WOMEN have reached the highest levels in politics, commerce and the professions. Yet according to Robert Oulds in his new book The Biorealist Manifesto, feminisation of the economy ‘is a misguided endeavour based on false assumptions that ignore human psychology and physiology’. To be sure, his thesis is not a tirade against women in the workplace generally, but against a postmodern diversion of productivity from market forces to ideology of ulterior motive that undermines society and prosperity.
Oulds writes in his chapter, The Social Harm: ‘A few powerful men at the top have replaced class conflict with gender warfare and its accompanying identity politics in a divide and rule strategy. It takes advantage of the phenomenon that capitalism, rather than creating a unified working class as Marxist theories predicted, actually tends to a shattering of the bonds between people . . . The elite-driven power grab has enabled the largest redistribution of wealth and power from the masses since man first learned to control nature and its beasts . . . The cultural, demographic, and economic revolution that is being foisted on a once socially conservative civilisation is creating a new dark age where we are suppressed, irrational, and increasingly impoverished. The reality runs contrary to established, and somewhat fanciful, benefits of feminisation.’
Feminism was thus weaponised in pursuit of goals other than the advancement and contentment of women. Arguably, as Oulds’s monograph discusses, it has made women unhappier, taking them on a journey away from the natural inclinations of their sex. An obvious motive was money, as legions of female workers produce higher profits and tax income. But that was not the only motive. As women gain independence from men, they become more dependent on the state, thereby becoming more controllable. It is through women that the elite class is dismantling conventional roles, responsibilities and relationships to build a ‘brave new world’.
The pseudoscience of eugenics lurks behind the celebrated advance of feminism. Back in the 1920s when JD Rockefeller funded the launch of Planned Parenthood, he believed that reducing the birth of unwanted children would keep women in the workforce. The Communist regimes of Chairman Mao’s China and the Soviet Union emphasised women’s place in the factory rather than at home with the family. Just as Mao’s Cultural Revolution attacked the structures and norms of traditional society, in the West too, war has been waged on the family.
The historical progress of feminism is described as waves. There is much overlap between these phases, with each having inner conflict and extreme or radical fringes. Broadly, the first wave of feminism was a demand for equal rights: to vote, own property and receive an education. The second wave, in the rebellious Zeitgeist of the 1960s, pursued equality at work and at home, demanded reproductive rights, and drew attention to ‘sexism’ in prevailing attitudes and behaviour. The third wave, beginning around the 1980s, focused on gender theory and intersectionalism, with the concept of equality replaced by moral relativism.
A seminal text of second-wave feminism was Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Published in 1963, this book described American women as ‘walking corpses’ living in a ‘comfortable concentration camp’, with their husbands as jailors. Motherhood was portrayed as slavery by Friedan, who was undoubtedly a cultural Marxist.
Although Friedan’s book promoted female attractiveness to men, feminists began to reject femininity. A slogan of the ‘Women’s Lib’ movement was ‘burn the bra’. In 1970 Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch urged women to strive to be as tough and competitive as men, and to reject culturally learned feminine traits of empathy, caring and domesticity. Critics suggested that Greer was urging women to take on the very traits that she despised in men. Feminist writers demeaned women staying at home to raise children; but in reality working mothers were paying other women to do the child care instead.
Second-wave feminism was bankrolled by the Rockefeller Foundation in pursuance of the fragmentation and ensuing transformation of society. The underlying motive of eugenics was advanced by the contraceptive pill, legal rights to abortion and homosexuality. Hollywood and mainstream media began to undermine traditional family values, with the role of father gradually recast from breadwinner and ‘head of home’ to a lazy ignoramus. As early as the 1960s, the soap opera (always a tool of propaganda) Coronation Street was portraying men as morally and socially stunted.
According to feminist Fay Weldon in Godless in Eden (1976), campaigners had fought against the traditional family so successfully that they had created a new class of professional single women. Feminism was becoming increasingly bossy and intolerant, as revealed in the writing of Simone de Beauvoir (1975): ‘No woman should be authorised to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.’
By the 1980s feminism was challenging the concept and constraints of biological sex. For Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (1990), the male and female dichotomy was a category error; gender is a social performance, not predetermined. Thus sex was usurped by gender, which is a malleable social construct. Christina Hoff Sommers, in her book Who Stole Feminism? (1994), was troubled by the shift from equality, which she regarded as a liberal and humanistic goal, and the emerging gender feminism, which was social constructionist, illiberal and radical Marxist.
Intersectionality was the theme of third-wave feminism. As described in 1989 by critical race theorist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, women are an oppressed group within a matrix of oppression. White women need to ‘check their privilege’ when engaging with black women. Divisive identity politics are an expression of ‘woke’ culture in the younger generations, but this would cause a major problem for feminism. The very concept of womanhood is challenged by the ideology of gender fluidity and the encroachment of ‘trans women’ into women’s space. Traditional feminism (if that is not an oxymoron) is under attack by social justice warriors who regard gender as an individual choice. Arguably, feminists are reaping what they had sown in undermining natural differences between the sexes. Harry Potter author JK Rowling is smeared as a ‘Terf’ (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) for wanting to protect women from male pretenders.
Meanwhile ‘toxic masculinity’, a concept from the margins of academic feminism, has become an uncritically accepted truth. The American Psychological Association validates the concept, explaining that toxic masculinity manifests in stoicism, competitiveness, risk-taking, aggression and violence. ‘Mansplaining’ is a feminist term for a man talking over a woman or dominating a meeting or discussion. Undoubtedly some men do this, as in the ‘pub bore’. But it is increasingly applied to any situation where a man argues against anything said by a woman. Some female politicians use the term repeatedly, and it works.
The notion of male privilege is emphasised despite men having poorer outcomes in longevity (about five years less); higher rates of imprisonment, homelessness and suicide; they are statistically more prone to violent assault or murder, and the family courts often minimise their contact with children after marital breakdown. Illustrating double standards of modern feminism, Melanie Phillips (2003) remarked on women insisting that mothers have custody rights for children, and demanding financial independence while claiming substantial pay-outs from husbands after divorce.
As feminism has moved on to fourth or fifth waves (the distinctions are blurred), the priorities seem to be those of the middle-class audience of Radio 4 Woman’s Hour. ‘Boutique feminism’ is decadent. It sells books, such as Invisible Women byCarole Criado-Perez, but it makes little noise about discrimination against women in traditional Muslim/south Asian cultures: genital mutilation, aborting of female foetuses, honour killings, and patriarchal control interpreted from scriptures held to be sacred. Some women are more equal than others . . .
A growing number of women realise that feminism, as pushed by politicians and activists, is not for their benefit. I have written for The Conservative Woman website since soon after it was launched 12 years ago by Kathy Gyngell and Laura Perrins. This has been an influential medium of resistance to adverse social engineering, to which mainstream media are supine. My first article on TCW was on feminist Labour MP Jess Philips’s one-sided recital of the names of women killed by male partners over the preceding year, ignoring the smaller but not insignificant number of men killed by female partners. My point was that such feminism is not principled but partisan.
Such lack of principle was very evident to me while lecturing at King’s College London. The university was a keen participant in the Athena SWAN charter, which was created in 2005 to boost female careers in science and overturn the alleged patriarchal culture of academe in the UK. In 2015 it was expanded to arts, humanities, social science, business and law. Participating universities must show commitment to systematic assessment and action on gender equality. In 2011 the National Institute for Health Research requires the Athena SWAN silver award for any institute applying for research funding. In my department at King’s, many staff hours were spent on meetings and initiatives to help female staff to succeed against male colleagues – that’s what Athena SWAN really means.
The scheme was mired in controversy when it was subverted by gender activists, such that men pretending to be women could benefit from the considerable support provided. Athena SWAN decided to recognise gender as a spectrum, and it was praised and partnered by Stonewall, the LGBT activist body. Some critics may be amused on seeing a divisive agent of identity politics, falling to a more radical cause (potentially reversed by the Supreme Court judgement denying that ‘trans women’ are women).
While socially-cuckolded men have been meek, the most effective resistance has come from a few women. A climate of misandry was displayed by the documentary film The Red Pill, narrated by a feminist. A men’s rights movement has emerged, but it remains small and starved of media attention. More publicised are authors of popular psychology books that explain real differences between the sexes in a world of egalitarian dogma.
In Robert A Glover’s No More Mr Nice Guy (2003), the nice guy believes that if he is good, people will like him; if he is kind to others, they will reciprocate. But when others do not fulfil their side of this unwritten contract, he feels resentful. For men, behaving like women does not get the same reward as women get. In Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus by John Gray (1992), the differences between men and women cause various difficulties in relationships. Men are more direct, take things at face value, and misinterpret comments as criticism. Women are more emotionally variable, and prone to misinterpreting partner’s response as rejection. The solution is for men to relate to women as women, and vice versa.
The idea that men are from Mars and women from Venus is the theme of one of Oulds’s chapters. Women are ‘risk-averse and focused on social harmony, while men are more competitive and goal-oriented’. The public sector, he writes, is dominated by ‘overly agreeable’ people who seek consensus and maintain conformity.
The prevailing state ideology of compassion and sharing is, however, a façade to manipulate people, particularly women. The lack of incentives and few penalties for poor performance in the state bureaucracies creates a culture where public sector employees are from Venus, those from the private sector are from Mars. The result is massive inflation in the feminised public sector, drawing money out of the economy in return for not very much.
Oulds does not pull punches in his writing style, and readers may feel that they are being taken on a rocky road with little smoothening in his path of argument. Some assertions may seem simplistic or exaggerated. But he is surely right to criticise the one-sided advancement of equality – or indeed equity – for women, while ordinary men are left behind.
Sex differences are so controversial that academic writers tend to temper their words carefully, to the extent that they make little meaningful contribution. Oulds cannot be accused of this, but few feminists or their facilitators would take his book seriously. The problem is that cases can always be found to refute any generalisation. Social psychologistSteven Pinker, in The Blank State (2006) avoids absolutist notions of sex differences, while describing similar traits to those in Oulds’s thesis.
He wrote: ‘Men are not from Mars, nor are women from Venus. Men and women are from Africa, the cradle of our evolution, where they evolved together as a single species. Men and women have all the same genes except for a handle on the Y chromosome, and their brains are so similar that it takes an eagle-eyed neuroanatomist to find the small differences between them. Their average levels of general intelligence are the same, according to the best psychometric estimates, and they use language and think about the physical and living world in the same general way. They feel the same basic emotions, and both enjoy sex, seek intelligent and kind marriage partners, get jealous, make sacrifices for their children, compete for status and mates, and sometimes commit aggression in pursuit of their interests.’
As Pinker described, there are scientifically verified differences between men and women. Men are predisposed to philandering (given the opportunity), they compete tenaciously, engage in rough-and-tumble play in childhood, they have better spatial skills and ability to solve mathematical problems, for better and worse they have a wider range of intelligence, and for better and sometimes much worse they are inclined to risk-taking (the Darwin Awards for stupid acts are usually won by men).
Women have higher emotional intelligence, language skills, memory for people and interactions, warmer empathy, closer and more trusting friendships, better eye contact and other non-verbal communication skills, they are more attentive to others, and (despite the feminist assertions) they prefer intimate relationships to casual sex.
Pinker’s conclude that feminism is often too divisive and irrational: ‘Feminism as a movement for political and social equity is important, but feminism as an academic clique committed to eccentric doctrines about human nature is not. Eliminating discrimination against women is important, but believing that women and men are born with indistinguishable minds is not. Freedom of choice is important, but ensuring that women make up exactly 50 per cent of all professions is not. And eliminating sexual assaults is important, but advancing the theory that rapists are doing their part in a vast male conspiracy is not.’
Feminism is not making either women or men happy, and that was never the intent.
As Oulds’s describes in this book, it has had a subversive impact on society, a socially and economically destructive force that has undermined the foundations of society, blamed men collectively for all of the world’s problems, and sent Western civilisation spiralling into decline.
Oulds accepts that there are some economic benefits from feminisation of the economy. The decline of heavy industry and loss of male working-class jobs had a rational basis. Letting developing nations do the manufacturing while Britain focused on profitable financial, legal and other professional services led to a growing middle class and significant advance in female careers. Feminine attributes such as communication skills have contributed considerably to the success of the UK economy. But now that artificial intelligence is replacing jobs at higher-educated levels, Western feminisation is facing a dead end. Other countries which emerged from economic backwardness to embrace the market economy without ideological interference are inheriting the earth.
Subtitled The Economic Costs of Feminising Society and How to Restore Prosperity, Oulds’s book deserves to be read widely. The text may be read in bite-sized chunks, having 31 chapters with headings such as ‘Sheconomy’, ‘The Fasces of Compassion’, ‘The Credit Card’ and ‘Karenisation’. It is a flow of high-octane fuel to the fire of gender debate.
I should note my acquaintance with Oulds, having written a book with him six years ago on the ‘woke’ subversion of society (Moralitis: A Cultural Virus), and like me he is a trade union rep for the Workers of England. In this role, Oulds gained experiences and insight for his latest book. In representing members he regularly faces women in the position of HR (human resources) officers. These women apparently care for workers – particularly those deemed of special need or identity – while by contrast treating anyone expressing ‘wrong-think’ (typically male members of staff, but sometimes lower-class women) severely. Indeed, HR officers are the protagonists of the feminised economy, promoting the values of equality, diversity and inclusion as instruments of control.
As Oulds observes, ‘perverse gender-based discrimination exists in employment decisions’, and as argued through the title and content of his startling book, this and other insults to natural sex roles ‘must end and be replaced with biorealism’.
