I recently came across a mewling article in one of Canada’s “progressive” mags, The Walrus, in which theatre critic Erika Thorkelson bemoans “the insidious sexism of the Canadian theatre world” and the comparative paucity of female actors and playwrights. Her theme is “gender imbalance” -- the latest buzzword in the feminist war against men -- which, of course, is owing to something like an exclusionary male commissariat intent on safeguarding its unjust privileges. That there may be other reasons for the supposed “imbalance” -- lack of comparable interest, different distributions of talent -- must not be mentioned since that would call her thesis into question. I certainly have not noticed any marked dearth of females on the theatrical, operatic, or cinematic scenes. And in the music world, come to think about it, females abound. No matter. The patriarchy strikes again.

At around the same time that I stumbled on this silly piece of special pleading and culturally ratified paranoia, I learned that the husband of a friend, a self-taught biblical scholar and an expert on the Gospel of John, is now serving time after having been accused by his disaffected stepdaughter of sexual assault, although the evidence is sketchy at best, the stepdaughter is psychologically disturbed, and his wife and his other children have testified on his behalf. The judge nevertheless found the daughter’s rather improbable story credible and the man was sentenced to a seven-year prison term. To compound the judicial felony committed against him, he was remanded to maximum security after his preference not to be housed with Muslims was discovered -- he had good reason, having been stabbed by a Muslim for wearing a t-shirt stenciled with the legend “I Am an Infidel.” The fact that he was a believing Christian clearly did not help his case. In any event, this was another tainted victory for the feminist cause.

Like our literary community and our judiciary, our schools are equally engaged in promoting the feminist agenda to the disadvantage of deserving -- indeed, of all -- male students. A typical instance occurred at a high school in a neighboring town, as a friend whose son has just graduated and who attended the graduation ceremony informed me. My friend reports that approximately 90 per cent of the innumerable awards were distributed to female students for various obscure achievements such as offering encouragement to classmates, displaying enthusiasm for the subject, showing aptitude for commitment or evincing general improvement, in short, for enriching the parietal atmosphere by their very presence. Many of these awards came with the caveat “in the opinion of the teachers.” Two girls, the school was proud to announce on its Twitter feed, excelled in the technologies -- “Times Are Changin’” reads the accompanying comment. But the vast majority of these female laureates demonstrated their accomplishment in the mainly “soft” subjects -- the Humanities, social sciences, dance classes, and the like, where marking typically involves a high degree of subjectivity and teacher preference often plays a role. Only a comparative handful of male students were honored, all of whom majored in the “hard” disciplines where objectivity rules -- science, math -- and received top grades. The valedictorian, obviously, was a girl, with a high composite average enhanced, it would appear, by easy marks in the less demanding areas -- and, I strongly suspect, likely with the help of grade inflation, since the principal is female, the vice principal is female, most of the teachers are females, and the school focuses in its Twitter feed, replete with the most cloying and vapid bulletins imaginable, primarily on girls. The high school is toxic for boys, who prudently kept out of full participation in most school groups and activities. Male students cannot but react with a mixture of bemusement and resentment -- going MGTOW, going Galt -- at the cost of our society’s scientific, literary and intellectual health, already in precipitous decline.

At an ICMI (International Conference on Men’s Issues) event in London that I attended, where my wife was a featured speaker, I could scarcely believe what I was hearing about the problems faced by men, though by this time I should have been inured to the inconceivable. In particular I was appalled by the nightmare endured by British visual artist Mark Pearson, who was accused by a well-known 60-year-old TV actress of sexual assault in a heavily trafficked London Underground station. CCTV camera stills recorded that the entire episode, as Pearson enters and leaves the visual field, transpired within two or three seconds, during which time he was alleged to have stopped, knelt, reached under her skirt, penetrated her with his fingers and then hit her on the shoulder, without breaking stride and, be it said, without a single commuter noticing. The physical and temporal impossibility of such a thing happening in the recorded time span -- it took Pearson, one hand holding a newspaper and the other on his rucksack strap, about half a second to actually pass the woman -- did not stop the police from visiting Pearson in his flat and subsequently subjecting him to a year-long criminal proceeding, even though the complainant could not identify him. Pearson, who spoke at the conference, invoked Franz Kafka’s protagonist in The Metamorphosis, who awoke one morning to find he had been transformed into a gigantic cockroach. (He might also have mentioned Kafka’s Joseph K. in The Trial relentlessly prosecuted for a crime of which he had no knowledge.) The police plainly wanted a conviction and must have felt secure enough in a rabid feminist cultural atmosphere to incriminate a man despite lack of forensic evidence for a crime that was, in any case, beyond the bounds of human possibility. And in the pro-feminist environment we have allowed to emerge and establish itself, an abomination of this nature can happen to any man at any time, absent the slightest provocation.

Another conferee pointed out that charging men for sexual assault has now become a virtual industry in Japan, where subways are sudorifically crowded, people are constantly rubbing up against one another, and women extort men for hush money to avoid reputation-damaging lawsuits.

I am, obviously, offering anecdotal evidence, accumulated within one short week, of a ubiquitous trend affecting our entire society. But the anti-male climate cannot be doubted. We have seen the war against men prosecuted in our courts, in our primary schools where boys are preventively sedated, in our universities where every male student is regarded as a potential rapist and men’s issues groups are refused accreditation, in family dispute tribunals where men routinely lose custody of their children and are driven into bankruptcy, in hiring practices where women are elevated into positions of prominence by virtue of gender rather than merit, as at the University of Melbourne in Australia where competition for three senior positions in the Mathematics and Statistics Departments has been closed to men.

In pursuing their punitive agenda, feminists justify their emotional animus and legal vendettas by insisting that we live in a misogynist culture, which must be put to right via a vindictive campaign of retroactive justice targeting men everywhere. That we live in a repressive patriarchal society could not be further from the truth. If one wants to learn what qualifies as a misogynist society, one need only look to the Islamic realm in which a woman’s testimony is worth less than a man’s (Koran 2:282; 4:11), wives can be beaten on scriptural authority (Koran 4:34), women go about garbed in stifling canopies of cotton, crepe or polyester to conceal their femininity and guard their modesty (Koran 33:59) and daughters can be murdered by their fathers -- so-called “honor killings” -- for disobedience or willful conduct (a widespread cultural practice). On the contrary, we in the West live in a gynocentric culture in which women outnumber men in the universities, enjoy the sympathy of the judiciary, and are regularly favored over men in the prestige professions.

It should be noted, too, that feminists would have been unable to advance their cause without the complicity of a professional echelon of corrupt and indoctrinated males, not an alpha among them. For a typical illustration of male-feminist brown-nosing, see Jeffrey Cohen, an obscure academic specializing in queer theory and eco-criticism, who saw his chance to jump on the feminist “bandwagon” by viciously maligning a far superior, anti-feminist scholar, the distinguished medievalist Allen Frantzen. According to Cohen, “we have far too little [feminism], rather than too much,” a conviction that signals a severe case of intellectual depletion. Naturally, he equates anti-feminism with rampant misogyny, an existential fallacy that is also an effective career move. 

The feminist assault on the “patriarchy” as a tyrannical power elite inimical to the rights and prerogatives of women shows no sign of abating. In fact, it is increasing. It is aimed at every level of society, from the high to the low, at children as well as adults, at those brave women like Erin Pizzey, Daphne Patai, Karen Straughan, Janet Bloomfield, Diana Davison, Christina Hoff Summers, and my own wife Janice Fiamengo, who protest the manifest injustice of the gynolatric project, and at men in every walk of life. As Hoff Summers writes in Who Stole Feminism?, “feminist ideology has taken a divisive, gynocentric turn, and the emphasis now is on women as a political class whose interests are at odds with the interests of men,” and who are “united in hostility” against a presumably adversarial culture.

Feminism will ultimately fail for the same reason that socialism always fails: it has absolutely no understanding of human nature and it is utterly impervious to economic reality. But, like socialism, it will wreak enormous damage on its way to cultural and political disaster. Individual feminists, however, like individual socialists, will do quite well, thank you, insulated by privilege and the barriers of residual power. Nonetheless, the feminist Morlocks and their Eloi-male confederates have overrun a once-great and hardy civilization, which has now sunk into a condition of sexual rancour, gender distrust, wanton litigation and near-terminal effeminacy.

Let us be warned. None of us is safe.