Metal cages were used in the tarmacked playground to kettle the children in their bubbles during break and lunchtime. The field was off limits. Some of the students went berserk in their containment and invented a new playground trend: attacking children with crocodile clips. My then 13-old nephew was stabbed in the neck. Fun times from the ‘Stay Safe’ brigade.
When the Guardian revealed this week that NHS referrals for anxiety in children are more than double pre-Covid levels to 500 a day, I remembered the thundering injustice of lockdown policies on children and felt that white-hot rage all over again. Lockdown, now three to four years ago, can’t take all the flack for what’s happening to the mental health of our children but it bears the lion’s share of responsibility, for the simple reason that it presented other people and the outside as dangerous. For the anxious, this mindset is a catastrophe.
I know this to be true because I work with school refusers and those who have been expelled, with a view to encouraging them back into educational settings. We focus on simply getting outside, ordering food in cafes, learning how to cross the road, understanding that the world is not to be feared, before attempting academic work. The stories these wonderful children tell are familiar: primary school went well but lockdown happened and when they returned to secondary school, they couldn’t cope: “I hated the crowds”, “I threw chairs around”, “I thought I was going to get sick”.
When two of my children returned to their state secondary after lockdown it was like a zoo. The teachers had lost control of the children and the children were not keen on reverting to compulsory rather than optional education. And when stabbings with crocodile clips, unruly behaviour and dystopian queues for nasal swabbing and face mask wearing were thrown into the mix, it’s no wonder that some children marched straight back home to the safety of their bedrooms.
We keep forgetting about the fact that there is a ‘persistent absence’ rate of 20% from schools; before lockdown it was 13%. It’s easy to remain unmoved by statistics, but not when the individual cases are known.
I asked my sons for a quick rundown of their most badly affected friends:
- The girl who wore her black face mask right up to the bridge of her nose, grew her black fringe below her nose so her face was entirely covered. She changed her name to Keith and when eventually she took off the mask, a tic had developed.
- The girl who developed agoraphobia and has just ‘disappeared.’
- The girl who made herself tutor-hand-sanitiser-monitor and whenever someone, usually a boy, splashed it around, she’d run screaming and hide under her desk shouting “Germs!” Her tears of fear were genuine.
- The boy who spent lockdown gaming, attempted to return to school where everyone noticed he’d got enormously fat, retreated to his house and has rarely been seen since.
When I hear Dominic Cummings on the Chris Williamson podcast talking so insouciantly and confidently about lockdown policy and how his actions saved thousands of lives, I am stunned. Surely he must now know this is not true. Computer models are not real life. I wish he could meet some of the children I work with. I wish he could sit in on these NHS referrals for anxiety and understand the downstream effects of his rotten decisions. Now that Mark Zuckerburg has apologised for enforcing White House demanded Covid censorship, maybe people like Cummings will apologise for contributing to the deep and ongoing damage to children.
Incidentally, my crocodile-clip-stabbed nephew received nine grade 9s in his GCSEs this summer.
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence mentor.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
I offer the view that if you think, in the words of the song, that it is ‘a Mans World’, you have fundamentally misunderstood how it all works.
One only has to look at the feminisation of education, and the effect of the ‘no child left behind’ rationale, ‘everyone wins a prize’ mentality, to see where we loaded it all in a handcart, and set out to hell…
I think the narrative women were oppressed is obvious bs to anyone who reads history at all. Oppression that existed is mostly the very wealthy exploiting the very poor. The idea that men oppressed their wives en masse has to be the most insultingly stupid idea of the 20th century yet of course largely unchallenged. Taking it’s to it’s conclusion it’s really saying women are weak, stupid and easily exploited, that’s far from my experience. The experiment since the 60s of promiscuity and mass divorce has been a total disaster for both sexes. Who’d have thought running society along the ideas of a bohemian commune would be a good idea.
Any woman who is likely to join this club already has plenty of power as well as money. People who think that these clubs are a source of plotting have clearly never heard of social media; it is a quite old fashioned viewpoint.
There are good men and women and bad ones. They act differently for sure in many very noticeable ways but whether the result is good or bad depends, in my view, mostly on the values and moral character of the individual.
I will say this. The more “socially advanced” a society with respect to women’s role in society, the lower the birth rate seems to be. On the whole.
Sadly there are too many in our society that think that’s actually a good thing. Personally I see it as the ultimate in self destructive behaviour.
Exactly agree, when you gather all women or men in one basket and generalise about the inequity or not of a sex it pretty much tell us nothing. Rather I take ppl as I find them, good, bad, indifferent, normally all three.
Regarding the lower birth rate: “improved status of women” is highlighted as a population control measure in the 1976 memorandum to the President “First annual report on U.S international population policy”.
Available from the CIA archive, I’ve previously posted the link (it’s not so convenient to do comments on a phone).
As you downvoted so politely, here’s the link.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp79m00467a002500120004-8
It’s a shame about the birth rate, I agree. Tricky to know what best to do about it. Ban contraception, abortion and divorce? That might make a difference though it’s impractical and I think wrong (not 100% sure about abortion). Maybe better to encourage families in other ways with tax incentives – but we don’t seem to want to survive as a race.
I tend to think we’ve gone a bit too far with ways of thinking that are let’s say more from the more “feminine” and of the spectrum and need to regain some balance for the good of everyone. But I also find the terms “women” and “men” unhelpful in this debate. I am not other men and my wife is not other women, and while we are clearly different we share a great deal of the same way of looking at the world.
My read of the situation is that we have been so strongly conditioned to regard the social advancement of women as the right thing that all critical faculties in that respect have been suppressed. And by social advancement, I mean the elimination of traditional, differentiated gender roles, where the man is (generally) a breadwinner and the woman is (generally) a home maker and child rearer and where women are given a social status on a par with men.
I know I’m going to bring on myself the wrath of many, but I think I’m only stating what can be easily observed if I say that the “social advancement” of women appears to be a recipe for birth rates so low as to cause the eventual collapse of the species.
But, hey, if faced with the choice between pursuing particular notions of social justice that bring about near extinction and holding on to traditional, hierarchical gender roles that preserve the species, society chooses the former, well, so be it.
Or maybe it won’t come to that and society will somehow evolve and recover birth rates. Or maybe we’ll become reliant on technology to maintain the species in some new form and evolve into some kind of post-humanism.
Whatever it takes to keep the missus from nagging.. (joke, sort of…)
We may be able to balance more freedom of choice regarding “gender roles” and preserving the species. That would be ideal, IMO, but I think we need to come to it by mutual agreement and it not be imposed, otherwise we’re back to square one.
It could be argued that that state was achieved some years ago but clearly wasn’t a very stable state.
Personally I think we are trapped in a liberal mindset that is fixated on equality and fairness.
Nature is in a perpetual state of competition, which seems to be essential to the reproductive drive, not just of humans but of every biological species.
In nature, animals select mates on the basis of their ability to out compete rivals by. any means necessary it would seem. And no doubt the attraction is pure instinct.
Maybe humans will evolve to develop other attraction instincts not based on competition and aggression. But I don’t think it’s very likely.
I tend to agree. I like the idea of equality of opportunity but it’s been replaced with the idea of equality of outcome.
I will say this. The more “socially advanced” a society with respect to women’s role in society, the lower the birth rate seems to be. On the whole.
I think it’s more like The more women are integrated into the process of economic value creation, the lower the birth rate becomes, for the obvious simple reason that pregnancy is time consuming and reduces work performance as a side effect. Childless or almost childless women are economically more productive and thus, earn more money and earn their employers more money. One could as well call this a more socially regressive role for women, by the way. In the late 19th and early 20th century, poor women had better remained childless because they had to work in factories just like men. Nowadays, this applies to middle class woman as well. It’s expected that they work and hence, they need to spend as little time with getting children etc as possible. Actually, they might even end up being abused for getting children instead of working 24×7. I’ve heard women being called “too lazy for work” when they chose to care for their children instead, despite this is patently absurd as caring for children is a lot of work.
I couldn’t agree more that producing and bringing up children is the most important thing. At least it is for me. How the task is undertaken is a matter for each family, but the traditional specialisation of roles has.worled well and the everyone does everything approach probably not as well, on the whole.
An excellent article. I would suggest that men need to be successful in their field or in their own way, as a means of becoming more attractive to the opposite sex par se. If you remove the drive to become “alpha” as it were, you remove a necessary driver for society at large. As alluded to above, why compete or study to be successful when there is no longer any incentive to do so.
There’s so much I could pen here, but I’ve made my point often enough. It’s slightly heartening that others are raising the same concerns/observations, but it’s women themselves that have to get onboard with the idea that feminism is hypocritical, divisive and destructive – not least of all to women themselves.
Women can’t be so powerless if we now live in a society in which feminism is considered a good thing while the opposite is referred to as male chauvinism and is considered a bad thing.
Or where women have the exact same rights as men and in many ways sone additional privileges, where women suffer no real discrimination and yet the narrative in society remains that women are disadvantaged and society needs to change to better accommodate them.
These are not exactly signs of powerlessness.
Actually I’d say women have entered in to a bargain consciously or not with the state, in certain aspects to weaponise family law against men. This is a dubious bargain really as the state cannot really offer anything except theft through taxation and perverting natural law, IE rewarding ppl for appalling behaviour. The contract of marriage has to be the only legal contract where the person breaking it by and large gains.
It’s interesting really, isn’t it.
How do you square a society supposedly dominated by men that comes up with laws so clearly detrimental against men and in favour of women?
There are several possibilities.
There may be other explanations, but none of those three fit very well with the narrative of a society of men oppressing women.
I see the three lawyers in the photo don’t know how to use apostrophes either
Dan Wotton on who really runs the World
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2GeWGdL6BM
Stan Gooch’s “Cities of Dreams: When women ruled the Earth” has some interesting theories regarding Neanderthals and a matriarchal society which our ancestors and more recent cultures feared and would put girls through brutal, sometimes fatal, coming-of-age rituals to prevent them gaining their full powers.
Not suggesting this is a case for or against, just interesting.
“Is the World Better With Women in Charge?”
In order to answer this we need to define ‘women’.
I’ve read the Guardian article but I don’t think there’s anything worthy of a counter-argument in there. The basic thesis is
Man are obviously bad and women obviously good and hence, what men do is bad and what women do isn’t.
By extension, men-only clubs are obviously bad while women-only clubs are obviously good. Blah.
This mainly illustrates how much of a simpleton people can be and still publish in the Guardian. If there’s something Ochlawski can’t get, she wants it as a matter of principle, ie, to prove that she’s more powerful than the people trying to keep it from her. And if there’s something she has these ‘men’ people can’t get, she obviously wants to keep it that way, again to demonstrate her power. And there’s nothing more to that. If that’s supposed to be a philosophy, I suggest to call it jealous stupidism.
Many women seek the submission of men under the pretext of fairness and equality. As a strategy it’s worked really well. Men are so gaslighted by this point that they find it hard to push back even push back when it is suggested that women are actually better than men.
That’s just a special case of Many people seek to dominate other people.
Indeed, although now it has the full force.of society and the law as well behind it.
It is a comlete misunderstanding of the female psyche or if you prefer Jungian terms it ignores the presence and power of the animus and anima. To put it simply the question rests upon certain naiveties in terms of the nature of power in a fallen world. You can have sub groups within the world where women and you could say feminine principles prevail: Scandinavian countries work well with this arrangement. It was born of necessity in Norway where the men would go out fishing and the women would have to look after all the affairs at home. The question is a distraction from the real evil.
More women??? ——What, you mean like Nancy Pelosi and Ocasio Cortez? or how about Nicola Sturgeon and Dianne Abbot? Or how about Von der Leyen or Merkel?
Anyone for more Jacinda Arden?
They want to lash out and prove their balls in the same way as a low testosterone man might strut his stuff if he got the chance. Giving power to the previously powerless might seem like something noble and enlightened but it isn’t. I would wager that any structure ruled by women will be far more violent than the same structure ruled by men. Not that I have any fondness for violent and coercive male structures of power.
Great article. I believe I might have been one of the earliest female paid subscribers to what is now the Daily Sceptic. I was utterly dismayed about the madness of lockdowns and at that time, it was mostly a few brave male voices (e.g. Toby in his shed) speaking out against it. I’ll never forget the hours and hours Mike Yeadon devoted to videos & threads on twitter to try & warn everyone the carnage that would be caused by the “vaccines”. Sadly he was right.
Although I am happily married to a fantastic guy & have a few great female friends, I love the irreverent humour that men have. Some of the times I laugh the hardest & the most are with him and the fellow members of his occasional covers band. We’re all battle hardened northerners, maybe that helps too
Bar one person over a 30+ career in IT (& his issues were more to attempting to apply the cheerful Yank approach to the whole team of “do this batshit crazy thing or don’t let the door bang your arse on the way out & saying & writing that down
– UK HR quite rightly had a fit) the few problems I’ve have with bosses have all been women. Micro managing, bitchy, undermining, passive aggressive, evil nightmares.
Mary Harrington & Louise Perry have done important research in this area on how the sexual revolution & resulting changes to society really harmed women. And don’t get me started on the appalling damage caused by the academic class of more recent feminists – who don’t give a toss about working class & truly disadvantaged women. Their creation of queer theory (yes Judith Butler looking at you) & support for “sex work is work” and the abuse of transgenderism has hugely harmed millions of women and ever increasing numbers of children.
Of course, applying generalisations is not right & there are many bad men who support the alarming feminisation of education & wider society, and many good women who support the ethos & objectives of what the Daily Sceptic stands for.
Nice to see a female post on here that’s critical of feminism. I think it might be a first! There’s normally only a small handful on here (Stewart, Neil Parkin… apologies if I’ve missed anyone) that are willing to stick their necks on the line against the in-house feminazi and their cheerleaders, so it’s good to see the same concerns being raised by a woman. My hope, and I’ll cling to it, is that the passionately pro-feminists will, at some point, realise that they’re part of one of the biggest cults in history; one that’s destroying everyone’s lives with narcissism, lies and propaganda. I shan’t hold my breath however.
I completely agree with what Dr Alexander says in this article (and also with Lady Haleth in her comment below – BTW, why do so many of these comments appear to be over a day old? I comment as soon as I get and read my DS email, ie almost straight away!).
They’re commenting on the original article on the website. The email collects all the articles from the day before and goes out overnight
Thank you, JSiN (!). In that case I’ll never be up to date with my comments! In some ways, what’s the point of subscribing to the emails if each day I could simply go straight to the website? But I don’t think I can be bothered to change my habits now. So my comments will be virtually irrelevant (except possibly to the article’s author who might possibly be interested enough to look at comments).
I’ve read it…
Great piece. One important missing element (unless its me that’s missed it…) : Risk. The different attitude to risk between the sexes is (I would say) obvious. We cannot advance without a willingness to take risks, and taken as a whole women just don’t do risk. Look at what’s happening in the betting industry – being brought to its knees by feminine principles.
And look at what happened at the Post Office when a female cabal tried to be risk-takers. They were cautious when they should have been brave and reckless when they should have been cautious.
This problem started 45 years ago when the idea that women could “have it all” first emerged. They can’t, no matter how much they want to, but they insist on changing society to meet their goals. Make a choice, girls – kids or careers. You cannot, demonstrably have both.