It’s a year since Sarah Everard was abducted, raped and murdered — and the London Mayor this week called for men to lead a “fundamental cultural shift” to help end violence against women. Sadiq Khan said the problem was not just violent men, but men who engage in sexist behaviour and who stand by silently when other men harass women. So far so good.
But is he really the best candidate to speak about sexism? This is the same man who dropped Joan Smith from her role as Co-Chair of the Mayor’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board without explanation, although it is thought to have been because she has campaigned against giving biological men access to women-only refuges. Khan, like so many prominent Left-wing men, is on the “trans women are women” side in the gender war; he appears not to understand what sex is.
The gender wars have proved useful for these men over the past few years. They have used the issue to firmly and incessantly position themselves as progressive superheroes, bending over backwards to be seen as supporting the oppressed and marginalised at all times. These men signal their support for Black Lives Matter — and spout, at every opportunity, “trans women are women”. But scratch the surface of Left Man and you will find all kinds of hypocrisy.
Left Man uses liberal feminism as a smokescreen to mask his misogyny. He is unwaveringly committed to the “sex work is work” and “porn is empowering” ideologies. So long as there are a few female voices claiming that women freely choose to rent out their body parts for men’s one-sided sexual pleasure, the social structures that underpin porn and prostitution worldwide — the racism, colonialism and misogyny — can be set aside.
While men on the Right tend not to bother pretending to support feminism, progressive men not only claim to be feminists, but also then try to dictate feminism’s terms. Recently, in the interval of a play exploring the history of racism in the US, I heard a white, bearded dude shout, “my feminism will be intersectional, or it will be bullshit”. He was sitting with a group of mates, sipping real ale, and I heard mumbles of “transphobia” and “TERFs”.
The mantra that the young man shouted out was coined by Flavia Dzodan who, in her scathing critique of feminism, argued that “intersectionality” means including men in the category of women, and celebrating prostitution. It is a twisted version of the original definition, which was created by the feminist law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe the specific challenges faced by black American women in the workplace. If you’re standing in the path of multiple forms of oppression and exclusion, Crenshaw argued, you are likely to get hit by both.
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SubscribeMen who claim to be feminists are always creeps.
its why (female) feminists exist! They date these creeps under the illusion that they’re decent human beings and the best the world has to offer and then judge all men from the experience!
Sounds plausible.
I agree. My own view is that it’s not my battle. Feminists seem happy enough to fight each other, without me getting involved. I still recall those ridiculous pictures of Nick Clegg and Ed Milliband, wearing t-shirts bearing the slogan, “This is what a feminist looks like.”
And I admired David Cameron for not being stupid enough to fall for it at the time, too.
I loved those t shirts. Somehow they made everyone who wore them look exactly how you thought a feminist looked.
To my mind, there are two types of feminist:-
(A) Misandrists.
(B) Non-misandrist women who want to improve the lives of women.
I like my adult daughter, and B-type feminists are fine by me. I agree with you about Clegg and Miliband, though.
What Bindel et al dont get when it comes to men is that the majority of men are not misogynists, they do however, (generally) have a juvenile sense of humour and enjoy winding people up and as feminists (generally) have no sense of humour, they are easy targets.
When it comes to male feminist however, the phrase “the virtue hides the sin” springs to mind.
The truth.
Oh–trying to be po-mo there. Very clever.
And such a strategy of abusers–if you recount our abuse, you’re 1) stupid; 2) unfunny; 3) paranoid; 4) lying; 5) oversensitive; 6) crazy; 7) have actually harmed the abuser.
Are there any other fields of endeavour anywhere where someone can make wild and unsubstantiated claims like this without being challenged or made to show their working? It seems that as long as you identify ‘racism’ as the villain, you can say virtually anything.
Is there any evidence for this whatsoever? And how would it explain those who champion sex work in places where there are very few black people?
it is pretty much the Unherd house style
Unherd’s great.. cut them some slack, Richard.
had that joke several times now
Followed by utterly unsubstantiated conflation of the week
“The championing of ‘sex work’, which is in part built upon the racist objectification of black women.”
I think the moderator should have picked up this article
I laughed when Bindel said that colonialism underpins prostitution. Absolute madness.
I used to laugh at it too. Now I don’t. Too many people are starting to think that way. Its worrisome instead.
I suspect if you ask college educated 20-30 year old women, the majority would agree with that statement.
I was gobsmscked when I saw figures for support for Labour in the last election amongst this demographic.
Miss Andry writes another tedious column complaining about misogyny.
What worries me, a life-long Tory voter, is how much power and influence Left Man has.
Same here.
The Tories have absolute influence. What do you think Brexit is? You’ve been in power for over a decade. An Etonian is in power. You own all the newspapers? Pointing at a bunch of radical lefties and claiming society is biased is blinkered.
It’s a fair push back but not entirely accurate- the Guardian and the Independent being two pretty radically left papers.
It’s a shame GB News hasn’t entirely got its act together yet, but some of the better analysis pieces highlight the enormous chasm between the BBC/Sky etc and any semblance of unbiased reporting.
Every day on here we read of some professor, or student, or poor Joe Soap, who has fallen foul of the SJW mob and been threatened out of his or her workplace or educational institution.
Anybody who works for a corporate will have been exposed to DIE indoctrination.
I have been accused of white fragility by my own (Oxford educated) children.
My grandson tells me that assembly at his bog standard comprehensive school is dominated by racism/homophobia etc everyday. Fortunately he’s fairly sensible, I quote “Oh yeah, the kids that need attention are all bi or fluid, or something, now.”
Eton fired a master for taking on feminist ideology. The Tories are just less bad than the alternatives, but they’ve also been infected.
The cultural zeitgeist across much media, and almost the totality of academia, and the arts (ie all the key communication channels), is woke dominated.
Finally, you remember that the Tory PM, and most of his cabinet, campaigned against Brexit. What Brexit is, is the people exercising a voice. A voice the current Leader of the Opposition and the bulk of the establishment went to great lengths to try to silence.
So, from my perspective, a fair bit of evidence that society is biased.
The Independent? Are they still plying their trade? I stopped following them some years ago on Facebook when they just dropped provocative one liners that were lapped up by the mediocre.
prat.
Good, subtle argument.
prat.
Stop gaslighting us, it’s boring.
The Guardian is owned by Bill Gates… wink wink. As an outsider who once thought it contained some fine pieces, I have realized that they are 24/7 spewing the same load of nonsense as the BBC and Sky.
Extreme left and right are the same. They want to see those who disagreed with them tremble and be crushed. They are the pathological wings of politics. The addicts of power whether petty or grand.
While that may be true, the extreme Right has effectively no political or cultural power, while the extreme Left currently controls every major institution in America: media, education, universities, government, nonprofits, corporate boards.
Until all the serious Catholic Integralists in America can no longer fit into a Denny’s, I know which side’s loons I’m most worried about.
WTF…?
Would you care to explain … ?
The comment was not immediately clear, at least to me. Is he for or against integralism? I read it to mean he’s against, ergo, WTF.
The extreme Left (not really extreme, more like neoliberal centrism LARPing as radicalism) certainly has the power in the media and the federal government, but it’s a bit of a stretch to say that the Right has “no” political power at the same time that state governments are restricting abortion access and banning critical race theory in schools. Whether you think these are positive or negative developments, they would suggest a certain amount of real power held by the Right.
I agree that the Right has some political power at the state level in America. But this pales in comparison to the Left. Name any major cultural institution controlled by the Right today. Media? Universities? K-12 education? Teacher colleges? Non-profits? Corporate boardrooms? Chamber of Commerce? I can’t think of any.
Republicans in some states are banning CRT in schools, because that is what the voters told them to do.
Since apparently I wasn’t clear, the Right has loons, but all our cultural elites (and even most of the Right) treat them as loons. They effectively control nothing.
The Left has loons too, but our cultural elites treat them as serious participants in society. They control corporations, NGOs, media empires, universities, etc…
I am far more concerned about the Left than the Right at the moment. If the Right’s loons ever start to get power, I’ll worry about a theocracy, but that seems pretty unlikely at this point. (Hence my comment about “all the serious Catholic Integratlists [one of the Right wing loon groups] fitting into a Denny’s”.)
I am concerned about the “loony” left because of their seizure of so much of the cultural and educational establishment, but, if I were an American, I would be concerned about the “loony” right because they have guns.
Julie Bindel always undermines her own case, even when she has a valid point, by engaging in extreme and blatant misandry. She reveals herself as bitter and damaged, with resentment eating away at her heart, What a terrible way to spend the few years of life we each have.
What’s sad is that her reporting on serious issues more often than not makes for humorous reading because, no matter what the subject, she inevitably gets side tracked into telling us that all men are evil oppressors of women.
Any chance she could be sent to report in the Ukraine then?
This is the main problem that I, too, have with Ms Bindel, I often agree with many of her points, but she insists on over-egging the pudding by a general rant against all men instead of restricting her criticisms to the sub-group against which she is arguing.
Yup. But I think that’s because she just sees this as an opportunity to attack all men. The particular sub groups just provide the occasion.
“But these sexists in sheep’s clothing” are mainly on the pull.
My life and thoughts, and those of my family and friends, are so far removed from the picture which Julie Bindel paints of people, and the relations between the sexes, that it is like listening to an account of life in Aztec Mexico, or on Mars for that matter.
“While men on the Right tend not to bother pretending to support feminism”
Ah Julie, you just don’t understand men on the right. We don’t really care about feminism in particular, we just want everyone to get a fair crack at a good life, without the identity distractions.
Lets explain it:
Left man feminist pretends to support women and their rights. So he’ll sneakily undermine feminists because he doesn’t value womens rights over the rights of other groups.
Right man cares about everyone’s rights but, now equal rights are generally established, doesn’t care about identity rights for specific groups such as women. So he will oppose anything that upsets equal rights – but you can convince him that women’s rights may require reinforcement to achieve equality.
Your best ally is man on the right, as so many feminists writing in these pages and being ejected from left wing society and publications are now finding out.
I’m wary of people who want to disempower women by taking away our right to women only spaces and use specious terms such as intersectionality. Any man who supports use of prostitution and claims to be a feminist is a self deluded and potentially abusive misogynist. Support for trans rights should not be about silencing the voices of women.
My neighbour’s dog will suffer any indignity to secure a condescending rub between his ears.
My neighbour’s dog, and male feminists, would understand each other perfectly.
Sounds like someone has never heard of football.
Or pints, or motorsport, or fishing, or poetry, or art, or any of the other 1000s of other things that normal people bond over.
Besides which porn (which I have studied purely to work out what I think of it) is really, really boring. It’s akin to those cookery contest programes where the viewer can neither smell nor taste the winning dish. All one sees and hears is a lot of oohing-and-ahing, the viewer necessarily being excluded.
Indeed. In fact just about anything but porn, which tends to be a solitary pursuit
I agree, but am always puzzled at why these commentators always neglect to address the fact that humans are only half a step away from “the beast” and much more closely linked than they would have us believe. Much of human nature, especially regarding sexuality is driven by urges received in our DNA millennia ago.
Civilisation is a very fine, almost transparent veneer.
finally a comment that makes sense
“He writes not only about the misogyny explicit in pornography, but also the racism; unlike many men on the Left, Jensen understands Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, and is able to apply it.”
Reading this sentence, I suddenly started intensely disliking Julie Bindel.
Anyone that uses the term intersectional uniromically is likely to have several screws loose
Exactly.
” … group of mates, sipping real ale, …” It’s difficult to believe that that sort of thing still goes on in 2022.
And drinking “stout”. Do any of these chaps have whippets?
That first reply was a laughing face David!..:)
Surrogacy is a form of prostitution supported by ‘progressive’ men, particularly gay couples who want to pretend that one of them has given birth. In fact, it is the farming of impoverished women and the deliberate creation of children who will be brought up without a mother, causing trauma in later life.
Speak out against it, however, and the masses have been so brainwashed by the ‘celebrity’ media, and by the culture of mawk, that you will be attacked by hordes of idiots with ridiculous eyebrows saying, ‘As long as a child is loved…..’
It is strange that the ‘progressives’ are rightly appalled by the forced adoptions that took place in the post-war years, where babies were taken from unmarried mothers who loved them, but think surrogacy, because it benefits men and ageing celebrities, is absolutely fine.
There are extreme views on both sides of the political spectrum. Of course, women should have equality and parity. I think the whole porn/prostitution debate should be framed in terms of people’s safety. Whatever policies make it safer for women should be followed. What does the evidence suggest?
As for extreme left men, there is probably a part of them that is desperately insecure and they are looking for a place to belong. They are looking for their tribe. The same way far-right hooligans join the EDL.
.
“Left Man uses liberal feminism as a smokescreen to mask his misogyny. He is unwaveringly committed to the “sex work is work” and “porn is empowering” ideologies. So long as there are a few female voices claiming that women freely choose to rent out their body parts for men’s one-sided sexual pleasure, the social structures that underpin porn and prostitution worldwide — the racism, colonialism and misogyny — can be set aside.”
The main problem with left-wing man on this point is that he doesn’t need any women to agree with him. Whether one likes it or not, sex work is indeed work: it is a service provided for money. It may well be wrong that this is both legal and regarded as acceptable by liberal-minded adults, but that is a different issue to the question of whether sex work represents a transactional exchange of time for money, and this specific question is a matter of fact, not something that can be true or false depending upon whether women agree with it.
As for this: “It is no longer possible for men on the Left to claim that racism, economic or global inequality is irrelevant to their work, he tells me, “but men on the left can, and routinely do, ignore the relevance of patriarchy”.”
It would appear that left-wing men are not insane enough to actually believe nonsense about patriarchy (surprising to me at least, if they’re daft enough to think that transsexuals are actually women). I know of course that just me saying this is taken as as a form of denial, but that’s the politics of the witch hunt for you: one is damned irrespective of the facts.
Sorry but I am seeing a lot of sweeping generalisations pitting ‘left’ vs ‘right’. There’s no obvious rational conclusion.
Live by Critical Theory, die by Critical Theory, whether the racial, feminist, or queer variant. Like most evil ideologies it eats its own.
Fact check: There are places where one can find objectification and degradation of black women but Hefner’s Playboy isn’t one of them. For most of its existence Playboy was famously, notoriously white. In later years it “featured” the occasional black model but remained overwhelmingly a showcase for airbrushed, idealized white women.
Ironically, black men seem to agree with that.
That’s right – to be on the left is to be eternally “not good enough”. Not very appealing is it?
Oh God – his poor parents!
I always get a good laugh out of the comments under JB’s articles.
The comments section is just oozing with resentful men who compete with each other to craft the freshest rehash of their predictable put-downs.
And as usual, the resentful ones are only resentful because they feel entitled to something they can’t have. Guys who 1) have lives; 2) are good at their work 3) have healthy egos and 4) let’s face it, have lots of sex whenever they want it, because women are attracted to 1-3, don’t try to bond in online comments sections over how much they can degrade women’s concerns.
Cause, you know, raping, assaulting, and killing trafficked teen girls and then distributing it, like is ALREADY happening in Ukraine, is FUN.
At least one upside is that every moment you’re venting here, you’re not out somewhere hitting on 16-year-old cashiers.
Well said.
What is amusing is a lot of “feminists” think men are supposed to be insulted or inferior unless they “have lots of sex whenever they want”
Which is doubly ironical because it tells us more about how some women view themselves, as trophies to be won by some sort of alpha male to boost their shallow vanity
And because the kind of men whose endgame in life is merely “have lots of sex whenever they want” often display the kind of male behaviour those feminists feign to condemn.
I’m not sure whether this is ironical
Go Julie! a great article. Angry, obviously, but we have to be angry about all the bullshit that have buried feminism under all this leftie pretence. I’ve noticed that pretty much every feminist article gets lots of flak here from entitled, not to say privileged as it sounds leftie, blokes who have time to read every article and comment on them, and therefore surely have a woman, paid or unpaid, to do their shopping, cooking and cleaning.
Oh dear!!
Very well put Sean
My query as to whether this is true in general:
has been deleted.