An ode to niceness

We praise the kind, the soft, the sweet,
Who smooth the path of all they meet.

A gentle word, a smiling face—
Is this the mark of moral grace?

But niceness, warm and neatly spun,
Can smooth the path where wrongs still run.

To soothe, to spare, to not offend—
May comfort now, but harm in the end.
When feelings rule and thought is slight
We turn away from what is right.

A hive of hearts, attuned to pain,
Demands we bend, again, again.
Yet moral weight is not a mood,
Nor virtue found in platitude.

A treat for tears, a queue ignored,
A compliment too freely poured—

Each gesture smooth, but out of place,

When fairness loses to soft grace.
These acts, though nice, may miss the mark
of progress on the moral arc.

They calm the storm, but in their wake,

Leave deeper wrongs we must unmake.

So let us care, but not be led
By every whim or tear that's shed.
For niceness, when it takes the stage,
Can dim the light of a reasoned age. 

The leader for this story is not a good leader

 

Consistent and stoic, Leah Williamson is most natural of unnatural leaders | England women's football team | The Guardian

Consistent and stoic, Leah Williamson is most natural of unnatural leaders History-making England captain is often seen barking orders but has a more introverted persona off the pitch www.theguardian.com

 '

What a stupid headline and analysis of leadership. Who thinks that consistency and stoicism are not leadership traits?

'She is the most natural of unnatural leaders, seen barking orders in huddles and firing the team up in stark contrast with her more introverted persona off the pitch. That is a learned trait...She plays and leads with an emotional intelligence, often seen deep in conversation with Sarina Wiegman whenever there is a pause in play, the mind constantly analysing, learning, recalculating...'

Wait, what? The mind constantly analysing, learning and recalculating is, er, emotional intelligence? I think that consistency (of approach), stoicism and constant analysis are very natural traits for good leadership. I also consider them strengths of mine.

What this author has implied is that the traits we usually select for leadership are indeed natural traits for good leadership: a dominating, expressive, loud presence; emotionality that mimics charisma; forceful, quick and individually-made decisions; and a confidence that drives all before it.

This is the sort of person who rises to leadership in a vacuum. Someone whose forceful personality drowns out caution and leaps into action before anyone else has considered what is best. And because we're accustomed to such leaders in playground games, we come to expect such leadership in more serious situations, until finally we believe that this is good leadership and we only pick such people to be leaders. And they, in turn, believe in themselves, and select others like them to succeed.

Such people, however, need to be controlled. They are disrupting forces who mess up team co-ordination and silence productivity. The point of systems, and formal selection processes, is not to imitate what would happen in anarchy, but to reach a better solution. We should select leaders, not noisy self-confident shysters. 

We have seen 'emotional intelligence' become a bit of a fashionable term, associated with femininity, while plain old intelligence is boringly masculine. This is presumably why the author tried to claim that Ms Williamson was demonstrating emotional intelligence as a leader. But in truth, we have suffered far too much from leaders relying on emotional intelligence. It is emotional intelligence to charm, smarm and browbeat people into agreement; this requires the ability to understand the audience's feelings and apply such tactics. It is emotional intelligence that underpins charisma, and we often say that emotional stability and confidence come from emotional intelligence; whereas self-doubt and hesitation require further self-reflection.

It is real intelligence that we lack in our leadership. A mind capable of constant analysis, with the sense to recognise that others can have good ideas and the ability to recognise those ideas. Intelligence means knowing that complex problems are complex and that the greatest risk comes from underestimating them by diving in without care or due diligence.  Intelligence is holding back from hazarding an opinion until you have as much information as possible.

People seem to have conflated arrogance with intelligence. It's not clever to blast your own ideas out first, trusting that they're usually good. 'Usually' is not 'always' and 'good' is not 'perfect'. What we think of as leadership is a sign of confidence and, perhaps, above-average but not amazing ability; the ability to have pretty good ideas and the willingness to promote them without ever supposing that there could be a better one. We don't need 'emotional intelligence' as a counter to this; we need more plain-old-boring intelligence. 

There is an old truism that when you ask a researcher in a field how much he knows about it, he will say "almost nothing", whereas an undergraduate or casual reader might claim to have very good knowledge of it.

We are too accustomed to assuming that the bright undergraduates who are over-promoted to positions of leadership in politics and business are humanity's best paragons of intelligence, when in truth our selection is deeply flawed. It's not intelligence that sees a bright undergraduate slave away for 16-hour days at a job which will promote only 10% to great wealth. If I offered you an employment contract of working 8 hours a day for me for 3 years, after which I might or might not choose to pay you a salary for your time, you'd turn me down. Yet this is effectively the offer from the highly-respected consultancies, law firms and banks: give us your free time and we might promote you later.

Anyone taking such an offer is either dangerously risk-seeking, deluded or has inside information and connections. Promotion is dependent on sucking up and networking, so perhaps these bright young things fancy their chances. But most likely they believe that hard work will achieve their goals, as it has throughout their schooling. Because these are not the brightest people who found schoolwork easy: these are the hard workers who did well because of their work ethic. That's not a bad thing, but it is a different thing. These are not paragons of brilliance. They are laudably hard-workers: important workers in a modern economy, no more and no less.

The author also unwittingly points out another aspect of leadership that we often overlook: Ms Williamson shows a 'learned trait'. We often think of leaders as born, not made. We trust that charisma, confidence and the ability to fast-talk others is innate and celebrate those who have managed to acquire and use these traits, but we work hard to try to teach people to understand and calculate. Various organisations I have been in seem to have assumed that leaders will find a way to understand a subject, or use underlings to do so, and that they, and others, should be promoted based on social performance.

I hazard the unpopular thesis that someone responsible for anything should understand what it is they are responsible for. People who are good at networking, brown-nosing bosses and dumping colleagues in trouble are showing precisely the behaviours that we do not want in senior positions. 

There should be nothing 'unnatural' about an adult displaying learned behaviour. We are humans: we are different from other animals because of our enormous, adaptable brainpower. It's natural to use it; if anything, it is inhuman to fail to learn and adapt.

When I was applying for graduate entry jobs, or thereabouts, I underwent a large number of quizzes about my behaviours. Mostly my real answers were not one of the multiple choice options: I wanted to say "it depends on what my boss expects, on organisational culture, on explicit instructions" but instead I had to pick one from four inadequate multiple choice options, and it seems I always got it wrong. They were looking, perhaps, for traditional leaders - have-a-go-failures who'd try to take on everything whether they had the information and ability to do it well or not, when my tendency, absent instruction or encouragement, would be to do what I am capable of and defer to others of supposedly greater ability on other things. 

But one instruction (e.g. "don't pester me unless it is [this urgent]" would be sufficient to change me into a different worker. Because I can learn and adapt. Yes, it rankles years later. I'd rather have had a choice of well-regarded fast-track careers to greatness than spend years in career doldrums. 

There is no harm in learning to behave in a better way. We start as mewling babes, puking in our mother's arms, and only gradually learn to be more thoughtful in our interactions with others. Deliberate behaviour is no less meaningful or leader-like for being deliberate. In fact, I would argue that it is more valuable, demonstrating that real thought and intent has gone into it, rather than it coming from an uncomprehending animal who is merely fortunate that his instincts have worked well for it so far, which is how I would describe some of our most famous 'leaders'.

In fact, Ms Williamson is clearly a natural leader. Our perception of leadership is so flawed that a writer can write the opposite and have it published, which is a far more interesting story.

What causes misanthropy

 

I heard a podcast recently about stroke care: the sad fact that over the couple of decades between her husband dying from a stroke and her son having one stroke care has barely changed. She talks of how doctors assumed in both cases that disability was permanent, and rapid decline to death inevitable, and that this was their prognosis.

She was a journalist, and spoke to various stroke experts, and the more expert they were, the less certainty they had over any one prognosis. Her husband had begun to recover his ability to write when he died; her son had regained the ability to walk, but she had to fight for his treatment. Emergency thrombolytic treatment has been invented that reduces the damage caused by a stroke but is to be given within 4 hours of the stroke.

He had a stroke while sleeping and when his wife woke up in the middle of the night was told an ambulance would take 4 hours to arrive. A kind neighbour drove him to A&E and they arrived 4.5 hours after he had gone to sleep.

They initially refused him the thrombolytic treatment, even though the 4 hour limit is a guideline: biology rarely has absolute cut-offs, and also despite the fact that it was most likely the stroke had occurred within the 4 hour limit.

He was given physiotherapy, which is vital for stroke patients; they need constant exercise for their immobile limbs to prevent them painfully atrophying and help them rebuild the nerve connections for control. But the hospital could only manage 2 sessions a week, which hardly counts as constant. 2 a day would be effective: one stroke expert she interviewed called his 'homeopathic physiotherapy'.

I find such stories annoying much of the time: one anecdote proves nothing about the wider world. This one chimed with me because it is exactly how my mother died. She had a catastrophic stroke during surgery (we will never know, now, whether this was a mistake or a tragic accident) and spent a couple of weeks on a stroke ward receiving care and physiotherapy. She smiled, she talked, she beat the staff at Scrabble and was, broadly, her normal self, despite being completely paralysed on her left side: her arm would not move, her left mouth barely moved.

Then the hospital said it needed the bed and kicked her out to a care home. Without physiotherapy her immobile arm seized up and she was given massive doses of opiates to kill the pain. These also sedate people, and she spent the rest of her miserable life either forced asleep or in even greater pain than she had endured during her better years, before finally dying of a lung infection, probably caused by breathing in food when someone in the care home was trying to get through the long list of people needing to be fed.

These concrete anecdotes demonstrate how lack of funding directly kills people. It's not just an abstract concept that means nothing. Ambulance services that cause many emergencies to wait; junior doctors who don't fully understand the treatment protocols because they've been given massive responsibility, insufficient training and are stretched too thin; physiotherapy cut to nothing because it doesn't sound important; stroke wards with capacity for one third of the stroke patients in the area (and because this kills off so many early, this could be more like one fifth of an appropriate level); these all kill people.

When our doctors provide us with a bad prognosis, it might be their experience, but it might also be a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's not the case that disease is simply terrible and bad outcomes inevitable.  This is sometimes true, but often we have caused the outcome to be bad through our voting choices. I would give all my wealth for my mother to have been saved for another few years of conversation. Most people feel the same way about those they love. And yet we resent tax increases of a few pennies; we prefer to have a bit more money to spend on cheap tat than keep people alive.

Every week there's another story about a brave campaigning family trying to get very expensive treatment for a disease. Hospital bosses are typically portrayed as the enemy, evilly refusing treatment that this family knows might help.

That money might save dozens if the boss spends it on faster ambulances, or a handful of people if on physiotherapy. Hospital bosses are papering over massive holes in care, barely managing to make it look serviceable. You might argue that this is counter-productive; that if they funded some carefully and had none left for the more expensive diseases at all this would show how poorly-funded they are. You might argue that some hospitals are run inefficiently: that some bosses are better than others and inefficiency could be spent on care. This is probably true, but this will be 1 or 2%, or maybe 5% of the total. 

The real enemy is us. We are the ones giving bosses 50% of what they need. We vote for politicians who say they will fix things by reorganisation and new targets, and maybe a 1% increase in funding for some areas when inflation is 6%. We voted for politicians who burdened hospitals with massive, real, PFI costs just so that they could pull off an accounting trick.

We need to stop ascribing to disease what is a result of our social systems. When doctors give a prognosis for a stroke, that's more because of human decisions than biological necessity. 

When I think of why my mother died, it wasn't an inevitable consequence of disease. It might have been a careless anaesthetist. It wasn't a mean hospital boss; it wasn't the consultant who discharged her from the ward. It was you. It was the people I walk past on the street. It was the not-so-great British public who voted for a Conservative government that cut government services. She died because of humanity's short-sighted selfishness, trying desperately to grasp onto a few pieces of silver at the expense of our humanity. 

The moral corruption of a moral crusade

 

In the UK we recently suffered the implementation of the 'Online Safety Act'. Labour assumes that it is wildly popular, with a minister saying that a usually vile and obnoxious man is 'on the side of child abusers' because he says he would abolish the Act if he were in power. 

I have no doubt that this man would be on the side of child abusers if he knew any wealthy ones, but this seems to be yet another case of a supposedly good cause being used to avoid all rational debate and thereby do bad things.

    The main purpose of the Online Safety Act is to protect children from pornography. This is nowhere near the most dangerous thing facing children, and nor does the Act protect them. The regulations are sensibly worded to ensure that big technology firms cannot just ignore them and pay meaningless fines: the penalties are the greater of £25m or 10% of global revenue. It is a good idea to make regulatory penalties meaningful to those being regulated. But it's an idea that needs to be matched with sensible regulation! These have collateral damage and fail to serve any useful purpose.

    For example, a long-running text-based game about zombies (along the lines of the original dungeon-crawler games from the '80s and early '90s) was run by a tiny community but now cannot continue, as the risk of a £25m fine is too scary for the organisers. Children are safe from text-adventure primarily about zombies! Hooray!

    Similarly, a website devoted to modifications of computer games, a way for players to adjust games to their own liking through crowd-sourced changes, is also struggling to navigate the new rules. Modifying games is what normal people call 'harmless fun', even if some of the mods give characters skimpy outfits. But now their community platform is responsible for preventing children from seeing such content, on pain of bankruptcy.

    Meanwhile, adult users of pornography are now required to share their identity online when accessing such recreational material. Given how much judgement there is of different sexual tastes, this is something that anyone sensible would prefer to keep private, but regulators have created a massive risk for innocent internet users who previously could have browsed anonymously and safely.

 

    There are already plenty of reports that the ban represents a minor, tedious barrier: that it forces people (both adults and children) to give their data to unreliable 3rd-parties who might not keep it securely or whose software could be dangerous, creating vulnerabilities in people's devices. The Online 'Safety' Act has reduced online safety, encouraging millions of people to be more susceptible to hacking, blackmail and fraud, while children and adults still access supposedly harmful materials.

    So what are we achieving by sacrificing millions of people's recreation and fun? What danger does any and all sexual content pose to children? 

    The NSPCC, the major children's charity, published a report about online dangers to children. There are clear dangers from sexual bullying by peers and adults: sexual exploitation using online communication. But the NSPCC reports that 'With the exception of cyberbullying, which has a relatively well-developed evidence base, there is only a modest amount of evidence about the outcomes and impacts of exposure to, and engagement with, ‘primary priority’ and ‘priority’ content [defined as pornography, content that encourages suicide, self-harm and eating disorders, cyberbullying and hate crime].'

    The report notes that recommender algorithms, quantification of social activity and popularity metrics all exploit psychological needs in humans and increase exposure to harmful content. Such a conclusion has broad applications to all content and all humans, but hasn't been acted on at all in the Online 'Safety' Act.

    The NSPCC suggests that the evidence base is poor and more research about online harms is sorely needed.

    The Children's Commissioner issued a 'report' using evidence from one police force and one clinic that found that some of the children referred to being inspired by violent pornography and/or overusing pornography. From these anecdotes of about half of violent children citing violent pornography as something they used we get a call to restrict access to all pornography.

    There are multiple levels of argument here. First of all, there is the conflation of violent, abusive pornography, as anecdotally mentioned, with the 'any sexual content' controlled by the Online 'Safety' Act. Then there is the assumption that violent pornography caused the sexual violence, when it has been consistently shown in other such social furores (over computer games, Dungeons and Dragons) that the activity that correlates with misbehaviour is either chosen by people already likely to misbehave, or is an activity undertaken safely by many with no harm at all, disproving the suggestion that it is intrinsically harmful.

    The evidence seems to be that some children who have committed sexual harm have used violent pornography. Given the prevalence of its use, this is exactly what we would expect if these things were entirely unrelated. What we need, to justify the Online Safety Act, is evidence that any and all pornography causes children to commit sexual harm. We already know that children typically see pornographic content at 13, and yet we do not find that all teenagers are sex criminals. If we take a sample of murderers, we will find that over 50% of them are male. This does not lead us to conclude that being male causes murder and we should ban it. We will also find that a large proportion of criminals take medication for mental health. Should we ban such drugs because they cause criminality?

    The same reasoning applies to pornography. If a child has inclinations that cannot safely be satisfied in the real world, pornography could be a salve, not a cause. It could be one and then the other for a different child.

    Put simply, there is no evidence that pornography causes harm; that it causes more harm than good; or even that the violent subset of pornography causes harm.

    Why do people think it does? Why pick on pornography? Because a fair few people dislike it: it is seedy. It feels bad and carries a social taboo. It is not highly regarded and people conflate their dislike with it being bad for other reasons too. There is pornography of everything, and much of it is revolting; people have different tastes, and these seem to vary most when it comes to food and sex. Yet no-one thinks it reasonable to restrict children's access to pineapple, grapefruit or legumes. I personally find the former two distasteful, and could construct spurious arguments about how they are dangerous for children. Pineapple contains harmful enzymes that actively digest your mouth. Grapefruit contains a compound that interferes with your liver's processing of common drugs such as paracetamol, vastly increasing the risk of toxicity. Digestion of legumes creates gas that can cause discomfort, lack of concentration in class and bullying. 

    But if on the basis of these vague claims we decided to force anyone wanting legumes (chickpeas, perhaps) to sign a waiver that they were an adult happy to inflict gas on any companions, it would be seen as a gross overreaction and imposition on normal life. And people would also understandably be unhappy at the prospect of such waivers being made public, even though such behaviour is entirely legal and normal biology.

    I have chosen such an apparently silly comparison because the principles are the same. I know that pornography 'feels' different to food choices. It feels seedy, distasteful and unpleasant. But I would say exactly the same about grapefruit and be more literally truthful. We must separate these culturally-ingrained feelings from the factual justification for new law.

    Some people hate pornography with a passion; they think it's deeply immoral, or that it demeans or abuses women. I think they haven't a clue, but such opinions are also irrelevant to the Online 'Safety' Act. The Act is supposedly about protecting children from harm. If you think that something is entirely wrong, that's a different argument. Of course it might make you very relaxed about interfering with adults' freedom to do it; that would, for you, be a welcome side-effect, or even the secret purpose, of spurious arguments about protecting children. Children are merely the Trojan horse to manipulate and control adults into conforming to your personal tastes, and as such you would never want to delve into the substance of the argument, because you know it is merely a front.

    You would want to shout loudly about saving children, making the most of any goodwill towards such a commendable goal, rather than losing that goodwill by admitting that this goal will not be achieved and the real goal is something else.

    Some pornography does demean women, and some is made by abusing the participants. This is much the same as capitalism: some companies abuse their workers, and many demean them. Let us ban pornography only when the larger entity of capitalism has been defeated. Or, and this might be shockingly novel to you, we could specifically ban the nasty behaviours! Why should we punish everyone producing the same product because some people do it wrong? Did we ban all paint from the country when we found that some Chinese-made white paint had toxic lead in it?

    I think that getting sexual pleasure from visual (and auditory) stimulation disgusts some people who either have no libido or whose sexuality is more stimulated by environment or social setting. Their narrow-minded intolerance of people who are naturally different is disgraceful. I find it revolting to be desired only because of a fancy location or fat wallet, rather than who I am. 90% of the population finds homosexual interaction unpleasant, but we understand that what consenting adults do with each other is, broadly, none of our business.

    It is only our business if it causes wider damage, or harms the participants in a way that we must mend (costs the NHS, perhaps).

    On the subject of harms, even if you think that pornography is harmful, it's impossible to argue that it was the most harmful unregulated threat in the country. As the NSPCC reported, the very nature of recommendation algorithms that funnel people to ever more niche and radical content and the nature of social pressure created by measures of interaction and popularity create toxic environments online. Cyber-bullying and sexual exploitation by other children and by adults happens primarily on communication platforms such as Instagram and WhatsApp. Right-wing and religious extremism directly leads to vast amounts of nasty, unpleasant behaviour even before we get to the crimes committed by believers. Online disinformation has distorted our democracy, and echo-chambers have undermined the desire or ability to engage in proper debate about important, life-changing issues (such as this one)! Large technology firms have created monopolies, or virtual monopolies, and are now mining the new economic territory thereby stolen for themselves for all they can get, spoiling without regulation or control what could have been a beneficial new world. 

    That's just a start. Children are radicalised into religions: delusional beliefs about non-existent sky-fairies. Children are taught to interact with others through manipulation and drama rather than generosity and reason, by television and parenting. Gambling online and in person causes great distress and financial ruin to many for no inimitable benefit. Advertising distorts people's desires and behaviours beyond unhealthy food, the advertising of which to children is already banned. Why should children be persuaded to pester their parents for specific holidays or toys? 

    And of all that list, it is teens giggling at naked titties that we decided to regulate? That we decided to apply penalties of 10% of global revenue to?

    I know what any anti-porn nutjobs are thinking. They want to scream at me that it's not children giggling at titties that's the problem: that there are serious issues of sexual violence being depicted and enacted. To which I can only ask: why then did we not regulate that? We could have limited the law to sexual violence, not all nudity or sex. The scope has been expanded for one reason that I can think of, and one reason alone: prurient interfering busybodies who want to force others to live according to their own tastes and made-up moral rules, but who know that their evilly illiberal goals cannot be achieved without the deceit of pretending this is all for a different cause.

    What better good cause to pick as deceitful cover than 'for the kiddies'? Those poor, innocent kiddies who need protection from everything until they miraculously become perfectly able to deal with it at 18. The innocent kiddies who never bully others, commit crimes or mistreat others. 

    Children are not the innocent models of perfection that such people imagine: humans start as brutal animals and must be taught good behaviour. Mostly they learn from those they interact with most; their parents. And some parents are just not good. Others want to 'protect' their children from outside influence because this makes indoctrinating them easier. If children are exposed to the outside world, they might find some of it more interesting, and choose for themselves what they want, rather than being moulded into the new mini-mes that the parents want.

    Despite all this, people imagine children as sacred. Invoke the holy term 'for children' and suddenly you are a saint working for a holy cause, unquestionable and pious. Modern society loves such quick and binary distinctions. It's tiresome to work out if someone really is doing what they claim: easier to ignore that question and engage in a bit of moral grandstanding yourself, jumping on the bandwagon to show how upright you are. 

    The truth, of course, is that it's deeply immoral to have such disdain for truth, or be so uninterested in whether someone is doing good or not. I think it's disgusting to corrupt decision-making about national issues that affect so many with personal reputation-enhancement by simply shouting "I'm in favour of good things too!" It might appear morally upright to mob anyone who questions assertions, but by failing to determine whether (or demonstrate that) what you support is actually the right thing to do, you demonstrate a sad lack of regard for morality. 

    And that, in my opinion, sums up the supporters of this disgrace of a law. We should ban moral crusading.

Female entitlement

 

There is a segment of society that claims to believe in equality and fairness; and yet refuses to examine the privileges of one half of the population and the suffering of the other half.

                One can find discussion of male privilege on every online ‘street corner’. Universal human traits are ascribed to men if they are bad; and to women if they are good. Supposedly radical feminists believe in this biased doctrine unquestioningly, their radicalism halted by their own self interest in promoting ideas that often benefit them, inflate their own egos, and which gain them kudos from the community they hope to impress.

                On the other side are right-wing nutjobs who take reasonable points and use them as foundations for a fantasy world of toxic, unsupportable ideals such as male dominance, religion, nuclear families and rigid social hierarchy.

                If you don’t acknowledge the reasonable points that are self-evidently true then you turn away the young men who see the truth of them and ideally would support ideas of justice and fairness. It doesn’t matter how harshly you think women have been treated in the past; a relentless focus on men as oppressors and women as oppressed is a stupidly un-nuanced dichotomy, and actually very far from more traditionally left-wing ideas, which saw the simple truth that the poor suffer more than the very wealthy. It might be true that men at the 10^th and 100^th percentiles of wealth had nicer lives than women at those levels of wealth, but the difference between women at the 100^th percentile and men at the 10^th percentile is enormous. As Amia Srinivasan put it, most of most women’s suffering comes from poverty. A feminism that ignores poverty for only issues that every woman shares is not a feminism that really wants to help women.

                We have all seen period dramas in which rich women command servants, both male and female, demanding support for their luxurious lives. We are all aware that men worked as miners, soldiers, whalers and other extremely dangerous jobs, while the wealth went to others: rich men and their wives, sons and daughters.

                When men discuss women, in general, in a negative way, it’s often regarded as sexism. There are plenty of women doing the same who think that what they are doing is funny or reasonable. For every online misogynist talking about body count and men being in charge, before moving into human trafficking, the right to sex and cryptocurrency scams, there are women proposing that men are more dangerous than bears, that men are dolts and that using men for dinner with no intention of getting to know them is fine. This is all sexism: outrageous, unpleasant and downright cruel bigotry.

I have two main theses: that women do experience privilege (and that it is significant); and that many experiences attributed to sexism are more attributable to stupidity or generic malice that focussed sexism. This could easily be a Trojan horse to try to diminish attempts to improve people’s lives, but I do not intend it that way. I do, though, think that these points should encourage people to change how they try to improve people’s lives, as it should be clear that punishing men and/or promoting women does not address stupidity nor women’s privilege. If we think that the root cause is different, the solution is also different.

The realms of life

                We often talk of life as divided into work and personal life. These are the two great pillars of human existence. Feminism has spotted women’s suffering in both, but a lot of the campaigns we see are about work. I have doubts that poor women are much more interested than poor men in women’s representation at board level, and nor do I believe that being polite, thoughtful and empathetic are hindrances to career advancement that are limited to women. I also think that study of the data reveals that much of the pay gap can be explained by different career decisions, and that it emerges in people’s 30s, about the time that women are having children. We could further discuss possible reasons for different career decisions or whether bigotry is entirely responsible, but I want to look at the other side of life: personal lives.

                Some people live to work. They are fools. Work can be fulfilling, but donating free labour to any employer is not a good precedent, nor a good boundary. Many people burn out from overwork, and popular, fulfilling careers come to be dominated by people with massive life advantages who can afford the low compensation that employers come to expect. There is also another essay to be written about that, but not here.

                In our heart of hearts, whether we openly admit we work to live or are wage-slaves buying into the idea that a little bit more overwork will push us further up a greasy pole of life advancement, we know that our personal lives are the most important aspect of who we are and whether our lives are worth living. Only a very rare few have such massively important jobs, such as ruling a country, that the job could ever replace the fulfilment from a personal life.

                The hierarchy of needs records community and social life as an important part of a good life, just above basic necessities such as food, housing and safety. A person needs all these to be happy and fulfilled, but it’s hard to enjoy and pursue the higher ones without the lower ones.

                Women face some severe issues in the social world. There are bigoted men out there who believe that women should stick to very limited roles in life including subservience and obedience to men. This attitude, heavily guided by religion, is easy enough to avoid in more civilised places in the world.

Women claim to fear for their safety, and although certainly most convictions for domestic abuse are of men, the number remains tiny.

I remember even back at university some students changing the way they lived for fear of assault, in a quiet, pleasant city. And I remember many women living normal lives quite happily, doing things these other women feared. And in 7 years, in a city of 200,000 people with a busy university nightlife, there were fewer than five assaults by strangers, each reported as big news in the local newspapers.

I need to say, in this day and age, that I agree that’s five too many. I shouldn’t have to explicitly say so, but there are a lot of people out there who assume that if I disagree with their conclusions I must dispute their premises. I agree that five assaults is bad (the premise) but I disagree that this is sufficient reason to live life in fear; and I disagree that this is sufficient evidence of systematic oppression (although there are other things one might cite), I disagree that it is sufficient horror to make any other suffering negligible and not worth discussing and I disagree that any level of suffering makes a victim immune to discussion of her privilege or misbehaviour.  Discussion of female privilege is not necessarily a diminishment of male privilege or female oppression and if you think of it that way because you can only focus on one issue at a time, I suggest that you focus on a global threat such as climate change, emperor Putin and the CCP, and forget privilege entirely.

Social suffering

Men, in the social sphere of life, face numerous challenges. Men tend to be more lonely, less well-educated, live shorter lives, less trusted. Some of these are the opposite of women’s problems. Women say that they live with the fear of assault; rare, unpleasant, well-reported events that, like terrorism, have an outsized effect on people’s judgement of risk. Men live under suspicion. A friend recently recounted a story of a black friend of hers who was followed around a shop by a security guard and mentioned it casually because it’s normal to be regarded as a likely shoplifter when black. “It can change your whole experience of shopping” she thought. I am sure it could. As could a significant fraction of the population regarding you with similar suspicion in various social contexts.

Women complain that it is to a woman that people confide when they need support or reassurance, assuming that a woman will undertake this unpleasant burden. Men instead experience the loneliness and isolation of never being trusted; of knowing no gossip, being unaware of other people’s thoughts and feelings and being expected and required to do the emotional work of dealing with all burdens by themselves.

Women complain that they are regarded as emotional; soft, unable to deal with difficult situations, sights or gruesome ideas. Men who do deal with such things are expected to do so with no support at all. Women are regarded as in need of help and get healthcare all through their lives: men are expected to be tough and receive less, ending up unhealthier and unhappier and dying early.

There is a fine balance to be struck: humans can deal with such things, but should get some support from friends or even professionals without it being regarded as demeaning their humanity. The social pressures to conform to one extreme harm everyone: the mere requirement to conform, rather than be oneself, demeans humanity.

There are women out there who genuinely believe that a man should be 6ft, have a 6 pack and earn a six-figure salary (the median is still under £30,000); there are women who believe that a man who has hobbies is childish and that she is entitled to throw out what he enjoys once they are married because he has now bought into her ideals; there are women out there who regard any form of dating except what she wants as immature or inept; who think that a man should make more effort than she does; who hold themselves up as objects to be won through the unpaid labour of pampering. The media are full of representations of inept, incompetent men who cannot contribute to a household or relate to family life and yet also full of images of steroid-abusing, dehydrated men in great lighting whose musculature is unachievable for many, and never permanently. Men are told that they are not good enough: that they will never be good enough.

 

A common reply when discussing men’s problems

Mean-spirited feminists often have glib answers, often enough that it’s worth mentioning them here. For example, one might say ‘but men are often incompetent householders who cannot relate’. To which we can answer ‘but fifty years ago women were often less educated, focussed only on homes and families, and we represented them as such’. Or, delving right down to the nub of the matter, why should we represent statistical reality in advertising, television and film, rather than something aspirational; something that could be? Why do we need to show the ‘everyman’ character rather than something better? Our oldest stories are about heroes: people we could aspire to be like. That’s what stories are for.

And those same mean feminists say ‘ok then, let’s have a story with an emasculated house-husband changing nappies while his wife bosses a job and him so that men can aspire to be househusbands’. This is obviously not aspirational: it’s an attempt to punish a fictional man for society’s failings, to portray those feminists’ perception (or desire) of reality and hope that men buy into it. An aspirational stay-at-home-father figure would be wise and trusted by his children and wife, capable at and on top of chores at home such as DIY (and nappies), bossing his wife around at home because it’s his area of expertise and she’s the one out at work all day who isn’t familiar with what’s needed. Perhaps meals would be a bit more skewed to his tastes ( a few more steaks and fewer salads) but still healthy, because he’s not incompetent at caring for his family. He’d be the one at the sports event dispensing advice, receiving the hugs from the children for his help. Not getting rejected by children; making peace between family members with insight and warmth; anchoring them in the community with barbecues and games nights; involved in local politics or volunteering at the school… being good at the life he has adopted!

Instead men in caring roles are often emasculated: depicted as lesser humans, unable to meet their role in society, failures who need others, often women, to bail them out. It’s humiliation: a psychological degradation which I assume is regarded as righteous payback by women, but remains exactly as wrong and revolting as it was when other women experienced it from society decades ago.

The only caring role allowed for men is the ‘hero’s mentor’ stereotype, and amazingly enough such characters are usually very popular with boys and men, because it’s not ‘being caring’ that they hate, but the humiliation of men in such roles. Some women want men to aspire to be rubbish: to know that women are superior and that there is no hope for them except to pray for mercy. This is not a mature attitude towards other humans.

Related to this is the insidious idea of women having it all. Women were held back in their careers, but if we just remove sexism they can be bosses, mothers, wives, friends all at once. Make a woman a boss and she remains a perfect mother, in charge of the home as well, superior in all ways to a husband who is now a waste of space… a hopeless fiction that can never be true. Modern work requires time; being a parent requires time; housework requires time; friendships require time. Work and parenting will absorb as much time as you can give them. More time means more chance of doing well. By depicting women having it all, not only are women enjoined to try to achieve something impossible (and feel bad when they cannot), but men are necessarily also sidelined. Good relationships, in any context, share the burden. People specialise in different things.

If a woman specialises in earning money at a high-powered job (which overwhelmingly require workers to donate their free time to already-rich bosses to achieve the job and to remain in it) then she necessarily cannot specialise in parenting too. A partnership should depict not a flailing husband incapable of undertaking this woman’s role, but a man equal to the task he has set himself. Writers struggle to balance characters, and advertisers know that women make most purchasing decisions, but selling a lie harms us all.

 

                This is a common theme: that men’s suffering is often regarded as due punishment for the suffering of women. It requires roughly 200 milliseconds of thought to realise that the men who are suffering are not the ones who benefit (most) from women’s suffering. The men who rule us; the very rich and very powerful; are not the men feeling lost and alone, despised by the world for their privilege even though their suffering is real.

                Feminism has developed the concept of ‘microaggressions’ to describe many minor, almost insignificant experiences that add up to a very different life. Feminism has also created the concept of ‘lived experience’, which in its best use is intended to encourage us not to dismiss other people’s judgements of their lives just because we are unfamiliar with them. (In its worst form it’s a post-truth demand to be believed despite all evidence.)

 

Return to the theme of social privilege   

                I divided our lives into two realms, work and personal, because it is inarguable that women have been worse off at work. There are very few things that disadvantage men specifically, although plenty of things that are disadvantages that men can share in ( e.g. poverty, autism, honesty, outside interests). This is beginning to change, as young women are so much better educated than young men, and better trained to work in the collaborative, social world of the office.

                We work to live, and a major part of most people’s personal lives are relationships. As the hierarchy of needs makes clear, we cannot be fulfilled without relationships: both community and romantic relationships are vital to human flourishing.

                Men’s experiences in these realms are worse. I will point out some of them in a moment. But let’s be clear: the reply that ‘it’s men doing it to themselves’ is not only incorrect, but also a mean dismissal that demonstrates bigotry itself. We would never say of injustice “it’s only humans doing it to themselves”. Feminists rightly balk at making women responsible for overcoming their own oppression, noting that all of society should address societal and social failures. The same applies to male suffering.

                Also, when discussing the experiences of a whole sex we must necessarily deal with trends. There will be people whose experience is not normal, or who lead the way in living a better life. ‘Men’ and ‘women’ do not mean ‘all men’ and ‘all women’ respectively.

                 

Entitlement in dating

                Women may have had less physical and political power than men, but in the social world of dating and relationships they have the biological value: the ‘erotic capital’. A woman can bear children, and without her those children cannot be born. Any one man can have children, but without him another man will do about as well.

                Men seem to have a bigger sex drive than women, focussed on physical appeal. Many men have a desire for sex like they hunger for food: they feel it whether or not it is likely to be satisfied, but when something that looks good is right there then they will be even more aware of the unmet need.

                Women abuse this biological difference with expectations of payment. Some do it openly and honestly, asking for currency, but more often there is a list of behaviours and payments-in-kind. A man must make the approach, he must arrange the date, he must impress, he must buy dinner, he must follow up… a woman may play games, waiting for him to get in touch first, prove his devotion, wrap himself around her little finger.

                I exaggerate, and yet the infamous book ‘the game’ telling women how to manipulate men, or its cousin ‘Honey Money’, about abusing women’s erotic capital, are not roundly condemned for the sexist, deceitful, immoral tomes that they are. Women are entitled to behave badly; to turn up late, make demands, ‘flake’ and string people along and put in little to no effort. It might not always work, just as men with privilege do not always get precisely what they want, but they have the privilege of being allowed to try such behaviour without much reprimand or disapproval. There are women out there today publicly complaining that men don’t work as hard as they apparently used to: that once upon a time a woman just sat around, turned a man down and then had him plan a sequence of fantastic experiences for her. Many women resent the need for effort in dating; they feel entitled to have good things come to them. Bring back the good old days when men behaved as the inferior servants that they once were!

                Men are required by society to pursue women; women encourage further pursuit, welcoming it even after apparently rejecting the advance, because they wanted greater effort in ever more impressive forms and idolise such romantic gestures in commentary, books and film. Yet women also despise unwanted attention, insist that ‘no’ means no and mock men’s ham-fisted attempts to impress in exactly the ways idolised in media.

This a long video demonstrating that women can be entitled too by quoting ridiculous messages they have sent to potential dates. Women expect to be chased; they do rude things to see if they can get away with it, tell men they’re not good enough to date them and they’re not interested, just to get the men to be more desperate. This is at odds with respecting someone else’s autonomy: a man can either accept her decision and move on, or try to persuade her despite (in these cases, but not always) explicit statements that he should not. Yet when men do accept the woman’s rejection and walk away, women can be as rude and nasty as any man’s reply to a woman’s rejection.

                Men are left doing all the work, in exchange for all the uncertainty, mockery and belittlement. While one part of society tells them to buy a woman’s love with displays of effort and money, another is telling them that this is immature machismo. These two parts of society should talk directly rather than fighting a proxy war through men. Feminists have the right of it: it is immature machismo and deeply unromantic. We need to tell the sexist women out there who continue to promote and respond to it.

                Society projects in our stories how relationships should go. Feminists complain about women being the prize for heroes: a valid complaint about how saving the world seems to coincide with relationship success when really it should be the antagonists, with their wealth and power, who have the relationship success. But women still get away with regarding their own desires for romance; to be a princess swept away by a handsome love-bomber; as reasonable and mature, while men’s desire for sex, both inside and outside close relationships, is immature.

                That’s privilege right there: ‘my desires are socially acceptable and therefore mature: your desires are invalid and childish’. I don’t know if women really do naturally feel desperate to get attached, married and sprog in rapid succession, or whether this is at least in part programming by society. I do know that it chimes less well with male biology and with my own desires. Why is the more feminine relationship a ‘serious’ one, as if the rest of us are somehow joking with our own lives? If we just get more in tune with ourselves we will miraculously become more in tune with societal expectation? The infernal arrogance to assume that your desires are the only valid ones and everyone else should support and agree is privilege as bad as any male entitlement.

                I am familiar with women’s complaints that men want to win a beautiful princess and can’t deal with ‘real women’. And yet it is up to right-wing loons and rare commentators (often ignored or booed by mainstream progressive campaigners) to point out that male beauty standards are ridiculous; or that women looking for a 6-foot man with a six-pack and six-figure salary is truly outrageous entitlement. To be fair, some women saying this are trying to be ironic… and yet feminists are very good at pointing out how men being ironically sexist are often trolls using irony as an excuse, or else contributing to a world in which people who really believe this junk feel validated. I do not see many women jumping on this sort of ‘irony’ as sexist or unproductive: it is valid aspiration, an assertion of girl power and body positivity. Any woman can achieve her dreams! I have seen women on dating apps whose profiles show unattractive pictures and low-paid jobs telling men who aren’t the top 1% of looks and income to give up and go away.

                This is entitlement: the belief that you are worth so much more than you are; that you are not the equal of others, but superior to most or all. The gap between aspiration and entitlement is an interesting one. Do you hope, or believe that you deserve? The question applies to men and women: do those basement nerds really feel entitled to a hot girlfriend, or do they merely dream and resent the knowledge that it is only a dream? Some feminist commentators certainly refer to ‘men feeling entitled to a girlfriend’, but I haven’t perused men’s dating profiles to see lots of poor men telling women on low salaries to get lost.

                Women struggle on dating apps, I know. It’s hard to find a good man amongst all the chaff who send nude pictures of genitalia as a way of demonstrating that they are too illiterate to use language. Some of humanity never evolved past the pictograms of millennia ago… It’s tiresome to have people compliment one’s looks as an opening line 100 times and try to work out which has any character worth spending time with.

                I recently spoke to a friend on a dating app who replied to a man she liked some time after he sent her a message, because his message had got lost in her inbox. Most men could never lose a message in an inbox; a man can view tens of thousands of profiles, approve half of them, match with hundreds, send messages to all (because he has to waste the time sending the first message) and receive a handful of replies. After all these hours and this filtering, most of these conversations will be pointless: one-word messages from a woman putting in a second of effort to string him along; the occasional woman looking to elicit compliments and worship to soothe her insecurities but with no intention to meet or know the man; and, of course, of those who are genuine, not all will turn out to be compatible!

                Who oppresses whom? The women who get dick pics in their search for love, or the men who get nothing for far more effort?

                There is a dating app that forces women to send the first message. The intent was to ensure that men couldn’t flood women’s inboxes, saving them harassment and filtering problems, and sparing men the trouble of sending lots of messages to women who were not interested. Women’s answer? Send one-word first messages to overcome the app’s ban, but then continue as normal, ignoring most, stringing many along, not engaging in conversation with most of the men they messaged. Was this men oppressing women? This is women using their power to make life worse for other people and overcome a system intended to address the power imbalance.

                Women are entitled to put no effort into a partnership of supposed equals, instead dreaming of being whisked away by a handsome and rich prince… and at the same time criticising the male equivalent of being caught up in the life of a ‘manic pixie dream girl’. Women get to demand their whims be satisfied, to sit in judgement over others’ attempts to impress them, and even to mock and deride genuine and well-meaning attempts to engage on roughly these terms. He got flowers! How cringe! And if a man dares to express an interest in, say, sex more than emotional subservience, well that’s not a valid desire. It’s evil and immature and manipulative. We don’t tell gay people that they are evil and immature for wanting what they want… but if you don’t fancy being the servant who works to impress your girlfriend, or the sap who slots into her dream of a marriage and family but is merely a tool for her to achieve those true loves, many women will regard this as unacceptable heresy to be stamped out.

                Why does anyone try to win another person’s approval? Because the value from gaining enough approval to spend more time with the person outweighs the effort and indignity of pursuing approval. But it remains an indignity. We know this from workplace studies where people with the power to control their own work are happier and healthier. It still holds true in the social world too. Poor people are more stressed. And men face the same uncertainty and indignity, compounded by women who both expect to be won and yet mock attempts to win them.

                I know that women can resent the need to dress up and look good, and a few women do resent not being able to ask men out without a risk of him thinking that’s a man’s role. I know that there are women out there who do not play with men’s attention and have enough integrity not to lead men on or laugh at them for continuing to try. I am depicting men’s experience of dating despite the existence of such women and despite women’s feelings of oppression. If a behaviour is widespread enough it can warp everyone’s experience without being universal; and one group’s suffering does not mean that non-group people must all be better-off. Bad systems can hurt everyone!

                There are people out there using the dog-whistle ‘sprinkle sprinkle’ to indicate gold-digging: an idea that men are there to be used and abused for their money. This is as inhuman as Andrew Tate; a pig-butchering fraud on an individual scale. It should be decried as such, but I must have missed the outcry.

                If we believe in the fundamental moral worth of all human beings; in equality and fairness; then we should recognise this mistreatment for what it is. Feminists argue that women are trapped in such behaviour by patriarchal and misogynist attitudes; that women who express interest in a man, make advances and follow up are deemed to be too assertive and manly. There is indeed that risk, as there are plenty of male and female bigots out there who struggle with the idea of women as truly independent human beings. I would have thought, however, that this would be a happy coincidence, weeding out men not worth a woman’s time… unless the really happy coincidence is that this bigotry justifies women’s laziness and not pulling their weight. Furthermore, the fact that one cannot fight injustice without some sort of response or penalty is not an argument that injustice does not exist.

It is not, despite some feminists’ claims, ‘men do this to themselves’; it is ‘some men do bad things to women; and some women do bad things to men’. If women encouraged each other to ask men out, using their ‘girl power’ to manage potential rejection, the bigoted men would have a hard time making just one of them suffer for it. But girl power is not to be used to break a cycle of harm to all; it seems to be reserved for the war between the sexes, not the war of humanity against its universal darker side. ‘Patriarchy’ has historic value as a term, but really we’re looking at a huge range of social pressures to conform to rigid, foolish roles that coerce men and women, and harm men and women. Using a gendered word such as patriarchy misrepresents the analysis or misleads readers.

                Women being passive and unhelpful leads to less cautious, thoughtful men over-pursuing them. Who can blame those men for their harassment when a lack of interest can sometimes be a giggling attempt at flirting rather than an actual lack of interest? When ‘no’ often means ‘try harder’? When ‘I hate you and would never date you’ occasionally means ‘I actually want you but I’d like you to abase yourself’? Is that women hurting women? I think that those men should have some awareness and give up; and I also think that women should stop encouraging bad behaviour. The cycle of behaviour perpetuates itself and has roots in both men’s and women’s behaviour. It is not men oppressing women, nor the reverse, but humanity harming itself through shared thoughtlessness and conformism.

In Relationships

                Once people are in relationships, women still have the power, according to media and online commentary. I cannot judge the world’s relationships except through such representation, as I haven’t visited a thousand couples and observed their intimate and personal interactions.

                Yes, there are abusive men who cleverly coerce, bully and threaten women into co-operation and submission. We draw the line of criminality at physical aggression, but that leaves plenty of room for coercion, bullying and other mistreatment. Men, being bigger and stronger, will inevitably be most of the criminals, as any woman tempted to physical aggression will have to overcome the very real prospect of losing a fight even before the police arrive.

                But if I look at fictional depictions of relationships, I don’t see much to hope for for men. Many involve a litany of disappointment, emotional blackmail, shaming and humiliation that looks like a sad life. The problem that I see is that a lot of this isn’t regarded as abuse: it’s normalised. Abuse is when men are violent. So it’s inevitable that the statistics will show that men are abusers! But if we think about what actually lessens someone’s quality of life, women having the power at home and using it (even out of frustration) to bully their partners still harms men. Bullying harms even when not physical.

                There are many small stereotypes and larger guiding principles of how we expect relationships to go that privilege women. Endless little moments of emotional blackmail that add up to a mess. Another example might be the question “Do you only want me for sex?” This shames a man’s sex drive that he cannot help having; and it shames him for displaying it in the most appropriate context (someone with whom he has or intends to have a consensual sexual relationship). I have seen and heard it come up when there have been many non-sexual interactions but the woman does not feel like it at that moment.

                It’s an example of a power imbalance. Women are often more desirable in relationships. Men have the sex drive, and we see in recent psychological studies, more need for romantic relationships to fill the yawning gulf of loneliness that society inflicts on men. That means that women can get away with such (passive-)aggressive approaches, inflicting shame, holding the relationship itself as a prize to be won by conforming to control. It’s a small example, one that many women might not ever think they have done. But for many men their everyday experience of relationships is this sort of low-level emotional abuse.

                Feminists like to remind men that men fear rejection, but that women fear murder, and thereby imply that men’s concerns are negligible. But how many women really fear murder every day, and are they justified? How many women were murdered last year – on first dates by strangers; and by partners they were physically controlled by?

                We have little data about lower level abuse in relationships. We know that the worse end of the spectrum is done much more by men to women, and more by men to other men than by women to men. But as we get less criminal, we get much more of it. Of my various dalliances and relationships I would say that the slim majority, by time and number, involved women who tried coercion and manipulation; and almost all those which were only a few dates and never got very far also involved such behaviour.

                I would call it bullying. We know that bullies are bad people and that victims suffer, even when no violence is involved. But when it’s a widespread approach to relationships people deem it to be unquestionable, especially if it’s men suffering. It’s not ‘right-on’ to think about men suffering or women being part of oppression rather than universally the victims.

                It is normal for women to demand that men check-in when out; to demand communication on their terms (i.e. ridiculously frequently with low response times); to threaten to forbid the use of a shared bed, or to lock a man out. Men sleeping on the sofa is a regular part of popular culture, being in the doghouse for myriad sins, as if the home is not actually his and using what he co-owns is a privilege, not a right. It’s not a funny joke: it’s condoning abuse. There will always be examples where a man has been evil enough to deserve far worse. But there are plenty where he has not: where it is a punishment for disobedience to his ‘partner’.

                Which is worse: the one big, rare event or the everyday grind of a lesser existence? Go to a chronic pain clinic and you'll find at least as many depressed people as in any intensive care ward. Progressive campaigners invented the term ‘microaggression’ to refer to the calculus of myriad small things adding up to a very different experience. It applies to men’s experience of social life, an integral part of human flourishing. Not just being manipulated, but the absence of approval or even liking.

                Men are required to bear their own burdens. Men and women alike regard it as unmanly to seek support or validation through extensive discussion, and so men are pressured into keeping quiet. Where a good life would be tackled with a network of support and expertise, men are much more alone. There was an infamous video released by a crying transgender man who had liked the idea of being manly, but didn’t realise how every day, every moment, social interaction is less, and less pleasant. Where women have supportive phone calls, brief moments or comments of support and validation, men live in an empty wilderness.

                Not just a racial subset of men. Amia Srinivasan recites the story of an Asian (oriental in Br. Eng.) man who at 12 had heard his sister tell their mother that she would never date an Asian man because they are unattractive. She notes that there is no right to have others feel a certain way towards you: men are not entitled to sex from women, nor are Asian men entitled to feel attractive, nor are trans women entitled to have lesbians date them. I would add that nor are ugly women entitled to male desire, no matter how much body positivity there is. We can question the forces that make people withhold feelings and behaviour that we suspect they would naturally want to give, but not force them to do anything they do not choose.

                We feel for this man, as for ugly women who have been insulted and devalued. This is most men’s everyday lives too. Unwanted, unattractive, socially unwelcome. This video is one man listing all nine compliments he has ever received in his life. At best, men are another face in the crowd, average and meaningless; at worst, a symbol of oppression despite never having wronged anyone, an object of scorn or revulsion for merely trying to exist and pursue a happy life according to the rules of a messed-up world. And what do some feminists say to men who complain about being lonely and unwanted? ‘Be better people and maybe people would want you’. Try saying something so cruel to a fat woman and see how those same feminists react.

 There is plenty of dating advice out there trying to persuade men to recognise that the women they want to date get compliments every few minutes and they’re not special for saying something nice. This applies in reverse. Women should recognise that men do not get compliments. That no-one checks in to see if they doing well; no-one notices or cares if a man is sleepy or ill. If his shirt is crumpled it’s because he’s lazy and uncommitted, never a sign that he’s struggling.

We hear from epidemiologists and anthropologists that loneliness is a big killer. It’s widespread enough a message that The Economist cited it in a podcast just this week. It disproportionately affects men, but it’s not systemic sexism because … because so many people think that men and women are enemies and that to help men means taking from women. And young men, consciously or unconsciously, absorb this attitude from pretend feminists and rightly conclude that since we’re enemies they should fight back… and that means misogyny and hatred.

Every single woman who self-righteously promotes, or acquiesces to, an idea that is pro-woman but not pro-justice pushes more men into misogyny and reciprocal hatred. It doesn’t matter if she has her own litany of sexist experiences to point to: if she lacks the self-control to distinguish between psychological revenge against a whole category of people and real justice then she is not a trustworthy advocate of policy. The craving to balance global karma is real, but it is not balanced by hurting the wrong people, nor by putting the right people in a group with people you can actually punish. A lesson that stretches beyond sexist campaigning…

Hobbies

                Men have few friends, an inferior role to play in relationships, which are expected to conform to women’s needs, and no support. They are unhealthier, live shorter lives, commit suicide vastly more and are the vast majority of rough sleepers. Men fare far worse in education. Men are taught to be buttoned-up, macho idiots, and the only alternative some feminists promote is for them to be ‘60s women: housebound baby-raisers, in touch with emotions while women do all the important and interesting stuff. Men are often portrayed as incompetent even when in such roles. That’s not a real alternative to machismo. That’s misandry disguised as social progress.

                How can men deal with such an unpleasant life? How about some escapism? A jolly adventure film, some wargaming, drinking his sorrows away with his friends? No, that’s immature and not acceptable. He must embrace his impoverished life with no respite. There are women who will throw out a man’s trading cards or toy miniatures; women who resent his time at a pub with men because it’s not enough that he wants her as his wife: he must want only what she wants as well, subsume his desires to hers. This is a remarkably common refrain: ‘give up your joys in life because I do not like them’. ‘I will insult these things that bring you joy because I am the only arbiter of what is mature and reasonable’. 'I will not support your happiness because your only purpose is to make me happy'. Entitlement and privilege writ large and yet still overlooked by society.

                Action films have been regarded as the worthless cousin to real filmography for a long time. I gave up on film reviews even when I was teenager because the critics would offer something unhelpful such as ‘it’s a bit of spectacle I suppose’ or ‘I hated it but all action films are rubbish so go for it if you want’. The snobby lovers of high drama couldn’t distinguish between the taught, exciting Die Hard and the continuous plot hole of Star Trek (2009). This remains the attitude, with extended franchises ruined by people who, I assume, think ‘well it’s only an action film so if we string some CGI spectacle together it'll be fine’.

                This scorn is also applied to science fiction and fantasy, for no good reason. Maybe it’s a coincidence that these have more male followers, but nonetheless men’s experience is that their interests are regarded as lowest-brow, something to enjoy despite derision, rather than with enthusiastic support for something that brings them happiness.

                It’s immature to want one person to satisfy all your needs in life. It’s immature to go gaga over a pretty frock. It’s immature to enjoy romcoms. It’s not only immature but a sign of latent sadism to enjoy all the conflict of soap operas (or their modern equivalent, ‘reality’ television shows). It’s immature to enjoy gossip columns or follow celebrity news. In fact, everything women enjoy is immature. They need to grow up and know who Leman Russ and Urza are. Yippee-Ki-Yay.

Self-image         

                Some people are predicting that body dysmorphia will soon be more prevalent amongst men than women. The ideal male body is now something that can only be achieved with dangerous drugs. Women might think that it’s only fair, having aspired to busty skinniness for years, but fairness in suffering is hardly ideal (and steroids with strict diet and exercise are more harmful than strict diet).

                Women online are laughing at the ‘dad bods’ of famous actors who are actually fit and healthy, but simply not utterly shredded all year long (an impossible look to maintain, even with all the unhealthy short-cuts). Body positivity tries to shame men for finding ugly women unattractive and yet at the same time tells them that the healthiest, fittest men are not attractive enough. Only steroids and dehydration will do. The truth is that if you can run 10k in 45 minutes and/or bench press your body weight your body is probably great and anyone claiming otherwise is a fool.

                Plenty of feminists have proposed that men find their self-worth in helping women; that this would go some way to undoing the injustices inflicted on women. This would be much like telling those same feminists to find their self-worth in giving me money, as it would go some way towards alleviating my own suffering in life. Yes, it’s a worthy cause. No, they (probably) didn’t cause my suffering and are not responsible for making it good.

                Does helping women now undo historic wrongs done to women 30-1,000 years ago? Is there a feminist out there who has more female ancestors than I do? If there are women alive who have suffered from sexism, how can we measure and make good a generally low value from life? If only there were some universal way of comparing the value of different things… ah yes: we would find ourselves addressing poverty.

Attribution: men at the root of all evil?

                Middle-class, well-off feminists will accurately note that a woman can be well off but potentially better-off without having been held back by sexism. If we’re prioritising, we need to ask whether they suffer more than someone who is not well off at all. And a secondary question is whether people are only held back by sexism, or whether the array of characteristics that unfairly reduce someone’s prospects is so large that picking just one of them (i.e. sex) to redress alone is itself unfair.

                A moderately successful woman might care about how she is everything the male candidate was, but a man turned her down because he thinks men do his job better. A black man might care about race. I care about anti-autistic, anti-honesty tests in which the majority of interview questions should not be answered directly and literally; and selection processes which benefit liars, whether in person or on CV. Underqualified charlatans with good sales patter do well. Some feminists see this as the ‘white male character’. I assure them that this is as bigoted, offensive and unjustified as saying that women are mindless baby machines who do not belong in responsible jobs.

                Yet again, we have an attribution error. The result might be that white men do well, but it is not necessarily direct racism and sexism. It is that rich white men are taught to be, and allowed to get away with being, underqualified charlatans, reliant on an easygoing yet assertive manner and on social capital. It is that interviewers are not good at selection and use proxy measures such as confidence, or similarity to themselves (and they’re doing the job well, right?) to judge who will be best.

                I recently introduced two friends and explained to the woman that the man had previously experienced some trouble; he had been in the habit of getting drunk at the bar where we would meet and had been accused of intimidating women. Despite my assurances that this was entirely untrue and obviously far from his character, she seemed to believe it, saying that people can be like that.

                He was a big man. Perhaps his very presence would be intimidating to people thinking in those terms. But none of his behaviour ever was. Yet the ‘right-on’ approach is to assume that there is no smoke without fire; to ‘believe women’, not in the sense of trusting them enough to investigate their allegations, but in the sense that investigation is not necessary because they are always right. This is unjust, and one can demonstrate this by changing some of the story. It was actually a black man drunkenly talking about advanced mathematics and climate change at the bar. A black man regarded as intimidating by his mere presence in a white-dominated environment, with no behaviour ever cited to support this claim? The right-on crowd is much more likely to see the bigotry now.

                The modern world is full of reactionary people whose responses to historic injustices are themselves unfair: universalised inverse snobbery.

                Men must deal with such bigotry just as women have had to deal with the original sexism. Where we could identify human stupidity, often we seem to read about male stupidity. An endless litany of insulting one sex has already been decried by feminists as oppression that can warp people’s lives. They were talking about the oppression of women, but the point remains valid. I have already covered numerous examples of human stupidity being deemed masculine. For example, we have seen ‘getting butthurt by rejection and taking your pain out on someone else’, which it turns out women do too, now that they do more asking-out than they used to.

                If you are a brilliant person, you are more likely to get a senior role where you can influence narratives, be it as a writer, producer, executive, journalist or anything similar. If you are also heterosexual, as most people are, then you are likely to try to find partners of the opposite sex, and because you are brilliant you will find most of the people you try to get to know intimately inferior, and most of the people you therefore know to be inferior will be of the opposite sex. It is a natural consequence of being brilliant (or pretty decent: truly brilliant people will have realised all this already). The same applies to youth of today behaving worse. People who have the platforms to make such moans are those who were probably better-behaved as children. They see the most misbehaving children of today (the rest don’t impinge on your consciousness) and compare them to themselves, the best-behaving children of yesteryear.

                There is no deterioration in moral standards; there is no cosmic superiority of one sex over the other. The apparent differences are what we would expect from the specific circumstances. Successful female writers might ‘know’ that men are idiots. The truth is that most humans are idiots. We should be wary of indulging in or seeing prejudice or conspiracy when things can be readily explained by stupidity. Stupidity is almost limitless: we should expect to find it everywhere, in larger amounts than any other factor.    

                I could add many more examples. Another might be ‘mansplaining’: the belief that once you know a little bit more than average you can lecture anyone on the assumption that they are average or below. I do believe that for various reasons we should expect men to do more mansplaining than women, but I have met plenty of women who thought that a few articles from glossy magazines (or their online equivalents) enabled them to offer opinions on diet, exercise and obesity to me, when for a few years I was an expert on such things (teaching medics at university), and I still remember enough to see through bunk. I have been lectured on hiking by 6-mile-a-day weekenders; on running by 10kph-is-sprinting jellybags and on acid-balancing diets by women who’ve never heard of breathing off CO₂.

                Should we coin pejorative terms labelling things as male even for actions that are universal but more often done by men? I think it makes people blind to the behaviour in women; it’s a discriminatory term. We have left-wingers who object to the idea of targeted police checks even if more black Americans are dealing drugs or more Muslims are Islamic terrorists; and left-wingers who agreed that monkeypox should be renamed M-pox just in case racists found the name tenuously racist. And yet not only are terms such as mansplaining accepted, but they are celebrated.

                There is a certain spiteful vitriol in such terms: a happiness at being able to be mean to someone, and a resentment at the possibility of having this outlet for inherent sadism taken away. If judging people by their group (which the judger categorises them into) is discrimination, it remains so even when you do it to others. I am not the first feminist to observe the 'psychic satisfaction of punishing men'. If I were to take the feminist approach, I would label this misandry. I am not so foolish. It is another universal human trait to feel pain and to cause pain in the world as a consequence, trusting in karma that it will all balance out. Sadly, however, balancing your own personal ledger of pain caused and punishment given without paying further attention to who is giving and receiving them is fundamentally unjust, and just like wealth, pain does not spread around evenly. It accumulates on the most disadvantaged.

                The world is complex. Not all men are evil, and not all men are better off than women. For every woman likely ever to read this, we can all imagine men in the world who are even worse off. Much of what is called feminism nowadays is self-interested sexism, done by women. Actual feminists seem to be silent about this; the promotion of women as a group benefits them, and putting men down feels good.

                That silence is why there is a backlash against feminism and wokery; when the rational ideals and carefully-argued concepts of justice get lost in self-interest and delusion, or are simply no longer enforced, then a progressive, good movement falls apart into the chaos of humanity and rivals such as Andrew Tate, Trump and Musk can easily dismiss the hypocrisy.

                It is hard to criticise those who are ostensibly on your side; to risk alienating hard-won supporters. All political movements must, to some extent, be broad coalitions of overlapping interests rather than cult-like slaves to one doctrine (although the modern world of Trump and wokery does seem to demand slavish faith). At the same time, though, to legitimately claim to be part of a movement one must understand and promote that movement’s belief. A Jesuit who went around telling people to turn the crosses upside down and hail Satan would not be long for the Catholic church, even though they agree with him that the cross and the devil are important and powerful.

                ‘Feminists’ who mistake demeaning men for being progressive are such a Jesuit’s equivalent for ideals of justice and fairness. It’s not valid self-assertion or reclamation of status, nor is it reasonable treatment for self-doubt. It’s sexism. Girl power seems to assume that women are all timid, morally doubtful in need of directed support that men do not need. So either women are inferior – a strange belief for a feminist! – or they are equal and ‘girl power’ is a discriminatory way to provide additional motivation while excluding others.

                I know the response. Historically, women have been less powerful than men and this overall detriment must be rectified. I agree that historically it has been the case and that in some limited circumstances in western countries it remains so. I do wonder why the phrase ‘girl power’ is so popular with progressives but ‘poor power’ (i.e. democracy, rule of law and regulation) does not have the same cultural and social grip. Is it perhaps because ‘girl power’ enhances the culture wars that distract us from real change, and therefore presents no great threat to the powerful people who should be our focus? Does poor power threaten the rich women who gain the most from ‘girl power’?

                The problem is not that Elon Musk and Donald Trump are men, nor that they are masculine (if you think that they are!). The problem is that Trump, Musk, Theresa May, Liz Truss,  Marine Le Pen, Georgia Meloni and many others are stupid ideologues who are touting inconsistent, damaging and harmful ideas either because they are too idiotic and ignorant to understand them well, or because of self-interest, or perhaps a deluded combination of both. These are not toxic men. Four of the six I have named are women.

                They, just like men, are caught up in a system of governance that allows ignorance, delusion, wealthy self-interest and incompetence to flourish in power. There is nothing masculine about this at all; any feminist who stretches the concept of masculinity that far has left biology, psychology and politics far behind and is an outright bigot.

                Patriarchy hurts everyone. Men are lonely and depressed and lack the social networks that provide support for such problems. Some women laugh at this: “not my problem”, they think: it’s men harming men, or harming themselves. They can form networks if they want. This is inconsistent with the usual feminist approach that teaching women to be passive, polite and self-effacing is a systemic problem holding them back. To be consistent that would be women harming themselves: they can be pushy if they want.

                I happen to agree that these roles are taught and enforced through social pressure, but that they should not be. Men should be encouraged to have and form social networks; and men should be taught to be self-effacing too, and arrogance and pushiness punished in everyone. Patriarchy is just a name given to a set of oppressive habits that overall keep some men in power. But it’s not andrarchy (rule of men): it’s a subset of men that have the power. The rest are disempowered too.

                What is masculinity?

                I guess we should ponder this briefly. Men are, biologically, expendable. One man can father many children; one woman always adds to a population’s fertility and losing her detracts from it. Men therefore naturally compete for a greater prize with greater risk. The winner might get a harem (or the equivalent; a pride of lionesses, a batch of fish roe etc.) and the loser gets nothing, possibly even dying.

                Men’s biology prepares them for this by making them more risk-taking, bigger and stronger, the better to get into such competition and win it. There is also greater variation, as men are expendable and therefore failed experiments are less damaging for the population.  This omits much detail, but captures the essence of biological difference. Everything else is horseshit: made up by people with an ideology to promote.

                Being bigger and stronger has mostly been a good thing, although is much less so in a world where most physical work is done mechanically and space and sustenance are expensive. Being risk-taking has a place in life, but the point of it, biologically, is to encourage rivalry, conflict and suffering to thin out the crowd for the benefit of the rest of the population. I could argue that to be masculine is to be a foolish expendable grunt, taking long-shots that serve the population in the hope of being the unlikely winner. Masculinity is about serving the collective; whereas being feminine gives a person limited but individual value.

                Anything else that we call masculinity is just coercion into conformity with someone else’s preferences.

Conclusion

                The ideal man, just like the ideal woman, is rational, thoughtful, civil, self-controlled, kind, emotionally stable and secure, patient and principled. This is what humans should be, plus extra characteristics for whatever their life goals are: well-read, fit, industrious, knowledgeable, caring and so on.

                Society does not encourage or even allow men to achieve this ideal, which would best ready them for happy lives. Men are lonely and isolated, vilified and scorned, bullied and emotionally rejected in relationships by the only people they get to be close to. They are taught to feel only anger and then hated for being aggressive. Men are given no tools for sociability, few outlets, and are even shunned if they do try to form adult friendships. Friendship between men and women who have relationships is often treated as suspicious. Our societal belief that one human being can be and should be everything to another; that there is a soul mate who can meet our every need; is idiotic and harms us all. Women want men to be dedicated and willing to sacrifice everything for them; and then complain that a man is a social burden who doesn’t have his own friends or contacts.

                There is little attention paid to such worries, and when social campaigners do think of it, they think meanly of their own psychological satisfaction in punishing mankind, creating humiliating and undignified role models in which men embrace or idolise inferiority and incompetence. Sometimes this is an ‘everyman’ protagonist who is outshone by a not-so-everywoman (c.f. Harry Potter or Sam Witwicky) and sometimes it is merely a mean aside in an article, promoting stay-at-home childcare to men, even when women have rejected being stuck at home and focussed only on children as a limited and demeaning existence.

                The enlightened and judicious use of power, including girl power, is to uplift all humanity. Of all humanity’s challenges, poverty and climate change are far and away the most important. A wealth tax and a carbon tax should be our priorities. That doesn’t mean that we can’t have time for other social issues, and when we do, we should be wise and compassionate in helping everyone, men and women, rather than jockeying for priority and stamping down on enemies who truly should and could be our allies in the fight against our own worst natures and the oligarchs who embody them.