Men Have Lost the Battle of the Sexes … Now What? By Mrs Vera West
There are a number of articles from conservatives concluding that the so-called battle of the sexes has been won by women. Of course, feminists have proclaimed this for some time, an example being The End of Men and the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin. For the feminist, this is but one step on the road to their utopia, which will only be complete when, I presume, men have been totally wiped out, socially at least. After all, the rhetoric today is that we are still in a patriarchy, and that women are still oppressed. This line has been pushed with all seriousness even by female prime ministers and big capitalism leaders, so, it is propaganda, as these people having top positions, refute what they say, by their position.
The conservative response sees the bigger picture, asking how this rise of women will impact upon politics. It will mean more woke and liberal policies, such as with immigration and refugee intake, with polls showing women softer on the immigration issue than men. Then there is the further erosion of the family. If conservatives are right that the traditional nuclear family is the foundation stone of society, then this as well does not bode well for the continuity of the modern world. It comes down to this, as a feminist critic of feminism, Camille Paglia famously said: “If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.” We will find out the hard way if the implications of this, the return to grass huts, will pan out.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303997604579240022857012920
“The war between the sexes has ended, and rather than a co-operative future that could benefit all, it has turned out to be more like a lopsided win for the female side. After millennia of power struggles based on such things as biology and social function, the role of women in advanced societies has expanded dramatically, which is generally a good thing but has some rarely cited downsides.
The crux of the problem lies in the fact that as women rise, men seem to be falling. This limits opportunities to establish stable families or even find decent partners. The Brookings Institution’s Richard Reeves has found that as much as one-third of the decline in marriage rates is driven by the inability of women to find mates that they see as stable, smart, good earners or otherwise up to their standards.
The gap between the sexes has been driven in large part by shifting rates of educational achievement. In the United States, women now collect nearly 60 per cent of bachelor’s degrees. In Canada, they have accounted for most university graduates for at least a decade.
To be sure, the longstanding pay gap between men and women still exists, but women are making progress towards the top echelon in Canada, as well as the U.S. Women started a majority of all new firms in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021. Men still earn more, but among young adults aged 20 to 24, the income gap has narrowed to just US$43 (C$58) a week.
The biggest divide may be found among the working class. Many workers, especially those with jobs tied to physical labour, have faced extreme pressures from both foreign competition and regulatory restraints. Today, according to demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, employment rates among men are at “Depression-era” levels. As Reeves notes, men are increasingly “left behind,” plagued by psychological disorders and a lack of friends, and remain outside the economy.
Some feminists may celebrate this decline, but it does not bode well for women, at least outside the job market. In many areas, such as self-harm and depression, teen girls generally suffer more than men, according to psychologist Jonathan Haidt, while the percentage who have contemplated suicide has surged. These are trends seen, not just in the U.S., but in other western countries, including Canada.
More importantly, this divide blocks the path to family life. In the past, the choice was often between the husband’s career and that of his spouse’s. Now, with so many men on the sidelines, more women have no choice but to fend for themselves. This situation is particularly intense for some minority communities, notably African-Americans, where the gap between male and female achievement is profound, both Eberstadt and Reeves point out.
The virtues of marriage are often dismissed, but remain critical to better physical and mental health for women, according to a recent Harvard study. The current mental health challenges faced by women seems particularly acute among progressives, who are far less likely to be married, have children or attend church — all traditional sources of comfort.
It is also clearly better for children to have fathers on hand. “Closeness with fathers,” notes author Jennifer Breheny Wallace, according to recent studies, translates into less anxiety, weight concern and “fewer depression symptoms for both boys and girls.”
The growing male-female divide can also be seen in terms of sexual activity. Today’s tech-savvy children clearly have problems relating to the opposite sex, a phenomenon traceable in part to their immersion in social media and easy access to internet porn.
In the U.S., Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Japan, China and the United Kingdom, younger people are experiencing a “sex recession.” The share of sexually active Americans stands at a 30-year low. Around 30 per cent of young men reported in 2019 that they had no sex in the past year, compared to around 20 per cent of young women.
If current trends continue, as many as one in four women will be childless in the near future, according to analyst Lyman Stone. Many, he notes, will be approaching retirement age with no immediate family. Married women tend also to do far better professionally and economically, notes Brookings. Single parent households, it finds, do far worse.
The growth of a large class of educated, but financially challenged, young women, as well as men, could shape our political future. American women, particularly single women, are the real base of the Democratic party. Much the same can be seen in Canada, where, according to a 2020 poll, women favoured the Liberals by two to one, while men slightly tilted to the Conservatives. Issues like abortion, in particular, drive these divergences further.
Without the traditional focus on wealth creation by families — married people account for around ¾ of all homeowners in the U.S. — there’s a natural tendency to support greater government in the form of things like rent subsidies or direct transfers.
The pitch of Democratic presidents — as reflected in former U.S. president Barack Obama’s “Life of Julia” and President Joe Biden’s “Life of Linda” — is geared to women who never marry, with the occasional child-rearing addressed by not by family resources but government transfers. These ideas also reflect the increasing domination of education by female teachers, who tend to be far more left-leaning and prone to cancel culture than their male counterparts.
The sexual dynamic is transforming the progressive policy agenda. Where once social democrats fought for strong families, the progressive left has become increasingly indifferent, even hostile to such things as parental rights. There’s a boom in such things as “queer studies,” sometimes with an agenda to replace the “nuclear family” with some form of collectivized child-rearing.
Groups like Black Lives Matter made opposition to the nuclear family a part of its platform, even though family breakdown has hurt African-American boys most of all. The current transgender fixation also can be seen as hurting women, such as by allowing clearly biological males to compete against them in sports, even in the face of protests by athletes and some prominent feminists.
Over time, these shifts also will likely accelerate an already dramatic decline in birthrates, something currently evident in countries like Japan and South Korea, where male-female relations appear to be notably abysmal. Birth rates have been declining for years in America, while Canada’s fertility rate hit a record low of 1.4 children per woman in 2020. In Canada, the dependency ratio — the ratio of people over 65 to those between 15 and 64 — is projected to increase by over 20 per cent in the next 20 years.
Ultimately, this suggests a very dystopian future, in which only the elderly population grows, while children and families become rarer and more stressed. This portends not a feminist paradise, but a dysfunctional society, where men and women are increasingly indifferent towards, or at odds with, each other. The very magic that has driven society, albeit often in flawed ways, essentials such as romantic love, companionship and family, are being lost, which is not good for society, or both sexes.”
https://unherd.com/2023/05/irvine-welsh-the-betrayal-of-white-working-class-men/
“Ironically, however, most of those lives lost in Western society were male, white and working-class; basically, those citizens assumed by the paradigm of class-denying intersectionality to be the enemy of progress. White working-class males are now recast as the establishment’s salivating attack dogs; the overseers of imperialism, enforcing the bidding of their wealthier masters. Their role in securing most of our human rights — through workplace struggle in the trade unions, strikes, demonstrations, wars and riots — is to be erased from our collective consciousness.
Because some sections of the white working class bought into the reductive neoliberalism of unrestrained capitalism through the Thatcher-Reagan revolution, so the entire group was written off. …
So, what excludes white working-class men from this LGBT intersectional paradigm? It can’t be race, as white women are permitted. It can’t be class, as working-class women and black men are allowed in. It can’t even be sex/gender, as gay or bisexual white working-class men and women are included. But perversely, white proletarian men are lumped in with their bourgeois “brethren”; outsiders in this rainbow-coloured festival of the oppressed.
In this bizarre schematic model, working-class football supporters in Liverpool are deemed on the same side as rabid establishment mouthpieces such as The Sun’s Kelvin McKenzie, who demonised, vilified and lied about them. Conversely, black teenagers in inner London estates, continually the victims of harassment by the Metropolitan Police and at the bottom of Britain’s opportunity pile, are ludicrously deigned to have common cause with the privately-educated colonial elites placed strategically in the media and commerce through “equal opportunity” positive discrimination schemes. There’s something about the bourgeois psyche that produces a visceral reaction to that deadly combination of working-class, white and straight — irrespective of the actual views and life experiences of someone in that grouping.
The decline of class politics and its replacement by the schisms of identity is an integral part of the neoliberal order. After all, one unites and the other divides. The class war was won by the elite in Britain, probably as far back as Orgreave in the 1984 miners’ strike, when organised labour was crushed. Today, capital rules supreme, steadfastly tightening its hold, aided by a rapacious individualism that has now tipped into a demented narcissism, and a technology concentrated in the hands of corporations and its co-opted governments.
Therefore, in the realms of finance and economics, nothing is now contestable, unless it’s national elites using their power (and manipulating the populace) to try to gain more traction and influence at the expense of the interrelated global ones. What is presented to us as politics is a hollow civil war of the super wealthy, with the rest of us as pawns. Silver-spooned, daddy-issue Republicans, like Trump and his ilk, have long presented as comic-book versions of the most vulgar, dumbass versions of redneck USA. This is now Right-wing de rigueur, enabling exploiters to “connect” with a politically and socially displaced white America, which embraces grievance and victimhood as eagerly as any grouping that claims to be oppressed. This folksy affectation is only partly strategic: late capitalism has stupefied its winners as much as its losers. Hollywood has recycled the potty mouth of the ghetto into the boardroom, where the same tropes are now regurgitated in a decontextualised way, with defiant alienation replaced by entitled arrogance, under the depoliticised posturing of “attitude”.
Meanwhile, digital technology and its deployment solely for private profit through capital accumulation has …… all our attention spans, and our sense of the past, as completely as George Orwell suggested. (Indeed, there’s little point in saying that: the ubiquity of Orwell as just another internet cliché has completely nullified the power of his message.)
In Britain, I believe that the traditional working man — of all colours — has had a bad rap. Recently, I was out with some old pals, and we were talking about how we’ve stayed close friends down the years, despite life, love and work taking us off in varying directions. One friend went on at length about how his partner and her friends were quite surprised at the continuing bond between us all. It’s a recurrent theme with women I know, who ask, perhaps not unjustly: how can you still be bothered with each other?
Men, whose camaraderie can seem frivolous, built on drinking, football and laughing at each other’s embarrassments, paradoxically tend to stick together down the years more than women, who talk of weightier, more emotional subjects. Several years ago, following a relationship breakdown scenario, I went through a phase where I felt like I was done with male company. I decided I could do without the gung-ho nature of the archetypal male response to such events: “Forget her. They’re all the same. Get another round up. I’ve left a line out for you in the toilets.” As a result, I basically surrounded myself with my women friends. Not for the first time, they were the ones offering real support and genuine insight into my predicament.
Then you realise: it’s not about thesis and antithesis. There’s always got to be room for a synthesis of different ideas and values. Once more, I’m appreciating the narrow, lazy affirmation that belonging to a mob of men can offer. The best thing about being a man of my generation is that we’re allowed to get the …… out of the house. Now I feel for youth who don’t do this so much — they really don’t know what they are missing. When they do, the experience is invariably packaged for them. The biggest indictment you can offer our current dystopia is that we’ve created a society where the old pity the young. That’s just not right.
Masculinity (as well as femininity) is tied to our lost sense of community. As pubs and clubs close down across the country, teenagers are more likely to spend their evenings on Instagram, TikTok, playing video games or on some dubious porn forums than getting drink from the office and messing around in the park or on abandoned railway lines. A social vacuum has been created at the same time as a dumbed-down visceral communication system has emerged.”
Comments