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Andrew Tate: the epitome of online misogyny. Daniel Mihailescu/AFP/Getty
“Women have no idea how much men hate them,” wrote Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch (1970). It’s perhaps true that women, at least those who spend time online, have more of an idea than we used to. You don’t have to spend much time in the sucking void of the manosphere to get an extremely vivid picture of how much some men hate us. Now, though, according to the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, this kind of sentiment is to be treated as a serious threat. Cooper recently announced a rapid review into extremism — a concept that will now include “extreme misogyny”.
But “misogyny” is also a slippery beast, and not just thanks to many Labour politicians’ well-documented inability to give a coherent definition of “woman”. What counts specifically as hatred towards women is at least somewhat subjective, a fact that led LBC’s Ben Kentish to suggest that the policy might unduly chill speech. But Jess Phillips, the minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, told Kentish that the new provisions would simply be subject to the same test as Islamist or far-Right ideology.
So that’s all fine then, isn’t it? Well, perhaps — at least if this is rigorously followed. But the difficulty with “misogyny” as a metric is that it’s both very emotive, and also very broad. At the risk of stating the obvious, half the planet’s human population is female, and this in turn means you could attract accusations of misogyny for criticising almost any large-scale group or institution. Given this, it would surely be difficult for any politician to resist wielding such a useful designation on Schmittian principles.
Accordingly, several groups outside the political mainstream have already expressed concern about being targeted unfairly by Cooper’s initiative. The far-Left Morning Star, for example, treated the whole extremism review with deep suspicion, viewing it as marching in lockdown with Tory clampdowns on the freedom to protest. Some women’s rights campaigners, too, expressed a concern that the next move would be including trans-identified men in the “women” category, in order to reclassify any accurate description of such individuals’ biological sex as “extreme misogyny” and therefore a matter for counterterrorism.
Others again responded cynically to the announcement with photos of women in burqas, sex-segregated Labour Party rallies, or videos of Islamist men talking about how praiseworthy it is to be jealously controlling of your wife’s behaviour. The aggregate insinuation was that the “extreme misogyny” which ought to be the focus of Labour’s counter-extremism was not the one Cooper has chosen to highlight — and that, in fact, Cooper is content to ignore misogyny from Muslims, or even to protect it in law, preferring instead to persecute Right-wing anons and forum nerds.
Such cynicism is perhaps somewhat understandable, given Sir William Shawcross’s recent independent review of Prevent. Shawcross described the service as good overall, but unevenly distributed in its foci: specifically, “too narrow” in its definition of Islamism, and “too broad” in its definition of the “far-Right”. This was misguided, he argued, given that the most severe and large-scale material threat to British security still came from Islamists.
Uh oh! This is going to rile up the incels who post here – and there are a lot of you!
Prediction – there will be a LOT of male commenters saying that misogny doesn’t really exist or if it does its only those Islamic chappies that do it.
Go ahead lads, prove me right!
Nonsense, misogyny is everywhere, even at the Olympics. We all saw a hulking Algerian boxer level a female opponent. Is that not violence against women?
Telling women that they’ll be happiest if they’re childless and alone is also an obvious form of misogyny.
Who else would tell women to choose the miserable conformity of a cubicle job over a loving family, but a raging misogynist?
Well, to be fair, two women boxers in an Olympic bout would provide a straightforward – and proportionally greater- example of violence against women. No need to drag in the Algerian.
Who tells women they will be happiest if they are childless and alone? Are men told the same thing?
No opinion on the substance of the article itself then. Or did it land a bit hard?
Well, you’re an incel, how do you feel about it?
Nice bit of front-lashing there, CS.
Predictably dull contribution.
Maaate, the only incel here is you. Top self own.
‘The aggregate insinuation was that the “extreme misogyny” which ought to be the focus of Labour’s counter-extremism was not the one Cooper has chosen to highlight — and that, in fact, Cooper is content to ignore misogyny from Muslims, or even to protect it in law, preferring instead to persecute Right-wing anons and forum nerds.’
This will of course not be policed impartially, and will only lead to further (justified) accusations of ‘two-tier’ enforcement.
Having personal likes and dislikes is not the government’s business. I see nothing wrong in women disliking men, and men disliking women.
It’s obvious that given the hatred of the sexes for each other males and females should be separated in education, work and transport.
Relationships between males and females have broken down irretrievably. It’s time to build separate societies.
Indeed this will end up in a two tier exercise. Ms Cooper and her Labour party have, I believe, opened themselves up to a massive predicament of their own making. This is a multicultural country and while some find ‘honour’ killing, a rightful course of action, other call this murder. While some find under aged forced and child marriage acceptable, others regard this as paedophilic. While some admire the status of being genitally mutilated others find this an abomination. Yes, there are laws against these behaviours, but they are not well policed and most have impunity if the truth were to be admitted. This will inevitably get the Labour party’s moral compass in a spin.
Salmon Rushdie, put a name to such behaviour some decades ago when he was criticing Pakistan, he identifed and named such behaviour as ‘Sexual Terrorism’. I believe this is what needs to be stopped. But I have a feeling it isn’t what Cooper had in mind.
What a job: highly paid to write vague policies with no parameters, no objective and no time frame.
SMART goals is a great thing to use in eg software projects, but what would a SMART goal be here?
Author at least recognises that extreme, incel-type misogyny needs firmer response. Glad in doing this she drew attention to outrages such as Jake Davidson. She might have pointed out that didn’t draw any Far Right demo did it.
She has a point that this will be seen by a good number as a test of impartiality. One would be v surprised if Cooper and Phillips don’t know that and Phillips own re-election was coloured by some visceral Islamist type intimidation. That won’t be lost on her.
But just to pull the Author up on one of her key errors – She refers to ‘…migrants bring their cultures with them’. No sh*t Sherlock! That has been the case for millennia. What so many fail to grasp is British Culture, or rather values perhaps, has a much bigger impact on these arrivals over time than the reverse. How about a bit of self confidence and pride in that for once. Many migrants better understand this and value it than vast tracts of the more indigenous population.
The Islamist intimidation Jess Phillips and her team suffered during the election campaign was actually completely lost on her. She proceeded to defend the same people during the riots when they were harassing journalists and attacking white people in and near her constituency. She’s not fit for the new office she holds and we all know it.
It wasn’t lost on her; she chose to ignore it or risk losing those 700 seats.
“What so many fail to grasp is British Culture, or rather values perhaps, has a much bigger impact on these arrivals over time than the reverse.”
This is such a stupid statement. This has already been proven to be false, all over Europe, and human history backs it up as well. Your so called ‘values’ are already being swept aside in an a deluge of third-world demographic change.
VJ you long since proved you have no real grasp of British culture or values.
Now bit of homework – go an look up how many democratic countries there were in 1945. Then look up the number now. Yes democracies have problems, and arc of progress is bumpy, but you think our culture isn’t the most vibrant and forceful worldwide? Evidence suggests otherwise. You lack confidence and suspect you also have a racial reflex.
‘Vibrant’ and ‘forceful’….hahahaha….I get it now, you are a troll. I thought you were just drippy. You’re just winding people up.
There is no ‘Far Right’. It’s a figment of your imagination.
Mary Harrington’s article is interesting and fair. How odd that she chose to begin it with Greer’s nasty statement.
Feminist indoctrination of each generation since the 1970s has been ongoing and I doubt whether Mary is an exception, but at least she wrestles with it, and remember, she is probably addressing her feminist peers as much as anyone else when she writes an article like this.
I think your analysis is skewed. It’s the more feminist feminists who take issues with her writing because she shits on so much of it. But thankfully none of us, including people who hate feminism, need to be tribalists to their death and can actually take analyses and discourse to deepen and broaden our understanding leading to new insights.
Germaine Greer is a strange one. I’ve never read The Female Eunuch myself, it’s not my cup of tea, but I do quite like her as a person, despite her early extreme feminist ideas. I think perhaps a lot of it was/is tangled up with her troubled relationship with her father. Fortunately she seems to have calmed down and become more sensible with age.
Most feminists had either abusive or absent fathers, or had clinical levels of mental and emotional problems, from Shalamuth Firestone to Andrea Dworkin to third wavers like Jessica Valenti.
Greer has grown up a bit, or perhaps become less extreme.
But there are no female eunuchs. Female sexuality has always been treasured, not destroyed. Females never had to guard harems, nor dress the emperor.
While many of the Caliphs in Persia had blue eyes – their mothers and grandmothers were often from the seraglio – the men who guarded their mothers had no children.
When The Female Eunuch was published (1971 I think), I was living in a quiet street in a conservative Sydney suburb. The woman in one household invited her female neighbours to a weekly discussion of the book. Those discussions were for most an introduction to what was then called Women’s Liberation. The nearby Macquarie University was known as the divorce factory since so many mature-aged women took advantage of Whitlam’s abolition of university fees, turned up, studied doggedly and left their marriages.
Pointless.
Our ruling class whether Tory or Labour will doubtless tolerate cultural and religious misogyny and clamp down hard on the native population.
I was willing to give this labour a chance, but they are proving to be every bit as authoritarian as Peter Hitchens warned they might be.
Likewise. And I begin to worry that this is the only thing they will actually deliver on!
Looked at cynically, the Labour Party is feminist dominated- and this is a means of ensuring feminists stay on board and continue to support MrStarmer.
For the Nth time, Mr Morley, feminism is not homogenous. Labour’s feminists are “socfems”; socialist feminists. Socfems are pro child mutilation in the name of gender ideology, pro worshipping men who say they’re women and letting them dominate women’s spaces, pro sex work and surrogacy, pro Muslim misogyny.
They can hardly be called feminists with any accuracy, in my opinion.
Gender critical feminists, by contrast, will support Muslim women to flee forced marriage, FGM and domestic violence. They support protecting children from the harms of gender ideology in schools and wider society (Another prominent trans activist has been charged with paedophilia – Stephen Ireland). They oppose prostitution, porn and surrogacy as they are all ways in which women’s bodies are exploited and often involved trafficking women.
Please stop tarring us all with the same brush.
Labour party women are very strange feminists! No support for women’s spaces, standing by a leader who thought he had a cervix and the latest unnoticed omission by Cooper over the Strip Search disgrace. While she rightly criticised this outrageous behaviour, and went on to draw attention to the racial profile of these child victims, she cmpletely omitted to mention the sexual profile!!!
anarcho tyranny: A system of government fails to enforce or adjudicate protections to its citizens while simultaneously persecuting innocent conduct.
Does this definition cover the current state of affairs in the UK?:
Anarcho-tyranny refers to a societal condition where the state exhibits both tyrannical and anarchic tendencies simultaneously. This paradoxical phenomenon is characterized by:
• Tyranny: The state exercises oppressive power over its citizens, often targeting the law-abiding and innocent, while failing to protect them from real threats.
Anarchy: The state’s inability or unwillingness to enforce basic public duties, such as protection or public safety, creates a power vacuum, allowing criminal elements to flourish.
Key Features:
1. Selective enforcement: The state focuses on persecuting certain groups or individuals, while ignoring or enabling criminal activity from others.
Ineffective governance: The state’s inability to address real problems, such as crime and public safety, leads to a sense of impunity among criminals and a lack of trust among citizens.
Rise of bureaucratic power: Anarcho-tyranny often stems from an over-reliance on bureaucracy and experts, leading to a “managed pacification” and the usurpation of autonomous social functions.
“For in this case Cooper and Phillips will be exhibiting so casual an indifference to the real-world safety of British women and girls we might even call it misogynistic.”
Punchy final sentence but inaccurate. It will be a combination of liberal left ideology (= diversity is our strength, migrants only bring good stuff and drop nasty habits like misogyny at the UK border), political correctness and fear of reprisals from certain cultural/religious groups that will mean this policy will be unevenly deployed, not casual indifference.
You only have to look to Germany where Ahmad Mansour, a popular, very critical voice on all things to do with integration and political Islam, can’t leave the house without police protection.
He was the one to inform me that the reason so many young Muslim male immigrants carry knives is because being in our Western culture (where women are free to do things like wear bikinis in public and criticise them) threatens their masculinity to such a degree that they “need” the knife to restore a sense of self. Sorry, but, as a woman, the young lads taking their switchblades with them for a morning constitutional cause me FAR greater fear than sad sacks like Tate.
Back in the UK Labour have bought into the Noble Lie – all immigrants are by definition good, all those with critical voices are extremists.
The Noble Lie is used to convince the Little People that their experiences must be brought under the approval of the State. But eventually the Noble Lie collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.
Does extreme misogyny exist? Yes. Does it always result in harm – only sometimes. But the Noble Lie will paint misogyny as the blackest evil whether it is deserved or not, and it will be applied by the broad brush of bureaucratic indifference.
Their attitudes stem from a fear of being emasculated, hence their need to control women.
Far from demonstrating masculinity, they’re demonstrating fear and inability to control their emotions. It’s weakness, not strength, that drives them.
You’re absolutely right – but this is scant comfort if you manage to provoke or threaten one of these blade-toting young ‘uns just by doing something a Western woman (or man – they’re not that fussy) is entitled to do and find yourself with a knife in your abdomen.
Perhaps. But even a very strong martial arts expert can be stabbed and killed by a weaker man. Or can have the misfortune to encounter a stronger, more skilled opponent.
Which is why banning weapons is a terrible idea. The wealthy will still tallyho after grouse, and be safely guarded in expensive urban areas, but the great unwashed will be defenseless.
Particularly so if two or three or four tiers of “justice” are required of the constabulary.
Suggest you look at Silat,Escrima, Russian Systema which spend considrable amounts of time defending from knife attacks.
Systema: how to disarm a knife? (youtube.com)
This Silat Master Is Impossible To KILL (youtube.com)
Career of W E Fairbairn
William E. Fairbairn – Wikipedia
The UK Police appear to be unwilling to learn from W E Fairbarn who it was said had 600 fights with Triads during his time in Shanghai.
What I find difficult to understand is that people say they are scared of violent crime, undertake physical exercise but decline to learn a martial art.
Statistics repeatedly show that the safest response is to flee rather than fight.
Neither option is of any use to those of us too disabled to do either, though.
There is probably a genetic component
You have said exactly what I would say. The reason no one will tackle Islam’s misogyny—and that’s a mild word—is because everyone is afraid of what will happen to them. Knife attack? Acid? Decapitation?
While attending Speaker’s Corner, a favourite passtime of mine a few years ago, I came to witness the palpable hatred those Muslim men who gathered there had with regard to the freedom that Western women have. It did indeed threaten them. There was also a mistranslation operating. These men ‘knew’ that Western women were sexually free. Having no conceivable concept of this phenomenon, they interpreted this as meaning free for them to use.
Young men carrying knives has little to do with “misogyny” and they will probably use it against each other before anyone else.
It all depends on what this Labour government hope to achieve by making misogyny, extremist or otherwise, an offence.
Are they being honest about their motivations ?
Are they being realistic in what they say they want to achieve ?
There has been outcry from some women, especially since the murder of Sarah Everard, to protect them from “male violence”, as if violence against women, or children, or animals, or other men, was a new phenomenon. Can women, realistically, be protected more than they already are, considering the UK is one of the safest countries in the world ?
Perhaps feminism led women to believe that in today’s new world of equality and women’s empowerment it would be a safer nicer place, and yet it is’nt. Perhaps there is no feminist utopia. Perhaps power is not the answer, but personal responsibility is.
That’s not to say we don’t need a decent police force because we do, and personally I would prefer the government to focus on improving the police, than making misogyny a crime.
I don’t think anyone can be protected from violence. We have laws and sentences made to remove violent people from the community and also as a deterrent. But those sentences don’t seem to have stopped violence against anyone, male,female or child. If they were serious about misogyny they might begin with real proactive action against men and domestic violence. Not an easy thing to deal with but certainly an obvious beginning and certainly an area that is more easily defined as an objective.
Violence will never be eliminated, but it can be reduced, and it does vary between cultures.
We have been taking a feminist approach to domestic violence now for decades, and it hasn’t worked. First of all it assumes men by definition to always be the perpetrators, and this is simply not true. Women are also frequently the perpetrators both in heterosexual and lesbian relationships. Second it fails to examine the real causes (which are various) because it is too locked into feminist explanations.
The emphasis on “violence against women and girls” shows the Labour Party is still locked into outmoded thinking. And even if you don’t care about violence against men, what about boys! They are children too!
Agree. There is a level of safetyism associated with today’s feminists which infantilises women as in need of protecting – the Guardian suggesting men cross to the other side of the road when passing women on the pavement or gender critical writers viewing men using women’s toilets as a threat – as I have noted before, most men are not a threat but those who are have always been able to walk into the ladies’ lav without presenting a gender recognition certificate.
Journalists of all stripes need to remember that in the phrase “women and girls”, one of those demographics is made up entirely of adults.
Women and girls have always needed & will always need protecting. We are physically the weaker sex. That is not something that can be wished (or legislated) away, no matter how smart women might be.
What we needed & had, until 5 minutes ago, was a whole kinship system based on family, chivalry & protection. (Louise Perry is very clear-eyed on this) That didn’t prevent really egregious harms coming to women who fell outside that network & Im not for one minute misty-eyed about a past that kept us from voting or participating in the world of work. But did they have to be mutually exclusive?
For feminism to have turned away, in the late C20, from concentrating on basic protections for women & girls, eg against physical violence & r*pe, towards rallying for those most likely to carry out such harms, while monstering all ‘men’, from whose quarters most of us get our only protection, has left many of us reeling.
Jess Phillips et al need to start being intellectually honest – first with themselves, then with the rest of us.
Much of the developing world is still a truly horrendous place for women and girls. And we see more and more of the practices that make it so occurring in Europe: a rise in grooming gangs, Sharia courts, FGM, forced marriage, femicide etc. This is the issue that real feminists would be tackling, but they are too busy fighting the mythical Far Right.
But did they have to be mutually exclusive? —–> That question strikes at the heart of pretty much every social justice concern – it views things in a binary or zero-sum manner in which either there are two choices and two only, or one side must lose for the other to win.
Those people from overseas are their partners in liberation, which is why you have young western women demonstrating for Hamas.
Women are FAR safer in Israel than in any Muslim country, but if one wants the omelet of social justice, some eggs need to be broken.
To claim that women need protecting from men while correctly observing that most men are not monsters is contradictory.
Similarly, the parts of the world where women are most subject to violence are precisely those where a “kinship system based on family, chivalry” is relied on and leads to, for example, honour killings.
The equal application of the law, property ownership, suffrage, freedom of movement and employment rights are what distinguishes countries where women are relatively safe from those where they are not.
No, I don’t think it’s contradictory. Women, girls & young boys too (all children) need protecting: against a minority of men but also other physical dangers. That no longer includes wild animals in the uk but hopefully you get the point.
I thought a long time before posting what I posted because I foresaw, & take your point about, a ‘kinship system based on family, chivalry etc’, leading to honour killings. Let me clarify. As far as I know, honour killings have never been widespread practice in Europe. I believe this is because it is based principly around shame, not chivalry. The latter has respect built into it – respect for the inmate worth of women. Ditto we’ve not had FGM or gang r*pe or even Burkha-wearing as culturally coded into our societies. Different societies have very different culturally-specific codes & this is a desperately obvious point the Left misses.
So my point was that, once we had won the ‘equal application of the law, property ownership, suffrage, freedom of movement and employment rights’, it might have been a good idea to take stock and help those women & girls in the developing world gain the same. Because ‘property ownership, suffrage, freedom of movement and employment rights’ do not protect women in places like India or Nigeria from r*pe or death. Legislation is important; culture, essential.
How for instance are you meant to legislate against adult women consenting to the mistreatment of themselves?
If you read Tom Holland’s Dominion, the origin of chivalry is Christianity.
That’s a very good response.
Perhaps there is something unique to western culture that has always been more protective of women. A kind of deference. A sense that women’s lives matter more. A desire to protect them. This predates things like women getting the vote, and is perhaps part of the cultural ground work for this happening.
This attitude is not universal.
Agreed, David. Or at least that women’s lives matter as much as men’s.
You completely miss the point. What makes a man into a monster? Men are born monsters. What makes a man civilized is the Christian ethic. A man raised on NT principles learns that his highest destiny is to direct his aggression and sexual energy into providing a safe home for a wife and children, and to build a business, trade or service which creates order and defeats chaos. There are innumerable books and sermons on this. Jordan Peterson is hugely popular with men because of his teaching on responsibility as the primary driver of a good masculine life. Women like this kind of man.
C Northcote Parkinson observed chivalry appeared to have developed in Europe about 1000 AD and may have been adopted from the Beduin.
That seems unlikely. What were the channels by which elements of the Bedouin culture of the Arabian and Syrian Deserts could have been transmitted to Europe around 1000 AD? Clearly not the Crusades, as these started a century later).
My reply to you disappeared so I’ll try again.
I don’t think it’s contradictory to say that women & girls, & boys too for that matter (all children), need protecting from a minority of men. In the uk it is still a minority – for now – because we’ve had very strong societal moral codes in place for centuries which took us out of the dark ages and into civilisation.
I thought carefully before posting because I foresaw and take your point about ‘kinship systems based on family & chivalry’. Allow me to explain the difference between chivalry – which comes from a medieval Christian knightly tradition, based on kindness and respect towards women – and honour killings which are shame-based and treat women as having no inherent worth except as they relate to men.
‘The equal application of the law, property ownership, suffrage, freedom of movement and employment rights’ do not protect women from gang-r*pe or murder or being enslaved in places such as India or Nigeria because, while they have protections on paper, these places have different cultural traditions also going back centuries. A point that the Left manages to miss spectacularly every single time is that cultural differences matter. Legislation is important but culture is essential.
How, for instance, are you meant to legislate against practices that adult women willingly accept for themselves, no matter how damaging to them? It is mothers and grandmothers who mutilate baby girls in the name of making them ‘clean’ for their future husband and, in the west, proudly accept the burka, despite many of their sisters in the developing world campaigning to throw these off. What would you say to this British couple:
https://youtu.be/3DgT0LYTWAg?si=-Dir1DUNer1yRa-c ?
Deleted replica comment
My reply to you disappeared so I’ll try again.
I don’t think it’s contradictory to say that women & girls, & boys too for that matter (all children), need protecting from a minority of men. In the uk it is still a minority – for now – because we’ve had very strong societal moral codes in place for centuries which took us out of the dark ages (when might was right) and into civilisation.
I thought carefully before posting because I foresaw and take your point about ‘kinship systems based on family & chivalry’. Allow me to explain. I think the crucial difference here is that chivalry comes from a medieval Christian knightly tradition, based on kindness and respect towards women, while honour killings are shame-based and treat women as having no inherent worth except as they relate to men.
‘The equal application of the law, property ownership, suffrage, freedom of movement and employment rights’ do not protect women from gang-r*pe or murder or being enslaved in places such as India or Nigeria because, while they have protections on paper, these places have different cultural traditions. A point that the Left manages to miss spectacularly every single time is that cultural differences matter.
Legislation is important but culture is essential.
How, for instance, are you meant to legislate against practices that adult women willingly accept for themselves, no matter how damaging to them? It is mothers and grandmothers who mutilate baby girls in the name of making them ‘clean’ for their future husband and, in the west, proudly accept the burka, despite many of their sisters in the developing world campaigning to throw these off. What would you say to this British couple:
https://youtu.be/3DgT0LYTWAg?si=-Dir1DUNer1yRa-c?
Why is it contradictory to recognise that women need protecting from men and most men are not monsters contradictory? Surely it just recognises that some men are a threat to women and most men recognise a duty to protect women from such men.
Let’s not forget that some of these close family members were the guilty parties. The past was not so great, and in general, in the west, things are far better now.
But I basically agree. We need to be absolutely honest about where current threats to women come from.
Golda Meir’s comment about Israel’s enemies – about how their hatred for Israel surpassed their love for their own children – is also very apt for feminists.
Their hatred for men is what drives them. Which is why they would rather blather on about “misogyny” and this mythical collective of men, rather than focus on sensible actions that help women.
Any normal man would support being tough on crime, strong policing, putting the spotlight on cults like islam, restricting immigration from countries which have a culture problem.
Feminists – on each and every one of these issues- have exactly the opposite stance.
Yes. As recently as 7/10 I would have grappled a bit with you on this, but the scales really have fallen from my eyes since then.
My central issue here is that there aren’t really ‘places like Afghanistan’. The Islamic World certainly does have a problem with its treatment of women, no one would deny this, but Afghanistan is uniquely awful in that regard, and in every other Islamic country there exists a substantial activist base of Muslim women actively campaigning for human rights. The only other country that comes close is of course Saudi Arabia, but even there at least girls can go to school. The Taliban aren’t even representative of all Islamists, yet alone all Muslims.
Afghanistan is not “uniquely awful” -what about Yemen, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan etc., etc.
And yet here in Brooklyn I can observe little Muslim girls (mostly children of Yemeni immigrants) growing up, until one day they suddenly disappear. I can only assume that they’ve joined the ranks of the chador and veil-wearers. Never to be actually seen or heard in public again.
While I sincerely respect the rights of my neighbors to make their own choices I can’t help but wonder; how much of this is really voluntary? In our Western milieu this, and similar issues with other minority traditions, are legitimate subjects the need to be addressed, or at least discussed.
So they are backward and misogynist, but not as backward and misogynist as Afghanistan, so not to worry, and it’s ok to welcome that culture here?
Female Genital Mutilation (Middle East and Africa), honor killings (Muslims everywhere) being stoned to death for having and affair while the man gets a few lashes (Saudi Arabia), beheadings (Saudi Arabia), Looking at the world through the screened slit of her hot burka (everywhere), men marrying little girls (everywhere), Christian girls kidnapped by Muslim men and impregnated (see: Boko Haram, Africa), and so on. Some right-wing men might be misogynists, but Muslim men operate on a completely different level.
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Ah, if only. What do you say to all those activist women (mostly non-Muslims) in Muslim countries with Sharia currently struggling for basic human rights ? Countries ‘like’ the Islamic Republic of Iran, where they are gang-r*ped, have their eyes gouged out & are even killed for protesting or wearing the Hijab incorrectly?
Do you know how many Iranians have been killed by their own regime? These Iranian expats do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGgT2tGa4jM&t=4s
Have you read Yasmine Mohammed’s Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam (2019)? I strongly recommend it & want to give her the last word, because she has so much more experience than either you or me:
‘now as an adult woman, I work with suffragettes […] every day from all over the world. Like me these women have seen both worlds and are choosing to risk their lives for the chance to live as free women. They are women in Iran who get lashed and imprisoned for refusing to wear a Sharia government-mandated cloth on their heads. They are women in Saudi Arabia who are tortured in prison for demanding they have the right to drive a car or to travel without a male guardian’s permission. They are young girls in Afghanistan who are shot in the head because they want to attend school. They are little girls in Sudan who burn themselves because they do not want to be married off. They are young women in Egypt fighting to keep their bodies intact, unmutilated by razors. I don’t have to refer to a history book to find women who are risking their lives to fight societies that view women as second-class citizens. I interact with them every day.
[…]
People in Muslim-majority countries are just trying to progress their culture in the same way western cultures have. You have been able to abolish slavery. You have been able to fight for women’s equality. We just want to do the same. Why is it that when we try to progress, suddenly it’s a bad thing? We get called Islamophobic for criticising Sharia and pushing for change. Why should we have to retain our misogynist, homophobic cultures?
[…]
I hope that people will start to assess one another and deal with one another based on ideas and not identities. I hope that when people meet a girl being beaten by her family, they won’t bow down to the ethnicity of her parents. I hope they will realise that all little girls bruise, regardless of ethnicity. I hope they understand that justifying the beating because of the ethnicity of her parents will condemn her to a life of physical and psychological torture that will stay with her until the day she dies, regardless of the colour of her skin. I hope that they will choose to protect the child, rather than a faceless, nameless culture or religion that is undeserving of protection. Religious rights can never supersede human rights. I hope they will understand that doing so is not only gross and racist, it is inhumane.’
As Mary mentions, this could also be a tojan horse for self id and such like. After all if the lovely Yvette doesn’t know what a woman is, who is she really planning to protect? And if they do decide that a woman is someone who says is a woman, then the likes of Harrington and Stock could well find themselves on the wrong side (according to Yvette) of the law.
And anyway, isn’t “extreme misogyny” already covered by existing legislation or am I to understand that now is some kind of free for all?
You begin to wonder if this sort of thing isn’t largely displacement activity. Rather than address more serious and immediate problems, let’s keep digging the identity politics hole (and ignoring Denis Healey’s advice on holes).
How is this even close to being a priority issue for the UK right now ?
And when will we be seeing the corresponding legislation on misandry ?
This new government is beginning to remind me of the title of the romcom “How to lose a guy in 10 days” – “how to alienate the public in 10 months”. It’s just one unforced error after another.
It can be summed up as Anarcho Tyranny.
As a generalisation, Greer was clearly wrong. Most men never get more negative than a certain exasperation – a feeling which is clearly returned. Haters are rare but noisy. Anti male feeling, even hatred, is more common and socially acceptable – but again hardly representative of all women.
If Germaine Greer had only talked to a good psychiatrist about her hatred of men, instead of making a career out of it, Western Society might be a better place.
She is to be fair a voice of reason these days.
To be fair, she has always been persuasive, but I’m not sure that makes up for all the harm her influence has caused.
When you consider the attitudes of women like Greer towards male victims of domestic violence, or toward serious issues that mainly affect men such as suicide rates, homelessness or biases in family courts…
Her statement, while of course false, is much more readily explained.
It’s purely projection. As simple as that.
110% correct.
Elliot Rodger was prescribed Risperidone, which is an antipsychotic , used to treat schizophrenia.
At last, we are recognizing that people with severe mental health issues should be on a watch list.
It would be helpful if YC would provide examples of what would be considered extreme misogyny, and what would be considered misogyny which did not need the involvement of the law.
Is the idea that women should not leave the house unveiled extreme? Is it also extreme if expressed by a woman? What about common internet ideas, for example that women in general are hypergamous, that body count matters, or that abortion is murder so that all women who have abortions are murderers?
Test test. Is my other comment visible?
I don’t have “voting buttons”, which is odd, but this comment doesn’t have them either.
EDIT:
They seem to have appeared here, which means my other comment is likely in purgatory.
This site is like the film “Brazil”.
I do wonder sometimes.
My other comment seems to have been released from quarantine now…
One does wonder (especially because I am sure I replied before to your message).
Surely the ‘real truth’ is that people possess a strange need to have an enemy. The target of hatred may be women, men, race, sexuality, religion, wealth, body shape, holiday choices, habits… A wonderful line in the film The Peacemaker is when a rogue Russian general passes a column of refugees and declares, ‘I hate them because they are poor.’ Any excuse for a bit of hatered!
“there is no need to direct British counter-extremism resources at such offences. Firstly, they are already illegal in the UK”.
This doesn’t follow – all terrorist offences such as murder, ABH and rape are already illegal in the UK and (as far as I know) every jurisdiction on earth, even if they are weakly prosecuted.
Maybe the reasonable counter-terrorist response would be to monitor anyone who starts promoting murder and violence regardless of political colour – after all, whether you focus on incel terrorists alone or include Islamic terrorists on this watchlist, you would – by definition – be ignoring misandrist terrorism (should that ever come into existence), Hindutva terrorism, etc, so Mary is nevertheless arguing for a two-tier counter terrorism policy that focuses on unpopular groups rather than to any (potential) threat regardless of political or religious affiliation.
The law must be impartial if it is to be accepted by those to whom it is applied.
There is already a two tier counter-terrorism response, when was the last time a “far right” terrorist attack happened? Just about every other terrorist “incident” is described as “mental health issues”.
I feel sorry for those with actual mental health issues, just as it was being destigmatised, it starts getting applied to terrorists
You rang? Jokes aside, my experience over the past 20 years living with severe and crippling OCD has shown me that the entire movement to ‘destigmatize’ mental illness has been an appalling failure, and that’s only if you assume helping the mentally ill was ever even the point. All it’s seem to have done is conflate actual, legitimate illnesses with the more nebulous and easily exploitative concept of ‘mental health’. Now, when people talk about suffering from ‘anxiety’, more often than not they really mean being neurotic and highly strung, which is in *no way* comparable to my ‘anxiety disorder’ that is a result of a chemical imbalance in my brain caused by a divergence in the structure of my memory and impulse control centers, and leads me to have such an extreme response to specific stimuli that it literally changes how my senses perceive the world. I don’t need my illness ‘destigmatized’, I need it f***ing TREATED.
It reminds me of how advocates for the homeless-, sorry, ‘unhoused’, say the main thing we need to protect them from is stigma. Really? Here I thought it was *the rain*.
Perfect comment. I agree 100%. So much of the Left’s good-doing is really covert narcissism.
Thank you Mary for this piece. Not only is it great in general but it’s helping me make sense of your views. In your book, which I loved, I took issue with how you said patriarchy practically does not exist in the west anymore. I wondered if you denied the existence of misogyny or actual women-specific struggles. I know you don’t. But still didn’t understand it fully. This piece helped and I’d love to read more like that.
Easy to tell what ideology is in charge of Britain by what’s being given a total free pass – left-wing extremism.
What motivated the Southport racist? Social media is saturated with far-left ( which includes black supremacist ) anti-white race hate and conspiracy theory, for example.
Does murdering little girls at a dance party constitute a hate crime and an act of misogynistic terrorism? Does randomly stabbing another little girl on the street constitute a hate crime?
‘Does randomly stabbing another little girl on the street constitute a hate crime?’
Has this just happened?
According to what I read about policing in the UK, it depends on whether the attacker said anything hurtful during the attack. It’s the words that matter more than the killing or the shedding of blood.
I was briefly a member of the Labour Party in the eighties, but left when I realised that the class hatred of middle class socialists is far worse than anything you find on the right. It’s basically a movement of curtain-twitching busybodies driven not by altruism but by the petty authoritarianism of the bureaucrat much more interested in controlling you than in making your life better. This sort of oppressive legislation is absolutely par for the course. Expect much more of it.
Dear God, o hope you’re wrong but fear you’re spot on.
This is the same “specific gap” targeted by the photo of Andrew Tate that leads the article, rather than the real misogynists who emigrate to the west. Why not use a more accurate photo – perhaps a real victim – rather than adding to the misplaced pile-on of “incels.” Speaking of the latter, I rarely see in print any consideration of incels being the product of extreme feminism now that the accepted philosophy is the concept that women don’t need men.
Most of the western world now coddles women at the expense of men. Entire safe spaces and human resource departments are created (by women and staffed by women) to minimize the possibility of women being exposed to criticism of their ridiculous ideas.
Apparently extreme misandry dealt out by radical feminists towards men is perfectly ok though. Or am I displaying extreme misogyny for pointing this out
Stop. Don’t.
With respect to passing laws to protect against ‘hate crimes’ or ‘hate speech’ or views that are considered ‘extreme’ and dangerous (Or is it threatening? Violence inspiring?), I’m reminded of Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka warning the children who are getting ready to do something really stupid and land in a very bad spot in his deadpan manner, “Stop. Don’t.”
Like in the movie, it won’t matter. The stupid people seem compelled to continue creating an ever more complicated (and subjective) tangle of dangerous speech and thoughts that will eventually ensnare them or someone they love, all in the name of protecting them and us.
Hey – all of you who want to try and police what people say and more importantly what they may be thinking when they say it: Stop. Don’t.
Heavy sigh…
Yet again, a government criminalises opinions. Why shouldn’t people dislike women, or any group for that matter, if that’s genuinely how they feel?
Even the Taliban recognise that women legally exist as distinct from an idea in a man’s head. In the UK since 2004 an adult man with a psychological disorder or a sexual fetish is awarded a female birth certificate. It is obscene.
So what are you actually saying? That women are better off under the Taliban.
Don’t be ridiculous. Melissa is simply pointing out that even a regime or ideology that sees women as second class citizens knows the difference between men and women. It’s not hard to understand what she meant.
I’m pretty sure the point was if even a group as awful as the Taliban can get this right, what the Hell is our excuse for getting it so wrong.
This term, much like racism, is so watered down as to be meaningless. To legitimately criticize the actions of a politician who happens to be female is to invite accusations of misogyny, as if no male politician is ever criticized. And yes, it is quite amusing that this new hysteria comes from the same group that cannot define ‘woman’ in the first place. How nice that much of the West can dabble in first-world problems while continuing to ignore the far more serious issues all around.
Prevent is already being used as a weapon by the `left’ if you fall foul of the alphabet police & the pro Hamas mob. I’ve no doubt that it will be used in an attempt to hammer gender critical women into acquiesce.
Daily Mail 280624: “ A 12-year-old schoolboy has been investigated by counter-extremism officers after he declared there ‘are only two genders’.
The child made a video, posted online, in which he also stated: ‘There’s no such thing as non-binary’.
And in response to school bullies who mistakenly believed he supported transgender ideology, he said: ‘[I’m] gay not queer.’….”
the family was interrogated by officers
“She[the mother] said counter terror officers – who visited the family home – raised concerns over the fact that her son, who is Jewish, harboured extremist views on account of his response when asked if there were any groups that shouldn’t exist.
She said her son responded that ‘Hamas (the Gaza-based terror group) should be wiped out’.
Further fears were raised over comments he made to school bullies, stating he wanted to ‘exterminate’ them.
He is said to have made the remark in relation to appalling racist slurs from classmates.” I wonder if the school or the counter terrorism officers investigated the bullies?
As the toughness of the Police declines so does their willingness to confront strong violent criminals. When the Police comprised Assistant Commissioner of Police Ernie Bond OBE, Commander of Bomb Squad, formely Scots Guards and a sergeant In SAS and Sergeant Jack Terry DCM of SAS who served in the Nottingham Police, they were willing to confront strong violent criminals.
The most important aspect of Policing is prevention of crime. Many criminals from Eastern Europe have had military training: what percentage of the British Police scare them such they do not commit crime?
‘“Women have no idea how much men hate them,” wrote Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch (1970).’
Really? Men have a very clear idea how much women hate them .. and seek to replace the patriarchy with a vicious matriarchy.
What often goes completely unmentioned and unnoticed in these conversations is that one of the leading causes that pushes young men down the path that leads that noiseome and purile idealogy of ‘inceldom’ is the hyper fixation in modern society of everything ever on all things ‘woman’. Much like the twin issue of the hyper fixation of all things ‘of colour’, it leads to annoyance and eventually resentment on the part of the large swathe of the population that are neither women nor of colour, who often are blamed for all the world’s problems regardless of actual culpability. Many men, particularly young men, find themselves lost and struggling, and yet the consistent messaging they’re getting from broader society is they’re not lost and struggling *enough*. Resentment then leads to bitterness, and bitterness to anger, and the first steps along that dark path become ever increasingly alluring. I’m not defending these types of extremists, obviously, after all I believe that there’s a lot of truth to what Jordan Peterson said on the topic, about how if all the women ever dislike you, maybe it’s not them it’s *you*. But we need to remember that, although sexism is terrible, it has two sides; misandry and misogyny. One fuels the other and vice versa. And one currently is not only socially acceptable right now in the West, but outright encouraged.
Some of us men prefer women’s company, women friends and working with women, as well as actual relationships. The truth is that, especially in this country, many men do not actually relate to women, outside an actual relationship or marriage, and even then love to maintain their ” lads nights out” and ” male only” social gatherings, which I have always avoided.
Assume you mean the U.K. and yes, you’re right, but it goes for women too. There’s a kind of informal gender segregation here which you don’t find everywhere. I’m like you, I generally prefer women’s company – but it’s a bit unbritish.
I think this problem has existed for 10’s of thousands of years.
Now is the answer to bury their bodies with shell jewelry and a thick layer of ocher?
No, I think you make laws against things like assault and murder and you prosecute the offenders. Instead of trying to understand them.
The case which Mary refers to from Calcutta, Bengal is more due to a hard Left oppressive regime’s culture of political violence enmeshed in governance failures of a deliberate kind rooted to systemic corruption.
The brave doctor had stumbled upon a wider nexus of misdeeds involving very powerful elites.
Broadly in the South Asian context violence against women is far more rooted in political reasons than in the West. There is less misogyny in a Western sense than deep rooted patriarchal codes enmeshed in feudal ways of thinking; combined with the politics of appeasement, especially of minorities.
I think we all know how this is going to go.
Mary Harrington like so many of the political classes does not ask if ‘extreme misogyny’ was applied to culture just how many seminal books,films,music and plays could be banned or censored.Or if living artists such as Sir Mick Jagger could be arrested for having written extremely misogynistic lyrics?
How about the misogynistic practice of selectively aborting the female foetus? Something that is already causing a shift in the balance of sexes in certain countries. Will Mrs Balls restrict sex testing of the foetus, ban sex specific abortions and travelling abroad to procure one?
If I recall correctly this all kicked off with an alarming rise in women getting real abuse in the real world – I think the example used was on trains. So how has it suddenly become about online abuse?
We also need to be very wary about the stretching of the meaning of extremism and terrorism. There are some very draconian laws which help protect us from real terrorism. Having those laws used for this sort of faux terrorism would really be a very bad step beyond the authoritarianism we are already reeling from into totalitarianism.
I think we are ignoring the massive decline in physical toughness in men combined with ridiculing of chivalry which leads to poor treatment of women. One cannot be chivalrous to a woman and be a wimp. Pre WW2 in Britain men boxed and played physically tough sport and many went to work at fourteen years of age. Most Fathers were tough and taught their sons to be chivalrous to women. Men who are secure in their toughness and technical competence have no need to rude, coarse or crude towards women and have no need to carry weapons. The fact that so many boys and men spend hours playing violent games while not practising boxing, martial arts, rugby makes them delusional and totally insecure when threatened by violence, hence they carry knives. Apart from a few criminals, men did not carry knives for protection in the 1930s.
Culture in the UK is heavily influenced by American which since the late 1960s had become coarse and crude, compare Motown with gangsta rap and drill. The swear words “ Mother F….. “ has been frequently used. The advantage of men undertaking hard sports they will have athletic bodies which will make them attractive to women.
Dalzel –Job was a WW2 RN officer and commando who may have been the inspiration of James Bond, He said he only ever loved one woman, his wife.
Patrick Dalzel-Job – Wikipedia
Alain Delon was very attractive to women and appears to have treated many badly.
Alain Delon – Wikipedia
For many boys, Fathers are absent which in run down areas is the reason they join gangs.
For many boys the choice of role model is wimp, gangsta rapper or Andrew Tate so they chose the latter two. The decline in toughness and ridiculing of chivalry mean that even when Fathers are present in their sons lives, few are like Patrick Dalzel-Job. Women managers have said to me said to me they prefer working on construction sites as they are treated with more respect than in offices.
Construction sites require competent people, whatever their sex, gender, or anything else.
Islam is the religion of rape and misogyny. How much would anyone like to bet that this new law will not intrude on it at all?
And when the gaps have all been closed, will anyone be able to speak?
uncomfortable truth 1 it was the so called far right who weren’t systematically ignoring the grooming gangs – the backlash against which – at least had a part to play in the recent protests against uncontrolled immigration. Uncomfortable truth 2 the male muslim immigrants to this country may indeed harbour misogyny but they are not responsible for the billion dollar pornography industry which really was the elephant in this article. Not mentioned. But if you don’t want the issue swept under the rug it’s something that has to be dealt with by the ‘silent majority’ already.
“…unless our new Home Secretary is unusually scrupulous about impartiality…”
Falls at the first hurdle then!
The author indulges in extreme mendacity when she speaks of “that extreme misogyny the West spent futile trillions trying to expunge from Afghanistan”. The West’s escapade in Afghanistan came about because the West in the shape of the US went into an uncontrollable huff to avenge the action of an alleged group based in Afghanistan that resulted in the demolition of a couple of buildings and some loss of life. Later when the whole vanity project turned out to be a folly and people started to ask “what is it all about?” they came out saying “oh, we are trying to free the women”, to give their enterprise a lofty glow. It had another objective – to drive a wedge between men and women, thus sundering social cohesion by convincing the women that the men were their enemies. This to my mind is the reason why Taliban policies re women’s safety and participation in public life are formulated the way they are. These policies, while may be necessary on practical grounds, help to c**k a snook at the sanctimonious West too. Afghanistan does not have the resources to accommodate a free for all in social matters – single mothers, unwanted pregnancies, rampaging sexual diseases, and the jobs for everybody. They have to cut their coats according to their cloth. The system of ‘purda’ is not an anti-female measure. If anything it is an anti-male measure. Should the West be interested in ‘progress’ for Afghan women, the West should tone down the snide remarks emanating from its official circles.
Culturally the West has a deeply misogynistic culture. The existence of a plethora of pejorative terms/slurs in public use, for example in the UK, is testimony to that. A ‘wednesday witch’ is one of the few printable ones.
Some men hate women, some women hate men. Most of us treat each other as individuals and not based on immutable characteristics. And beyond that, largely indifferent and focussed on ourselves.