I found my way to your stack from Mary Harrington's (via your comment on "The Missing Aunties").
What a world we're living in: we of the liberated first-world, fantasizing a beneficial return to what we will now perceive as having been valuable in a pre-fragmented social world. While sharing the planet with us, in real-time, continue horrors beyond comprehension. Not to mention the children. And babies. Hell is real for too many in this life, let alone any imagined after life.
This is a moving comment but of course there are no 'answers'. When I wrote this essay I was conscious that it is unrealistic for most of us to truly care deeply about the sufferings of millions thousands of miles from us. But we can and should at least put our own little rich world sufferings in a more honest perspective.
I fully agree, even though I did use the word 'tragic' to refer to the mating situation in our part of the world (on the Aunties post). But it's all relative, as they say... if we think of the divorce rate. But, at least 'we' get to *leave* an unsatisfying one.
I'm about halfway through a book, "Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of our Ancestors," by Nicholas Wade, that you might find interesting. It is primarily concerned with population genetics in the light of modern genomic discoveries which necessarily touches on a number of these issues. I have in mind particularly a couple sections a chapter, one titled, "The Costs and Benefits of Warfare." He is discussing traits we share in common with our closest genetic cousins - chimps and how they differ from our slightly less close cousins, bonobos and practices among humans - and their frequency - throughout the ages from the dawn of time. One of the unique features of chimps and humans and no other social species is patrilocality: females going off to live with a group dominated by males in territory they control, leaving their familial group behind. Genetically, the prevalent theory on this is it prevents inbreeding in small groups that otherwise don't mix because they competitively hostile. The mechanisms are almost always violent. Most females - chimps and humans up until very recently - were stolen in raids which were generally lethal for at least some of the defenders. And most of these females are raped by the raiders. Although the fields of anthropology and primate studies spent most of the twentieth century trying to ignore all the evidence - often coming up with farcically ludicrous explanations - the evidence is overwhelming at this point. Rousseau's myth of the pastoral peaceful man living in a state of "Nature" is pure wishful thinking. The genetic benefits of this behavior for the males is unambiguous. Chignon's studies of the Yanamamo, for example, found that the males who participated in raids ended up having 2.5 times as many children as those who didn't. Modern wartime rape isn't substantially different, only tamer for the most part. The further back in time one goes, the more violence was the norm.
I don't dispute the difficulty and pain experienced by so many women and girls Graham. However your piece, as does the conventional wisdom of the last several generations, places the experience of men in the shadows or relegates them solely to the role of perpetrator.
While women are violated in the craziness of war, men are killed. Outrage and anger though are saved for the women. There are innumerable examples of this as it's the framework for the conversation about women and men.
One way to see this very graphically is to take a single but extremely telling snapshot. In the movie "The Red Pill," feminist Cassie Jaye interviews men's right's activist Karen Straughan about the world-wide outrage about the girls abducted by Boko Haram in Nigeria. You can watch the movie for free at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7MkSpJk5tM and the part with Karen and Cassie starts around the 1:23:40 mark. (I recommend respecting Cassie and paying if you're going to watch the whole thing.) The footage shows the profoundly different treatment afforded the abduction of the girls and the invisible slaughter of the boys.
For the centre to hold we'll need to see both sides of complex issues.
This was an essay inspired by a book on what war does to women so that inevitably is its primary focus. Nevertheless I empathise with much of what you say in your comment but to be fair I did say (and early on in my essay) "It should however not be overlooked that, alongside the stories - of villages where women and children are loaded en masse onto trucks and destined for horrific brutalisation - there is typically also a brief mention of the parallel fate of the village men; ending up as a pile of corpses riddled with bullets." And later on: "This idea – in its politically correct feminist version - can itself be toxic and unhelpful in its failure to discriminate between the soldier who rapes and the soldier who doesn’t."
I am often struck by how much physically violent bullying boys experience at the hands of other boys (and some masters in boarding schools)- King Charles endured truly vile abuse at Gordonstoun - and how this has been sanctioned in elite schools as hazing to get into special societies - and how many boys are the victims of sexual abuse - whereas girls are far more emotionally vicious which can do lasting damage - the bitchiness of women is a neglected topic especially by feminists - Women's Inhumanity to Women by Phyllis Chesler makes for sobering reading - but boys who do not embody the alpha male ideal of strong, aggressive, sporty, confident and domineering - often the more intelligent boys who prefer chess and IT - really seem to arouse a murderous hatred in their peers - this could be because many adolescents are insecure and frightened they may not have what it takes to become 'real' men so the 'wimps' automatically inspire contempt - this may hark back to prehistoric times when good hunters and fighters were essential to the survival of the tribe and a wimp was a liability even if he was clever and could invent better tools and weapons - pretty girls can be equally vicious to their less attractive peers but the violence is generally emotional.
Ironically in our modern age it is the unathletic geeks like Bill Gates who are having the greatest impact on our world but boys like him will always inspire contempt and violence in their peers.
And the jocks - even if brutal - will always inspire admiration. Which is why Andrew Tate - a thoroughly vile individual - became so popular amongst boys.
"Ironically in our modern age it is the unathletic geeks like Bill Gates who are having the greatest impact on our world but boys like him will always inspire contempt and violence in their peers."
Not amongst Jews and many other demographics around the world. Seems the Anglosphere and African American male culture are the primary ones to worship at the altar of jocks and meat heads. Everyone else values academia and artistic and intellectual pursuits.
I don't think you actually know anything about boys.
I think this is a very stereotypical female comment.
No, jocks don't generally have murderous hatred of geeky boys.
These are all deeply hysterical, deranged, misandric comments about boys which are not in any way relevant the real world.
The boys bullied King Charles because they envied his king status, it has nothing to do with masculinity. It's just classic envy. I suppose instead of emotionally abusing him into cutting himself like girls would do, they just opted to beat him up, but it doesn't make a very big difference, does it?
Bill Gates doesn't inspire contempt or violence in men.
This comment is absolutely deranged, and speeks to female neuroticism, arrogance, desire for moral superiority, and confident ignorance.
A piece that could only possible exist in the feminist world that we live in.
Millions of women? Well humans have existed for 100,000s of years. 100 billion people or so have been born. So the timescale, if you mentioned it, would make it apparent how exaggerrating you are being.
Millions of men have been brutalized throughout history in similar fashion.
"there is typically also a brief mention of the parallel fate of the village men; ending up as a pile of corpses riddled with bullets."
Pathetic, disgusting, and misandric. Men have been tortured throughout history in horrific ways that equal or surpass women's, considering that the most violent forms of torture throughout history have historically been reserved for men. Executions in general, torturous or otherwise, have historically been reserved for men.
"This other dimension is that the major atrocities of recent times have all occurred in places that are barely evolving from entrenched cultural tribalism and misogyny."
So you mean social norms are the cause. Maybe, instead of just straight up associating brutalizing women with manhood, you might be honest, and just say that social norms cause certain behaviors, which is incredibly fucking obvious.
"One in which women historically have been culturally programmed down the millennia into believing in such things as women’s primal shame, or that they should silently submit to male domination, even rape? Yes, to some extent at least, is the grim answer."
demonically misandric to be frank. These cultures honor kill men as well, and have many immoral practices that negatively affect men and women alike.
Not to mentiont that different cultures pop up around the world. Cannanite women copulated with deers and the cannanites sacrificed babies by burning them alive. Is it an integral part of womanhood to commit beastiality? Maybe, with that dog meme and all (in jest).
"Whilst clearly not the book’s intention, Our Bodies can bring you uncomfortably up close to the conclusion that, on some level, acceptance of male aggression is, in varying degrees, culturally hard-wired. Whilst civilisation has brought romantic love, monogamy, chivalry and mutual sex-for-pleasure, the human animal nevertheless still shares some characteristics with the animal kingdom; gangsters and molls, sheiks and harems; stags and does."
This is just complete garbage man.
What do you mean by male aggression? Do you mean competing for mates though making money? becoming a ufc fighter? Sports? Getting into barfights? I mean, maybe, but female aggression is equally accepted, and in our day, emotional violence and genocidal female mania is the norm, to the point that you would be reasonable in thinking that women wanted men to kill themselves. If this is what you mean, I'd have to call you a misandrist for this as well, because there is absolutely nothing wrong with this male aggression.
It is not culturally hard-wired to to accept brutalizing women.
Also, men evolved to desire women to orgasm. Men evolved to want to make women orgasm, as a method of pair bonding. Sex for mutual pleasure is evolved. You're just spouting pseudo-science. Monogamy is also evolved, and romantic love/chivalry is actually feminist and bad.
"what it is about humankind that war or ethnic conflict can unleash - in quite large numbers of men and even former ‘friends’ and neighbours - such orgies of unbridled sadistic savagery?"
This savagery has been done to men moreso than women and children, contrary your and the book's claim. This is also, horrifically and genocidally misandric again, because women are able to socialized to do horrific things as well. You are intent on making clear the association of burtalizing non combatants with manhood, rather than chalking it up to dehumanization of the enemy. There is nothing about men that makes them want to intrinsically kill babies. It's merely wartime propaganda, and dehumanization of the enemy.
"What can induce a soldier to force a long wooden stick or a bayonet into their victim’s vagina or to stamp on her baby?"
Even here it's so patently obvious that it has nothing to do with manhood, and is a socialized phenomenon. But apparently you just hate yourself and wish you were a woman. I really do not see any other explanation.
"Evidence of the persistence, in parts of the world, of an embedded cultural misogyny do occasionally surface, albeit fleetingly, in Western media. Like the chilling interviews in the documentary India's Daughter about the notorious 2012 Delhi bus rape:"
This isn't evidence of fucking anything. These are opinions from randoms. These aren't evidence of an embedded cultural misogyny. You even admit India had outrage over it. This is just misandric frothing at the mouth. It's frankly deranged.
"She locates this in a historically entrenched pre-conception that war is really about what men do to other men."
That's because it is. Men have been the bulk of wartime atrocity victims, no matter what the book claims. War is about men, not women.
More boys were kidnapped by boko haram than girls. "Bring back our girls" is just evidence of your neurotic fixation on women and their experiences, and your purposeful, calculated ignoring of men and their suffering, even when they surpass that of women's.
Afghan women aren't oppressed. They can still go to university, and western people are living in a feminist orwellian fever dream.
"There is a similar wilful myopia about 'honour killings' occurring on European soil and second generation immigrant girls being shipped back ‘home’ for forced marriages or genital mutilation. "
Men are victims of honor killings just like women are. Men's genitals are mutilated just like women's are. And I wonder if men are shipped back home for forcecd marriages as well, although on that I'm not sure. It wouldn't suprise me though, feminist gaslighting is a powerful cultural force.
"Lamb’s chilling stories do not necessarily entirely disprove – but do rather take the shine off - Professor Steven Pinker’s celebrated thesis in Better Angels of Our Nature that, statistically speaking, violent oppression of women is on a slow secular decline."
Women have never been violently oppressed in history, at least not more than men at the same time.
And Lamb's stories don't change anything about what I believe. Her stories are emotionalistic frothing at the mouth that you're expected to kowtow too, lest you be considered satan himself.
"Do the paroxysms of rampant sexual brutality that Lamb so chillingly recounts, give weight to the currently fashionable idea that there is such a thing as ‘toxic masculinity’?"
No. It's just socialized dehumanization.
If you want to say that a soldier kills babies in wartime because of his masculinity rather than socialized attitudes towards the enemy, I am going to call you a frothing at the mouth misandrist.
"But it is not misandric to recognise that a degree of sexual aggression is in the nature of most men – especially so-called ‘alpha males"
You don't have an iota of what the hell you are talking about. Just more nonsense. I suppose if you think approaching a woman flirting, or trying to get laid is "sexual aggression" then I could see how you could come to that conclusion. I guess if men ever want to have sex fucking at all, they are sexually aggressive. That seems to be the logic being used. No wonder that women in feminist countries tend to have more rape fantasies with how frigid this line of thinking would make them. They think a man flirting is him being sexually aggressive towards her!
You also have never actually listened to any "alpha male" content creator. Or else you'd know they do not preach sexual aggression, regardless of whether or not you think they are corny.
Camille Paglia stated that young pubescent boys loving adult men was acceptable. She's also fucking crazy and state she had some transgender issues. She is not a good source.
If men collectively had the desire to rape women, they'd do it, and women wouldn't be able to stop them. Men are 50% of the population. Who would dissuade men who want to rape? Other men who want to rape? If men wanted to rape women, they'd do it, and women wouldn't be able to stop them.
Ironic, the shift in the 70s away from men as sources of protection of women, as threats to protect women from.
You droning on about intrinsic male buttraping is definitely not helping, Mr. Cunningham.
“society is not the enemy, as feminism ignorantly claims. Society is woman's protection against rape.”
Well, society is man-made, and solely so.
Men made the roads, the houses, the cars, the lights, the plumbing. Men made the philosophical ideas, whether christian, hindu, islamic, Jainism, etc etc. Men made the framework that we all live under as well as any other framework. Men invented science, and made all of the scientific discoveries. So if society protects women, well, their welcome.
"Some kinds of violent misogyny can even be ‘woke’: rap artists boasting of subjugation and even rape of their 'bitches' can be lapped up by adoring college kids."
Nope. Not "woke" at all. Don't know how you would even come to that conclusion.
And let's not forget that if it weren't for Feminists around the world, both native to indigenous culture and "western", many of the horrors that women and children go through globally would never have come to light in the media.
There's a lot in what you say. What grates with me about the 'parochialism' of Western feminist journos is not that they don't have solutions. Of course there's little (or nothing) that they can DO about the brutalisation of women in places like Iran and Afghanistan. But they can CARE about it. Empathise with it. It surely should be a bigger deal in their moral framework than empathising with the regretted sexual indulgence of male media moguls made by actresses on the way up the greasy pole of fame. It's the wrong ordering of moral priorities that grates. Maybe it's a case of the Freudian concept of 'the narcissism of small differences'.
Oh Yes....and the narrowness of most Western feminist journalism's purview is - as I say in this essay - something I find endlessly jarring.
I found my way to your stack from Mary Harrington's (via your comment on "The Missing Aunties").
What a world we're living in: we of the liberated first-world, fantasizing a beneficial return to what we will now perceive as having been valuable in a pre-fragmented social world. While sharing the planet with us, in real-time, continue horrors beyond comprehension. Not to mention the children. And babies. Hell is real for too many in this life, let alone any imagined after life.
This is a moving comment but of course there are no 'answers'. When I wrote this essay I was conscious that it is unrealistic for most of us to truly care deeply about the sufferings of millions thousands of miles from us. But we can and should at least put our own little rich world sufferings in a more honest perspective.
I fully agree, even though I did use the word 'tragic' to refer to the mating situation in our part of the world (on the Aunties post). But it's all relative, as they say... if we think of the divorce rate. But, at least 'we' get to *leave* an unsatisfying one.
Added horror is given in the prevalence of female infanticide: the number of 'excess' men in India is about 35 million, in China 50 Million.
I'm about halfway through a book, "Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of our Ancestors," by Nicholas Wade, that you might find interesting. It is primarily concerned with population genetics in the light of modern genomic discoveries which necessarily touches on a number of these issues. I have in mind particularly a couple sections a chapter, one titled, "The Costs and Benefits of Warfare." He is discussing traits we share in common with our closest genetic cousins - chimps and how they differ from our slightly less close cousins, bonobos and practices among humans - and their frequency - throughout the ages from the dawn of time. One of the unique features of chimps and humans and no other social species is patrilocality: females going off to live with a group dominated by males in territory they control, leaving their familial group behind. Genetically, the prevalent theory on this is it prevents inbreeding in small groups that otherwise don't mix because they competitively hostile. The mechanisms are almost always violent. Most females - chimps and humans up until very recently - were stolen in raids which were generally lethal for at least some of the defenders. And most of these females are raped by the raiders. Although the fields of anthropology and primate studies spent most of the twentieth century trying to ignore all the evidence - often coming up with farcically ludicrous explanations - the evidence is overwhelming at this point. Rousseau's myth of the pastoral peaceful man living in a state of "Nature" is pure wishful thinking. The genetic benefits of this behavior for the males is unambiguous. Chignon's studies of the Yanamamo, for example, found that the males who participated in raids ended up having 2.5 times as many children as those who didn't. Modern wartime rape isn't substantially different, only tamer for the most part. The further back in time one goes, the more violence was the norm.
I don't dispute the difficulty and pain experienced by so many women and girls Graham. However your piece, as does the conventional wisdom of the last several generations, places the experience of men in the shadows or relegates them solely to the role of perpetrator.
While women are violated in the craziness of war, men are killed. Outrage and anger though are saved for the women. There are innumerable examples of this as it's the framework for the conversation about women and men.
One way to see this very graphically is to take a single but extremely telling snapshot. In the movie "The Red Pill," feminist Cassie Jaye interviews men's right's activist Karen Straughan about the world-wide outrage about the girls abducted by Boko Haram in Nigeria. You can watch the movie for free at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7MkSpJk5tM and the part with Karen and Cassie starts around the 1:23:40 mark. (I recommend respecting Cassie and paying if you're going to watch the whole thing.) The footage shows the profoundly different treatment afforded the abduction of the girls and the invisible slaughter of the boys.
For the centre to hold we'll need to see both sides of complex issues.
This was an essay inspired by a book on what war does to women so that inevitably is its primary focus. Nevertheless I empathise with much of what you say in your comment but to be fair I did say (and early on in my essay) "It should however not be overlooked that, alongside the stories - of villages where women and children are loaded en masse onto trucks and destined for horrific brutalisation - there is typically also a brief mention of the parallel fate of the village men; ending up as a pile of corpses riddled with bullets." And later on: "This idea – in its politically correct feminist version - can itself be toxic and unhelpful in its failure to discriminate between the soldier who rapes and the soldier who doesn’t."
True that. Thanks Graham!
I am often struck by how much physically violent bullying boys experience at the hands of other boys (and some masters in boarding schools)- King Charles endured truly vile abuse at Gordonstoun - and how this has been sanctioned in elite schools as hazing to get into special societies - and how many boys are the victims of sexual abuse - whereas girls are far more emotionally vicious which can do lasting damage - the bitchiness of women is a neglected topic especially by feminists - Women's Inhumanity to Women by Phyllis Chesler makes for sobering reading - but boys who do not embody the alpha male ideal of strong, aggressive, sporty, confident and domineering - often the more intelligent boys who prefer chess and IT - really seem to arouse a murderous hatred in their peers - this could be because many adolescents are insecure and frightened they may not have what it takes to become 'real' men so the 'wimps' automatically inspire contempt - this may hark back to prehistoric times when good hunters and fighters were essential to the survival of the tribe and a wimp was a liability even if he was clever and could invent better tools and weapons - pretty girls can be equally vicious to their less attractive peers but the violence is generally emotional.
Ironically in our modern age it is the unathletic geeks like Bill Gates who are having the greatest impact on our world but boys like him will always inspire contempt and violence in their peers.
And the jocks - even if brutal - will always inspire admiration. Which is why Andrew Tate - a thoroughly vile individual - became so popular amongst boys.
I agree with all this.
Talking of 'plain' girls and geeky boys, I think you might find my The Less Desired post of some interest.
Yes I have already read it!
I meant to say before....I think Miss Haversham is a brilliant pseudonym.
"Ironically in our modern age it is the unathletic geeks like Bill Gates who are having the greatest impact on our world but boys like him will always inspire contempt and violence in their peers."
Not amongst Jews and many other demographics around the world. Seems the Anglosphere and African American male culture are the primary ones to worship at the altar of jocks and meat heads. Everyone else values academia and artistic and intellectual pursuits.
That is good to know.
I don't think you actually know anything about boys.
I think this is a very stereotypical female comment.
No, jocks don't generally have murderous hatred of geeky boys.
These are all deeply hysterical, deranged, misandric comments about boys which are not in any way relevant the real world.
The boys bullied King Charles because they envied his king status, it has nothing to do with masculinity. It's just classic envy. I suppose instead of emotionally abusing him into cutting himself like girls would do, they just opted to beat him up, but it doesn't make a very big difference, does it?
Bill Gates doesn't inspire contempt or violence in men.
This comment is absolutely deranged, and speeks to female neuroticism, arrogance, desire for moral superiority, and confident ignorance.
A deeply deranged and misandric piece.
A piece that could only possible exist in the feminist world that we live in.
Millions of women? Well humans have existed for 100,000s of years. 100 billion people or so have been born. So the timescale, if you mentioned it, would make it apparent how exaggerrating you are being.
Millions of men have been brutalized throughout history in similar fashion.
"there is typically also a brief mention of the parallel fate of the village men; ending up as a pile of corpses riddled with bullets."
Pathetic, disgusting, and misandric. Men have been tortured throughout history in horrific ways that equal or surpass women's, considering that the most violent forms of torture throughout history have historically been reserved for men. Executions in general, torturous or otherwise, have historically been reserved for men.
"This other dimension is that the major atrocities of recent times have all occurred in places that are barely evolving from entrenched cultural tribalism and misogyny."
So you mean social norms are the cause. Maybe, instead of just straight up associating brutalizing women with manhood, you might be honest, and just say that social norms cause certain behaviors, which is incredibly fucking obvious.
"One in which women historically have been culturally programmed down the millennia into believing in such things as women’s primal shame, or that they should silently submit to male domination, even rape? Yes, to some extent at least, is the grim answer."
demonically misandric to be frank. These cultures honor kill men as well, and have many immoral practices that negatively affect men and women alike.
Not to mentiont that different cultures pop up around the world. Cannanite women copulated with deers and the cannanites sacrificed babies by burning them alive. Is it an integral part of womanhood to commit beastiality? Maybe, with that dog meme and all (in jest).
"Whilst clearly not the book’s intention, Our Bodies can bring you uncomfortably up close to the conclusion that, on some level, acceptance of male aggression is, in varying degrees, culturally hard-wired. Whilst civilisation has brought romantic love, monogamy, chivalry and mutual sex-for-pleasure, the human animal nevertheless still shares some characteristics with the animal kingdom; gangsters and molls, sheiks and harems; stags and does."
This is just complete garbage man.
What do you mean by male aggression? Do you mean competing for mates though making money? becoming a ufc fighter? Sports? Getting into barfights? I mean, maybe, but female aggression is equally accepted, and in our day, emotional violence and genocidal female mania is the norm, to the point that you would be reasonable in thinking that women wanted men to kill themselves. If this is what you mean, I'd have to call you a misandrist for this as well, because there is absolutely nothing wrong with this male aggression.
It is not culturally hard-wired to to accept brutalizing women.
Also, men evolved to desire women to orgasm. Men evolved to want to make women orgasm, as a method of pair bonding. Sex for mutual pleasure is evolved. You're just spouting pseudo-science. Monogamy is also evolved, and romantic love/chivalry is actually feminist and bad.
"what it is about humankind that war or ethnic conflict can unleash - in quite large numbers of men and even former ‘friends’ and neighbours - such orgies of unbridled sadistic savagery?"
This savagery has been done to men moreso than women and children, contrary your and the book's claim. This is also, horrifically and genocidally misandric again, because women are able to socialized to do horrific things as well. You are intent on making clear the association of burtalizing non combatants with manhood, rather than chalking it up to dehumanization of the enemy. There is nothing about men that makes them want to intrinsically kill babies. It's merely wartime propaganda, and dehumanization of the enemy.
"What can induce a soldier to force a long wooden stick or a bayonet into their victim’s vagina or to stamp on her baby?"
Even here it's so patently obvious that it has nothing to do with manhood, and is a socialized phenomenon. But apparently you just hate yourself and wish you were a woman. I really do not see any other explanation.
"Evidence of the persistence, in parts of the world, of an embedded cultural misogyny do occasionally surface, albeit fleetingly, in Western media. Like the chilling interviews in the documentary India's Daughter about the notorious 2012 Delhi bus rape:"
This isn't evidence of fucking anything. These are opinions from randoms. These aren't evidence of an embedded cultural misogyny. You even admit India had outrage over it. This is just misandric frothing at the mouth. It's frankly deranged.
"She locates this in a historically entrenched pre-conception that war is really about what men do to other men."
That's because it is. Men have been the bulk of wartime atrocity victims, no matter what the book claims. War is about men, not women.
More boys were kidnapped by boko haram than girls. "Bring back our girls" is just evidence of your neurotic fixation on women and their experiences, and your purposeful, calculated ignoring of men and their suffering, even when they surpass that of women's.
Afghan women aren't oppressed. They can still go to university, and western people are living in a feminist orwellian fever dream.
"There is a similar wilful myopia about 'honour killings' occurring on European soil and second generation immigrant girls being shipped back ‘home’ for forced marriages or genital mutilation. "
Men are victims of honor killings just like women are. Men's genitals are mutilated just like women's are. And I wonder if men are shipped back home for forcecd marriages as well, although on that I'm not sure. It wouldn't suprise me though, feminist gaslighting is a powerful cultural force.
"Lamb’s chilling stories do not necessarily entirely disprove – but do rather take the shine off - Professor Steven Pinker’s celebrated thesis in Better Angels of Our Nature that, statistically speaking, violent oppression of women is on a slow secular decline."
Women have never been violently oppressed in history, at least not more than men at the same time.
And Lamb's stories don't change anything about what I believe. Her stories are emotionalistic frothing at the mouth that you're expected to kowtow too, lest you be considered satan himself.
"Do the paroxysms of rampant sexual brutality that Lamb so chillingly recounts, give weight to the currently fashionable idea that there is such a thing as ‘toxic masculinity’?"
No. It's just socialized dehumanization.
If you want to say that a soldier kills babies in wartime because of his masculinity rather than socialized attitudes towards the enemy, I am going to call you a frothing at the mouth misandrist.
"But it is not misandric to recognise that a degree of sexual aggression is in the nature of most men – especially so-called ‘alpha males"
You don't have an iota of what the hell you are talking about. Just more nonsense. I suppose if you think approaching a woman flirting, or trying to get laid is "sexual aggression" then I could see how you could come to that conclusion. I guess if men ever want to have sex fucking at all, they are sexually aggressive. That seems to be the logic being used. No wonder that women in feminist countries tend to have more rape fantasies with how frigid this line of thinking would make them. They think a man flirting is him being sexually aggressive towards her!
You also have never actually listened to any "alpha male" content creator. Or else you'd know they do not preach sexual aggression, regardless of whether or not you think they are corny.
Camille Paglia stated that young pubescent boys loving adult men was acceptable. She's also fucking crazy and state she had some transgender issues. She is not a good source.
If men collectively had the desire to rape women, they'd do it, and women wouldn't be able to stop them. Men are 50% of the population. Who would dissuade men who want to rape? Other men who want to rape? If men wanted to rape women, they'd do it, and women wouldn't be able to stop them.
Ironic, the shift in the 70s away from men as sources of protection of women, as threats to protect women from.
You droning on about intrinsic male buttraping is definitely not helping, Mr. Cunningham.
“society is not the enemy, as feminism ignorantly claims. Society is woman's protection against rape.”
Well, society is man-made, and solely so.
Men made the roads, the houses, the cars, the lights, the plumbing. Men made the philosophical ideas, whether christian, hindu, islamic, Jainism, etc etc. Men made the framework that we all live under as well as any other framework. Men invented science, and made all of the scientific discoveries. So if society protects women, well, their welcome.
No thanks to them obviously.
"Some kinds of violent misogyny can even be ‘woke’: rap artists boasting of subjugation and even rape of their 'bitches' can be lapped up by adoring college kids."
Nope. Not "woke" at all. Don't know how you would even come to that conclusion.
And let's not forget that if it weren't for Feminists around the world, both native to indigenous culture and "western", many of the horrors that women and children go through globally would never have come to light in the media.
This is not true.
This is female hysteria and complete nonsense.
The media would report on bad things happening to women regardless if they were feminists.
With a name like "incel theory" it's eminently obvious how full of shit you are.
The British empire ended the practice of widow burning in the 19th century, before feminism was a mainstream thing.
So no, you're full of shit.
You're just some neurotic bitch bitchin.
There's a lot in what you say. What grates with me about the 'parochialism' of Western feminist journos is not that they don't have solutions. Of course there's little (or nothing) that they can DO about the brutalisation of women in places like Iran and Afghanistan. But they can CARE about it. Empathise with it. It surely should be a bigger deal in their moral framework than empathising with the regretted sexual indulgence of male media moguls made by actresses on the way up the greasy pole of fame. It's the wrong ordering of moral priorities that grates. Maybe it's a case of the Freudian concept of 'the narcissism of small differences'.
Men are brutalized significantly more than women in Iran and Afghanistan.
Men are most of the honor killing victims.
This is all female hysteria. The exaggerration of women's perils is endless, and you're adding to it.
women aren't oppressed in Iran, or Afganistan, or in 90% of places in the world.
You, and pile of shit that wrote the book, are feminists.