Welcome to another in our ongoing series of As I Said Twenty Sod-Bollocking Years Ago. Women have inherited the thrones of great powers - Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, Victoria - and presided over massed ranks of courtiers drawn from the "pale, male and stale" (thank you, David Cameron). But America and its client states are the first in history in which every significant venue aside from ladies' sport is now dominated by women. The west is closer than any society should be to the end of men - which is a big source of the terrible confusion in our schools that has led children to offer themselves up for bodily mutilation and irreversible infertility. Helen Andrews' much noted "viral" essay on the phenomenon informs us inter alia that by 2024 American law schools were fifty-six per cent female and that sixty-three per cent of judges appointed by Joe Biden's autopen are likewise on the distaff side. Elsewhere, fifty-five per cent of New York Times reporters are women (up from ten per cent half-a-century ago) and 57.3 per cent of US undergraduates are what we would once have called "coeds".
At the same time, the principal source of immigration to the west is from a patriarchal culture even more severe (if you can believe it) than 1950s sitcom dads. If you live in London, Paris, Brussels, Stockholm, Dearborn, do you see more body-bagged crones on the streets than you did a generation back? Are you figuring on seeing more still in another twenty years? Or are you betting that the tide will have receded?
It is at the intersection of these two not entirely compatible trendlines - a feminised society with a patriarchal immigration policy - where lies the future (such as it is) of the western world. With that in mind, the annual commemoration of the 1989 Montreal massacre each December 6th has a symbolism that extends far beyond my own deranged dominion. Not just because it was an early example of the state hijacking the actual news to impose a narrative more helpful to its own needs. In the dismantling of manhood and manliness, no lie is too outrageous. As I wrote in The National Post of Canada on December 12th 2002 - twenty-three years ago:
For women's groups, the Montreal Massacre is an atrocity that taints all men, and for which all men must acknowledge their guilt. Marc Lépine symbolizes the murderous misogyny that lurks within us all.
M Lépine was born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, whose brutalized spouse told the court at their divorce hearing that her husband "had a total disdain for women and believed they were intended only to serve men." At eighteen, young Gamil took his mother's maiden name. The Gazette in Montreal mentioned this in its immediate reports of the massacre. The name 'Gamil Gharbi' has not sullied its pages in the thirteen years since.
The Gazette notwithstanding, that might open up many avenues of journalistic investigation, don't you think? The potential implications of Canadian immigration policy. The misogyny in particular of Islam, and its compatibility with developed societies. But instead everyone who mattered in the Dominion's elite decided it was all the fault of Canadian manhood in general - of Gordy and Derek's, or Émile and Pierre's, culture of toxic masculinity. That narrative has held for two generations. The only even slight modification has been from a sliver of academics who posit Gamil Gharbi as "the first incel". I'm not sure "incels" - young men who are "involuntarily celibate" - existed as a mass phenomenon back in 1989: they are a consequence of the societal feminisation Ms Andrews writes about. The "incel" segment was by far the most interesting part of the Tucker/Fuentes convo, and the least remarked upon, but the notion that they're itching to kill women bolsters the original 1989 framing, so the media are minded to entertain it.
Yet we all know, surely, that the young ladies in that Montreal classroom would have benefited from a little bit of available "masculinity" that day. Alas, the men to hand were in a certain sense far more profoundly disarmed than the wildest dreams of "gun control" advocates. From my book After America:
To return to Gloria Steinem, when might a fish need a bicycle? The women of Montreal's École Polytechnique could have used one when Marc Lépine walked in with a gun and told all the men to leave the room. They meekly did as ordered. He then shot all the women.
Which is the more disturbing glimpse of Canadian manhood? The guy who shoots the women? Or his fellow men who abandon them to be shot? For me, the latter has always been the darkest element of the story. From my column in Maclean's, January 9th 2006:
Every December 6th, our own unmanned Dominion lowers its flags to half-mast and tries to saddle Canadian manhood in general with the blame for the Montreal massacre -- the fourteen women murdered by Marc Lépine, born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, though you wouldn't know that from the press coverage. Yet the defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lépine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, obediently did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate -- an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The 'men' stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.
So the annual denunciation of manhood in general is the precise inversion of the reality of the event. That was unusual in 1989, but has become routine since: the UK Government's "Prevent" programme, set up in the wake of the July 7th Tube bombings to "prevent" further "Islamist" attacks, now focuses its energies on the threat from a "far right" boorish enough to insist on noticing all these Islamic provocations; January 6th is an insurrection for which trespassing gran'mas have to be hunted down and banged up in solitary, but Thoroughly Modern Milley telling the ChiComs he'll ignore his commander-in-chief or James Comey taking to Twitter to urge his chums to "eighty-six" the President is true patriotism of the highest order; in German cities saving democracy is so critical that it is necessary to ban the leading political party.
So the inversion of reality is pretty much standard operating procedure these days. There is, however, a sense in which that terrible one-off atrocity from the late Eighties has become a portent of tomorrow - of a western world thoroughly unmanned. Your average feminist lobby group doesn't see it that way, naturally. "The feminism I think of is the one that embodies inclusivity, multiculturalism and the ability to change the world through the humanity that women do bring," says Stephanie Davis, executive director of Atlanta's Women's Foundation. "If there were women in power in representative numbers - fifty-two per cent - I think that the World Trade Center would still be standing."
That's a familiar line. If only your average Security Council meeting looked like a college graduating class, or that room at the École Polytechnique after the men had departed, there would be peace on earth.
Really? The Swedish government, which the day before yesterday was advertising itself as "the first feminist government in the world", now presides over the highest rape rate in Europe. Helen Andrews observes en passant:
The point of war is to settle disputes between two tribes, but it works only if peace is restored after the dispute is settled. Men therefore developed methods for reconciling with opponents and learning to live in peace with people they were fighting yesterday.
So, fifteen years after nuking the Japs, we awarded them the Tokyo Olympics; likewise, fifteen years after Bomber Harris and the RAF reduced German cities to rubble, the Beatles were playing Hamburg and recording with Bert Kaempfert.
On the other hand:
Females, even in primate species, are slower to reconcile than males. That is because women's conflicts were traditionally within the tribe over scarce resources, to be resolved not by open conflict but by covert competition with rivals, with no clear terminus.
So today the Yank who started the Ukraine war and the Kraut who wants to keep it going forever are everybody's favourite She-Wolves of the Donbass, Victoria Nuland and Cruella von der Leyen. A generation of Ukrainian men has been fed into the meat-grinder to the point where the country will never recover demographically.
I see Tucker has been attacked for telling Piers Morgan that he prefers England's Pakistani taxi-drivers to America's woke liberal women. Without wishing to argue the precedence of a louse and a flea, he has usefully distilled the two principal choices in western society. That may not be unconnected to the fierce rejection by Continental men to recent proposals for the reintroduction of the draft: those are not options worth dying for. When I first started writing about the Montreal Massacre all those sod-bollocking decades ago, my male contemporaries generally agreed with me about the iniquity of abandoning those young women to their fate. But, as the years roll on, more and more younger correspondents respond with something on the lines of: "My ex- earns more than me but I still have to give her the house and she won't let me see the kids. There's a gal I liked at work, but I said her hair looked nice and she told everyone in the office she was thinking of making an HR complaint. My dad still holds the door and doesn't seem to notice all the women scowl at him. Why should I take a bullet for these people?" That used to be maybe one per cent of the reactions, but amongst the young 'uns (those under my own age of 112) it's now trembling on the brink of preponderance.
Me again, back in the sod-bollocking era:
Whenever I've written about these issues, I get a lot of e-mails from guys scoffing, 'Oh, right, Steyn. Like you'd be taking a bullet. You'd be pissing your little girlie panties,' etc. Well, maybe I would. But as the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle put it:
'When we say 'we don't know what we'd do under the same circumstances', we make cowardice the default position.'
I prefer the word passivity – a terrible, corrosive passivity. Even if I'm wetting my panties, it's better to have the social norm of the Titanic and fail to live up to it than to have the social norm of the Polytechnique and sink with it.
As I put it ...oh, golly, a mere two years ago:
We have made a world of men that women don't want and women that men don't want, and that doesn't seem likely to end well.
It wouldn't end well in laboratory conditions. But I think it's bigger than that now because of the twin tracks of native feminisation and the incoming patriarchy. On this thirty-sixth annual day of atonement for the general ghastliness of men, it is not just the "incels" who have decided to sit this one out.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Mark's column on the new Minnesota. On Saturday the latest edition of Mark's weekend music show celebrated a Rat Pack centennial, while Rick McGinnis returned to the movie beat with W C Fields. On Sunday we offered Part Fifteen of Mark's special twentieth-anniversary audio serialisation of his highly prescient demographic bestseller, America Alone - plus a Song of the Week that tips its hat to Bizet's Carmen. Our marquee presentation was the first of this year's seasonal Tales for Our Time, a double-bill by O Henry. Click for The Gift of the Magi and for Part One and Part Two of Christmas by Injunction.
If you were too busy this weekend wondering why Somali terrorists suddenly seem flush with cash, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
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