What some call the “battle of the sexes” between males and females began long before our species arrived on the scene and no doubt will continue after homo sapiens has died out completely, as on current trends it will have before that many centuries have gone by, or been replaced by cyborgs. As the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins likes to point out, unlike race, “sex is pretty damn binary” and has been for many millions of years.
For several decades now, females have been on the offensive in much of the world, with males beating an apologetic retreat and agreeing that “toxic masculinity” is nasty and should be done away with and that the “the patriarchy” it fathered should be dismantled. Will the many gains chalked up by women, who outshine men in academe and as a result have broken through one glass ceiling after another, be permanent?
Only if the societies in which it is being taken for granted that women can do most things better than men turn out to be stronger in the long run than those in which antiquated values attributed to male chauvinists are widely accepted. For that to happen, more women would have to give birth to more children, a requirement which those who thought Kamala Harris would beat Donald Trump by going on about abortion surely find most distasteful.
In the United States – the country that for a variety of reasons pioneered the age of feminine empowerment that so many others are now experiencing – the advocates of a more traditional approach are mounting a counteroffensive. Trump and the people who surround him evidently believe that the time has come to roll back some of the gains chalked up by women.
In the Senate hearings he was obliged to endure, the man they chose to be defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, made no bones about his determination to purge the Pentagon of the many bemedalled “woke” generals who infest it and are far more interested in waging war on misogyny or prejudice against transsexuals than in destroying their country’s enemies. He wants to instil a “warrior culture” in the armed forces and has long thought that women should have no place on the battlefield.
In his primitive way, Hegseth assumes that, for straightforward biological reasons, few women are able to perform the gruelling physical tasks that are routinely demanded of male soldiers and that, in any case, when women are around men instinctively want to protect them, a proclivity that would be bound to distract them from the business of killing their foes.
For feminists who want to minimise the importance of biological differences and find chivalry insulting, such attitudes are ridiculously outdated. However, they are based on rather more than nostalgia for the days when it was habitual for those of a patriarchal disposition to refer to “the weaker sex” without anyone berating them for their lack of sensitivity. The sad truth is that men do tend to be much tougher than women.
In all sports involving physical strength and stamina, males outperform females by a very wide margin; thousands of them can easily smash the world athletic records set up by women whose feats have made them internationally famous. On several occasions, female football teams hoping to become world champions asked schoolboys in the neighbourhood they were training in to face them in a practice match and got roundly beaten. All this means that there are plenty of jobs – such as those involving soldiering, fire-fighting and the like – that are best left to the men, just as there are others in which what were once seen as womanly virtues are more valuable.
Female empowerment is very much a Western phenomenon. In many parts of the world, especially those dominated by Islam but also, less aggressively, in China and Russia, “feminisation” is seen as a symptom of decadence and attempts to export it are fiercely resisted. Though few Muslim regimes nowadays are willing to go as far as the Taliban in Afghanistan – who treat women as chattel slaves – most are reluctant to allow them to play significant roles in public life. Instead, they are told to stay out of sight because otherwise they would run the risk of exciting male carnal passions. This approach brings to mind that of the Victorians who, it was unreliably reported, covered up the legs of tables and pianos for that very reason.
The stark difference between the Muslim view of human sexuality and that prevailing in the West has already brought about a huge number of personal tragedies and could soon have far-reaching geopolitical consequences. The appalling “grooming gang” scandals that, thanks to the intervention of Elon Musk, in recent weeks changed the political landscape in the United Kingdom, are a direct result of the clash of cultures. For decades, gangs of Muslims of Pakistani origin sexually enslaved thousands of underage working-class white girls, subjecting them to quite horrendous treatment, while the police and the local authorities looked the other way for fear of harming “community relations” and thereby saying goodbye to the Muslim vote. Similar outrages have also been taking place in Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and France, where the police and politicians, supported by much of the mainstream media, have grown accustomed to behaving much like their British counterparts. For a long time, those who protested or, worse still, called for something to be done, were automatically labelled fascists, but it would appear that on this issue at least public opinion is now changing.
When consulted, Muslims who deplore the behaviour of the rapists often say that the way Western women dress and behave is highly provocative so it is not surprising that men brought up in their faith or have just arrived from abroad see them as easy meat. Many also find it hard to understand the passivity of the fathers and brothers of their victims; in Muslim countries, any outsider who dared prey on their daughters or sisters would come to a grizzly end.
It would be unfortunate for many innocent people if Westerners were to adopt a similar attitude, but there are signs that this is about to happen, with governments throughout Europe and North America coming to the conclusion that, no matter how attractive “multicultural” may be in theory, in practice it has turned out very badly. This is one reason, perhaps the main one, why “right-wing” nationalist movements are on the rise in Europe and Canada, while another has already reached power in the United States, and the rhetoric about the need to start mass deportations is getting increasingly strident not just on the wilder fringes of society but among people who, by traditional criteria, are middle-of-the-road moderates.
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