Have you heard of the phrase ‘basic white girl’? No, nor me, until I ran a series of workshops to help teenagers prepare for, amongst other things, university interviews. A number of courses would be mentioned and immediately dismissed by some as ‘basic white girl’ courses. These included: psychology (80% female), English literature (70%) and sociology (77%). (‘Basic white girls,’ I learned, also love side-stripe baggy trousers, Taylor Swift and being pretty.) These subjects represent the extreme trend in universities becoming female dominated: 57% of UK undergraduates are now female. The balance of academic teaching staff at universities in 2022-23 is 51% male and 49% female, but the wider university staff is 55% female. Is it possible that what happened in primary schools, where only 15% of teachers are male and secondary schools (35%), will happen in higher education? Are boys already self-excluding from this female-dominated world?
I bumped into a group of aforementioned students yesterday, a mixture of boys and girls all with high (conditional) offers from great universities, and had a chat about their A-Level revision. What alarmed me is the difference in enthusiasm between the boys and girls about their intended university adventures. The girls are locked in: open days and offer days enthusiastically visited, first choices chosen. The boys are altogether more diffident. One of them explained: “Me and my friends are just motoring along with no sense of purpose. We all have fantasies about going off on a great adventure, fighting animals, living in the wild.” One of the girls shoved him and said, “OMG, you’re so lame.”
I conducted a straw poll amongst my friends – all their children who are off to university have noticed the same sex divide: girls already enthusiastically planning university stationery and the boys reluctantly being sent on offer days by their parents. Our own 18 year-old son has decided on a gap year, unable, in spite of lovely offers, to muster up sufficient enthusiasm to justify the average student debt of £48,000. He and a mate are investigating mining opportunities in Australia.
And this is where we get back to the troubling idea of ‘basic white girl’ stuff. My husband shouts from the hammock, my pink straw hat balancing on his head to shade out the spring sunshine: “Don’t make these teenage boys sound like misogynistic bastards, because they’re not.” He’s right of course, teenage boys love teenage girls, they worship them, they adore them, they expand a considerable amount of energy trying to talk to them, have a coffee with them, and if they are extremely brave and successful, kiss them. But they do not want to predominantly hang out with big groups of them. They do not want to be the only boy in the psychology lecture theatre. Hence whole spheres of knowledge, education and training being written off by boys on account of the preponderance of female students. I’m not sure this is misogyny – just a natural preference to spend significant amounts of time with other males – and females – just not majority female.
When my son ordered university prospectuses I noticed a decided lacklustre attempt to recruit white boys (still the majority ethnicity of the UK at 74%). One top university did not picture a boring white male until page 26 – lots of happy photographs of girls in burkas, gentlemen from the Afro-Caribbean club, young men waving pride flags, but nothing for the majority male until page 26.
Of course all of these marketing efforts are well-intentioned efforts to correct a once male-dominated enterprise. The Oxford college I attended in the 1990s only admitted women in 1980. My history don said it was a marvellous thing to do so, as well as encouraging state school applicants. He explained: “Academic standards soared. When it was just aristos they used work on entirely the wrong subjects – throwing sofas out of windows – that sort of caper. Dreadful.”
Has the correction been too thorough? How alarmed should we be that a July 2024 House of Commons research briefing on ‘Equality of access and outcomes in higher education in England‘, reports that: “White pupils are less likely than any other broad ethnic group to go to higher education. … Access to Higher Education was higher among women than men.” Various “barriers to access, participation and outcomes” are listed that include: financial concerns, insufficient advice, sexual and racial harassment on campus or general lack of support. It seems to me however that the real peeling off of boys from the university system is a vague feeling of it being simply, somehow, not quite for them.
Would strict sex quotas help? 50% of all the student body and staff must be male and female? Not sure. Let’s see how this mining venture pans out.
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence mentor.
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I remember early on in the shitshow when I was still actively trying to persuade those among my friends and colleagues I mistakenly considered intelligent and politically aware of the evils of lockdowns, I quoted something from Sikora to a ex-friend. She’d clearly not heard of him (neither had I to be fair, before all this) and obviously then checked him out on Wikipedia. Her answer to my arguments (and his) was to send me this snippet from his Wikipedia enrty:
“In a 2017 Newsnight opinion piece, he described the NHS as “the last bastion of communism””
That was the extent of her counter arguments – Sikora has dared criticise the NHS, so he is Literally Hitler and all his opinions are immediately invalid without further discussion, as are mine by association. That more or less summed up for me the covidian cult mentality.
I think it was/is one of the many modern faiths that we simply couldn’t recognise as being a faith. People in modern society, through a lack of real human interaction, have become decoupled from reason and logic. Social media and online communication in general has driven this disconnect (yes, I see the irony in my own musings). We need meaning in life, and we seem to have replaced the meaning we get from direct human interaction with the meaning we get from faith – ‘vaccines’, climate, the NHS etc. Much of this faith is clearly a kind of self-flagellating pleasure. Also interesting is the idea of God as a higher power being replaced by the Gods of Big Tech, Big State & Big Pharma – these are now revered. In the biggest paradox in history, technology has driven us backwards into the dark ages.
Beautifully put.
Yes, I suspect I have a lot of ex-friends because I refused to accept the lockdowns. There are simply lots of people who I haven’t bothered to contact, because I know how they’ll think. People are hopelessly brainwashed. We’re living in the world of Atlas Shrugged right now.
She’s an ex friend now I assume?
Yes. We don’t mix much with non-sceptics now – at present it’s just too much of an effort.
It’s not the NHS’s fault.
It’s not their fault that it had grown into an unmanageable behemoth that couldn’t cope in the first place.
It’s not their fault that they overreacted to a pretty mild flu like virus and stopped treating those with other diseases.
It’s not their fault that they dedicated so many resources to rolling out a treatment most people didn’t need and actually has caused quite a lot of harm.
It’s not their fault that they don’t really want to meet patients any more
They’re the NHS, a national treasure, that needs to be loved and saved at all costs.
It’s our fault for not changing our lives enough to adjust to the needs of the NHS. And for doing annoying things like getting sick or developing illnesses.
What we need to do is to shut up, give them more money and do as they tell us. That’s how you build a world leading service.
A blisteringly accurate appraisal.
How many people do you think would be in their front gardens banging their pots and pans this year if it was made a ‘thing’? No need for a poll to get an idea of just what the public opinion is of “Saving the NHS” this time round is there? And don’t forget to keep a look out for all of those highly choreographed Tiktok dances…that were obviously cobbled together over their lunch break. Not!
The way to build a world-beating NHS is for everyone to die at home all at once, then there won’t be anymore waiting lists!
Nail. Head.
It’s the perfect cover. You can imagine the conversation – “but how do we hide all the deaths from this shot?”… “lockdown. What we do is we lock everyone in their homes for a couple of years, let a huge backlog of medical issues mount, further weaken the immune system and, hey presto, we’ve got two for the price of one. Not only do we kill and maim with the shot, we kill and maim through removal of medical care. We then hide the shot deaths amongst the lockdown deaths. Job done”.
Pretty much. The first lockdown was designed to instill fear and get the population used to being controlled, then the propoganda campaign hit like a Blitzkrieg intended to ramp up the fear. Then, tantalisingly the talk of vaccines was introduced and only, if only, these could be produced quickly would millions be saved from certain gruesome death.
Those responsible for imposing lockdown, nominally Bozo and his band of Co genocidalists, would certainly have known that locking people up, denying social interaction, would undermine mental and physical health and dilute the population’s ability to fight infection and disease AND keep many away from rNHS. This of course would lead to:
“hey presto, we’ve got two for the price of one. Not only do we kill and maim with the shot, we kill and maim through removal of medical care. We then hide the shot deaths amongst the lockdown deaths. Job done”.
And that’s because Bozo et al knew that mass sickness and death was inevitable following the ‘jab’ campaign.
As somebody rightly pointed out yesterday, why are no politicians and certainly no leading politicians falling to heart attacks or sudden aggressive cancers?
Simple – none of the buggers have been injected, more’s the pity.
The agenda is to maim and kill. Depopulation and enslavement for a few sickly survivors.
Before Bozo ultimately became a man without a country, he was already a man without a soul, having long since sold it to the highest bidder.
The elites all probably got the saline placebo jab instead.
Good interview with (once) eminent Dr Tess Laurie with John Oliver.
How she woke up
https://youtu.be/cgX7IY2rBug
Neil Oliver…
He’s well worth watching.
The sooner the state admits the NHS is dead and all that’s left is a corpse churning with maggots giving the impression of life, the sooner we can sort out a replacement. A couple of weeks ago, my Mum was told that there was a 50-week wait on the NHS to see the specialist who took a carcinoma off her leg, as the wound hasn’t healed properly. So she spent £140 to go and see him at his private clinic for ten minutes last week. Significantly, he told her what to do with the wound and it’s now healing well. The nurse practitioners at the GP surgery had told her completely the wrong thing to do with the wound and had dragged out the healing process by months.
In my home town, an equity firm is now running three of the NHS GP practices and more are likely to fall under its ownership soon. I pay monthly insurance to cut down the NHS fees at my optician’s and there are no NHS dentists available so I’m looking at £22 per month minimum rate to go to a private dental surgery
So we’ve already de facto privatisation, only with all the worst elements of the state gumming up the works. If I didn’t have to contribute thousands of pounds a year in National Insurance to help fund other people’s NHS treatment (and employees’ diversity courses), I could find a comprehensive private insurance package that would include GP care, opticians and dental plans, rather than scrabble around looking for someone who isn’t already oversubscribed…
The once-great NHS has apparently been moribund for a while now, from decades of mismanagement and death by a thousand austerity cuts. The latest machinations are simply finishing it off.
Privatization is basically a foregone conclusion at this point. Of note, of all of the rest of Europe, only Spain has a similar fully-socialized healthcare system. Switzerland, in contrast, is basically the polar opposite. And the rest are either some variant of either single-payer Medicare for all (i.e. public insurance but private healthcare system) or some sort of hybrid system.
What I will say, as an American, is whatever you do, DON’T be like us though with our for-profit sick care system and widespread medical bankruptcies that everyone ends up paying for either way. Frying pan, meet fire. As for our neighbor to the north, Canada, they WOULD have a good single-payer system if they didn’t subject it to their own death by a thousand austerity cuts for three decades straight.
The rot in the whole health sector is rife. The NHS is corrupt and broken, while the private sector is exploiting the shortfalls whilst not having any interest in doing something positive. Two grasping hands on one stinking amoral moneypit.
“We failed a generation of children – many of whom are now overweight, unable to talk…”
I have a sister and two neices who work in the education industry. The term used for children who cannot speak – literally – when they start school aged 4 / 5 is:
NVC – Non Verbal Communicators.
I kid you not, and there are lots of them.
Will that generation, and future generations, ever forgive us?
Then there is the increase in children starting school still in nappies. Children who have regressed in social skills of all kinds.
This may be of interest https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.589884/full
Can I call people who imposed the lockdowns child killers as children were never at serious risk and children have died as a result of the various interventions?
Absolutely!
How many people that you know, who were in remission, have had their cancers come back as stage four and die? I know three people.