What ‘Privilege’? On a Minister for Men
By Sean Bw Parker
September 8, 2023
‘Over the last century we’ve worked hard with equality to put women at the table along with men which is super important. But we can do two things at once’ — Nick Fletcher MP
Do boys and men at last have a hero in the UK House of Commons? Softly spoken northern MP Nick Fletcher is proposing a Minister for Men (MfM), and this seemingly radical idea has prompted lively debate on BBC Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour. The fact that Minister for Women Caroline Nokes has been an strident rhetorical attacker of men, in word or in tone, in recent years might surely have played into Fletcher’s thinking on this initiative.
Debate on Women’s Hour threads tended to circle back to the craven point that happier men would be also better for women. No doubt, but is the proposal simply some sort of levelling-up? The fact that there wasn’t a Minister for Men automatically created when the women’s position was created is already injustice enough. Justice for men and boys has to neither genuflect to the justifiably won rights of women, nor somehow apologise for its own existence.
Twenty-five-plus years after the Westminster demographic shift of Blair’s Babes (and their male facilitators) passing policies virtually unopposed, ‘affirmative action’ has been exposed as the imbalanced prejudice it always was, as democratic representation of the people’s choice has gradually returned. In an advanced liberal democratic society members of parliament should be elected solely by the residents of their constituencies, regardless of sex. It’s not up to civil service wonks to socially engineer them out of their wrong-choice.
The apparently terrifying figure of ‘self-declared misogynist’ Andrew Tate is invoked in every other line on the MfM subject, rather than being the cartoon cut-out idea of machismo that most see him as. One of the duties of the incoming MP will presumably be to make sure school pupils stop asking awkward questions about Tate’s brand of unapologetic masculinity (Romanian human trafficking and rape charges notwithstanding). Tate has his nemesis however in Charlotte Proudman, a similarly attention-hungry online force, a self-declared ‘c*nt’ who tweets almost hourly against men in any story into which she can spanner her undergraduate rage-musings. Great look for a family court barrister, you might think.
Regarding the “The Misogyny Myth,” John Tierney writes:
“This instinct to protect women has been essential for societies to survive, but it has also made us easy prey for a modern industry of academics, journalists, activists, lobbyists, and bureaucrats who falsely blame sexism for any gender gap that doesn’t favor women.”
Back on Women’s Hour, following robust early points made by Mike Buchanan of Justice for Men and Boys, female callers were mixed in their reception of the idea of a MfM. ‘Male privilege’ was repeatedly mentioned without challenge by the host. What privilege is this? The privilege to be the most likely to die by suicide, at work, or years earlier than women? The privilege to be more likely to be the victim of violence, false allegations or massive prejudicial bias in the family courts? Or the privilege to be denied work or opportunities due to diversity of ‘positive discrimination’ policies that preclude them on the basis of the immutable characteristic of their born sex?
The truth is that privilege in the west is (still) based on class and wealth; rich men and women are privileged, the poor somewhat less so – while the risible 2010 Equality Act insists all outcomes be the same, in a horrendous real-time race to the bottom, played out in an increasingly incredulous media. The theory that the angry reaction that many males are expressing in response to the current blanket misandry across mainstream culture stems from ‘fear’ was also repeated. Anger about injustice is not fear – it’s anger about injustice.
Endless messaging about the ‘patriarchy’ and ‘toxic masculinity’ – both theories that have been massively damaged since the Depp-Heard trial and exposes about #MeToo-era corruption in the media – have left males of all ages feeling shut out of a society built by their forefathers. Ideological activists, emerging from gender studies indoctrination for the last thirty-plus years, have metastasized from academia to publishing, to television and the civil service, and now every message channel is full of relentless ‘with us or against us’ rhetoric.
This has become a silent political extremism, and that is why Nick Fletcher is correct, and brave, and very very necessary.