Boys Are Not Defective Girls

The Government has announced a new initiative in which teachers will be trained to spot misogyny and boys exhibiting signs of it will be sent on behavioural courses to mend their ways. 

As a progressive middle-aged man who has grown to accept that women are allowed to vote, drive and answer back (even when their husbands are only trying to help them become better people), I look back in horror at the speed of my juvenile radicalisation. 

It all started with a joke on television about family dynamics. I won’t repeat it or name the comedian, because I don’t want to fall foul of the Online Safety Act and it is unfair to traduce the dead, but he was very uncomplimentary about his mother-in-law. Who could have imagined at that moment that the bawdy laughter of a Northern working men’s club would be my gateway drug to toxic masculinity?

One night only a few months later, I was leaving the house, clad entirely in black and carrying a small holdall, when my mum accosted me. 

“What’s that on top of your head?”

“They’re night vision goggles.”

“I see… One of the kitchen knives seems to be missing. Have you seen it?”

“Yes. It’s in here,” I said, pointing to the holdall. 

“What is the balaclava and gaffer tape for?” she asked, peering into the bag. 

As I started to explain that I had been tracking a local woman for the past few weeks to study her daily schedule and route home from work, she rolled her eyes theatrically, chuckled to herself and ruffled my hair. “Sit down you little scamp. We need to have a chat.”

A counterfactual scenario in which my mum had been out that night, or the parent intercepting me had been Fred or Rose West, doesn’t even bear thinking about. I’d probably still be in prison to this day. 

Now, if you’re one of those po-faced prigs that have been so emboldened by the censorious climate of the 2020s, please spare me a lecture about making light of a serious subject. At this advanced stage of societal disintegration, humour is probably the only thing keeping the mentally stable from the burgeoning ranks of the professionally ‘anxious and depressed’. If we didn’t laugh, we would be crying into welfare cheques at your expense.   

Honestly, it’s hard to know where to start with this latest ham-fisted attempt by the state to usurp the role of the family.  

Well, let’s start with that. 

A ham-fisted attempt by the state to usurp the role of the family; both a symptom and a tactic of socialist subversion. 

Not that the family, whether nuclear or otherwise, bears all the responsibility for pastoral care. Too many adults, from policymakers to coddling parents, seem to have forgotten that moral education is more osmotic than explicit. Values are slowly absorbed through the home, peer group and broader culture, not drilled in by the clumsy pedagogy of misandrist institutions. 

The vast majority of men have never raised a hand to a woman, yet I doubt many of us were ever expressly warned against it by parents or teachers. 

Which begs the question: who exactly is the audience for these sermons of the bleeding obvious? Violence against women is wrong. Racism is bad. Gay people should be free to live with dignity. Sexual assault is unacceptable. Everyone knows these things. It’s preaching to a massive choir, split unevenly between the converted, who never needed to be told in the first place, and the recalcitrant, who don’t give a shit.  

With Sadiq Khan’s excruciating ‘maaate’ campaign for young men to call out sexist banter, Keir Starmer’s suggestion that the “documentary” Adolescence be shown as a cautionary tale in schools (what kind of Philistine doesn’t know the difference between a drama and a documentary?) and this anti-misogyny gimmick from Jess Phillips, the henpecked male youth can feel the tentacles of American HR culture tighten around his throat.

Most boys and young men cannot articulate why they find the feminised worlds of contemporary education, corporate governance and public discourse so repressive and suffocating, an incoherent frustration that is most likely to express itself in the very same anti-social behaviours these proposed struggle sessions are intended to prevent. But what else would you expect of a tone-deaf establishment so inattentive to second order consequences?

Case in point. The oxygen of ‘manosphere’ figures like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate is the hyperventilating disapproval of polite society. Polite society’s solution to their (overstated) influence? Strongly disapprove, censor, deplatform, hyperventilate until you pass out. Tell young men that these people are bad role models who are beyond the pale, because, as we all know, nothing is less appealing to an adolescent male than transgressing taboos. 

So boys will continue to be pathologised as defective girls, while the definition of ‘misogyny’ keeps expanding to satisfy the insatiable demands of woke bureaucracy and the covert motives of the digital surveillance state.

Sadly, these attempts to regulate normal human interaction through Orwellian legislation and overzealous policing will probably be welcomed by a population that has shown it will trade pretty much all freedom for the illusion of safety. Having entered into an abusive relationship with us in 2020, the state is pleading the old ‘you make me do it’ defence. 

If the radicalisation of young men isn’t a confected moral panic, we should all try to find a solution. But this isn’t it.