A woman called Jenny Jones, now elevated to Baroness Moonbeam, or something, in the House of Lords has proposed a 6 p.m. curfew for all men everywhere. This would prevent men from killing women on the streets. Mrs Moonbeam is a member of the Green party and presumably agrees with their manifesto which insists that men who identify as women are women and there’s an end to it. In which case all I would need to do is don a wig and take to the streets — and upon being apprehended by a policeman simply explain that my name was Loretta and I’d just popped out to do a spot of murdering, I mean shopping, officer. Technically speaking, I wouldn’t even need to bother with the wig. That’s one flaw in the mad woman’s argument, then.
Another is that henceforth men might feel constrained to cram all their malfeasance into the daylight hours, thus quite overwhelming the emergency services. A third is that under Queen Moonshine’s proposals, after six o’clock men will be cosily ensconced at home with their wives or girlfriends. But here’s the thing: when women are attacked, it is overwhelmingly by members of their own family and usually their male spouses. Attacks by random strangers are comparatively rare (especially in the UK). So the proposal could well lead to a quite dramatic increase in the very problem the imbecilic woman is attempting to solve.
But Jenny Jones was not really attempting to solve any problem at all; it was, instead, a reflexive moment of spite and gender-based hatred from a woman who has a long and noble record of this kind of stuff. The horrible epidemic of stabbings and shootings we’ve seen in London these past five years is concentrated among youngish BAME men. If I were to suggest a 6 p.m. curfew for all young BAME people as a corrective measure I would rightly be condemned as both a bigot and an idiot. But Jones’s proposal found traction and was being considered by the First Minister of Wales. Luckily for men there is little point in going out after 6 p.m. in Wales anyway; I know from experience.
The body of Sarah Everard was found on 10 March in woodland near Ashford in Kent. It was a horrific murder. But we have heard very little about the poor woman for the past two weeks. Such is the overweening narcissism of the times that her killing was immediately co-opted into the political armoury to make a wider complaint about men and the nuclear family — despite the fact that the circumstances of Sarah’s death were extraordinarily unusual, statistically.
There are very few countries in the world where women are less likely to be attacked by a stranger than the UK. But the facts do not matter, so long as a dozen or so columnists can scream ‘#MeToo!’ for 800 words — and then go on to explain how a bloke once chatted them up in a bar, or spoke to them unbidden on a train. And how as a consequence we need to do something.
No. Not remotely comparable to a woman who was abducted and killed — and an insult to her family and friends who are trying to grieve for her. But you see, it’s all allowable, because this was a George Floyd moment. Or a Harvey Weinstein moment. Everything these days is. A singularity occurs and the pile-on begins: Me! Me! Me! This is what I have to experience every day! It’s all about me! Or, desperate to get in on the act, their husband columnists: ‘A man wolf-whistled my wife while she was out jogging in Queen’s Park.’
A singularity occurs and the pile-on begins: Me! Me! Me! It’s all about me!
Meanwhile the whole thing is ratcheted up by the radical left, including the Socialist Workers party (which has a very interesting history of ignoring violence against women), and a shrill fugue consisting of concatenations — on the BBC, in the press, on social media — soon convinces the government that we need plain-clothed policemen in bars to stop men being a bit lairy to women while the Welsh decide whether to ban men entirely. And those who raise even a vague question about this stuff — Davina McCall, university professors, even a close friend of the murdered woman — are vilified and seen, in the eyes of the crusaders, as being almost as bad as the man who killed Sarah Everard. The enablers. Cancel them!
Much of this wretchedness has been visited on us by the immediacy of social media, but it is also a consequence of affluent, liberal western societies in which the absurdities of identitarian politics hold sway. Men commit the overwhelming majority of violent crime. That is true of every country in the world. It is true of every society which has ever existed, for 40,000 years. There are solid evolutionary and biological reasons for this, some involving testosterone but also more complex stuff concerning competition between sperm.
What is undoubted is that these fundamental differences between men and women are utterly innate, hard-wired and not simply the product of social conditioning. We in the UK have gone further than almost any other society in addressing how one can harness the benefits (which are many) of gender differences — and minimise the obvious downsides. But quite how feminists can continue to insist simultaneously that women are ‘better’ than men, that men dominate women, and that men and women are born more or less identical is an utter mystery to me.
Meanwhile, remember Sarah Everard. The real victim in all of this. Such a terrible end to a wonderful life.
