World
(Photo: Alamy)
12 February 2023
7:30 PM
I hope I’ll be forgiven for not dropping my dog-eared copy of The Female Eunuch in sheer molten awe upon reading in the Times that ‘Courses for teachers on how to tackle Andrew Tate’s views are selling out as schools try to persuade teenage boys to shun so-called toxic masculinity.’ One teacher said, ‘Andrew Tate is just a personification of this rampant masculinity that’s existed in schools and been tolerated for years – boys harass and abuse peers and teachers and male teachers haven’t done enough to combat this. Schools have racism and homophobia policies but hardly any have sexism policies; it’s become naturalised.’
Better late than never, but it’s no good schoolteachers getting their knickers in a twist over one miserable little incel (Tate brings to mind the greatest ever Little Britain character who got away) when – since the birth of gangster rap (bitches and hoes), the growth of Islamophilia (M&S selling hijabs for three-year-olds) and the trans-activism of the 21st century which seeks to erase the very word woman from public life, a climate of woman-hating has been steadily building.
Music may be bad, films may be trash, but one thing we’re certainly living through is the Golden Age of Misogyny; indeed, a Rainbow Coalition of misogyny where fear and loathing of women unites millions of men who would otherwise have nothing at all in common.
We saw this when police and grooming gangs across this proud nation were united in the belief that raped and trafficked children were ‘white slags’ whose word was not to be trusted.
Misogyny is like Whack-A-Mole, popping up everywhere. We used to expect it from the Tories, but individuals in the Labour party have also recently demonstrated troubling behaviour.
Recently the Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle’s idea of an apology for acting in an aggressive way towards the Tory MP Miriam Cates during a parliamentary debate was saying that he had failed to control his ‘passion’ – a concerning excuse.
In a decade’s time there may well be none of what we widely recognise as feminists – people who put women’s rights at the centre of their concerns – in the Labour party, so widespread is the adoption of trans-maid ideology. The Peoples Party remains the only political party in the UK never to have had a female leader and the way things are going, it’s entirely likely that the first eventual one will have been born a man. I wonder if man-panderers like Lisa Nandy – who has said that male trans rapists should be allowed in women’s jails – will think that failing to support some of the most vulnerable women in our society was worth it.
Centrists can display what could be perceived as a shocking level of misogyny – think of David Lammy accusing women who don’t want to strip off in front of a stranger with a penis of being ‘dinosaurs…hoarding rights’ – but of course the extreme left is far worse. One of the reasons I’ve always viewed what we may call wokeness as a reactionary rather than a revolutionary instinct is due to the extremely short shrift it gives women’s rights.
The trans-activists of recent years are another example of misogyny popping up where it was least expected, but as befits the only ‘liberation’ movement born from and fuelled by pornography, the monstrous regiments of the Stunning & Brave are chock-a-block with woman-haters.
Porn is yet another arena in which men who might otherwise be each other’s worst enemies appear to find mutual ground – like that legendary football match between the British and German soldiers during world war one, only this time women are the thing being kicked around. Whether it’s Pornhub declaring loyalty to BLM while touting numerous videos depicting the humiliation of black women, Tory MPs watching it in parliament (‘looking for tractors’) or the police watching it at work when they should be attempting to clear up the all-time low in rape convictions, the horn of pornucopia is a bottomless well of nourishment which fuels woman-hating.
How much easier to blame everything on Andrew Tate than look at the humdrum hatred all around us, though it was amusing seeing liberals tie themselves in knots late last year when he converted to Islam, the Muslim Abu Yusuf Al Hanbali noting that Tate was drawn to Islam by its ‘uncompromising stance against toxic feminism, LGBT and the liberal world order’.
The Great and the Good have found their emblematic Bad Guy in Tate and are now busy signalling their virtue about it. Doing so is easier than dismantling the vast structure of misogyny which at times can seem overwhelming. A baby girl is four times as likely to be sexually abused than a boy from the day she is born. As a toddler she is treated to Drag Story Time, where she will learn that the state of being a woman is inherently ridiculous, and that though Blackface is something people of colour quite rightly get upset about, Womanface is something she’ll have to learn to laugh at if she doesn’t want to be appear a humourless scold. As a pre-teen schoolgirl at her most self-conscious, she’ll find that boys who say they are girls can spy on her at her most vulnerable. If she seeks to enjoy her own body – which often appears to be public property, judging from the number of adult men who harass her in public – through the apparently innocent medium of sport, males claiming to be females will easily beat her. Never mind, here come her fertile years – she can prepare herself for the biting, slapping and choking which pornography portrays as a normal part of the dating game, as well as revenge porn and deep faking of her beauty in its prime. She may think getting married provides a safe haven from the sorrows of the singleton life – but she’d better not displease her lord and master, or she risks becoming one of the two women a week killed by ‘partners’ and exes. Having survived the menopause, she might believe that her experience may lead to the kind of respect older men get – but no, she’s mocked as an old witch, forever in the wrong, taunted for her very ability to stay alive by angry young men wearing black nappies on their faces and calling her a TERF. Finally in her dotage she will experience a better outcome than men, living longer – let’s hope the BBC don’t put her in jail for forgetting to pay her licence fee, as a whopping 76 per cent of those prosecuted for this deadly crime are female.
Of course I exaggerate – but if this was happening to any other group but women, there would be rioting in the street. And don’t believe for a moment that it can’t get worse. Look at photographs of young Iranian women in the twentieth century, on the beach and at college, their faces turned to the sun. Think of all the American women who had safe abortions, now criminalised. They thought that Gilead could never come, too.
What can women do to fight this? Never vote for a political party which puts the feelings of men before the rights of women. Don’t #BeKind – it’s not kindness, it’s cowardice, and you’re selling out the women who were prepared to be hated to win. And don’t believe for a minute that – just because Andrew Tate is behind bars – this tsunami of melting-pot misogyny will not come for you.
Nelle's journey 