Difficult Women

No one wants to be labelled a misogynist. My experiences with the fairer sex have, until recently been very rewarding. So why are today’s universities so jam-packed with passive-aggressive females?

Last year, I wrote a Substack article entitled ‘Daft Spunk’ that was laced with humour, riffing on my love of electronic music, and confronting my far broader concerns about the indisputable gender imbalance that has pervaded our college campuses for some decades now.

The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October, 1834 (1834-35) by Joseph Mallord William Turner. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

I’ll freely admit that the expression ‘concerns’ and the fact that they are endlessly, stupifyingly raised by anyone who claims to be tolerant, so as to express their intolerance, has become drained of all meaning. I have legitimate concerns about paying my grocery bills or my mortgage in modern Canada, but there’s precious little I can do about it, and there is certainly no mechanism for filing complaints.

In fact, one reason I took up writing in this, my post-cancellation period, is to step forward to defend my own language, misunderstood as it is by most Canadians—aside from Conrad Black—and routinely mutilated by twice as many Americans.

When I submitted an edited version of ‘Daft Spunk’ to the National Post, an outlet that Douglas Murray—a journalist whose penmanship routinely earns him twice the number of comments than even local hero, Jordan Peterson—has candidly described as, “[probably] the only serious newspaper left in Canada,” I was caught short by the editors who chose to run with the rather incendiary headline: ‘The dark side of the feminization of higher education.’

That wasn’t what I had in mind at all, but it most definitely caught readers’ attention. What are they doing at The Post? Are they trying to get me fired from my university for harassment?

I will strenuously contend that I am not a misogynist. I am just a man—emphasis there on the ‘just,’ meaning simply or merely. I try to be a just man, as well, but I falter and refuse the hurdle when it comes to being ‘socially just’ because, despite the attractive veneer coating that concept, I am not completely witless.

Speaking of social justice, I am, as it happens, a gay man. Hence, I can claim belonging to an oppressed minority grouping, and I should probably choose to play that ace-card, whether or not it makes any logical or moral sense. I am also not one for clichés, but as will surprise absolutely no-one, I’ve had my fair share of intimate relationships with women, ones that did not involve—gulp!—heterosexual carnal interludes in any way, shape or form.

Like the committed social wallflower I was in my twenties, I tried that just the once: at college, ironically, and I quickly realised I was barking up the wrong tree. But I would still always return to bucolic Warwickshire during the holidays and laugh out loud with my straight male friends in late-night VHS-screenings of Naked Gun, when the late, great Leslie Nielson quipped to Priscilla Presley, “Nice beaver!”

The late Canadian actor Leslie Nielson plays Lieutenant Frank Drebin in the Zucker brothers’ The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988). Image courtesy of Forabodiesonly.com

“Thanks. I just had it stuffed,” responds Presley and hands Nielson a life-sized replica beaver from off-camera.

The women I bonded with were possessed of brilliant minds. My doctoral supervisor was a startlingly precocious German woman, Sabine Flitsch; and my most influential mentor was Rosyln Bill, who now holds a prestigious chairship at Warwick University in Britain.

These women guided my tremulous first steps into academia. So why is it that today, I am surrounded by females who have ideologically gone so far awry? Two thirds of administrative posts at universities are held by women, and a culture of niceness, insipid kindness and safetyism has imbued every aspect of academic life today, to the point where men are running for cover. To use these ideologues’ own language of subversion, this virulent strain of kindness has become ‘systemic.’

Perhaps there ought to be little or no surprise that women have been flocking to these roles. They offer a high level of security in exchange for a physically undemanding desk job with—on today’s post-pandemic campuses—highly flexible in-person attendance requirements. They also involve a great deal of interpersonal interaction and electronic communication.

This segues well with the far heavier burdens placed on the majority of women, compared to men, when it comes to their family lives and nurturing children. Women often tend to be better rules-followers than men, being more conscientious on average, and making them better adapted to handling a complex bureaucracy.

Men, on the other hand, tend to a much larger degree to be excitement-seekers and risk-takers. These traits have benefits when it comes to testing boundaries and advancing research, one could argue, but not ideal for reliable execution of quotidian routines. Indeed, a typical refrain of frustration that I have heard from female university administrators is that they have been left ‘carrying the baby’ while their male counterparts gallivant around night and day, unfettered, chasing their research grants; and, more than likely, their female graduate students as well.

I am sympathetic to all of this; and it makes complete sense. But much like any trend that tracks the knowledge train off course, too much veering in one direction could prove catastrophic. A good example in the academic sphere is the growing contention over whether students ought to be granted any number of so-called ‘accommodations’ to compensate for their various physical, mental and emotional shortcomings—whether those misfortunes are real, perceived or imagined.

The greater propensity for women to exhibit nurturing and empathetic traits militates for wholesale acceptance of such concessionary measures. By and large, male academics tend to be rather less forgiving. Such absence of compassion is always interpreted within the narrative of today’s campus orthodoxy as an oppressive patriarchal tendency that needs to be overridden, rather than admitting to the very real possibility that these might be valid reactions.

The standard routine, when handling modern, ‘toxic’ attitudes like these is for the social justice chastisers to don their thick identitarian gloves and vilify men like me with a selection of well-chosen, off-the-shelf slurs. The result is a typically histrionic display of fourth-wave feminism that attempts to browbeat men into submission with linguistic cudgels such as ‘toxic masculinity’ and ‘mansplaining.’

If at all possible, ‘concerns’ are raised with the po-faced seriousness of a crowd of zealots that comedian and writer Andrew Doyle has described as the New Puritans. It always makes me laugh, because these people have no sense of humour. The physicists tell us that the coldest temperature in the universe is zero Kelvin—absolute zero to the layman—but even there, molecules still ‘wiggle’ and vibrate because the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle says they must. In the universe of today’s social justice ideologues, there is no humour whatsoever. None. It is dead; there’s not a twitch of movement.

Up until quite recently, there was sufficient gender balance on the campus to retain a certain political and operational neutrality. But it is, very specifically, the activism of fourth-wave feminists that has upset the seesaw, bringing with them a new ideological weapon-of-mass-destruction. That weapon is intersectionality.

I first heard this term brought to bear in a very impactful way when I was mediating a dispute with a previous dean of mine. She had elected to aggregate a sequence of my misdoings and wag her finger at me, declaring that, “it was the intersection that mattered.” Faced with the futility of the situation, in the end, I volunteered to step away from my own administrative post because our views were clearly not aligned, and my continuing would have been unproductive.

What stuck with me, though, was the flimsiness of this ideology, which seemed to be percolating unchecked through the Office of the Dean, and how female figures in especial had quickly learned to wield it with remarkably lethal results. It smacked of retribution, and a shocking and pervasive misandry that was fuelled by critical theory: the grievance studies subjects so eloquently debunked by James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian.

Soon, the blinding reality dawned on me. Women were entering the academic workforce at speed—to which I had no objection—but among them, those that were swiftly ascending the siege-ladder to success were a new breed of careerists who specialised in weaponizing the ideas of the modern left to eclipse men and get ahead. It turned out that this could be achieved, not by dint of merit—and after all, a prior wave of women had tried this and were not seeing the results their successors felt entitled to—but by effectively hobbling men and stepping over their bodies. In this new strategy, intersectionality has become as metaphorically deadly as the musri, the throwing knife of the Teda people of the Sahara that when thrown horizontally can cut down a galloping antelope at 100 yards.

This is not a good atmosphere for anyone to inhabit, especially if you are a man. If you examine the staff line-up in my home department for instance, you’ll quickly realise that the vast majority of employees are women. All power to them. But the sheer absence of men—men who are not drones, let me be clear—has a very tangible effect on the work environment. Meetings are relentless, always focusing on creating safe spaces—because the advocates of such spaces have the personality types that inevitably always need them—and expressing ‘kindness’ even when it is destructive and counterproductive. All of it is subsidised from the public purse.

Yet, if you keep conceding to students’ demands for this, that or the other accommodation, and transmogrify the concept of deadlines such that it becomes a fantasy, and dub ‘time pressure’ as the oppressive artifice of the patriarchy, then, well, to no-one’s surprise the result will be weak students, students who will go out into the wider world and be less than useless. They will be a burden.

Realistically, we cannot go on this way. It is unsustainable. I’ve taught at the University of Toronto—purportedly Canada’s greatest seat of higher learning—for almost two decades now. This past year, I discovered that graduate students training for a professional master’s degree in biotechnology were unable to perform a simple mathematical calculation, working collaboratively in teams, unsupervised for about 90 minutes.

Those female administrators fencing me on every side would call this out. These are toxic expectations. They would vilify me as a white Eurocentric individual who is embedded in the patriarchy. It’s a harsh sentence, and in today’s climate of self-destructive political correctness, an implacable one. After all, in the US, the Department of Justice has recently told various groups that they are racist for expecting their employees, police and firefighters, to be able to perform trivial calculations.

There are, of course, any number of strong, motivated, intelligent women throughout our society: Helen Joyce and J.K. Rowling and Kathleen Stock and Lionel Shriver and Julie Bindel, to name just a handful in my own sphere of creative writing. But these same courageous females of the species are more than likely today to be labelled ‘difficult women’ for their defence of common sense values and the truth. They refuse to talk about ‘pregnant people’ and they insist upon recognising the reality of biological sex. They demand that women should have unique access to their own spaces; not the ‘safe’ ones that the intersectional harpies have long campaigned for, paradoxically permitting men to enter them.

What’s painfully clear is that these women have all been chased off the universities’ campuses, leaving behind a veritable intellectual famine.

And what is the longer term consequence? It won’t be long before the students I mentioned earlier have graduated and gone on to secure gainfully employment in Big Pharma. There, they will find themselves parroting marketing mantras in efforts to sell drugs to physicians, and at once discovering themselves quite incapable of interpreting, unassisted, the pivotal graphs they’re told to present, let alone appraising them critically.

This is the future that I can attest to with absolute certainty, one that is now being charted for all Canadians by their deranged institutions of higher learning. Loyal and honest taxpayers, many of them forever trapped in a windowless cell that is padded by the legacy media, should learn about it today. Why? Because the dry kindling of pervasive kindness is about to spark a wild-fire of incompetence, and it’s anyone’s guess how many of us will be burned by the flames or choked by the fumes.

“Canada has seen weeks of unprecedented wildfires, with thousands of people evacuated. Is climate change to blame?” The BBC’s features correspondant Isabella Kaminski advocates yet more climate alarmism. Image courtesy of BBC & Alamy.