The demonisation of men – Mark Latham
Spectator Australia
Latham’s law
Much of the current political campaign about women is actually an expression of Left-feminist hatred of men.
In truth, 99 per cent of men are protectors of women. We see this in natural disasters when man after man puts the safety of his wife and children first. Husbands and fathers would ‘take a bullet’ for their family loved ones. This is the natural male instinct — to be a protector, not a violator of women’s safety.
Is this fact ever recognised in the media, or the reports of Left-feminist government agencies like Our Watch and the Human Rights Commission? Never.
It’s a relentless concentration on the one per cent of men who do the wrong thing, intended to give the impression this is typical of male behaviour. It is not. And the question is never asked: if just one per cent of men are doing the wrong thing, what is it about them that produces this aberrant outcome?
Instead, the Left-feminists have created generalised theories, ones that slur all men in society.
For instance, much is made of the role of Kate Jenkins, the Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner. Scott Morrison has appointed her to conduct an inquiry into the workplace culture of Canberra’s Parliament House.
She has produced a series of other reports on sexual harassment. Her main technique has been to redefine and trivialise the meaning of sexual harassment, so that the survey figures are always inflated.
In Jenkins’ world, sexual harassment includes staring at an attractive woman (we had better build extra jails if that’s the case), ‘sexist’ jokes (such as three blondes walk into a bar…) and even so-called ‘erotic gifts’ (I suppose this includes a replica of Michelangelo’s David brought back from Florence).
In other words, she has turned the whole notion of sexual harassment into a meaningless joke. Other government bodies, such as the man-hating Our Watch have done the same.
It’s not helping women combat genuine sexual harassment (from one per cent of men) to reduce the problem to trivia, to take regular social behaviour and turn it into a crime.
This is the problem with proposals for new workplace tribunals (kangaroo courts) to handle sexual harassment complaints (instead of the legal system with its well-established rules and procedures for natural justice). It’s impossible to effectively rule on things like how long a man was looking at an attractive woman. Or the contents of a joke, an attempt to make people happy.
These kangaroo courts would realise the Left-feminist goal of ensuring that every allegation against a man is assumed to be true, ruining his reputation.
This is the new Salem, a new Star Chamber we have entered, where anonymous slurs on social media are automatically given the status of truth (like the schoolgirl complaints website now being taken ultra-seriously by the NSW Police and Education departments).
No one ever checks for truth and evidence. The anonymous slur is enough for woke governments and media to condemn all males.
Therein lies the irony. Workplace and school standards of respect for women and girls are miles ahead of where they were thirty or forty years ago. Yet the relentless drive for male demonisation is now at its peak in 2021.
For years the Left-feminists have been frustrated by their failure to popularise the #MeToo movement in Australia. They missed out on jailing actors and celebrities, so then they turned their guns onto politics in Canberra.
The Kate Jenkins and Our Watch slogan is to believe that ‘Violence against women is caused by gender inequality’. But where is the evidence for that? There is none.
In fact, the evidence points the other way. In the past decade in Australia we have seen big, important workplace professions become female-dominated, such as lawyers, GP doctors, vets, teachers, office managers and the federal and state public service. It’s been a huge and welcome surge in gender equality.
Has it reduced rates of domestic violence and sexual assault (as the Jenkins/Our Watch theory would say)? Not at all. Billions of government dollars have been spent in these areas pushing nonsensical Left-feminist theories for no positive result. None of the rates have dropped, as the NSW government recently admitted at Budget Estimates. If the theory is wrong then, of course, the outcome will be disappointing.
The real problem lies in the one per cent of men doing the wrong thing, the blokes who display mutant bad behaviour. Among them, the most accurate predictor of domestic violence is a man (particularly Aboriginal) who has a prior criminal conviction. They are part of a criminal culture, invariably linked to poverty, that causes the great bulk of these problems for women.
Do you hear the Left-feminists and their woke male apologists (like the NSW Attorney General Mark Speakman) talking about this reality in trying to protect women from harm? Of course not. It doesn’t fit the Leftist narrative for the demonisation of all men.
How pathetic. The problem is obvious. The solutions are clear. But the wacko world of woke is running a hateful, intensely political campaign based on gender.
They would rather have a gender war than a war on poverty. And endanger Australian women in the process.
This is the real crime: those who march, wave placards and yell in the media about the rights of women then do everything possible to ignore the available evidence on how to make society safer, for all Australians.