Why we can't talk about men's issues

 Summarized in 6 minutes.

 

The Force is Female

 So Kennedy is doubling down on the whole direction Star Wars is taking.

The problem is not that there are girls playing with our toys -Star Wars has always been inclusive, no matter what certain media organizations claim. Reeva, Rey, Rose, that purple-haired admiral, and the rest were not reviled because they were women and or black. There were plenty of women and non-white characters before and since who were absolutely adored by the very same toxic fans who hate the second-hand Inquisitor, Ms Mary Sue Skywalker and the rest. It has been talked about why the sequel trilogies were horrible, why the new series are trash (with the exception of the Mandalorian, which is mediocre, but enjoyable - although...) so that is not the point here.

The point is that falling profits from movie tickets, from merchandise, from theme parks matter not - they are pushing the same idiotic strategy to make sure Star Wars die completely. (Well, Mando, which was "the" successful show so far, is turning into a Bo-Katan show now, too, and viewership is falling...) 

Not sure what is going on, honestly. As with many things it seems like the inmates took over the asylum. The people who make decisions are absolutely distanced from the real world, they seem to have no idea about the franchise they are leading, and they do not seem to care about profits. There were so many squandered opportunities to create truly great shows, movies, whatever -and they conscientiously thrown everything into the gutter, and went with the "strong female character takes over from the incompetent original male character". Guess what. People do not like their beloved characters deconstructed, dragged into the mud so that new ones can "take over" without actually earning their place. We saw a Han Solo that reverted to his old scheningans becoming a deadbeat father, a failure in all fronts. Luke Skywalker became cynical pessimist who is ready to kill the son of his sister and his best friend because he had a bad dream, and then goes off sulking alone. (Don't worry, Rey will create that Jedi Academy for you, old man.) And so on and so forth. For some reason people do not like this, do not buy the tickets, the merchandise. Yes, a wider audience will go to the movies -but franchises are not sustained by casual viewers. They are sustained by those people Disney reviles -the fans.

This is truly puzzling because so far it seemed like these high level decision makers are perfectly fine with corrupting anything in the name of profit. But now they behave like full-blown activists - very much like the revolutionaries of old in the USSR and China who were full of great ideas and disregard of how the real world actually works. The results are usually catastrophic - in this case it merely leads to the death of a franchise and the lay-off of seven thousand (!) people. Obviously this number does not include those who are responsible for steering the ship into the rocks. Those people will not be fired; they will get a cushy bonus, and maybe a golden parachute, so they can try their hands on ruining another franchise in a different company.

So apparently men are to blame for the Mating Gap

 As an upcoming book states, there is a lack of eligible men for these women to have babies with. (There are so many gaps now - there is an opportunity for a dirty joke here for sure.)

Obviously. The author is a professor of anthropology at Yale, after all, so she must know.

Now before we go further I want you to imagine the following scenario (and I know it is going to be a controversial and strenuous analogy, but bear with me). A historian wants to understand the reasons of the collapse of the Third Reich, so what does he (or she) do? Read all the interviews, speeches, memoirs about what Hitler thought the reasons were, and then writes a book that "the Jews were behind it".

This is literally the methodology. As the author says, she gathered egg freezing stories from 150 American women and analyzed them. 

And obviously the results are (drum roll):

• Men who are reluctant to partner with high-achieving women, leaving these women single for many years.
• Men who are unready for marriage and children, often leading to relationship demise.
• Men who exhibit bad behavior, including infidelity and ageism, which often leads to relationship instability and rupture.

So, as we know, it is all men's fault. The first point is patently false -there are lots and lots of studies showing the opposite, as in women are reluctant to engage with men under their own status while the opposite is not true. Heck, even the Guardian (which was very enthusiastic about writing about this issue highlighted in the book) wrote about it. 

I am fairly certain if you ask incels why they can't get a partner you will get a similar list, but obviously those basement-dwelling jerks would be wrong. For some reason people tend to rationalize why they are not to blame. Who knew. So it is very striking to base your methodology on accepting anything your subjects say on face value. And also not correcting for the fact that egg freezing is something that is only a serious reality for about 1% of the population. This is the very definition of Grievance Studies at work -it is men who cheat, it is men who refuse to settle down, it is men who are ageist and refuse to date higher status/earning women. All of which is patently false, or ignores the current reality of how the "new" society (patterns in education, economics, etc.) -and feminism itself-  disenfranchised men, and made marriage less than attractive. Or simply ignores the fact that women seem to have unrealistic expectations.

There are other voices that provide explanation about the "death of marriage" -and it ain't those blasted men who refuse to grow up and cheat with everyone with a vagina. They come both from the left and right.

Now, there are three things to be mentioned here. 

One is that the patently anti-scientific grievance-based social "science" is still in the rage, even in the highest institutions. (Although the fact that George Bush managed to graduate from Yale puts a lie to the supposed high standards of this institution...) This does not bode well for the future as often these questionable "studies" form the basis of policies and provide an endless supply of angry, radicalized upper-middle class crowd, which, when they get into a position of power (which they do due to their privilege of having connections), they will go full into activism mode. We have seen this at Disney (crashing and burning popular franchises), but even (perhaps) in the banking sector. (Obviously a collapse this magnitude is not going to be a single-cause one, but it would not be surprising if we learned that the leaders were happily doing their little activism projects while their ship was sinking -due to their poor, activism-driven decisions...) I am very interested (well, desperate really) to see this sort of activism sweeping into the fields of "hard" sciences (which it already has begun), because when engineers, scientists and doctors are not chosen based on merit, you will have a catastrophe at your hands - as we have seen with ideologically-driven experiments, like Communism, Nazism, and so on and so forth. And you can't make a logical argument against identity-politics deciding who should become, say, a neurosurgeon. After all, you can't argue that it is fine to have crappy writers, politicians, economists, businessperson, etc. chosen based on their identity (the whole equity, diversity and inclusion stuff) but you can't have it with professions where it actually matters... It either matters everywhere or nowhere. So enjoy your diversity hire engineer designing the airplane you are sitting on. It seems like the inmates are taking over the asylum. 

So that is one big problem. The second issue is that these hacks completely discredit sciences. I know it is just social sciences, not hard sciences, but these obvious distortions coming from academia will tarnish every other fields of science -immunology and climatology included- giving fodder to the other group anti-intellectuals on the Right. (Because make no mistake: identity politics is by definition anti-intellectual.)

The third: if you want to help these very rich, powerful women, who find that there are very few richer and more powerful men for them to date, well, perhaps, you should not engage in misguided finger-pointing... Not surprisingly these powerful men tend to date  younger women (as in the case of DiCaprio, many of them sequentially), without a financial risk to the fruits of their hard work. It certainly makes you feel better about yourself, and you can imagine yourself as fighting the good fight (because actually fighting the good fight, for example for the women of Africa, the Middle East and the rest, would be hard), but it will not help those women you profess to be wanting to help. It will make them even more miserable.

So for the love of god, please stop lying. And do not tarnish sciences like this. 

Depp and Heard again - #believeallwomen and the hypocrisy of reporting

I know. It is a bit tiring to talk about these two: this mess of a trial did bring out a lot of dirty laundry apart from the whole domestic violence issue which makes you really re-evaluate what you feel about the rich and privileged. In short: not good. They are frankly disgusting, and it is obscene how much money they waste on menial, stupid things. But bear with me; this Depp vs Heard situation is a perfect demonstration of what is wrong with today's so-called progressives.

Variety came out with an article discussing whether Depp's career survives this trial, and there were a couple of issues I could not help but notice.

Let's forget the fact that the author only took look at this mess from one perspective: Amber Heard's. We can't even entertain the notion that perhaps Depp may be innocent, and the woman is lying. In fact, all the people who are quoted are staunchly on the side of Heard.

But the real interesting part comes when Allred is quoted. You know, when people say #believeinallwomen was never about believing whatever women said? Well, this is what Allred has to say about this

“I look forward to the day where it doesn’t take 10 or 20 women for one women to be believed, but I’m still not sure if that’s going to be enough,” Allred says. “We’ll have to see how far we’ve really come in 2020. As much as we think we’re progressive, culturally, there is still a lot of bias against women – especially if she makes any accusation against a man, and especially if that man is a celebrity.”

So I guess no. It does mean that progress is when a woman accuses someone we automatically believe her, no trial necessary.

This is an interesting take in light of all the insistences to the contrary; I suspect this really is what these progressive fourth wave feminists truly believe. (But now desperately deny. Allred did not get the memo, apparently.)

The article is problematic from another angle as well. Nowhere is it discussed that Depp lost tremendous amount of money and a lot of opportunities due to mere accusations, had petitions to cancel his contract as a Dior celebrity, and overall his reputation took a deep dive, while Heard is still a Human Rights Champion for the Stand Up for Human Rights campaign by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) ambassador, and also is a L'Oreal spokesperson.

The sheer double standards of this does not occur for the author. It seems like the media is creating a reality independent of facts -a reality, that is more real than facts are, nevertheless. 

Gender pay gap and the case of who gets to the top

The narrative about gender pay gap has changed subtly over the last year or so; finally the flimsy argument not supported by actual facts, that "because of Patriarchy women get paid less for the same amount of work" has seem to be dropped; it's nice because literally nothing supports it. (But if you did not know: we have pocket money pay gap, too - again the evils of men suppressing women from an early age.)

The ONR's figures show that between the ages of 22 and 29 women earn 1.1% more than men of the same age, and between 30 and 39 women earn 0.2% more than men in the same age group. (Of course this is not a problem worth correcting.) This pay gap reduces and then reverses around the average age of having children. Yes, overall men earn more but that is because the pay gap flips before the higher earning years. Employers, however, are being gender blind on this issue, and simply basing decisions on productivity and output. Feminists can describe this as unarguably unfair and hence slander men as sexist or even misogynist but it is a grey area depending on your perspective on fairness. For instance is it fair to discriminate against someone who has more experience and fewer career breaks simply because they are a man?

When you compare apples to apples -same experience, same qualifications, IT companies (which supposed to be the epitomes of "Da Patriarchy", with all those spotty little nerds who break out in sweat whenever they see a woman) show no gender pay gap.

So finally the narrative is shifting; now even The Guardian admits (in contrast to previous articles) that the situation is not as clear-cut as women getting paid less for the same work. (It took about two decades, but finally data and facts overtake ideology. There is hope still. Next you're telling me that Climate Change is real...) The sneering condescension is actually ramped up, but there you go. It's somewhat ironic that finally they are getting closer to the "other" narrative, and admitting that the situation is more complex than the identity politics' response of "women are downtrodden", and yet being more hateful and confrontative. I think it's understandable (and even necessary) since they cannot possibly admit that "the other side" might have been right about something all along.

So what does it leave us with? Our feminist now scornfully explains (you can see this as "womansplaining") that the solutions should include societal changes - the very things that "the others" have said, since this is what the data suggested. Just to make it clear: she is explaining something that was constantly brought up to feminists as an alternative explanation to the disparity of pay between genders... in a tone that suggests that everyone else but her was stupid. I really do think it's a great example of the hitherto unidentified, but not unobserved womansplaining.

Yes we know. We kept telling you the very same thing while you called us misogynists. 

So there are a couple of issues here. Career choices - a difficult proposition. A woman who has no family has the same pay as a man. But can you negatively discriminate others so that you promote women who do have children? It is something that does need to be discussed; but the angry, straight-out hostile tone is not helpful -or even warranted. Interestingly these authors are looking at women in isolation when it comes to career choices and pay, instead of looking at them as part of a family unit. By taking a career break, they do impact their own earning potential; however the other member of this family unit can actually make up for the shortfall. Unless you gimp them as well, because "they're men, and they should also earn less even though they have more experience and did not take career breaks". In this case the whole family suffers the loss of earning, you know. Unintended consequence which can be actually foreseen. 

The author of this Guardian article also argues for gender neutral recruitment; which is a very good thing, but it can certainly backfire spectacularly. She also calls for encouraging women to enter different fields; but how exactly are you going to force them to do so? Are you going to set up quotas for mining engineers, for example? Sorry, Rosie, I know you want to be a teacher, but you will need to enrol in astrophysics to fill out the quota? Like it or not, genders do differ, and men and women in general might be inclined to gravitate towards different fields. It does not mean that a particular woman cannot be a fighter pilot or a coal miner, but in general women tend to do other types of jobs. A lot of which is underpaid, I might add. This is not a gender issue we're talking about; it's a societal issue. Our society in general seems to reward other things that most of us see important; lawyers, economists, pop stars are making dis-proportionally more than people who wash the bottom of your grandmother in the hospital. We should definitely make sure that our carers and teachers are paid better; but the identity politics really poisons this conversation.

The other issue constantly brought up about gender inequality is the relative low representation of women in the top management positions (and in politics). Certain people like to look at it as the Patriarchy oppressing women; as if Joe the Septic Tank Cleaner might benefit anything from an Oxbridge educated white guy getting a CEO position at a hedge fund. (I guess they all know each other from the weekly secret penis-meetings where they discuss everything they need to oppress women). 

It is certainly a possibility, although I never got an invite, so I'm feeling a bit left out. However there are some minor issues with this. For example a LOT of high management positions are being filled out with women in the civil service, academia, etc - and there are more and more female politicians, too. So it seems like the trend is changing already. Perhaps people should just wait until this naturally equalises in reaction to the affirmative actions taken over the last two decades. (After all, women already are represented in higher numbers in universities... and yet no cries can be heard about gender imbalances.) 

Another intriguing possibility presents itself by simply taking a look at these positions and what it takes to get there. We do know that people in high positions often express psychopathic traits. And by "often" I mean one CEO in five does. Which is way more than in the general population. This is really not surprising; to get to the top you have to be absolutely driven and be absolutely without any scruples. You don't get these promotions by being passively promoted, as these authors in The Guardian seem to think; according to their wisdom you are promoted to a high management position on the basis of the possession of a penis. The truth is somewhat different. You have to be a one hundred percent dedicated individual who is willing to put in an insane amount of work, and walk over anyone if necessary -in other word, well, you have to be a psychopath. (Or something close to it.) Even if you reached a moderate success, and possess enough money to invest and live off comfortably with your family without having to work another day, these people still put in sixteen hours a day to get even higher up.

You don't get these positions by playing nice, and doing your work, climbing up the ladder one step at a time; you have to elbow yourself in, and destroy all your rivals (professionally only usually, but personally, too, should it become necessary). 

But perhaps women are underrepresented in the higher management positions partially because fewer women are willing to engage in these struggles; fewer women want or can put in fourteen hour workdays, and put up with the merciless contest leading to the top. Very few people are willing to do that - regardless of what their genitals look like. What I think is that there are a little bit more men than women who are competitive and ruthless enough to succeed; that's all. We are talking about the very edge of the outliers on the bell curve here. What feminists and other mostly arts and humanities majors tend to forget that we are biological beings; results of millions of years of evolution. This includes our gender roles as well; a hundred years of societal conditioning will not erase millions of years of savage struggle for survival. Men ARE evolved to be more aggressive; its foolish to think this can all be forgotten because you played with gender neutral toys as a toddler. 

There is also a different aspect of the higher management positions: there are really not a lot of these around, so statistics will not be very useful. For every one of these high-earners you get thousands of underlings, so a very small imbalance can absolutely skew the statistics. Ironically the feminists are right that these people make way too much; but it's not a gender issue.

I'm not sure what the solution can be to address these issues. Sudden society engineering moves will not be very successful. You cannot mandate gender quotas only in certain positions (unless you're willing to do that for others as well- coal miners and construction workers come to mind), and you certainly cannot discriminate against men  without a serious backlash. You can't mandate more women in leading positions, either; vagina-quotas will not fly well with corporations, and ironically you will entrench the position of women as the "lesser sex", since obviously they need help to climb up. You can only encourage more women to enter the fight for those position. But how exactly are you going to do that? How fair would it be to handicap males or help females to get to higher management? First of all you really, really need to answer the question: are there fewer females in these positions because it's a boy's club, or is it something else, some other factor at play? (Such as the potential explanations above.) 

#metoo has gone #too far

When you read about the #metoo movement in The Guardian and other papers, or hear people talking about it, you find that the speaker/author regularly confuses and conflates several different things.

1.       Sexual coercion in several areas of professional life (It started from the movie industry, but now it is concerned about all areas, rightly so.)

2.       Sexual assault and the nature of consent (and that we’re living in a rape culture)

3.       Domestic violence

4.       Patriarchy

Interestingly in any of these situations the narrative is always the “men are perpetrators, women are victims”. Neither of the loud proponents seems to be concerning themselves with victims other than women and perpetrators other than men, and they are more than happy to ignore the grey areas so that they can present a beautiful black-and-white picture that supports their crusade against the Patriarchy. A lot of people –women included- are saying that the #metoo movement transformed into a sort of “warlock-hunt”; these articles are worth reading.

Sexual coercion

Powerful individuals pushing themselves onto vulnerable people, taking advantage of them is wrong. Forcing others to perform sexual  acts to get advantages is wrong. Weinstein is a scumbag. (So are Spacey and Takei, by the way.) However. The idea that in a relationship the one holding the power is automatically the guilty party (especially if he is a man) is just plain stupid. The first lab I attempted my PhD was in a lab where the PI had a wife who acted as a lab manager. I learned later that she used to be his MSc student, and my PI divorced his fat and ugly wife to marry his blonde and thin student. In this case you may argue that my PI took advantage of his situation, but it’s not what happened. What really happened was that the lab manager took advantage of her situation, and simply seduced her supervisor. There are cases when you clearly have a scumbag abusing his power (see Weinstein), but a lot of these cases we like to forget that we all are humans with our insecurities, worries and, yes, libidos. Just because in a professional setting the guy was a superstar of peptide chemistry, does not mean he was not an insecure chubby man who could be easily manipulated by a self-assured, striking young woman. And I have not even mentioned people who abuse their sexuality to get ahead in line. Sexuality is power too, you know. In fact it is the ultimate power in this world. What I’m saying here is yes, scumbags, like Weinstein should not be allowed to do what they do best; however every case should be treated with care. (The problem here is what the problem is in most of these cases involving genders: the people setting the tone are not concerned about collateral damage, since it does not happen to the members of the group they belong to. Even if the perpetrator does happen to be a member of their group they normally get off easy in both legal proceedings and in the social media outrage-machine.)

Rape culture and sexual consent

This has some tangential connections to the issues triggering the #metoo movement, but only in a very specific way: can someone give consent if the other party is much more powerful than they are. This has, since then, spun out to be a general outcry about consent, and the whole, very unrealistic “yes means yes” attitude. Apparently women are not capable vocalizing their wishes if they don’t want something, so to protect these fragile creatures a constant verbal confirmation is needed during sexual acts. Interesting concept, but it does beg the question if these people have ever had sex before. It also means, of course, that if two drunk people bang each other, the man essentially raped the woman since she has taken something that made her incapable of consent. (This is true even if she only had a glass of wine, by the way.) The fact that the guy was drunk too, does not come into play. It’s not two adults doing things that they may regret later –it’s one adult doing things to another for which he will be criminally liable for the rest of his life. Responsibility is something only one party has to think about. (I wonder why infantilization of women is OK with these people, but whatever.)

Weinstein did give a very good opportunity for these people to push their agenda; after all we all know men are always more powerful than women, right? After all, Patriarchy.

To be honest it is not necessarily wrong to re-evaluate social norms, and create new ones; the problem is when it’s a retroactive, one-sided process. The retroactivity is pretty easy to see: people get burned for relatively minor things (like touching of knees or pretending to grab boobs for stupid photos) they did in the ‘80s. Well, guess what. Those were different times, and it’s not necessarily conductive to judge those times based on your present social norms. The one-sidedness is also quite evident; it’s enough just to talk to a bouncer or a bartender if you want to hear about inappropriate behaviour by women – behaviour they do not get pilloried for; but behaviour a man could easily find himself arrested for.

But this is not where one-sidedness ends. OK, let’s pretend women do not behave obnoxiously, or there are no double standards on behaviour. The present discussion places every single iota of responsibility on the man. There are no clear “new norms”. We still live in the past (apparently) where it was a man’s duty and job to court women; they are (and were) the proactive party most of the cases. Like it or not, this is something that has been going on for as long as sexuality existed in the animal kingdom (OK, not as long, but nearly). The males court the female, the female chooses her mate. Just because it has always been like that does mean it’s set in stone: after all, social norms can and do change. In fact, many men would prefer if women were more proactive. However. This places men into a very precarious situation presently, since there are no accepted new norms yet. Most women expect men to pursue them; most women expect men to be proactive and “manly”. It’s not the “toxic masculinity” certain feminists like to talk about; it’s simply the fact that genders do have different roles. You don’t have to abide them, but the differences are there. You smile at someone, you bring them flowers, ask them out, kiss them; we all know the drill. Right now what is being argued for is that anything that a woman does not welcome is sexual harassment or abuse. There are no clear lines, no clear definitions. She can change her mind later, too –like in the case of Aziz (and countless others). So what these people are arguing for is that women have no responsibility in changing their behaviour, only men do. But we are not giving them new rules; the rules are that if we don’t like you, we don’t like what you do, or we regret something we did later, we can absolutely and totally fuck you up. (Like Mattress Girl, and the others who destroyed the lives of men they accused of rape.) Funnily enough this can happen to a woman, too, if she poses as a man. But, as we know, women do not lie about rape or sexual harassment. Ever.

And this is not on. This is not “sexual liberation” of women; this is an absolute empowerment of women at the expense of men.

Since we discuss rape. Does rape happen? Absolutely. It’s not Mattress Girl’s figment of imagination at all. A friend of mine was raped when she was a child by their neighbour and her parents dismissed her claims. It’s absolutely outrageous and something that needs to be punished severely. But the discussion is incredibly one-sided.

It is incredibly disingenuous that rape –in the eye of the law in most countries- can only be done by men to women. It is also incredibly disingenuous that people disregard every single piece of evidence and statistics that do not confirm with the “men are rapists women are victims” narrative; and that narrative drives policies. The simplest examples are the female teachers sleeping with their students; most people just shrug, or even feel a bit of “that’s the way to do it, my son” attitude. (Myself included if I want to be honest.) However, these cases should not be treated differently from male teachers sleeping with their underage students –yet they are. Both in the public eye, and in the eye of the law.

But it does not stop here. Female on male rape does happen. In fact, a study looking at sexual violence found that females and males had carried out sexual violence at nearly equal levels by the age of 18. You can read other studies and statistics, too.  Most US studies conclude that federal surveys detect a high prevalence of sexual victimization among men—in many circumstances similar to the prevalence found among women. The factors perpetuating misperceptions about men’s sexual victimization are reliance on traditional gender stereotypes, outdated and inconsistent definitions, and methodological sampling biases that exclude inmates. And yet nothing happens; these people are not included in the list of people deserving help; they do not conform the “men are the perpetrators, women are the victim” narrative. The typical response from a feminist (and I use this word with reluctance because I guess “third wave feminist” would be more fitting), is that “Patriarchy hurts everyone”. This is bullshit, of course. “Patriarchy” used as a convenient trump card in these discussions even though it makes absolutely no sense. Patriarchy is supposed to disadvantage women so that men can exert their power over them –after all, it is in the name. If this system disadvantages both genders in different way, it is not a patriarchy. As we discussed, names are important. The real issue is here –as with all the other “Red Pill” issues- is that certain feminists think it’s a zero sum game: if we talk about men’s problems we will ignore women (or, if I’m less charitable, they hate men). So it’s a struggle from here on between sexes for them; a struggle they are actually winning.

It does not have to be like that. As a feminist scholar said about male victims: “Compassion is not a finite resource.”

Domestic violence also comes up a lot when it comesto #metoo. This, just like rape and sexual assault, is a very grey area- not as black-and-white as they would like it to be seen. In fact, people who dare to claim it is a reciprocal thing, tend to get death threats. And lose the right to enter the shelter they themselves founded. Figure that.

Let’s see the statistics again. There are also studies on the matter; freely available for everyone. Yet nobody bothers; or even worse, they ridicule the victim.  It seems like men are also quite often victims of domestic violence; yet they are never on the agenda when it comes to help. The fact is, a man who is a victim of domestic violence, has nowhere to go. (Or rather, he can go to prison if he calls the cops.) This is not to say that all things are equal; it is very true that a lot more women die or get seriously injured as a result of domestic violence. What I am doing here is pointing at the discrepancies of narratives and realities. The usual “men –bad, women- good” narratives are just not true; and a lot of victims go without support because of that. What is worse, even the victims these movements love to pretend they want to protect go unprotected, since all policies aimed at protecting women in domestic violence are built on a false narrative, and not on the actual evidence. They will make you feel great about yourself, but they do jackall to actually protecting women.

The whole issue has been hijacked by a very radical form of feminism worldwide; even mentioning the discrepancies in sentencing, the homelessness rates, the suicide rates, education, and so on evokes a mixture of hatred and ridicule. There are no sane voices in this debate; and this is what the #metoo movement morphed into –another weaponized outrage-factory in this gender war where everything is about the evils of Patriarchy, and not correcting the problems in our society we both built. (Or if I want to be cheeky, men built.)

What does 100% diversity look like?

Apparently, this.

And, apparently, this is something great. I mean we have achieved our greatest goal! No negative discrimination! ONLY white women are making the decisions now! Yay for diversity...

Conflicting ideologies on the Left

You could ask me (not that anyone bothers :) ) why I focus on the Left so much.

Well, the answer is simple: I expect more of them than the usual tribalism, and ideology-driven thinking I kind of taken granted from the Right. (In which I myself display my own set of biases and bigotry.)

Anyhow. The import of "Taharrush gamea" (the mass sexual assaults on women by young men) into Europe with the recent migrant crisis points to a very interesting contradiction on the Left.

I associate the Left with human rights, women's rights, equality, feminism. Usually left-wing thinkers campaign for these things, and usually people on the left fought for them. Most feminist writers I know identify as someone being on the left. And yet, when it comes to these sexual assaults, both the political establishment, and the media is strangely silent; it's mostly the right-center right that is vocal about them. It seems like things flip upside down when it comes to migrants and sexual assaults: the Left is content blaming the victim ("keep them at arm's length" as the mayor of Cologne suggested; blaming drinking culture, as some people in Sweden suggested), while the Right wants to defend women against these men from a very different culture.

It is mind-boggling. Jessica Valenti is silent on the matter, even though she was quite vocal during even the Shirt Gate crisis. No prominent feminist writer in left-wing papers talk about these issues. It seems like the different ideologies (multiculturalism, Wilcommenculture, feminism, human rights) have this rock-paper-scissors dynamics. Apparently multiculturalism beats feminism when it comes to migrants. And this is sad, because it points to one thing: not even the Left has a coherent world-philosophy. (Well, very few on the Left does, let's just put it like this. Chomsky would probably have no problems processing these issues.) It shows that the Left is merely a collection of activists with very little intellectual power (or just simply too lazy). People who cannot or will not comprehend that things don't have to be mutually exclusive, so when one ideology (feminism) clashes with another (open borders, multiculturalism), one will lose out. I just had a conversation with someone who said the whole issue was blown out of proportion due to "some improper touching in Cologne that happened once". The mind blows. Suddenly I have a leftie who blames women, and trivialises sexual assault -something that is usually thought to be the privilege of the Right.

This leads to this weird reversal of roles between the Left and Right. I never thought one day I'd see Farage to be more of a feminist than Merkel.

Cologne and the press

There were a series of mass attacks on women during New Year's Eve; attacks which were coordinated, committed by people who "look African and Middle Eastern", and attacks which did not really get a lot of attention from the media for a long time. Even the police reported initially that all was well... The very first thing that came to my mind was the fact that the far right was actually using this as a warning cry to whip up the fear: they are coming to rape your daughters... we came to an age when closet Nazis are more dependable source of information than the mainstream media. The second thing actually reinforced this notion: it took an awful lot of time and misinformation for the facts to come out: it was not committed by Germans, or by people who have been living in Germany for decades. These attacks were prominently committed by newcomers, who were arriving as refugees.

The media outlets took up this story very slowly. The Guardian specifically was silent for five full days; even though they were really fast to comment on the Shirtgate, or on Mattelgate (the missing female figurine), and were really eager to jump to conclusions on refugee matters as well previously. But now they were taking their time. Suddenly everyone is surprised, as if this was not predicted before. Well, guess what. It has. Cairo and Sweden had experienced similar attacks (which was promptly covered up by the police); it was not really difficult to imagine something like this can happen in areas where refugees/economic migrants were present en masse. Suddenly people are surprised about the skewed sex ratio- oh, my, there's a lot of men in the crowd! Too bad, though they called everyone a Nazi who said the very same thing before; and interestingly this fact did not register for the photographers, either, who spent a year trying to pick up the odd little girl from the crowds of young men for emotional photos about the plight of the refugees.

The Guardian's rich and very excitable feminist writers are also silent; as if actual attacks of women's basic rights were not worth the effort. Even the victim-blaming from the Major of Cologne was left unmentioned... This cartoon sums up everything nicely.

But the Guardian was not silent on other matters. It was running a really long feature on the Two Tailed Dog party, in which they equated Orban with the Far Right (which he is not), and that idiot who charged a police station in France and got shot was featured prominently on the front page, too. It took five days for articles on Cologne to appear. One even called for asking for tough questions, but then avoided to do so.
One genius piece managed to have the following two quotes in the same article:

Abroad, Merkel will work for burden sharing, tougher measures to patrol Europe’s borders and seek solutions to stop the refugees at source

Already the venomous Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán is calling for tougher border controls,

Really?

It seems like the media by propagating the idea of uncontrolled migration boxed itself into a corner it cannot come out of without looking foolish or criminally negligent. And what they are doing now is just as bad.

The main problem is: this sort of behaviour completely surrenders the issue to the far right. It only gets stronger when the media does not report, lies, when the media and the police covers these things up, when you label everyone with concerns racist... you are responsible for turning away from the victims (the women who were assaulted), and you are responsible for the strengthening of the far right, and the gangs who mete out their own justice, and beat up Middle Eastern people on the street.