The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

The work of Judith Butler from the University of Berkeley was particularly popular in this regard. In Butler’s view (especially in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 1990), feminism has made a mistake in thinking that there are categories such as male and female. Both the masculine and the feminine are ‘culturally presupposed’. Indeed, gender itself is nothing more than a ‘reiterated social performance’ and definitely not the result of a ‘prior reality’. At the same time the same exercise took place in black studies, where the same work was being done – with reference to the same sets of thinkers – to assert that just like gender, race too was in fact a cultural construct, which was ‘culturally presupposed’ and to do only with ‘reiterated social performance’.

The utility of such groups is obvious: their ‘highly diverse struggles: urban, ecological, anti-authoritarian, anti-institutional, feminist, anti-racist, ethnic, regional or that of sexual minorities’ give purpose and drive to a socialist movement that needs new energy. What is more, unless they cohere together these groups might just pursue their own agendas and their own needs. What is needed is to bring all these movements under one umbrella: the umbrella of the socialist struggle.

Their enemy is defined not by its function of exploitation, but by wielding a certain power. And this power, too, does not derive from a place in the relations of production, but is the outcome of the form of social organisation characteristic of the present society. This society is indeed capitalist, but this is not its only characteristic; it is sexist and patriarchal as well, not to mention racist.

Marxist thinkers has always been that they do not stumble or self-question in the face of contradiction, as anybody aiming at truth might. Marxists have always rushed towards contradiction.

Their ideological children in identity politics and intersectionality seem content to inhabit an ideological space littered with contradiction, absurdity and hypocrisy.

strong words, not helpful for conversation, like at all

The weapons to hand (accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia and finally transphobia) were all too easy to wield and there was no price to pay for wielding them unfairly, unjustifiably or indeed frivolously. Critics of the emerging orthodoxy, including scientists, were accused of being propelled by the most base motives.

For the purpose of large sections of academia had ceased to be the exploration, discovery or dissemination of truth. The purpose had instead become the creation, nurture and propagandization of a particular, and peculiar, brand of politics. The purpose was not academia, but activism.

from both side

So long as people were willing to claim that we live in a patriarchal society, a ‘rape-culture’, a homophobic, transphobic and racist culture; so long as they indict their own society and scatter in a smattering of admiration for any other society (from an approved list), then almost anything can be said. So long as the pyramid of oppression is believed in and propagated to others, almost anything can find its way into the canon of unreadable and largely uncited academic work.

Any parent may notice the differences between their sons and daughters, but the culture tells them that there are none or that those that are there are purely ‘performative’ issues.

define differences though...

Worse is that we have begun trying to reorder our societies not in line with facts we know from science but based on political falsehoods pushed by activists in the social sciences. Of all the things that are deranging our societies, everything to do with the sexes – and particularly relations between the sexes – are perhaps the most deranging of all. Because the facts are there all the time, in front of our eyes. It is just that we are not meant to notice them, or if we notice them we are expected to stay silent.

Of course this comes from a white male. Man this guy can't be serious..

If it weren’t the case that women are practised at these forms of behaviour, just consider the market for women’s clothing and accessories that are meant to present women to men in an even more sexual light than they might otherwise appear.

It’s all about making women feel better about themselves: absolutely nothing to do with men; without men, women would still go around wearing ice-cold, fake, stick-on nipples. But the marketing for such products makes it perfectly clear what – and who – they are really for.

Example. Cats?

Again, it might be possible to claim that this has nothing to do with men and is just the sort of thing women would like to wear around under their dressing gown at home or under the baggiest pair of trousers or skirt at work. That it is all about how a woman feels about herself.

Women

And moments like this are interesting. Because if somebody says that opening this discussion up does not mean women shouldn’t dress how they like, and yet still a lot of people hear (or claim to hear) that this is exactly what Peterson is saying, and what’s more that he is excusing sexual assault, then something is clearly going badly wrong. This is not about mishearings or misunderstandings. It is more likely an example of people deliberately and lazily adopting simplified misrepresentations of what other people are saying in order to avoid the difficult discussion that would otherwise have to take place.

It is what you are doing too genius...

The manner in which marketing addresses women tells us a great deal about what women are actually motivated by when they think men aren’t watching.

And we seem to have decided that the individual complexities which actually exist not just between women and men but within men and within women can simply be pushed to one side with the assumption that they have all been overcome.

Individual complexity

And yet he can go online or down to his local bookstore – if he can find one – and discover that the books which have recently sold in the greatest numbers to women (including those of his mother’s age group) are ones centred around women’s rape fantasies.

Is he actually serious?

Wearing just a bra on top and a pair of lacy and holed leggings she moves around the man, gyrating as she goes.

Let's use Nicki Minaj as an example for female behavior and desire.why not?

The demand is that a woman must be able to lap-dance before, drape herself around and wiggle her ass in the face of any man she likes. She can make him drool. But if that man puts even one hand on the woman then she can change the game completely. She can go from stripper to mother superior in a heartbeat.

Point

What is the demand that is being made here? The impossible demand that cannot be met but which has been written into contemporary mores? It is that a woman must be allowed to be as sexy and sexual as she pleases, but that does not mean she can be sexualized. Sexy, but not sexualized.

So the raped is to blame I guess that is what you meant to say.

It is an impossible demand. And not just an unreasonable but a deranging demand to make on men. But nobody wants to explore it. Because to explore it would be to uncover a whole world of unremediable, unsolvable, complexity.

Main?

that the current accepted way of regarding women is: the same as men, but different where it’s useful or flattering.

Petty

There is one other surefire way to get the crowd on your side. And that is for a woman on the stage to express concern, nervousness or a sense of ‘imposter syndrome’. One impressive, smart and striking young woman involved in a start-up business begins her contribution by saying all of these things. She is nervous and feels almost as if she shouldn’t be there, with all these amazing women in the room who have achieved so much.

So petty. Aren't You doing exactly the same thing feeling sorry that things aren't what they used to be anymore? Glad you feel that way btw.

That women – not all women, but many women – have an ability that men do not. This is the ability to drive members of the opposite sex mad. To derange them. Not just to destroy them but to make them destroy themselves. It is a type of power which allows a young woman in her late teens or twenties to take a man with everything in the world, at the height of his achievements, torment him, make him behave like a fool and wreck his life utterly for just a few moments of almost nothing.

Power of women

Studies repeatedly show that – all else being equal – people who are attractive manage to climb higher in their chosen professions than their less attractive peers.

Harvard University has been developed as the Implicit Association Test (IAT).

In 2015 the Royal Society of Arts in London announced that it was training people on selection and appointment panels to address their unconscious bias. The organization released a video explaining how this was done. It advocated four principal moves: deliberately slow down decision-making; reconsider the reasons for your decision-making; question cultural stereotypes; monitor each other for unconscious bias.

Western democracies include a range of groups (women, ethnic minorities, sexual minorities and others) who are structurally oppressed in a ‘matrix of oppression’. From there what the intersectionalists urge is a political project rather than an academic discipline. The interests of one of these groups is portrayed as the interest and concern of all of these groups. If they unite against the common enemy of the people at the top of the pyramid who allegedly hold the power, then something good will happen.

To say that intersectionality has not been thought through is an understatement. Together with its other faults it has not been put to the test in any meaningful way anywhere for any meaningful length of time. It has the most tenuous basis in philosophy and has no major work of thought dedicated to it.

Has slavery? Has industrial revolution? Has Globalism?

In recent years, as intersectionality has begun to catch on, the workplaces which are attempting to implement it have produced stranger and stranger conundrums.

It seems every ism comes down to the theory of development eventually

At firms in all the major cities a concerted drive will take place to promote women or people of colour into higher positions. But as an increasing number of companies and government departments have to account for pay differentials between the sexes and people of different racial backgrounds, fascinating new problems arise.

Problems

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?

Bad example..

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.

No wonder class is not a chapter here. But these conservatives refuse to provide free food for poor children. And he dares to put class in the topic.

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.

Track record of success

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.

Different perspective

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.

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.

Niche

Many of the claims made in French’s book are tendentious and ahistorical.

Like yours is not.

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.

Like in this book?

The other thing to get embedded in this stage of feminism was a form of misandry – man-hating.

But you can hate all the other niche groups..

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.

Example. Point.

But nobody knows what the preponderance of male suicides (according to the Samaritans, British men are three times more likely to commit suicide than women), deaths in dangerous occupations, homelessness and much more might mean. Is this a sign of the opposite of male privilege?

When it is about men it is a different kind of logic. You are using extreme cases to represent the groups you hate, but you use general data for groups you try to protect.

there is the term ‘mansplaining’ to decry any occasion when a man can be said to have spoken to a woman in a patronizing or supercilious manner. Certainly everybody can think of examples when they have heard men speak in precisely such a tone of voice. But most people can also think of times when a woman has spoken to a man in the same way. Or indeed when a man has spoken patronizingly to another man.

Point

women’s magazine Grazia said, ‘We live in a patriarchal society, that much we know.’ The reasons it gave as evidence were ‘the objectification of women’ and ‘unrealistic beauty standards’, as though men are never objectified or held to any standards in their appearance (a claim that men who have been surreptitiously photographed on trains by strangers and had their photos uploaded to ‘Hot dudes reading’ on Instagram might dispute).

The APA claimed that 40 years of research showed that ‘traditional masculinity – marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression, is undermining men’s well-being’.

does a form of ‘toxic femininity’ exist? If so, what is it and how can it be permanently excised from women?

Point

Of course if there are toxic traits within masculinity the likelihood is that they are so deep (that is, they exist across all cultures irrespective of situational differences) that they are ineradicable. Or it could be that there are specific aspects of some male behaviour which in certain times and places are undesirable.

Point

If the latter is the case then there are almost certainly specific ways in which to tackle the problem. But in either case inventing concepts like ‘male privilege’, ‘the patriarchy’, ‘mansplaining’ or ‘toxic masculinity’ would not get near to addressing the problem, proving either too little or too much for the diagnosis at hand.

The first time he talks about solving problem.. It is about protecting the men..

The more obvious explanation from any outside analysis is that there seems to be a move less intended to improve men than to neuter them, to turn any and all of their virtues around on them and turn them instead into self-doubting, self-loathing objects of pity. It looks, in a word, like some type of revenge.

Would you neuter the rapist?