He doesn't care about female knowledge workers (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
The Tories’ women problem is back. Polling suggests that Labour are on track to win over 17% of the women who voted Tory in 2019, but barely 3% of men. But it seems unlikely that this shift is a consequence of the two sex scandals that precipitated this week’s by-elections — after all, tutting at sexual indiscretion is more a feature among conservatives than today’s “sex-positive” progressives.
A report published last weekend sheds light: the female drift away from conservatism is structural and is a worldwide trend. The authors offer some speculation as to why, such as the need for state-subsidised childcare since we entered the workplace. But this is to see things backwards. It’s not so much that women are becoming more progressive, as that progress is leaving men behind.
If the Unabomber declared in the manifesto he sent to the New York Times and Washington Post in 1995 that “the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race”, we’re now some decades out of the industrial era and into the “information age” — a much more asymmetrical disaster, whose principal weight has been borne by working-class men. Meanwhile, the Left that once stood up for those men has been colonised by a female-heavy new class of knowledge worker, that wields progressivism as a means of legitimating its interests. And the implications of this change reach well beyond the Tories’ electoral prospects with female voters.
In the smoking rubble of the Second World War’s aftermath, a new dream took hold: cleaner, safer and more modern than the industrial one. Post-industrial “knowledge societies” would be governed by rules-based internationalism; manufacturing could happen anywhere, and what mattered was ideas and innovation. In 1963, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson told the country that a new Britain was rising, and would prosper in the “white heat” of scientific revolution. Wilson wrote later that his speech’s aim had been to “replace the cloth cap [with] the white laboratory coat as the symbol of British labour”.
This post-war push from an industrial to a knowledge base created new opportunities for women. For while men are, on average, considerably physically stronger than women, and as such more likely to be able to perform heavy industrial work, an economy that’s more geared toward desk-based work places no such constraints on the sex of employees.
And this, in turn, reshaped the Left. As a movement born out of 19th-century trade unionism, and premised on the power of working-class people to exact better pay and conditions from their bosses through collective action, the industrial Left’s relation to women was historically ambivalent. Speaking in 1875, for example, TUC secretary Henry Broadhurst declared that the aim of trade unionism was a situation “where wives and daughters would be in their proper sphere at home, instead of being dragged into competition for livelihood against the great and strong men of the world”. Even in 1906, many within the Labour Party argued that including women in the demand for universal suffrage would weaken their cause.
But de-industrialisation levelled the employment playing-field between men and women. From the mid-century onward, these changes combined with a flood of new consumer technologies that eased the previously arduous work of housekeeping, and medical ones that meant women could enjoy an active sex life with minimal risk of pregnancy. Thus liberated by technology, women demanded the right to seize those opportunities on the same terms as men — and second-wave feminism was born.
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Subscribe“I doubt I’m the only woman who would rather this than an escalating militant, macho, jack-booted backlash, powered by working-class rage and served with a side-order of embittered misogyny.”
Rather missing the main point I think. There is a serious long term consequence to consider under all this political correctness. The denial of complementarity implies that neither men nor women contribute anything unique to raising a child simply because of gender. It is an assertion that male and female parents are interchangeable components in child-rearing. In practice, this means that fathers are separated from their children. A father contributes nothing essential to the child that his mother is also not capable of contributing. So he loses yet one more compelling reason to stay. After all, everything “will be fine” if he leaves – or if he was never there in the first place.
Multi generations of boys raised without a father. Looking for that father figure to model themselves on…. Anywhere….. anyone..
The fact many young men online rate Jordan Peterson as a father figure and that is is often the least worst option says a lot. Many often turn to gangs and other disgruntled peers. Regardless of ones race, religion, sexuality etc, having two parents who love each other, don’t suffer any mental issues and are married is the greatest privilege one can have in life and is the greatest indicator of success.
Amen to that. All one needs to look at is the fabulous success of all those deep blue cities to see what our future looks like.
Thank goodness for Jordan Peterson.
“ Regardless of ones race, religion, sexuality etc, having two parents who love each other, don’t suffer any mental issues and are married is the greatest privilege one can have in life and is the greatest indicator of success.” – 100% as stated and strong even without some of your qualifications.
“ rate Jordan Peterson as a father figure and that is is often the least worst option ” – this statement suggests you have no idea who he is and what he stands for. Listen to even one of his lectures on the physiological significance of the Bible and you may very quickly change your position.
You didn’t even spell “psychological” right. What does he stand for again?
The idea of objective reality for starters. The reason for, & necessity of, hierarchical structures. The necessary balance between order & chaos. Why you should try to solve your own problems before sorting out the world’s ailments. There’s a lot more too if you watch his lectures.
That 1st observation is such a worth-sucking statement.
Adam & Eve ? They seemed like good parents.
Physiological?
Let’s say there are 6 children in that beautiful ideal family from the fifties; tell me how many turned out successful ? If Laura Ingram, a devotee of this theory, was correct; then the hippies and the counter revolution generation gap would never have occurred. Put another way : Why did the great generation bear infertile fruit ?
Peterson points out the types of occupations that compose, in my view, the foundations of society, are usually predominantly composed of men – and working class men at that. Thus, in the food production and farming sector, energy sector, plumbing, electricians, foundaries, refuse collection, sewage sector, infrastructure servicing, construction etc etc.
Jordan Peterson saves the lives of countless young men.
Hmm. I rather think Mary (as usual) hits the underlying nail on the head:
“
This is the tack now being adopted by Missouri Senator Josh Hawley in the US, a vision of “levelling up” explicitly directed at defending working-class men against those who would class their priorities and perspectives as “deplorable”.
Hawley’s suggestions include re-shoring industries, financial support for marriage and families and cracking down on university-driven talk of “toxic masculinity”. “
This is also what Trump did or was trying to do (although I think Trump screwed the pooch after the election, especially on Jan 6). The US and UK have burdensome regulations for environmental issues, and for the safety and “fair pay” of labor, etc. So the knowledge elites “off-shored” the environmental and labor regulations to countries (China, Viet Nam et al) that DONT have meaningful regulations for manufacturing.
This off-shoring removed many, many good paying manufacturing jobs from US and UK shores, and allowed the Steve Jobs of the world to pocket the difference.
Plus, it is now clear that the vast majority of crimes and suicides are the purview of boys raised without fathers (as you suggest), which is another problem but related to the destruction of the Culture.
Working class men have been sold down the river by the progressive, affluent liberal order via free trade, feminism and unfettered immigration. It’s a societal disaster. One our war generation would be disgusted by.
It would make them (the war generation) wonder: What the hell did we fight and die for?
Yep. All that blood and fear and sacrifice and suffering and waste – for this degenerate, perverted dystopia?
Boys raised without fathers. Indeed, the tragedy of our time.
Jordan Peterson spoke with Dr Warren Farrell recently in a YouTube podcast on Peterson’s channel. They raised the very point. Highly recommended interview.
Indeed. The off-shoring occurred principally under Thatcher and Reagan, who in their social outlook were far more aligned to the people they threw out of work than to those who benefitted from their ‘reforms.’
Trumps blue-collar revolution and the Tory Blue-Wall is testament to a whole class of people who have been left behind economically and culturally. As a white, male, Conservative-inclined voter I have much sympathy and respect for them. Therein lies the political shift now taking place.
It’s been a continual, accelerating process since c. 1960, starting with shipbuilding – but a further Rubicon was crossed during the Clinton years, with NAFTA and the rise of China.
Cain had a father .
Cain is mythical
I agree with everything James Rowlands said, other than “Rather missing the main point I think”.
As the single mother of a boy, I heartily agree. I blundered into having him, having placed no weight on the importance of a father in a boy’s life. I was a classic 70s feminist. My son has suffered for that absence all his life. But the silver lining to that cloud is that he has grown into an outstanding father to his own two boys. Some men are toxic. But so are some women. Masculinity has strengths and weaknesses. What we need is a society people with good individual women and good individual men.
Beautifully and honestly put.
Visiting my daughter in her apartment one day, I noticed she was reading a book, “Masculine Toxicity” for her graduate school class. I asked her if she had read the complementary volume, “Feminine Toxicity”? Her dumbfounded expression was priceless.
Its the men who left not the women. How many women abandon their children?
Isn’t it mostly women who call time on their relationships with the fathers, knowing they are not losing their children in doing so?
This is thereafter known as “the father abandoned his children”.
They may not leave them, but it seems they’re killing them a lot more lately.
Actually, over 80% of divorce proceeding are initiated by women. The only reason it looks like men are leaving’ is because of the sexist bigotry of the law: all a woman has to do is demand it, and the man is flung out of his own home by Court Order.
Similar stats for Australia. Over 80% of women are employed in ‘service’ industries: aged care, childcare and education, health, retail etc.Women are incentivised through the tax system and high house prices to return to work within a year of giving birth, creating a two tiered system where low paid women look after the children of the professional class. Working class women are employed in a market largely created by the employment of women. Caring still needs to be done, and is still overwhelmingly done by women, however rather than being based on kinship bonds, the care is now a service delivery and part of the economy. A lot of woman would reject this if they could but it’s now taboo to admit it and men certainly expect women to contribute equally to the family income. As a constantly exhausted working mother, I feel like feminism has been sold to us in the same way cigarettes were sold as ‘torches of freedom’ and casual sex as a revolution. Once we outsource sex to prostitutes and childbirth to surrogates, the liberation of some women from their sex will be achieved, upon the labour of the females who still embody their sex but without even a word to identify them as a group.
Yes, it’s all just another kind of bind. Instead of being bound to the home, bound to your workplace. The “progressive” political parties promise cheap easy state sponsored childcare so you can be free to work, by which they mean you won’t be able to financially justify not working.
Very true. My own missus stays at home minding the sprogs… and supervising homework… and running a household… managing day-to-day finances etc, supposedly contributing nothing to GDP. But if she went into paid employment and used the extra income to employ help, our country’s GDP would rise by two incomes. A tiny blip of course but you see the point, namely that caring is undervalued and paid work overvalued – all because of an accounting trick. The root problem here is that caring – by men and women – is not assigned a proper value in society.
Isn’t there a thing in economics that if a man marries his housekeeper GDP is reduced?
Your comment implies that there is a fixed supply of jobs, which is nonsense. Everybody is worth something on the labor market, and if they move from the unpaid to the paid sector, then GDP goes up by the size of their paycheck.
Sort of naive dogmatic comment one so often sees from you. I guess you’re an academic?
In the real world, a good many people are worth considerably less than nothing in the labour market, being either dishonest, unreliable or having sub-85 IQs and therefore being incapable of handling the simplest task without real risk of making an expensive and dangerous hash of it. And the cost in management time trying to supervise them…
Quite right. Following the “culture” can result in a ticket to hell. Be truly free and create your own culture, live your life and pursue happiness.
Marriages would stay together longer if a man’s salary could look after a household still. Women find it hard to juggle life and career. Look at the stress levels and the antidepressant prescriptioning!
Having more children who know their fathers, not brought up by single moms, would drop the crime rate in a heartbeat.
Just so disgusting what feminism has done to society: just spoiled middle class feminist nutjobs from the 70s like misandrist Kate Millett babbling cultural Marxist bullshit that has wrecked the fabric of good gender relations.
“It’s not about the nail.” YouTube
Telling us about your feelings is a separate issue from working out how to actually improve things.
Oh dear. And all this just happened! And no, Eeyore, you weren’t pushed.
I have two maxims about this.
First, “women believe what they have been carefully taught.” Men, not so much. So if women are carefully taught to want higher education and careers they do it. Men, not so much.
Second, “women expect to be protected. Men know they are expendable.” Since the modern welfare state run by the educated class shrieks that “we are here to protect you,” it is not surprising that women believe it. But actually governments don’t protect women. Only husbands do that, as we will find out in the sequel.
Truer words have not been spoken, but I would add that men need to be MORE “man-like” and women need to be MORE “woman-like”, as only prescribed by Jesus (Ephesians 5:25) That is the only long-term solution. Everything else is just temporary.
You are right, but not in the way you think.
The reason for the glut in divorced is because most people do have flustrations with their married partners. It’s natural.
Now imagine you as a woman
A. Get to keep the financial support of marriage, house, maintenance
B. They get to keep kids to themselves and get back at evil hubby by denying him contact. For all the screaming and wailing about men not sharing in housework (it takes 20 hours a week to operate the dishwasher and washing machine apparently), they seem quite happy about ex husbands not sharing in child duties.
And the solution is, as you say, is for men to stop being man like. ie, stop slogging on a tough, high paying career and offering women the free option of not having to contribute equally to earnings.
Basically, no marriage, no fathers, no costly alimonies. Stop being providers and breadwinners like men have been for ages. Problem solved.
Um, it’s not the men who have become more ‘unsatisfactory’, it’s the women who have progressed and are demanding more. The men haven’t changed, the women have, except for the stubborn evolutionary fact of female hypergamy. Liberation, rising social status and greater independence are great, but not cost free, that cost being the ongoing shrinking of the pool of men who qualify as protectors. What was once a ‘good’ man is now literally an unattractive man to the successful woman. In general, women need their partners to be of equal or greater social status in order to feel attraction. Asking men to be less ‘man-like’ is hardly the solution. It is sure to make the situation much worse.
It is. I also rather suspect that women are prone to bullying men they don’t respect.
This is a naive viewpoint. Witness how predatory Western governments are becoming toward women now that they have effectively cut off male gallantry by labeling it a form of soft bigotry,
Predatory? How’d you mean, exactly? The transgender mania, introducing bewigged, mentally-ill sex-pests into women’s lavatory cubicles by Statute and expecting actual women to just suck it up and thank them for it?
Very interesting article. I do feel if the stats mentioned in this article was about any other group in society there would be national outrage and calls to do things about it. Progressives (being left myself I now honestly believe these people have co-opted left politics) have held white men up as the devil and moved discussion onto how to help already privileged women get more jobs and not care about the structure of the economy. Just more managed decline that both sides are peddling.
To compound this feminists want to pretend that some reason we still live in 50s where all women are constantly at threat and being maligned at every turn. Even though they are living in a time that is better for women than at any other point in history!
As usual Mary Harrington provides a fact filled analysis rather than the usual mush served up by journalists here.
The book Factfulness by Hans Rausing highlights the way in which the great majority of people, even those who ought to know better, have an inaccurate picture of world poverty that represents how things were in the 1960s not how they actually are today.
So to I suspect do most people have a 1960s picture in their mind of social relations between men and women. We have not yet caught up with current reality something that Mary outlines here. Too many people still have a 1960s idea of toxic masculinity etc that simply does not represent today’s facts.
“This then accelerated with deliberate de-industrialisation under Thatcher, aimed at breaking the power of the unions.”
Can we please just stop this lazy repetition of re-written history (Mary: you’re better than this).
Firstly, this sentence conflates two separate problems – the uncompetitiveness of much British industry, much of it state-owed and excessive trade union power – and implies that industry was the innocent victim of addressing the trade union problem.
But this was not so. The industrial competitiveness was not limited to trade union problems. And the trade unions certainly played some role themselves in making industry less profitable.
But let’s just take the easy way out and blame Thatcher.
Nor was it “deliberate de-industrialisation”. It was the removal of state subsidies for loss-making industries. This was correct and necessary and allowed resources to be re-allocated to more profitable enterprises. This is what the free market does – when politicians don’t interfere. This creative destruction is a necessary part of a free economy.
Thatcher gets the blame here because she had to compress this into a period of less than ten years. But that was only because the problems had been allowed to fester and grow for at least the preceding twenty years. If the problems had been addressed earlier (and we hadn’t joined the EU on such unfavourable terms for our own industries), perhaps a lot of the closures might have been avoided. But it’s challenging to hold Margaret Thatcher responsible for that.
Yes, we probably all agree that more might have been done to help those who suffereed from these sudden changes adapt and recover. But that the changes were necessary and unavoidable by the early 1980s, I have no doubt.
Your free market ideas are false: the mkt has not unleashed any additional productivity gains for the economy – economists are still scratching their heads. After all those privatizations too.
Must be because you’re seeing an Austrian mirage. Don’t worry though all will be apparent in the coming year as sterling collapses and the whole neoliberal edifice goes with it
Economists scratching their heads isn’t new. I wait for the Queen to ask the LSE why they hadn’t seen inflation coming. Though all my links to that letter and the long list of Prof and PhD’s that signed it and which always made for amusing reading, no longer work.
Sterling may well collapse, but the Euro is the best bet on that score. 19 countries, inflation at 20% in Latvia, 6% in France and various others in between. The ECB not going to sell off all those bonds, but roll them over, and next month, just what interest rate will they impose? One to stem Latvian inflation and Kill off Italy?
I’m an economist. I saw it coming, but I’ve seen it coming since 2008. We’re working on new theories of inflation since classic monetarism would have had inflation starting right when I said it would.
There have been massive productivity and more-for-less cost saving gains in many areas. Much of it from new technologies (which by no coincidence the unions were blocking). Unfortunately, some areas have not kept up (and even gone the other way) – usually those in which the government is involved.
BT is still a pretty awful company, but it’s certainly better than it was and we now have alternatives.
Sterling will only “collapse” if it proves to be weaker than other currencies. But you argue that the whole world economy is about to go down – in which case all currencies go down more or less together.
Let’s come back in a year and see if things have totally collapsed then. I think not.
I’m not sure about the UK but here in the US I distinctly remember the politicians and pundits, Left and Right, all going on about the better world ahead. “Nobody wants those (factory) jobs. They’re dirty and dangerous; soul crushing, too. All those Teamster-types will get their Masters degrees and move right up!”
Even much more recently there was a rather surreal push to get Joe Sixpack and friends into nursing degree programs. Can you imagine??!
This was a deliberate effort, almost a conspiracy, to defeat the working classes. Giving China “most favored” trade status was only one of hundreds of legislative moves to further that effort.
This was not a natural evolution of market forces. Instead of “follow the money” we should just “follow the legislation”.
Even though academia is female dominated from elementary school through post-graduate university, and teaching methods have been radically revised over the past few decades to favour female learning, there is absolutely no reason why an equal percentage of men could not attend university.
In fact, men potentially have more employment options available to them since they can work both knowledge-based and muscle-based jobs.
Teachers are not going to help in this area. Their built-in bias towards female students will continue to disadvantage boys especially. However, as in many areas of child development, parents who value their sons hold the key.
Absent female quotas, men will continue hold many of the highest positions in industry and business simply due to their innate single-minded focus and willingness to sacrifice the social aspects of their lives to advance at work.
Furthermore, male exceptionalism at the extreme high end of the intelligence scale will ensure new companies founded on radical new inventions will continue to be male dominated.
The bottom line is that boys and men need to wake up to the relatively hostile social environment, understand they have significant advantages in employment, and that they must strive to succeed. They can’t sit back and expect the world to be handed to them on a plate.
I doubt that most men “expect the world to be handed to them on a plate.” What they do expect is equality of opportunity and of respect. And this is true not only on a personal level but also on collective level. How can men make some contribution to society that is distinctive, necessary and publicly valued? Those who can’t do indeed become passive and resentful. In fact, they drop out of either society or out of life itself. That’s neither indolence nor arrogance, because what’s missing for them is not “privilege” but a fundamental and universal human right.
The point is that no man should expect to be recognized as necessary or publicly valued. That IMHO is a ridiculous expectation and extremely egotistical. Accept that you are at the bottom rung of society, that the government is certainly not going to help you, and that you must work to build yourself up.
Expect nothing, study hard, work hard, and don’t lose sight of the prize. Most of all, do not give away resources of any kind, neither material nor intellectual. There is no shortage of people who will take from you. If you do dispense resources make sure it’s in payment for something you want in return.
Constantly striving sounds like a pretty shit life to me.
5x more male geniuses than female. Feminism wants to ignore this and circumvent the competence hierarchy – it is the principal reason standards are so low in Britain now.
What feminism wants is their business. It should be irrelevant to any man with a mind of his own and a modicum of self realization.
What a ludicrous claim. You won’t even run out of fingers if you try counting the females.
It is a real issue though – the lack of fundamental and revolutionary creativity in women.
I did the political compass test the other day, expecting to find myself halfway between the y axis and the extreme right, and about a third of the way below the x axis towards extreme libertarianism. I was very surprised indeed, given my visceral opposition to woke and the far left, to discover myself at almost the dead centre. The lesson I draw from this concerns the extreme nature of the ideology I oppose, and my correctness in opposing it.
I did the test too and was also close to the centre, leaning slightly to the left politically and towards the libertarian in my social attitudes – no doubt much to the bemusement of my children, who think I’m off the scale ‘right wing’ in both respects. So either there’s something wrong with the test, or the lesson you draw is the correct one.
Inspired by your post I did the test and came out one square into the left segment and two squares into the libertarian segment. Pretty near centre. I certainly don’t think of myself as any sort of leftist and am constantly told “you can’t say that!”. It looks as if most of us here are probably in fact in the solid centre and the woke are on the fringes of political opinion. Certainly talking to people I know the woke world view does seem to be an extreme anomaly – something you wouldn’t think from reading and viewing the MSM.
Lost any sense of what woke and far left means. I’m in favour of government controlled railway system – perhaps through majority share, as in Germany, is that far left. I’m in favour of building far more social housing, is that far left? Think Brexit is an economic disaster for this country, is that far left? Woke is just a Daily Mail term – not even sure they have any clear idea what it means anymore- apart from “stuff we don’t like”.
You have indeed lost a sense of what woke means because it has nothing to do with the three political positions you describe. Indeed I agree that there is something in favour of nationalised railways as they lack the sort of competition that keeps capitalism honest.
Perhaps you need to read more than the Daily Mail? Do that and you’ll soon discover what ‘Woke’ means.
I’ve always preferred the ‘successor ideology’ to woke, but it isn’t very catchy.
When I use the term “woke”, I am referring to the authoritarian pseudo-progressive usurpation of liberalism. Now bog off and bother someone else, wokie.
As usual the author dares to put her head above the parapet, and risks the bile of the progressives by speaking truth to their power.
One area left tellingly untouched by the feminists, quick to identify any patriarchal oppression in the workplace, is the plasterboard ceiling. Anyone attempting to get building work done could hardly fail to notice the absence of women in the building trades.
In several decades of renovating properties in the UK, US and France, never once has a woman responded to a listing for plumber, electrician, plasterer or other, amongst hundreds. What nefarious plot of The Patriarchy is at work here to deny women these plum jobs!? And why feminists’ silence in the face of this oppressive exclusion?
I posted something above regarding Jordan Peterson’s similar observations. The question for me is at what level do these jobs occupy in the hierarchy of critical societal occupations?
All this and yet “empowered” women still demand that, whatever the problem, men must do something!
So what, men don’t have to listen.
Indeed, the willingness of reasonable men to sympathize with women is steadily eroding due to the us-against-them and all-men-are-evil attitude of feminists.
When men get off their backsides and put in some effort they can succeed no matter what obstacles and biases are put in their way by society.
“When men get off their backsides and put in some effort they can succeed no matter what obstacles and biases are put in their way by society.”
That sounds both psychologically and morally tone-deaf to me. It’s true that we all face obstacles and biases, which we should all face with courage and diligence. But that ignores the moral obligation of any healthy and democratic society to discourage obstacles and biases that are not inherent in the human condition but rather in ideological attitudes and laws that are designed to encourage some people at the cost of discouraging others. Misandry is a real problem, not some neurotic fantasy.
I don’t think he is ignoring the context you point out. In one of his posts above (that you replied to) he did mention the “boys and men need to wake up to the relatively hostile social environment”. I understand and sympathise with your point. I do not think both positions are mutually exclusive.
I strongly sympathise with the women demanding female-only spaces, who were abused and intimidated by fascist Antifa thugs in Bristol last Sunday.
Yep adverts like that do men no good and can compound the conceit of women who may be inclined towards delusion or misandry. But then it is very hard to see positive representations of men in adverts unless the man is non white. White males seem usually to be represented as buffoons. It isn’t a healthy approach.
Norcott is certainly well intentioned as is his Man Whisperer guest, but I found their recent episode suggestions about mental health lacking.
Their suggestion seemed to be that men should emulate what you could describe as stereotypical female behaviour – to talk about their problems in order to feel better. This just adds to the further feminisation of men – and present us with a false dichotomy: That we only have two options when it comes to mental health issues – to express (good) or suppress (bad.)
This omits the most important option – investigation. – Using methods of investigation into how and why we suffer, and learning how to bring it to an end. Many of these methods don’t involve talking, but rather thinking more constructively about situations from different perspectives.
These methods can be particularly useful for men and women who don’t want to talk or who are inclined towards developing verbal dysentery when they do – for whom expression becomes indulgent and narcissistic.
But, people can only share these techniques if they know of them. So at least Norcott is trying to help.
I think you overlook male associations like Rotary (although women are increasingly involved) and Masonry – still totally male. My sons are involved in informal Rugger and football and sports activities that are male dominated. I don’t think they care if anyone were to ask why they were male dominated.
It would be more true to suggest that college-educated women have taken over left-wing politics – class is out, equity is in. They form the backbone of support for progressive ideas among Democrats for instance and are the mainstay of public sector workers – civil servants, education, health and social systems. What are the impacts of the take over of public life by women? Is it in any way qualitatively different from rule by men? For instance, does it factor into the the trend to technocracy, or rule by experts? Does it get the balance between safetyism and risk right? Do we get more freedom and more security as a result?
“Knowledge” “Workers”
Mostly public sector or charity sector. The ideology creates the jobs, and then the jobholders vote for the people who will support the ideology. Everyone gets a teat to suck on.
I always thought the “charity sector” meant village fetes and flag days. Now it turns out it is the 3rd largest employer in the UK! That’s a lot of jumble sales.
My ‘awakening’ to what Charities were came in 1987 – when I discovered the Charity worker I drank with had a boss earning 60K a year – 1987!!! Sadly I was so shocked by that, I can’t remember what Charity it was. Tho’ perhaps the amount of Cider consumed may have also played a part.
If you really want a surprise, Google how many U.S. charities (more broadly, nonprofit organizations) have presidents making over a million a year. Although, granted, if you can raise $100 million in contributions, maybe you’re worth a million. Or two.
In the UK since Blair charities’ income is mainly provided by government at all levels and by NGOs. They are accountable and incentivised accordingly.
Mary might have the wrong end of this, I think. Women, particularly poorer women, are inherently more conservative than men, as they have a lot more to be conservative about. The problem is that our public discourses are largely dominated by men who failed to grow up – Boy/Charlatans who are anything but conservative. No wonder women are pushing them aside. Just listen to Tony Blair, Boris Johnson and multitudinous others (Macron, a president married to his nanny). Ignore the grins, just listen to the words. It’s more than just the loss of manual labour – Infantilisation has infected men from non-manual social classes even more than it has those from the traditional working class.
If we really want to engage in worthwhile political debate and I am not sure that we do, a start might be to agree not to use terms such as left-wing, right-wing and progressive. These words mean whatever people want them to mean, and hence, mean nothing at all. Without them we will be forced to explain ourselves.
“If we really want to engage in worthwhile political debate and I am not sure that we do, a start might be to agree not to use terms such as left-wing, right-wing and progressive. These words mean whatever people want them to mean, and hence, mean nothing at all. Without them, we will be forced to explain ourselves.”
I wholeheartedly agree with that,
That’s an interesting point. If we grant that it’s the case I think we would need to ask why then women dominate progressive parties to the extent they do.
My thought would be that it’s at least in part because traditional conservatism is really distributed between the parties rather than being found mainly among the Tories. There are certain elements of the left parties that are clearly about social stability. And the Tories, just like conservative parties in other countries, have adopted a lot of this free market deregulation stuff that is really a kind of libertarianism and doesn’t appeal to a true conservative temperment.
While the social supports of the left may not have a conservative form the libertarian right really isn’t offering much in the way of an alternate. Historically the main alternate to the the welfare state would be strong communities and intact families along with a certain amount of national infrastructure, but in the end Tories and other parties on the right seem to be about equally commited to the dissolution of all that with globalism and the movable workforce being the order of the day.
“The problem is that our public discourses are largely dominated by men who failed to grow up” I am afraid this is true
Women who failed to grow up are a significant presence too.
And yet the Labour party has never had a woman for a leader, and the current incumbent appears unable to even articulate what a woman might be.
Women are programmed for safety – to preserve the home.
Men are programmed to take risks to provide for the family.
Progressivism not only tries to provide safety but does it without the need for men.
Hence women are more left-wing.
Amen Dave. Incredible how these middle class feminists ignore the science – that they are risk averse neurotics, incapable of assessing risk.
Hence the covid mass hysteria – we have elevated bad as well as good female characteristics to the societal level.
It’s also the reason everyone’s emotionally incontinent these days….
In general men and women are certainly different but we are not ‘programmed’. (It’s bizarre how one minute conservatives are extolling the virtues of freedom of choice and the next claiming we are all programmed to certain gender roles) Just cod evolutionary psychology. I am far more home minded than my wife. I’m the one who wants a new kitchen she couldn’t care a toss. Does that mean I’m not a proper man and she’s not a proper women? That’s where that absurd stereotyping leads, a kind of self-fulling prophecy where males and females are given a stereotype they feel they have to live up to, unless they want to be regarded as weird.
I should state in making the claims below (before I get accused of misogyny or somesuch), that I have no political or cultural side I am bound to, my opinions are based on what I observe and I am interested ideas, debate and honesty rather than agendas, no matter how uncomfortable the conclusions may be for anyone including me – because I’m cold-eyed like that. (I have looked deep into my soul for signs of unconscious bias, and the only thing I found I was unconsciously biased against was in fact unconscious bias). Anyway…
It is absolutely the case that technology effects have brought about empowerment, almost to the point of material equality for women in the developed world, visibly so since the beginning of the 20th century, but accelerated from the second half of the last century onwards – with, as MH points out, some deleterious consequences for some strata of men now becoming apparent, some of them side-effects, some authored. These types of rebalancings between (any) groupings may not be outright zero-sum, but there will inevitably be losers where there are winners.
However, another wave of that heedless juggernaut that is technological advance is not so much coming, as has already started – and to me at least, it looks like it is set to put immense strains on the interests of women as a strata as it reshapes societies. I mean by this:
i) the very same technological forces that have so far delivered varieties of emancipation and equality for women, are on the verge of creating societies with atomisation and isolation inherent, that I believe will be more inimical to women then men going forwards, because (sigh, big generalisation) women are less innately autistic then men, who are more temperamentally able to tolerate such an environment. This is of course not true of everyone, but I’m talking about aggregated effects. This is notwithstanding the statistics quoted about increased suicide rates amongst working class men at the moment. Nothing is set in stone however, and biotechnological fixes will no doubt become available for those who want them – uppers, downers, mind-state alterations… Hey, I never said the solutions would make you happy, even if they do in fact, make you happy….
ii) women within the strata of ‘knowledge workers’ are equally vulnerable as men to the ongoing trajectory of the very same technological forces that created that strata in the first place. In the next phase, the knowledge ecosystems dramatically reduce the numbers of people needed, because of the next rounds of automation oncoming. The space gets truncated to those who can participate in the ongoing creation (as opposed to the ongoing management) of those ecosystems – and this means numerate and STEM skills win out, at the expense of those with generalised skills. I believe this phenomenon will be exacerbated with the combination of a deep recession (pending) and a simultaneous shortage of workers which we have now – both of which tend to accelerate the drive towards automation. In this situation, companies will spend big on IT so they can reduce headcount long term. That is not to say all jobs disappear, but enough do to drive many currently prospering people towards relative poverty. It also means a ramp in the demand for STEM skills. Women and men without the requisite skills are equally vulnerable in the first instance, but at the moment at least there are many more men within STEM than women, who tend for reasons unknown to congregate around the biological sciences within STEM.
I don’t think you are wrong at all on your second point.
As far as the first, I certainly see where you are coming from. I am not sure though that when you get right down to it, men flourish without social interaction any more than women do. They may feel they do, but my sense is that they actually need more structure than women to make sure those interactions happen – a club, or a regular interaction with other men in some sort of community work party, or something like that. They are less likely to organize themselves for some kind of purely social get together. And while they may not feel the immediate lack of such interactions, I certainly think it affects their attitude towards and engagement to the community and even towards their own family. We end up with a bunch of adult men stultifying themselves with online video games and soft drugs.
You’ve missed out the elephant in the room. Lefty, compliant women are acceptable and even more highly regarded than lefty men. Especially if they’re “of colour”. But woe betide the conservative woman, especially if she’s black and believes in the obvious fact that there are two sexes. Then she can be as black as the ace of spades but some screeching white (hhhwwite, hhhwite, hwiiiitet) Scot Gnat can whitesplain why she is wrang.
And men, of any colour, can claim to be women and punch a real woman in the face. And get away with it. And a rape victim has to, in true Orwellian style, use the oxymoron “her peeenis”.
It is said the majority of Trade Unionists are women. However the article doesn’t really say what the split is.
52/48 is very different from 70/30. The former would be technically correct but factually misleading.
The reference in the article is a Guardian article which also avoids providing this rather crucial bit of information.
In an article based on facts this feels all a bit he said she said. As a source reference I’m not sure the Guardian really cuts it.
I suspect that in the U.S. the majority of trade unionists who are women is way more than 52% because teachers are trade unionists.
The Guardian is a low circulation, north London newspaper. Not worth bothering about.
Weak. The reason the west is failing is because most of the jobs of which you speak for women have zero value add in terms of wealth creation.
We have run a huge trade deficit for goods since 1984 – which means money leaks out whenever the government spends fiscally (out of our taxes) instead of staying in the country, giving jobs to the manufacturing sector in particular which carry multipliers.
We’ve focused on worthless service and bureaucratic jobs deliberately to give women graduates something to do.
The whole thing is massively top heavy and is about to become rudely exposed as a wicked recession approaches the nation.
Economists say they are baffled by the collapse in productivity but they won’t be paid in a feminized culture to study what seems like reasonable correlation between the increase in female workers and productivity falls over the same period.
Once sterling collapses all will be brought to light: including the fact that women pay no tax as a group, they only take. 80% of tax is paid by men, 80% of the expenditure is taken by women. So please, no more about gender pay gaps – your already subsidized by us men to merely breath.
You’re!
Ian, there’s an edit button…
A well-argued case, but you seem to miss out one powerful effect:
To be socialist you need to have adopted an ‘identity’ view of the world – exploited working-class victims oppressed by the bosses.
The roots of post-modernism have the same approach: women and non-whites oppressed by the patriarchal white males.
With more young women going to university and most of them doing social-science type subjects, far more have been indoctrinated by the ideology.
Post-modernists are naturally socialist – and more of them are female.
The history of democracies gives us two giant data sets: society since women got the vote … and that society in the same time period before women got the vote. Any real significant difference? Anything that can only be attributed to female suffrage? I see nothing positive at all but there may be negatives.
It turns out that women prefer the security of the state to the security of a husband.
The state can then extract what the women need materially by making their erstwhile husbands into its slaves.
What the men get out of this is the option to opt out and just play vidya.
Well done women! Pass the anti-depressants.
DO WOMEN LOVE?
The relative and absolute position of the sexes is such a deep and important question, that it justifies raising other, also deep, but less attended to questions – which may relate to those positions.
One question would be the use of kindergarten. It is possible that leaving the care of 1-3 months old, or 12 months old, children to the less personal care in kindergarten changes the population entirely. Perhaps people who grow up this way become less able to, or less interested in, personal contact – or even in “being personal”. As we know, the use of kindergarten is relatively new, and has had a different impact on the positions of two sexes regarding work.
Another deep question would be the ability of the two sexes to work in care. I believe the main point of David Goodhart’s latest book, “Head Hand Heart” is that labour class men shall have to accept working in care rather than “in steel”. But the question remains if they can, and what impact it will have on them.
A yet deeper question, I guess, is “what is work?” (- as posed e.g., by David Graber). The white laboratory coat may once have been supportive of industry – but now it has perhaps driven the level of industrial products way beyond human needs. How many pixels should a good photo have? How many apps do we need? (And, by the way, how many essays do we need every weekend?) My point here is not to moralise over “too much consume”. My point is “only” to question if the production of those consumables can count as work. Or better: to challenge the class interests of to-days knowledge-workers. The “other class”, that do less questionable work, may rightly be frustrated over the huge class above them that once counted only 20 % research and administration.
Those frustrated people (men) seem to be the only worry of Harrington. She suggests we pay attention, because otherwise those men may become a real nuisance.
I agree with Harrington on this point, but I shall add another couple of reasons which are directly about sex (unlike the above three). First, I shall ask if there is a lack of masculinity throughout society, including the knowledge class. I will e. g. suggest that clarity is masculine. If clarity once was a hallmark of academia, I am not sure if it still is. The opposite might be something like diffuse, or “associative”. An essay written by an academic to-day shall give the right associations (and even feelings) not clarity. I will also suggest that directness, and even “confrontation”, is masculine. But my diagnosis would here be a lack of good relation to the opposite – I mean there is no shortage of directness in the form of brutality, but “loving directness” has been replaced by polite indirectness (when you shall say something negative and do not want to be brutal).
Speaking about love, I shall end by asking if women are still interested in men – or were they ever? I believe men are interested in women. (Yes, I am a man.)
Think you need a bit more clarity- whatever does it mean to say clarify is masculine!? It sounds on the same level as astrology – just bunkum.
What would be your suggestion?
There’s yet another layer (perhaps the most important one of all) to add to the debate which arises from Mary’s article: the bio-technological and internet-enabling facility of conception without a male partner. Yes, sperm donors are required, but women will select from a pretty narrow range of desirable male characteristics (most often in the absence of the donor) which may include those whose online profile tends towards intellectual and artistic achievement over physical strength (the latter less able to be demonstrated). Even amongst those women who choose a partner to start and raise a family with – or maybe just start! – there may well be a tendency towards males with characteristics which are less to do with brute physical prowess than at any previous time in human history.
Thus, the inexorable changes brought about over time by the transmission of genes will further reduce the population of males whose attributes tend towards manual labour. Of course, this would happen in developed first-world societies to begin with; but that in itself would create a greater differentiation from those societies where physical strength and manual labour are still required to a much greater extent, all with unforeseeable consequences.
In Britain, and possibly Europe generally, almost all of those donors are Danish. In the UK men lost the right to anonymity so hardly any ever donate. It’s the same in much of the EU, I believe.
Women have complained about it because it puts about £1k extra on the bill because it’s imported.
I vaguely recall reading something about the prevalence of Danish sperm donation, but thanks for the further insights. It just goes to show the lengths (and expense) that women will go to, having perhaps decided (and increasingly so) that having a male actively involved just isn’t for them. That speaks to a serious problem that contemporary males will have to deal with, or lose out in the passing on of their genes.
I note a couple of comments that seem to want to take us back to a time when males were ascendant in society. The genii of technology will ignore them and increasingly, so will women.
They are Danish because women almost universally want to sire children with 6’3 blonde men, not because of the anonymity aspect.
I don’t know any women with more than a basic grasp of our country’s politics. Those that do are often wrong and confuse social justice with socialism. They buy cars for their colour and park in easy spaces. Gullible mostly, easy prey for cynical leftists, they are more likely to do as they’re bid than men.
Dear me, you need to get out more.
You may need to meet more real women. The red go faster stripes on the boy racer hatchback in our drive was what tempted my wife to buy it. Now she regularly takes on the boy racers – tho’ they generally have tweaked their old machines so they actually go faster with or without stripes, so she often loses. Hasn’t stopped her trying tho.
Shy, retiring women who are content to be wives and mothers are real women too. They are not particularly my cup of tea, but let’s not get huffy about what makes a woman “real.”
I see your comment has attracted a suggestion that you need to get out more, but my wife has a tenuous grasp on our countries politics ( although not a prey for cynical leftists) and will always chose to park in easy spaces. Her mother persuaded her husband to buy a totally unsuitable car because she liked the colour. So I can see where you are coming from in your comments however much they might be condemned as sexist stereotypes.
Excellent read again as usual.
Feminism has been in bed with the patriarchy from the beginning. This has served the market, desecrated the family and kept wages low. It has been a continuence of the class war, dividing and conquering the working class. Particularly the blue collar working class whom many white collar workers have been only too happy to put the boot into.
If anyone thinks feminism has made our society better or even more equal take a look at the rates of child abuse perpetrated by women and still ignored. Mostly against boys who are then blamed for having a bad attitude towards women.
Govern me harder, Daddy.
Thanks, Mary – great article.
This is as good an assessment of the current economic and social divide as I’ve seen. Societal changes imposed by technology are always uneven, and there are always unintended consequences. It’s important to handle those changes in a positive way, empowering winners to drive civilizational success while establishing guardrails to support the economic losers from stagnating to the point of becoming a violent revolutionary class. It’s obvious to me that the US and most of Europe is failing at this, quite spectacularly. Instead the establishment and ruling class are turning people against one another and co-opting whatever language they can to justify their continued rule. Appealing to feminism, anti-racism, etc., is, as the author points out, easy for them as it aligns with their economic agenda. The author is quite right to be worried about jack-booted backlash, but the only thing that would stop that, an economic turn away from globalism toward national borders, workers’ rights, corporate accountability, and local governance, would require a sacrifice from the economic elites that they have, so far, been unwilling to make. There’s a reason Josh Hawley is hated by the establishment of both parties. It’s the same reason they hate Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. For better or for worse, the die is cast, and I fear it will take a revolution or a world war or both to dislodge our reactionary ruling class.
Could you explain what exactly the workers are unhappy with right now? Is joblessness high in where you are?
It’s not that there are no jobs. It’s the KIND of jobs. The ugly truth is that not everybody will be happy sitting behind a computer or dealing with the public every day. Not everybody has the mind to work in STEM, or the emotional intelligence to be in a service job. A couple generations ago these people could get a job at a factory, work with their hands, join a union, make decent money, raise a family, and be generally satisfied with life. Now the people who would have occupied those jobs are working minimum wage service jobs at McDonald’s or Wal-Mart, where they hate the work and they’re treated like disposable trash. Some of them aren’t working at all. The suicide rate is high. Nobody is sure how or when but they know they’ve lost something important. They’re angry, and will stay angry until either things change or the cultural memory of the way things ‘used to be’ fades and that can take a very long time. The ruling class don’t care about any of this. They see an unhappy minority, uneducated whites, and thumb their noses. The people who don’t like the jobs that are available can pound sand. Look at Romney’s comment from 2012 about people who don’t pay taxes, or Hillary’s famous ‘deplorables’ comment. Bottom line, the American system that’s endured for nearly 250 years is straining under the weight of the present ruling class’s collective incompetence.
So do you think the solution could be to have more jobs requiring manual skills? We still have endeavors like petroleum engineer, mechanical engineer, construction, welding, electrician, farming, after all. Even things like internet are related to not only “sit behind computer”, but a plenty of jobs requiring “work with your hands”.
What I am trying to understand is what should the solution be? “Return manufacturing” has pro’s but also con’s – local production will drive prices high at least for some time. Are people prepared to lower their consumption standards? This will affect not only middle class, but actually the poorest.
Aw Hillary’s comment only made “deplorable” the person who said this (herself). One with a brain does not treat opponents like this.
I checked the statistics and it seems like overall unemployment is equally low for men and women – 3.9 and 3.7% respectively. But from what you said it sounds like some people are unhappy with jobs they are doing, not the lack of ones.
First off, don’t trust those unemployment numbers. The government messes with them to make things seem a lot better than they are. They don’t count ‘underemployed’ people, those on disability, people who are retired, and most stupidly, people who have given up looking for a job. We’re well past the point of what I’d call ‘good’ solutions. Tariffs that balance wage scale differences between countries due to things like exchange rates, labor laws, or environmental regulation would be a great start. If we’re saying that corporations can’t exploit workers or dump toxic waste in Ohio, they shouldn’t be able to do it in Bangladesh and then pocket the savings (as of right now, they absolutely can and are), and less friendly countries shouldn’t be able to manipulate their currency to their economic advantage, and our disadvantage, without consequence. That’s what Trump, or more likely someone intelligent that worked for him, was attempting with the China tariffs and NAFTA renegotiation. Another thing that would help would be to unionize the service industries like fast food and retail, but those industries would fight it viciously every step of the way, as Amazon already is. The left’s answer is, surprise, expand the welfare state, to the point some advocate for universal basic income, which is basically giving everyone a stipend to live on just so they won’t cause more expensive problems like riots, crime, violence, etc. These and other solutions have costs in the form of higher prices. The US has already pivoted in that direction. Both parties have abandoned free trade as an idea because it’s politically toxic. Both are playing to different pieces of a disaffected working class (whites vs. minorities). Both advocate for some retrenchment from unrestricted globalization. Like everything else, though, there’s a cost and it comes in the form of higher prices for everything, or, in other words, inflation. Lo and behold that’s exactly what we’re already seeing. It’s likely to get worse before it gets better, if it gets better at all.
The solutions you are proposing sound logical to me.
Yes, I understand that statistics does not show it all, but it still provides some insight into what is going on. I can also judge by what I am seeing on the streets, in real life. You spoke of Ohio – that’s exactly where I am. Except for several neighborhoods known to be sketchy, I don’t see much unemployed people. On the contrary, there is a plenty of job offers. Yes, not all these jobs sound “stellar”, but the thing is that my way in science didn’t start from Nobel Prize winning projects either. I pretty much started from picking what one would call “garbage” projects, and then slowly climbed my way through it.
I agree with the policies Trump administration proposed regarding China, although, my understanding is that Biden didn’t change much of this particular part. On the contrary, I saw that manufacturing jobs were growing since 2008 and then short drop in 2021 related to COVID restrictions. We have a lot of construction in our area, for instance. And for the “ghost towns” – the thing is that they always existed, and in more than one country. I am not sure if this can be always fixed – some technologies and industries supporting them get obsolete. Returning them would be analogous to attempt to return carriages instead of cars. I work with full understanding that technically, when main research questions in my field get solved, my job (now considered white coated) will follow the same fate.
I agree with you that welfare state is not a solution, though. Although, it’s still better than giving these people nothing. Results will not be good, no one wants bolshevik revolution here. I am from USSR, and I assure you, it didn’t work, despite the fact it was literally based on near 100% domestic production and little outsource.
However, I don’t think that these economic problems are fault of women. One day caregiving industry will be at least partially automated and consequences will be similar. As for now, women take these “soulless office jobs” largely because that’s what is advertised to them. I came to this country and found out that no one except me knows who Barbara McClintock was, despite she is a Nobel Prize winner in molecular biology of relatively recent time. But young American ladies are not aware of one of the greatest female scientists of the USA, while my post-Soviet medical school managed to teach me about her. Real blue collar jobs are not advertised to women either. Pink aisle, “princess culture” have an effect.
I understand where you’re coming from. I recently quit teaching after two decades. Not because I hated it, but because the leadership team, consisting almost entirely of women, at my work was becoming increasingly authoritarian, so much so, that despite excellent student evaluations and lots of personal and professional friendships, I had no option but to leave. I believe I was the sixth male teacher to leave that year. Work is becoming a toxic environment to men.
This is as horrible as when women are received similarly to what you are describing in “traditionally male” endeavors. We need to end this. I loved my male and female teachers equally. I am very sorry for your experience.
The focus on the socio/economic aspects of the story misses some of the very interesting, purely social effects of the (feminine-ish) adjustments that the world is going through.
The “safety-ism” that became so pronounced during the pandemic is almost certainly an effect of increased female social influence. Thirty years ago the public reaction would have been different; the risk tolerance higher.
Also, the maniacal levels of violence and brutality in our entertainments and, occasionally in our society, can reasonably be ascribed to the dimunition of adult male influence. “Don’t shoot people cause it’s not nice” doesn’t hold a candle to “If I ever see you even just level that gun at someone I’ll make you eat it! I don’t care if it’s loaded or not…”
There are many such occasions; all fodder for the war between the sexes. So put up your dukes! That war isn’t going to end any time soon. But maybe someday we’ll find an exceptable truce.
Nah, the barbarians just come in over the walls.
That’s how it’s always worked in the past.
Mary Harrington as usual writes astutely on this subject. For once holding back on a political analysis, I would note that there are masses of opportunities for savvy men (mainly!) in the trades, such as plumbing, electricians, gas fitters etc. If we have not gone totally insane as a society, these are only likely to increase with the mania for replacing gas boilers etc. We just need to get rid of the now-dwindling cultural bias in favour of educating people on pointless courses at utterly mediocre universities – or even the better ones to be honest. Ordinary people are not stupid, they are working this out for themselves.
Someone is also going to have to service all those windmills in the middle of the sea
I was raised in the U.S. to believe that the Democrats supported the working class. By 1980, though, my father became a Reagan Democrat and then a full-fledged (if closeted) Republican. He saw the tide turning before a lot of other people, including myself. The liberal party in the U.S. reached out to the groups that it believed were the neediest, and thus could greatly benefit from a sympathizing political party. That included women and minorities. This empowered some (or let them feel like they were being empowered) while alienating a lot of others, including white men. Not that the conservatives in the U.S. have done much to win over the alienated groups. If they refuse to reign in the far far right, they’re not going to win over many voters. For those of us in the middle, we watch this play out as we drift without an anchor. Speaking as a woman, I don’t necessarily feel like I benefit from progressive politics.
The world i grew up in to the 1 i currently face and live is totally different. I am working class male. I don’t care any more. Let woman do what they want. The quicker the human race falls the better it is bio system that provides life support of every living thing in it. Man had his chance. Let woman have a go. Let them have careers and not families. To many humans on the planet as it is. Until the human race puts aside it “I take offence agenda’s” I personally take offence to those who take offence ” Grow up mentally and look around look at the chaos we are pandering to. Take your head out the “I take offence I am entitled!” sand and take long hard look. (You would not be able to express you desires wants and goals without a long long list of the effort of those who have gone before you stop been petty and selfish learn to accept and not judge. And remember no one and nothing especially the planet owes you a thing.) Unless we are willing works together and put aside our petty difference the human race is bound to suffer along with the planets bio sphere!. Until we recognise that we let EGO rule our minds and not the other way round EGO will always find a reason to seperate and hate and dress up its way of thinking and makeit way of living as justified. We have to remember this planet owes us nothing and we do not have a right to here. Unless we work together as species to and have a symbiotic relationship with nature We do not have the righgt to be on this planet and the bio sphere. We are master of our future and doom. But we are not masters of the bio sphere and if we think we are and science will find the answers. That is the EGO of the human race not the soul. Also in 1000 years who will be looking back and will give a hoot. Will they be thanking us? Or will they be writing the new version of the bible. Only this time it will Adam ate from the tree of knowledge and gave it to Eve! (you going to have to use logical imagination as how that comes about (war, war of the sexes or races, CME’s etc etc) EGO rules soul does not. A person in touch spiritaully (I dont mean religion) Accepts difference with out judgement EGO does not! EGO is all about self! And judgement! We are a part of a bio sphere and SELF is not a good survival stratergy long term.
This is not aimed at the Original poster or woman in general (but if you want take offence and think it is all that. That is ok by me as I stated I don’t care because the current state of the planet looks beak from a survival point of view and its your EGO not your true natural self that is speaking) but at the whole of humanity. We must accept the strengths and weakness of each sex and work together to make each of them stronger equally. With out prejudiced.
“Jack booted “ backlash? Weird. Jackboots? Remember that Fascism was always a progressive movement. In Germany proletarian workers alternated their votes between the Communists, Socialists, and German National Socialist Workers Party
It has been long known that women like authority figures. Feminism has brought that in by spades.
I don’t really ‘get’ this article – maybe I’m mislead by the headline.
We probably need to start by differentiating ‘left wing’ from the current labour party & the squawking metropolitan lefties who can’t even define a woman any more.
I don’t recognise the idea women want to be erased by their politicians.
I do recognise that the growth of women in the workplace has changed it – and you can argue if that’s for the better or worse. (although expressing the wrong opinion is likely to see you excommunicated)
Also I don’t trust pollsters who tell me this percentage are going to vote for this or that – they have been monumentally wrong in most recent elections – maybe they poll the wrong people or maybe their own internal biases get in the way.
Maybe, on balance, women are more socialist and men more authoritarian – the old trope of cave women sitting around as a group looking after the family and ‘gathering’ while cave man went out hunting where there would be a leader organising the hunting party.
I’m really not sure what the article is trying to say & I’m not sure its helpful to try to put everyone in boxes as ‘working class’ or ‘blue/white collar’ – I think we live in a more nuanced world & women are just as capable as men in switching their allegiances when they get in the ballot box
Please define “left wing” in a context other than France in the 1790s
Do those women read nothing about Labour? Here’s a list of ‘women friendly?’ Labour news items, starting with ‘What is a woman?’
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/keir-starmer-s-gender-identity-muddle
Then where do we start with Labour’s Women friendly environment? Corbyn?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/01/good-and-brave-labour-mps-should-be-defended
and today?
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jun/22/labour-mp-apsana-begum-signed-off-sick-after-campaign-of-misogynistic-abuse?amp
I expect they’ll be very disappointed if voting for them and expecting anything really woman friendly if they get in.
On the contrary. I think women voters are likely to be repelled by the behaviour of the previous male MPs and the failure of candidates to properly address it.
Some women seem to love grotty men. The vast reams of love letters to nearly ever serial killer in prison right now are an example.
Solid article but I find solutions lacking. For one, the decline in manufacturing was as much structural as it was societal. The author highlights that while the economic value of the manufacturing sector has remained around 10%, the number employed continues to decline. Productivity gains destroyed those jobs, not necessarily knowledge workers. As much as I agree that progressive ideologues have marginalized working class men, I do not see a scenario where manufacturing remained as strong as it was in the 1970s regardless of progressive ideology. At best, we perhaps would have had more concern and more constructive solutions if we felt freer to discuss the issues.
Thank you for this! It’s the clearest explanation of the state of politics today that I’ve seen. I think having this context here as the starting basis for further discussions may in fact manage to untangle some of the seemingly impossible to solve problems in the Western world.
‘This then accelerated with deliberate de-industrialisation under Thatcher, aimed at breaking the power of the unions.’
No, false. Deindustrialisation was happening anyway and much of it was all but inevitable. It happened in Europe and the US as well. Wilson and Heath squandered billions trying to prop up badly managed, dying smokestack industries with appalling labour relations, hamstringng the rest of the economy in the process. Thatcher merely ceased to do so and let economics take their natural course, setting the scene for 20-25 years of rising living standards – though admittedly, the social cost in post-industrial areas was and remains enormous.
I can’t see our feckless political class rising to this challenge, I think it will probably work out as Arnold Toynbee predicted ‘when the internal proletariat make common cause with the external proletariat the Empire is finished’
I think you just about nailed it.
Perhaps not in the USA
PS Mary thanks for dropping the overuse of ‘I’
“The female drift away from conservatism.” Well look what the Republicans are doing to women in the US. They are not our friends.
And as a woman that’s the issue isn’t It? Who is my friend? And that’s the end of it.
How about what is going to work best for society as a whole?
“today, women make up a majority of trade unionists” I am wondering if the author ever bothered to check the facts.
The recent statistical analysis (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/irj.12324#:~:text=Accordingly%2C%2035%25%20of%20male%20employees,remained%20comparatively%20stable%20at%2027.1%25.) examined workplace data and made the following findings:
1) “The paper examines whether workplace gender dynamics contributed to the decline of unions. To this end, it reviews relevant literature and proposes three hypotheses, which it then tests using alternative empirical analyses and data from Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) and British Social Attitudes Survey (BSAS). The results from employee-level analysis reveal that, compared with women, (i) men were significantly less likely to have never been union members and (ii) they were also significantly more likely to have been union members in the past.”
2) “Accordingly, 35% of male employees had a trade union membership in 1995 compared with just under 30% for females, but by 2019, male membership has dropped to 20.1% whereas female membership remained comparatively stable at 27.1%.”
From this, it’s very clear that neither 20.1 nor 27.1% could qualify for “the majority “. It would be more accurate to say that some men and some women workers have the membership, with changes in percentage over time.
On top of factual fallacy, article is full of logical ones. Sure, automation and technology annihilates some jobs and even professions, leading to shifts of labor markets. But, it also creates more opportunities in other sectors. Why wouldn’t male workers enter these fields such as care and “knowledge” work, perceived to be “female-dominated”? Are they this way because of the discrimination, or because men themselves are less likely to be teachers or caregivers?
Demands on markets have changes many times in society, not only in Western world. The modern people might have forgotten, but one of the consequences of English colonization in India was demise of some professions, like embroidery and clothes making, due to replacement with remarkably cheaper English factory goods. I doubt that any of those people who regret “men being left behind” lament or even know this today.
So the question is: why not adjust to the new structure of job markets? If “knowledge” and “care” based professions are more on demand nowadays, men are welcome to embrace this, along with a fair share of child caring responsibilities.
Author also misses a huge point: one of the most demanded jobs today lay within STEM, particularly IT and computer science, where men represent domineering percentages. Why not pursue career in these highly demanded, well payed fields?
I think that the author tried her best to argue “facts and logic”, but at the end of the game this is just one of the many cries about “old good times”.
Well, we did. Of my friends at high school, all of us have ended up working in computing and related fields. I was the only one who was actually doing programming at the time, the others didn’t, they got into it later.
Nonetheless the average company in that business is dominated by feminists who are determined to stuff the org with women and spend significant quantities of time finding ways to interfere with skills-based hiring to bring that about. Pretty miserable stuff. Everyone has stories of a “project manager” they got landed with who knows nothing about software projects but is good for the quotas. Sometimes they learn to swim, to their credit, but others just splash around and play corporate politics to cover up their lack of contribution. Plus if you get unlucky enough to be in competition with a woman for a promotion or management position it’s time to start looking for a new job immediately because you will always lose regardless of merit. Everyone understands this.
W.R.T. why not teachers or care givers. Different reasons.
Care work is minimum wage. Men are expected to earn more than women or else women won’t want to date them. Harsh but that’s how it is. If you become a carer you will struggle to attract the nicer ladies.
Teaching – well, I once read an article written by an ex male teacher. He had just been put through the wringer by a school system that automatically trusted some very young girl when she claimed she was being abused by him. She was lying and he proved it in court, but not before the teaching profession literally tried to end him. He got zero support from his (mostly female) colleagues and headmistress. After it was over he gave an interview to the press. It was years ago but I remember it crystal clear. He said if you’re a man, do not go into teaching under any circumstances. You will be treated as an object of suspicion by the women and they will not treat you fairly. It wasn’t just that one event that led him to think that, it was other experiences too. But his message was unambiguous – men, stay away. Well, that was the day I resolved to never become a teacher. Message received, over and out. Life is too short to deal with that kind of aggro.
“Everyone has stories of a “project manager” they got landed with” – you are very correct. I also have 2 stories regarding this. One is from a Math major and Actuary II, now doing actuary/data science job for a company. Her male project manager not only lacks competence, but also actively interferes with every attempt to get the project done faster – I guess, to not look bad if her performance will be compared to others. It was not just one example, these people are abundant in corporate world and I wouldn’t say there is more females than males in them. The other is even worse – my PhD boss not only was not particularly competent in his field, proposing bad experiments and halting the promising ones, but also managed to fabricate the data in research grant thus putting everyone under him at a severe risk of being forever crippled in research careers. This didn’t prevent me from publishing very successfully in a new lab, so it’s not that the issue was with me and I am looking for excuses.
With that, I’d expand your point – there is a plenty of unnecessary jobs in all the sectors, and these people no matter their sex contribute nothing to the process. It’s hard to say what exactly drives these “paper-workers” and “schedule managers”, but I suspect it’s lack of desire to either go for really intellectually challenging jobs or accept a contributing blue color job. It might have something to do with over production of “Liberal Arts” and “Business” degrees which have not much qualification or desire to learn, but plenty of desire to get paychecks.
Your point regarding teaching is understandable, and it’s sad that this person was treated like this, but I am always careful in rushing from individual experience to statistical conclusions. It’s a big question who suffers more in the job – male teachers wronged as “object of suspicion”… or teachers in general, who suffer with disrespect and disdain from entitled students and their parents, treating them like servants. Overall, teacher is a very important and severely underpaid job, because the only way to make it’s pay reflecting all overwork and burnout of working with poorly behaving kids is to make education not free. And this might result in a huge portion of population being unable to afford it, with corresponding consequences.
As for needing to earn a big chunk of money to attract nicer ladies…while this attitude definitely exists today, I am seeing sings of it changing. As for me, I would willingly accept a partner making less than me or willing to work part-time for the sake of taking on more childcare. Of course, this wouldn’t come with less respect to them from me. I think there already are more men willing to be stay at home dads, and this was another thing which puzzles me in the original article. Yes, for you taking in this role might be “down-pricing”, but for those “poor blue collar men” – not much. They could easily exchange “shrinking” market of physically demanding labor (which comes not only with benefits of embracing traditional masculinity, but also with broken backs, worn out joints, black lungs and other side effects of heavy physical labor) to expanding market of caregiving jobs. My English, French, Physics, Literature teachers were male, Maths, Biology, Chemistry, Russian language – female, and I don’t recall enjoying ones more/less than others.
So my overall conclusion out of this is: everyone wants high paying, respectable jobs. It once was believed that women have some “special X-chromosome linked” magic gene making them to love crappy underpaid “care” related jobs, but in reality it’s a tooth fairy. And a real question is – how to balance the desire of people for the first with the need of society for the second. Also how to let people afraid of loosing their current job to automation to see other possibilities.
But market forces – however slowly and imperfectly – will tend to weed out the incompetent male manager and reward the brilliant female scientist as surely some entrepreneur or up and coming company will hire her. Indeed you yourself were able to find a new lab after being treated unfairly. But the forces that Norman mention are backed by structural forces aimed at intentionally privileging some groups over others. The white men being cast out of their jobs for simply being white men have limited options (and CEO stats are irrelevant here as I am talking about the average man)
And if you look at any corporation, you will see huge swathes of non jobs (or limiter value ones) dominated by women.
Not so easy. I have a spy mind, so I realized the storm is coming, and did a side project for another lab. By the time I needed a change, ground was ready, they knew me and were aware I am worth the second chance. Otherwise I think my ending would be “cast out” and probably sent back to Russia with failed PhD. I don’t think Vladimir Putin would take an excuse from me if in response to that I’d decide to “backlash” on a Red Square.
My case is not very representative – we have a plenty of people who quit because of high pressure and toughest competition. Couple years ago one woman in my department died of Berry aneurysm which occurred in parallel with high stress of multiple projects and grants. Where I am going with this is that our jobs look nice and “white-coated”, but the reality is heavy, stressful, rough, competitive, and surprisingly labor intense. Maybe not things like theoretical physics, but my field definitely. Also, scientists in academia almost always work 10-12 hours a day and never just 5 days a week. It does not need to be said that the pay is for standard schedule. So… not as shiny as banners show. Other thing is that you are on your own – no one tells you what to do, but ALL failures are yours. Experiments not working – no papers – no grants – cast out.
I agree with you and strongly oppose “non jobs”. But they affect me negatively, too. For example, our grant submission deadlines are shorter because “business people” have to approve everything, and they need their time to make sure they could take a day off, so it ends up that I have to create a heavy research grant 16 hours a day to make sure a schedule managers have enough time to check a box.
I think forces Norman mentioned are negatively affecting not just “white men”, but all workers with primarily manual skills. I could exemplify this with laundresses. They once were one of the main female endeavors. Now they are automated, and of course at the moment many of them were cast out. But do people nowadays want to return to manual clothes washing, when your joints are ruined by permanent immersion in water and detergents? Likewise, carriages. They once lost to cars, but would many people today want to ride horses instead?
The thing is that while some jobs are being lost or replaced, others come. We in the US have relatively low unemployment now, except for some towns like Detroit. Why not take new jobs? Men still make up the majority of jobs like petroleum engineer, plummer, welder, electrician, and those are all very important jobs with good pays.
What would be your suggested solution for this? Is there anything we could do to counter these corporate forces? Or maybe more boys need to be encouraged to go to STEM (they dominate there anyway). I don’t know, most people I compete with for funding and papers are men. Most professors in my Midwestern hospital are also men, as well as lab heads and division directors.
I believe myself to be a “normal” male, and the thought of working in a care-based profession leaves me both cold and horrified. It has been stated that men are less empathetic than women, and from my own observations and experience that is true. I don’t expect to be cared for, now or in later years, and nor do I particularly care for others outside my immediate family. The idea of a career in “caring” is not one I would ever have entertained.
Don’t blame the so-called “woke” left for this situation. People need to remember that it was the neo liberals – Reganomics and Thatcherism – that threw the manufacturing classes under the bus through rampant world trade tariff busting, market deregulation and trade union anihalation. Uneducated white men need to realise that the Jordan Peterson personality-cult and the utterly deranged Donald Trump are not going to turn back time and save them.
as a male ” Nicky” I far prefer the company friendship and consortia of woman, almost to the exclusion of men ( easy when one likes cooking, horses, racing and hunting) and frankly woman are far more able than men at most things that do not involve strength…and that applies from insect to mammal.
I honestly believe that most UK men dont actually , for want of a better word ” like” women, whereas Italian, and other Latins do.
I can’t complain… the longer you chaps are away on golf, lads, stag weekends, at Twickenham on Lords…. the more time I have to enjoy with your neglected ladies!!!
Reading the comments here I begin to suspect that you may be right about most British men not liking women. I do take heart, though, that this site does not represent all British men.
No, they just don’t like you and the rest of the feminist bs. That’s why we’re staying single, enjoying casual sex, or marrying foreigners!
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Not mine, she’s certainly not neglected.