Gillette faced a backlash in 2019 for lecturing its (male) customers on ‘toxic masculinity’. service members assist the Department of State with a non-combatant evacuation operation in Afghanistan on Saturday It’s difficult to find mainstream cultural imagery that doesn’t at least superficially support the ‘girlboss’ consensus. Defence manufacturing behemoths Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman all have female CEOs. Big companies publish gender pay gap data.Īcross the West, you can be fired for being lecherous to women, or saying unkind things about LGBT people: in July, a teacher was fired from a Surrey school for referring to a transgender pupil as ‘that’.Įven the American military industry is now run by women. These days, I’d have grounds to take her to court on sex discrimination charges. Aged 18 and working in a pub, I was told by the landlady that sexist remarks on my appearance were ‘part and parcel of the job’. Mainstream public culture has changed immeasurably over even my adult life. They’re looking at images of gun-waving men in a violent, war-torn wasteland where women can be beaten with impunity.

Far from feeling a patriotic love for their own culture and nation, a minority of fighting-age Western men viscerally hate it. But just think for a moment about what it implies.

I’ll be the first to condemn this swamp of hatred – and, of course, there is a danger that in discussing it, the noxious opinions reach a wider audience. And, above all else, these angry Western men detest feminism.Ī US Marine carries a baby as a family is processed through the evacuation control centre at an airport in Kabul One meme circulating on social media as Kabul fell depicted barefoot Taliban fighters next to a photo of American soldiers wearing high heels for a PR stunt, mockingly connecting Western support for gender-bending to a failure of military competence. And they’re lionising the Taliban as heroic anti-woke freedom fighters. These alienated men hate all of it – the whole woke world view, from racial tolerance to LGBT rights to feminism. Such men consider abhorrent this value system that an America-led coalition spent trillions of dollars trying to instil, via two decades of Afghan ‘nation-building’.

He characterised this as powered by ‘liberalism, consumerism, secularism, usury, democracy, global capitalism… and most of all, feminism/women’s rights/women’s liberation’. One user on an online message board called the toppled Western-backed Afghan government ‘globohomo-clownworld’. They’re cheering on the Taliban.įar-Right groups are gloating. But they’re not backing Western soldiers. Amid the blood-spattered horrors of Kabul, perhaps the most startling response has been an outpouring of warlike passion from disaffected young Western men.

Mary harrington unherd