This post is published on the 25^th Anniversary of the Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize (9^th February). What better way to celebrate this milestone than to read the final part of my exploration of Emma Humphreys’ life and legacy?

As she was only 18 at the time of the trial, Emma was sentenced “at Her Majesty’s pleasure” meaning that she was given an indefinite sentence. An appeal in 1986 proved unsuccessful. Later, according to VennerRoad, Humphreys wrote to Justice for Women after hearing about their campaigning for the release of Kiranjit Ahluwalia, a woman who had burned her husband alive in 1989 after apparently suffering years of abuse at his hands. Ahluwalia’s appeal to have her conviction changed from murder to manslaughter was successful and she was released in 1992. Justice for Women, founded by lesbian feminist couple Julie Bindel and Harriet Wistrich, have campaigned for the release of women like Kiranjit Ahluwalia and Emma Humphreys (VennerRoad acknowledges, nevertheless, that Humphreys and Ahluwalia’s cases were very different) since 1990 and succeeded in securing Emma’s release in 1995.

Humphreys’ instability and impulsivity, evident before her conviction, revealed itself again following her release from prison. According to Bindel’s and Wistrich’s recollection, Emma “ran wild” following her release – indulging in drugs and picking up men like she had done prior to her stabbing Trevor Armitage. VennerRoad provides a quote from Wistrich where she recalls an incident where herself and Bindel had to turn Humphreys away “from our house at 5am with nowhere to go” showing that even they couldn’t tolerate some of her behaviour. However, Julie Bindel and Harriet Wistrich perceive Emma Humphreys’ actions to be the result of trauma from her time in prison and everything that had happened to her before, effectively robbing Humphreys of any agency.

Just like before her imprisonment, Humphreys was in and out of several accommodations due to being disruptive and challenging. Imagine what she was like with Trevor Armitage! I have read some accounts about Humphreys which describe an appearance on a radio show (Woman’s Hour perhaps?) at some point after her release where she talks about being in another abusive relationship with a man and stating that “if he doesn’t hit you, he doesn’t love you” which resulted in the interview abruptly ending! However, I can’t confirm if this really happened because I haven’t found evidence showing if/when this interview took place.

Nevertheless, there is footage of Humphreys on the day she was released from prison in this video with the rather dubious title ‘Emma Humphreys – An Inspiring Legacy’. Humphreys can be seen being cheered by a crowd of women while balloons with the Suffragette colours of green and purple drift up in the air; I find this detail rather appropriate as, like Emma Humphreys, many of the Suffragettes engaged in acts of violence and so were not as heroic and ‘inspiring’ as feminists have presented them as been.

Judging from the video, Humphreys comes across as a little childlike and not particularly intelligent. However, this may have been the result of drug taking as VennerRoad notes she looks ‘spaced out’ during the interviews. This child-like and/or drug-addled feature of Emma Humphreys’ psychology makes interpreting her actions something of a Rorschach test; whoever observes her may draw their own unique interpretations about what she did and why she did it. Moreover, like many mentally unstable people, Humphreys would have likely being easily swayed by others. In truth, Emma may not have completely understood why she stabbed Trevor Armitage but feminists were available to interpret for her.

From the small amount of footage I’ve seen of her, I get the impression that, in spite of what she did, Emma Humphreys may not have been an entirely bad person but she was definitely a very troubled and dangerous individual. If she wasn’t going to be in prison, she should have certainly been in an institution, for her sake as much as anybody else’s.

The video also shows Emma Humphreys’ struggle with anorexia which likely contributed to her early demise. It’s shocking to see how Humphreys’ appearance changed from how she looked shortly after she left prison (see 1:19 on the above linked video) compared to how she looked a while later (see 8:33). She wasn’t a bad looking woman but towards her death she looked much older than her thirty years. Freedom, it seems, had aged her far more than 10 years in prison had.

Emma Humphreys died of a choral hydrate overdose on 11^th July 1998. Interestingly, the video gives her birth date as 1968 rather than 1967 possibly showing how little her feminist supporters actually researched her background – or maybe they just don’t understand how someone who was born in October 1967 could be 30 in July 1998.

Following Humphreys’ death, Julie Bindel apparently told the inquest that Emma was “thrown out of prison and left to her own devices” seemingly forgetting that Bindel had partly contributed to this cause of events by lobbying for her release. In this memorial to Humphreys, Harriet Wistrich writes that she “sometimes …wondered whether we were doing the best thing for Emma” during their campaign for her release and Bindel recalls here Wistrich noting that “cruelly, Emma had been safer in prison than on the outside.” – you think so, Harriet?

Although Bindel, Wistrich and others did attempt to look out for Humphreys following their successful campaigning – they frequently visited her and tried to give her food to gain weight – they seem have been, and likely still are, blinded by their own ideologies and have a very naive perception of Humphreys.  In their eyes, Emma Humphreys was merely a tragic victim of the Patriarchy and her own actions were simply a reflection of that. That Humphreys bore some responsibility for what happened to her has likely never occurred to them. After all, how would they then turn her into a martyr and create a prize dedicated to her?

I don’t doubt there was a lot of sympathy and empathy from the likes of Bindel and Wistrich towards Humphreys and they couldn’t have predicted that she would die so soon after her release, but their involvement in the last years of her life have enabled them to control her legacy and spin a very particular version of events. This account of Humphreys’ life by Harriet Wistrich from earlier last month shows how sentimentalised and distorted her story has become. It also appears neither Wistrich nor Bindel have reconsidered how their actions may have contributed to Emma Humphreys’ early death.

Dea Birkett, writing in The Times back in 2002, notes in this article several cases, including that of Emma Humphreys, of women convicted of killing their male partners being set free on the grounds of abuse.

Birkett notes:

“A gaggle of feminist and legal groups have welcomed these women walking free. The judiciary are finally accepting the argument that domestic violence and abuse are sufficient grounds for provocation, declares Justice for Women. Put in plain language, this statement is terrifying: if your boyfriend gives you bruises, it’s understandable if you knife him in the heart. Soon, women will be able to get away with murder. It cannot be right that our legal system is being used as a weapon in the war between the sexes.”

Dea Birkett – ‘Women should not get away with murder’

She also makes this compelling point:

“But the courts are not the place to redress centuries of women’s oppression. These murdered men, however unsavoury, should not be scapegoats for society’s inequalities. If this were the purpose of our legal system, any Muslim killing any Christian would be committing mere manslaughter because of the atrocities of the Crusades. A black burglar could be defended on the basis that he was redressing the sins of slavery. Such arguments would be, rightly, laughed out of court. Each of these individuals is committing a crime against a person.”

Dea Birkett

Although we could debate whether women have endured “centuries of oppression” – at least compared to any other group of human beings – her overall point was very well made.

Emma Humphreys’ life was in many ways tragic, but this doesn’t mean we can’t judge her actions or her as an individual. She was not some poor helpless soul who could be rescued by heroic feminists and go on to have a normal life following her release. What happened to Humphreys after she came out of prison indicates to me that Bindel, Wistrich and their fellow campaigners didn’t really know who or what they were dealing with. Emma Humphreys’ unfortunate fate should be seen as a warning to what can happen when the simplistic and black-and-white viewpoint that an ideology provides encounters the cold and complicated real world.

Often omitted from most presentations of this case is Emma Humphreys’ own incidents of violence and difficult behaviour, at least before her killing of Armitage and subsequent conviction.

The Guardian released some of Humphreys’ diary entries in this article and argued that, if they were published at the time of Humphreys’ initial conviction, they could have lessened her sentence. Ironically, in my opinion, the diaries could have equally SUPPORTED her conviction.

One entry comes from her time in Canada. Both Emma’s mother and stepfather seemed to have been heavy drinkers which clearly made her home life unstable. According to her own account, Emma had ran away from home on at least one occasion and ended up spending time in a children’s home called Westfield in Edmonton where she records that she cut herself and, in one incident, “went rank” (whatever that means) on her social worker which resulted in her being restrained by security guards.

She also describes her relationship with her mother. Humphreys records her mother “drinking 24 hours a day” and writes that “she upsets me” (this is admittedly open to interpretation: is Emma being sympathetic towards her mother or saying that her mother says/does things to her which she doesn’t like?) Later she writes that she “never had a mother-to-daughter relationship” with her mother.

When she was living with her ‘Nana’ (grandmother) back in the UK in Nottingham she writes that she and her Nana “aren’t talking again” because her Nana was “being so judgmental towards me”. This suggests that Humphreys’ behaviour was concerning enough to warrant criticism from her grandmother and probably the reason for Humphrey not staying with her.

Other entries after she moved in with Armitage describe him hitting Humphreys, her getting involved with another man called Anthony, and the two of them smashing up Armitage’s house which led to them ending up “at Radford Road cells.”

The (biased) Wikipedia article on Humphreys mentions that she had convictions before her murder case:

“In January 1985, Humphreys was arrested and kept on remand at HM Prison Risley for two incidents, one of which involved assaulting a hotel manager.”

In her diary, Emma writes that she had assaulted a police officer as well as the hotel manager! The Court of Appeal judgement simply refers to Emma appearing before the criminal court “as a result of two incidents” conveniently not mentioning any assault on her part. There is however an interesting detail here that Humphreys was conditionally discharged on 21^st February 1985 – only a few days before she killed Trevor Armitage – who had “took in another girl” while “she was away”.

Did Armitage taking in another woman while Humphreys was on remand contribute to Humphreys’ actions days later? It may have certainly infuriated her and made her jealous – although this is simply a conjecture on my part. Killing someone only days after being conditionally released isn’t exactly going to help you avoid going to prison though.

What is evident here is that, even before her association with Armitage, Emma Humphreys was capable of impulsive and destructive actions like the one that led to her imprisonment.

True, Emma Humphrey’s erratic behaviour would have likely made her vulnerable to dangerous and predatory men but she was obviously just as capable of being violent and unpredictable.

According to her Wikipedia article, a psychiatrist at the original 1985 trial described Humphreys as:

“of abnormal mentality, with immature, explosive and attention-seeking traits, the last trait referring to her tendency to slash her wrists”

A medical examination after her killing of Armitage also revealed cuts all over her arms including recent ones. According to Emma herself, Armitage had taunted her about her wrist-slashing which was what led to her stabbing him. Was this evidence of persistent mental abuse by Armitage towards Humphreys which caused her to finally snap and retaliate? Or evidence of the couple’s destructive characters and relationship? Feminists would have us believe that the former was the case. This interpretation of the events is a classic example of so-called ‘battered women’s syndrome’ which argues that pre-meditated or seemingly unprovoked acts of violence by women against their male partners is the result of the men’s previous abuse of the women. Obviously, acts of violence from one person to another will, in many cases, result with a response in kind but if that response leads to murder, then the murder victim is still a victim.

Had Trevor Armitage forced himself on Emma Humphreys and tried to rape, injure or murder her, then her stabbing of him could be justified as an act of manslaughter – which makes the idea of battered women syndrome futile.

For a while I’ve been interested in the sad, dramatic life of Emma Humphreys, a woman who was convicted of killing her boyfriend/pimp Trevor Armitage in 1985 and was then released in 1995 after the feminist campaign group Justice for Women got her conviction changed from murder to manslaughter. Humphreys later died aged just 30 in 1998 from an overdose.

The Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize (EHMP) was established following Humphrey’s death, as described on the website emmahumphreys.org:

“Every year since her death in 1998, the Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize has given two awards to feminist campaigners in honour of Emma. The awards carry a prize of £1,000 and are given to women campaigners and to campaign groups who have, through writing or campaigning, raised awareness of violence against women and children.”

Only feminists could establish a prize for “recognising women who work against male violence” and dedicate it to a woman who murdered a man. Humphreys was able to get her conviction changed because it was argued that she had been physically and sexually abused by Trevor Armitage and so her murder of him was an act of self defence. February of this year (2024) marks the 25^th anniversary of the prize so this post was unintentionally well timed.

What makes this case interesting to me is the way it shows how narratives can diverge from the facts, or as close as we can get to the facts from the information at hand, as well as how ideologies can have a big impact on our perceptions. I’ll attempt to illustrate here in three parts why this case is a good example of the truth being distorted to fit a particular ideology, in this instance feminism.

The standard narrative presented about Emma Humphreys is that she grew up with a violent stepfather and was forced to run away from home and become a prostitute. She was later the victim of abuse by Trevor Armitage which led to her killing him. In response, the apparently brutal and patriarchal justice system condemned poor Emma Humphreys to life in prison until feminists came to her rescue in the 1990s. After being released from prison, the psychologically damaged Emma was left to fend for herself which led to her untimely death.

The basic, uncontroversial facts about Humphrey’s background prior to her crime are that she was born in the UK in 1967 and then went with her mother, stepfather and siblings to Canada after her parents’ marriage broke down. She later came back to England to live with her father, then her grandmother and, at some point, began living with her victim Trevor Armitage after she had turned to prostitution.

A more in-depth description of her background can be found in this post by ‘VennerRoad’ which also gives a detailed overview of her murder case.

Trevor Armitage is always referred to as being Emma Humphreys’ pimp but it is unclear how much he was involved in Humphreys’ sex work. Was he forcing her to prostitute herself or was he simply taking money she had earned from prostitution in exchange for letting her stay at his residence? My own thinking is that the latter was more likely. Perhaps it’s more accurate to call Armitage Emma Humphreys’ “pimp” in quotation marks since he may have been indirectly gaining money from her prostitution. What is clear is that Humphreys and Armitage had a very tumultuous relationship.

Trevor Armitage was certainly a deeply flawed man – he had previous violent convictions and was in a relationship with a much younger woman barely older than his son (Armitage was 33 and Humphreys was 17). He could have definitely been violent towards Humphreys but she had opportunities to leave him if the abuse was so bad. Some might argue that Emma may have been too afraid to leave but she was not exactly harmless herself.

However, you can believe that Trevor Armitage was a scumbag and at the same time think that Emma Humphreys should have remained in prison for killing him. Feminists like to say that there is ‘no such thing as a perfect victim’ but does this also apply to men? Feminists seem to think however that any blame placed on a woman is equivalent to saying all the blame is on women. In fact, assuming women have responsibility over how they behave is surely less patronising than presenting them as powerless victims?

As already noted, Trevor Armitage was not exactly a saint and his decision to have a relationship with Humphreys cost him his life. However, would it be politically incorrect to suggest that birds of a feather flock together? In other words, perhaps Emma Humphreys and Trevor Armitage’s volatile personalities drew them towards each other.

Since Trevor Armitage is not alive to put forward his own version of events, we are only left with the information presented about the case. The same cannot be said for Emma Humphreys, who later presented as a heroine fighting a sexist, patriarchal justice system.

Emma Humphreys killed Trevor Armitage with a knife to the chest while he was lying on his back at their residence sometime between 25^th-26^th February 1985. He was only wearing a shirt which Humphreys claimed was an indication that he wanted to have sex with her. The Court of Appeal judgement (which is linked on VennerRoad’s post) argued that a comment made by Armitage to Humphreys while they were in a pub with some friends earlier that night about them being “all right for a gang bang” was evidence of provocation.

Notice that these are assumptions rather than definitive evidence of threatening behaviour by Armitage that would justify Humphreys stabbing him. It is one thing to talk about a gang bang than to engage in one. Armitage’s “undressed state” as it was described in the Appeal may have indicated he wanted sex from Humphreys but he didn’t force himself on her before she stabbed him. Maybe he would have. Then again, maybe he would have spontaneously combusted had he not being stabbed. This is further complicated by the fact that we only have Emma Humphreys’ account of what happened. To say that she may have been an unreliable narrator might be an understatement.

Just a quick one to let any readers know that this blog is still active despite the fact I haven’t posted anything for a while. I haven’t done much with the blog this year despite expressing my desire last year to be more active on it. 2023 hasn’t been the best year for me so, while I haven’t had any serious problems to deal with, I haven’t felt up to writing or posting content on here a lot of times although hopefully that should be different in 2024.

I’ve had more of a problem with having too many things I wanted to write about rather than having too little. Events I wanted to write about this year include the Barbie/Oppenheimer phenomenon (although I haven’t seen either film), the Laurence Fox/GB News incident, the Russell Brand controversy, the Israel/Palestine conflict, Joey Barton, Nigel Farage and the upcoming UK/US elections among others. In most cases, events had moved on before I had thought of anything to write about them.

I also have about four book reviews that I want to write but haven’t even started. As well as that, I have a lot of content that I’ve started writing but not finished.

All of that is to say that next year should be more active that this one.

The final extract from Louise Perry’s book explores how changes in attitudes towards sex since the sexual revolution may have contributed to the sexualisation of children.

Perry starts by looking at the well known campaigner Mary Whitehouse who unsuccessfully campaigned against the depiction of sex and violence on TV. Perry notes that some of Whitehouse’s campaigning seems quaint to us now such as the use of sexual innuendo in TV shows in addition to her opposition to homosexuality which resulted in her becoming a figure of ridicule. A porn star for example changed her name to Mary Whitehouse as a way to mock her and the BBC Director-General Hugh Greene is said to have had a grotesque picture of her which he would throw darts at!

A lot of people who disagreed with Whitehouse, however, have conceded that she had a point about the type of content that was produced by television which has, if nothing else, perhaps made popular culture more dumbed down than it used to be. Whitehouse was also I think a bit of an easy target for certain people who could have at least accepted that she had a point of view that was shared by a significant percentage of the population even if they didn’t share it themselves.

I’ve noticed that some feminists have tried to reclaim Whitehouse as a kind of ‘proto-girlboss’ due to her opposition to pornography and other areas of sex as Louise Perry elaborates in this article. Perry argues that Mary Whitehouse was “one of the few public figures of her day who gave a damn about child sexual abuse” which made her “remarkably prescient”.

For all the BBC’s animosity towards Mary Whitehouse and her moral campaigning, they can’t really claim any high-ground having employed figures such as Jimmy Savile, who was revealed to have been a serial sexual predator only after his death. Louise Perry notes that Savile’s celebrity status allowed him to exploit his victims without any repercussions. However, Savile was apparently open about his behaviour, even in his autobiography, and it appears this wasn’t taken seriously.

Perry argues that relaxed attitudes towards child sexualisation in the 1970s and 80s allowed groups such as the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIB) in Britain and the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) in the USA to flourish whilst European countries had freely available child pornography. Left-leaning intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida also apparently campaigned in France to decriminalise the age of consent.

Returning to Mary Whitehouse, Louise Perry notes that Whitehouse’s lobbying helped pass the Protection of Children Act in 1978 which Perry argues has been forgotten by liberals in addition to their own “tolerance for paedophilia”.

While paedophilia is now condemned by liberal thinkers, Louise Perry believes their argument is based on the idea of consent – i.e. since children can’t consent to sexual acts, sex with children is wrong. Perry nevertheless asks such thinkers to consider adult performers dressing or acting like children, or graphic depictions of sex with children – are these also wrong?

Perry here writes:

“The problem has always been where you draw the line, and this puts liberals in an awkward position. When you set out to break down sexual taboos, you shouldn’t be surprised when all taboos are considered fair game for breaking.”

Such taboos that could be broken include incest, beastiality or necrophilia although the latter two could be ruled out due to the issue of consent. Louise Perry believes that we are “starting to see some slippage back towards the paedophilia advocacy of the 1970s” using the infamous Netflix film Cuties as an example.

This particular film caused outrage for depicting prepubescent girls wearing revealing outfits and twerking, grinding and other sexualised poses. Like with any controversy nowadays, there was a distinct political divide with commentators on the Left arguing that the film was a satire on child sexualisation whereas the right saw it as promoting child sexualisation. Perry writes:

“There is something about paedophilia anxiety that is currently considered rather low-status among the liberal elites. Snobbish progressives present it as an obsession of the ignorant and credulous working classes, fired up by tabloid newspaper stories.”

Louise Perry acknowledges the hysteria that can surround accusations of child sex abuse but also notes that sexual exploitation of children does take place, such as with Jimmy Savile and also Jeffrey Epstein.

Perry concludes:

“Yet these things really happened. They are an indication of the murky places to which a no-holds-barred attitude to sexual liberation can lead — just as Mrs. Whitehouse was warning all those years ago, and got no thanks for.”

There isn’t much in this article that I disagree with Louise Perry on since any right-minded person would object to the sexual abuse of children and it is reasonable to suggest that the sexual revolution allowed figures like the aforementioned Savile to be exploitative.

However, Louise Perry does not point out that feminism, which she still identifies with, has taken advantage of society’s fears of child sexual abuse for their ends. For example, Erin Pizzey has said that mothers in child custody cases in Western countries such as Canada can prevent fathers from seeing their children by using the ‘silver bullet’ of claiming that fathers had physically and/or sexually abused their children. There will be some genuine claims of paternal sexual abuse, but it’s still a powerful weapon to use by mothers, or their lawyers, to stop fathers from having any contact. Stephen Baskerville, whom I mentioned in Part 2, has made similar points about the family court system routinely presenting fathers as abusers.

The fear of paedophilia may have also resulted in the decline of male teachers in schools and other roles where men interact with children, such as in the Boy Scouts; This particular organisation is often the source of lazy and overdone jokes about scoutmasters being actual or borderline child molesters. No doubt, paedophiles will go to occupations where they are authority figures over children, but these cases should not devalue other men who may want to work in such professions.

There’s an episode of the Channel 4 show TV Heaven, Telly Hell where the comedian David Mitchell notes the decline of older ‘children’s TV’ presenters from when he was growing up and their replacement with younger ‘cool elder sibling’ presenters. Mitchell says he prefers the ‘fun middle-aged man’ which predictably gets some laughs from the audience. David Mitchell then argues that it’s not a bad thing for a middle aged man to be fond of children and children to also like middle-aged men. The presenter Sean Lock (RIP) responds that Mitchell has a good point but that they can edit it very badly for him! The whole episode can be watched here although the relevant bit starts around 09:05.

In short, the fear of child abuse by some men has been used to demonise men as a whole. I remember watching a discussion programme about masculinity on TV – I think it was The Big Questions – in which a men’s rights type-man was arguing that men should have more time with children. A white knight – I mean another man – questioned whether this was a good idea since men tend to be more violent and sexually abuse more children than women. While it’s possible that most child abusers are men, this is only a fraction of a percentage of men as a whole, to say nothing of female child abusers. Feminists nevertheless have taken advantage of society’s fears of male predators to cast doubt on any man who works, or who may be interested in working, with children.

This is one reason why I don’t believe some commentators on the right who claim that the Left, or at least the Left as a whole, want to normalise paedophilia – there are certainly extremists who may wish to do so, but the public would not tolerate such leniency if it meant that children were put in harm’s way. The backlash that has followed legislation over transgenderism is one example of this.

Like with transgenderism, I’m willing to admit I’m wrong if things get too far, but, for understandable reasons, paedophilia is a useful stick to beat your opponents over the head with. It’s not a surprise that the Catholic Church, not exactly a traditionally Left-leaning organisation, has been attacked because there has been cases of a small number of Catholic priests molesting children. While I’ve heard that most of the victims of abuse at the hands of priests were older boys and adolescents – suggesting the issue was more about homosexuality than paedophilia – even if this is true, it will not wash with critics who might claim that this is an attempt to dismiss the scandal. Of course, the Catholic Church is by no means the only organisation to have been tainted with sexual abuse accusations, which, in the age of #MeToo, have been levelled at many organisations and institutions.

On the other hand, we shouldn’t be naïve in thinking that child abuse doesn’t happen in powerful circles where certain people have the influence and resources to get away with their behaviour. The individuals described in Perry’s article are one example of that. Similarly, there is definitely questionable subject matter being taught to children by certain ideological teachers which does need to be investigated.

All that being said, I would be more sympathetic to Louise Perry here if she had pointed out that fear of paedophilia can be an effective political tool used by many different movements (e.g. feminism) even if genuine concerns of abuse are sometimes dismissed as hysteria.

Conclusion

Compared to most feminists, Louise Perry at least has some sensible things to say and I don’t think overall she’s a bad person. Nevertheless, judging from these extracts from her book, I wouldn’t recommend reading it as Perry does not want to let go of the feminist victim narrative. This is why I haven’t jumped on the reactionary feminist bandwagon like a few people I follow appear to have done. As Janice Fiamengo notes in this Substack article about Perry’s fellow reactionary feminist Mary Harrington (whom, in fairness, I regard as a more interesting thinker than Perry):

“Nothing says “Women are wonderful” quite like the applause in conservative and non-feminist circles that greets a feminist who makes even the mildest criticisms of feminism…”

Janice Fiamengo – ‘A Reformed Feminism Still Sees Men as Accessories to Women’

Such feminists at least make the conversation about the relations between men and women more interesting, and the likes of Perry and Harrington may well develop their views in the future, but at present I’m going to remain more sceptical about their insights.

Note: Unless stated otherwise, all quotes from this post are taken from this article.

In the second extract of her book, Louise Perry writes about how marriage has changed over the last 50 years. Following the 1969 Divorce Reform Act, the number of children born to unmarried parents increased from 8% in 1968 to almost 50% in 2019. Last year, there were in fact more children born to unmarried parents than married ones for the first time since records began in the 19th Century. Louise Perry concludes from this that the institution of marriage is “more or less dead.”

The purpose of the divorce reforms was not to attack the institution of marriage, but to allow unhappy couples to end their marriages and lift some of the stigma surrounding divorce. However, as with many social reforms, there were unintended consequences. According to Perry, divorces trebled over the next decade before peaking in the 1980s due to marriage itself decreasing.

There was also a shift in people’s attitudes towards marriages:

“Self-discovery, self-esteem and personal growth became the key markers of a marriage’s success. Before then, couples who were not ‘irreparably unhappy’ tended to remain married. Now they usually don’t.”

Perry also notes:

“the mood that it’s better to cut and run is catching, and in a culture of high divorce rates even marriages that last will run the risk of being undermined. With wedding vows no longer truly binding, and marriage accepted as impermanent, couples become less confident in their relationships and the institution as a whole changes in ways that no one could have imagined.”

Louise Perry claims that, according to surveys, half of couples who get divorces later regret it.

Divorce reform was only one of several cultural changes during this period, following on from the introduction of the contraceptive pill and the decriminalisation of abortion. All of these changes led to the idea of premarital sex no longer being a taboo which meant women were more likely to have sex before marriage.

Perry quotes the journalist Virginia Ironside:

“It often seemed more polite to sleep with a man than to chuck him out of your flat…

Armed with the Pill, and with every man knowing that, pregnancy was no longer a reason to say no to sex. And men exploited this mercilessly. Now, for them, no always meant yes.”

Notice how this puts the blame entirely on men as if women had no power to refuse to have sex if they didn’t want to. The ‘no always meant yes’ attitude may have been the case for the brief ‘free love’ period during the 1960s, but I don’t think it lasted very long. Perhaps Virginia Ironside has never heard this remark by the comedian Steve Martin: “You know that look that women give you when they want sex? Me neither.”

The American writer Paul Craig Roberts also observed during this time that men were more ambivalent about the situation than is often claimed. This is likely because while men may like the idea of sexually available women, they also know that almost every other men does as well which makes having exclusive access to a lot of women difficult. This is also why women who are (or have been) promiscuous are a turn off for a lot of men. This ambivalence is probably one component of the so-called ‘double standard’ of promiscuous men being seen as ‘studs’ whereas promiscuous women are seen as ‘sluts’.

Perry writes:

“Thus motherhood became a biological choice for women – but that also meant fatherhood became a social choice for men”

Rob Henderson, of Luxury Beliefs fame, has made a similar argument which suggests that fatherless families are largely the fault of men absconding rather than taking responsibility for their children. This argument conveniently ignores the changes in family courts which are often imbalanced in favour of mothers. This development was influenced to some degree by the destigmatisation of single mothers along with the idea that fathers are optional. Fatherhood being ‘a social choice’ also implies that fatherhood is something that is forced upon men by women rather than something men may desire for themselves.

She continues:

“Before then, only the most flagrant cad would refuse to acknowledge and provide material support to his children if he was in a recognised relationship with their mother at the time of conception.”

“Now, deadbeat dads are commonplace. In the UK less than two-thirds of non-resident parents, nearly all of them fathers, are paying child support in full. Not only are record numbers of children growing up without a father at home, but many of them don’t even get any money out of these absent men.”

The conservative writer Stephen Baskerville has criticised this perception of ‘deadbeat dads’ in his books such as Taken into Custody where he outlines institutional bias against men in the US family courts. You can watch this interview here for more information.

While many people on the right are critical of feminism, there is a tendency to view the situation we find ourselves in to be the fault of ‘feckless fathers’ taking advantage of poor naïve women. This is undoubtedly why Louise Perry has been embraced by some mainstream conservative figures online. Baskerville himself points out in the video I linked to that many conservative commentators don’t seem willing to address the problems of identity politics as it is more complicated that the old Cold War divisions of the past.

The ‘dissident right’ scholar F. Roger Devlin reviewed Taken into Custody in his essay Rotating Polyandry – and its Enforcers where he cites this claim from the book:

Another survey, conducted in the north of England, found that “the most common reason given by the fathers for not having more contact with their children was the mothers’ reluctance to let them.” Here we see one of the reasons for marriage: not to prevent men from absconding, but to prevent women from interfering with the father-child bond.

F. Roger Devlin ‘Rotating Polyandry – and its Enforcers’

A likely feminist response to this claim would be that women may have legitimate reasons for preventing fathers from seeing their children such as the fathers being unreliable, uncooperative or even dangerous. Thus, such men are being disingenuous by claiming that mothers are preventing them from seeing their children. We could call this the “he would say that, wouldn’t he?” argument.

However, we can just as well flip this around and argue that it is equally possible that a woman would make claims about fathers as a means to prevent fathers from seeing their children and maintain control over access. We might call this the “she would say, “he would say that, wouldn’t he” wouldn’t she?” argument. While there will be individual cases where either argument is valid, the important point here is that the situation is often more complicated than the simplistic narrative of ‘deadbeat dads’ often presents.

In contrast to the common perception of ‘deadbeat dads’, Devlin argues:

“fatherhood is natural. If shotgun marriages and child support collection agencies were necessary to force men to provide for their offspring (as so many sanctimonious male commentators imply), civilization could never have arisen in the first place. The human male simply cannot be as bad as now routinely portrayed, whether by hate-filled feminists or pharisaical conservatives.”

F. Roger Devlin ‘Rotating Polyandry – and its Enforcers’

This quote definitely relates to Louise Perry’s description of fathers in her article. Compare her description of absent/non-custodial fathers with how she describes single mothers:

“research shows that, despite the often valiant efforts of single mothers, children without fathers at home do not do as well as other children on average. Fatherlessness is associated with higher youth offending and incarceration rates for boys, higher rates of teenage pregnancy for girls, and a greater likelihood of emotional and behavioural problems for both sexes.”

While her point about the disadvantages of fatherless families is true, she presents single mothers as essentially heroic, tragic or both at the same time. This continues here:

“This is not only because children are denied the material support their fathers might have given them, but also because single mothers are obliged to take on the almost impossible task of doing everything themselves: all of the earning, plus all of the caring, socialising and disciplining of their children. There is also the sometimes malign influence of step-parents to consider. A step-parent is 40 to 100 times more likely than a biological parent to kill a child, and stepfathers are also far more likely than genetic fathers to sexually abuse children.”

Although Louise Perry makes a legitimate point about the difference in homicide rates for children raised by a step-parent or a natural parent – otherwise known as the ‘Cinderella effect’ – single mothers are presented here as unfortunate victims of circumstance simply doing the best they can.

The reality however may be different. It’s not hard to imagine a situation in which a man and woman who barely know each other have sex, go their separate ways and then the woman discovers she’s pregnant with the man’s child. It’s also not difficult to imagine this happening in many poor and deprived areas of our towns and cities. Although both parties bear some responsibility in this scenario, did the man ‘abandon’ the woman? And is the woman being responsible for keeping the child rather than having the child adopted or (the more taboo and complicated choice admittedly) having an abortion? Given how generous our welfare state is, is it also taboo to suggest that some women keep children to claim benefits from them? Such questions are impossible to ask in our current discourse which displays what Theodore Dalrymple has called ‘the rush from judgement’.

Obviously, single mothers, like everyone else, can differ in their circumstance and personality and many may well deserve our respect and sympathy. I’m not naïve to assume that there are no situations where a man abandons a woman he got pregnant and she manages to successfully raise the child alone. The issue here though is that ‘feckless fathers’ are assumed to be the cause for all other cases of single motherhood whereas the more accurate explanation could be ‘feckless parents’.

There may also be a problem with using the term ‘single mothers’ since the circumstances in which such mothers find themselves in may be widely different. Class, family background and whether or not the father is around are just some of the factors that will affect outcomes of children in single mother families. Most of the social problems associated with single mother/fatherless families might be more related to the one-night stand scenario I described above.

Back to Perry:

“Of course it is sometimes better for children not to live with their genetic fathers, or even have contact with them, particularly if those men are abusive or dangerously unstable. And of course there are plenty of devoted stepfathers and stepmothers who make exceptionally good parents. But there is no doubt the presence of a step-parent in a young child’s home increases the risk of bad outcomes.”

The reader might have detected a recurring theme here. Louise Perry is correct in stating that it may be better to prevent some fathers from being in contact with their children, but notice that she doesn’t acknowledge that some children may be better off not being raised by their mothers. Would a baby be better off being raised by their impulsive, mentally unstable, heroin-addicted mother or a stable, loving couple who can’t have children of their own but desire them? While this particular example is a little over the top, you get the point I’m trying to make. In my opinion, Louise Perry’s perception of single mothers is virtually identical to that of most feminists which makes her argument here a little weak.

Writing about feminist opposition to marriage, Perry argues:

“But it’s no coincidence that most of the feminists who opposed marriage never had children of their own. They have not put to the test the key question: how are women supposed to reconcile their search for freedom with a condition that necessarily curtails it?”

and

“Because having children changes the whole dynamic. If you value freedom above all else, you must reject motherhood, since this is a state of being that limits a woman’s freedom in almost every way.”

This point of view mirrors the claim made by some critics of feminism that the movement is anti-motherhood but I think the truth is more complicated.

Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young have noted the differing views expressed by second-wave feminists over motherhood in their book Replacing Misandry which can be seen in the following quotes:

“Early egalitarian feminists tended to downplay motherhood on the personal level, in short, for the purpose of attaining economic independence on both the personal and collective levels. By the 1980s, however, feminists such as Sylvia Hewlett were ready to challenge that approach.”

“Ideological feminists began to emphasize motherhood not for practical reasons but for personal ones. And these relied, explicitly or implicitly, on the notion that women, by virtue of their maternal instinct, are innately superior to men.”

“Juliette Zipper and Selma Sevenhuijsen noted that “in the women’s peace movement and in the eco-feminist movement, women speak in the name of motherhood, which is supposed to give a special wish and capacity for protecting life and nature, which is said to be threatened by patriarchal and/or male principles. In the wake of these activities, the connection between Woman-Mother and Nature is restored.”

Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young ‘Replacing Misandry’

I’ve observed this ‘motherhood makes women superior to men’ belief elsewhere: I once read an article in a newspaper about a device that apparently allowed men to experience the pain of childbirth which led to a rather self-satisfied comment from a woman in the following day’s newspaper. The woman commented that if men knew the pain that women go through to bring children into the world, they wouldn’t commit as much violence and war etc.

I imagined responding to this comment by asking what that woman thought about all of the medical breakthroughs and innovations, predominately made by men, that have made childbirth less dangerous for women and the world a better place in general! I wouldn’t be surprised if the woman who made that comment was a feminist, as feminists also like to speculate what it would be like if men got periods and tend to assume men would make things easier if they did.

It would be unfair to dismiss the complications and difficulties women can go through during pregnancy, but it’s hard to imagine an alternative simulation which allowed women to experience a difficult situation that almost exclusively involves men, such as working down a coal mine or fighting a battle in a war.

Nathanson and Young conclude in their book that second-wave feminists had conflicted views on motherhood as some devalued it while others glorified it. This contention appeared to stem from whether feminism should focus on ‘sameness’ or ‘femaleness’ which is reflected in the controversy over transgenderism we see today.

Louise Perry argues here that the supposed attack on motherhood is due to modern society’s preoccupation with individualism. Compare what Nathanson and Young say to what Louise Perry claims in these quotes:

“This clash of priorities has never really been addressed by feminists. They shut mothers out, with motherhood discussed in just a tiny percentage of research papers, academic journals and textbooks on modern gender theory. The whole topic has slipped out of sight. And no wonder, since the logic of individualism collapses upon contact with motherhood.”

“The pregnant woman’s frame contains two people, neither of them truly autonomous. The unborn baby depends on the mother for survival, and the mother cannot break this physical bond except through medical intervention that will result in the baby’s death. And then, after birth, mother and baby remain a unit, tied together both emotionally and physically. As one leading paediatrician puts it: ‘There is no such thing as a baby. There is only a baby and someone.’”

“Acting as that ‘someone’ means giving away some portion of your freedom, which runs counter to what we women are supposed to want.”

To make her argument, Louise Perry focuses on the feminists that devalued motherhood without acknowledging the opposing side which emerged as the movement progressed. Similarly, popular culture is often far more sympathetic to mothers than it is to fathers and I’ve read quite a few articles from women talking about how hard motherhood is (as if this is somehow a recent discovery) and how society works against them.

It’s interesting that many wealthy women throughout human history had nannies and nursemaids to look after their infant children presumably because these women found some aspects of looking after babies unappealing – dealing with a baby’s various bodily fluids for example. It could be said that childcare is the modern equivalent of that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that women don’t have a maternal instinct; that stay-at-home mothers aren’t valuable or that it’s a good thing for very young children to be away from their parents (especially their mothers) for long hours day in day out, but it does suggest that some women prefer some components of motherhood over others.

Yet again, Louise Perry does not stray too far from typical feminist assumptions as seen in this quote:

“Many feminists described their goal as ‘women’s liberation’ – womankind was in chains, they said, and those chains had to be broken. And that goal was not without merit, given that women are still too often consigned permanently to the role of ‘someone’ – always caring, never cared for.”

This perception of women self-sacrificing for others and being taken advantage of is what I call ‘female martyrdom’ which is used to present women as perpetual victims. Rarely mentioned is the fact that societies often bend over backwards to accommodate women’s demands yet we are often told how women’s issues are ignored.

Louise Perry has issues with individualism because she believes it devalues dependency:

“But the solution cannot be individualism, because being ‘a someone’ or needing ‘a someone’ is our instinctive lot as human beings. We have to find a way of being dependent upon one another.”

Dependency, according to Perry, is instead being provided by the state:

“Some see the State as the answer, providing assistance from outside the family. And indeed the State as back-up husband is tasked with providing institutional childcare in day centres.”

Perry notes the problems with looking to the state for solutions to this need for dependency:

“Mothers can thus return to the workforce and put their tax revenue towards feeding the daycare engine. But such a model depends on physically prising apart women from their children, and that too goes against our natural instincts.”

It is possible that individualism can lead to more selfishness, but it could also be argued that individuals value families and tend to thrive in stable ones, so therefore families are also important. In other words, being individualist does not necessarily have to come at the expence of group dependency.

On the issue of mothers in the workplace, one reason for the expansion of childcare may be due to women desiring facilities where they can have respite from looking after children as I noted above although there certainly has been a big push in the past few decades to get more women working. This could be seen as two ideas converging on the same point – some feminists wanted to eradicate differences between the sexes whereas other feminists wanted to create more choices for women which has led to more women working.

Louise Perry also points out the evolutionary basis for women’s maternal instincts:

“We are animals, descended from individuals whose offspring survived to adulthood, and natural selection therefore favours attentive mothers. This means that when social structures fall away, the result is generally that the person left literally holding the baby is the person whose instincts make her most devoted to the child. And without the protection of a marriage, she faces a struggle.”

Comparing human behaviour to animals or our ancestors has its uses but it can also be tricky. Animal mothers are certainly attentive to their young, but may also display behaviour which would be considered unacceptable for human mothers to do. For instance, female animals may abandon or kill offspring they deem to be weak or deformed in some way. Of course, many animals’ lives are much more unpredictable and dangerous than humans so we can’t judge animal behaviour by our standards. This suggests however that natural selection may favour mothers who alter their behaviour towards their offspring depending on the situation.

Perry then notes that feminists see marriage as a way for men to control female sexuality, which she acknowledges as true, but also adds that stigmatising sex outside of marriage served women’s interests because it protected women from the outcomes of sex – i.e. pregnancy by giving them a man to provide for them. Perry however, doesn’t give any reason why men would want to control female sexuality, especially if marriage is meant to serve women’s interests anyway.

Here she writes:

“The stigma around single motherhood caused a great deal of misery for its many victims, but it also existed for a reason: to deter women from making an irreparable mistake for the sake of a worthless man, a cad who would desert them after casual sex rather than take on the commitment of being a dad.”

But was every woman who got pregnant by a man who deserted them whiter than white themselves? The situation suggests that at least some of theses women were poor judges of character, unless the man had promised marriage to the woman and then disappeared which is presumably what Louise Perry thinks.

Back to Perry:

“The problem for women, in the past and now, is how to persuade men into sexual continence. Because the fact is that the cad mode of male sexuality is bad for women.”

Once again, Perry has a point, but is this ‘cad mode’ not attractive to women? And what about the ways in which societies had tried to discourage negative aspects of female sexuality? – what we might call ‘slag mode’. Perry seems to suggest here that no stigma against women in the past was necessary in order to promote marriage as it’s something that women naturally want.

If the sexual revolution allowed men to have sex outside of marriages, it also allowed women to have children outside of marriages, in essence, to become mothers without first becoming wives. A legitimate response to this claim would be to ask what woman would want to have children without a man around? It is true that most women desire a man to provide for them and help with raising children, but a lot of women appear to be perfectly content with being single parents as long as their ex-male partners or the state is providing for them. Perhaps this is due to the influence of feminism, but I think human nature also plays a part.

Any partnership like marriage and parenting involves some degree of conflict between the two parties in which one may, on occasion, have to acquiesce to the other to maintain stability. Women, for example, may have to accept that their husband, or their husband’s family, may want her child to be raised in a particular way – raised in ‘x’ religion, go to ‘x’ school, disciplined in ‘x’ way – which she may have issues with. (Men of course also have to be accommodating, but my focus here is on women).

Feminists have additionally encouraged the idea that any compromise by women with men is a loss to women in some way which makes single motherhood more appealing to feminism. Consider as well that a single mother may have support from other people such as their parents, other family members, friends as well as the state, all of which may be more lenient with how the mother brings up her offspring. This is because unlike a husband and father, these parties do not share the same relationship with the mother’s children.

With the possible exception of a woman’s parents, no other figure presents a bigger challenge to a mother’s influence on her children than the children’s father. This is very likely why feminists have tried, and in many ways succeeded, to undermine fatherhood. In an ideal world, mothers and fathers’ interests should always be aligned, and of course fathers are not always in the right, but feminists have encouraged us to adopt the mantra: what mothers want, mothers should get.

A single woman raising children with outside support does not have to worry about having to compromise with another person who may have their own views on the child’s upbringing. In short, a wife has to accommodate a husband as well as children whereas a single mother only has to do so for the latter.

Regardless of sex, it is human nature to want to reap the most benefits from a situation and avoid the drawbacks. In some situations, women may believe they are better off without a man, and society doesn’t judge them for having this assumption anymore. Of course, single mothers may regret thinking they are capable of raising children alone if they find that, particularly with their sons, they can’t control them like a father would.

One of the ironies of feminism for me is that many of its critics accuse it of being anti-motherhood despite a lot of its success being, in my opinion, our tendency to sympathise with mothers and children over fathers/men in general.

Perry advises young women to get married and try to stay married. While this certainly isn’t the worst advice you could give young women, they still may have to convince men it is worth the potential difficulties that marriage offers to them. She also advises women not to bring a stepfather into their home until their children are older, although a better suggestion would be to have good judgement over which man you choose to become a step-father; This suggestion might not have crossed Perry’s mind because it places too much responsibility on women.

Ultimately, Louise Perry is advocating for marriage on women’s terms, as if the point of marriage is simply to meet female needs. Even though it is assumed that marriage was primarily to benefit women and children, both sexes had to make sacrifices to make marriage work.

The benefits of marriage on society that Louise Perry describes are true, but she views marriage as simply a means to ‘tame’ men, pointing out that marriage and fatherhood appear to decline men’s testosterone levels. There may be biological reasons for this, but presumably women want men to be masculine enough to potentially protect them or father other children with them as well.

Bernard Chapin argued in his book Women: Theory and Practice that any man considering marriage should ask himself the question: “what’s in it for me?” He didn’t mean that marriage should be entirely for men’s benefit, but instead that men should weigh up the benefits and drawbacks of marriage and consider if they have more to gain than to lose from it.

Any man thinking of getting married should go into it with their eyes open about the present situation and ideally with a woman who doesn’t believe it’s wholly for her benefit. Although some men may go for the MGTOW option, it could be argued that men who are aware of these issues have an advantage over other men who are blissfully unaware of the dangers of modern marriages. I’ll leave it for the reader to make their own mind up.

The feminist writer Louise Perry published a book last year called The Case Against the Sexual Revolution which she has been interviewed about on certain YouTube channels I’m subscribed to including Benjamin Boyce (here) and Triggernometry (here). More recently, she has spoken to Jordan Peterson (here). The book was positively received by publications on both sides of the political spectrum and a number of people I follow on Twitter.

Louise Perry is part of a group of women who have been called ‘reactionary feminists’ which is made up of thinkers who advocate for women’s rights but also criticise some feminist ideas and express conservative viewpoints – you could also call them ‘anti-feminist feminists’. Mary Harrington and Nina Power are two other examples of this kind of feminist and both have also recently published books. My attention here though will just be on Louise Perry.

It might be the contrarian in me, but I am less enthralled by Louise Perry and her views as a lot of people I follow online appear to be, although this is not to say that Ms. Perry has no valid points to make.

In this post, which will be one of three, I’m going to explore three extracts from Perry’s book that were published on the Daily Mail website when the book was released. Reading these extracts is not the same as reading the entire book, but they still give us insight to Louise Perry’s thinking.

The first article adapted from her book can be read here.

Article 1

Louise Perry begins by saying that sexual freedom has backfired for women:

“Rather than women being emancipated sexually, in the digital age we have become a society in thrall to the worst of male sexuality.”

A recurring theme in the article, and presumably the book, is the contrast between male sexuality and female sexuality, but more on that later.

Ms. Perry argues that current attitudes towards sex separate it from love and commitment which in her view is more harmful to women than men. Promiscuity and pornography tell women “to enjoy being humiliated and assaulted in bed” and websites such as Instagram and TikTok are full of “women desperate for some positive male attention.” Similarly, dating apps like Tinder are often used for casual hook-ups rather than to potentially find a long term partner.

Because of this Louise Perry, and many others, have concluded that sexual liberation has benefitted men more than women.

To reiterate her point, Ms. Perry looks at what she calls the “earliest icons” of the sexual revolution: the Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and the actress Marilyn Monroe. Hefner and Monroe were born in the same year – 1926 – and are buried beside each other as Hefner bought the crypt next to Monroe’s. I was surprised to learn that Hugh Hefner and Marilyn Monroe never met when they were both alive but Hefner apparently claimed that “spending eternity with Marilyn” was “too sweet to pass up.”

As you can imagine, this caused some outrage because of the fact that Marilyn Monroe couldn’t consent to who would be buried next to her. Of course, most deceased people can’t decide who will be buried next to them! Hefner’s actions were also controversial because Monroe posed nude in the first edition of Playboy magazine and later claimed she only got $50 for doing it (I’m not sure how much this would be in today’s money).

According to Louise Perry, the lives of Hefner and Monroe show:

“in perfect vignette the nature of the sexual revolution’s impact on men and women.

Ms. Perry even quotes Andrea Dworkin, who claimed that Monroe’s “lovers in both flesh and fantasy had fucked her to death.” Given Dworkin’s status as a radical feminist who had misandric views, she might not be the best person to quote on this subject. It is true, however, that Hefner and Monroe’s lives turn out very differently: Marilyn Monroe died in 1962 aged only 36 whereas Hugh Hefner died in 2017 at the grand old age of 91.

Louise Perry writes:

“Hefner…experienced ‘sexual liberation’ very differently from Monroe, as men typically do.”

It should be noted that Monroe was not the only Hollywood actress of that era to die at a young age. Hollywood stars of both sexes who died prematurely include James Dean (24), Judy Garland (47), Montgomery Clift (45), and Jean Harlow (26). Harlow’s life was in some ways similar to Monroe’s in that both women were Hollywood sex symbols, both got married three times and both died young. Nevertheless, Jean Harlow’s death was in 1937, well before the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

Louise Perry also claims that Hugh Hefner lived out an adolescent fantasy living with younger women in his Playboy mansion and had a coercive relationship with them. I don’t know enough about “Hef” to judge how much of a controlling or predatory man he may or may not have been, but you could say his lifestyle was overly shallow and hedonistic. On the other hand, it’s possible that Hefner had to play up to a certain image even in his old age and may have preferred an early night to being the ultimate Playboy! One ‘Playmate’ claimed that Hefner would lie on his bed “with his Viagra erection” which doesn’t sound particularly appealing.

Given his role as a figurehead for ‘sexual liberation’, Hugh Hefner was involved in other related political causes:

“After his death in 2017, a British journalist argued that Hefner had indeed ‘helped push feminism forwards’ by taking a progressive stance to the contraceptive pill and abortion rights and promoting them in his magazines.”

Here Louise Perry restates her argument: while the sexual revolution allowed women control over reproduction and freedom from expectations of chastity and motherhood, she believes it was more beneficial to male sexuality than female sexuality. In short, liberal attitudes towards sex has unleased male sexual behaviour and society, and women in particular, are experiencing the consequences of that.

This idea is not exactly groundbreaking, since you can find many conservatives, especially conservative women, who say similar things. While I can understand the general principles behind this stance, I think it is also incomplete and often one-sided, which I’ll get to later on in this post.

Louise Perry was originally on board with liberal attitudes towards sex but eventually had a change of heart. Her hybrid feminist/conservative viewpoint came about from working in a rape crisis centre and witnessing “the reality of male violence up close.” She goes on to write:

“It made me realise that the sexual revolution has not freed all of us, but it has freed some of us, selectively and at a price.”

As well as writing:

“I am baffled why so many women desire a kind of sexual freedom that so obviously serves male interests.”

Commenting on the commercialisation of sex, Ms. Perry points out the beliefs of those who advocate it:

“Sex is nothing more than a leisure activity”

and

“It has no intrinsic specialness, it is not innately different from any other kind of social interaction and can therefore be commodified without any trouble.”

These last two quotes are valid observations, which have been made by other writers such as the late philosopher Roger Scruton. Engaging in sex without any attachment involved can certainly lead to a lot of dissatisfaction and unfulfillment. Similarly, although I’m not a prude, I recognise that the commercialisation of sex has arguably made our culture more crass and self-indulgent than it had been before.

That being said, I should now explain my issues with some of Louise Perry’s views.

The reader will likely have noticed that Perry takes a dim view of male sexuality which has supposedly being unleashed onto society since the 1960s. In what could be considered an appeal to female superiority, Louise Perry makes this comment about the modern, commercialised idea of sex:

“In general terms, that has long been the male attitude to sex.”

Later she writes:

“On average, men want casual sex more often than women do, and women want committed monogamy more often than men do.”

While Louise Perry is right to point out differences between men and women, such as attitudes towards casual sex, it is clear Ms. Perry has a far more favourable view of female sexuality than male sexuality. From her perspective, male sexuality could be seen as being like a seedy, pornographic magazine, whereas female sexuality presumably is a Jane Austen-type novel full of romance, sacrifice, duty, and commitment; male sexuality is base, hedonistic, exchangeable and potentially exploitative in contrast to female sexuality which is romantic, noble, civilised and socially conscious. For Perry, women who have sex “like a man” to liberate themselves from traditional expectations are actually degrading themselves to be like men.

The idea of sex being a commodity that benefits men more than women, and is thus characteristically more male than female, is understandable considering that men are predominantly the consumers of sex industry ‘products’ such as pornography and prostitution. However, if men are able to buy sex, then some women must be willing to sell it. Likewise, some women must have chosen to become Playmates, models, prostitutes, or whatever without some evil spell being cast upon them by figures such as Hugh Hefner.

While there are no doubt men in the sex industry who are controlling, predatory and exploitative, there will be women who take advantage of the system for their own benefits. Similarly, while it is probably true that men can handle a casual ‘hook up culture’ better than women can, women in the sex industry, or many other industries, understand that sex is a useful quid pro quo. Think of women who have “slept their way to the top”.

Louise Perry does concede that some women enjoy casual sex but argues that it does not benefit women as a group. The problem, she believes, is the notion that men and women are the same – a.k.a. the blank slate idea of human nature.

In Ms. Perry’s words, if you think men and women are the same “why wouldn’t you want women to have access to the kind of sexual fun that men have always had.” Perry also argues that other sex differences are ignored, such as the fact that men are stronger than women but I don’t think this is as widespread as often stated. Similarly, she makes the points that there are more “super-horny” men than women are more “super-not-horny” women than men.

The following quotes may be familiar to anyone who has read Bad Men by David Buss (or my review of it):

“gospel of sexual hedonism is openly preached”

“The prevailing culture is a terrible deal for women. It demands that they suppress their natural instincts in order to match male sexuality and thus meet the male demand for no-strings sex.”

“Inexperienced young women are encouraged into situations in which they are alone and drunk with horny men who are not only bigger and stronger than they are but are also likely to have been raised on the kind of porn that normalises aggression, coercion and pain.”

“Many of these women are naively aware that men are, in general, much better suited to emotionless sex and find it much easier to regard their sexual partner as disposable.”

“Young women don’t have to look far for advice on how to overcome their perfectly normal and healthy preference for intimacy and commitment in sexual relationships.”

Perhaps it takes another feminist to take some of Louise Perry’s views to task: Cathy Young gives a pretty good review of Perry’s stance in this article for Quilette where she notes that Perry’s arguments have been made before by other women such as Wendy Shalit in her book A Return to Modesty. Young also writes:

“in her eagerness to push back against dogmatic sex-difference denial, Perry lapses into massive and drastic generalizations about women and men, despite some pro forma disclaimers that these differences are averages, not absolutes. Yes, the evidence of a greater male preference for sexual variety and a greater female preference for sexual commitment is quite strong; however, not only are there numerous variations in this pattern, but the preferences are often a matter of degree rather than a stark binary.”

Cathy Young – ‘Children of the Counter-Revolution’

and

“for all her dissent from modern feminist orthodoxy, Perry’s own feminism is stuck in the same woman-as-victim mindset. It’s telling that one of the feminists she cites most approvingly is writer and activist Andrea Dworkin, who died in 2005 and was briefly touted as a misunderstood prophet during the rise of #MeToo.”

Cathy Young

As Young points out in the above quote, it’s one thing to recognise differences between men and women, but being too black and white about the sexes can also have its drawbacks. It’s important to understand that humans are contradictory creatures who have desires that are not always compatible.

For example, we on the one hand desire safety and security, but on the other hand also desire danger and excitement. This certainly applies to our sexual desires. Women for instance may desire a stable, dependable provider in a romantic context but at the same time desire a ‘bad boy’ who will excite them sexually; men obviously like a sexually available woman but this can also be off-putting if men want to have children they can be sure are their own.

Perry reverts into a more standard feminist way of thinking by arguing that women have replaced one form of subservience towards men, such as a 1950s housewife expected to look after her husband, with another, the modern expectation of pleasing men with sex.

This argument ignores the fact that contemporary women have often been taught to be uncompromising, independent and have a dismissive attitude towards men and male behaviour. She also mentions a guide called ‘how to have sex without getting emotionally attached’ which suggests avoiding eye contact with your sexual partner. While it’s true that women desire emotional attachment, men who act distant and dismissive towards women can be attractive to the opposite sex.

Louise Perry proposes an alternative sexual culture that recognises other human beings as real people with value and dignity. While this is hardly an original idea, I’m not suggesting that Louise Perry is entirely wrong in what she is talking about, as it’s possible she is ultimately ‘right for the wrong reasons’. Are we any happier as a society following the sexual revolution? This is a question that is definitely worth asking but it all too often falls into the narrative of poor helpless women being preyed upon by beastly, sex-obsessed men.

As I noted earlier, Louise Perry does, on occasion, make some legitimate points. For example, she states that women need to avoid courting danger:

“here’s the point: rapist don’t care what feminists have to say. Posters that say ‘don’t rape’ will prevent precisely zero rapes, because rape is already illegal and would-be rapists know that. It has to be possible to say simultaneously that rape is reprehensible and that it is okay – in fact, essential – to offer advice that could help to reduce its incidence.”

She follows this by stating that rape convictions ‘are appalling low’ but this should take into account the difficulty in convicting a man in rape cases where it is unclear if the sexual act was consensual or not – the old ‘he said, she said’ problem. etc. Perry also suggests limiting opportunities for rapists because some men are aroused by violence and are unable to control their impulses. This is true but could the same thing be said for some women?

Similar to David Buss, Louise Perry comments on the potential dangers of women going on a night out:

“if you wanted to design the perfect environment for the would-be rapist, you couldn’t do much better than a party or nightclub filled with young women who are wearing high heels (limited mobility) and drinking or taking drugs (limited awareness)”

True, but for every potential male rapist, how many men would alternatively try and protect women from such men? And if women were so afraid and in so much danger, wouldn’t they never go out and get drunk in the first place?

At the end of this first extract, Ms Perry writes:

“My advice to them is this: only have sex with a man if you think he would make a good father to your children. Not because you necessarily intend to have children with him, but because this is a good rule of thumb in deciding whether he’s worthy of your trust.”

Although this advice is perfectly sensible, telling women to only have sex with men who may be good fathers is like telling men to only have sex with women who will make good mothers. What both sexes are attracted to in the other is not necessarily related to if they are good parent material. Just because a woman may be young and beautiful doesn’t mean she will be a good mother, even though a lot of men would want to have sex with her. Moreover, what women may be sexually attracted to men may not correlate with the men being good fathers. Women’s attraction to men can vary depending on their so-called ‘short-term’ or ‘long-term’ mating strategies also known as ‘dads vs cads’.

I’ll conclude here by offering an alternative reason why sex-positive feminists have promoted sexual liberation for women.

Many societies have placed restrictions on the sexual activity of both men and women, but may have been more lenient with men owing to differences in sex drive and because men don’t get pregnant. Restrictions that were, or are, placed on women can include forbidding the wearing of make-up, expecting women and girls to tie their hair up rather than letting it hang loose and wearing clothing that does not show off their bodies, such as the veil in Islamic societies. One obvious purpose for these restrictions is to reduce the likelihood of sexual interest from men which may be welcomed by women or not. This remains so even if women are married and sexually active.

Another, less obvious, purpose for these restrictions was not just to protect women but also men. This idea may seem strange in the age of #believeallwomen and toxic masculinity. Many men might also feel emasculated by the idea that they would need protecting from women. Why would they?

The answer can be found in historical portrayals of dangerous women. In Greek mythology, for example, sirens would lure sailors towards them with their beautiful appearance and singing so that the ships would crash on the rocks and the sirens could eat the sailors. Similarly, in folklore, the succubus was a female demon who would seduce men and make them physically/mentally ill or even kill them.

Given that there are countless portrayals in many cultures of women or female creatures luring men with their sexuality, it appears that humans all over the world have recognised that sexuality can be used to control, manipulate or even destroy someone. Although male predators – real or imagined – can be sexually alluring, it is often female predators who are presenting in such a way. Since men have a higher sex drive than women, they are potentially more vulnerable to being taken advantage of using sexual attractiveness. From this perspective, sex can be both a source of power or powerlessness for men.

We often assume that men have the upper hand in matters relating to sex because of their physical advantage over women. While this should always be taken into account, we also need to think about ways in which women have an advantage over men. For instance, women’s greater physical vulnerability can produce protective instincts in men which can also be exploited, whether consciously or not, by women. Women could also use their sexual attractiveness to play men off against each other or make a man sexually jealous by flirting with other men.

Similarly, women have always been able to shame men about their masculinity, or lack thereof, which can have a psychological effect. Obviously men shame other men too, but women can use sex and a man’s sexual performance as a way to humiliate, intimidate and even emasculate him. Consider how a woman could mock a man for having a small penis, or who “can’t get it up”, who “is quick at the draw” or that she fakes orgasms during sex with him. These statements could have a profound effect on men, whose identity is somewhat less clearly defined than women’s.

Although it may be taboo to suggest it, this shaming behaviour by some women may be, in certain cases, the root of men’s violence towards them, although this is not to condone such behaviour or justify violence against women in any way.

Prior to the sexual revolution, many parents may have been concerned about their sons bringing home a girlfriend who was, to use an old-fashioned phrase, ‘a woman of loose morals’. This concern would have been because parents thought such women were exploiting their sons or would not make good wives and mothers. It’s interesting how words such as ‘harlot’, ‘whore’ or ‘slut’ have disappeared from our language due to their association with a particular kind of woman and are now considered misogynistic.

In short, women who express themselves sexually can have a lot of power even it comes with vulnerabilities. In essence, both men and women are attracted to and afraid of the opposite sex albeit for different reasons: physical strength for women, sexual allure for men.

This arguably presents an interesting paradox, sexual liberation makes women more available to men, but it also makes men more vulnerable to sexual manipulation or attacks about their sexual prowess by women. Since women are assumed to be victims, men are also more vulnerable to being blamed for any sexual impropriety.

Being sexually explicit can also have an effect in other ways. In the Channel 4 sitcom Derry Girls, there’s a scene where the characters are talking about which boy they might take to a 1950s style prom they’re having at their all-girls school. The sex-obsessed Michelle has this exchange with her friends and her cousin James about one of the boys she’s thinking of going with:

Michelle: I have heard he is really good with his hands. And when I say ‘he’s good with his hands’ I’m not talking about putting up shelves, girls. I’m talking about…

James: Everyone knows what you’re talking about , Michelle.

Michelle: “..fingering.”

James: Honestly!

I’ve actually encountered more women who talk in this sexually explicit way than I have men and had a similar reaction as James, although I’ve usually thought it rather than said it! Men who talk in this way might be considered sexist or even predatory which may explain why I’ve encountered in more in women.

One reason for this overly sexual behaviour might be as an expression of freedom – i.e. the freedom to express your sexuality without being judged or disapproved by others. Another reason may be as an act of provocation – i.e. to create the sort of response from people such as James, even it’s just mild disbelief. There is power in busting taboos as it allows the taboo buster to shock or even ‘trigger’ people who might be sensitive towards subjects like sex.

There is a balance here to be struck between acknowledging that women are more vulnerable than men when it comes to sex from a physical standpoint, while also acknowledging women can take advantage of men via their sexuality.

Women want to be protected from dangerous men, which is fair enough, but also want to wear make up and dress in a way that some societies would disapprove of. The fact that women dressing in certain ways encourages a sexualised response from men is often presented as a type of ‘victim blaming’ if women are sexually assaulted, like at a party or on a night out. The purpose of stating this fact however is simply to note that, regardless of women’s intentions, appearing in a sexually appealing way may trigger responses in certain men which can lead to bad outcomes for women. Feminists appear to want women to be both free to be as sexually explicit as possible while at the same time being free of any harassment or assault from male predators.

The key point here is that the sexual revolution enabled women to flaunt their sexuality without judgement and restrictions from society and in a way that might entice or disturb men, or both at the same time. While Louise Perry rightly points out some of the disadvantages for women, she doesn’t acknowledge that sexual liberation gave women a kind of power that societies in the past have tried to discourage.

Overall, I feel ambivalent about how much sexual freedom societies should have: what people do behind closed doors is their business, assuming that it’s consensual, and sex can be a very funny subject as well as a very serious one. Having grown up in the 1990s and 2000s, I’m fairly laidback about a lot of sexual matters even though my own experience has been very innocuous. However, a society that is laidback about sex has to be willing to weigh up its complexities in an intelligent way.

As I was writing this, I started to think that a better term than ‘anti-feminist feminist’ for women such as Louise Perry is ‘OG feminist’ because they believe that society needs to control male sexual behaviour for the benefit of women. The anti-feminist academic Janice Fiamengo made this fascinating video talking about attitudes of 19th Century feminists towards male sexuality which are very similar to Perry’s.

I’ll continue exploring Louise Perry’s book by looking at the second extract.

I occasionally type ‘masculinity’ into Google’s news section to see what articles pop up about the subject. Typically, there are pieces on ‘toxic masculinity’ that most of the time are not worth reading. However, sometimes an article comes up that is worth looking at. One such article was recently posted on the website Areo. In it, Stewart Slater explores the problems men face in modern society and how we define masculinity.

Slater here describes one commonly cited sex difference:

“The hypothesis that men tend to be more interested in things, women in people has been proven to have a large effect size by a recent meta-analysis. It has also been observed in rhesus monkeys so may well be rooted in biology. This difference is thought to explain the gender equality paradox— whereby, as countries become freer, the sexes increasingly sort themselves into stereotypical professions. Typically male occupations such as manufacturing, which are less reliant on face-to-face contact, have been the first casualties of automatization and globalisation.”

Stewart Slater – ‘Defining Masculinity’

There is certainly evidence to support this claim: if you observe the list below which shows the types of professions which are respectively male- and female-dominated, you can easily make a ‘people-thing’ distinction.

The male-dominated professions are all manufacturing/maintenance based and many involve risk, being alone or getting your hands dirty. The female-dominated professions in contrast are all either administrative and may involve working with children or the public.

Similarly, boys and girls have been shown consistently to prefer particular kinds of toys independent of outside influences and this difference can even be observed among primates. Girls tend to prefer dolls and other ‘people-like’ toys in contrast to boys who tend to prefer ‘thing-like’ toys such as guns, trucks and trains.

There is so much evidence to show this ‘people vs things’ distinction between the sexes that it cannot be easily disregarded by sceptics of natural sex differences.

Nevertheless, I do wonder if focusing too much on this difference can be a stumbling block sometimes. While the difference is definitely valid, the context in which you describe it can determine its effectiveness.

For example, if you wanted to make a general observation about how men and women are different to someone who didn’t know any better, saying that women are interested in people and men are interested in things would be useful enough to give the ignorant person some understanding. However, if you were having a more in-depth conversation about sex differences and how they are expressed, then I think the people vs things distinction can only do so much.

A while ago, I saw a woman I follow on Twitter (I think it was Helen Pluckrose but I can’t be sure) arguing that women are more likely to study psychology because women are more people-oriented and so are more interested in the subject. Someone in the comments pointed out to her that psychology was once a male-dominated profession and it was predominantly men who pioneered the field in the first place – I sometimes wonder if the word ‘psychoanalysis’ came to be replaced by ‘psychotherapy’ during this transition from male to female!

Carole Hooven makes a similar argument in her book Testosterone about women being more likely to be teachers due to being more people-oriented which again overlooks the fact that teaching was previously a male-dominated field.

Of course, women moving into the workplace in greater numbers over the past few decades has led to many of them choosing to go into professions that they are interested in such as those that are more people-focused which has changed the sex ratio of certain professions to reflect this.

It’s not a stretch however for people to assume that women being more ‘people-orientated’ means women are better at dealing with people. We hear a lot about women apparently having superior ‘interpersonal skills’ than men but it’s rarely specified what these ‘skills’ actually are.

I concede that there will be some things in the realm of interacting with people that women will be generally better at than men, but communication is very complex so why should we assume that women are always better at it?

One implication from this idea is that any man in a ‘people-oriented’ profession like teaching will always be lacking in some way. In other words, men have nothing unique to bring to these roles as they are not as ‘skilled’ as women in them. This implication could partly explain women’s dominance in these professions.

For all women’s supposed communication skills, it’s interesting that there are a lot of jokes about women being hard to understand, at least for men. Here’s two scenes from the animated shows Monkey Dust and Family Guy parodying men’s difficulties with women.

Similarly, since men constitute roughly 50% of ‘people’, there will areas where men are better able to understand other men. I’m reminded of David Shackleton’s comment in the Canadian documentary Singing the Gender Blues: “men know they don’t understand women. Women think they understand men.”

In addition to men being presented as poorer communicators, the idea that women’s ‘people skills’ gives them an advantage in the modern world may prevent us from criticising aspects of what might be called ‘feminine communication’.

It’s been suggested by some commentators that the rise of political correctness is linked to the increase of women in public institutions (which I’ve explored myself on this blog) due to more emphasis being placed on not offending people rather than being direct and honest with others even if this directness may sometimes be upsetting. The tendency to be more easily offended is also, on average, a female trait than a male trait which can additionally make communication difficult as women may find it harder than men to work with other people they don’t get along with.

This difference may reflect another ‘broad but useful’ distinction between the sexes which is that men are direct and women are indirect. If we broadly determine male communication to be more direct and female communication more indirect, we could weigh up the pros and cons of both. In fairness, there is utility in being indirect or talking around a point which is explained in this video.

Another flaw with designating certain occupations as ‘people-orientated’ is how you distinguish these kinds of jobs from others, given that any activity that involves people could be said to be ‘people-orientated’. I get that commentators have a particular type of job in mind when they are making this claim, such as a job that involves a lot of face-to-face communication or ‘caring’ professions like nursing, but it can still be a little misleading.

For instance, is medicine a ‘people-oriented’ profession since treating people is at the heart of it? Does this mean women have a natural affinity for it? What about law? Or politics? Are men always at a disadvantage because of this? Women are in fact becoming more prominent in these professions although this is also related to education becoming more female-dominated.

Although fields like psychology are now occupied more by women than men, there are still male-dominated professions which could be said to be ‘people-oriented’. Sales is more a male-dominated domain which involves interacting with people in order to get a deal even if it is not done face to face, such as over the phone.

Business as a whole could also be considered a ‘people-orientated’ activity which was, until recently, more male-dominated. Being a leader in some form or another also requires some ‘people skills’ to get others to follow you unless violence and tyranny is used instead.

Stewart Slater’s article mostly focuses on the idea that men are struggling due to technological advances leading to a decline in jobs requiring upper body strength and an increase in jobs requiring communication. This is a common observation, but the argument that men are at a disadvantage due to these developments can itself be switched around.

Since most jobs involving technology tend to appeal more to men than to women, men could potentially have an advantage as these jobs become more advanced and commonplace. Predictably, there is a lot of concern over the fact that there are fewer women than men in the so-called ‘STEM’ fields as this article describes.

Women’s relationship with ‘things’ is also worth exploring. Women are certainly interested in people, but other female interests include clothes, beauty products, accessories like handbags, furniture, art, books etc. all of which constitute things. You might say these are all linked to people in some way, but couldn’t the same be said for male interests?

To be clear, I’m not trying to disregard the ‘people vs things’ argument entirely or the people who make it. It’s important not to fall into the trap of dismissing a sex difference for simply being broad or even ‘stereotypical’. However, there’s a difference between saying ‘stereotypes are true’ and ‘stereotypes have some truth to them’. The latter implies that you can still scrutinise broad assumptions.

To conclude, ‘People vs Things’ is a good starting point to explore differences between the sexes, but it shouldn’t be an ironclad rule that all discussions about the sexes are based upon.

Another year has come and gone which means it’s time to look back at what has happened in the last 12 months with this blog and what I want to do with it in future.

To say that this year has been eventful would be an understatement. In the UK, we’ve have had three prime ministers and witnessed the death of our longest reigning monarch and elsewhere we have seen war come to Europe again through Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In the US, Donald Trump has relaunched another Presidential campaign and Elon Musk has taken over Twitter.

In the more mundane world of this blog, I set myself some targets at the end of 2021 and unfortunately I didn’t do too well! I think it was a case of biting more than I could chew. I have looked back on the targets I set and, even though I didn’t achieve most of them, I want to look at how well I did on each one.

Regular posts

I had a target of doing two posts every month this year but I only managed to do this between January to March. Although I managed to post at least once a month, I struggled to get a post finished before the month was out on a few occasions so I think this target was a hindrance rather than a help. Although I still want to post regularly, I’m not going to bother trying to post every month next year. Ideally I want to get to a point where I have enough writing to post more often. I’m not going to post anything next month and instead have a little break from writing.

More book reviews

My target this year was to read and write a review for five books but I only managed two and I’m still reading the books I had planned to review this year! I’m pleased overall with the reviews I did during the last 12 months although they were probably too long and detailed than they needed to be and it was often very draining writing them. Believe it or not, those reviews were even longer before I edited them. I’m still going to write reviews in the future but I want to try to make them more concise.

More videos (eventually)

I completely failed in this goal and I still don’t know when or if I’ll get round to making any videos at the moment. Next year I want to at least think more about this than I did in 2022.

And other things

This is the only target that I had any success with as I managed to write about other subjects such as films alongside my usual content. I have more ideas what I want to write about but I still have to work on a lot of them. I managed to redesign the layout of this blog as well and I’m happy with how it looks at the moment.

A bigger audience

I also failed on this front although I could have done more to promote my posts such as using Twitter. However, I don’t like to use that platform too much and I like having time away from political stuff – on the internet at least. Using Twitter more would mean I’d spend more time on there than I want to. Like my idea of making videos, how I could get a bigger audience is something I should try to think about more in future.

Instead of making more goals, my target next year is to just keep doing what I’m doing but keep trying to improve things. Happy New Year!

Musk and Twitter

I try not to go on Twitter that much and restrict the time I spend there to once a week but I’m enjoying the drama that is unfolding following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the site earlier this year. Musk has reinstated accounts such as Donald Trump, Jordan Peterson, Kanye West and Carl Benjamin – a.k.a. Sargon of Akkad – much to the chagrin of many establishment figures.

Despite now being back on Twitter, Trump has not returned and instead remained on his Truth Social account. Musk reminds me a lot of Trump particularly during the latter’s Presidency as Musk has the same chaotic energy that drives many people insane.

Musk has compared Twitter to a town square but, as I argued in a post last year, Twitter – and the internet as a whole – can more accurately be described as a hybrid between public and private spaces since we can interact with complete strangers in the comfort of our own homes. Similarly, people interact with each other on Twitter either using their real names and photos or – like myself – behind a false name and image. This obviously makes the task of managing a major social media site such as Twitter hard to handle.

The question of which individuals to allow on the site and which to prevent is inevitably going to be one that Musk and his staff at Twitter will have to deal with for the foreseeable future. One solution I thought of was to allow those who use their real name and faces to have free rein over what they can say with anonymous accounts given less freedoms in comparison. There would still be a debate here however over what constitutes a banning or restriction.

Predictably, Musk’s actions have led to opponents arguing that hate speech will become more commonplace on the site. By ‘hate speech’ presumably they mean primarily ‘speech which we personally dislike or disagree with’. There has also been the suggestion that Twitter under the helm of Elon Musk is crashing and burning due to Musk’s eccentricity and hubris.

There is also likely some wishful thinking going on in the sense that people are predicting the demise of Twitter due to Musk’s mass firing of its staff and his admission that the site has various debt problems. The counterargument to this is that Musk’s reinstation of various accounts will increase interest in the site and result in more people creating accounts.

Despite various famous people claiming that they are going to leave Twitter, for the time being Twitter remains the go-to social media site for the rich and powerful. I can’t see an alternative equivalent to Twitter emerging any time soon which will culminate in a mass exodus of celebrities and establishment figures who can’t comprehend that other people don’t share their worldview. Many people announced they would leave the United States if Trump became President only to remain when Trump was elected.

The current talk around Twitter reminds me a little of the sneering criticisms that followed the launch of the GB News channel last year. In the channel’s first few months, it faced technical difficulties, disagreements over the channel’s political leanings and a rotating door of presenters joining and leaving with many people concluding that the channel would ultimately fail. Following its teething problems, however, GB News has maintained a steady number of viewers along with established and experienced presenters. At the very least, it offers a slightly different take on current events and news which is not provided by other news networks, although I still prefer online content creators. Similar to Twitter, many mainstream commentators hoped GB News would fail because they didn’t like the type of political commentary it could offer.

My prediction, such as it is, is that Twitter is not going anywhere and Musk will eventually figure out how to make the site financially stable by subscription charges or some new features to the site. Musk has said that he will eventually step back from Twitter and let others run the site but I hope he will continue to stir up trouble to drive the establishment crazy.

It will be interesting to see what unfolds during Donald Trump’s 2024 Presidential campaign and if Trump will return to Twitter during the election which, at the time of writing, is still just under two years away. Considering how eventful 2022 has been we likely have a lot to go through before 2024 even comes around.

‘She Said’ Bombs at the Box Office

A film about two journalists investigating the sexual assault claims against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein called She Said, based on a book of the same name, has been released and has only taken $2.2 million from its opening weekend despite costing $32 million to make. This puts the film among the biggest flops in history.

Despite being lavished with praise by critics, it seems audiences didn’t want to see a film about the #MeToo movement which has already been shoved in their faces since the Harvey Weinstein controversy emerged in 2017. It’s also been pointed out that other films have already explored #MeToo such as Bombshell which was about accusations against Roger Ailes at Fox News. Even Weinstein himself, via a spokesman, has gloated at She Said‘s poor performance.

She Said could go down as the definitive example of the idea of ‘Get Woke, Go Broke’. The film critic Armond White wrote a good article here where he notes that the media thinks that it simply gives what audiences want when in reality it just assumes that its opinions are widely shared by the public and makes excuses when certain films fail.

I don’t support sexual harassment but I don’t support the #MeToo movement either so it’s tempting to think that She Said flopping is evidence of the public giving a middle finger to #MeToo. However, the underperformance of She Said is a pattern shared by other ‘awards contender’ films being released which has been partly explained by people being more reluctant to go to the cinema following the pandemic. It may also point to the declining interest in Hollywood films in general.

The domination of Marvel movies and streaming services means that there is less appetite for people to go to the cinema for films they can eventually watch on services like Netflix. Award ceremonies like the Oscars are also declining in relevance. Being a film geek, although I’ve never cared about watching the Oscar ceremony, I’ve always liked to know who the winners were. However, this year I completely forgot about the Oscars and was only aware that it had taken place because of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock. Also, most people couldn’t name the films that have won awards over the past few years.

Here’s hoping the failure of She Said is evidence that #MeToo is disappearing up its own backside.

World Cup – just woke bread and circuses?

At the time of writing, the FIFA World Cup is currently taking place in Qatar. Since FIFA announced that Qatar would host the 2022 tournament, it has been the subject of controversy due to the country’s lack of footballing prowess, human rights abuses and political views that are not shared by most Western countries.

There has also been pressure on teams like England to make a stand for LGBT rights and continue to ‘take a knee’ against racism. I like football, so I’ve just watched the matches and ignored most of the politicking happening around it. A lot of other people have boycotted the competition though due to these controversies.

Detractors on the right or people who are just anti-woke in general often disparage the World Cup as simply ‘bread and circuses’ for the masses or use the dismissive word ‘sportsball’ to describe it. The argument here is that such spectacles distract people from looking at deeper societal problems but I doubt that many people would suddenly become enlightened about the state of the world if sports tournaments ceased to exist. The internet is a massive source of information yet many people are content to watch cat videos or argue with complete strangers about absolutely anything.

It is true that football is ultimately pointless, many players are overpaid prima donnas and the sports industry can be very tacky and consumerist. Not everyone likes football and that’s fine. Nevertheless, criticisms about ‘sportsball’ can just as easily be made against the entertainment industry as a whole. Much like films – unless it’s She Said – people turn to sport as a way to forget about all the crap that’s happening in their lives. Ironically, the insertion of wokeness into sport and film does the complete opposite of that.