Over the past few days, women have come forward in droves to relate stories of being harassed or assaulted by men. Indeed, there can scarcely be a woman in London, and doubtless in other towns and cities too, who doesn’t feel nervous walking alone in isolated places at night; and many more have experienced some kind of harassment or threat from male strangers in the street, even in broad daylight.
So this is a real concern. Unfortunately, it has been hijacked by those with an extreme agenda, who have shamefully appropriated and politicised Sarah Everard’s murder in order to demonise men in general.
A Green party peer, Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb, called for “a 6pm curfew for all men” which would “make women a lot safer, and discrimination of all kinds would be lessened”.
Apart, of course, from discrimination against men which would become mandatory.
Now there are calls for the government to add misogyny to the roster of “hate crimes”. Oh, for goodness’ sake! Why not add misandry and misanthropy too, and make a clean sweep of prejudice against women, men and the entire human race?!
As with all hate crimes, the subjective nature of “hate” means that such legislation serves potentially to criminalise all criticism or mere dislike. The power vested by “hate crimes” in police and prosecutors to harass people — in this case, men — on the basis of highly disputable classifications of attitudes that are deemed to be beyond the pale — in this case, by women — is enormous and potentially oppressive.
The move to suppress attitudes that some women may not like also sits very ill with the protests now swelling against a proposed new law extending police powers to stop public protests, a law which critics say would be so broad and ill-defined it would clamp down oppressively on the right to free expression.
The extremist feminist agenda that’s now running is itself prejudiced and bigoted because it damns and demonises the entire male sex. Does one really need to point out that it is extremely rare for a woman to be abducted and murdered in broad daylight, and that most victims of violence (as well as perpetrators) are male? Does one really need to point out that not all men accused of rape are guilty, which those demanding that the rape conviction rate be increased inescapably imply? Does one really need to point out that, just as it would be wrong to lump all women together and generalise about their behaviour, so too it is equally wrong to do that with men?
Yes, unfortunately one does.
Yes, there is a problem of men all too frequently harassing, stalking or groping women in public. And yes, too many men are violent to their female partners (although research has persistently found that it is mostly women who initiate domestic violence against their male partners and not the other way round, a finding confirmed by more than 200 studies of intimate violence as reported here).
But there are many men for whom all such behaviour would be abhorrent. They wouldn’t dream of harassing, abusing or attacking a woman. These are almost always men who have themselves been brought up in stable families with decent male role models, and which adhere to strong codes of self-restraint, civility and respect for women. Where whole communities adhere to such values, often because they consist of certain religious, ethnic or other tightly-knit cultures, women in those neighbourhoods feel safe when out at night alone.
So this is not a problem with masculinity. It’s a problem with the erosion of the social, cultural and moral codes which restrain the savage and uncivilised in all of us.
One major contributory factor to this erosion is the prevalence of pornography and the appalling reluctance of anyone to curb it. It’s not just that pornography objectifies women. It’s that the images circulating on social media are as depraved and bestial as they are now widely available. They persuade boys and men that the physical and sexual abuse to which they see women being subjected in such images is normal behaviour for both men and women. They constitute social conditioning in degeneracy.
This vile material is now being viewed by teenagers and even young children. Soma Sarah, a young woman who has started a campaign highlighting teenage sexual abuse, told The Times:
“In the holidays I grew up in London social circles and sex was a palpable presence throughout my teens. Disgusting behaviour was trivialised. It could be sexual coercion, rape, catcalling, sexual bullying, stealthing [non-consensual condom removal], image-based abuse [revenge porn], victim blaming. Sexual abuse didn’t just exist, it thrived. It was rife.”The online porn culture can’t have helped. “It reinforces boys’ idea of entitlement over women’s bodies and consent not even existing in porn. It’s very toxic, yet it’s ingrained at such a young age — 11-year-old boys are watching porn. That’s their sex education. Sex education needs to be treated with the same interest as an academic subject, but it was a joke.”Girls, Soma says, are complicit too. “The slut-shaming, jealousy, competition. We are all guilty to some extent. We have this weird culture now where we post pictures of ourselves and want to be liked like the Kardashians. Social media gives us this impossible body image that creates insecurity and eating disorders and never feeling perfect enough.”Male sexual assault is an issue that she says is “super” not talked about. “That is even more stigmatised — boys forcing other boys into actions that they didn’t want. Some boys have been sexually coerced by girls, too. Girls who have relationships together are fetishised by boys; it all comes back to boys feeling entitled to be entertained.
There’s a deeper problem still than pornography, and that’s the destruction of the sexual contract by women themselves. Back in the seventies and eighties, feminists declared the sexual liberation of women. Equality meant women making themselves sexually available, just like men. Furthermore, since men were now declared to be a violent and dissolute waste of space, women would now bring up their children without their baby’s father. Men were to be regarded instead merely as sperm donors, walking wallets, transient sexual partners and occasional au pairs.
The result has been catastrophic for men, women and children. Set loose from the sexual contract which had tamed them by binding them into responsible family life, some boys and men reverted to caveman patterns of brutish behaviour. Women became regarded as sluts, to be treated with a total absence of respect. Domestic violence towards women and children greatly increased in relationships in which men didn’t feel they were fully invested. Although back in the eighties or nineties the Home Office censored collecting the relevant statistics, I recall research showing that women and children were something like 33 times more likely to be physically or sexually abused by an unmarried partner or non-biological father.
In other words, the reason so many women feel so unsafe is not because the entire male sex is a menace, nor because there aren’t enough laws to criminalise them. It’s because of the seismic cultural shift in which the bargain of mutual interest between the sexes has been torn up. Women are unsafe in large measure because the culture has become degenerate. And there’s not one politician brave enough to do a thing about it. Melanie Phillips.
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