A Free Left Blog

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of our system of diversity is the way feminists and Islamists avoid directly confronting each other. Their ideologies are utterly opposed to each other, but within the system they are allies, so maintain distance and attack others. We can see this in how feminists resolutely avoid picking up on specifically Islamic-related instances of actual misogyny and discrimination in action. They nearly always stick to generalities and abstractions about the world or society as a whole, as Fawcett Society chief executive Sam Smethers does in telling Owen Jones that , “We have a very misogynistic culture in the UK.” In this version of reality, there is a single culture – or at least all the cultures we have come from the same root - and it is ‘very misogynistic’. This is the ‘patriarchy’ theory that is remarkably popular in the upper echelons of the liberal-left, just as it is among young feminists coming out of their Gender Studies courses at universit...

A few days ago I was pointed to an article by Owen Jones about ‘young men in crisis’.   It is a reasonably sensible piece for the most part, though doesn’t look beyond more spending on mental health as a solution. What really caught my attention though was this little sentence, squeezed down in the meat of the article: “ Even though the women's and LGBT movements have changed what it is to be a man for the better, men are still keeping quiet as their mental health is battered by an ever more insecure world .” Owen Jones [For those unfamiliar with the jargon of the organised left, ‘LGBT’ stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender] Now we can’t expect writers to fully justify everything they say, but this aside that the women's and LGBT movements have changed what it is to be a man for the better set my alarm bells ringing. It’s a pretty big thing to say, let alone throw out as an aside that doesn’t need justification or evidence. Let’s unpick th...