The Madness of Crowds

by Douglas Murray

  This may be an especially ludicrous example of where the obsession with quotas can get people. But in company after company there are more prosaic examples of something similar. For instance, every firm that makes a concerted effort to promote people of colour, women or sexual minorities will always arrive at a moment where they make some version of the following discovery: the people they have promoted are themselves likely to be comparatively privileged. In many, though not all, cases they are people who have already been well served by the system. They may be women who are from a well-off background, who have been privately educated and gone to the best universities. Did they require a leg-up? Possibly. But at whose expense?

  Likewise the discovery has been made that in the first waves of sexual and ethnic minority employees benefiting from ‘positive discrimination’ in order to ‘diversify’ an office environment, the men and women in question were not from the most put-upon groups in society. A phenomenon occurs similar to what happens in political parties. When the Conservative Party in Britain sought to increase its number of ethnic minority MPs it managed to recruit some very talented individuals. These included at least one black MP who had been to Eton, and another whose uncle is the vice-president of Nigeria. As for the Labour Party, it chose among its candidates for Parliament a woman whose aunt is the Prime Minister of Bangladesh.

  As it is in politics, so it is in private and public companies. Fast-tracked diversity may promote the people who were nearest to their destination already. And very often these are the most privileged people of any group – including their own. At companies across Europe and America which have adopted this approach to hiring, a common story is emerging, albeit one only talked about in whispers. For people in such companies are gradually realizing that there are costs to all this. That is, while their companies have managed to increase female mobility and ethnic minority mobility, their level of class mobility has never been lower. All they have managed to do is build a new hierarchy.

  Hierarchies are not static. They have not always been in the past and they are unlikely to remain the same in the future. For their part, the proponents of intersectionality, bias training and more have made extraordinarily swift inroads. And the flow of these ideas straight through into the corporate world is a demonstration that a new type of hierarchy has been set up. This one has – like all hierarchies – its oppressor class and oppressed class. It has those who seek to be virtuous and those (‘Chief People Officers’) who are in a position to enlighten those who are not. For the time being this new priestly class is getting a pretty good run at explaining how they think the world works.

  But the overwhelming problem is not just that these theories are being embedded in institutions without sufficient thought or track record of success. The overwhelming problem is that these new systems continue to be built on group identities which we still haven’t come close to understanding. They are systems built on foundations which are nowhere near being agreed upon. Such as the whole issue of the relations between the sexes and issues which we would once have called ‘feminist’.

  This Feminist Wave

  In part this confusion emerges from the tremendous success of the first and second waves of feminism, and the fact that succeeding waves have suffered severe symptoms of ‘St George in retirement syndrome’.

  Pinpointing exactly which waves of feminism occurred when is complicated by the fact that they are recognized to have occurred at different times in different places. But it is widely accepted that the first wave of feminism was the one which began in the eighteenth century and continued, in some estimations, up to the franchise and by others right up to the 1960s. It was precise in its ambitions and deep in its claims. From Mary Wollstonecraft to the Campaign for Women’s Suffrage, the claims of first-wave feminism were defined by the demand for equal legal rights. Not different rights, but equal rights. The right to vote, obviously. But also the right to petition for divorce, to have equal guardianship over children and the equal inheritance of property. The fight for these rights was long, but it was achieved.

  The wave of feminism which began in the 1960s addressed the priorities that remained unresolved underneath those basic rights. Issues such as the rights of women to pursue their desired careers and to be supported in those aims. In America Betty Friedan and her allies championed the rights not only of women’s education but of maternity leave and childcare support for women in employment. These feminists argued for reproductive rights around contraception and abortion, for the safety of women inside marriages as well as out of them. The aim of these feminists was to help get women to the place where they would have an equal shot in their lives and careers, comparable to men.

  Having managed between two and three waves (depending where and how you are counting) in as many centuries, by the 1980s the feminist movement splintered and fell out over niche issues such as what attitudes feminists should take towards pornography. Those people often described as third-wave feminists emerged, like the fourth-wavers that swiftly followed them in the 2010s, with a striking style of rhetoric. With the major battles for equality behind them, it might have been expected that feminists would mop up the remaining issues that existed and that the fact that things had never been better would mean that the pitch of their rhetoric matched this reality.

  Yet no such thing happened. If anything ever picked up steam and careered off down the tracks just after having pulled in at the station, it was feminism over recent decades. From the 1970s onwards a new pitch embedded itself within the feminist camps, with several distinctive motifs. The first was that of defeat being imminent just before the point of victory.

  In 1991 Susan Faludi published Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. A year later Marilyn French (bestselling author of The Women’s Room in 1977) repeated the trick with The War Against Women. These hugely successful books thrived on the notion that although rights had been achieved there was now a concerted campaign under way to roll that progress back. Equality had not been achieved, Faludi and French argued, but the possibility that it might be had set the males off on an inevitable response in which even those rights that had been achieved would be taken away. It is remarkable to revisit those works at the distance of a quarter of a century, for they have simultaneously become absolutely normal in their pitch and are clearly deranged in the claims that they make.

  In her international bestseller, Faludi identified the ‘undeclared war against women’ in almost every element of life in Western societies. She saw it in the media and the movies. She saw it in television and in clothes. She saw it in academia and in politics. She saw it in economics and in popular psychology. What it all added up to, Faludi insisted, was ‘the rising pressure to halt, and even reverse’ the quest for ‘equality’. This backlash had many apparent contradictions. It was both organized and ‘not an organized movement’. In fact the ‘lack of orchestration’ made it ‘harder to see – and perhaps more effective’. Over the previous decade, which had seen cuts in public spending in countries like the UK (instigated, of course, by a female Prime Minister), ‘the backlash has moved through the culture’s secret chambers, travelling through passageways of flattery and fear’.21 Through these and similar means, the war against women was at once both staring everybody in the face all the time and so subtle as to require Faludi to make it noticeable.

  For her part French declared at the outset of her book, ‘there is evidence’ that for around three and half million years the human species lived in a situation in which men and women were equal. In fact more than equal, for in those days women apparently enjoyed a higher status than men. Then for the last 10,000 or so years our species allegedly lived in ‘egalitarian harmony and material well-being’, with the sexes getting on pretty well. But since the fourth millennium BCE, French informs her readers, men began to construct ‘the patriarchy’, a system she defines as ‘male supremacy backed by force’. For women ‘it has been downhill ever since’. We are informed that women were �
��probably’ the first slaves and have since then been ‘increasingly disempowered, degraded and subjugated’. For the last four centuries, French says, this has got completely out of control, with men (‘mainly in the West’) attempting to ‘tighten their control of nature and those associated with nature – people of color and women’.22

  Having established her definition of feminism as ‘any attempt to improve the lot of any group of women through female solidarity and a female perspective’, French claims that men ‘as a caste . . . continue to seek ways to defeat feminism’. They seek to take away its victories (the example French gives being ‘legal abortion’). They also seek to put a ‘glass ceiling’ over professional women and create movements aimed at returning women to ‘fully subordinate status’. This and more amounts to ‘a global war against women’.23

  Ignoring a fair amount of evidence to the contrary, and showing no compunction about essentializing or making generalizations about the male half of the species, French declares that ‘the only ground of male solidarity is opposition to women’.24 She sees the demands of feminists as equally straightforward. The challenge to ‘patriarchy’ by feminists is simply a demand ‘to be treated as human beings with rights’, including the demand ‘that men not feel free to beat, rape, mutilate, and kill them’.25 What kind of monster would oppose that? And who are the members of this patriarchy who feel free to beat, rape, mutilate and kill women?

  In French’s argument, from every direction, the problem is men. Every time women make an advance, men can be found ‘mustering all their forces to defeat this challenge’. Male violence towards women is not an accident or a by-product of some other factor (let alone many potential factors). Rather it is the case that ‘all male violence toward women is part of a concerted campaign’ that includes ‘beatings, imprisonment, mutilation, torture, starvation, rape and murder’.26

  It is bad enough that men are driven to such acts as part of an ongoing wider campaign to defeat women, but what is worse, according to French, is that men also organize in other ways to ensure that ‘women are disadvantaged in every area of life’. Men apparently arrange this by systematic wars against women in every imaginable field, including in education, work, healthcare, law, sex, science and even in a ‘war against women as mothers’.27

  The final insult, as described by French, is that there are not only wars against women which women have to worry about, but also war – period. Literal, actual, non-metaphorical war is also a problem and is also in and of itself anti-women.28 From its language to its actions, war is a male act and as such is designed to oppose women. For women – it becomes clear by the very close of French’s book – are the embodiments of peace. Whereas men wage war, women have a set of movements like the Women’s Pentagon Action in 1980 in which women encircled the Pentagon, declaring that ‘militarism was sexism,’ and at Greenham Common in Britain. This is the good news, French reveals at the rousing end of her book: ‘Women are fighting back on every front.’29

  Many of the claims made in French’s book are tendentious and ahistorical. Once she has set up her paradigm she is able to make almost anything fit into it. But it is the dichotomy she insists on throughout which is most striking. Everything that is good is female. Everything that is bad is male.

  French, Faludi and others were enormously successful in embedding this idea. They also established a pattern, which was that the success of feminist arguments began to depend on claims being distorted and hyped. Gradually the most extreme claims took over as the norm. Not just the most extreme claims about men, but the most extreme claims about women as well. These came to be insinuated in every aspect of the claims made by the new waves of feminists. For instance, in her hugely successful book The Beauty Myth (1990) Naomi Wolf claimed that although it was true that the benefits of feminist achievements and analysis meant that women were better off than they had ever been before, in other ways they were quite literally dying. In The Beauty Myth she famously tried to claim that in America alone around 150,000 women a year were dying from anorexia-related eating disorders. As a number of scholars including Christina Hoff Sommers subsequently showed, Wolf had exaggerated the actual figures by several hundred times.30 Exaggeration and catastrophism became the regular currency in which feminists were encouraged to deal.

  The other thing to get embedded in this stage of feminism was a form of misandry – man-hating. This had been present among various individuals in earlier waves of feminism, but it had never been so dominant, let alone triumphant. At some point in the 2010s it was reckoned that third-wave feminism had progressed into a fourth wave of feminism because of the advent of social media. Fourth-wave feminism is mainly third-wave feminism with apps. What all these waves have inadvertently demonstrated is the deranging effects that social media can have not just on a debate but on a movement.

  Consider the scene in February 2018 when self-declared ‘feminists’ are once again on Twitter pushing around their new favourite slogans. ‘Men are trash’ is the latest arrangement of words they had come up with in order to persuade more people to come onto their side. Fourth-wave feminists are trying to get ‘All men are trash’ or just ‘Men are trash’ trending on social media. One of those who whipped this along is the British fourth-wave feminist writer Laurie Penny, author of various blog compilation books, including the charmingly titled Bitch Doctrine (2017). In February 2018 Penny could be found on Twitter saying, ‘“Men are trash” is a phrase I adore because it implies waste.’31 She went on to explain that the beauty of the phrase had to do with the fact that ‘toxic masculinity wastes so much human potential . . . I hope we’re on the cusp of a giant recycling program.’ This was followed by the hashtag ‘MeToo’ and an emoji of hands being raised in the air.

  As is so often the case, a member of the public was at hand to ask if Penny might perhaps have had father issues that caused her to use phrases such as these. At which point, as so often, Penny pivoted on a dime. ‘Actually, my father was wonderful, and a great inspiration. He passed away a few years ago. We all miss him.’ The reader pushed his point. ‘Was he toxic?’ he enquired. At which point the reader was reprimanded by Penny for being ‘harsh’. She went on to reprimand him: ‘It’s not appropriate to make cracks about someone’s dead dad.’ Meaning the line had already developed to: ‘All men are trash apart from my late father, who you’re not allowed to mention.’ Within an hour the victimhood narrative developed even further. Penny returned to Twitter to say: ‘Right now I’m facing a barrage of abuse, threats, antisemitism, fantasies about my death, disgusting things said about my family. It has rapidly become frightening. This is all because I said “I like the phrase ‘men are trash’”, it implies the potential for change.’ Which actually wasn’t what she had said. She had said how delighted she was to use a phrase that described half of the human species as ‘trash’. And then having behaved like a bully she found shelter behind the claim of being bullied. As though, having written off half the human race, it would be wrong to get any kind of pushback.

  In fact, had Penny waited a while, a fellow feminist would have been at hand to explain that whether or not Penny wanted to justify the words she had used she no longer needed to, because these words were among the growing list of magical words which did not mean what they appeared to mean.

  The War on Men

  The byline of the Huffington Post writer Salma El-Wardany describes her as a ‘half Egyptian, half Irish Muslim writer traveling [sic] the world eating cake and dismantling the patriarchy’. As part of this dismantling, El-Wardany turns out to be fond of the phrase ‘all men are trash’. But she explained in the words of her headline ‘What women mean when we say “men are trash”.’ According to this Huffington Post feminist, ‘It can actually be directly translated into; “masculinity is in transition and it’s not moving f**king fast enough.”’

  El-Wardany claimed that the phrase ‘men are trash’ is heard everywhere in her world, ‘like a gentle hum vibrating across the globe. An anth
em . . . a call to arms and a battle cry.’ She claimed that if you enter ‘any room, social event, dinner party, creative gathering and you’ll hear the phrase from at least one corner of the room, and you’ll naturally gravitate towards that group of women because you immediately know you’ve found your tribe. It’s basically the password to the “pissed off at men” club.’ It turns out that the words are the consequence of a condensed form of ‘anger, frustration, hurt and pain’. And in El-Wardany’s view this hurt and pain come from the fact that while women are constantly asked what sort of girl or woman they want to be, men are apparently never asked – and never have to ask – what sort of man they are going to be. While women are constantly having demands made on them, ‘masculinity was handed down from father to son, with little or no deviation from the typical provider/protector role’.

  In conclusion, when women say ‘men are trash’ what they in fact are saying is ‘Your ideas of manhood are no longer fit for purpose and your lack of evolution is hurting us all.’ It is saying that men are the slow kids in the class and that they have got, in El-Wardany’s words, to ‘get there a lot faster’.32

  As it happens, ‘All men are trash’ and ‘Men are trash’ were at the lighter end of feminist rhetoric in its fourth wave. One of the previous popular hashtags used on Twitter by feminists was ‘Kill All Men’. Fortunately the journalist and commentator Ezra Klein was available at Vox to decode this one. Whilst conceding that he had not enjoyed seeing the hashtag ‘Kill All Men’ or the moment when this phrase leaked out from the virtual world into the real one, the words did not mean what they appeared to mean. As Klein explained, when people he knew and ‘even love[d]’ began to use the term in casual conversation, he at first recoiled and felt defensive. But he explained that he came to realize ‘that wasn’t what they were saying’ (italics in original). He realized that not only did they not want to kill him or kill any men. In fact it was better than that. ‘They didn’t hate me, and they didn’t hate men.’ Klein’s discovery was that ‘Kill All Men’ was merely ‘another way of saying “it would be nice if the world sucked less for women”’. A hell of a way to say it, but Klein went on, ‘It was an expression of frustration with pervasive sexism.’33