We live in such a time as Theodore Dalrymple described in Soviet society, where the purpose of state propaganda was “not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better”. Like Soviet citizens, we are forced to assent to obvious lies: we are all racist (but denigrating white people is “anti-racism”), burning cities is peaceful protest, people who dress in sinister black uniforms and systematically bash and bully anyone who disagrees with them are “anti-fascists”(who don’t actually exist, anyway), men can get pregnant and women can have penises, but, above all, women are ruthlessly oppressed by a sinister, omnipresent patriarchy.
No one (outside the Special School of the left) really believes any of this, but anybody who dares say they disagree is ruthlessly ostracised. We are, as Dalrymple said, “a society of emasculated liars”.
It is for daring to speak out against the lie of “patriarchal oppression” that writer and educator Bettina Arndt has been subject to a very real campaign of oppression.
She’s not alone.
Across the Western World, universities kowtow to [feminist] orthodoxies. Swedish economist Magnus Henrekson is a professor and president of the Research Institute of Industrial Economics in Stockholm. He recently completed an interesting study which seemed a good contender for publication in one of the leading economics journals.
It was based on an extremely large and exhaustive data set covering the entire Swedish population, used state of the art econometric techniques and their hypothesis was confirmed, with strong empirical support.
The paper was endlessly rejected for the most spurious of reasons, but the unspoken reality was clear: the paper was simply too controversial for the emasculated liars who have appointed themselves as the gatekeepers of academia.
The crux of the Swedish research is that women who marry men with extremely high incomes often start their own businesses which then underperform.
If you’ve ever known an upper-middle-class woman who starts a vegan candle-making or a reiki art-therapy business that looks suspiciously like a hobby, then you’ll know what the study is talking about.
Still, it’s got more cachet than being “just a housewife” hasn’t it?
In this elevated social set, it goes down better at cocktail parties for these women to mention they are importing matsutake mushrooms or designing diamond nose studs than simply raising rugrats.
It’s clearly not singing from the feminist songbook to suggest that the presence of a well-heeled husband could result in women choosing to dabble in unprofitable businesses rather than pursuing careers. Hence no one is allowed to publish research showing this is the case and even the most eminent journal reviewers meekly toe the party line.
I’ve been hearing such stories for decades. Research challenging the current cultural dogma simply doesn’t get published and students writing theses on the wrong topics can’t find supervisors or end up not qualifying for their degrees.
The same script plays out across the workforce. Many young men of my acquaintance complain that they struggle to find work, while all the girls they know have at least one, often two or three jobs. This is not just anecdotal: official data shows that young men are unemployed at a higher rate – a trend which has been growing stronger for decades.
Another young man of my acquaintance, recently returned to university to study science, told me, “I thought all this stuff about PC on campus was all exaggerated, but it’s even taking over STEM subjects!” Even the hardest of hard sciences are turning soy-boy flabby.
An Australian astronomer who ultimately decided to leave the country due to the invasion of his discipline by feminist and social justice politics[…]explains exactly how the playing field is being systematically tilted to favour women.
Here, in his own words, is what life is like for an academic dealing with this climate:
Before telescope-time or grant application meetings, we are now commonly subjected to patronizing speeches by diversity figureheads, who remind us how important it is to be fair to female applicants, how we should think twice before rejecting their applications, and how we should be mindful of gender balance and role models in our selection. It is a low-level form of brainwashing. We know that if we select too many male applicants (even if we do it on merit) our choice and motives will be scrutinized, monitored, criticized. Instead, if we select a few more female applicants (even if not all on merit), we will be praised and left in peace. Most astronomers unsurprisingly choose the path of least resistance.And this is the result:
Some astronomers still spend most of their time researching and monitoring the sky; others instead spend most of their time researching and monitoring gender balance within astronomy departments, setting up equity-and-diversity committees, writing 200-page reports on discrimination, conferring awards to themselves for their social-justice work, making up new types of privileges, and running blogs full of political propaganda. Unfortunately, funding is shrinking for the former class of astronomers like me and is ever-expanding for the latter.
As a result, unscientific garbage like this ends up being published by supposedly serious scientific organisations.
If the young men of my acquaintance think it’s hard getting a job at the local supermarket ahead of the girls, they better not aspire to be astronomers.
To obtain a good job, a male astronomer needs to be in the top 10 % of male applicants, while a female astronomer only needs to be average.
Oh, well, there’s always a career in garbage collection or sewer work – feminists don’t seem to be too interested in “fixing” the gender imbalance in such dirty, unglamourous jobs.