Men have a problem – and it won’t be solved by either Andrew Tate or Caitlin Moran
Talking about "men" in general is typical feminist brainlessness. Men are all different and the differences between them are great. Are a professional footballer and a celibate priest the same?
I can think of nothing that is true of all men. These days some "men" do not even have penises. According to the screed below, men "make endless jokes about their balls". I have NEVER made such a joke. And do I have a "fondness for super-skinny jeans "? I have nothing like that in my wardrobe. The generalizations below are just stupid and entirely counterfactual. Nothing is to be learned from them.
And even if she confines her universe of discussion to men's relationships with women it does not help. One example of how reality is more complex than any feminist allows: I regularly open car doors for women but I have long been tolerant of my girlfriend going out with other men. What generalization covers that? There is none. I am an individual, not an "example" of anything. My attitudes are mine, not anybody else's
So do I have problems? Sure do. I sometimes fall in love with wildly "inappropriate" women. That is not common so what does it tell you about "men"? Nothing at all. Despite my XY chromosomes, I don't exist in the sad little world of feminist stereotypes
Caitlin Moran has some questions for men. Why do they only go to the doctor if their wife or girlfriend makes them? Why do they never discuss their penises with each other – but make endless jokes about their balls? Is their fondness for super-skinny jeans leading to an epidemic of bad mental health? Are they allowed to be sad?
Published earlier this month, Moran’s What About Men? sees one of the nation’s most prolific feminist writers turn her attention to the problems facing men and masculinity. Marketed as a deep dive into the modern man, the book interrogates a range of issues, from mental health to sexuality. It’s a noble pursuit. And yet, it’s one that has been ruthlessly torn apart. Critics have labelled it everything from “patronising” to full of “flagrant stereotypes”. One reviewer described it as “rhetorical essentialism that lucratively pigeonholes men and women even at the risk of misconstruing both”.
But in 2023, a time when misogyny is rife online and the likes of Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson are upheld as stalwarts of masculinity, Moran’s questions are the kind we need to be asking more than ever. Why is it, then, nobody wants to answer them?
Moran has since responded to the backlash in an article in The Times, claiming that she’s been confronted by two different kinds of critics: “The first were all like, ‘How dare you suggest men have problems with communicating their emotions? That is an incredibly old-fashioned and patronising generalisation’,” Moran writes. “And the other half were like, ‘How dare you suggest that men should communicate their emotions? We’re not biologically designed to be emotional – you’re just trying to turn us into women.’”
Even this response, though, came under fire, with further critics arguing that Moran seemed to misunderstand why so many people were troubled by the book. That, rather, What About Men? flouted individualism to instead present men as one universal body with shared belief systems and behavioural traits, all of which seemed wildly outdated. And that the implication of her book was that men are in trouble and Moran is here to fix them.
According to gender studies academics, there are several issues with this thesis. The first is that men might not really be in trouble at all, at least not in the way Moran suggests. “Historians have found people worrying about [the] ‘crisis of masculinity’ throughout history,” says Dr Ben Griffin, associate professor in modern British History at Girton College, University of Cambridge. “But if a crisis is perpetual, it’s not really a crisis – it’s just the way of things.”
The real problem, he claims, is that masculinity cannot be discussed in such singular terms. “If we asked a football fan, a vicar, and a banker to define ‘manliness’, we would probably get three very different answers,” he says. “When people talk about a ‘crisis of masculinity’, they are usually complaining that their preferred variety of masculinity seems to be losing prestige or influence relative to other forms of masculinity.” Today, we have ideas of masculinity coming from all angles, whether it’s in sociology, pop culture, advertising, charities, TikTok, government campaigns, or around a table in the pub. “Amid this cacophony of competing voices, it is harder than ever for any one form of masculinity to establish itself as culturally dominant,” says Dr Griffin. “To some people, that looks like a crisis.”
A lot of men hear phrases like ‘toxic masculinity’ and they simply withdraw. Or worse, it serves to confirm their sense of victimhood, so they chase insalubrious gurus who provide cheap hope and unhealthy ideology
That’s not to say, though, that there aren’t issues that need solving. In her book, Moran cites a range of shocking statistics, among them that boys are more likely than girls to be medicated at school for disruptive behaviour, less likely to go on to further education, and more likely to become addicted to alcohol, drugs or pornography. Men also make up the vast majority of the homeless and prison populations. And on top of all that, the leading cause of death for men under 50 is suicide.
Other concerns have also emerged of late. Since the pandemic, there has been a notable rise in penile enlargement surgeries, for example, a trend that highlights society’s obsession with defining masculinity in sexual terms by placing social currency on penis size. “A different kind of ‘crisis’ talk occurs when men find themselves incapable of performing their preferred variety of masculinity,” explains Dr Griffin. For some, this might be aligned with sexual prowess and performance. Any sense of a shortcoming could then lead someone to feel as if it’s not possible to do the things that make you a “real man”. But then another question emerges: what does?
It’s this lack of identity that seems to be at the heart of some of the biggest problems facing men today. “We don’t know how we are meant to be anymore,” says Max Dickins, comedian and author of Billy No-Mates: How I Realised Men Have a Friendship Problem. “What Moran’s book represents is a stylish exemplar of a discourse that has become stuck. The think pieces [and] the books all tend to have the same form: ‘Here are men’s problems!’ ‘The reason for said problems is that men are stuck in a box of toxic masculine norms!’ If only men could behave more like… women!’”
Of course, the fact any book is prompting further interrogation into these issues is largely a good thing. But perhaps something has to change about the tone of that interrogation if we’re ever going to make progress. “We need a shift that encourages men to get involved in the conversation, or at least, stops casually insulting them,” says Dickins. “A lot of men hear phrases like ‘toxic masculinity’ and they simply withdraw. Or worse, it serves to confirm their sense of victimhood, so they chase insalubrious gurus who provide cheap hope and unhealthy ideology.”
In her response piece, Moran speculates that one of the reasons why her book prompted such a backlash is because it was written by a woman. “It was the first question on [the] first night of the tour that resolved my confusion over the backlash,” she writes. “‘You joke that you wish a man had written this book,’ said a man in the audience. ‘But how could he? Can you imagine a man saying, ‘What about men? Pay us attention! It’s our turn now!’ We’d be torn to bits. It had to be a woman who said it first.’”
It’s a fair point, one that highlights how far we have to go in order to achieve meaningful change. After all, no one’s denying that Moran’s book isn’t at least attempting to do something important. But perhaps the response illustrates just how complex an attempt it is given how charged conversations around gender can be; whatever you say, and whoever says it, there’ll inevitably be a group of people armed to attack or discredit your argument.
That being said, Moran’s book went straight to Number One on the Sunday Times bestseller list. Evidently, and despite people’s protests, there is clearly an audience for her perspective. And progress is being made, even if it might not feel like that. Would a book like this even have been published five years ago? And if it had, would anyone have wanted to actually read it? Would Moran fill out rooms of people on a nationwide book tour, all of whom had paid to listen to what she has to say about men?
The truth is that there are always going to be certain belief systems holding people back, no matter how hard Moran or anyone else tries. That’s just the nature of conversations around masculinity. “In general, it’s a good thing for people to recognise that there is no one way of being a man,” says Dr Griffin. “It might also be useful to acknowledge that the same man performs many different masculinities in the course of a day. The individual who is a devoted family man caring for a dying parent might be a ruthless businessman in the office and a clown in the pub.”
The important thing that’s often missing from these conversations, both online and off, is nuance. Accepting that one person’s definition of being a man is different from another’s, and that no two men perform masculinity in the same way, is key to becoming a more progressive and inclusive society that can benefit all genders. But getting there could take some time.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/caitlin-moran-men-book-andrew-tate-b2382259.html
**************************************************What the Oppenheimer movie does not tell you
Why was this film even made?
Here is a rather simple story. The US government grasps that, with a huge concentration of brilliant minds and vast sums of money, it may be able to make a weapon more destructive than any in history.
The possibility is not a secret. Scientists in several major powers, including Britain, had been examining this since 1939. British experts have already made major advances but the country lacks the money to carry them through. A large team of British scientists go to the US to help in what they think (wrongly) will be a joint Anglo-American project.
Hollywood, typically, makes little of the British contribution or of the later freezing out of Britain, which led to the 1945 Labour government restarting the UK's own independent nuclear weapons programme. A brilliant, brutal bureaucrat, General Leslie Groves, has proved he can work wonders by building the Pentagon in no time. He is picked to build the bomb, and chooses Oppenheimer as his scientific chief, a Left-wing eccentric with a messy sex life and a tragic marriage (his wife is an ex-Communist who drinks too much), who reads the Hindu scriptures for relaxation.
He is not your ordinary suburban person. He has Communist friends but he is good at nuclear physics and managing scientists. Oppenheimer duly delivers the bomb, too late to be used on the Nazis but in time to be dropped on Japan.
Bang. Hurrah. The war ends. Sorry about all the innocent people who got burned to death but that's war and they shouldn't have attacked Pearl Harbor. The end.
Except that it isn't the end.
All kinds of worrying things are buried in the story. At one point, in 1942, one of Oppenheimer's Communist friends suggests that Oppenheimer gets in touch with the Soviet Union about the bomb project through a British scientist (and Soviet asset). Oppenheimer realises the suggestion is treasonous and refuses it. But he does not report the contact for eight months. When he does, he tries to cover up his friend's role for four months.
All this matters because soon after the German defeat, it becomes clear Stalin has penetrated the bomb project, and has known for ages about it.
And the US, having been Stalin's close ally until 1945, violently switches to being Moscow's bitterest enemy.
Suddenly, now that the Soviet Union is the enemy, all those Communist dalliances in the 1930s start to matter. Just because the stupid, gristle-brained Senator Joe McCarthy says so, doesn't mean the American establishment hasn't been infiltrated by pro-Soviet Communists. Subsequent intelligence disclosures confirm that it was. Oppenheimer, later in life, ceases to be indispensable to the US nuclear bomb programme. Plenty of others can handle it. He has also become politically awkward as he clearly suffers from remorse over the uses made of his discoveries.
But why is so much of the film devoted to an attack on an obscure US politician, Lewis Strauss, who took part in the campaign to remove Oppenheimer's security clearance.
Hollywood was badly scorched by crude witch-hunts during the McCarthy years and has never really seen straight over such issues since.
The danger was not imaginary, or purely the result of American hysteria. The truth is that there were Communists, and fellow-travellers, in the US and in Britain, and that quite a few became agents of Stalin. Many probably got away with it.
In unhysterical Britain, the nuclear scientist Alan Nunn May, an actual Communist, was jailed for ten years for giving secrets to the Soviets. The German refugee Klaus Fuchs, who also gave British nuclear secrets to Stalin, was jailed for 14 years and went to live in Communist East Germany when released.
All of this has been known for years. But a film made in 2023 needs to get past these ancient 1950s Hollywood resentments. Here are several huge issues barely touched on.
The scientists knew they were building a weapon of mass destruction but excused themselves because Hitler might build one, too. We now know that Hitler never got near building a bomb.
The whole moral driving force of the project was a fantasy.
In the summer of 1945, British intelligence assembled a group of captured German scientists at a picturesque old house in Godmanchester, near Huntingdon. The house was bugged from basement to attic. The Germans were astonished at news of the bomb and plainly had never got within miles of making one. This has been public knowledge since 1992.
Even more devastating is modern historical research about Japan.
It is clear that Japan's surrender was not forced by the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Japan's fanatical leadership cared little about civilian deaths (they had not blinked when a firebomb raid in March 1945 killed 100,000 in Tokyo itself). By the time the bomb was ready, there were few Japanese cities of any size left standing.
The scholar Tsuyoshi Hasegawa concluded from Japanese and Soviet records that Japan's surrender was mainly caused by Stalin's decision to enter the war. The military leadership feared he would invade Japan from the north and seize large parts of the country.
It has long suited Japan and the US to pretend that the two A-bombs ended the war. Japan can pose as a victim nation. The US, which is embarrassed about being the only country to use the bomb in war, can soothe consciences by saying the action saved tens of thousands of Allied troops from death. But the worrying truth is known to academics and diplomats. So the second great justification for the use of the bomb in 1945 melts away.
President Truman's airy dismissal of Oppenheimer as a 'crybaby' for doubting the morality of using the bomb now looks callous and self-serving. Truman was a nobody promoted to power by the crooked Tom Pendergast machine in Kansas City, Missouri. For sure, he was no great intellect.
Oppenheimer, by contrast, was a powerful thinker. A great film could have been made out of this huge story. But this wasn't it.
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FDA Commissioner: No One 'Envisioned' the Consequences of New Sesame Seed Labeling Rule
One of the better recent examples of how government officials do a poor job of anticipating the consequences of their actions occurred after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) mandated warning labels for products containing sesame seeds.
The unexpected result: Suddenly everything seems to contain sesame.
In case you missed it at the time, here's what happened: In an attempt to aid those with allergies to sesame seeds, the FDA added the ingredient to a longstanding list of items—including eggs, milk, and shellfish—whose presence must be noted on the packaging of food products and at restaurants. In response, food producers started adding sesame to products that previously contained none.
The food producers were simply doing what made economic sense. The FDA's fines for not disclosing the inclusion of sesame are steep, and it's much cheaper to add a few seeds to everything than to face potential penalties for accidental mixing. "Rather than worry about how to prevent potential cross-contamination in products that don't contain sesame, some restaurants and food makers—including Olive Garden, Chick-fil-A, and Wendy's—are simply adding sesame to their products. That way they can list it as an ingredient and not worry about being faulted for accidental contamination," Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown wrote last year.
The result? Fewer sesame seed–free products are now available for people who are allergic.
But the cherry on top of this sundae of government failure—or perhaps the sesame seed atop the FDA's bun of bureaucratic bungling—was provided this week by none other than the agency's own chief.
"Some manufacturers are intentionally adding sesame to products that previously did not contain sesame and are labeling the products to indicate its presence," acknowledged FDA Commissioner Robert M. Califf in a statement. Califf went on to say that the FDA's goal, of course, was to help individuals with sesame allergies "feel more confident" about their choices.
"I don't think anyone envisioned there being a decrease in the availability of products that are safe choices for sesame-allergic consumers," he concluded.
Yes, no one could have possibly envisioned this outcome—except, perhaps, for the many food processing facilities that immediately responded to the FDA's new rules by doing exactly this.
What Califf means, of course, is that no one within the FDA considered this possibility. That's a telling statement. It indicates that the FDA likely didn't do a good job of investigating how the businesses affected by its rules would respond to the placement of sesame on the federal allergens list. It also suggests that the FDA's staff lacked the ability to see beyond the good intentions—helping allergy sufferers—of the policy to interrogate how such a rule might be implemented in the real world.
There is a recurring idea that advancements in technology and data processing can allow governments to solve the so-called knowledge problem—Friedrich A. Hayek's observation that central planning will always fail because government officials cannot aggregate all the necessary information to make better decisions than the decentralized ones made by individuals acting via markets.
But Califf's remarks show just how difficult solving that problem is. The FDA has virtually unlimited access to public health data and can easily acquire whatever information it might need to make any decision. And yet no one at the agency was able to predict how a regulation of a tiny seed would have huge unintended consequences.
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Michigan Bill Making ‘Misgendering’ a Hate Crime Is Unconstitutional
Last month, the Michigan House passed HB 4474—legislation that would expand the state’s existing Ethnic Intimidation Act beyond current protections for religion, ethnicity, and race to categories including sexual orientation and gender identity or expression.
HB 4474 would make it a felony hate crime offense to cause someone to “feel terrorized, frightened, or threatened” with words—deliberately “misgendering” someone, for example—subject to a potential penalty of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
The Left has been pushing its “words are violence” premise for some time. But Michigan’s willingness to go the extra mile and criminalize gender-related speech has summoned a ghoul from some dystopian fever dream.
HB 4474 is unconstitutional, and I’m not the only lawyer who thinks so. To argue otherwise ignores two of the U.S. Supreme Court’s newly minted rulings on what speech the First Amendment protects—and what it doesn’t.
In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment prohibited the state of Colorado from forcing a website designer to create expressive designs conveying messages on same-sex marriage with which she disagrees.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, recited a long line of precedents establishing that the First Amendment not only protects an individual’s right to speak her mind but prohibits the government from compelling her to “speak its own preferred messages.”
Yet that’s precisely what Michigan proposes to do. Its preferred messages require affirmation of another’s gender identity on pain of criminal penalty—even if the speaker believes that sex is binary and immutable and that there are only two genders.
In Counterman v. Colorado, the court examined the interplay between the First Amendment and criminal conduct—specifically, making “true threats” that are unprotected speech. The court held that for Colorado to prosecute someone for making a “true threat” of violence, it must prove a defendant had some subjective understanding of the threatening nature of his statements.
Writing for the majority, Justice Elena Kagan noted that even though a true threat “lie[s] outside the bounds of the First Amendment’s protection,” prosecution of true threats poses “the prospect of chilling non-threatening expression, given the ordinary citizen’s predictable tendency to steer wide of the unlawful zone.”
By requiring a showing that a defendant recklessly disregarded a substantial risk that his words could be perceived as threatening, a speaker would be prevented from—as Kagan wrote—“swallow[ing] words that are in fact not true threats.”
That means a prosecution under Michigan’s hate crime law would require proof that the speaker knew his or her speech on gender identity or expression was likely to be perceived as threatening but acted with that knowledge by issuing the threat anyway. The speaker would therefore be acting “recklessly.”
Yes, as the gender juggernaut sprints ever forward, it’s certainly likely that “transgender” individuals could perceive misgendering as “threatening.” They are, after all, the fraternity of the perpetually offended. However, to qualify as a prosecutable “true threat,” the speech must convey a threat to commit an act of violence—speech that is hurtful or offensive does not qualify and is protected speech under the First Amendment, regardless of whether the majority of Michiganders agree or not.
Further complicating Michigan’s intention to silence dissent is the fact that at least one federal appellate court has held that gender identity is a “hotly contested issue,” one on which reasonable people can and do disagree.
Indeed, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals noted in Meriwether v. Hartop that “the premise that gender identity is an idea ‘embraced and advocated by increasing numbers of people is all the more reason to protect the First Amendment rights of those who wish to voice a different view.’”
Despite Democratic characterizations that HB 4474 is “commonsense hate crime legislation,” the expansion of hate crime laws to speech concerning an individual’s subjective self-identification is anything but common. It compels alignment with the state’s preferred orthodoxy, something the Supreme Court has routinely struck down. What’s more, it points the way toward even bolder government efforts to censor unpopular or politically inexpedient speech.
Whether concerning hate crimes, stalking, or public accommodations, no law, as Gorsuch wrote in 303 Creative, “is immune from the demands of the Constitution.” A law that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation (such as Colorado’s public accommodations law) or establishes criminal penalties for speech based on gender identity or expression (like HB 4474) must still conform to the First Amendment’s protection for the freedom of speech.
The government may not prohibit expression merely because it might prove offensive to some or run contrary to its stated policy objectives. Disagreement is not discrimination, and while Michigan’s House Democrats appear to have forgotten this, their Senate colleagues would do well to remember it.
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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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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
1 comment:
Whenever a "modern" feminist brings up misogyny it's mainly because they are about to try to justify their own misandry.
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