The porn industry is a weathervane for gender ideology, and it’s pointing towards something that looks like the end of the world
Content warning: This article contains references to graphic imagery, as well as sexual violence and abuse.
It’s difficult to begin any missive relating to the past few years of, well, existing on planet Earth without sounding — at best — completely trite. Of course, what could possibly be said about the disaster of the years-just-passed that has not already been said; from global pandemics, to global economic crises. It has been, to put it lightly, a total nightmare.
Despite the tumult we have all felt to varying degrees regarding the state of our social order and relationships therein over the past few years, there has been a morbid totem of certainty for anybody who has had the misfortune to Log On™️ for even the briefest of moments: the so-called Gender Wars.
Much has been written about this issue over preceding years, and a wholesale rehashing here isn’t warranted (nor, depending on the reader’s opinion of this lowly author, desirable, I’m sure).
Those who have been following the “Gender Debate” will be aware that cultural awareness of pro-gender ideology and the “advocacy tactics” therein was confined predominantly to online spaces in its digital infancy, and had not made its way into the wider public conversation at a grassroots level (although, as this thread by Legal Scholar Alessandra Asteriti very comprehensively covers, pro-gender ideology took institutional root many, many years ago).
Statistics show that between 2004–2015, searches for “transgender” were relatively low and stable, but in 2015, suddenly spiked. In the years following, searches consistently increased, and as of 2023, are double those in 2015.
It seems uncontroversial that in recent years the digital pontification of millennia old, metaphysical enigmas such as “can a lesbian ever have a penis?”, “should male rapists be locked up in women’s prisons?”, “women’s sports: what is it? Should it continue to be for women only? And why not?”, and “is biology a thing?” has since irrevocably spilled over into the “real world” as if a sluice of dreadful opinions had been opened and finally taken human form.
And within this deluge, one particular characteristic has become more prevalent than ever: the torrent of sexually violent imagery and abuse directed, by men, at women who dare to defend their sex-based rights.
Although this is nothing new — after all, men have been threatening and carrying out acts of sexual violence to control women for centuries — particular attention must be paid to the prevalence of the specifically sexualised nature of this abuse.
What could possibly be the reason for this intersection between gender ideology, and threats of grotesquely explicit sexual violence? As with any analysis of any socio-political movement — gender ideology or otherwise — of course there is no “single” answer to a question posed; but there are threads to be untangled here, and there is no more pressing place to start than the pornography industry, and how the impact of capitalism on this industry has shaped — and offers a window into — modern-day transactivism.
For the uninitiated, porn, gender ideology, and their roots in capitalism may seem at best only loosely connected. Even more so when trying to use it as a framework to examine exactly how men might continue to engage in a form of biological entryism predicated on gaslighting vast swathes of well-meaning — but ultimately naïve — liberal feminists; and Nice Guy Woke Blokes who “believe in equality”, but have yet to make the full transition into Vicious Misogynist Woke Bloke whose favourite shorthand for “woman” is “cunt”.
To understand this properly, it is vital to understand the trajectory of the porn industry, and how that has come to shape popular culture and, specifically, attitudes towards women. Feminist literature critiquing the porn industry spans decades, and women have been writing on the issue longer than I have been alive, so don’t take my word for it. But what has accelerated in the past decade or so since the explosion of the internet is the sheer quantity of porn available, and the impact of this both in terms of economic output but also the actual content produced.
In her vital and excoriating analysis of the porn industry in Pornland, feminist scholar and author Dr Gail Dines predicted the course of how the industry would develop in light of the impact of the internet back in 2010, stating:
“Making money in the porn industry is not as easy as it was during the early days of the Internet; the explosion in recent years of the number of films and Web sites has produced a glut of products.”
She goes on to state, recounting a time when she attended a “sex-po” convention for pornographers:
“As I wander around the hall, talking to pornographers, it becomes very clear that they are not particularly interested in sex. What turns these people on is making money”
The porn industry is effectively one of the purest forms of free-marketeerism in the world. What some may still view with misty eyes as a “magazine under the bed” trope has actually turned into a ruthless marketplace where women’s bodies are bought for the lowest possible price, and then forced to engage in the most degrading acts possible.
There are very few, if any, regulations that dictate what can and can’t take place within the hellish confines of a porn set — including the recent gutting of U.S. Code 2257, which previously required producers to keep records of the age of any performers to combat so-called “child pornography” (filmed child sexual abuse, or CSA), but is now done on what is effectively a good faith basis.
Coupled with the enormous growth of filmed CSA as an economic market, as well as the prevalence of performers in “mainstream” porn looking younger and younger to fulfil the fantasy of the user, this is a disaster happening right in front of us.
To understand fully why this is happening, it is important to understand the corporate structure of the porn industry as it is now, vis-à-vis the company behind the curtain: Mindgeek. Mindgeek is an international conglomerate that owns over 80% of the web’s porn sites, including major sites and production studios such as Pornhub and Brazzers. It functions by buying up any and all profitable sites, and then simply takes a cut through hosting, advertising, and product sales.
Most popular amongst these are the tube-style sites such as Pornhub and YouPorn, which in effect act as a free-for-all with an almost unlimited array of content encompassing all manner of racist, misogynistic, paedophilic stereotypes, images, and videos. Looking to Pornhub specifically, Mindgeek makes its profit through advertising to the billions of site visits made per year, and those who appear within the videos have seen their profits decreasing in line with Mindgeek’s ever expanding snare on the industry as the majority of content on the site is free to access.
And this isn’t going anywhere. As Pornhub’s 2019 “Year In Review” stated:
Pornhub keeps on growing and it doesn’t show signs of letting up. In 2019 there were over 42 Billion visits to Pornhub, which means there was an average of 115 million visits per day…there were over 39 billion searches performed, which is 8.7 billion more searches than last year…there was a record amount of video uploads, over 6.83 million new videos were uploaded to Pornhub.
The industry is expanding, there is more content than ever, and this is creating a market crush where performers are required to engage in whatever depraved fantasy a producer thinks up in order to satisfy the demands on those who view it, often for very little money in return.
Sites such as OnlyFans, which allegedly “puts the power back into the hands of the performers”, has predictably followed this free market trajectory, with 80% of the profit being made by just 14% of accounts, and the average monthly income totalling a meagre $180, with performers being required to engage in acts they never planned on or wanted to, just to maintain a profit stream.
As one woman who was forced to turn to OnlyFans after being fired from her job during the pandemic states:
“It is already an incredibly saturated market. The idea that people are just going to open up an OnlyFans account and start raking in the dough is really misguided.”
OnlyFans is just one specific example of a literal marketplace as it would commonly be understood, in terms of paying for “access” to a product. But this also extends to the wider porn industry. We only need to look at the titles of easily accessible, mainstream videos to see this: Teen whore; Busty MILF; Ebony Bitch; Thai squirting slut.
The women in these videos are reduced to their component parts, usually in the form of a racist, hyper-sexualised, misogynistic set of stereotypes. There is a particular “item” that the viewer wants, whether it be a woman of a particular race, or of a certain physical shape, or of a particular age. There is no limit to the intense “product” stratification that occurs within the marketplace of porn.
This reduction of the woman into a singular body part has the effect of literally dehumanising her. Men can live out their most depraved, racist fantasies by masturbating to videos such as ‘black slave girl pleasures white master’, and then when they have achieved orgasm, simply close the page and go about their day.
The woman ceases to exist beyond that brief moment in time; she is a product that the user has picked out of millions based on her ability to fulfil a fantasy that is concocted within the reality of patriarchy — hence how porn use is always fundamentally misogynistic — utilised to reach orgasm, then digitally discarded.
What is particularly pertinent here is how this market performance will continue to play out. There is now an increasing trend towards virtual reality porn, and the rise of DeepFakes allows people to create their own videos with whomever they wish, provided they have a bank of photos to import into the video.
This represents the truly harrowing zenith of free market capitalism and its application to porn: women as physical beings have effectively become broken down to their literal component body parts, but no longer need to actually exist in order for users to achieve sexual gratification. They can be conjured up with the use of technology, provided by capitalism, to perform in exactly the way the user wishes, totally without her consent.
As the thousands of tweets calling anybody who dares criticise the commercial sex industry a “SWERF” (Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminist) attest to, this is clearly not an uncontentious nor uncontested position.
What is interesting, however, is that performers themselves recognise the violence and abuse meted out within the porn industry has a symbiotic relationship with the “real world” (as if the things that happen on a porn set are somehow not actually happening to a real body, but let’s leave that to one side). As performer Janice Griffith tweeted:
“Like I make porn and because I speak out about it it’s suddenly my job to fix an entire society? Porn doesn’t exist in a bubble — the violence and harassment we experience is a direct mirror of the world we live in.”
Clearly, Griffith recognises that the violence and harassment within porn is intrinsically linked to the violence and harassment women face outside of porn. The “chicken-or-egg” issue of whether porn drives male sexual violence or is merely a symptom of it is probably a fait accompli at this point, given the ubiquity of porn both culturally and in purely quantifiable terms, coupled with the increasingly young age at which young people and children are able to access it; but what is certain is that pornography both reflects and portrays the degradation of women, by men.
As mentioned, it may seem dubious to some to draw a link between the relentless commodification of female bodies within the porn industry, and the growing rate at which women are told to “suck on a lady dick” for expressing a commonly held view, but the links between the two are absolutely stark.
First and foremost, in the most obvious and straightforward sense, the sexually violent threats and language used by men who in some way subscribe to or are supportive of gender ideology bears an uncanny resemblance to the sexual vitriol levelled at women within porn. Studies have shown that over 80% of mainstream porn contains some form of physical or verbal violence or aggression towards the woman involved.
When a woman is dehumanised through a verbal categorisation as “cunt”, “bitch”, or “whore” whilst the male performer forces his penis down her throat until she literally vomits, it really isn’t difficult to see how this translates into the interactions that then take place between violent men and women who refuse to conform to misogynistic expectations.
https://terfisaslur.com/
What is particularly striking, however, is how brazenly on display this misogyny is.
Those who have spent any time researching topics such as male sexual violence within the sex trade, for example, will be familiar with the cognitive dissonance amongst many punters in that their misogyny is often tempered.
There is an obvious feigned ignorance as to the true nature of what it is they’re doing; most men don’t purchase sexual access to impoverished and vulnerable women, and fewer still are gleeful about the misery they have inflicted upon the women and children they exploit. Not to get side-tracked, but this is often why punters complain when the women they exploit don’t “buy into” the fantasy they have concocted in their head of a sexual dynamic based upon mutuality and enjoyment.
Gender ideology has produced something entirely different. Of course, this is not to create a sort of “Misogyny Olympics”.
But the fervour with which many transactivists are willing to talk about how they want to sexually violate women is unparalleled.
The role of porn in this respect cannot be understated. Studies consistently show that viewing porn is an escalating behaviour that, over time, changes sexual tastes. In straightforward terms, this means that what may start out as a once-per-week habit viewing material that isn’t “explicitly” violent (i.e., does not necessarily show physical or verbal abuse) very often turns into an addictive pattern of behaviour, where the viewer is required to seek out increasingly taboo material that shows increasing levels of violence and degradation.
It should be no surprise then, bearing in mind the notable negative effect porn has on men’s perception of women, that those same men will then replicate the behaviour learned from porn when seeking to also dehumanise women they disagree with. Hence, the overtly sexually violent language reminiscent of how men treat women in porn.
The violence and abuse used to “keep women in line” within porn becomes a learned behaviour that men then replicate in the relationships, both social and romantic, they have with women outside of their viewing of pornography.
Put simply: if a woman dares to contravene the imposed expectations of any given man, she will be told in no uncertain terms what he thinks of her.
There is also a more insidious development occurring, if that is even possible, that has an uncanny resemblance to the way porn has developed over the past ten years. As mentioned, the way mainstream porn has intersected with a free market race to the bottom has meant that the women involved are increasingly reduced down to their component body parts, dehumanised and entirely separated from any kind of existence as actual being. As DeepFakes and VR porn becomes more popular, this will increasingly lend itself to a further dehumanisation in the most literal sense, where the woman involved no longer actually exists.
This is, in essence, one of the most horrendous examples of right-wing accelerationism in action, where capitalism — and the very object it is commodifying, in this case, women — is indefinitely intensifying and finding new ways to push beyond the current economic and socio-political landscape.
This may sound far-removed from having any relevance to the “mainstream” view of gender ideology — in other words, one of superficial and frankly bizarre slogans such as “Climate Justice = Trans Rights” parroted by the most bovine 21st century slacktivists you could possibly imagine — but the similarities are striking for anybody who has ever had the misfortune of stumbling upon the deluge of porn-soaked female fetishisation that is increasingly prevalent online.
This is just a selection of the musings of men who are sexually aroused at the thought of themselves as a dehumanised — and importantly, female — sex object. In part this traverses what famed Sexologist Ray Blanchard defined as autogynephilia (AGP), the theory that a subset of men within the larger transsexual (or transgender, in modern parlance) umbrella are sexually excited by the idea of themselves as female.
But in relation to the porn industry, it is important to note that the fetishisation of being female extends beyond the specific parameters of what Blanchard outlines in his tripartite typology: that is to say, modern pornography is driving a variety of fetishistic behaviours that extend beyond simply being “autogynephilic”, which is predicated on the subject’s heterosexuality.
Indeed, the adjacent idea of being reduced into a barely-sentient, empty-headed hole that exists to be penetrated is one that transgender activist Andrea Long Chu has already acknowledged.
This particular brand of deeply troubling, Kafkaesque pornography — commonly referred to as “sissy porn” — is becoming increasingly mainstream. Sparing you the task of having to do this yourself, a brief search on PornHub for “sissy” brings up videos that have hundreds of thousands of views, and there are numerous subreddits dedicated to “sissification” with subscribers numbering again into the hundreds of thousands.
The common thread running through all of these videos is that the male who is becoming “sissified” (i.e. turned into a braindead caricature of a hyper-sexualised woman) submits entirely to the will of the “actual” male doing the penetrating. There is no autonomy, there is barely any actual sentience. The male has fulfilled his fantasy of becoming the “ultimate sex object”: a woman who cannot and does not resist, and does not actually exist except to be penetrated.
“At the centre of sissy porn lies the asshole, a kind of universal vagina through which femaleness can always be accessed. Getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is.”
— Andrea Long Chu, Females
So what we have now is a global, digital marketplace where women exist a) to be as physically, verbally, and sexually degraded as possible, through all manner of violence and abuse; and b) within that, a subset of pornography that focuses exclusively on the reduction of “being female” into a barely-human void with no autonomy or free will.
Drawing these two points together, the bottom line is this: pornography is the ultimate manifestation of patriarchy, where women exist only as non-human entities for the sexual gratification of men. As a result of a steady diet of brainrot-inducing consumption of said pornography, the consequences become clear to see.
On the one hand, the pornography industry has created a situation in which the debasement of women has become normalised, and this shapes the way its consumers “deal with” ideological opponents such as women who outright oppose the creep of gender ideology in wider society.
If you regularly consume media where dehumanised women are put in their place through threats of sexual violence and physical abuse, then the conceptual leap required to do that to women who disagree with you “in the real world” is not so much a leap any more, but a tiny little step. A step that many men find all too easy to take. This is particularly the case with men who have gleefully embraced the opportunity to appear progressive by shilling for the sex trade under the guise of being liberal feminist allies. Why actually work on deconstructing your misogyny when you can just call women who challenge it a “TERF bitch” instead?
On the other hand, latent sexual urges amongst men who wish to see themselves as sex objects to be controlled now has a crystal clear manifestation in the real world: why not become a woman. That is, after all, the idea that pornography has inculcated in the minds of many of its consumers.
There is also a flip side to this. One of the most despairing talking points in recent years has been the 4000% increase in young girls being referred to “Gender Clinics” to pursue “treatment” pathways including the administering of puberty blockers. Those who advocate for the “pausing” of puberty argue that it is simply an adjournment for children who may be questioning their own identities, and once they have had time to consider all the options (whatever that means), they can either choose to proceed onto cross-sex hormones (CSH), or alternatively, desist from puberty blocker treatment.
If alarm bells are going off already, then good! You have been blessed with critical thinking skills and a functioning amygdala. Congratulations. If not, then let’s unpack it a little further.
First and foremost, puberty blockers themselves come with a whole host of negative side effects, including fatigue, weight gain, hot flushes, loss of bone density, depression, anxiety, and possible loss of fertility.
“But at least they alleviate symptoms of gender dysphoria such as persistent thoughts of self-harm and negative self-image!”.
“Puberty blockers used to treat children aged 12 to 15 who have severe and persistent gender dysphoria had no significant effect on their psychological function, thoughts of self-harm, or body image, a study has found.
However, as expected, the children experienced reduced growth in height and bone strength by the time they finished their treatment at age 16.”
So on the one hand, puberty blockers don’t alleviate the negative psychological function underpinning gender dysphoria, but on the other, they…reduce a child’s bone density and overall growth? The maths ain’t mathin’!
The short term impact of puberty blockers on the children who take them is in most cases a moot point anyway, given that over 90% of children on PBs go on to begin CSHs, which in effect sterilise the recipients for life (amongst other things).
Of course, as mentioned at the beginning of this essay, there are undoubtedly myriad reasons why young girls are feeling so alienated from their own bodies that they seek to escape from them in any way they can, including surgically removing healthy organs such as breast tissue and flesh, as well as taking life-long medication that has an irreversible impact on the healthy functioning of their body outside of the surgery.
But it is incumbent upon all of us who may oppose the medical experimentation being imposed on children who cannot fully understand or consent to the decisions they are taking to recognise the role that porn, and porn culture, play in this alienation they feel within and from their own bodies.
As Gail Dines states in Pornland:
“Today, a girl or young woman looking for an alternative to the Britney, Paris, Lindsay look will soon come to the grim realisation that the only alternative to looking fuckable is to be invisible”.
Whilst Pornland was written 10 years ago, the message still rings as true today as it did then. The impact porn use has on women and girls’ expectations of themselves, what they are “expected” to do, and what men “expect” to see is undeniable. Studies show that porn use normalises attitudes sympathetic to, and supportive of, violence against women and girls. Because women and girls are painted as “prudes” or “vanilla” if they don’t watch the same material, they feel compelled to acquiesce to the treatment to avoid the status of “invisible”, as Dines puts it in Pornland.
As a direct result of porn use, young men and boys are being socialised into viewing their peers as objects to be dehumanised and violated.
“Women were significantly more likely to be spanked, choked, and gagged than men. Aggregately speaking across the sample spectrum, women were verbally insulted or referred to in derogatory terms 534 times, whereas men experienced similar verbal assaults in only 65 instances. Women were spanked on 953 occasions, visibly gagged 756 times, experienced an open-hand slap 361 times, had their hair pulled or yanked on 267 separate occasions, and were choked 180 times. Men, however, were spanked only 26 times, experienced an open-hand slap in 47 instances, and for all other aggressive acts, were aggressed against fewer than 10 times”
This violence is not only confined to instances of physical abuse, but also sexual violence, with rape, torture, and even attempted murder being common themes. The increase in violence in something that has been recognised even by those within the industry, with porn producer Rob Black stating:
“[…] what I did was fantasy. I was able to preach it as a movie. It is a guy in a costume. Now you have companies that do it in the guise of BDSM. You put a girl on a dog chain and chain her to a wall and them keep her there for two days and take a cattle prod and electrocute her and do all this under the guise of a documentary. You are taking the element of the movie out. Now, you are doing torture. You are taking the fantasy out. Now all of the sudden it’s let’s do this under the guise of BDSM.”
This abuse has also resulted in an explosion of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), more colloquially known as “child pornography”. This has in part stemmed from an ease-of-access resulting from legal rollbacks, but just as notably, viewing pornography itself can encourage an increase in the desire for material that would have previously been considered “disgusting and degrading”. Anti-CSA expert Michael Sheath, of the charity Lucy Faithfull, stated that:
“Mainstream pornography sites are changing the thresholds of what is normal and I think it’s dangerous […] What we are seeing on a daily basis is the conflation of easy access to hardcore and deviant pornography and an interest in child molestation. The link is unambiguous.”
This desire to view more degrading material then extends into the “real world”, with a notable shift in the attitudes of porn consumers towards women and girls. It has led to an increase in both attitudes that are more supportive of male violence against women and girls, and in actual instances of victimising women.
Rape crisis centre workers who conducted face‐to‐face and phone interviews with sexual and physical assault survivors, and with abused woman who sought support from battered women’s services, found “a strong association between men’s porn consumption and female victimization.” They also found that “abuser use of porn doubled the risk of a physically assaulted woman being sexually assaulted”.
Given that porn use is becoming more common amongst young boys — and consequently, the impact will be felt by young girls — the question is no longer “Why are young girls so alienated from — and desperate to escape — their bodies?”, but rather, “why wouldn’t young girls feel alienated from — and be desperate to escape — their bodies?”.
It is important to note that the word “alienation” is used in a technical, Marxian sense within the context of an (anti-) capitalist analysis of gender ideology. The idea of alienation was suggested by Marx as a description for an individual’s feelings of being divorced from their own humanity and human nature, as a result of the capitalist division of labour.
In the first Volume of Capital, Marx elaborates on this idea, stating:
The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity.
In a world where material goods are assigned a great social value than some people — and specifically here, of women and girls — the people themselves become entirely devalued, creating a feeling of total loss of existential purpose for those subjected to such alienation. And now, in the 21st Century, in our hyper-sexualised, hyper-commodified culture where porn teaches men and boys that women and girls exist to do nothing more than provide sexual gratification to them, the alienation of and from the female body is made real.
Pornography breaks down the bodies of women and girls into their component parts; each female body becomes a nightmarish “workplace”, where each orifice is the “product” produced to be abused and degraded, and then said abuse and degradation is sold for profit.
The women and girls involved in pornography are alienated from the “commodity” — although make no mistake, a true Marxist analysis of the sex industry fundamentally precludes its conceptualisation as any sort of “work” — and the same can be said of the women and girls who are vicariously subjected to the impact of men’s consumption of said pornography.
The women and girls with whom these men interact have the idea reinforced by those same men that their bodies exist to be subjected to any and all manner of degradation the male pleases; there is an adjacent alienation that occurs as a result of how pornography inculcates ideas within the minds of men, about who and what women are, and consequently how women and girls come to view themselves as a result of their social interactions.
Women and girls are alienated from their own bodies as a result of what our hyper-sexualised society teaches them their bodies are for: sexual abuse and degradation.
What flows from this in tangible capitalist terms is that morally bankrupt exploiters pounce on the opportunity to create profit in ways that are quite decidedly monstrous.
For example, Dr. Sidhbh Gallagher is one such individual who has built a medical practice administering double mastectomies to girls as young as 13, a process which she horrifyingly calls “Teetus Deleetus” or “Yeet the Teet”.
There are no moral or ethical boundaries that will not be crossed by those who seek to profit from the misery that young girls feel as a result of simply being female in a patriarchal, hyper-sexualised society; one which teaches them that their specifically-female bodies exist to be sexually abused, exploited, degraded, and harmed.
Just as the depraved pornographers of the world see the economic and social vulnerability of young women and girls and pounce on it in order to extract profit through the filming of their exploitation, money-hungry medical practitioners commit grievous acts of bodily harm against women and girls by instilling the idea that their bodies are “wrong”, and must be carved up — sometimes repeatedly — in order to be remedied.
Why would young women not seek to escape this harrowing form of sex-class exploitation when offered with a supposed route out in the form of literally removing all the physical characteristics that make them identifiable as being female?
For many, the “Gender Debate” may seem overwhelming and insurmountable in and of itself, before even beginning to place it within the context of industries such as pornography and, more generally, capitalism. But to view it in isolation would be to fail to understand how and why the ideology can be imposed and replicated in the first place.
Robert Jensen is a pro-feminist academic and scholar, and in his writings he has stated:
“Pornography is what the end of the world looks like. By that I don’t mean that pornography is going to bring about the end of the world, nor do I mean that of all the social problems we face, pornography is the most threatening. Instead, I mean that pornography encourages men to abandon empathy, and a world without empathy is a world without hope.”
Rather shamelessly, that phrase will be lifted and applied to the situation before us. The pornography industry is decades old, and has taken root in our society in a way that extends far beyond the surface-level symptoms such as porn sites; it has infected society with a rot where the idea of profit being extracted from the sexual objectification and commodification of female suffering is normalised and, increasingly, desirable.
The wind of gender ideology has spun the metaphorical weathervane to an outcome that looks remarkably similar. A world where the bodies of women and girls are literally disassembled by medical practitioners who only wish to swell their bank accounts; when the dignity and privacy of women in, for example, single-sex spaces such as rape crisis shelters and prisons is cast aside by law-makers in an effort to appease hostile and malicious activists who have no qualms sending death threats and threats of sexual violence to those who dare disagree with them; where the safeguarding of children and their protection from being sexually abused by paedophiles is seen as expendable in the never-ending pursuit of political inclusion.
This might not be the end of the world in the most literal sense, but it is certainly a world without empathy for women and girls. It is a world where we tell them that their bodies and lives and everything contained within that is at the lowest rung of the social ladder.
And that is not a world we should wish to live in.
Wow! Really a top flight analysis Tom. Thank you. That is the best concise macro-analysis I've read on these important intertwined topics. I'm a retired social worker who has reached many similar conclusions through my own research and thinking, but I could never convey them with the clarity and nuance that you do in this piece. Well done.
I was until 6 months ago blissfully unaware of the level of madness at play in the gender-ideology movement - and it was ironically the public hate and death treats directed toward J.K. Rowling that led me to finally take a deep dive into this topic. Imagine my surprise when I discovered I quite agreed with Rowling - and that my agreement with her somehow "magically" transformed me into a "bigot" and a "transphobe." I was quite naive initially I must admit.
What I find stunning in all this is as you point out the blatant open misogyny routinely expressed as threats of rape, assault and murder against women who simply claim their right to "safe spaces" free of such "threats" of "rape, assault and murder." Somehow in our newly "woke" world it is socially acceptable to present oneself as a "victim" - even while one openly threatens to both "rape and murder" women - and to do so in the name of - "tolerance" and "inclusivity" - no less. No wonder the "woke" have no tolerance for "rational" discourse and reflexively resort to censorship, threats and cancel culture.
Having worked in both locked and unlocked psychiatric units as a young person early in my career, I learned rather quickly that one cannot have a "rational" conversation with someone who is floridly psychotic - no matter how sincerely you might "want" to converse with them. My own more recent research into attempts by women and male allies to simply engage in rational conversation with gender-ideologues about "safe-spaces" and the reality of "biological sex" suggests that the true-believers in gender-ideology have embraced a rather rarified form of madness absent any hint of "rationality." There is simply nothing rational at play in any of it. When the "right's" and "feelings" of human beings with a penis - ipso facto - are more important than the "rights" and "feelings" of human beings with a vagina - (no discussion allowed - no debated permitted) - you are witness to "misogyny" - by definition - plain and simple. And no amount of trying to paint that misogyny over with the latest "pronouns" and "rainbow flags" and pleas of "victimhood" makes that misogyny any less vile and hateful toward women. Like you, I've come to the conclusion that it is truly frightening to imagine what the world must look like to a 12 year old girl at this point. How on earth could she "want" to grow up to be an adult female amidst this misogynistic madness?
Thank you for your work Tom. It is excellent.
Thank you Tom for you work on behalf of exposing the hellish scenario we're facing. Having spent my adult life nurturing safe spaces for women fleeing male violence it's demoralizing to see it all being destroyed along with most of the other advances women have made during the last half century.