It is said that one of the signs of getting older is that you see the same old, same old, come round again, and in that sense the gender wars can make you feel very old indeed.
There have been a slew of articles across the press these last two weeks, proclaiming among other things ‘the death of feminism’, ‘why feminism still matters’, that eternal favourite ‘the need to tackle the gender pay gap’ and….drum roll…..’it is men we should worry about’.
I must confess that, apart from the contributions here on TCW, I didn’t read a single one of them. Partly that was out of cowardice: it is a pretty miserable experience finding your sex treated with contempt and pity in equal measure. However, mostly it was out of sheer boredom: you could have read variants on these articles one, two, five or even twenty-five years ago. In that time, the arguments or their weight have barely changed, but neither has the direction of travel in feminism’s favour.
If we are experiencing ‘the death of feminism’, no one seems to have told David Cameron, who is personally championing the need for firms to publish their gender pay gaps; an exercise deliberately designed to shame firms into equality of outcome. Not to be outdone, the Davis Commission is advocating a 30 per cent target for women at company board positions with a view, according to CityAM, of achieving full gender equality in the future.
The brutal truth is that the intellectual arguments for feminism have been extremely weak for a generation, but politically the movement remains in an unassailable position.
Here are the killer facts:
Women are more likely to be floating voters than men.
The shallow politically correct doctrine of ‘equality’ is attractive to centrist voters who usually think little about politics.
Feminism is extremely attractive to female metropolitan journalists and their personal social network, who stand to gain most from the social engineering of a gyno-centric world.
The metropolitan elite generally is chemically addicted to feeling good about itself, and gets its daily fix through constant virtue signalling.
The protection of women is a deep primal urge in men, who hate complaining or drawing attention to their own vulnerability; men rarely become politically energised by gender issues, they just slowly fade away from society – a process now well underway.
All that means is that to the kind of ambitious, careerist politician who forms the political class, taking on feminism is tantamount to a death wish: can you name a single front-rank politician who has done so in your lifetime?
Nothing will be done to combat the grave injustices of our emerging misandrist society until male alienation gets so bad it demonstrably starts to afflict the economy and thus corporate profits: at that moment, the Tories’ corporate paymasters will start to twitch and demand action, but of course by then a huge amount of pain, humiliation, bitterness and irreversible social damage will have been caused. Expect then – and only then – for the politically correct media narrative to swing sharply into reverse, and all of sudden the casual misandry of today’s society will be deemed as disgusting and sexist as misogyny is today.
Given that men seem to becoming steadily less important to the economy and alienated indigenous men are currently easily replaced by migrant labour from abroad, that moment of epiphany seems likely to be a long way off. For men, it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
