Only Men Can Man the Barricades, pt. II

The second part of my recent Man's World essay on the scourge of feminism.

Any serious understanding of the decay of the West must account for feminism’s role in that decay. We must confront the fact that our perverted culture, unrestrained appetites, astonishingly incompetent government, and deplorably idiotic elites, are the product of a few bad ideas. Among those bad ideas is feminism. It’s time we reckon with this fact: the widespread decline of the West is largely the consequence of the widespread success of feminism.

In part I, I explored the harm brought to American women by six decades of feminist thought. Beginning with Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, feminism quickly assumed the contours of a liberationist theology. It promised to free women from a thousand years of cultural norms and a million years of biological imperatives, all without any serious consideration of the consequences. For women, the consequences were disastrous, resulting in large-scale increases in diagnosed psychological disorders even as psychological disorders were defined out of existence. Gender dysphoria, alcohol abuse, and mental-health disorders, among other stress indicators, exploded. At the same time, birth rates and marriage rates fell as did, predictably, overall life satisfaction. These high costs were supposedly offset by the elimination of patriarchal barriers to women’s career ambitions. With the annihilation of those “barriers,” a small percentage of highly intelligent and hard-working women were “liberated” to work 80 hours per week at the nation’s stultifying law firms and grasping investment banks, often (though not always) ending up single, childless, and lonely. Today, the West is awakening to the increasingly obvious fact that this was a raw deal for women.

It was also a raw deal for men…

You can read the rest of this essay at Man’s World.

And here is Part I.