Transcription
Everywhere I look these days, I see women drowning in rancor against their male counterparts. There is a tendency to look upon female hatred of men as sort of insignificant or even justifiable. Not something that has any particular implications for society as a whole. But of course, it does.
Now, quick caveat, stick with me. There are countless women who have suffered at the hands of men and therefore have a mistrust or even aversion to men as a result. Violence, abandonment, and betrayal, these are timeless challenges that men have thrown at women. Torrents of ink have already been spilled lamenting this reality. But what's happening now is something different. It's not a reflection of that long-standing reality.
My name is Jenny Holland and this is my channel, Saving Culture from Itself, where you can find a little bit of sanity to help you survive the woke revolution and maybe even fight in the common-sense counter-revolution. You can find my essays over on Substack at jennyehollan.substack.com. You can buy me a coffee at buymeacoffee.com/savingculture. And most of all, please hit that like and subscribe button and let me know what you think in the comments.
Over on the internet, men and women have never been more alienated from each other. So wrote The New Statesman a few weeks ago in that groundbreaking piece that I discussed in my second-to-last video. One young lefty woman that The New Statesman interviewed was asked how she felt about men. "I don't care for them," she answered.
Now, this is going to be a long one because I have a rather complicated personal connection to this topic other than just being a woman, and that's why this video is going to be a little bit longer than usual. My own father wrote a book called Misogyny, The World's Oldest Prejudice. Now, just a little personal aside, it would turn out to be his last book in a long career of journalism and fiction writing. And he died before it could be published. I read the draft with him as we sat in a cancer ward in a Manhattan hospital. And after he died, my mother and I finally managed to get it published. And that's a long story of its own. And I wrote the forward to this book in 2006, 20 years ago. So, that book took up an enormous amount of my attention for a long time. And so, naturally did the topic, men's hatred of women.
Now, I have never called myself a feminist. And although [snorts] I was very pro-woman generally, when my father explained this idea uh to write this book on misogyny, I was actually very skeptical. I was a young woman, I was in my 20s, but I was skeptical. I thought that men mistreated men just as much as they mistreated women, if not maybe more. But, my father made such a compelling case, especially when the book was finished, that much of civilization had been built on the male desire to control the female, to control and dominate the female, that by the end of this whole process, I largely accepted his premise.
So, today, 20 years later, when I point out that in fact, we have a misandry problem, I'm doing so despite being intensely familiar intellectually, historically, and personally, just as a woman, with the many ways men do women wrong. So, two decades later, in an utterly changed and topsy-turvy world compared to the one in which I last saw my beloved and brilliant and very secular liberal father, my alarm is no longer raised over how men view women. It's over how women view men.
There has always been and will continue to be an undercurrent of men who hate and fear women. But, if we saw men routinely and publicly talk about women openly the way that women routinely and publicly and openly talk about men, if contempt for women was as mainstream as contempt for men, it would be declared a worldwide emergency. And I I've seen a couple of examples of this really recently that really gave me pause.
Somehow, I came upon the story of one Anne Marie Tendler, the ex-wife of a mildly famous and not at all interesting to me comedian. I'm only mentioning it because I watched an excellent YouTube summary of Tendler's memoir. And I'll put the link to that in the show notes, which was billed as a tell-all, but even according to feminist critics, is a navel-gazing score-settling [ __ ] Tendler, it seems, is the perfect representative for this collective female derangement. She has a fair grievance. Her famous husband impregnated another celebrity while still married to her, and now he constantly posts about his domestic bliss, which is extremely awful. But because her own descriptions of her long history of bitterness and unhappiness and lack of drive and lack of success and mental illness and her openly expressed hatred of men, all her sympathy points vanish.
Even to feminist critics, Tendler is by her own admission a woman who before marrying a celebrity failed cosmopol- cosmo mythology school, quit every job she'd had. In her teens and 20s she dated a series of older and or more successful men, including a tech millionaire, while she's working as a hairdresser and living in an outer borough. Post divorce to the famous comedian, and his name is John Mulaney, I believe, if you care, which I don't really. She dates a series of nonentities that only confirm her contempt for men. In an argument with one of these many boyfriends over why she claims she did not does not want sons, she says, and I'm quoting from the book as is quoted in this YouTube video, "I hate men. I hate them so much. Men are the cause of all my problems. Men are the cause of everyone's problems. They are stupid and they are arrogant. They think everything they say is true and right. I hate them so [ __ ] much. I don't even know if I can [ __ ] them anymore." End quote.
Her therapist gingerly suggests that actually her rage may be anger towards her mother or other maternal figures. According to her own book, her mother was full of rages and she had this not very good childhood. But Tendler counters with, and I quote again, "The field of psychology was developed by white men using white men as the baseline standard for behavior and sanity." In short, she is every awful stereotype affluent white female urban liberal. She is She is the awful stereotype come to life and she is far from alone.
One Instagram account that I follow is called Words of Women. This woman, Lauren Martin, has over 600,000 followers. And she produces a steady stream of vitriolic, disparaging, and hate-filled content aimed mostly at men. Like Tendler, she has a history of mental illness. She openly dissects her crumbling marriage to what sounds like a rather long-suffering man. She obsesses and cries over the usual Democratic Party talking points. She disparages other women more and more these days and even her own children. And she literally seethes and grinds her jaw and blows rage out of her nostrils like a cartoon bull. Mostly from what looks like a very spacious and well-appointed closet.
In one post, she says, and again, I quote, "You know what I think we need to start doing? Kicking men in the [ __ ] balls." And she says in another, "Angry crazy women are cool now." Yeah, not really, but her comments are a smorgasbord of women encouraging other women to double down on their very stupid opinions and their kind of crappy behavior. One of her commenters says, "Having a man is honestly so embarrassing rn right now." Stands for right now. And another commentator, this one really takes the biscuit, outrageously opined that men don't understand what it's like to be targets of physical violence and therefore they sort of walk around in a Pollyanna fugue state where they skip around thinking nothing can ever go wrong. Men. Men are free from violence. Men. I cannot fathom the the of pig ignorance it takes for a grown adult to think that.
Her audience seems to be full of women who think they could actually take on a man in a physical contest. Wrote another one, "I'm so glad you are feeling the rage. I am Canadian Gen X and menopausal and I'm actually preparing for potential war with the US. Add a little menopause in the mix and you've got one hell of a warrior," says another. I'm sorry, I am also of that age. If you put me in a battle with a man, I would last approximately 1 and 1/2 seconds. Be real, ladies. Be effing real.
Woke ideology and its very vocal subset, feminism, are the perfect masks for all sorts of pathological behavior and the perfect tool for avoiding accountability, which is exactly what these women are doing. Both the woke ideological superstructure and feminism place the blame for our lack of success, of money, of acknowledgement, of happiness on external factors that we do not control. It's never our fault. It's the patriarchy or it's our husband or it's our boyfriend or it's capitalism.
A fellow substacker of mine, a doctor by the name of Hannah Schpia, very eloquently describes the impact feminism in particular has had on generations of girls and women. She wrote that feminism was the key shift. Feminism did not only change laws or employment patterns. If it had stopped there, maybe it would have been fair enough. That's my editorializing. I continue with her quote now. Feminism also changed the interpretive frame through which girls and women were taught to understand life's disappointment. Let me read that again. Feminism changed the interpretive frame through which girls and women were taught to understand life's disappointments. That is spot on.
Now, I, in my personal life, usually am a 50/50 person, meaning when things go south and it comes down to blame in a very general sense, I believe it's normally shared between the sexes. We are two sides of the same human coin, and this is incontrovertible, I'm afraid. Even in today's world where women can ostensibly live happily independent lives, and some do, including several friends of mine, if women en masse were better off alone, we would see a concurrent flourishing of human happiness and fulfillment. Are we seeing that? No. We are seeing the opposite.
Even taking into account the structural disparities between men and women in what is commonly referred to as the patriarchy, even under those systems, women always had ways of making up for their lack of power and influence in one sphere with an enormous amount of power and influence in another sphere. Women are human. Humans are irrepressible, and a motivated woman is more irrepressible than most. And yet, the modern middle-class woman does not see this. They only see how hard done by they are. One UK-based writer whose brand is angry and overwhelmed menopausal lady, there seems to be good money in that, wrote, quote, "Every woman I speak to is angry."
Now, women who hate men do seem to have several other negative characteristics that seem to go along with this hatred of men. They become self-obsessed. Intense solipsism is something I have noticed among women, in particular feminists for some time now and I have recognized it in myself too, especially when I was younger. As in I used to tend to even now spend and certainly as a young person spent a lot of time thinking about how I was perceived, how I looked, how I related to others and what they thought of me. It was a lot of I I I. There's this myopic concentration on the self. Women who are diagnosable narcissists take this to truly toxic extremes.
In a very revealing 2007 documentary about London's revolutionary feminists of the late 20th century, women looked back on the movement, women who participated in the movement looked back on it. And that time in history may seem to have faded, but actually it's made a work roaring comeback in woke. One woman said, and this is a direct quote, "We were all about us. Keep the focus here. Keep the focus female." When I'm scrolling through left-wing women's accounts on TikTok or Instagram, I'm really struck by the self-focus. It's actually very suffocating attaching yourself so fiercely to thoughts of the self. It means that random occurrences, random utterances take on an outside significance. It's incredibly freeing to move through the world unselfconscious, to not notice. And when you're focused on yourself and your fellow women and your interpersonal interactions with other women online and person, you're also forgetting completely that all of your comforts are created mostly by men.
Women who hate men also lack the moderating effects that living in a harmonious relationship with a man provides. And this one definitely works both ways. Having to contend with a male partner and all his rude maleness forces you to be at least somewhat flexible. It forces you to contend with another's point of view. Men are kind of mysterious creatures to us. When I was growing up, society did a terrible job teaching me what to expect when it came to dealing with men. And it's only gotten worse since. Just as a woman will soften a man in a happy relationship, so will a man calm a woman. You learn so much from intimate relationships and also friendships, actually. Friendships with the opposite sex. About yourself and about men. You learn that all the platitudes you were taught were almost all wrong.
Of all the disastrous results of socially encouraged misandry, one of the worst, if not the worst, is that it makes it so much harder for girls to experience long-term committed relationships with men. It's also terrible for the children of these bitter, angry women. In the feminism documentary, another woman talks about how women in the movement were judged for having husbands and boyfriends and even sons. Quote, "A lot of radical feminists felt you should give them up. A lot of them were saying you should give up boy children." I can't believe it now. It was so cruel and horrible. The documentary's voiceover tries to make this inconvenient evidence somewhat less damning by saying, "Some separatists were forced to make an agonizing choice between their sons and their politics." Forced? Forced? Forced by whom, exactly? Was a camp commander standing over any of these women holding a gun to their heads? Or was it that they were simply being confronted with the implications of their own terrible, toxic, and stupid ideas? Or they were too concerned with how these other women perceived them and not concerned enough for their own children.
Even if you are not actively abandoning your children, it's very difficult to model happiness for your children if you're unrelentingly negative about your husband. As Lauren Martin of Words of Women says in one of her many ranty posts, "I'm just going to say it. I am not enjoying my children right now. It's a loop of the same [ __ ] every single day of like Miss Rachel and Peppa Pig or reading the same book, Ariel, Ariel, Ariel, and screaming and not eating dinner. Really, it's not fun. It's not fun at all. And I'm like, can you just be good?" She sounds like a teenager herself. Can you imagine if a man did a post complaining of his children like that?
In another post, she advocates that her followers buy guns because she says she thinks the time has come where passive, peaceful resistance in your own home might not benefit. "I think we have children to protect." Well, that's interesting because you don't seem to be interested in protecting your own children from your own terrible attitude. It's weird how she feels comfortable publicly stating how her actual children make her unhappy, but tells her over half a million followers to buy guns to protect some unspecified other children.
The dire implications of this discord are worse than just joylessness among the youth. It threatens the survival of this particular demographic. As the New Statesman found, young women are nearly twice as likely to not want children as young men. Am I being hyperbolic when I suggest that this outbreak of man hatred in the middle class among educated women threatens to be an extinction level event for this group. Two weeks ago I said we need to keep a door open for the younger women who've been captured by woke ideology. But for the slightly older demographic, women like Martin and Marie Tendler and many, many, many angry Gen X women they're going to have to learn the hard way how miserable life is when you hate half the human race.
Thank you for watching and thank you for saving culture with me.