“Feminists”

Since the 1960s, cultural leaders in media, Hollywood, academia, and politics have fiercely criticized men for expressing male characteristics, and have fiercely criticized women for expressing female characteristics. This has led some commentators on the right more recently to lambast what they call the “overfeminization” of society.

But are we really experiencing a cultural “overfeminization?” It looks to me like, instead, we have a swap. We have feminization where there should be masculinity, and masculinization where there should be femininity. Our women are pushed to act like men, and our men to act like women, and the resulting social transgenderism makes everyone extremely unhappy, not to mention dysfunctional.

Both sexes are out of whack. We are all transgender now.

“You heard of ExxonMobil?” Hannah Pawelski asked her dad during a phone call posted on TikTok. “It’s like an oil company,” she added. When her father replied yes, Pawelski, holding back laughter, told him she “saw like a job posting, and I applied and it’s like an apprenticeship … in an offshore oil rig,” and that it “pays so much money.”

Pawelski, like many other girls participating in this latest TikTok prank, isn’t serious about working on an offshore rig, but her dad doesn’t know that. Her father understandably responded to his twentysomething daughter’s call by trying to make her understand that offshore oil rigging is not for her. “You’re in the middle of the ocean, the wind is blowing. It’s probably one of the most dangerous jobs in the world,” he told her.

It’s not just male influencers who preach manipulation

“Men do not love you, okay? So stop thinking that they do. They tolerate you. They lust you. That’s it.”

The YouTube influencer SheRa Seven’s advice for young women is as sharp as the wings of her black eyeliner. To single ladies, she offers the following on sex: “The longer you hold off, the more that he will like you.”

To married ones: “Don’t give it up every time he want it. Make him wait, make him work for it still. Gotta make him chase!”

The war between the sexes has ended, and rather than a co-operative future that could benefit all, it has turned out to be more like a lopsided win for the female side.’

So begins Joel Kotkin’s National Post op-ed Women have won the “war between the sexes”, but at what cost? It is a welcome but disappointing analysis that starts with a show of defiance and ends in quiet desperation. Of course, it’s good to find anyone in a major newspaper willing to cast a less-than-adulatory eye on The Future [that] is Female or to write sympathetically about men. Kotkin, a prolific author on cities and technocracy, proves his good faith on the strength of that opening statement alone. Aside from the wishful thinking of believing feminism to be winding down (was #MeToo a prelude to a ceasefire?) or ever having envisioned a cooperative future (he should take a look at Kate Millett’s incendiary Theory of Sexual Politics), Kotkin is to be commended for daring to name as a war the decades of post-1960s activism in which all the decisive victories have been claimed by feminists against men.

Remember this phony viral moment?

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern fired back at a reporter’s suggestion she met with Finland Prime Minister Sanna Marin “just because” of their similarities, such as age and gender.

Now Jacinda and Sanna really have something in common: they’re both out of office. Jacinda resigned in January and Sanna just lost an election.

Maternal instinct is not a chauvinist myth

A little friend of my daughter’s has just had one of her parents walk out, to start a new life with a new partner. Given that they were a heterosexual couple, and based on your observations about the world, can you guess which parent stayed behind to feed, care for and try to comfort a shocked and grieving little girl?

Go on. You know the answer. We all know which way round this usually works.

The Men’s Rights Movement was born to weigh in on cases like Johnny Depp’s. The movement gained prominence during the Seventies and Eighties in response to what some men saw as preferential treatment of women in family court cases, especially where custody arrangements, alimony, and divorce settlements were concerned. As the historic injustices faced by women gained more attention in the media, legal system, and politics, these men organised to cry, What About Us?