How to Stop the Female March Leftwards
What have Little Red Riding Hood, Jane Austen’s Emma and prison reformer Elizabeth Fry got in common? They are all female-coded ‘compassionate’ girls and women who can help us understand why young women are veering to the radical Left. The New Statesman has reported on this trend and the predilection of young women to support various perceived victim groups – trans rights and Palestinians, for example – even when these groups clash with their own interests.
Explained as “suicidal empathy” by Gad Saad and the “hijacking” of instinctive female care for victims by Eric Kaufmann, the lurch to extreme Left-wing ideology by young women today deserves our full attention. Lord Young wrote about the phenomenon last week and wonders:
Can anything be done to arrest this trend? … Our best hope might be to focus on adolescent girls, with teachers trained to spot misandry and sufferers being shipped off to play darts and given a crash course in banter.
By contemplating Little Red Riding Hood, Emma and Elizabeth Fry, we might however be able to work out another solution. Rather than bantering and darts lessons what’s needed is a nationwide celebration of the compassionate and caring nature of girls and women, directed, crucially, at the genuinely – not Left-confected – needy.
When female compassion is misplaced or poorly executed it is a terrible thing. In Little Red Riding Hood’s case, her kindness in taking a basket of goodies to her ailing Grandmother attracted the attentions of a hungry wolf who soon gobbled up both her and Grandma. Emma’s compassionate bid to assist the love life of family-less Harriet Smith resulted in heartache, confusion and insults all around. Emma’s meddling, though well-intentioned, hurt those she loved best. In both instances, men, in the form of the woodcutter, and firm but fair Mr Knightley arrived to sort everything out.
Some might dismiss these examples of female folly as misogyny, but whether we like it or not, girls and women love to care. HR, GPs, teachers, nursing and care workers are all female dominated industries, for instance. Men obviously care as well, but on average, women score higher on measures of empathy and concern for the vulnerable or marginalised. Anyone who has ever seen a newborn baby will understand immediately why such a temperament in women might be vital. My sister used to sit next to our Hi-Fi sobbing as she listened to Ralph McTell’s ‘Streets of London’.
This deep, profound and good instinct to care for animals, our own children, the dispossessed, the homeless and so on is entirely to be applauded. Alas what has happened in recent years is that caring girls and woman have been laughed out of town. Mothering has been ridiculed by politicians such as Jeremy Hunt who talk about the wasted talent of women who look after their own children. Caring, if there at all, is reduced to hashtags, slogans and ‘safeguarding’. Remember Michelle Obama uselessly carrying the sign #bringbackourgirls.
‘Childcare’ at secondary schools is suggested as an option only to those girls who have little academic aptitude and girls are instead encouraged to become plum-trouser-suited Chancellors of the Exchequer. Very few teenage girls or young women would openly and proudly admit that their life’s goal is to get married and have children. The idea that, like my Grandmother-in-law, girls at school would spend their breaktimes knitting baby jackets for orphans is impossible to contemplate. Regular school visits to old people’s homes? Forget it. Trips to children’s homes to give epiphany gifts? A safeguarding risk. Shifts at the night shelter? Too dangerous.
Though society elevates different accomplishments (STEM in, Cookery out), human nature doesn’t change. With limited encouragement to actually and practically care, girls and women will direct their caring attentions to those currently deemed vulnerable. At the moment, this group consists of illegal immigrants, gentlemen who think they are ladies, Gazans and more recently, the anti-ICE protestors. Luckily in the age of the iPhone, nothing actually needs to be done for them beyond a digital like here or there. And we wonder why 20% of teenage girls are said to have a mental disorder.
Elizabeth Fry (born 1780) might however provide an answer. Known as ‘the angel of prisons’, the formidable mother of 11 reformed Newgate Prison, then a festering hellscape. She set up schools, forced Parliamentary prison reform, hosted the King of Prussia in prison and inspired a whole generation of female philanthropists.
Unlike Little Red Riding Hood and Emma, whose caring natures led to danger and unnecessary strife, Elizabeth Fry’s caring hard work actually improved the lives of thousands. The solution therefore to stopping the Leftward march of young women is not to insist on bantering lessons and darts, but to allow girls and women to give full vent to their caring natures.
The devaluing of domestic caring work within the home must stop, a desire to have children must be celebrated, and youngsters of both sexes must be encouraged to roll up their sleeves and help the vulnerable and dispossessed – real life ones in our own towns and cities: visits to the lonely elderly next door; shifts at the homeless shelter; childcare for disadvantaged babies and toddlers; homecooked meals for families with not enough money. When an enthusiastically caring 17 year-old I worked for the Church Army and did a stint at mother and baby homeless unit. It convinced me that problems were far more complicated than I then understood them to be. I have leaned Right ever since.
There is enough need out there to fully occupy caring young people, girls in particular, and keep them from channelling their laudable instincts into toxic Left-wing causes.
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach.
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Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House. So concerned about poor Africans that she neglects and bankrupts her own family.
Bleak House published 1852-53. Excessive empathy was a grim thing of ridicule even then.
While the article makes some good points, I tend to think that a bit like we should stop talking about race, we should stop talking about sex.
I guess that’s a great solution if we want to see how long we can continue to breath whilst our head is buried deep in the sand. Personally, I believe that feminism and the emasculation of society, which has been its main purpose – whether feminists understand that or not – is fundamental to the destruction of Western civilisation. So we can stop talking about it, but it’s like saying “Yeah, yeah, communism wasn’t great, but why keep banging on about Karl Marx? It’s tiresome.”
I don’t think many of us here have our head in the sand.
I just don’t think that language that lumps together all females is helpful and neither is the word “feminism” as it is so vague as to be meaningless.
Instead let’s continue to challenge what we think are stupid ideas, whoever has them.
Blimey, ToF. Did you fall and hit your head in the shower or something?😵 It’s not like you to break ranks with the Boys’ Club. You know there’ll be a price to pay for not toeing the line and demonstrating such a level of objectivity that you’re almost ( only *almost* ) on a par with RW, right?😁
I just think this particular horse has been well and truly flogged to death and my thought is always “OK, well let’s say what you say is true, where does that leave us, what to do about it?” and my answer is well let’s try to persuade people of both sexes that these ideas we think are stupid are actually stupid.
As soon as you stop looking at people as individuals and rely on applying huge generalizations to parts of the population your entire narrative falls apart. That’s why realists like me go down like a tonne of bricks on here because I acknowledge ALL the evidence. I don’t just exclude or dismiss facts which don’t support my argument because I have no agenda or axe to grind, unlike most people, seemingly. Example: you can look to the ‘pro-Pally hate marches’, the eco loons, the ‘anti-fascist/Socialist Worker’ gatherings and even the anti-ICE protesters in the US. All of these, without exception, have both men and women taking part. So explain to me like I’m 7yrs old: why is this topic constantly getting pitched like it’s a female specific problem when an abundance of evidence shows otherwise? Why do you think Joanna Gray always write articles in this vein? Because she toes the DS line and is therefore part of the problem. Another example just recently of Monty Toms and his pal getting assaulted just for debating about mass deportations at a London uni. Which gender do you see present in this footage? ”Freedom Fighter William ‘Willsy’ Coleshill, a great friend of… Read more »
I don’t know much about Joanna Gray. Let’s be charitable and assume she writes what she believes, not what the DS tells her to. I am sure she means well – and that’s not meant to sound dismissive. I just think the approach is likely to be counterproductive.
I’m not suggesting the DS tell her what to write, I’m saying that her beliefs fit in with the curated DS narrative. We can see this is the case by the recent article, as cited above, that Toby wrote in the Spectator. Now we know what his views are and how they align with hers.
There is never ever any article which is counter to this narrative featured on DS. There must always be a divisive anti-women bias. Woke men are never acknowledged or focused on as a collective, so they’re given a free pass and mustn’t be held accountable, nor are us women who oppose this bullshit.
The angle they take satisfies the needs of the majority, though. The majority who are evidently incapable of being objective because their prejudice eclipses and cancels out any possibility of that. And I agree, it’s beyond tedious now and there’s nothing to be gained from it, but I guess these types of articles act as chum to initiate the usual feeding frenzy. Maybe that’s the intention.
Again I’d give the benefit of the doubt and say the intention is not to initiate a feeding frenzy but to make an argument that they think moves is forward. Would be interesting to have some responses from the authors in these cases.
Calm down dear!
My concern is, and always has been, that we pull the carpet over the rotten floorboards when what we need to do is first acknowledge the rot, then calmly tend to it. And of course it’s not all women, but a significant proportion of women have been brainwashed by feminist (Marxist) ideology into believing that men and women are similar enough to ignore general differences, and that actually women are superior – a superior intellect and superior morality. And how they show this superiority is by closing down direct debate through attacking with a toxic mix of patronising humiliation (on display in passive-aggressive comments that follow your own). And that that line of attack is ubiquitous within their ranks and has melted through our society like acid. Unless we confront it head on, we merely kick the can down the road… and there’s not too many yards left before that road comes to a very abrupt end. It is such a fundamental problem that I cannot simply wish it away. Sometimes I wish I could. Btw, I know we often disagree, but I’ve always respected the manner in which the disagreement is done. And that’s got nothing to do with… Read more »
Likewise
I think we have to agree to differ- all of the things you describe are problems and are happening but I think as soon as you start to characterise those problems as being seeded by only one of the sexes I think it’s counterproductive
The fight against Stupid Ideas nevertheless continues
I reckon most men and women realise that a bit of yin and a bit of yang is what we need
And of course it’s not all women, but … only all true women. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman Almost all household names associated with both Marxism and Post-Marxism are men. The single exception I know of is Rosa Luxemburg. Consequently, it can’t be such a specifically female thing. Apart from that, you’re basically just asserting that all true women are both intellectually and morally inferior to men (because only women could be successfully brainwashed into Marxism, because they’re stupid and vain enough to believe in their universal superiority over men and because they routinely employ dirty tricks for their own benefit, thus harming whatever the cause they’re supposed to further happens to be as a side effect — the latter sounds pretty much like a portrait of a lot of men I had the mispleasure to encounter). The notion that men and women are similar enough to ignore the differences in public life is neither feminist nor Marxist. As I already quoted in the past, article 3 paragraph 1 of the German basic law states Alle Menschen sind vor dem Gesetz gleich. [All people are equal before the law] and paragraph 2 says Männer und Frauen sind gleichberechtigt. [Men and women shall have equal… Read more »
💯👏
Some men are obsessed, their resentment and animosity towards the opposite sex has become pathological and all consuming, as they haul their grievance mentality around throughout their lives like a fifth appendage.
Women are to misogynists what Jews are to antisemites: society’s scapegoats. Or, in other words: Same shit, different century.
Lots of strawman arguments going on here. Strawman 1: “Consequently, it can’t be such a specifically female thing.” I’ve got no idea what your concept of “true women” is, and I’ve got no interest in finding out to be honest; it’s a distraction from the point being made. No, what I am asserting is that feminism is inherently Marxist in nature, and that women that bought into the ideology (which is a significant, probably majority, of women) have, mostly unwittingly, become part of the state apparatus and are fundamental to the destruction of Western civilisation as we currently know it. That is my basic theory. Of course Marxism isn’t uniquely female – but feminism is unique in the way in which it has been used in the pursuit of a Marxist agenda. I’m sure I don’t need to explain why. Strawman 2: “you’re basically just asserting that all true women are both intellectually and morally inferior to men (because only women could be successfully brainwashed into Marxism…” Entire countries have been brainwashed into Marxist ideology, so that’s clearly nonsense and makes a mockery of the second strawman, which literally placed imagined words into my mouth. I’m really not sure why… Read more »
I’ve got no idea what your concept of “true women” is,
You could have tried the Wikipedia link I posted to discover that it certainly isn’t my concept and what it means.
If I was in the slightest bit interested in what it supposedly means, yes, I could have tried your link.
Hear, hear.
As should be blatantly obvious, “the system” emasculates (I don’t know if there’s a female equivalent for this term) young men and young women alike and both men and women are involved with orchestrating this.
We should perhaps start with the assumption that both women and men have equivalent intellectual abilites and are both perfectly capable of rational behaviour. Or maybe, in the more realistic and cynical variant, that they’re both equally stupid and will act equally irrational, just coloured in a somewhat sex-specific way, with a large part of this colour being due to socialization.
In 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, self-barbiefication of women along the lines of “Math is hard, let’s go shopping!” absolutely wasn’t cool and young women didn’t behave in this way. I’ve met at least a couple who were clearly intellectually superior to me and made no attempts to hides this and nobody expected them to.
““the system” emasculates (I don’t know if there’s a female equivalent for this term) young men and young women alike and both men and women are involved with orchestrating this.”
Yes. Maybe “the system attempts to remove individual agency from…”?
Some may question some of your assumptions but I am not sure it matters.
Let them move left. We’re all going to get a bit bored with fighting for their rights if they keep voting for parties that want to remove them.
Let them move left.
Is there anything we can do for them? I doubt it.
I couldn’t possibly comment…
“It’s a beautiful world. Let’s keep that way…”
… by smothering the countryside with wind turbines and solar panels.
It’s all very well getting lefty, caring girls who are on the kindness trip to do something practical to help the needy but they won’t do it for nothing in their spare time. They will vote for any left wing commie party that screws taxpayers to pay them to be kind.
And it’s not only girls. There are some men like the little French Canadian gay conductor who pranced around the concert hall, while the Vienna Philharmonic played on their own, and told the audience that they had to be kind and not nasty to illegal migrants. Thank goodness we have gay men who are leading lights on the opposite side.
It’s a beautiful world.
In parts.
Let’s lift the world out of poverty – by letting them develop.
$2.6 trillion given to Africa in aid since 1960. Still a majority with no electricity or clean water. Are we allowed to ask a question..?
Like “Where’s the cash?”
To which the answer is “Under the streets of Zurich”.
Precisely. Give a man a fish… Teach a man to fish… and all that.
Stop giving them aid. Allow them and help them develop like we have. Look at our life expectancy and infant mortality rates over time as we developed to where we are now.
Reminds me of when Bonio of U2 decided to use some of the money he had hidden in the Netherlands to avoid Irish taxes to give the masses free mosquito nets. How well do you think that went down with the local mosquito net makers?
Yea. How long does a mosquito net last? Long enough to put someone out of work but not long enough to keep a child free from mozzy bites throughout his childhood. Wrong sort of help.
Among my female acquaintances of the past was a woman who lived together with a certain man for some time and had three children with him, one of them being a boy. Her mother had always been against this relationship and shortly after their marriage in church – sort of a last ditch attempt to save it – it broke down when she caught him using invented names to hook up with other women via internet dating sites. They separated and divorced and the kids ended up being cared for by her mother because they were still pretty small and she had started to work full-time again. She’d always abuse the boy very badly and justified this without a shred of bad conscience “He just reminds me of his father!” How do you square that with “women’s naturally caring nature”? Again declare that “No true scotsman would ever …” aka weasel-word around the issue that creating statistics of things a very small groups of (educated, white ‘western’) women once said about themselves simply doesn’t beget knowledge about “women” as such? At university, everyone is usually politically left, young men and young women alike, and that men naturally lack empathy and… Read more »
The leftward drift of women seems to match the leftward drift of the big philanthropists who instead of spending their funds to benefit communities they spend it on those who will make things worse like illegal immigrant charities etc.
Personally, I think Joanna is spot on. I think this is what Helen Andrews (The Great Feminisation) has also been saying. The fact is girls and young women don’t seem at all happy in their skin anymore.
Here is an example I just came across …
Council of Europe Pushes Conversion Therapy Ban.
from: https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/council-of-europe-pushes-conversion-therapy-ban/
“Members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, a human rights body separate from the EU, representing voters from 46 countries, will on Thursday vote on a resolution calling for a ban on ‘conversion practices’- a move that could open the door to criminal sanctions across the continent.
Under the text, introduced by UK Labour MP Kate Osborne – who believes that “some women have a penis” — conversion practices are defined broadly to include any psychological, behavioural, or religious efforts to change, repress, or suppress a person’s sexual orientation,
gender identity, or gender expression.”
so, not content with representing people in her constituency, where she was elected to the UK Parliament, Labour MP Kate Osborne has somehow gained the right to introduce legislation in this ‘Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe’ to continue the policy of smashing up society, castrating & mutilating children, cultural suicide, civilisation extinction – across the whole of Europe – which is the Labour Party Policy for the UK.
This parliamentary assembly cannot introduced any “legislation”. It can just issue resolutions, pretty much similar to the resolutions of the UN general assembly, and can demand that the governments which are members of the ECHR deliver a joint reply to that.
Joanna interesting and I suspect you are right, but also that ship has sailed.
Well we now inhabit Blair’s multicultural paradise, divided into our silos and banned from criticising them, at all. Polygamous religious cultures tell women how to dress and to look after their own clan, not universal humanity. Feminism has not touched these other silos, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali found out when she made her Google video ‘Submission’: he feminists backed the imams and booted her out of Europe.We should no longer talk of women in general, but women bearing the label of their silo.
The author is wrong to imply that Gad Saad’s term ‘ suicidal empathy’ relates specifically to women. His book of the same name refers to the problem when a society elevates victimhood to catastrophic heights. Both men AND women and particularly the progressive elites. Joanna should know this. It is Helen Andrews who argues in ‘ The Great Feminisation’ that women are a problem as they cannot apply logic, only emotion and because they’re riding higher now in positions of power western institutions are crumbling.
Well said Joanna. Of course this is correct. But given that your view seems to be controversial even among commenters in the Daily S, I wonder if you have any hope at all that the course of this ship will be corrected. I am expecting not.
When I was 17 I used to tune into Question Time with Robin Day. The leftists always seemed to be talking about fairness, and it all sounded like it was true. We should have fairness should we not? But fair for who? Is it fair that a person queues up at the chemist and sups methadone for 10 years? Is it fair that women have to see a man in their toilet or changing room? Is it fair that hundreds of thousands of economic migrants are housed and fed at taxpayers expense?Is it fair that government pretend they are saving the planet to deliberately restrict energy use? —–I could go on all day.
Great article, but surely omits Christianity as a driver of philanthropy then and its rejection now being deadly to social mores and genurine charitable endeavour? Elizabeth Fry was a Quaker, Josephine Butler an Anglican believer, Florence Nightingale stressed the Christian basis for caring for the sick and hopeless. I was struck by the elite leadership of the Brownies and Guides eradicating God from their promise – a move resisted by the membership but imposed by the Woke controller.