Toxic Masculinity or Toxic Femininity?
“Feminism” is an empty virtue signal. It is no more than a cover for wolves to hide in sheep’s clothing.
Sexual harassment and abuse of girls are too often accepted as part of daily life, according to a Commons Women and Equalities Committee report.” Note: these web pages and the original report have now been removed from the UK Parliament website - see notes in addendum)
Key findings are:
The committee chair, Conservative MP Maria Miller, is popping up on my radio every hour on the news bulletins and is explicitly pointing the blame at boys and pornography. She repeats the most shocking and salacious findings as if they were the most prominent findings in the report.
The report had already piqued my interest so I have been looking at it today. Here are some pertinent points from the list of conclusions and recommendations from the report itself
Sexual harassment and sexual violence in schools is a significant issue which affects a large number of children and young people, particularly girls, across the country. Evidence shows that the majority of perpetrators of this abuse are boys, and the majority of victims are girls. However, it is essential that the negative impact on both boys and girls is recognised and addressed.”
“There is insufficient data to conclusively demonstrate that sexual harassment and sexual violence in schools is a growing problem. It is true that such behaviour has occurred in schools for many years, as in wider society. However, significant qualitative evidence suggests that increasing access to pornography and technological advances, including online platforms, can facilitate harassment and violence and thus exacerbate the problem.”
Yet somehow, in light of this lack of evidence, the government should non-the-less…
…create a statutory obligation in the forthcoming Education Bill for all schools, primary and secondary, to develop a whole school approach to preventing and tackling sexual harassment and sexual violence. We also recommend that the Department for Education remind all school Governors of their legal obligations to address sexual harassment and sexual violence in school. Guidance and support on how to achieve this most effectively should be provided to Governing Bodies.”
Echoes of Title IX, anyone?
“By the time they reach secondary school children often have entrenched views about gender norms. It is therefore important that children are educated about gender equality, consent, relationships and sex in an age-appropriate way starting in primary school.”
In other words, an entrenched political and ideological organisation wants government funding to go into schools to teach young and impressionable boys and girls how to interact.
“Too often, SRE ignores the position of boys and young men. It must be broadened to challenge harmful notions of masculinity and reflect boys’ experiences. It should also support boys to challenge and reduce sexual harassment and sexual violence.”
“We welcome the Government’s interest in supporting boys and young men to be part of the solution to the problem of sexual harassment and sexual violence. We recommend that the Government fund research to establish the most effective ways to achieve this.”
You get the implicit picture - girls are victims, and boys are perpetrators of sexual harassment. In case this wasn’t clear enough, they included a visual signpost of a
…girl, interrupted by sexism…
Of course, the feminist Twittersphere is going nuts. If there was a flag representing “the patriarchy”, they’d be in the streets gleefully burning it.
So let’s review: the report itself states there is no evidence to support the problem is a growing problem, yet the rhetoric I’m hearing on the radio makes it appear out of control and endemic. Which is nothing new:
Sure, let’s lobby to let explicitly ideological political groups into schools. As long as they are feminist. What could possibly go wrong?
The report states that:
This is important, and we will come back to this later, but firstly, I was particularly interested in the following claim, number 1 on their page of findings and recommendations…
…it then further states…
Note the reference highlighted.
I followed it.
It took me here…
Keep in mind that the reference was cited to support the claim that “Evidence shows that the majority of perpetrators of this abuse are boys, and the majority of victims are girls.”
It took me a while to find a breakdown of the sex of the harassers – in all graphs they are referred to in sex and gender-neutral terms – but when I did, it revealed something very interesting:
The findings here clearly state that even if girls are more harassed in total, they are not more harassed by boys, they are harassed by other girls.
Spending more money on teaching kids about consent, as is in the recommendations, will not help victims. Demonising boys, toxic masculinity or “laddism” – all deemed problematic in the report – will not help anyone - except feminism.
The claim they want to help boys is hollow. The claim they want to help girls even more so. Who commissioned this report? How much were they paid and was it from the public purse?
Also, note that boys appear to “harass” other boys more than girls. They reached this conclusion by including name-calling and banter as harassment, “Calling someone “gay” or “lesbian”…was the most frequently mentioned type of sexual harassment”.
The numbers on female perpetrators of abuse appear to be in line with the findings of a 2014 Demos report on internet misogyny which found that 50% of online abuse came from females.
Now, lets revisit this comment in the Crossing The Line report highlighted above:
“Because girls reported higher rates of sexual harassment than boys did, this finding raises questions. Why didn’t boys or girls admit to sexually harassing girls when more girls than boys said they had been sexually harassed? Why does it seem to be more acceptable to sexually harass boys? These questions are critical to developing new strategies”
Let’s revisit the below comment in the MP’s report with the above in mind:
Indeed. The tip of the iceberg of female-on-female bullying.
I research female intrasexual competition (FIC), something I call the pink elephant in the feminist room. Female competition and rivalry exists but takes a very different form from male competition, which is more open. What these reports are uncovering is not the tip of the iceberg of endemic male harassment & bullying but of endemic female harassment and bullying of their female rivals.
The main strategies of female competition are well documented; targets are socially ostracized, she is the subject of pernicious gossip, her character is attacked, her sexual history is discussed, her reputation is ruined and crucially, boys are recruited by the female bullies to join in the attack. This is the well-documented anatomy of how females compete – by stealth. The effects on the target are utterly devastating. There is little more terrifying thought for a girl than to be excluded from the group, and this fear is an evolved adaptation that keeps women alive. In court evolutionary past, expulsion from the group would have been a death sentence.
It is THIS phenomenon that feminists should be looking into if they genuinely wish to help young girls. But I do not think that is a genuine wish. All the evidence points to feminism using women - and women’s rights - as a trojan horse to enter and milk institutions to benefit its ideology and primary goal. The primary goal of all feminisms is no secret. It’s not “equality” or “women’s rights”. It is to “dismantle patriarchy”. See the following articles by me here, here, here and here on the subject. If you prefer listening to podcasts, listen to me here on the Tom Woods Show.
It is this research that needs more government funding not feminist sex education.
Logic dictates that if there actually is such a thing as toxic masculinity, there must also be a female analogue. Feminism itself is a hotbed of female squabbling. Feminism itself is actually the primary arena for female competition as demonstrated by the pitch battles between radical feminists in the 1970s, right up to the current turf - or TERF - war for ownership of the feminist brand between radical feminists and intersectional feminists today.
The recommendations in this report do NOT support the paper’s findings. Feminists want access to young women in schools, to police their sexuality via fear of males, when the main negative effect on their self-esteem comes from their female peers.
Female intrasexual competition is not new. It’s just taboo.
Endnote. January 2023
This was originally written in September 2016. Such biased reports continue to come out. Intersectional feminism has infiltrated all of our institutions now - government, academia, even the NHS - and continues to write up ideological nonsense as valid policy briefs, wasting public money on bad research and making recommendations which are - in spite of what they claim - antithetical to the goal of helping women and girls. I don’t know what it will take for people, especially people in our media, to wake up to this. The meme of “feminism” is an empty virtue signal. And no more than a cover for wolves to hide in sheep’s clothing.
One of the most recent was this:
Here is a link to the Twitter thread.
Addendum
The Commons Women and Equalities Committee referenced in the first paragraph appears to have been replaced by the Women and Work all-party parliamentary group
Note the purpose of the group.
On the website, it states that “This year we will look at a variety of issues that impact women’s earning potential, including maternity costs, pension inequality, post-maternity pay freeze and the need for better gender pay reporting and pay transparency to assess and quantify, where possible, what “the cost of being a woman at work” is.” and declares that “in April 2021, the gender pay gap was still high at 15.4%”. It does not explicitly say whether trans women are included in this sample, however, in their 2019 toolkit and annual report Inclusivity and Intersectionality the group explicitly declared its intersectional approach.
Introduction
They are getting there, don’t you worry:
Remember, intersectionality is primarily - supposedly - focused on race, then disability (especially neurodivergent conditions that can be self-diagnosed), then gender (not sex), then all the rest, with anything cis, heteronormative or patriarchal at the lowest branch where all the rest are allowed to crap on them.
See screenshots from a selection of recent academic papers below to see what intersectionality is actually about: dismantling ciswhiteheteroracistsexistpatriarchy+ aka CHRiSPY+.
The ‘Women’ and Work group offer many services, one that includes providing clients with “political intelligence” which makes the next inclusion in their 2019 report a tad worrying:
Note, these “different sources” who they have “heard from” are never cited. Nonetheless, rather like the Commons Women’s and Equalities Report that began this article, these ‘problems’ are “deep-rooted and demand structural change” which demands the government itself adopt and “fully recognise intersectionality”
Huh? Let’s take a quick look at the purpose of the group again
Ah! Now. I get it!
and just for laughs:
Watch out families, to David Lammy, your personal choices are politically, and ideologically unsatisfactory and something needs to be done to address that!
But seriously…
The Women & Work All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) mentions the word “sex” only three times in its Inclusivity and Intersectionality Report and Toolkit. It mentions gender 34 times.
In the above article I also wrote, “Sure, let’s lobby to let explicitly ideological political groups into schools. As long as they are feminist. What could possibly go wrong?”
Hold on to your hat!
Oh, and after all this demonstration of how MP’s MPS! have not adjusted their arguments based on evidence, this really does belong here:
Thanks for reading :)
Read and enjoy here
Further reading on female intrasexual competition:
The development of human female competition: allies and adversaries
Joyce F. Benenson
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/368/1631/20130079
Female competition and aggression: interdisciplinary perspectives
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2013 Dec 5; 368(1631): 20130073.
Paula Stockley1 and Anne Campbell2
A Mind Of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women
Anne Campbell
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-mind-of-her-own-9780199609543?cc=gb&lang=en&
Warriors and Worriers: The Survival of the Sexes
Joyce F Benenson
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Warriors-Worriers-Survival-Joyce-Benenson/dp/0199972230/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1473767339&sr=1-1&keywords=warriors+and+worriers
When my youngest son was 1, I have three, now 35, 43, and 46, I suffered a car accident. I was off work for some years. As a result he and I would hang out together for many hours a day. One of our fave pastimes was being across the street at the park playground. Me and a bunch of single Moms! Most of their children were girls. There were a few boys playing but groups of girls were always there. I spent time watching and I noticed a number of things. First, the little girls would systematically exclude one person from the group. An Alpha, usually the same little girl would run things and her little grouping would push one member from the group, bring her back in while then excluding another member. This happened in every girl group. There was a constant flow of fringe girl going in and out. There always seemed to be one out, being shunned by the other 3 or 4. The Alpha mare would have a couple of stalwarts who would immediately take cues from the Alpha and push whomever had stepped out of line. It was weird. These girls were four years off age!! Second, a little girl would fall and every single Mom would run over and comfort her. A little boy would fall and cry and half the time the mom would ignore him for 30 seconds and then disparage him to her female friends ‘he’s such a little baby!’ And then genuinely go over and comfort him. But. It before making him wait. None of the other Mom would jump up as they would when a little girl fell and cried. Every single one of these Moms would have angrily said she was a feminist.
It was eye opening. The feminists were pushing male female stereotypes 100%. Which makes sense since that is what they see and are fixated on.