Kaeley, this is so good, and it tallies completely with what I'm seeing as a late-millennial gay guy. My straight male friends are generally somewhere on a spectrum between bemused/apathetic and full-on conservative/gender-critical. If anything they have moved right in recent years. Whereas my once-sane female friends have developed woke groupthink (#bekind-itis) and made supporting "LGBTQ+" and being an ally part of their personality and identity - to the extent that they ignore or talk over actual LGBT people who disagree with them. It's like everything LGBTQ+ has become a hobby and accessory for middle-class liberal white women, one that they find very exciting and which gives them a mission and purpose, a righteous glow to bask in, and the power to cancel other people.
I didn't come out in any of my former workplaces back in the 2000s and 2010s for a whole bunch of reasons - one of them being that I didn't want American female colleagues to treat me like a pet or reduce me to my identity label. A friend and her sister even tried to force me to come out to them because they wanted to be "allies" and thought my being gay was something that would be fun and exciting for them. https://wolfstar.substack.com/p/that-time-my-friends-were-so-desperate Now, things have gone so far that in the past few years, there have been a couple of instances where a woman I interacted with in a professional setting was offhand and rude with me because they mistakenly assumed I was straight, then came and apologised to me the next day after finding out I was gay. It's so revealing. Because I'm an ordinary-looking 40-year-old white guy, certain woke women assume I'm problematic, then once they find out I'm gay I apparently get a special pass and they venerate and patronize me. It's absolutely nauseating.
I'm not a writer, and not on any other social media, but I hope you don't mind if I refer to your comment in conversation. Although I will not ever believe it's the same thing, I as a black woman, can't stand being white people's mascot, pet, cause celebre, movement, slogan, etc. My true white friends and I are close because of all the elements of our lives and humanity that have absolutely nothing to do with my skin color. Too bad I can't even say that without being told I'm guilty of self-hate.
Thanks. Please do. I saw American Fiction recently and it really resonated with me - it's a great satire of how a lot of "woke" white liberals now treat minorities as pets.
May I also share this please? It’s fantastic to hear this from someone who is that person. I’m not a gay person but I do know what it’s like to be a toy, or a tchotchke or something.
I’m also a gay man in his 40’s and you’ve very much summed up my experience of this gender religion. To add to yours I’ve also had my female straight friend, ex communicate me for not validating her daughter’s fantasy of being a gay man. At the same time she also feels the need to “straight-splains” to me the nuances of being a gay man. Rainbow flags everywhere in their house draping over the kitchen door as they get stuck into the Quorn sausages and signal all the right kinds of virtue that make them all feel just oh so good about themselves all the while not seeing the irony of the performative homophobia being played out in front of them by their adult child, who at best, is stuck in some version of arrested development, as she wears her gay man uniform while drawing cute wee animated trans characters on her iPad, her new religion permeates every aspect of her life.
Know what stuck me as very odd about this? These same women would probably denounce any man who treated them as a token for a man’s own sense of self-worth (like “arm-candy” or the quintessential “trophy wife”), right? And yet, they turned around and did the same thing to you as a gay man.
Excellent piece! I must confess, as an old school liberal, that those of us who still exist are a major part of the problem. As you stated, we are NOT being kind to the vulnerable when we see this crazy woke b.s. and not only sit silently by, but continue to be fooled into thinking that woke has anything whatsoever to actually standing up in a positive way for then dispossessed. Far from it, whether it's burning down black neighborhoods and proposing the destruction of the nuclear family in order to supposedly make the lives of poor black people better, to propping up actual racism and antisemitism in order to supposedly end racism, to letting mentally ill drug addicts die on the streets in the name of compassion and letting other mentally ill people play out their sexual kinks in front of our kids and not only tolerating it but valorizing it, woke is a toxic ideology that hurts the vulnerable the most. It's distressing enough when the victims are other adults. The tragedy is multiplied a thousand fold when the victims are children. In my opinion the rise of this societal sickness is mostly the fault of cowed liberals and not conservatives.
I described your Substack to my therapist recently as providing me with "the perspective of a Christian woman who actually thinks she's a full human being and that the same God who made women loves them and wants them to use their brains and have self-respect." He knows how radically different this makes you from all the Christians I was exposed to as a kid and all the Christians who I've butted heads with online, and he said something in response that he's only said one other time. "Ah. You've come across an *actual* Christian."
Holly, your therapist is right, and there are many other actual followers of Christ out here. There are unfortunately many others like you who were done serious evil while the perpetrators claimed their behavior to be Christian. I'm so glad that you can see people for who they really are despite who they claim to be.
Excellent post. Thanks. The world has been turned upside down. Here in the UK some grisly men were recently in court for voluntarily slicing off each other’s genitals. But I ask here, why weren’t they being celebrated as stunning and brave? They were only doing to each other what is being loudly celebrated by the crackpot classes. Here’s the article. I promise it’s a funnier read than it sounds. https://open.substack.com/pub/lowstatus/p/one-mans-meat?r=evzeq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I am a man who falls into the camp of increasing apathy. I think it's absurd to have men competing in women's sports or in women's dressing rooms, but it seems like it's women who are pushing for such things! At least, many women are. And so after a while it's like; why would I risk getting cancelled or tormented online to push back against a thing that doesn't necessarily affect me, especially when it's women who are demanding it?
As a man who has not surrendered his masculinity to the cult of modernity, I am both saddened and bemused by the ever-increasing herd of soy boys. Saddened, because I would prefer that men were still men instead of pocket toys. And bemused, because I look at these soft whimpering things with their pasty skin and shit eye contact and think, fuck me. You're not gonna be much competition on the dating market are you? The more that society feminizes men, the more the remaining masculine males will stand out.
And feminization does seem to be the goal. I am perplexed that, as far as I can tell, modern feminism's dream is the boyfriend sitting in the car while the woman changes the tire. This is progress, apparently?
I have another thought too. I've been working through this idea for weeks and this will be the first time I ever put it to paper. I hope to refine my thinking over time.
It appears that the more feminized men become, the louder the mainstream women screech about toxic masculinity and evil males. At first glance this doesn't seem to make sense. Surely we have some of the least masculine men in human history, and yet the clamors of toxic masculinity have never been higher.
My evolving thinking is that perhaps this hatred/prosecution of men is actually a sublimated feeling on the part of women. Anger that the men have been too weak to draw boundaries and, frankly, tell *some* women to pipe down and think before they act. No tuts, your emotions should not govern foreign policy or pandemic response, so sorry. Women are angry that there are no longer men strong enough to contain some of their less well-reasoned urges, if you will, and the result is that women are lashing out at men for being weak. Women have chosen "toxic masculinity" as their battle cry when in fact what they mean is "neutered masculinity."
This is just a thought. I'm not a guy who wants to cancel women's right to vote or put them back in the kitchen or anything like that. Some of my closest friends are women, I love women. But I also see emotions dictating policy and this is not a healthy long term trend for society.
My sons found love in Asia. They both realized early on that American women (not all, but many that they knew) had an attitude that was mean and overly demanding (a summary of their opinions) and they were not loving, caring or interested in having a family.
Surprisingly enough, I’ve met several women who found love in the Middle East. They said they were not interested in weak men. Go figure...
" I'm not a guy who wants to cancel women's right to vote or put them back in the kitchen or anything like that."
When you talk of women's voting rights, you mean the right to extract men's resources by force (via the state) without having to offer anything in return, such as a sandwich or a family. Women are the greatest voting block, and the majority of women vote for bigger government and more socialism (more forced wealth redistribution from men to women). The greatest voting block today is single women who "don't need no man", because they can now gain access to men's resources under threat of imprisonment, thanks to government (men with guns).
If voting rights for women means access to the fruits of men's labour (in effect access to men's bodies) by force, then what would the equivalent right be for men and would you unquestioningly support that too?
Do you think the expansion of government and rise of socialism (forced wealth transfer from men to women) over the last century, leading to the erasure of traditional male/ female gender roles and responsibilities, might have anything to do with the collapse of gender identity in the west?
As for not wanting to put women back in the kitchen.... are you happy with the current solution which is to turn all of society into a giant kitchen (safe space), or is this a stupid idea which (along with socialism) is completely unsustainable and can only cause the collapse of society, and a lowering of living standards for all?
Women got the right to vote in 1920. Why were the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s not an orgy of safe spaces? I don't think it's as simple as saying women vote, therefore bad outcome.
Of course I'm not happy with the state of modern society. But I fail to see how forcing women back into the kitchen will solve much.
As an incredibly basic idea; the average guy can't do a single pull up. Let's start with that, first, before we talk about pots and pans.
Poor women always worked. Always. The one income household was a reality for middle/upper middle class women for a brief period in history. This was a tiny proportion of women’s lives over the last few hundred years. You are dreaming of a golden age that really never was.
Nobody voted for socialism. The USSR, CCP etc were formed as a result of bloody revolutions, mainly started by, fought by, and ideologically driven by men. It wasn’t Karla Marx and Valentina Lenin. Historically women tended to be more conservative than men. Women are more likely to enforce the status quo than men.
In addition, women are not a monolith. They don’t all think the same and are not all programmed by a feminist hive mind. They will be driven to vote for different things because of their different interests and philosophies, just like, you know, “real people”…
Your analysis, if I can call it that, doesn’t stand up to much, and where you make a few good point you spoil it by drawing the wrong conclusions. This monstrous regime of women you imagine is a strange boogeyman in your head.
Feminists seem to think they are tearing down patriarchy by criticizing men, but all they are doing is tearing down good men.
The truly bad men, which I believe is about 5% of men, could not care less what any one else thinks, particularly women. And many of those self-described feminists are more than happy to have sex with that bad 5% if he has money and good looks, and then she hopes he marries her. Then she hates all men because she only hooks up with bad men and ignores good men.
Good luck with that plan.
Men and women need each other for society to flourish and reproduce. The way we do that is with individual men and women falling in love, getting married, having children together, and spending a lifetime parenting their children.
Most men that I know will go to the end of the world for a woman who loves hims, supports him, respects him, and takes good care of his children.
The old adage of “you can get your way with honey, but not with vinegar” is very relevant.
I am loathe to derail an excellent essay (Holly can vouch for me) - you misapprehend the reason men had the franchise before women did, and it had nothing to do with Holy Writ, or somebody's idea of what Holy Writ is. No, it's a bit more prosaic than that. Men in the US must sign what amounts to a literal blood oath in order to vote - we have to register with the Selective Service when we reach the age of majority. We don't get to vote (or enjoy a great many other things in the public sphere) if we don't submit ourselves to potential mutilation and/or death via conscription. There's even the potential for prison if we don't register.
Voting comes at no cost to women, other than the consequences of electoral folly. If men could opt out of Selective Service and give up their privilege to vote with no other penalties attached, I'm certain some would. I'm equally certain that if women were required to register with Selective Service in order to have the privilege of voting, almost none of them would be willing to sign up for conscription.
Otherwise, we are in complete agreement. You jacked this one out of the park.
I'm sorry, but don't be silly. The draft has been sporadic in this country, used only during The Civil War, then briefly in WWI, and finally institutionalized in WWII. That lasted until Nixon's all-volunteer armed forces. Yes, you still have to register, but you can hardly equate something that was only institutionalized in 1940 for women not being allowed to vote before 1920. Whatever your grievance, it has nothing to do with women getting or not getting the vote.
Yes, I realize I risk "feeding the troll", but your grievances against the draft are irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Please make them elsewhere.
You are the troll. Not sure who designated you as the spokesman for all men, but many of us deeply resent having to certify our promise to be on-call cannon fodder for the military industrial complex. Personally I refused to register for the draft when Carter reestablished it, and the consequences included no eligibility for student loans and no state licensure for many occupations, among many other things. For people like you who wouldn’t understand, that’s called making a personal sacrifice based on ethical principles. And many of us of a certain age saw our friends, family, and neighbors sacrificed to the war complex during the Vietnam fiasco. A large number of Americas young men came home from that awful venture in body bags, and only a fool believes that history can’t repeat itself.
Those who don't learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat the mistakes of history. Those of us who did learn the lessons of history are doomed to watch those who didn't repeat those mistakes. ;)
Frank, that's the classic Fallacy of Induction - "it can't happen here."
You're right, it can't happen here, until it does. I pray you are perpetually correct, but I'm certain you aren't. Men are on the hook, women are not. And I hope they never are, because it will mean we find ourselves in circumstances similar to what the USSR faced in places like Stalingrad, Sebastopol, and Kursk.
Actually I am in favor of equal treatment of women, except I believe they should not be subject to the military draft. I hope we don't need the draft ever again, of course. And I'm fine with women being drafted for non-combat roles, and volunteering for combat.
Lots of truth here, but blaming women is too easy. Many if not most are silently opposed to the nonsense but the price of non-conformity is high, for us and our families by association. You don't see many liberal men speaking up for sanity either. The talk show guys, Stewart, Colbert, Noah, etc., most male comedians, SNL cast, and wokestar Trudeau are all leading the charge off the left cliff. They want to be on the "right side of history" applauded by the rainbow pierced youth. Too many women are lemmings, it's true, but there's plenty of blame to go around.
Thank you so much for this article. I’m going to share it. It’s alarming how many liberal women are so self sabotaging and so self righteous about the way they speak for all women. They’re often those griftivist women who wind up wrecking things.
I was loathe to admit it even to myself, when the jokes about Sports Illustrated closing because white liberal women were making the decisions, such as putting obese and trans women on the cover, were doing the rounds.
This used to be me. I lurked on the fringes of this 'sister-hood'. In my defense, I was born into it. But I wish I left years ago.
I could never wear a pussy hat, or post #metoo. I did post a silly black square, and voted left. There were several things I quietly thought were rubbish but I never said anything.
This bubble was ruined by degrees when I got out of debt, met my future husband, left my liberal city, got married, had two kids and I saw that reality did not reflect the views I was raised with at all.
It's hard being the only non-woke person in my family. The friendships I have cultivated over many years would not last if I were completely honest about my beliefs. But there's a cognitive dissonance in my life that has faded away. The mental health challenges are gone and no drugs were involved. It's so much nicer to live life without seeing yourself as a victim. Please know that these women, though blind to their privilege over poorer less articulate ladies, are hurting themselves as well.
A quibble about drag queens. You write that they are dressed in a "degradingly sexed-up caricature of womanhood." If you find drag costumes degrading, I suppose you have a right to your opinion. But what I can tell you is that, as a group, drag queens do not seek to degrade or put down women in the slighted. That's not what drag is about. If you think that's what it's about, that's a misapprehension on your part.
(Which isn't to say that little kids should be going to drag queen story hour. Separate issue.)
Just my opinion, but I find it difficult to view the grotesque caricatures those “drag queen “ men emphasize about women without feeling the misogynist vibes. I’ve met a few and they were quite salty. And sarcastically mean. Maybe I met the minority of that group? I won’t repeat that experience.
I would say they are misogynistic to the same level as they are misandrist. Just generally misanthropist! Panty Bliss once said, wisely, something like “wearing drag is me using the tools of femininity to mock the idea of gender rigidity itself”. It’s something like that. It’s camp in the old sense. An old school drag act is camp because it’s a man in a dress acting AS IF he was a man in a dress. He’s not acting like a “woman”. It’s gently mocking the male gaze, not enforcing it. Well that used to be the case. Now drag isn’t drag, twirling around a pole, thrusting your crotch into people’s faces, etc is not drag. I don’t know what it is but it’s not drag. It’s more like a degenerate burlesque, which is not for children.
Powerful writing and spot on. This me too nonsense was bad enough. Any ideas of hiring a woman went out the door as soon as some whacko progressive could just make an accusation and get a man fired. And without attached emotion, can you blame anyone for not willingly bringing that into a business?
Kaeley, this is so good, and it tallies completely with what I'm seeing as a late-millennial gay guy. My straight male friends are generally somewhere on a spectrum between bemused/apathetic and full-on conservative/gender-critical. If anything they have moved right in recent years. Whereas my once-sane female friends have developed woke groupthink (#bekind-itis) and made supporting "LGBTQ+" and being an ally part of their personality and identity - to the extent that they ignore or talk over actual LGBT people who disagree with them. It's like everything LGBTQ+ has become a hobby and accessory for middle-class liberal white women, one that they find very exciting and which gives them a mission and purpose, a righteous glow to bask in, and the power to cancel other people.
I didn't come out in any of my former workplaces back in the 2000s and 2010s for a whole bunch of reasons - one of them being that I didn't want American female colleagues to treat me like a pet or reduce me to my identity label. A friend and her sister even tried to force me to come out to them because they wanted to be "allies" and thought my being gay was something that would be fun and exciting for them. https://wolfstar.substack.com/p/that-time-my-friends-were-so-desperate Now, things have gone so far that in the past few years, there have been a couple of instances where a woman I interacted with in a professional setting was offhand and rude with me because they mistakenly assumed I was straight, then came and apologised to me the next day after finding out I was gay. It's so revealing. Because I'm an ordinary-looking 40-year-old white guy, certain woke women assume I'm problematic, then once they find out I'm gay I apparently get a special pass and they venerate and patronize me. It's absolutely nauseating.
Permission to share this comment? It’s really insightful/illuminating.
Share it where - as a note?
Was thinking about sharing it on Facebook as a conversation starter. No worries if you’d rather I not..
That's fine, feel free to share. Thanks for asking! x
I'm not a writer, and not on any other social media, but I hope you don't mind if I refer to your comment in conversation. Although I will not ever believe it's the same thing, I as a black woman, can't stand being white people's mascot, pet, cause celebre, movement, slogan, etc. My true white friends and I are close because of all the elements of our lives and humanity that have absolutely nothing to do with my skin color. Too bad I can't even say that without being told I'm guilty of self-hate.
Thanks. Please do. I saw American Fiction recently and it really resonated with me - it's a great satire of how a lot of "woke" white liberals now treat minorities as pets.
May I also share this please? It’s fantastic to hear this from someone who is that person. I’m not a gay person but I do know what it’s like to be a toy, or a tchotchke or something.
Thank you for your consideration.
Yes x
I’m also a gay man in his 40’s and you’ve very much summed up my experience of this gender religion. To add to yours I’ve also had my female straight friend, ex communicate me for not validating her daughter’s fantasy of being a gay man. At the same time she also feels the need to “straight-splains” to me the nuances of being a gay man. Rainbow flags everywhere in their house draping over the kitchen door as they get stuck into the Quorn sausages and signal all the right kinds of virtue that make them all feel just oh so good about themselves all the while not seeing the irony of the performative homophobia being played out in front of them by their adult child, who at best, is stuck in some version of arrested development, as she wears her gay man uniform while drawing cute wee animated trans characters on her iPad, her new religion permeates every aspect of her life.
Wow. It's crazy, isn't it.
How complicated and confusing. Thank you for sharing your story. .
Know what stuck me as very odd about this? These same women would probably denounce any man who treated them as a token for a man’s own sense of self-worth (like “arm-candy” or the quintessential “trophy wife”), right? And yet, they turned around and did the same thing to you as a gay man.
Bang on the money
Excellent piece! I must confess, as an old school liberal, that those of us who still exist are a major part of the problem. As you stated, we are NOT being kind to the vulnerable when we see this crazy woke b.s. and not only sit silently by, but continue to be fooled into thinking that woke has anything whatsoever to actually standing up in a positive way for then dispossessed. Far from it, whether it's burning down black neighborhoods and proposing the destruction of the nuclear family in order to supposedly make the lives of poor black people better, to propping up actual racism and antisemitism in order to supposedly end racism, to letting mentally ill drug addicts die on the streets in the name of compassion and letting other mentally ill people play out their sexual kinks in front of our kids and not only tolerating it but valorizing it, woke is a toxic ideology that hurts the vulnerable the most. It's distressing enough when the victims are other adults. The tragedy is multiplied a thousand fold when the victims are children. In my opinion the rise of this societal sickness is mostly the fault of cowed liberals and not conservatives.
I described your Substack to my therapist recently as providing me with "the perspective of a Christian woman who actually thinks she's a full human being and that the same God who made women loves them and wants them to use their brains and have self-respect." He knows how radically different this makes you from all the Christians I was exposed to as a kid and all the Christians who I've butted heads with online, and he said something in response that he's only said one other time. "Ah. You've come across an *actual* Christian."
Love what you're doing, keep it up.
Holly, your therapist is right, and there are many other actual followers of Christ out here. There are unfortunately many others like you who were done serious evil while the perpetrators claimed their behavior to be Christian. I'm so glad that you can see people for who they really are despite who they claim to be.
Wow!! Very powerful and well thought out article.
Excellent post. Thanks. The world has been turned upside down. Here in the UK some grisly men were recently in court for voluntarily slicing off each other’s genitals. But I ask here, why weren’t they being celebrated as stunning and brave? They were only doing to each other what is being loudly celebrated by the crackpot classes. Here’s the article. I promise it’s a funnier read than it sounds. https://open.substack.com/pub/lowstatus/p/one-mans-meat?r=evzeq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I am a man who falls into the camp of increasing apathy. I think it's absurd to have men competing in women's sports or in women's dressing rooms, but it seems like it's women who are pushing for such things! At least, many women are. And so after a while it's like; why would I risk getting cancelled or tormented online to push back against a thing that doesn't necessarily affect me, especially when it's women who are demanding it?
As a man who has not surrendered his masculinity to the cult of modernity, I am both saddened and bemused by the ever-increasing herd of soy boys. Saddened, because I would prefer that men were still men instead of pocket toys. And bemused, because I look at these soft whimpering things with their pasty skin and shit eye contact and think, fuck me. You're not gonna be much competition on the dating market are you? The more that society feminizes men, the more the remaining masculine males will stand out.
And feminization does seem to be the goal. I am perplexed that, as far as I can tell, modern feminism's dream is the boyfriend sitting in the car while the woman changes the tire. This is progress, apparently?
I have another thought too. I've been working through this idea for weeks and this will be the first time I ever put it to paper. I hope to refine my thinking over time.
It appears that the more feminized men become, the louder the mainstream women screech about toxic masculinity and evil males. At first glance this doesn't seem to make sense. Surely we have some of the least masculine men in human history, and yet the clamors of toxic masculinity have never been higher.
My evolving thinking is that perhaps this hatred/prosecution of men is actually a sublimated feeling on the part of women. Anger that the men have been too weak to draw boundaries and, frankly, tell *some* women to pipe down and think before they act. No tuts, your emotions should not govern foreign policy or pandemic response, so sorry. Women are angry that there are no longer men strong enough to contain some of their less well-reasoned urges, if you will, and the result is that women are lashing out at men for being weak. Women have chosen "toxic masculinity" as their battle cry when in fact what they mean is "neutered masculinity."
This is just a thought. I'm not a guy who wants to cancel women's right to vote or put them back in the kitchen or anything like that. Some of my closest friends are women, I love women. But I also see emotions dictating policy and this is not a healthy long term trend for society.
Perfectly described. None of humanity would exists without the other. Worts and all, as they're saying these day's.
My sons found love in Asia. They both realized early on that American women (not all, but many that they knew) had an attitude that was mean and overly demanding (a summary of their opinions) and they were not loving, caring or interested in having a family.
Surprisingly enough, I’ve met several women who found love in the Middle East. They said they were not interested in weak men. Go figure...
" I'm not a guy who wants to cancel women's right to vote or put them back in the kitchen or anything like that."
When you talk of women's voting rights, you mean the right to extract men's resources by force (via the state) without having to offer anything in return, such as a sandwich or a family. Women are the greatest voting block, and the majority of women vote for bigger government and more socialism (more forced wealth redistribution from men to women). The greatest voting block today is single women who "don't need no man", because they can now gain access to men's resources under threat of imprisonment, thanks to government (men with guns).
If voting rights for women means access to the fruits of men's labour (in effect access to men's bodies) by force, then what would the equivalent right be for men and would you unquestioningly support that too?
Do you think the expansion of government and rise of socialism (forced wealth transfer from men to women) over the last century, leading to the erasure of traditional male/ female gender roles and responsibilities, might have anything to do with the collapse of gender identity in the west?
As for not wanting to put women back in the kitchen.... are you happy with the current solution which is to turn all of society into a giant kitchen (safe space), or is this a stupid idea which (along with socialism) is completely unsustainable and can only cause the collapse of society, and a lowering of living standards for all?
Women got the right to vote in 1920. Why were the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s not an orgy of safe spaces? I don't think it's as simple as saying women vote, therefore bad outcome.
Of course I'm not happy with the state of modern society. But I fail to see how forcing women back into the kitchen will solve much.
As an incredibly basic idea; the average guy can't do a single pull up. Let's start with that, first, before we talk about pots and pans.
You must be lost. You’ll find my page is not a safe space for chauvinism. Please take it elsewhere. We’re all stocked up here.
This is a very ahistorical rant.
Poor women always worked. Always. The one income household was a reality for middle/upper middle class women for a brief period in history. This was a tiny proportion of women’s lives over the last few hundred years. You are dreaming of a golden age that really never was.
Nobody voted for socialism. The USSR, CCP etc were formed as a result of bloody revolutions, mainly started by, fought by, and ideologically driven by men. It wasn’t Karla Marx and Valentina Lenin. Historically women tended to be more conservative than men. Women are more likely to enforce the status quo than men.
In addition, women are not a monolith. They don’t all think the same and are not all programmed by a feminist hive mind. They will be driven to vote for different things because of their different interests and philosophies, just like, you know, “real people”…
Your analysis, if I can call it that, doesn’t stand up to much, and where you make a few good point you spoil it by drawing the wrong conclusions. This monstrous regime of women you imagine is a strange boogeyman in your head.
Very interesting article.
Feminists seem to think they are tearing down patriarchy by criticizing men, but all they are doing is tearing down good men.
The truly bad men, which I believe is about 5% of men, could not care less what any one else thinks, particularly women. And many of those self-described feminists are more than happy to have sex with that bad 5% if he has money and good looks, and then she hopes he marries her. Then she hates all men because she only hooks up with bad men and ignores good men.
Good luck with that plan.
Men and women need each other for society to flourish and reproduce. The way we do that is with individual men and women falling in love, getting married, having children together, and spending a lifetime parenting their children.
Most men that I know will go to the end of the world for a woman who loves hims, supports him, respects him, and takes good care of his children.
The old adage of “you can get your way with honey, but not with vinegar” is very relevant.
Agree about the 5%. Worked in child support for 19 years and that was approximately the percentage of total bastards
*Their Children. Otherwise very well said.🙏
Fixed. Thanks for the free edit!
It's important.
Well stated!
What?!?! Do we share a brain? So, so good. So very right.
I am loathe to derail an excellent essay (Holly can vouch for me) - you misapprehend the reason men had the franchise before women did, and it had nothing to do with Holy Writ, or somebody's idea of what Holy Writ is. No, it's a bit more prosaic than that. Men in the US must sign what amounts to a literal blood oath in order to vote - we have to register with the Selective Service when we reach the age of majority. We don't get to vote (or enjoy a great many other things in the public sphere) if we don't submit ourselves to potential mutilation and/or death via conscription. There's even the potential for prison if we don't register.
Voting comes at no cost to women, other than the consequences of electoral folly. If men could opt out of Selective Service and give up their privilege to vote with no other penalties attached, I'm certain some would. I'm equally certain that if women were required to register with Selective Service in order to have the privilege of voting, almost none of them would be willing to sign up for conscription.
Otherwise, we are in complete agreement. You jacked this one out of the park.
I'm sorry, but don't be silly. The draft has been sporadic in this country, used only during The Civil War, then briefly in WWI, and finally institutionalized in WWII. That lasted until Nixon's all-volunteer armed forces. Yes, you still have to register, but you can hardly equate something that was only institutionalized in 1940 for women not being allowed to vote before 1920. Whatever your grievance, it has nothing to do with women getting or not getting the vote.
Yes, I realize I risk "feeding the troll", but your grievances against the draft are irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Please make them elsewhere.
You are the troll. Not sure who designated you as the spokesman for all men, but many of us deeply resent having to certify our promise to be on-call cannon fodder for the military industrial complex. Personally I refused to register for the draft when Carter reestablished it, and the consequences included no eligibility for student loans and no state licensure for many occupations, among many other things. For people like you who wouldn’t understand, that’s called making a personal sacrifice based on ethical principles. And many of us of a certain age saw our friends, family, and neighbors sacrificed to the war complex during the Vietnam fiasco. A large number of Americas young men came home from that awful venture in body bags, and only a fool believes that history can’t repeat itself.
Those who don't learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat the mistakes of history. Those of us who did learn the lessons of history are doomed to watch those who didn't repeat those mistakes. ;)
Frank, that's the classic Fallacy of Induction - "it can't happen here."
You're right, it can't happen here, until it does. I pray you are perpetually correct, but I'm certain you aren't. Men are on the hook, women are not. And I hope they never are, because it will mean we find ourselves in circumstances similar to what the USSR faced in places like Stalingrad, Sebastopol, and Kursk.
Actually I am in favor of equal treatment of women, except I believe they should not be subject to the military draft. I hope we don't need the draft ever again, of course. And I'm fine with women being drafted for non-combat roles, and volunteering for combat.
That, by DFF, is not equal treatment of women, or more appropriately, not equal treatment of men.
I hope we never have another draft, either. But that isn't the world in which we live.
Let the trans people be drafted. The military doesn’t seem to have any respect for anyone else these days.
Lots of truth here, but blaming women is too easy. Many if not most are silently opposed to the nonsense but the price of non-conformity is high, for us and our families by association. You don't see many liberal men speaking up for sanity either. The talk show guys, Stewart, Colbert, Noah, etc., most male comedians, SNL cast, and wokestar Trudeau are all leading the charge off the left cliff. They want to be on the "right side of history" applauded by the rainbow pierced youth. Too many women are lemmings, it's true, but there's plenty of blame to go around.
Thank you so much for this article. I’m going to share it. It’s alarming how many liberal women are so self sabotaging and so self righteous about the way they speak for all women. They’re often those griftivist women who wind up wrecking things.
I was loathe to admit it even to myself, when the jokes about Sports Illustrated closing because white liberal women were making the decisions, such as putting obese and trans women on the cover, were doing the rounds.
It’s most probably true. Cheers
This used to be me. I lurked on the fringes of this 'sister-hood'. In my defense, I was born into it. But I wish I left years ago.
I could never wear a pussy hat, or post #metoo. I did post a silly black square, and voted left. There were several things I quietly thought were rubbish but I never said anything.
This bubble was ruined by degrees when I got out of debt, met my future husband, left my liberal city, got married, had two kids and I saw that reality did not reflect the views I was raised with at all.
It's hard being the only non-woke person in my family. The friendships I have cultivated over many years would not last if I were completely honest about my beliefs. But there's a cognitive dissonance in my life that has faded away. The mental health challenges are gone and no drugs were involved. It's so much nicer to live life without seeing yourself as a victim. Please know that these women, though blind to their privilege over poorer less articulate ladies, are hurting themselves as well.
A quibble about drag queens. You write that they are dressed in a "degradingly sexed-up caricature of womanhood." If you find drag costumes degrading, I suppose you have a right to your opinion. But what I can tell you is that, as a group, drag queens do not seek to degrade or put down women in the slighted. That's not what drag is about. If you think that's what it's about, that's a misapprehension on your part.
(Which isn't to say that little kids should be going to drag queen story hour. Separate issue.)
Just my opinion, but I find it difficult to view the grotesque caricatures those “drag queen “ men emphasize about women without feeling the misogynist vibes. I’ve met a few and they were quite salty. And sarcastically mean. Maybe I met the minority of that group? I won’t repeat that experience.
Salty -- yes, definitely. Sarcastically mean -- often. These qualities are part of the culture, I'm afraid. But misogynistic? That they are not.
I would say they are misogynistic to the same level as they are misandrist. Just generally misanthropist! Panty Bliss once said, wisely, something like “wearing drag is me using the tools of femininity to mock the idea of gender rigidity itself”. It’s something like that. It’s camp in the old sense. An old school drag act is camp because it’s a man in a dress acting AS IF he was a man in a dress. He’s not acting like a “woman”. It’s gently mocking the male gaze, not enforcing it. Well that used to be the case. Now drag isn’t drag, twirling around a pole, thrusting your crotch into people’s faces, etc is not drag. I don’t know what it is but it’s not drag. It’s more like a degenerate burlesque, which is not for children.
Powerful writing and spot on. This me too nonsense was bad enough. Any ideas of hiring a woman went out the door as soon as some whacko progressive could just make an accusation and get a man fired. And without attached emotion, can you blame anyone for not willingly bringing that into a business?
“It’s ultimately about making you FEEL like good people without actually having to be them”
SPOT ON.