Sexual politics is damaging young men

Masculinity has been in crisis for as long as anyone can remember. The usual explanation is that post-industrial society doesn’t much care for brawn. We’re all office dwellers now, mutely churning out spreadsheets for other spreadsheet producers. The theory makes sense as far as it goes. But something else has changed much more recently: a rejection of the very concept of masculinity.

The polling company YouGov found that just 8 per cent of people have positive views of white men in their twenties, by far the lowest of any ethnicity or age group. Males are routinely presented as inherently dangerous, aggressive and animalistic, incapable of controlling their own instincts. You can see it on public transport, where government adverts announce that staring is sexual harassment. Us blokes can’t even be trusted to use our eyes properly.

Teenage boys are routinely disciplined by their schools for even the most minor infractions of an insurgent sexual politics. A friend’s son at a smart English day school was recently hauled up for the crime of unprompted communication with a girl. The boy had sent a message introducing himself to a student from another school. There was, according to the friend, no sexual element to the message. It was a simple greeting. No matter. That kind of behaviour is unacceptable.

This moral shift has been encouraged by social media and an expansive higher education sector that delights in tearing down the old order. Things we once took for granted are merely ‘constructed’ – and anyone who disagrees is a misogynistic privilege-hoarder. The new believers are able to muster online, forcing their revolutionary worldview into the wider culture and on to institutions that simply want a quiet life.

Look at the ‘Global Boyhood Initiative’, which is writing a new curriculum – currently being piloted in a couple of London schools – on gender equality for children. Last year the GBI published a report on the state of UK boys that starts by suggesting that gender is ‘not tied to sex organs’ and then goes on to call families ‘gender and heterosexuality “factories”’.

A cottage industry of ‘toxic masculinity’ tutors has emerged following the Everyone’s Invited scandal, a wave of anonymous allegations of sexual impropriety at Britain’s top private schools that began in 2020. One such company is Beyond Equality, which sells its services to hundreds of UK schools, putting on workshops in which they tell boys to strip themselves of the ‘restrictive, burdensome armour’ of masculinity. The reason, they say, is to create ‘communities that are safe for everyone’ and to put a stop to ‘gender-based violence’. The implication is clear: men need to be reprogrammed.

‘Boys are now seen as potential perverts,’ explains one female former teacher, who quit the profession last year. ‘There was this obsession with the victimisation of women. I thought we had been getting somewhere with sex and relationships, teaching the children to treat people with respect, but that has been totally set back.’

A few weeks ago, a school in Essex sent a letter to parents telling them that their children were to be prohibited from having any romantic relationships with fellow students. All physical contact was to be banned, including a simple hug. In the letter, the school said the policy was designed to ‘keep your child safe. If your child is touching somebody else, whether they are consenting or not, anything could happen. It could lead to an injury, make someone feel very uncomfortable, or someone being touched inappropriately’. Who on earth really believes that children might injure themselves by holding hands?

This frantic prudery is a result not of a resurgence of conservative values, but of a progressive fear of men. Appalling behaviour is apparently everywhere. In 2021, Ofsted compiled a report that found 79 per cent of schoolgirls said sexual assault happened ‘a lot’ or ‘often’ at their school. But there seems to be an inability to hold two notions in our heads: that sexual assault is bad and that treating men as inherent sex pests is also bad. A reasonable worry about assault appears to have morphed into an institutional misandry. There is a lack of recognition that, as with all crimes, the proportion of perpetrators is vanishingly small. The awful behaviour of a few is leading to the mistreatment of all.

Another teacher, working at a London college, agrees: ‘The new sexual framework reaffirms the gender roles that boys are these really strong, insensitive masculine beings and girls are these wimpy things that need to be careful. We seem to be saying: “You’re a girl, you’re going to be taken advantage of, you need to be scared.”’ There’s a failure to contend with the idea that the awkwardness of young manhood – the playground scuffles, the stilted attempts at courtship – are the necessary growing pains of becoming a well-adjusted grown-up.

The result of all this over-policing is boys who feel uneasy, anxious and angry. Since 2017, the NHS has found that the proportion of boys with probable mental health issues has increased by more than 50 per cent, now at nearly one in five. The suicide rate for boys aged 15 to 19 has more than doubled over the past decade. The child psychologist Julie Lynn Evans supported the Everyone’s Invited movement, seeing it as a necessary response to decades of dodgy male behaviour. But now she worries the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. ‘The boys came out of lockdown into this slightly hysterical atmosphere of “Don’t touch, that’s inappropriate, that’s assault.” They are being treated as guilty until proven innocent. They can hardly move for fear of doing something wrong.’

I worry that boys are so browbeaten by activist adults that they are turning into purposeless young men. In the US, the proportion of males under 30 who haven’t had sex in the past year has tripled since 2008, now at a third. While data is still being collected, reports suggest the same trend is occurring in Britain. We have seen plenty of hand-wringing about ‘incels’ (‘involuntary celibates’), the uber-misogynists who rage against women. But I suspect that the same politics which frets about ‘toxic masculinity’ in part gives rise to the most toxic form of manhood. Tell someone enough that you dislike their character and they’ll naturally object. Resentment becomes mutual.

Inevitably, then, there has been a backlash from boys. It has come in the form of Andrew Tate, the British-American social media personality who projects an ‘ultra-masculine, ultra-luxurious lifestyle’. Tate was arrested at the end of last year at his garish Romanian party house where he is accused of exploiting trafficked women. His videos, in which he tells sad men to stop taking antidepressants and get to a gym, have caused something of a moral panic among Britain’s teachers. They fear that his self-professed ‘misogyny’ is turning boys into horrors. Female teachers have complained of teenagers writing ‘MMAS’ – ‘make me a sandwich’ – at the end of their homework.

Why are teenage boys so excited by Tate? According to the former teacher, boys would tell her: ‘I know this guy’s a tosser but he’s funny and he has a point. He’s challenging these ideas that really need challenging.’

Tate seems more symptom than cause. Young men have been moving away from progressive politics for at least the past few years. The political theorist Eric Kaufmann found that the young, specifically men, are turning to the right. In 2020, well before the likes of Tate came about, 18-year-olds were found to be as right-wing as people in their forties. Meanwhile, a majority of under-forties now believe that women’s equality has gone so far that it discriminates against men.

There’s certainly something going wrong with young men. For one thing, they are far more likely to be unemployed: a third of those aged 18 to 24 are not in work or seeking it compared with a fifth of the working-age population. Part of the problem is that British women have outperformed men in university applications since the mid-1990s. So the girls simply produce better CVs. Consider, too, the prospect of activist HR departments wanting to fulfil gender equality quotas: of course they’ll opt for the better candidate if she brings with her the glow of doing good. This explains why men on the cusp of adulthood are finding it harder to get not only jobs but girlfriends. Men tend to value physical attractiveness in partners, while women are interested in a wider set of attributes, including earning potential.

It’s almost a certainty, too, that these single, workless men are still living with their parents. After all, the enormous cost of housing means that two-thirds of people in their twenties do. So we come to a startling conclusion: young men are increasingly unloved, unemployed and unable to live independently.

Lynn Evans’s description of teenage boys could as easily apply to men in their early twenties: ‘They’re in their bedrooms and only really speaking to friends online. They’re also gaming and watching a ton of pornography. They’re living in a sort of fantasy world.’ Why bother going out into a hostile environment to find a job and a girlfriend when the need for a sense of achievement, along with sexual desire, can be sated in your childhood bedroom, however artificially?

What’s happening looks like the phenomenon of the Japanese hikikomori, adolescent males who resign themselves to their bedrooms for months, spending their days playing video games and kept alive only by sad mothers. We seem increasingly unwilling to accommodate any form of masculinity. The result is a breed of angry and unhappy young men, rejecting a world that rejects them.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/boys-in-a-bind

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Biden Bails Out The Rich And The Reckless

Once again, American families are worried that their bank deposits are no longer safe. Just a few days ago, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) became the second largest bank failure in American history. This was followed shortly by Signature Bank — now the third largest bank failure — with possibly more to come. While these banks have been reckless, government intervention set the stage for this disaster and threatens to compound it with bailouts.

SVB was the 16th largest bank in the country, but it engaged in highly speculative trades fueled by easy money and near-zero interest rates courtesy of the Federal Reserve. These speculations were profitable in the short run, yet doomed to fail as rates rose in the face of historic inflation. SVB actually seemed to recognize the risk and bought financial instruments to protect itself, but sold them off in 2021, leaving depositors unprotected.

This meant that when rates did rise, SVB’s entire business model collapsed. In response, the government is now bailing out SVB’s rich Silicon Valley depositors. (RELATED: BETSY MCCAUGHEY: Mr. President, Fire Your Woke Minions And Appoint Some Competent People)

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) has long guaranteed all deposits up to $250,000. But because SVB catered to the Silicon Valley elite, 96 percent of its depositors were above that threshold. These depositors knew the risk; indeed, they could have purchased private insurance to cover the rest of their deposits. Most chose not to.

But now the Treasury department, Fed, and FDIC have stepped in to bail out these rich depositors, raiding the FDIC — intended to cover only smaller depositors — to do it. The administration is claiming these bailouts won’t cost taxpayers a penny, that they will be paid by a special “levy” on the FDIC, bolstered by $25 billion in freshly printed money.

This amounts to raiding every bank account in America, rich and poor alike, to bail out the Silicon Valley elite. And if the FDIC levies and Fed handouts can’t cover all the losses? Last time, in 2009, the FDIC simply got Treasury to give it $500 billion in borrowing authority as a direct cost to taxpayers.

Worse, the Fed is now expanding bailouts to even solvent banks by lending against their failed investments at the original purchase price. This is effectively pretending those losses never happened. Imagine buying a car, driving it for 100,000 miles then claiming it’s worth the original price. For you that would be illegal. For bankers it’s a friendly favor. Not only does this reward recklessness, it compounds the losses to Americans unless banks can miraculously reverse the very interest rate gambles that is sending them off the edge one by one.

Finally, markets are now saying the Fed’s fight against inflation is now crippled: Interest rate expectations have plunged in the past week, signaling that Wall Street expects a quick return to the same easy money that launched near-double digit inflation.

And so, in a repeat of 2008, reckless banks egged on by reckless policy have created catastrophic losses for the rich and powerful that, once again, will be torn out of regular Americans. This “heads I win, tails you lose” bailout cycle is a recipe for more risk, more failures, and more crises.

Without even an executive order, let alone an act of Congress, the FDIC — the bedrock insurance of Americans’ life savings — is being raided to bail out the rich and the reckless. Banks now have a green-light to assume any risk whatsoever, safe in the knowledge American families will cover the tab.

Taxpayers should not be forced to bail out millionaires, venture capitalists, and the reckless banks that cater to them. Imprudent banks should be allowed to fail according to the long-standing rules of the game: Covering depositors up to $250,000, leaving the rich to get what’s left after FDIC resolution, and letting failed banks be bought by more prudent competitors.

Bailouts beget more bailouts. It is far past time to stop the cycle.

https://dailycaller.com/2023/03/15/opinion-biden-bails-out-the-rich-and-reckless-ej-antoni-and-peter-st-onge

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Facebook Hired Minorities and Paid Them Not to Work. "We were just sitting there"

In the last 5 years, Big Tech firms came under heavy pressure to publicize the racial and gender demographics of their workforce and to improve their numbers. That’s hard when your workforce is mostly white, Asian and Indian. This story may shed some light on how Facebook went about improving its numbers.

Meta (Facebook), like other tech companies, went on a hiring bonanza during the pandemic, as it faced enormous demand for its products and services while people were stuck inside.

Meta said it had 44,942 employees on December 31, 2019. By the end of 2021, the company listed 71,970 employees in its annual report and wrote it “expect[ed] headcount growth to continue for the foreseeable future.”

Meta then said that 2023 was going to be a “year of efficiency” after laying off 11,000 people in November. The company announced more layoffs this week that will affect another 10,000 people.

Levy, 35, was hired through Meta’s “Sourcer Development Program,” which attempted to recruit workers from underrepresented backgrounds. Levy, who is Mexican-American, said after being hired she was not given any work to do. She was let go in the first round of layoffs in November.

“We were just sitting there,” she added in the video. “It kind of seemed that Meta was hiring people so other companies couldn’t have us.”

Or so Facebook could claim to be diverse. People were hired to be diverse with no actual work for them to do. And then they were the first to be fired as is usually the case.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/facebook-hired-minorities-and-paid-them-not-to-work/

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On being working class

Cosmo Landesman

Pundits writing for a young audience are always telling readers to ‘stop pretending to be working-class!’ and stop ‘fetishising the working class’. They seem more angered by the imitation of class than the iniquities of class itself. Singer Lily Allen and the rap star Yungblud have both been denounced on Twitter for – to paraphrase E.P. Thompson – the faking of the English working class.

Personally, I don’t understand the fuss. For most of my youth I pretended to be working -class – and so did most of my middle–class mates (sorry, friends). And we were not alone. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s the voices of youth all sounded working–class, especially the middle-class ones like Jagger, Bowie and, yes, that faux working-class hero himself, John Lennon. Today, with our fixation on cultural appropriation, they’d all be denounced on Twitter for class tourism.

My journey into working-class tourism began when my American parents moved to London in the 1960s and I ended up attending a local north London comprehensive school called Holloway. In the hope of fitting in, I began trying to pass as just another working-class kid. Believe me, it wasn’t easy with a name like Cosmo. At Holloway you were either a Kevin, a Gary, a Dave, or you were a ‘tosser’ with a funny name.

Matters weren’t helped by my macrobiotic parents’ insistence that I took a packed lunch of such exotic delights as miso and tahini sandwiches, umeboshi plums and tubs of seaweed. My working-class companions had not yet learned to love the smell of curry, so you could imagine the impact my lunch had. I still remember the trauma I suffered when a classmate found my hidden lunch and brought it to the attention of the rest of the class – there were cries of horror, loud sounds of gagging and much mock vomiting.

Still, I was determined to fit in. So I bought a pair of cherry-red Doc Martens bovver boots – then the popular footwear of every self-respecting skinhead. I wore Ben Sherman shirts, a green windbreaker jacket, and learned to swagger like a geezer and talk like a cockney. And when I made it into the school football team, I’d finally been accepted as one of the working class.

You may wonder why I practised this deceit of mine. Why not simply be my nice middle-class self? Because I would have been beaten up for being a ‘ponce’ who talked funny and acted superior, that’s why. No, it was a question of adapt or die. This was not simply about tourism or slumming; all adolescents want to fit in with their peers.

But it wasn’t just an act. I had a real affection and admiration for the home lives of my working-class friends. Compared with the middle–class bohemianism of my home – a place devoid of rules and boundaries, where weirdo artists and crazy writers roamed free – the orderly homes of my friends offered a kind of comforting normality. It was a refuge from the chaos of my liberal progressive upbringing. Their mums offered such forbidden goodies as thick slices of crusty white bread lacquered in butter and strawberry jam along with Wagon Wheels and endless cups of sweet tea. At my health–conscious middle-class friends’ homes, you’d be lucky to get a glass of organic apple juice with your slice of sugar-free buckwheat cake.

When I left Holloway school and moved into adult life, I thought I’d left my working-class affectations behind. But it was my first wife – a working-class girl from Bristol – who one day asked me: ‘Why do you always talk to working people with that ridiculous Dick Van Dyke cockney accent of yours?’ ‘Dunno,’ I said, ‘I fink it’s because I want them to accept and like me.’

Those who rage against working-class tourism seem to believe that we’re still living in a pre-1960s Britain, where we were all in our own separate and distinct cultural worlds. Yes, the class system is still alive but there’s so much more cultural cross fertilisation that that kind of talk makes no sense.

When a typical middle-class kid professes a love of football or going to the pub, or shows off his latest tattoo, is he trying to pass for working-class? When a working-class kid wants to go into higher education, enjoy foreign travel and go into therapy, is he trying to be middle-class? We live in a much more mix-and-match culture that makes talk of class as a foreign country redundant.

Yes, call people like me fakes and phoneys, but isn’t imitation the sincerest form of flattery?

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/common-knowledge/ ?

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New Bill Would Curb Law Enforcement’s Use of ‘Civil Forfeiture’ To Seize Assets

Not before time. There have been tremendous abuses of the seizure power

A bipartisan bill in the House signals the potential for a deal on federal civil forfeiture laws, changes to which would be a major victory for property rights in America.

The Fifth Amendment Integrity Restoration or FAIR Act, reintroduced by Representatives Tim Walberg, a Republican, and Jamie Raskin, a Democrat, would overhaul federal civil forfeiture law.

Under current law, the civil forfeiture process allows law enforcement officials to seize personal and private property of individuals — and then keep or sell that property — by simply alleging it was involved in a crime, even if charges are never brought.

Civil forfeiture stories have often spurred outrage over their unfairness, such as in 2010, when one Alabama computer repair shop owner had more than 150 computers confiscated by police. Reportedly acting on a tip that the owner was receiving stolen goods, police confiscated the computers, some of which were customers’ property undergoing repair, and never returned them despite dropping charges.

The new measure before Congress is squarely aimed at ending civil forfeiture as it currently exists and removing the profit motive for law enforcement in seizing property. “The lawless seizure and ‘forfeiture’ of people’s private property by police officers is becoming standard operating procedure in many parts of the country,” Mr. Raskin said. “We want to restore the presumption of innocence, fair judicial process, and the opportunity to be heard.”

According to the senior attorney for the National Initiative to End Forfeiture Abuse, Dan Alban, the act would take “an even stronger stand against abusive forfeitures” than past measures. “Protecting Americans’ property rights isn’t a partisan issue and we’re glad to see lawmakers from across the aisle working together to pass true reforms,” Mr. Alban said.

The law would altogether end administrative forfeiture, or the forfeit of property seized by federal agencies, and instead require that only federal courts could order civil forfeiture to the federal government. The act would also provide for those seeking a return of property from the federal government to have access to legal counsel throughout the process.

The act would also reroute funds from civil forfeiture away from the budgets of federal agencies and toward the treasury’s general fund, meaning Congress would have control over the money instead of executive agencies. It would also eliminate “equitable sharing,” a program that allows federal agencies to evade state forfeiture laws by paying state and local law enforcement officials.

The burden of proof for civil forfeiture would also be raised to require the government to provide clear and convincing evidence that property owners knew their property was being used in crimes.

Currently, all that the government needs to do is show that it is more likely than not that the property is connected to a crime. Property owners can also have their property seized if it is implicated in a crime committed by someone else.

This legislation would be a milestone in the protection of property rights in the arena of civil forfeiture, which has attracted an increasing amount of attention in recent years due to examples of civil forfeiture abuse.

One example comes from 2017, when a Wyoming man had more than $91,000, money he intended to use to purchase a recording studio at Madison, Wisconsin, confiscated by police. After police pulled over the would-be studio owner for the way he was wearing his seat belt and an alleged lane violation, the man consented to having his car searched.

The police found the money in cash, stashed in a speaker in the back of his car, and said he could go if he signed a waiver giving up the cash. He was only given a $25 ticket. Although the musician eventually got his money back, cases like his have led to outrage over the practice, with many people in his position never seeing their property returned.

https://www.nysun.com/article/new-bill-would-curb-law-enforcements-use-of-civil-forfeiture-to-seize-assets

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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