Where have all the Real Men Gone? Part 2

Welcome to the Gynocracy

One day when Chris’s grandfather Chuckie, an electrician by trade, was around 50, he was working on a job site with a crew of men. It was a big job and the crew was under significant time pressure so Chuckie, as the senior member on the site, was delegating tasks. He asked the newest member of the crew, a strapping young ex-con who nobody particularly liked, to go get some equipment from the truck. The young man refused. Chuckie insisted. The young man stood up, got right in Chuckie’s face, and mouthed some version of “are you going to make me, old man?” — at which point Chuckie proceeded to knock the boy unconscious.

“Guess he didn’t know you were a south paw,” one of the other crew members opined, spitting his chewing tobacco. “Probably doesn’t know why you’re called Chuckie either,” another co-worker chimed in, referencing Chuckie’s earlier career as a semi-professional fighter—sort of a 1930’s version of an MMA athlete—during which he was known for his outstanding ability to “chuck” his opponents from the ring. His real name was Michael. This was the 1950’s. The boy recovered uneventfully and learned to respect his elders. HR did not get involved. The job got done and the lights came on. End of story.

Then the 1960’s happened and we smashed the patriarchy. Second wave feminists told us that the old male way of doing things was toxic and that women, with their kinder, gentler, more cooperative ways, would make better leaders than the likes of old Chuckie. Rules were made. Managers were added to enforce the rules and come up with still more rules. Workplace safety improved. The culture changed. Hardly anyone got punched in the face anymore. Did I mention there were more rules? Women moved into positions of power and influence and now make up almost 60% of medical school grads, 56% of new lawyers, more than 80% of new veterinarians, 56% of federal public service employees, 53% of working journalists, 66% of university administrators and an astonishing 75% of Ivy League university presidents. Meanwhile the traditionally female occupations—like education and nursing—remain overwhelmingly female. Congratulations, ladies, we have literally taken over just about everything. (*Isn’t it funny how the only thing the media ever reports on is the continuing “underrepresentation” of females in STEM fields and the CEO Suite? But I digress.)

Are some animals more equal than others?

The Evil Queen

If this were a fairytale, the ending would go something like this: “So the evil King (who liked to punch people in the face) was banished from the realm and the Queen took her rightful place on the throne, and everything was sweet and gentle in the land and the rivers flowed with honey and kindness, and the houses were built of candy and gingerbread, and….” You get the picture.

Except that last week I tried to make an appointment with the vet for my sick cat and guess what happened? They’re too busy to see sick cats! Too stressed out? Too busy raising babies? Too angry at each other to come to work? The truth is, I don’t know why the vets can no longer see sick cats in a timely fashion. Maybe I’m just being “catty.” (Forgive me, I couldn’t resist). What I do know is that the only remaining full-time vet (in a practice that can support eight) is a very competent middle-aged male who works about a hundred hours a week doing his best to take care of more sick cats and dogs than one human being can possibly take care of. Where, one might ask, have the 80% gone?

But wait, I hear you objecting, it’s not just the girls and it’s not just the female dominated professions! I can’t get my car fixed either! And just try finding an electrician these days!

You make a good point but what you are missing is this: we are all girls now.

We are all girls now because the Queen—who turned out to be an evil sorceress just as the old King-who-liked-to-punch-people-in-the-face tried to warn us she would be—has put a terrible feminizing spell on the land and turned everyone—or almost everyone—into a girl. She has morphed the entire Western world into one gigantic mishmash of informational safe spaces, adult puppy rooms and vicious little mean girl cliques who run around shouting “off with his head, off with his head…” to anyone who hurts their feelings. Masculinity is against the law in this brave new female world and, as the Daily Wire’s Andrew Klavan has cleverly pointed out, “when you outlaw masculinity, only outlaws can be masculine.” I am reminded of a certain orange man.

“When you outlaw masculinity, only outlaws can be masculine” —Andrew Klavan

As I boldly proclaimed in my previous Substack, men and women are different. We should not be surprised, then, that the world is changing as women ascend to positions of power and influence. Women are, on average, significantly more anxious than men and therefore more likely to value safety over freedom. They experience more negative emotion. They are more sensitive to interpersonal rejection and they tend to ruminate about it more. They are more eager to please and to fit in with the herd—and hence more prone to groupthink, cult membership and mass hysteria. They are more emotional and less logical. Female aggression—yes, there is such a thing—tends to centre on reputation destruction and group exclusion rather than physical violence.

George Orwell may not have been familiar with the research on personality and sex, but he recognized these tendencies in women. A quote from 1984:

“He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy.”

Social Justice Warriors haven’t changed much since the days of Mao…

Welcome to the Gynocracy

Of course there is considerable overlap in the male and female Venn diagrams on all of the traits and tendencies described above—there are relatively feminine men and relatively masculine women. But it only stands to reason that as women take over our institutions (healthcare, education, the media, government, etc) said institutions begin to operate in a more archetypally feminine way, a trend which is aided and abetted by modern technology—and in particular by social media. You have to be in the same room as a person to punch him in the face. But the Evil Queen can now destroy your reputation in the blink of an eye from halfway around the world. She can shut down schools to quell her anxiety about a virus which is not particularly harmful to children. She can censor the internet to protect her special babies from hurt feelings. And she can get you fired from your job with a flick of her delicate metaphorical wrist for not doing (or thinking) as you’re told.

Welcome to gynocratic technoauthoritarianism! You go girl!

But relax. It’s for your own good. Or for the common good. Or for the good of the planet. Or something. The Queen is always virtuous and compassionate, according to the Queen. Have another candy.

This is why it’s so hard to fight back. Just ask Harrison Butker, the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl winning kicker, who found himself in a world of trouble last week after suggesting—politely—at a graduation speech, that most of the women he was addressing (at a conservative Catholic college, no less) might find more satisfaction in their families than in their careers. That the men should be “unapologetically masculine, fighting against the cultural emasculation of men,” and that they should “do hard things” and “never settle for what is easy.” The Queen was not amused.

“Off with his head!” said the Queen, deploying the full force of her Crybully Army.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this

When asked to explain why he had chosen 50% of his cabinet ministers from a relatively small and unimpressive pool of female MP’s, Justin Trudeau famously answered: “Because it’s 2015.” Barrack Obama made similar statements during and after his presidency. “If more woman were put in charge,” he opined in 2019, “there would be less war, kids would be better taken care of and there would be a general improvement in living standards and outcomes.”

But more women have been put in charge. Education and healthcare, to take just two obvious examples, are now overwhelmingly female-dominated. Do you feel like we are achieving better outcomes? Do you believe there’s been a general improvement in living standards as we’ve collectively become less stoic and more reflexively empathic? Less competitive and more safety-focused? More emotional and less rational?

yes, but will they change it for the better?

Or have we all been fed a lie? Back in the ‘60’s, it seemed so obvious that the “patriarchy” needed to be smashed. But perhaps it should have occurred to us that the patriarchy may, for all its flaws, have served a purpose. That there may have been a logical reason (aside from the evil misogynistic exercise of power by men over women) why almost every society in the world since the dawn of civilization has chosen (or simply taken for granted) a more or less patriarchal structure. Maybe we should have considered the reasons for the thing before we went ahead and smashed it? Chesterton’s Fence, anyone?

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Thanks for Reading Part 2! In Part 3 we’ll explore how we might fight back against the reign of the Evil Queen and we’ll take a closer look at her (even more evil?) twin sister: the Devouring Mother. As a bonus, if you have a few minutes to spare and need a good laugh, watch this classic George Carlin video, which pretty much sums up everything I’ve been talking about—and is weirdly prescient.