sex-starved) forefathers (Is There Anything Good About Men? pp. 268-269).

Further, Soh draws a straight line between sex and intimacy. Does more or less sex necessarily correlate to more or less intimacy? Given the great difficulty in knowing the sexual experiences of ordinary people even in the fairly recent past, let alone centuries ago, it’s a large claim without substantial support. In the end, though, it probably doesn’t matter: it’s enough that some people feel the lack.

The second contention, however, about the deep reasons for modern loneliness and social isolation, is more consequential. For Soh and Seiwert—and for many other pundits across the ideological spectrum—what has happened in the past few decades has involved structural changes in the economy and society for which no one is to blame, and which no one would think of trying to change.

DEI hiring and the advancement of women into corporate, academic, and professional positions have put men at an economic disadvantage in relation to women, who continue to seek successful and wealthy men for mates. Too many men find themselves largely shut out of opportunities for sex with choosy, high-status women, and these men have withdrawn into hopelessness and, in some cases, misogynistic bitterness or laziness.

Male laziness, in fact, is a frequently sounded theme in the discussion, often with the claim that it is bad for women. As Soh phrases it, “If you’re watching porn regularly, especially as a man, it’s going to affect how you view women.”

This is a standard feminist charge that has never been, to my knowledge, satisfactorily proven. More importantly, the entire causal explanation is inadequate—though useful in mentioning the rank unfairness of DEI hiring (something feminists denied for decades). Not a word is said about the massive feminist assault on the male psyche that has been ongoing for the past century, increasing in tempo and viciousness in the past sixty years: fishes and bicycles, bathing in male tears, men not dying fast enough from Covid, heterofatalism, and many more. To rephrase Soh, if you’re consuming feminist propaganda regularly, especially as a woman, it’s going to affect how you view men.

Consequences of Feminist Revolution

It’s not just attitudes that have undergone a tectonic shift. Laws and policies have profoundly changed relations between the sexes. The meaning of sexuality itself has been altered by feminist theory and legal practice. To a degree never possible before, sexual relations—whether casual or marriage-traditional—have become fraught with existential danger for men, potentially involving social ostracism, job loss, intolerable financial burden, the judicial theft of one’s children, and incarceration.

A woman can put a pin in a condom (or collect sperm from a discarded one) and force an unsuspecting man to pay support for a child he never intended to father and whom he may barely be allowed to know (if at all). Many men end up financially supporting children who aren’t theirs as a result of a paternity fraud colluded in by state governments. They can and do regularly have their children taken from them, as Stephen Baskerville has eloquently explained, through no fault of their own. They can be and regularly are fired from their jobs or expelled from college for vague or non-existent gendered transgressions. Despite all this, they are expected to “acknowledge” their privilege and make amends by contributing their tax dollars to more and more programs to advantage and empower women.

These conditions did not appear out of nowhere. They were driven by the so-called women’s movement, implemented and enforced by western governments, harped on ad nauseum by feminist journalists, and accepted as necessary and good by large numbers of people.

#MeToo demonstrated the willingness of millions of women (and men) to watch men’s lives destroyed on the basis of (often decades-old) accusations. The Brett Kavanagh hearings showed how a vaguely-remembered or hallucinated long-ago teenage escapade could be turned into a reputation- and career-imperiling slander. The Harvey Weinstein scandal showed how women can turn on a man once he is no longer useful to their careers.

Countless other high-profile allegations have demonstrated how easy it is for a woman to destroy a man’s reputation by accusing him of harassment, assault, or rape. The cases are constantly before our eyes while, at the same time, women lament their lack of power and demand that men be held more stringently to account for their alleged misdeeds.

Whether powerful or powerless, rich or poor, married or single, celibate or playboy, any man who has been paying attention knows that his life is not his own. If a woman wishes, she can summon the power of the state to interrogate, investigate, arrest, hold, charge, try, convict, and imprison him, and there is very little he can do to save himself. Due process of law, bodily autonomy, and parental rights have all been eroded by the feminist juggernaut in a world in which male sexuality is assumed to be abusive; and female malfeasance is both denied and encouraged.

No wonder some men are wary of sexual or even friendly involvement.

Lazy Men and the Dolls Who Love Them

But such issues are barely addressed or even acknowledged by Siewert and Soh. The main import of the Free Press interview is the failure of men: their hapless loss of status and, it seems, of will. The thing that women demanded men offer—to work with women as equals, to assist women to enter and rise in various professions—is now pointed to as men’s undoing: unfortunate but irreversible. The modern woman finds, understandably according to Soh, that low-income men have little to offer in terms of material and emotional security.

At the same time, men are retreating from women, failing to make the required effort, falling back on the alternatives possible in a technologically-sophisticated, sex-saturated culture. They masturbate to porn rather than try to find a girlfriend. They pay for OnlyFans access or for an (alarmingly realistic) AI companion.

Such artificial outlets offer the man everything he wants, according to Soh, with no effort required: he need not get a good job, keep himself clean, learn the social graces and other behaviors that are pleasing to women. Moreover, looking at naked women online makes his view of women unrealistic. He expects too much of potential female mates and offers too little himself.

On the subject of women’s behaviors, we learn little. What about women who use sex toys that mimic the shape and action of a penis? Are they not also getting what they want without putting in the work of being a good partner? What about women who allow themselves to become grotesquely obese? What about women who refuse sex to their husbands or boyfriends? Are they also selfish and lazy?

As usual, men are the ones criticized in the discussion, the ones whose behaviors are named as ill-advised, damaging, or dangerous to women. Female porn consumption—not to mention female porn creation—never comes up. From the discussion, one would hardly know that women too are interested in viewing pornography or in AI companions or sexual aids. Women are not criticized for any failures, sexual manipulation, or mercenary desires. They want what they want, and that’s the end of it.

To be fair, Siewert and Soh are less condemnatory of men than many other pundits. They recognize some men’s lack of options. But they have difficulty maintaining a focus on men’s needs and desires; women’s needs and demands keep moving to the fore. Men’s choices are repeatedly discussed not as evidence of male pain or of their rational decision-making, but as signs of male irresponsibility, or worse.

On the subject of sex dolls, Soh claims that research shows that a man who imagines a relationship with his doll is a public safety risk, with a significant likelihood of participating in “violence against women and girls.” I have no idea how evidence could possibly confirm this thesis.

What is clear is that a conversation that seemed to begin as an unbiased attempt to understand how sexual intimacy is changing for men and women quickly drifted into a standard series of criticisms of male behavior in which everything men do is potentially damnable.

It’s not hard to think of reforms that would make work life, dating, marriage, and parenting less hazardous for men and could contribute to a renaissance of male-female trust: an immediate end to all DEI measures; a public reckoning around #MeToo’s ongoing witch-hunts; the dismantling of weaponizable sexual harassment policies in the workplace and universities; the return of due process and the presumption of innocence to claims of sexual assault; the reform of divorce and child custody to remove bias against men and fathers; the removal of feminist propaganda and advocacy from all schools, universities, newsrooms, and media, to be replaced by rational discussions of sexual etiquette and female accountability; and the encouragement of a culture of love and respect for men both in the bedroom and at large.

But that would be an entirely different kind of conversation.

Siewert and Soh don’t have any of the foregoing on their radar not because they are anti-male—I assume they like men generally—but because woman-centered and feminist-compliant assumptions are deeply embedded in mainstream thought. Until that changes, men are right to protect themselves and seek their best interests in whatever way they see fit.

Popular perception has it that just over a century ago, women in the Anglosphere fought long and hard for the right to vote. To gain that right, according to the prevailing story, they battled contempt and misogyny from entitled men.

An examination of the history of this period in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries shows that both the villains and the heroines of the story are false constructs employed to whip up anger at men and faith in the goodness of feminism.

The reality, as always, is more interesting and fraught.

Did Women Know Enough of National Affairs to Vote on Them?

In brief, it is true that some men did not believe that women should vote at the federal level, and some of their arguments sound condescending to a feminist ear.

Brian Harrison’s Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain (1978), published at a time when it was still just possible, with some careful hedging and pro-feminist protestation, to write a fair historical overview, has chronicled the primary anti-suffrage contentions.

Opponents of women’s right to vote argued that most women lacked even rudimentary knowledge of national and international affairs, usually too preoccupied with domestic life to give politics the attention it required. They also lacked, it was alleged, the calm practical-mindedness and rational outlook necessary for political decision-making. One anti-suffragist claimed that “The point of hysterical emotion and unreason is always nearer with women” (quoted in Harrison, Separate Spheres, p. 80)

Some anti-suffragists worried that women’s much-touted emotionalism would lead them to vote for social policies that would massively expand the size of government, increasing both government debt and legislative interference in citizens’ private lives (Separate Spheres, pp. 80-84). Others believed that the women who led the suffrage campaigns were motivated primarily by antagonism towards men, and that the entire campaign for the vote was designed to drive a wedge between the sexes.

These assessments were hardly inaccurate. As British journalist Wilma Meikle pointed out in Towards a Sane Feminism, which she published in 1917, many of her fellow suffragists’ were filled with an all-consuming anti-male fury: “These were the women who regarded the majority of men as conscious and willful oppressors” (pp. 84-85). Some such as Theosophist Frances Swiney developed theories of men as deficient non-females: in her 1907 book Bar of Isis, Swiney castigated “a selfish, lustful, diseased manhood” that “sought in woman only a body,” and she characterized semen as a type of pollution.

In response to feminism’s rampant animus (see Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments [1848] and Christabel Pankhurst’s The Great Scourge and How to End It [1913]), anti-suffrage societies formed in the years prior to the First World War, attracting many active members.

They promoted the complementarity of men and women, alleging that women’s interests were already well represented by male voters and would not be furthered by forcing women into electoral politics. Their perspective was based not on dislike of women or contempt for their properly-directed abilities, but on a particular vision of the social good.

Significantly, many of those who warned against the consequence of female enfranchisement were women themselves. For these women, domestic responsibilities were a deep source of self-respect. They claimed emphatically that most women did not want the vote and that involvement in political life would harm women’s ability to make their most important contribution to family and national well-being. Long suppressed by historians, their views remain relevant a century later.

The Narrow Historical Window of Alleged Male Privilege

Viewed historically, woman suffrage was not the clear-cut issue of universal male privilege and universal female disenfranchisement that feminists then and now would have us believe. It was not the case that men had been able to vote throughout history simply because they were male or that women had never been able to vote simply because they were female.

Many American states, for example, allowed women to vote for state legislators in the years or decades before the ratification of the 19^th Amendment. Some even allowed them to cast their ballot for President. Depending on the state, some women were able, in the later 19^th century, to vote in local, particularly schoolboard, elections.

On the other side, men’s right to vote had been limited for various reasons. Property requirements restricted white American men’s ability to vote federally until 1856. Black men were not eligible to vote until 1870. A majority of British men lacked the right to vote until the later nineteenth century, and even at the start of the First World War in 1914, when feminist women were making their angriest demands, approximately 40% of British men, poor and property-less, still did not have the right to vote.

In brief, the nineteenth century was a period of rapidly expanding democratic reforms that saw increasing numbers of men enfranchised. Voting rights would, in time, almost certainly have been extended to women even without the massive displays of feminine fury and wounded self-love of suffrage activists.

Women’s Arguments Against the Vote

Arguments against extending the vote to women were most often based on the claim that women were in general less suited to politics by temperament, interests, and experience, and that women’s most important contribution to their society—and to their own interests, ultimately—was made through care for family and non-partisan social advocacy, a set of “trusts,” that were, as one anti-suffrage organization put it, “as important and sacred as any that exist on earth.”

Historian Julia Bush, in Women Against the Vote (2007) has shown that anti-suffragist women believed with good reason that they spoke for the vast majority of women (exact figures on women’s suffrage views being impossible to determine, see pp. 3-4). After polling women across neighborhoods, anti-suffragists insisted that most women were not interested in partisan politics, preferring to direct their energies to areas of long-standing feminine concern such as child-rearing, public health, and public morality.

The Illinois Association Opposed to the Extension of Suffrage to Women phrased it in the following manner in its 1909 petition:

We feel that our present duties fill up the whole measure of our time and ability, and are such as none but ourselves can perform. Our appreciation of their importance requires us to protest against all efforts to infringe upon our rights by imposing upon us those obligations which cannot be separated from suffrage, but which, as we think, cannot be performed by us without the sacrifice of the highest interests of our families and our society.

At a time when most women were occupied in the domestic realm, often pregnant, often caring for children and dealing with household duties, electoral politics was an enervating and unwelcome distraction.

According to this anti-suffrage view, it was simply not true that non-voting women lacked political representation. On the contrary, women’s interests were vigorously upheld by the men in their families and by male politicians generally.

Liberal party member and British ambassador to Washington James Bryce concurred: “There can be no more baseless assumption than that the polling-booth is the main source of influence in politics. Women already enjoy greater influence in other ways, both public and private, than the franchise would give them” (quoted in Separate Spheres, p. 81).

Some anti-suffragists argued that women had more influence in their societies precisely because their advocacy was seen as non-partisan. The National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage wrote, “Because women now stand outside of politics, they therefore are free to appeal to any party in matters of education, charity and reform.” As Brian Harrison noted, it was “difficult to think of reforms for which late Victorian women energetically campaigned and which they were not granted” (Separate Spheres, p. 73).

Anti-suffragist women also believed that politics was ultimately, and should remain, a male contest because national governance rested on the use of force. To extend the ballot to those without the obligation or ability to enforce law and sovereignty was to introduce a falseness into the political system that would ultimately weaken whatever nation implemented it.

The Illinois Anti-Suffrage Association represented the argument as follows:

Because the basis of government is force, its stability rests upon its physical power to enforce its laws; therefore it is inexpedient to give the vote to women. Immunity from service in executing the law would make most women irresponsible voters.

Ultimately, the anti-suffragist position rested on a vision of mutual respect between the sexes, in which the qualities and duties of one sex rested on and supported the qualities and duties of the other. To quote again from the Illinois Anti-Suffrage Association,

Our fathers and our brothers love us; our husbands are our choice and one with us; our sons are what we make them. We are content that they represent us in the corn-field, on the battle-field, and at the ballot-box, and we them in the school room, at the fireside, and at the cradle, believing our representation even at the ballot-box to be thus more full and impartial than it would be were the views of the few who wish suffrage adopted, contrary to the judgment of many.

If the anti-suffragists were wrong, it was certainly not because they hated women. Their vision of respectful complementarity was designed to honor the different strengths of women and men, as well as to protect women from the corrosive effects of public life.

Were the Anti-Suffragists Right?

As we know, the anti-suffragists’ arguments did not succeed.

The First World War ultimately decided the matter of women’s voting rights. Women’s service on the war’s home front—their work in munitions factories and farms—highlighted female duty and public-mindedness, provoking strong public approval. The war might have confirmed the anti-suffrage view that physical force and massive male combatant deaths were still a factor in world affairs, and that, unable to fight on frontlines, women should not be empowered to direct national decisions. But it didn’t.

Women thus won the right to vote on the backs of hundreds of thousands of men dead in the trenches of Europe. That debt, of course, has never been acknowledged by feminists.

Although it is now difficult to imagine a world without women voting in national elections, it is at least as difficult to dismiss the anti-suffragists’ concerns. A female electorate has made politics increasingly emotion-based, with an ever-expanding state bureaucracy catering largely to women’s social concerns, fears, and easily-triggered outrage.

Over a century after women began voting, research has repeatedly found that men express far more knowledge about and interest in political affairs than women do. A 2019 article about gender differences in Britain reported a 20-point gender gap in expressed political interest amongst 15-year-olds and a 30-point gender gap amongst 25-year-olds.

A Pew Research Poll of Americans found women consulting newspapers for stories primarily about “weather, health and safety, natural disasters, and tabloid news.” Men were more interested in “international affairs, Washington news, and sports.” According to another report that criticized news organs for failing to attract female readers, women prefer local stories, accessible graphics, and an engrossing narrative rather than fact-based news.

The stereotypes that some suffrage activists raged against have turned out to be true.

Moreover, female political power has not made politics kinder or more efficient, wiser or less corrupt. It has driven a wedge between men and women, massively increased the size of government, increased bureaucratic regulation of private life, and left many children without motherly love and attention—and without their fathers at all.

Anti-suffragist’s professed gratitude for men and faith in gender balance stand in stark contrast to feminists’ continual complaints, accusations, and demands. As a minority of feminist radicals hijacked the political process, the worst fears of the anti-suffragists were realized.

What is perhaps most interesting about the historical debates concerning women’s voting rights is that they occurred at a time when it was still possible to discuss what was best for society from a perspective that included everyone: men, women, and children. Women’s suffrage has made it nearly impossible, finally, to talk about any good other than a feminist one.

Nothing beats a threat narrative for a gender studies academic in search of relevance, and what more urgent than the dark corners of the internet where men (and the women who love them) allegedly spread misogyny and male supremacism.

Many academics now claim expertise in this area of gender studies, probing the volatile fragility and violent anxieties of manosphere men, and calling to repentance all who resist the feminist future. Many of these academics are women, making a sweet living warning about male “hate,” but there are plenty of male feminists as well, crusaders against others’ toxicity .

In “Mapping the Neo-Manosphere(s): New Directions for Research,” four scholars of masculinity survey the latest research on digital media and violent extremism. Vivian Gerrand, Debbie Ging, Joshua Roose, and Michael Flood claim to have read hundreds of studies of the manosphere, which they call an “online ecosystem of anti-women actors.”

According to them, the manosphere is brimming over with grievance-mongering, grift, and gynocidal fantasy. Nothing in it is good or sincere or well-intentioned. Various sub-genres of online content, including fitness advice, stoicism, and the tradwife lifestyle, are presented as outgrowths of misogynistic extremism from which millions of men and boys require rescue, by force if necessary.

A Roll Call of Buzzwords

The researchers make no distinction between manosphere content generally and what they call male supremacy—or, indeed, between those terms and a host of others, all pejorative. Their introductory paragraph alone provides a roll call of buzzwords that link any dissent from Marxist-feminist orthodoxy to misogynistic violence.

The manosphere, we’re told, is “bound by the belief that mainstream society is a misandrist conspiracy that disadvantages men.” Manosphere groups “frame contemporary gender politics as a ‘war against men.’” These groups also “frequently engage in misogynistic abuse as well as inciting violence against women,” thus creating an “online environment of accelerating harms.”

None of these statements is ever supported with evidence, but it is likely too much to expect evidence: the direct equation between male-positive advocacy and murderous misogyny is no longer a subject of academic debate, if it ever was. It is an axiom.

In one short paragraph, then, we move from non-feminist perspectives to “misandrist conspiracies,” and from belief in a “war against men” to “inciting violence” and “accelerating harms.” Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with anti-feminist content will recognize the definitional sleights of hand. Are any of these academics genuinely familiar with the subject they are writing about? It seems more likely that they have taken a shortcut to a politically-approved position.

What about the mass of anti-feminist and male-positive content creators—Rick Bradford at The Illustrated Empathy Gap, Tom Golden at Men Are Good, Alison Tieman and company at Honey Badger Radio, Bettina Arndt at Bettina Arndt, Hannah Spier at Psychobabble, just to name a few—who come nowhere near “inciting violence against women”? On the contrary, they pursue a vision of mutual cooperation and accountability between the sexes by rejecting female privilege and paranoia. Is this manosphere content, or not?

Many men’s rights advocates—researchers like Stephen Baskerville, Paul Nathanson, James Nuzzo, David Shackleton, Gerard Casey, Helen Smith, and Grant Brown, just to name those I’ve been consulting most recently—simply document male disadvantage with evidence. They do not assert conspiracies or stoke grievance.

As for the “war against men,” have our researchers read any of the voluminous feminist writings that celebrate male death and openly advocate a world without them? When feminist leaders—many of them university professors—are not only allowed but actually celebrated for declaring their anti-male hatred and calling for a “decontamination of the earth,” what are sensible people to conclude about anti-male animus?

A PUA, a MGTOW, and a Christian conservative walk into a bar …

But sensible investigation is not at issue here, as is evident from the following howler about the alleged origins of the manosphere:

“The early manosphere was a conglomeration of communities, including men’s rights activists, involuntary celibates (or incels, who are men unable to access sex with women), dating coaches known as Pick Up Artists, male separatists and Christian conservatives.”

There were also a significant number of anti-feminist women (Karen Straughan, Judgy Bitch, Shoe On Head, Diana Davison, and Hannah Wallen, to name a few) who were shocked by the viciousness and dishonesty of the feminist project—not that women’s participation matters to the researchers, who dole out equal-opportunity excoriation. But the point is that these “communities” that allegedly “conglomerated” at the dawn of the manosphere had nothing in common, whether in their general worldview or in their specific action plans, and it is ridiculous to pretend that they were united in misogyny.

Christian conservatives tend to counsel men to abstain from sex before marriage and to pursue marriage as a sacrament. Dating coaches counsel men to pursue sex, period. Incels counsel men to despair over their lack of sex. Male separatists, or MGTOW, counsel men to abstain from marriage and from any woman-centered entanglements, sometimes including sex.

Their ideologies—if they can even be called that—could hardly be more different. Their attitudes toward women range from worshipful idealization and friendly interest through wary indifference and active dislike. A few manosphere denizens do hate women, though with nowhere near the single-minded fervor one finds in much of the received feminist literature that these academics fail to criticize.

**

“Mapping the Neo-Manosphere(s)” makes dozens more tone-deaf claims in prose of extraordinary banality. The authors are so frequently unable to communicate a precise meaning that one can only conclude that precise meaning was not their object.

For example, the authors inform readers that “This identification of the manosphere as grift is an important new development in the scholarship, which demonstrates how many facets of the neo-manosphere exploit existing vulnerabilities and monetize them in a cycle of ‘ontological racketeering,’ which consists of ‘threat proliferation,’ affirming and extending in viewers a sense of crisis, and alternately promising to deliver solutions to such threats.”

!!!

Having waded through the turgid academese, the reader is to conclude, presumably, that online entrepreneurs are wrong to identify a problem and offer solutions that men and women are interested in enough to pay for.

How is this a “grift”? One could just as easily, and with more cause, identify many gender studies researchers as grifters who, at enormous taxpayer expense and with far less factual basis, persuasive power, wit, or ingenuity, hype an alleged crisis of female victimhood and male brutality that the rest of us are forced to endorse or at least (unwillingly) fund.

“Unqualified but Highly Influential Entrepreneurs”

Content creators who monetize their work are a major target in this study, repeatedly portrayed as predatory hustlers, “digital evangelists,” who exploit the gullible.

The fact that no one is forced to pay them seems only to increase the researchers’ ire. A few of the alleged swindlers are singled out by name. Ryan Holiday, Jordan Peterson, Lex Fridman, David Goggins and Jocko Willink are condemned for their “simplistic, extreme, and polarizing content.” Also in the research team’s crosshairs are Myron Gaines and Walter Weekes, the Tate brothers, Sneako, Pearl Davies, Estee Williams, Hannah Neeleman, and Nara Smith.

Others are more generally excoriated. Tradwives are disparaged because they “uphold hierarchical essentialist understandings of gender seen elsewhere in the manosphere.” Black “Pick-Me” women are wrong to encourage other women “to find an apparent refuge […] in serving their husbands.” Black men come in for condemnation if they espouse the traditional family and are “homophobic and transphobic, believing too that welfare policies disrupt their patriarchal roles as leaders within Black families.” Muslim content-creators allegedly “draw on stereotypes about Islam as patriarchal, stoic and intolerant of progressive agendas.”

Even those who offer relatively apolitical content concerned with wellness, fitness, weight loss, strength training, self-help, stoicism, or wealth-building are viewed negatively and linked to “anti-feminism/misogyny” because they promote self-reliance and individualism, “self-help hacks” under guise of “an ostensible concern for men’s wellbeing.”

Here the authors’ authoritarian elitism is particularly evident. They criticize content-creators for a host of ideological errors, including “promulgating the myth that anyone can get rich if they work hard enough” and “encouraging boys to stop taking medication and turn to diet and fitness instead.” Men of all races are castigated for choosing “individualized solutions” to life’s problems. Some manosphere content-creators promote the apparently blasphemous idea “that taking care of one’s body and mind is the best strategy for navigating crisis conditions.”

For any readers who might not see why some or all of the above are wrong, the researchers fall back on the gateway thesis: once you’ve watched a couple of videos about positive thinking or financial management, you may develop an aversion to the 19^th Amendment or a preference for a barefoot woman in your kitchen. Some women may even get into the kitchen of their own accord.

“The shift towards health, wellness and stoic paradigms is a significant new development in the neo-manosphere and calls for deeper scholarly investigation, in particular regarding its efficacy as a strategy for drawing men into male supremacist spaces.” If it’s not male supremacist in itself, it is probably allied with male supremacism.

Also of concern to the authors are psychotherapists who prefer treatment options for boys that “eschew structural analyses of power, insist on immutable sex differences and claim that encouraging boys to express emotion is treating them as ‘defective girls.’” In other words, there are therapists out there who refuse to affirm the idea that masculinity is a damaging “construct.”

The Experts’ Crisis of Relevance

Ultimately, the authors’ determination to condemn men and women for pursuing their individual interests betrays a deep frustration on the part of these and other academics.

The simple truth is that it is galling for gender studies experts to recognize that millions of men and women are more interested in what “unqualified but highly influential entrepreneurs” in the manosphere are offering than what the academics themselves have to offer, and their angry frustration is palpable in every line.

Most online academic presentations are rarely viewed more than a few dozen or hundred times and often receive tepid or negative responses (see here, here, and here). Most academic publications are read near-exclusively by newly hired professors and graduate students in the field, those under pressure to accrue citations for their own conformist treatises. Academics such as these manosphere authors make an easy, secure salary to fulminate against male supremacism, but almost nobody freely chooses to read their fear-mongering verbiage.

Masculinity Experts to the Rescue

After thousands of words condemning right-wingers, Christian conservatives, incels, exercise therapists, MGTOW advocates, alternative health promoters, lovers of women, proponents of Stoicism, black traditionalists, trad wives, self-help gurus, wellness influencers, men’s rights advocates, and traditionalists of various stripes, the manosphere researchers conclude by recognizing the need to engage with these reprobates to lead them out of their extremism and into the community of the acceptable: “The scale of the problem calls for urgent educational interventions in both gender equality and critical digital media literacy.”

Men’s resistance to feminist indoctrination may be overcome, they suggest, with more indoctrination, perhaps more effectively carried out as a result of “a deeper understanding of boys’ and men’s motivations for joining and leaving such misogynist groups.”

How one is to engage with people for whom one holds such undisguised contempt is not addressed in the paper; there seems little chance that the “deeper understanding” might involve empathizing with and recognizing truth in manosphere concerns.

Hard on the heels of the call for “educational intervention” comes the predictable resort to censorship: “Against this context, the regulation of online platforms must be brought to the fore.” If you can’t win through the strength of your ideas, get Big Daddy government to silence those who disagree.

Despite their educational status, large salaries, and unfettered access to hundreds of thousands of young people every year, gender studies academics likely know they can’t defeat the manosphere except by shutting it down. Given their inability and unwillingness to empathize with those whose beliefs differ from their own, censorship will likely remain the option they endorse and, if they can, enforce in the years to come.

“Mapping the Neo-Manosphere(s)” strongly suggests that gender studies academics need to confront their own anxieties and irrational hatreds before they turn their attention to others.

Some commentators have expressed disappointment at the relative silence of feminists on the situation of Iranian women. “Isn’t feminism supposed to be about women’s liberation?” asked Iranian-born Sheila Nazarian, a Beverly Hills doctor and media personality.

Nazarian expressed shock that “with Iran, a country where women are governed by absolutist religious law that hardly treats them as human, so many Western feminists either maintain their silence or end up supporting the regime.”

Annabel Denham, columnist and senior political commentator at The Telegraph, recently expressed similar astonishment, asking “Where is the support for [Iranian women’s] glorious defiance? The Instagram carousels, the breathless declarations of ‘solidarity’ from former Harry Potter stars and pouting influencers?”

Others have noted the lack of outcry by feminist athletes, including the normally-vociferous Megan Rapinoe, over the request for asylum by members of the Iranian women’s soccer team.

The questions expose two premises: that women are Iran’s primary victims, and that the feminist movement cares about women. Both premises are false.

Tens of Thousands of Men Killed by the Islamic Regime of Iran

Iran is a bloody dictatorship that treats all of its citizens harshly, employing cruel punishments such as flogging, stoning, amputations, and blinding that decades of international condemnation have done nothing to mitigate. Focusing on the misogyny of the regime, as some pundits do, creates the false impression that men live well under the Islamic theocracy.

Male lives are cheap in Iran. Although the exact number of victims will probably never be known, we can assume that young men are the vast majority of those who have been imprisoned, tortured, and executed in the tens of thousands since January of this year. A report by the BBC noted that BBC Persia had identified “more than 200 of the thousands of people killed during Iran’s brutal crackdown.” The report focused, predictably, on female victims, but its own photo montage showed that at least 85% of those killed were male.

The Hengaw Organization for Human Rights issued a special report on Iranian human rights violations for 2025, finding that at least 1858 prisoners, probably a significant under-estimation, were executed in 2025, of whom 55 were reported to be women. The unstated reality: 97% of those executed were male.

In September of 2025, the Death Penalty Information Center reported that “In the three years since Ms. Amini’s death [Mahsa Jina Amini, whose death in police custody sparked widespread protest], Iran has exe­cut­ed at least 2,910 peo­ple, includ­ing 83 women.” That leaves at least 2,827 male victims in three years—again, 97% of the martyred. In an uprising sparked by a woman’s death and characterized by its focus on women’s freedoms, most of the victims were male.

Even a cursory glance through the Islamic Penal Code shows that punishments for various transgressions are just as harsh, or harsher, for men than for women. The punishment for a first-time offence of sodomy is execution while that for lesbianism is 80 lashes.

Punishment for fornication focuses on the male offender, as in the following description in a Death Penalty report: “According to Article 224 of the IPC: “A death sentence shall be imposed on the male party in cases of incest, fornication with their stepmother, fornication of a non-Muslim man with a Muslim woman and fornication by force or reluctance. The punishment for the female party shall be decided by other provisions concerning fornication.”

Hundreds of men have had fingers and hands amputated for theft in the past two decades, a punishment carried out using a hideous guillotine-like device that is employed without anesthetic. I could find no documented cases of a woman having a hand or fingers amputated. Men are more regularly flogged and given electrical shocks for various offences, including petty theft and peaceful protest.

It is safe to say that life is hard for both men and women in Iran, especially for those who fall afoul of the regime’s rules.

Doesn’t Feminism Support Women’s Liberation?

Yet the persistent lament about feminism is worth noting. Over decades, feminism has postured as a movement for female well-being, and most people are still surprised when feminists do not speak out clearly about women’s mistreatment by barbaric regimes.

Such commenters do not realize that while feminism does advocate for female power over men globally, it has other ideological commitments—particularly the mobilization of political hatreds and the destabilization of democratic societies—that are equally if not ultimately more important.

Annabel Denham gets at some of the truth in “This is why Western feminists are silent on Iran.” She notes that while Iranian women have been tearing off their hijabs in the streets and defying the regime, “much of the Western progressive commentariat has been out to lunch.”

Her diagnosis is that feminists gradually lost their way over the decades, focusing on easy targets at home and maintaining a simplistic ideology of western malfeasance. She argues that “The progressive instinct to avoid [Muslim] cultural offence has trumped the need to defend women’s autonomy.” For most feminist pundits, it is satisfying to agitate about “boardroom quotas, pay gaps and microaggressions.”

Further, she notes, “To acknowledge out loud and repeatedly the Islamic Republic’s misogyny, brutality and sponsorship of violence abroad would disturb their belief that all injustice stems from Western imperialism.”

In conversation with Brendan O’Neill, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has also addressed the issue of feminist evasion, explaining that western feminists are so wedded to their neo-Marxist commitments that they cannot fully sympathize with Iranian women’s demands, which tend to focus on individual rights and economic opportunities. She joined with O’Neill in condemning feminist “cowardice.”

Denham’s and Ali’s diagnoses are powerful, but the truth is even more shocking. Modern feminism is not merely keen to “avoid cultural offence.” It is not merely repulsed by so-called “choice feminism.” It is so genuinely committed to anti-western agitation that it would rather fight Trump and American conservatism than condemn the mullahs of Iran.

Feminists feel such profound revulsion for the west that they claim there is little to choose between a culture in which women are allegedly “objectified” in their bikinis and one in which they are forced to cover themselves in cloth from head to toe on penalty of police beating.

In fact, there is amongst many feminists a covert preference for the vigor, determination, and death-daring fervor that expresses itself in wanton executions and chants of death to America. Some feminists seem to revel in Islamists’ single-minded devotion to totalitarian purity.

If cornered, these ideologues will admit that some Iranian atrocities have been unfortunate, but they will quickly shift the blame to the United States, which should bear full moral accountability, they believe, for the Iranian regime’s fanaticism.

Feminism’s Anti-Western Turn

Denham notes that there was a time in the past when western feminists stood shoulder to shoulder with their female compatriots around the world. “In March 1979, as Ruhollah Khomeini seized control after the Iranian Revolution, the American feminist Kate Millett travelled to Tehran to protest against the regime’s plan to make the hijab compulsory. She marched beside Iranian women against the tyranny of pitiless old men with beards.”

Denham admires this gesture by Millett, not realizing, perhaps, that Millett suffered from mental illness most of her life and was not representative even back then of the holier-than-thou feminists who would shape the movement in her day. In her landmark Sexual Politics, Millett had been adamant that western patriarchies were significantly less intolerable than non-western ones. She condemned non-western patriarchies with relish, angrily enumerating the evils they had done and continued to do:

“The history of patriarchy presents a variety of cruelties and barbarities: the suttee execution in India, the crippling deformity of footbinding in China, the lifelong ignominy of the veil in Islam, or the widespread persecution of sequestration, the gynacium, and purdah. Phenomenon [sic] such as clitoroidectomy, clitoral incision, the sale and enslavement of women under one guise or another, involuntary and child marriages, concubinage and prostitution, still take place—the first in Africa, the latter in the Near East and Far East, the last generally” (Sexual Politics, 1970, p. 46).

Millett might then have been shocked to understand how quickly American feminists like herself would learn to refrain from criticizing African, Islamic, or other non-western cultural practices. As feminism became increasingly fervent and utopian, it became less interested in the practical conditions of real women and more interested in ideological purity inspired by Marxist and Maoist anti-westernism.

The Shame of White Feminists Before Their Third-World Compatriots

As early as 1979, when feminist leaders Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan co-authored an article objecting to the practice of removing the clitoris in women and girls, a practice carried out in many Islamic and African countries, these two canny feminist leaders were well-attuned to the racial sensitivity of the subject. They went out of their way to stress how fully they empathized with non-western peoples, including the African and Arab men and women who preferred to continue the practice.

“The situation is further complicated,” they wrote, “by the understandable suspicion on the part of many African and Arab governments and individuals that Western interest in the matter is motivated not by humanitarian concerns but by a racist or neocolonialist desire to eradicate indigenous cultures” (“The International Crime of Genital Mutilation,” Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, p. 336).

Steinem and Morgan were quick to accept that previous Western concern over clitoridectomy must have been racist and neocolonialist—why? Because a Kenyan leader had said it was. They wrote,

“As Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first president, noted in his book, Facing Mount Kenya, the key mobilization of many forces for Kenyan independence from the British was in direct response to attempts by Church of Scotland missionaries in 1929 to suppress clitoridectomy. Patriarchal authorities, whether tribal or imperial, have always considered as central to their freedom and power the right to define what is done with ‘their’ women” (pp. 336-37).

Without providing any evidence or explaining the logic of their conclusion, Steinem and Morgan accepted that the Christian missionaries who objected to cutting off little girls’ clitorises—which was, after all, the feminists’ own position—were motivated by western patriarchal arrogance rather than compassion or principle. They thus agreed that the missionaries who sought to end clitoridectomy were at least as objectionable as those who wished it to continue.

This was not moral relativism, as it is sometimes assumed to be. It was the acceptance of the moral inferiority of western culture, specifically its Christian inheritance and individualist ethos.

Soon it became forbidden for feminists to admit that white men had created freer and better societies, including better for women, than existed in other parts of the world. In Looking White People in the Eye (1998), feminist academic Sherene Razack let white women know that preferring the rights, affluence, and culture of western societies was a form of white supremacism. White men were responsible for imperialism, racism, capitalist oppression, homophobia, and Islamophobia, and unless white women denounced these in turn, they too would be classed as imperialists, racists, oppressors, homophobes, and Islamophobes.

Razack’s words dripped with angry sarcasm as she described white women’s bias and treachery in recognizing the goodness of white men:

“Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh men confirm handily the superiority of Western men …. White women’s responses to articles on Muslim women and the veil include the sentiment that in comparison to Eastern women, Western women should consider their own men as gems of enlightenment and kindness” (83).

In other words, white women were wrong to be grateful to live in a western country or to trust their own fathers and brothers more than they trusted foreigners. Because white women could not bear to be accused of complicity in racism and imperialism, they found themselves willing to agree that white male systems were the ultimate origin of all suffering and injustice.

That is why Narges Bajoghli, assistant professor at John Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies, writing in 2023 about the women’s movement in Iran, made direct parallels between Iranian women’s resistance to the Islamic regime and the #MeToo and LGBTQ+ movements in the United States. All were named as protests against “patriarchal control and domination,” allegedly rampant and resurgent, unvaryingly and indistinguishably, across the globe.

Bajoghli made no distinction between the treatment of women and homosexuals in Iran and in the United States, retreating into vagaries and historical misrepresentation in order to pretend that women and sexual minorities in the United States are harshly persecuted.

In the same manner, author Andrea D’Atri, a writer for Left Voice and founder of the Argentinian women’s group Bread and Roses, refused to say that the defeat of the Islamic regime by American and Israeli forces could be a good thing for the Iranian people. While admitting that the Iranian regime is repressive and harsh, D’Atri still called on feminists to “fight for the defeat of Trump and Netanyahu in Iran” and claimed preposterously that women’s and LGBTQ+ rights are equally under threat by “Far Right” forces in America and elsewhere.

“Trump, the Far Right, and their allies, such as Milei in Argentina, attack women’s and LGBTQ+ rights every day in their respective countries; they spew hate against feminism and exude misogyny in their government policies while displaying crude machismo in their public and private lives.”

**

Clearly, we should stop expecting that feminists will be reasonable in their assessments of national or international affairs. They feel as their political masters direct them to feel, with little energy left over for independent thought. They will certainly never express any appreciation for a country that tolerates and protects them.

These are not mistakes or confusion. Feminism really does support the enemies of the west, believing that these enemies may ultimately help to bring about the fall of an abhorred western patriarchy. Feminists may not agree on the precise outlines of the new utopian collective, but they are keen to try the experiment. Ordinary men and women’s suffering pales before their ruthlessly perfectionist vision.

“Most of the men I interviewed started out as liberals. Some still are. But to feel the weight of society’s disfavor can be disorienting.”—Jacob Savage

It can also be clarifying.

The fur is flying after the publication of Jacob Savage’s “The Lost Generation,” which Matt Walsh called a permission piece, a signal that cultural leaders can or must now admit, within carefully circumscribed limits and without accountability, of course, what the rest of us have known most of our lives: that discrimination against white men has been rampant in North America, with the result that at least one generation of such men were prevented from contributing their talents to key fields such as law, medicine, science, policing, popular culture, media, academia, reporting, Big Tech, business, and many more.

The fallout in substance abuse, screens addiction, nihilism, anger, loss of trust, and self-destruction has been massive, and is even now not being publicly confronted. Whether anything will be done remains an open question. Savage has little to suggest in this regard, putting emphasis on his own lack of anger at women and racial minorities. Only the older white men who allegedly engineered his exclusion—the safely demonizable Boomers—come in for direct criticism in his essay.

**

For years I have marveled at the patience of young men and wondered why a backlash didn’t come. I have spoken with many men about their sadness and anger at being passed over for opportunities and recognition. The whole of it can never be captured in raw numbers of the sort that Savage and others have supplied. It was relentless and exhausting, both subtle and crude. It was in the little and the big things that were consistently withheld: the letters of recommendation, school-leaving prizes, university admissions, apprenticeships, bursaries, scholarships, speaking engagements, opportunities for collaboration, appointments, public recognition, job offers, promotions, distinctions, workshop invitations, and many more; it was in what one could write about, what one could research, what counted as significant, whose lives mattered, what stories could be told. It was reflected in how attention was or was not paid, the casual misandry, the allowable jokes, the manner in which the entire culture turned against an agreed-upon target.

I vividly remember a small example, a talk by Milo Yiannopoulos that was disrupted at DePaul University back in 2016, as so many such talks were. Some black protesters surged onto the stage, taunting Yiannopoulos and flaunting their righteous victim-power. The camera panned over the audience members, who were almost entirely young white men, sitting in the hundreds while the speaker they had assembled to hear was harassed and silenced. Later, the President of DePaul condemned the disruption, but not before making clear that he hated Yiannopoulos, disagreed with every single one of his puerile utterances, and blamed him for the ruckus. The slap in the face to the students couldn’t have been clearer. I wondered then where they found their patience.

These are the same young men who would go on to find doors to employment and opportunity closed in the name of fairness and progress, who were lectured on their bigotry and privilege.

The Savage essay is shocking only in that anyone could pretend to be shocked by it. All those who worked in the fields he mentions—the publishing industry, Hollywood, academia—were perfectly aware. Many of them participated willingly, purchasing their moral righteousness on the backs of the men whose dreams they destroyed. These men had it made clear to them that social justice would be achieved at their expense, so that others in comfortable, highly paid positions could hold their anti-racist and anti-sexist heads up high. The few white men who complained were scorned and excoriated. Cry me a river, white boy! Equality feels like oppression to those who are accustomed to privilege. And so on. It was a con of massive proportions, smug and triumphant, leveled at men who were not privileged, and often leveled by those, women of all races, who had repeatedly been given special advantages, some of whom never legitimately earned anything.

I used to post academic job advertisements on Twitter that were women-only or Indigenous-only, etc. (for a partial list, see here). Always there would be a flurry of responses asking if they were legal. In the academic departments where I worked, there was no pretense of hiding what was going on because there was no question of any illegality. Universities and other government-funded corporations and enterprises in Canada were encouraged to practice so-called equity hiring.

Excluding white men didn’t require any subterfuge; the difficulty was in hiring any white men at all. (Usually, one had to explain in writing to one’s higher administrator why a woman or minority ethnic had not been selected.) The white man had to be demonstrably head-and-shoulders better even to have a shot, and even being much better didn’t guarantee success. Those involved in the hiring weren’t always honest about what they were doing either. I heard the rationales many times: how this female applicant with her very thin track record and unfinished dissertation was actually doing better work—more innovative, more cutting-edge, more in line with our department’s interests—than the male academic with a prestigious book and a dozen peer-reviewed articles in top-ranked scholarly journals.

I raised objections repeatedly to no avail. Most of my colleagues, if pressed, admitted that it wasn’t quite right. But what could they do? They didn’t want to go to war with the acknowledged leaders of their workplaces. A few did go to war, and lost. This was, as I’ve already said, established policy. It wasn’t a whim, an occasional outburst of intersectional feminist zeal. And once a hiring practice is instituted, there is no longer any need for those in favor to defend it.

The truth was that many people—even including a lot of young white men—were staunchly in favor. The policy didn’t come out of nowhere. It was the result of decades of anti-white and anti-male propaganda that made it clear to white men that they were in polite society at all only by the grace of the formerly victimized. As white men, they were the inheritors of an oppressive world, and a better one would be forged only through extensive power sharing and diversity of experience, which had to be gerrymandered into existence as quickly as possible. They would need to take a big step back and let the formerly marginalized, those possessed of moral purity and the capacity to empathize, take the helm. Many white men accepted this platform; some were enthusiastic about it, some grudging.

It would be satisfying to take Savage’s article and rub it in the noses of every single person, almost always a pious feminist woman, who made a career of claiming that she had to work twice as hard as any man even to have a chance at a career, poor-wonderful-me. These always pooh-poohed our pointing out the reality of the intolerable injustice, and the harm to merit-based structures, that was being done by decades of ham-fisted, closed-minded, smugly self-congratulatory equity hiring. Of course, it wouldn’t make any difference. The capacity of these people for self-delusion and their determination not to see the damaging consequences of the policies they championed is fathomless.

**

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.

**

I don’t know Jacob Savage, so I don’t want to impute motives or political allegiance. But there is a tone of resignation and do-gooder acceptance in the essay that is unwise and self-defeating. White men have every right to be furious about what has been done to them in the countries their forefathers built: not only the employment discrimination, though that is bad enough, but the entirety of the belittlement, mockery, defamation, demonization, and dehumanization; the steady marshalling of hate speech, dishonest claims, unfair policies, fake research, and false representations that have justified and mandated their degradation and dispossession.

It has mostly been done by intersectional feminist leaders and their so-called anti-racist allies. The attack on white men has not been, as we were so often told, a necessary sacrifice for the greater good, but a disastrous waste and warping of human dignity. White men should not go quietly into the night—the loss to the larger society in talent, energy, intelligence and leadership potential is inestimable—and I don’t think they will.

Their forefathers built North America, and North America needs them.

In the wake of the grudging admission of what has been done, there is the possibility of a more concerted resistance than has yet been marshalled. John Carter, for example, mentions various possibilities in his analysis, including grassroots public education, community organizing, political activism, large-scale investigations, class action lawsuits, the dismantling of DEI programs and university sinecures, repeal of unjust laws, and continued (digital) guerrilla warfare. All of these are worth pursuing. We must also correct falsehoods with facts and call out bigotry when we see it at every opportunity.

What is most urgently needed is a larger cultural renaissance in which the extraordinary achievements of white men will be fully recognized and honored, including by the women who have so often been the beneficiaries of their hard work, ingenuity, intellectual curiosity, individual enterprise, collaborative genius, humanity, and self-sacrificing generosity. This is a signal opportunity for white men to become aware of their identity as white men, despite the predictable arguments that will be launched against that. What is clearer than ever is that we cannot rely on those who dislike white men and made a living slandering them to correct the injustices white men have suffered.

A friend wrote a couple of days ago to say that he had seen shiny new copies of works by feminist author Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005) in Munro’s Books, one of Canada’s premier independent bookstores. One of the books was positioned on a shelf with the cover facing out to indicate that it was being showcased.

It is both shocking and unsurprising that Picador Books decided to reprint three of Dworkin’s texts in the past year, calling her a “prescient and visionary writer” who was “ahead of her time.” Anti-male paranoia is a sanctioned, cultivated taste more popular now, perhaps, than ever before, and Andrea Dworkin is its most notorious propagandist.

Known for her physical bulk, impassioned rhetoric, unkempt hair, and lesbian-identified overalls, Dworkin was a feminist icon in the 1980s and 90s, loved and hated in equal measure. No one did more to outline and consolidate the modern feminist understanding of sex than she, writing on the subject obsessively and with unparalleled fervor in books with titles such as Woman Hating (1974) and Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981). The MeToo movement is almost unimaginable without the influence of Dworkin’s pronouncements.

Like other radical feminists, Dworkin wrote about rape, pornography, and prostitution, but her special focus was the degradation for women of sex itself: regular sex, the commonly accepted, normalized indignity that men allegedly inflict on women every day. Tempering her words in the white-heat of her revulsion, Dworkin became feminism’s anti-sex evangelist.

**

Sex, Dworkin believed, embodied nothing less than men’s hatred of everything female: “Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women” (p. 175). This is the thesis of her most representative book, Intercourse, which was first published in 1987 when Dworkin was 41 years old. Dworkin’s characterization of heterosexual sex as the ultimate enactment of misogyny has had an enduring impact on North American culture.

Intercourse set out to illuminate, through select readings of literary texts, what Dworkin believed to be a constant of male culture: the “hatred of women, unexplained, undiagnosed, mostly unacknowledged, that pervades sexual practice and sexual passion” (pp. 175-76). The phrase she most often used in the book to refer to intercourse was “the fuck,” which was meant to signify the raw dehumanization that supposedly characterized it.

Dworkin nominated herself the expert on male contempt for women because she had been its victim. “Specifically, am I saying that I know more than men about fucking?” she asked defiantly in the book’s preface, and answered, “Yes, I am […] the way anyone used knows the user” (p. xxxi).

While she also claimed in the preface that the book “does not say that all men are rapists or that all intercourse is rape” (p. xxxii), she does essentially say that, if not in quite those words. As she asserted only a page after the denial, “Intercourse conveys […] what it means that men—and now boys—feel entitled to come into the privacy of a woman’s body in a context of inequality” (p. xxxiv).

In another segment, she clarified that most, even the vast majority, of men were sexually abusive. She charged that men object to feminist criticism of pornography and prostitution because “So many men use these ignoble routes of access and domination to get laid,” that “without them the number of fucks would so significantly decrease that men might nearly be chaste” (p. 61). The implication was that men who objected to her arguments about the omnipresence of sexual exploitation were themselves sexual abusers who didn’t like the thought of their exploitation being curtailed.

This was the Dworkin who made feminists swoon with admiration: bombastic, hyperbolic, and incandescent with accusatory rage.

**

Where did the rage come from? In middle age, Dworkin made a bizarre allegation about having been drugged and raped in a Paris hotel room; even devoted admirers found it difficult to believe—and it capped a lifetime in which Dworkin claimed to have been frequently abused by men. She said she had been molested or raped at around 9 years of age, later abused by New York City prison doctors at age 18 after her arrest during a Vietnam War protest, and then badly beaten and sexually tortured many times by a man she had married in Amsterdam in the early 1970s. There are no records to substantiate her claims.

Though she escaped the allegedly abusive husband and carried on a life of writing and advocacy in the United States, where she became closely associated with feminist leaders such as Susan Brownmiller, Gloria Steinem, and Catharine MacKinnon, Dworkin’s feminist advocacy was always distinguished from these other leaders’ by its unmitigated anti-male animus.

Most feminist leaders have been undisturbed by Dworkin’s fury, justifying it as understandable and necessary, even inspiring. “People who […] raised their eyebrows at her supposed extremism or her intransigence or her fire took secret glee from that,” feminist activist Robin Morgan has stated, adding that, like Malcolm X, Dworkin’s was “the militant voice, […] the voice that would dare say what nobody else was saying . . . and it can’t help but say it because it is speaking out of such incredible personal pain” (quoted in the foreword, Intercourse, pp. xix-xx).

That Dworkin had pain seems undeniable—she was eating to fill some kind of emotional void—but whether its sources were as she claimed has never been ascertained.

**

Many of Dworkin’s friends and admirers were surprised to discover upon her death, in 2005, that for 30 years, she had lived with and eventually married a man, John Stoltenberg. Stoltenberg claimed that Dworkin’s gender radicalism saved his life and allowed him to be the man he didn’t want to be. He published a book in 1989 called Refusing to Be a Man, which he dedicated to Dworkin. In turn, she often spoke of herself as a lesbian.

As an antipornography activist, Stoltenberg used to offer college workshops in which he would encourage men to assume the positions in which women were posed for pornography in order to make the men feel the women’s alleged humiliation (Intercourse, p. xxiii). The very fact of Stoltenberg’s masculinity-evacuating adoration undermines much of what Dworkin claimed about male nature but that, of course, hasn’t diminished her reputation as a truth-teller.

In the foreword to Intercourse, feminist journalist Ariel Levy claimed that “Dworkin’s profound and unique legacy was to examine the meaning of the act most of us take to be fundamental to sex.” Levy hedged that, “If you disagree with her answers, you may still find yourself indebted to her for helping you discover your own” (p. xv). This was Levy’s attempt to distance herself from Dworkin’s anti-male generalizations while still praising the author’s insights.

But Dworkin never examined anything: on the contrary, she pontificated, hectored, accused, eviscerated, and damned from her self-chosen pulpit as the excoriating prophet of inherent male sin, and her encouragement to thousands of other women to hate with equal passion remains her most destructive legacy, one that is as disabling and poisonous as it is patently false.

In Intercourse, Dworkin broke every rule of responsible literary and cultural analysis, reading works of literature as if they directly reflected the author’s life or opinions. If the author described a character who hated women, that must mean that the author hated women and endorsed such hatred. If the author described a character who hated men, that showed how despicable men were.

Women were never admitted to be capable of sadism, cruelty, callous indifference, or selfishness. “Women have a vision of love that includes men as human too,” she bragged (p. 162). Men couldn’t even manage a negative virtue: “When will they choose not to despise us?” (p. 177).

Throughout Intercourse, Dworkin always employed the most reductive explanation possible for all male attitudes and responses, as for example when she claimed that “Most women are not distinct, private individuals to most men; and so the fuck tends toward the class assertion of dominance. Women live inside this reality of being owned and being fucked” (p. 83). And, “The hatred of women is a source of sexual pleasure for men in its own right” (p. 175). And so on and on.

The writing is occasionally witty, but more often erratic, repetitive, and feverish, with chains of assertions carried along by Dworkin’s exultant, self-perpetuating anger. It is testimony to the delusional bitterness of feminist ideology that such ranting has been taken as perceptive, and one need only read testimonials upon her death and glowing commendations of her legacy to see how many feminists are still unashamed to admire Dworkin’s openly expressed hatred.

At times in Intercourse, Dworkin suggested that a loving sexuality between men and women might be possible. But the only concrete example she was willing to provide was self-admittedly female-supremacist: it was a model imagined by 19^th century American feminist Victoria Woodhull, whom Dworkin called “the great advocate of the female-first model of intercourse” for whom “women had a natural right—a right that inhered in the nature of intercourse itself—to be entirely self-determining, the controlling and dominating partner, the one whose desire determined the event, the one who both initiates and is the final authority on what the sex is and will be” (p. 171).

Here we see the deliberately asymmetrical logic of feminist advocacy: only when women control sexuality entirely can it approach “equality.” At other times in the book (see especially pp. 156-158), Dworkin seemed to assert that the physical reality of intercourse—which involved an alleged violation of the integrity of the female body—made it innately unequal, and therefore always to some degree an indictment of male power over women.

**

In 1983, 500 men gathered in St. Paul, Minnesota, to hear Dworkin give a speech at the Midwest Regional Conference of the National Organization for Changing Men (now the National Organization for Men Against Sexism). The speech was called “I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There is No Rape.” As the men might have expected, Dworkin pulled no punches, granted them no exemptions as pro-feminist men who wanted to “change” men.

She ripped into them, telling them that if they thought the problem of misogyny, abuse, and exploitation was “out there,” they were wrong. It was “in you,” she told them. “The pimps and the warmongers speak for you” (“I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce,” p. 165). And she told them that as men they were full of “contempt and hostility in [their] attitudes towards women and children” (p. 166).

She harangued them, derided them, and threatened them that if they couldn’t end rape at least for one day they could never claim to believe in equality or to care about women. They had not ended rape thus far because they clearly did not really want to. And therefore, she said, “The shame of men in front of women [was] an appropriate response both to what men do and to what men do not do” (p. 170). Until they could “end rape” and call off their side, as she called it, their shame and guilt “were not good enough” (p. 170).

That was what Dworkin had to offer men: shame and guilt, endless denunciation, and the impossible task of ending rape, which she claimed was “so little” to ask.

**

Male followers of Dworkin could also live like her self-declaredly gay husband, writing articles and books about how they had renounced manhood, encouraging other men to do the same. Even then, they would have to look every day, metaphorically, at least, as Stoltenberg had actually looked, at the words “Dead men don’t rape” (Intercourse, p. xxii), the poster that Dworkin had placed above the desk where she wrote her furious fulminations.

No wonder Stoltenberg could not bear to be a man. Even renouncing manhood was not enough for Andrea Dworkin and the legions of her followers.

I am sorry, but satisfied, to see Dworkin’s books reprinted. They offer a powerful revelation of feminism’s black heart.

“Even today most people will refuse to believe that one of feminism’s main aims is, and always was, to give women the power to rid their families of men.”—William Collins, The Empathy Gap (2019)

“‘The person who is least likely to abuse a child is a married father,’ notes Canadian Senator Anne Cools. ‘The person who is most likely is a single, unmarried mother.’” — quoted in Stephen Baskerville, Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage and the Family (2007)

**

Reaction in North America has so far been muted to what is being hailed as a significant victory for anti-father groups in Britain.

As reported by The Guardian newspaper in almost giddily triumphant prose, “The family courts will no longer work on the presumption that having contact with both parents is in the best interests of a child.”

Only time will tell how the new law, not yet formalized, will impact the family courts, where discrimination against fathers is already rampant. The government announcement is, at the very least, staggeringly symbolic of a new phase in the anti-father onslaught, with judges now to be directed, so it seems, to exclude fathers from their children’s lives in as many cases as the mothers wish. A simple accusation will suffice. The Guardian declares that,

“The move has been heralded as ‘groundbreaking’ by family lawyers and campaigners who have long argued that the ‘pro-contact culture’ in the family courts places the rights of abusive fathers over the safety and wellbeing of children.”

Naturally, not a single non-feminist advocate for fathers or children is quoted in the article, the wording of which doesn’t even attempt to hide its misandrist bias. The article alleges that “Abusers have long used the family courts as a way of retaining control over their ex-partners, while women who raise domestic abuse in the courts have often been subject to counter allegations that they are attempting to ‘alienate’ the child from the father.”

The article does not admit the well-documented fact that mothers are the most frequent perpetrators of child abuse and child homicide (see, for example, p. 65, perpetrators of child fatalities). Neither does the article acknowledge that women do indeed lie about abuse , precisely as a means to sway custody outcomes in their favor. Moreover, women do alienate children from their fathers, often with the assistance of family court orders. Alienation is a recognized form of child abuse.

Feminists quoted in the article admit that this is merely an important “first step” in their long march to total father-exclusion.

**

It is a truism that feminists seek to destroy the father-led family and have long worked to do so through anti-father propaganda, legal chicanery, and evidence-free allegations of abuse.

Those who have not read feminists’ own words on this subject may have difficulty appreciating the depth of their desire to deny fathers any legally- or socially-recognized familial role.

Elizabeth Gould Davis’s The First Sex (1971) provides a compelling example. Written at the height of the Second Wave of feminism, and published three years before the author’s death by suicide, it was a popular female-supremacist treatise. In it, Davis rhapsodized about goddess worship and female power in the ancient world, detailing a time when societies allegedly recognized and revered women as the superior sex.

In these societies, according to mythographer Robert Graves, “Men feared, adored, and obeyed the matriarch” (quoted p. 121). In thrall to women, men were peripheral, their roles as fathers non-existent: “[The woman] took lovers, but for her pleasure,” writes Davis, “not to provide her children with a father, a commodity early woman saw no need for” (p. 121). In this matriarchal sexual utopia, “Sexual morals were a matter of personal conscience, not of law” (p. 116), and the sole familial bond was between the mother and her offspring.

A chapter on “Mother-Right” made the case for a return to such a system, explaining that fathers contribute nothing good to their children’s lives. “The father is not at all necessary for a child’s happiness and development” (p. 117). Even children allegedly know this to be so: “In nearly every child’s experience, it is the mother, not the father, who loves all the children equally, stands by them without regard to their worth or lack of it, and forgives without reservation” (p. 118).

The father’s irrelevance is rooted, Davis explained, in men’s inability to love. “Maternal love was not only the first kind of love. For many millennia it was the only kind” (p. 119). Man has merely “learned to appreciate and be grateful for woman’s love, even though he was not emotionally equipped to return it in kind” (p. 119). She quoted Freudian psychoanalyst Theodor Reik to support her view that when men speak of love, they are actually speaking of a mere ‘scrotal frenzy’” (p. 119).

This rhapsody to female power and assertion of male uselessness continues for hundreds of pages in Davis’s ludicrous yet impressively-detailed book. Many feminists at this period made similar claims, attacking fatherhood and calling for the destruction of the patriarchal family. Author and activist Kate Millett, for example, argued in Sexual Politics (1970) that women’s oppression could not be ended without a transformation of “patriarchy’s chief institution […] the family” (p. 33).

In the same year, feminist radical Shulamith Firestone excoriated the patriarchal nuclear family as the “most rigid class/caste system in existence” (The Dialectic of Sex, p. 15). Two years earlier, would-be killer Valerie Solanas had expressed the sentiment crudely in her SCUM Manifesto: “The effect of fathers, in sum, has been to corrode the world with maleness. The male has a negative Midas touch—everything he touches turns to shit” (p. 45).

These were not simply sad cranks penning screeds in cat-piss-scented rooms (though many of them were mentally ill). They were acknowledged leaders of a movement that would, within a few decades, shape and control the core institutions of western civilization.

**

Elizabeth Davis’s encomium to the mother as “the origin of all culture, of every virtue, of every nobler aspect of existence” (p. 119)—with men as, at best, occasional vehicles for female pleasure—is reflected less acerbically but no less emphatically in many popular representations today. We find it in the romping ABBA-tribute musical Mamma Mia (2008), in which three men, prior suitors to matriarch Donna and each a potential father to Donna’s daughter Sophie, are summoned by Sophie to her wedding in the hope that she will recognize her father when she sees him.

At the comic climax of the movie, with each man in attendance to assert his paternity in front of the assembled wedding guests, Sophie’s mother admits that she doesn’t know (and doesn’t care, it seems) which man made her pregnant. Yes, she slept with all three over a period of a few days, and never told any of them about the pregnancy.

The men accept this disappointing news without protest. “Being a third of your dad is great by me,” declares one, and the others concur. All three will do their surrogate part to love Sophie, staking no claim and expressing no further interest in their actual paternity. This is how good men should be, the movie suggests. After all, Sophie doesn’t truly need a father (and neither did her mother need a husband); a previous outburst (“I don’t want my children growing up not knowing who their father is!”) is quickly forgotten.

The men return to their comic roles as past—or continuing, as in Sam’s case—lovers of Donna, offering sexual and affectional tribute (“You were the first girl I ever loved”) with no legal or personal claim on her child. Here is Davis’s matriarchal fantasy in the form of a much-loved modern musical.

It need hardly be said that there would never be a movie, comic or otherwise, in which a normal daughter did not feel a deep need to know which of three women was her real mother. It is also impossible to imagine any—fictional or otherwise—mother being willing to share a claim to motherhood with two other women. Only fatherhood is regularly treated with such jocularity and indifference.

**

Against such father-dismissive and, indeed, father-eliminationist voices, many lone men and organizations of men have fought to assert the reality of paternal love.

These are the men who slept in their cars for months because they had spent every penny and more fighting to see their kids. These men defended themselves in court, often for years, against baseless claims of violence or “coercive control.” They paid exorbitant child support, facing prison time if they fell behind. They endured their ex-wives’ contempt and avarice, and saw them allowed to break the law with impunity. They experienced overwhelming stress and sadness.

I know a Colorado man who lived for two years without hot water in his house because his spare money paid his lawyer and his (remarried) ex-wife so that he could be granted one overnight visit every second weekend with his two young daughters, whom he hadn’t seen unsupervised for five years. I knew an Ontario man, a collector of antique guns, who was ejected from his home and barred from re-entering (except for one half hour to gather belongings under police supervision) because his wife claimed gun-induced terror, despite none being operational. I knew a California man who committed suicide after he was unable to reconnect with his adult daughter, alienated through divorce. His most bitter memory had been being barred from the funeral of the grand-daughter he had never met.

Nearly everyone now knows at least one man like this. The machinery of the judicial kidnapping of their children and their court-ordered exclusion, helplessness, immiseration, criminalization, and incarceration has been magisterially detailed by Stephen Baskerville.

Many fathers’ groups have lobbied for decades to secure fathers’ legal right to be involved with their children, amassing peer-revied data showing that children do better with both parents present: they are less likely to experience mental illness and juvenile delinquency, less likely to commit crimes or join gangs, more likely to finish school, less likely to abuse alcohol and drugs, and less likely to commit suicide or self-harm. Against fierce opposition, such organizations have achieved significant success in the United States in helping to shepherd statutes through state legislatures that encourage judges to award shared custody to parents after divorce.

They have done this in spite of the mythic power of motherhood in our culture, which feminists have ably exploited.

**

It is a popular belief that until quite recently, children were legally considered the “property” of their fathers, with mothers left powerless and bereft. Some of feminists’ boundless animus may even be justified by that belief.

In Sexual Politics, Millett alleged that throughout history, fathers had “nearly total ownership over wife or wives and children” (p. 33). Professor of theology Mary Daly attacked fathers’ alleged totalitarian power, claiming that the image of God as a heavenly father sanctified men’s malign possession of women and children: “If God is male; then the male is God” (p. 19).

Many took as gospel-truth feminist leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s assertion in the Declaration of Sentiments (written at the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention in 1848) that, amidst various other crimes, men exercised a cruel power over their wives in divorce, denying them custody of their children. Stanton wrote that Man “has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes of divorce; in cases of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given; as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women—the law, in all cases, going upon the false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands.”

But it is not so.

As attorney Tom James demonstrates in his must-read The History of Custody Law (2014), assertions about fathers’ historical paternity rights, though almost universally believed, are simply untrue. For centuries, mothers have had the upper hand in child custody.

American courts never recognized a father’s paternity right as primary. In fact, some of the earliest American court decisions regarding child custody were resolved in the mother’s favor (see p. 127). Father’s rights language predominated only in cases of dispute between parents and non-parents, when custody suits were pursued in the name of the father.

In cases between a separating father and mother, courts always weighed issues related to the “best interests” of the child. In theory, as James explains, courts pursued a “general preference for the spouse who was not at fault for the breakdown of the marriage” (p. 115), yet in cases involving young children, courts almost always preferred to award custody to the mother.

A father could be denied custody even for offences that were not of his making, such as being unable to financially support his family (p. 129). A father’s having expressed doubt about a child’s paternity “was regarded as paternal misconduct so egregious and vile as to justify stripping him of custody—apparently even if he had valid reasons for his doubts” (p. 129). One father was denied custody merely because “he had made the assertion, in his petition, that as a father he had a superior right to custody of his children” (p. 130).

Many states enacted “tender years” statutes in the 19^th century, which formalized what had already been the guiding assumption. Tender years doctrine held that

“Maternal sole custody was in the best interests of children of tender years, i.e., young sons [usually of 10 years or less], children of any age who were in poor health, and, in some states, daughters of any age. For older children, courts generally regarded the child’s preference as controlling. In some states, paternal custody was assumed to be in the best interests of an older, healthy male child of married parents, provided he had not expressed a preference to reside with the mother” (p. 121).

It is evident from this definition that there were many cases in which a mother was assumed to be the most appropriate parent. There were far fewer in which the father was assumed to be.

Even when the mother was the one at fault for the breakdown of the marriage—as, for example, if she had committed adultery—many courts overlooked the marital indiscretion (p. 138) and “regularly denied fathers custody of their young children on the basis that caring for young children was the exclusive province of mothers” (p. 143).

Such maternal preference was only strengthened by the rise of the nineteenth-century feminist movement, which under cover of remedying women’s legal disadvantages actively sought female legal “primacy” (p. 152). Stanton and other feminist leaders worked to enshrine married women’s rights in law, including their right to their children (see pp. 153-55). The tender years doctrine remained in effect for most of the twentieth century, and even once formally revoked, continued to be the main influence in custody decisions, even in cases where the mother was shown to be both abusive and immoral.

So much for the father’s “ownership” of his children.

**

There was a relatively brief period in the 1970s and early 1980s when some feminist activists supported the removal of maternal preference, advocating gender neutrality in divorce proceedings.

Most feminist advocates at that time saw the maternal preference as a cultural restriction that put a brake on women’s professional opportunities. Moreover, father involvement was thought by some feminists to be necessary to socialist-style parenting. Radical feminist Robin Morgan, for example, advocated a “communal family, where children are raised by men as well as women, and by more than one pair; where parenthood is perhaps a biological fact but not a property-defined relationship” (Going Too Far, p. 105).

Movies such as Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), in which Ted learns what it means to be Billie’s father after his wife leaves him, gave expression to the ideology of gender equality. In the movie’s pivotal courtroom scene, the once-insensitive and career-obsessed but now empathetic and self-aware Ted acknowledges that women should not be discriminated against in their search for professional fulfillment. But by the same logic, he insists, men should not be discriminated against in their quest to be involved fathers. “I’d like to know what law it is that says a woman is a better parent simply by virtue of her sex,” he states. Then he speaks directly to his ex-wife about his love for Billie: “We built a life together. If you destroy that, it may be irreparable. Don’t do that, Joanna. Don’t do it again.”

Partly feminist-compliant, partly feminist-critical (“How much courage does it take to walk out on your kid?” Ted asks early on), the movie delivered a fairy-tale ending in which the bias of the family court judge, who awards sole custody to Joanna, is countered by Joanna herself, who realizes just in time that her son needs his father. “I came here to take my son home, and I realize he already is home,” she tells Ted. Even as it championed fathers’ rights, the movie pulled its punches about the lengths to which women would be enabled to go in their quest for maternal freedom.

Ultimately, parenting equality did not long remain in favor with feminists, likely because of the enormous financial incentives that came with sole custody. Before the end of the century, mothers’ rights had come roaring back into custody discussions. Feminists once again portrayed fathers as at best expendable and often toxic. Academic articles such as Joanna L. Radbord’s “Equality and the Law of Custody and Access” (2004) routinely claimed that fathers seek custody to control and abuse—or simply to reduce their child support payments (as if not wishing to pay their ex-wives to take away their children is evidence of malignancy).

National women’s groups in America (including the National Organization for Women) have been vehement opponents of bills to encourage shared parenting, claiming that a presumption of father involvement empowers male abusers. Such advocates reject any implication that women owe anything to the fathers of their children (Radbord is incensed that a woman might be prevented from moving out of state by a father’s petition), and refuse to acknowledge the sincerity of fathers’ parenting aspirations.

The demand for maternal preference and the move to deny a father’s right to see his children at all, as in the British government’s recent decision, have come inexorably to the fore.

**

Perhaps it is good to know that there never was a prior period in which fathers in the Anglophone world had uncontested or even secure claim to their own children. We have been too ready to endorse feminist fantasies, whether with shame or wistfulness.

Fathers’ rights have always been partial and tenuous, always subject to the sway of mother-right. Where we’ve come to now, in an admittedly Sisyphean battle for shared parenting as the norm in at least some jurisdictions, is a remarkable achievement attesting to father advocates’ unwavering dedication and love.

In the face of predictable exaggerations and misrepresentations by well-funded feminist organizations and the corrupt legal establishments they control, fathers’ rights will always have to be vigorously defended. The British decision will not be the last word on the matter.