I had a Women’s Studies minor in college in the early 90s. It was essentially indoctrination for how us women could frame ourselves as victims and learn to hate men in as many ways as possible. Your article is a great overview from the opposite direction. Thank you.
This is a very accurate portrayal of the history of these issues. The narcissism in women that feminism exacerbated and standardized became so blatantly obvious and harmful...and frankly ugly to behold...that even many women are standing up to it though few with the fortitude and accuracy of Hannah Spier and Janice Fiamengo. The irony is that feminism helped give women equal...and even superior rights...not women as a whole, with the help of a brave few...must demonstrate that they are worthy of keeping those rights and NOT being hammered by the same mechanisms they spend 150 years attacking men with. One can hope that women as a whole see the light...but the battle is definitely going to be uphill as the inherent narcissism which feminism exacerbated seems to be core to women's identity and works against the evolution that must occur. Time for women to grow up...and in this respect...become a bit more like men in self sacrifice, personal responsibility and justice for all.
Feminism has spent a great deal of time trying to tear down a society built on cooperation between men and women, without much thought as to what might replace it.
When women see themselves in charge of a 'future which is female', how will order be maintained? If we have not cooperation, oppression will be necessary. The future we can expect has been anticipated by an epigram from Frank Herbert's 'Dune'.
"When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom, for that is in accordance with your principles. When I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom, for that is in accordance with MY principles. "
A fascinating, sweeping account of how our culture got where it is today. The points about not letting misandrists get away with it, rejecting double standards, and telling the whole story are crucial. Like any other ideology, female supremacist ideology can be overcome when enough people fight back.
As a christian man with a chivalry bone the size of whale, I'm now at the point where I flip flop from day to day between ‘I have to stand up in protection of women’ and ‘screw it, I'm done, let's see how they're going to like sharia law’.
Tom makes a great point about the perverted campaign to present the male as villain, what I like to think of as a rebranding of femininity and masculinity in order to create a more androgynous culture that shackles aggregate masculine traits.
The new masculinity movement is another attempt to rewrite the history of men. It begins with the premise that masculinity is somehow flawed and--hence--needs changing and newness.
These New Masculinity Theorists (NMTs) ignore the innate evolutionary processes taking place that will prepare a boy for the world outside the womb and continue to shape him throughout life. There is a clear cultural effort to change and marginalize the masculine and shape it into something lesser and unnatural instead of directing critical male traits in a way that benefit him, family, and society. Masculinity needs empowerment and direction—not newness.
An excellent article which resonates with parallels worldwide. I can’t help thinking that much of the swell of misandry comes from government funded women’s groups, using taxpayer money predominately supplied by men.
A good start would be to have high profile government representation of men and boys which would, at least, equal this.
Feminism is a political snare for cupid politicans to get power and riches. It works well at first but destroys familis and our chritian civilisation. It is based on female greedyness and more numerous voters than men, thanks to their privileges in life. Feminist women are fools to beleive totalitarian concepts that can't admit individual merit and free expression
How could feminism conquer all politicians all over the world without opposition in a years in 1970 ?
Good question, Julok. The sudden success of feminism--which has surely been the quickest cultural revolution in all of history--did not occur on its own. The story has a context. In the United States, that context included several parallel cultural changes.
By the 1950s, racial segregation was increasingly challenged. This led to the Civil Rights movement of Martin Luther King. Also characteristic of the 1950s, in the midst of post-war prosperity, was a generational conflict that began with the Beatniks (and Hippies a few years later), who rebelled against their complacently "bourgeois" parents, turning toward Marxism (and eventually to Maoism) for inspiration. In the 1960s, this rebellion fostered widespread resistance to the Vietnam War. The war itself soon ended but not before leaving behind a generation that had marinated in rage and cynicism. But the Civil Rights movement, which had been founded on equality and justice (reaffirming the American experiment in democracy) was soon hijacked and distorted by various Black Power and other ethnocentric movements. It didn't take long for the latter to coalesce in the form of "identity politics" Feminists quickly found it expedient to adopt the same mentality at the same time, merely replacing "class" and "race" with "gender."
And all of these movements found fertile soil in ideologies that had been brought to American universities by academic refugees from wartime Europe. Feminism, as it quickly became even by the late 1970s, would have been inconceivable without postmodernism (warmed-over Marxism with the addition of post-colonialism). Its rise, too, was meteoric once the student radicals of the 1960s became "tenured radicals" in the 1970s and 1980s. But even this profoundly cynical ideology remained a blight only on campuses until the 1990s, when it began to metastasize well beyond the campuses due partly to the expedient transformation of journalism into "engaged journalism" (that is, political activism or even undisguised propaganda).
Meanwhile, rebellion against authority and tradition was no longer a defining feature of adolescence. By the 1960s, it had become an end in itself and deeply embedded in popular culture. (Consider the cultural gulf between "Rebel without a Cause" and "The Graduate," separated by only 12 years.) By now, entire "generations" define themselves implicitly as perpetual adolescents. Now that students are no longer trained in school to think for themselves (or even to acknowledge the existence of truth, except for "our truth" vs. "their truth"), "change" has taken on a life of its own and given new meaning to the old advertising slogan of "new, improved." The prevailing ideologies of our time--known collectively as "wokism," which includes feminism--are emphatically utopian. Ironically, given the ostensible focus on rebellion, they are in addition profoundly conformist or even totalitarian. They cannot tolerate disagreement, let alone imperfection, so they insist on destroying (or "burning down") the world as it is (and in some ways as it must be), root and branch, presumably in order to build a perfect one on the ruins.
So, there's a reason why feminists are prominent among the "progressive" and "socialist" candidates for political office (either in or beyond the Democratic Party). Feminism is no longer on its own. The goal is no longer to attain sexual equality (or even to foster heterosexuality itself). Feminism has become one movement, among many closely allied ones (including anti-Zionism and even anti-Semitism) that advocate the "deconstruction" (that is, destruction) of Western civilization.
I recognize, gratefully, the fact that fewer and fewer men are willing to remain silent in the face of cultural indifference, let alone of ideological lies, and the resulting injustice. Tom has written an excellent summary of how men have become villainous pariahs. As feminists often say, however, "we have a long way to go." The fate of men is inextricably tied, in fact, to the fate of our entire civilization. And that is tied, in turn, to those who value thinking more than emoting. Revenge feels good, after all, but that doesn't make it a synonym for justice.
Merely by becoming an ally of all other woke movements, feminism has indeed been contributing to the collective suicide of Western civilization. But there's an additional factor, because the wokers, including many feminists, have become active allies of jihadi Islam.
Why would they have done that? After all, feminists seldom point with admiration to the position of women in Islamic countries. And what would religious Muslims have to gain by an alliance with secular wokers? Aggressive Muslims have nothing in common at all with aggressively secular Westerners--except for one thing: implacable hatred toward the West. For different reasons, both sides of this "red-green" alliance want nothing more keenly than the final destruction of Western civilization.
This is an alliance made in hell. And, so far, it's working very effectively. Wokism under any of its many guises--Marxism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, intersectionalism, transgenderism, feminism and so on--has already infiltrated and undermined every Western institution, notably the family, from within. Encouraging anti-Western hostility from Muslims, whether local or foreign, could finish the job.
-- The real story is that the monopoly over the cultural narrative had begun to disappear. --
Beware. Monopoly control over digital communication can re-emerge through a sinister and seductive influence: convenience. Centralizing influences are at work, straining to transform the Net away from its rugged, everybody-gets-to-talk origins to a small collection of large funnels, each of them centrally controlled and regulated. The funnels relieve their users of the grunt work involved in setting up websites and creating channels to serve their own preferences. The funnels' regulators will have their own viewpoints about what constitutes "responsible speech," and they will enforce them.
Facebook and Twitter were powerful thrusts in that direction. Facebook is notorious for squelching viewpoints of which its masters disapprove. Even now in its new incarnation as X, Twitter users must take care not to offend against vaguely stated rules about "safety" and "authenticity." These chokepoints command a huge percentage of exchange over the Net by holding out convenience in one hand and imposing regulation with the other.
So true. And it is simple for social media companies to identify certain people who don't espouse the right ideas and shadowban them. That is, to limit the reach of their posts. No one will know the difference. Add the sad fact tht we are heading towards a surveillance state.
A notable data point not mentioned in this article is that the number of males who died in work-related accidents was more than 10 times the number of females who died in work-related accidents in both 2023 and 2024 according to BLS data: https://www.bls.gov/iif/fatal-injuries-tables.htm. The data shows that was also true in every year since 1992:
Can someone explain the milk carton reference in "This was also the time when the label of deadbeat dads was assigned to fathers and placed on milk cartons"? It's probably obvious to Americans but not to me.
Yes, about that time father's pictures were sometimes printed on the sides of milk cartons and labelled as "Dead Beat Dads" who had shirked their responsibility. Looking back it is hard to imagine how such a thing might happen, but it did.
“Patriarchy,” “toxic masculinity,” “believe women,” and “men are trash” could travel farther and faster than any careful discussion of male sacrifice, male duty, male disposability, or male contribution."
Your essay is excellent, Tom, as usual. But it is seriously marred by one word (though perhaps unintentionally or by habit). What has "disposability" got to do with anything in your essay? It comes along for a free ride with "sacrifice," "duty" and "contribution," all of which are assets, not liabilities.
Whatever that word means to you on theoretical grounds, it will not encourage men to be healthy participants in any community. Some words are heavily loaded in this context, even ideologically loaded. I advise caution. Think twice before using or implying them, especially when they contradict other words or ideas. I’ll keep; saying this, no matter how tiresome I might become for doing so, but I’m not optimistic about my ability to change anyone's mind about an idée fixe.
I had a Women’s Studies minor in college in the early 90s. It was essentially indoctrination for how us women could frame ourselves as victims and learn to hate men in as many ways as possible. Your article is a great overview from the opposite direction. Thank you.
This is a very accurate portrayal of the history of these issues. The narcissism in women that feminism exacerbated and standardized became so blatantly obvious and harmful...and frankly ugly to behold...that even many women are standing up to it though few with the fortitude and accuracy of Hannah Spier and Janice Fiamengo. The irony is that feminism helped give women equal...and even superior rights...not women as a whole, with the help of a brave few...must demonstrate that they are worthy of keeping those rights and NOT being hammered by the same mechanisms they spend 150 years attacking men with. One can hope that women as a whole see the light...but the battle is definitely going to be uphill as the inherent narcissism which feminism exacerbated seems to be core to women's identity and works against the evolution that must occur. Time for women to grow up...and in this respect...become a bit more like men in self sacrifice, personal responsibility and justice for all.
Feminism has spent a great deal of time trying to tear down a society built on cooperation between men and women, without much thought as to what might replace it.
When women see themselves in charge of a 'future which is female', how will order be maintained? If we have not cooperation, oppression will be necessary. The future we can expect has been anticipated by an epigram from Frank Herbert's 'Dune'.
"When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom, for that is in accordance with your principles. When I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom, for that is in accordance with MY principles. "
A fascinating, sweeping account of how our culture got where it is today. The points about not letting misandrists get away with it, rejecting double standards, and telling the whole story are crucial. Like any other ideology, female supremacist ideology can be overcome when enough people fight back.
That is key, "when enough people fight back." Time to fight back.
What is also interesting is the attempt to couple any correction to the feminist perspective as "far right".
Indeed!
As a christian man with a chivalry bone the size of whale, I'm now at the point where I flip flop from day to day between ‘I have to stand up in protection of women’ and ‘screw it, I'm done, let's see how they're going to like sharia law’.
Tom makes a great point about the perverted campaign to present the male as villain, what I like to think of as a rebranding of femininity and masculinity in order to create a more androgynous culture that shackles aggregate masculine traits.
The new masculinity movement is another attempt to rewrite the history of men. It begins with the premise that masculinity is somehow flawed and--hence--needs changing and newness.
These New Masculinity Theorists (NMTs) ignore the innate evolutionary processes taking place that will prepare a boy for the world outside the womb and continue to shape him throughout life. There is a clear cultural effort to change and marginalize the masculine and shape it into something lesser and unnatural instead of directing critical male traits in a way that benefit him, family, and society. Masculinity needs empowerment and direction—not newness.
https://gibm.substack.com/p/new-masculinity-puts-the-cart-before?r=7v0pb&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Excellent article
A culture which makes fools of heroes and heroes of fools is a deathcult.
An excellent article which resonates with parallels worldwide. I can’t help thinking that much of the swell of misandry comes from government funded women’s groups, using taxpayer money predominately supplied by men.
A good start would be to have high profile government representation of men and boys which would, at least, equal this.
Feminism is a political snare for cupid politicans to get power and riches. It works well at first but destroys familis and our chritian civilisation. It is based on female greedyness and more numerous voters than men, thanks to their privileges in life. Feminist women are fools to beleive totalitarian concepts that can't admit individual merit and free expression
How could feminism conquer all politicians all over the world without opposition in a years in 1970 ?
Good question, Julok. The sudden success of feminism--which has surely been the quickest cultural revolution in all of history--did not occur on its own. The story has a context. In the United States, that context included several parallel cultural changes.
By the 1950s, racial segregation was increasingly challenged. This led to the Civil Rights movement of Martin Luther King. Also characteristic of the 1950s, in the midst of post-war prosperity, was a generational conflict that began with the Beatniks (and Hippies a few years later), who rebelled against their complacently "bourgeois" parents, turning toward Marxism (and eventually to Maoism) for inspiration. In the 1960s, this rebellion fostered widespread resistance to the Vietnam War. The war itself soon ended but not before leaving behind a generation that had marinated in rage and cynicism. But the Civil Rights movement, which had been founded on equality and justice (reaffirming the American experiment in democracy) was soon hijacked and distorted by various Black Power and other ethnocentric movements. It didn't take long for the latter to coalesce in the form of "identity politics" Feminists quickly found it expedient to adopt the same mentality at the same time, merely replacing "class" and "race" with "gender."
And all of these movements found fertile soil in ideologies that had been brought to American universities by academic refugees from wartime Europe. Feminism, as it quickly became even by the late 1970s, would have been inconceivable without postmodernism (warmed-over Marxism with the addition of post-colonialism). Its rise, too, was meteoric once the student radicals of the 1960s became "tenured radicals" in the 1970s and 1980s. But even this profoundly cynical ideology remained a blight only on campuses until the 1990s, when it began to metastasize well beyond the campuses due partly to the expedient transformation of journalism into "engaged journalism" (that is, political activism or even undisguised propaganda).
Meanwhile, rebellion against authority and tradition was no longer a defining feature of adolescence. By the 1960s, it had become an end in itself and deeply embedded in popular culture. (Consider the cultural gulf between "Rebel without a Cause" and "The Graduate," separated by only 12 years.) By now, entire "generations" define themselves implicitly as perpetual adolescents. Now that students are no longer trained in school to think for themselves (or even to acknowledge the existence of truth, except for "our truth" vs. "their truth"), "change" has taken on a life of its own and given new meaning to the old advertising slogan of "new, improved." The prevailing ideologies of our time--known collectively as "wokism," which includes feminism--are emphatically utopian. Ironically, given the ostensible focus on rebellion, they are in addition profoundly conformist or even totalitarian. They cannot tolerate disagreement, let alone imperfection, so they insist on destroying (or "burning down") the world as it is (and in some ways as it must be), root and branch, presumably in order to build a perfect one on the ruins.
So, there's a reason why feminists are prominent among the "progressive" and "socialist" candidates for political office (either in or beyond the Democratic Party). Feminism is no longer on its own. The goal is no longer to attain sexual equality (or even to foster heterosexuality itself). Feminism has become one movement, among many closely allied ones (including anti-Zionism and even anti-Semitism) that advocate the "deconstruction" (that is, destruction) of Western civilization.
I recognize, gratefully, the fact that fewer and fewer men are willing to remain silent in the face of cultural indifference, let alone of ideological lies, and the resulting injustice. Tom has written an excellent summary of how men have become villainous pariahs. As feminists often say, however, "we have a long way to go." The fate of men is inextricably tied, in fact, to the fate of our entire civilization. And that is tied, in turn, to those who value thinking more than emoting. Revenge feels good, after all, but that doesn't make it a synonym for justice.
I did't end my answer..
Will future see the destruction of our Christian civilisation facing Islamic one ? Feminism did fragelised Chritianity and helped Islam !
We may know soon !
Merely by becoming an ally of all other woke movements, feminism has indeed been contributing to the collective suicide of Western civilization. But there's an additional factor, because the wokers, including many feminists, have become active allies of jihadi Islam.
Why would they have done that? After all, feminists seldom point with admiration to the position of women in Islamic countries. And what would religious Muslims have to gain by an alliance with secular wokers? Aggressive Muslims have nothing in common at all with aggressively secular Westerners--except for one thing: implacable hatred toward the West. For different reasons, both sides of this "red-green" alliance want nothing more keenly than the final destruction of Western civilization.
This is an alliance made in hell. And, so far, it's working very effectively. Wokism under any of its many guises--Marxism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, intersectionalism, transgenderism, feminism and so on--has already infiltrated and undermined every Western institution, notably the family, from within. Encouraging anti-Western hostility from Muslims, whether local or foreign, could finish the job.
By Weaponizing Gynocentrism!
I just found an article from Louise Perry :
"The case against sexual revolution" in your weekly stack
Quite interesting !
This article feels like the synopsis to a well researched and highly sought after bestseller book.
If this is an area you are willing to take the time to dive into, I say do it.
You can always take on a co-author to cover more ground. I think you should consider it.
Feels like you are just scratching the surface.
Thank you Blunky! Appreciate your encouragement. I sure wish this sort of thing was a best seller.
-- The real story is that the monopoly over the cultural narrative had begun to disappear. --
Beware. Monopoly control over digital communication can re-emerge through a sinister and seductive influence: convenience. Centralizing influences are at work, straining to transform the Net away from its rugged, everybody-gets-to-talk origins to a small collection of large funnels, each of them centrally controlled and regulated. The funnels relieve their users of the grunt work involved in setting up websites and creating channels to serve their own preferences. The funnels' regulators will have their own viewpoints about what constitutes "responsible speech," and they will enforce them.
Facebook and Twitter were powerful thrusts in that direction. Facebook is notorious for squelching viewpoints of which its masters disapprove. Even now in its new incarnation as X, Twitter users must take care not to offend against vaguely stated rules about "safety" and "authenticity." These chokepoints command a huge percentage of exchange over the Net by holding out convenience in one hand and imposing regulation with the other.
So true. And it is simple for social media companies to identify certain people who don't espouse the right ideas and shadowban them. That is, to limit the reach of their posts. No one will know the difference. Add the sad fact tht we are heading towards a surveillance state.
A notable data point not mentioned in this article is that the number of males who died in work-related accidents was more than 10 times the number of females who died in work-related accidents in both 2023 and 2024 according to BLS data: https://www.bls.gov/iif/fatal-injuries-tables.htm. The data shows that was also true in every year since 1992:
https://www.bls.gov/iif/fatal-injuries-tables/archive/fatal-occupational-injuries-by-selected-characteristics-2003-2018.xlsx
https://www.bls.gov/iif/fatal-injuries-tables/archive/fatal-occupational-injuries-by-selected-characteristics-1992-2002.xlsx
It's also significantly more than women killed in DV incidents yet receives far less coverage and public concern.
Can someone explain the milk carton reference in "This was also the time when the label of deadbeat dads was assigned to fathers and placed on milk cartons"? It's probably obvious to Americans but not to me.
Yes, about that time father's pictures were sometimes printed on the sides of milk cartons and labelled as "Dead Beat Dads" who had shirked their responsibility. Looking back it is hard to imagine how such a thing might happen, but it did.
Toxic women pushed the narrative.
“Patriarchy,” “toxic masculinity,” “believe women,” and “men are trash” could travel farther and faster than any careful discussion of male sacrifice, male duty, male disposability, or male contribution."
Your essay is excellent, Tom, as usual. But it is seriously marred by one word (though perhaps unintentionally or by habit). What has "disposability" got to do with anything in your essay? It comes along for a free ride with "sacrifice," "duty" and "contribution," all of which are assets, not liabilities.
Whatever that word means to you on theoretical grounds, it will not encourage men to be healthy participants in any community. Some words are heavily loaded in this context, even ideologically loaded. I advise caution. Think twice before using or implying them, especially when they contradict other words or ideas. I’ll keep; saying this, no matter how tiresome I might become for doing so, but I’m not optimistic about my ability to change anyone's mind about an idée fixe.