Two of the deepest shadows overhanging our culture are the psychic toll of Covid and the fact that men and women are diverging politically. What’s rarely noted, says Conor Fitzgerald on Substack, is that these things are linked: establishment reaction to Covid alienated men and continues to act as one of the key drivers of sex-based political polarisation. Here’s an excerpt.
A recent article in Vox (yeah, I know) highlighted the growing cultural power of what the author describes as the “anti-woke tech bro”, a mutation of the old style Libertarian and described as follows (emphasis of the final sentence is mine):
They regurgitate the gospel of tech overlords like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen and the creators who interview them — Joe Rogan and his many imitators. They love tough-guy sports like MMA and Brazilian jiu-jitsu but are worried about vaccines, seed oils, and the mainstreaming of trans rights. Their worldview is often a paradox, full of irony and sometimes hypocrisy. …
Since the Obama administration, two things happened that changed the way these men (and they are overwhelmingly men) think, look, and behave online: the overhaul of acceptable political discourse caused by the election of Donald Trump and, of course, the pandemic…
The article is wrong and silly in all the predictable ways but that last part is true and worth dwelling on. Two of the deepest shadows overhanging our culture are the unaccounted for psychic toll of Covid, and the fact that men and women are diverging politically. What’s not always noted is the obvious conclusion that the former crisis fed the latter: that establishment reaction to Covid in the West alienated men and continues to act as one of the key drivers of current sex-based political polarisation. The idea that the approaches adopted by all important bureaucracies and interpretative institutions during the plague years seemed based on a set of values foreign to many men, and accelerated male withdrawal from respectable cultural spaces and the creation of alternative ones explains an awful lot.
To begin it’s worth reminding ourselves how men and women felt about Covid and Covid restrictions.
Polling carried out by Gallup during 2020 highlighted that men were:
- less concerned about catching Covid;
- less likely to wear a mask in general, as well as less likely to wear one in or outdoors;
- less likely to follow social distancing guidelines, and more likely to never follow them.
The report noted that, “looking at the last two months of data, it is clear that differences between men and women are related to partisanship, but they also transcend it… there are still clear gender differences that go beyond party. Strong gender differences are observed among Republicans… such that men tend to be less concerned about and less likely to take measures to prevent COVID-19 transmission than women within their same party.” …
In these surveys, as in media coverage generally, men’s differing attitudes and behaviours are always seen as a problem to be solved, stemming mainly from misinformation and buttressed by natural cruelty, slovenliness, lack of reflection. But it’s at least as likely that these differences result from a different set of values, and with some thought it’s possible to reverse engineer a set of values from the polling results. Those values include things like:
- The importance of accepting whatever level of risk and consequences are necessary in order to live a life worthy of the name;
- Since difficulty is a normal part of life, the necessity of living with even quite punishing difficulty without complaining, becoming visibly upset or offloading the cost of that difficulty on to others;
- The importance of preserving owned space (psychological, physical, behavioural) from incursion by others;
- A feeling that it is profoundly morally wrong and personally disreputable impose the cost one’s own fragility on everyone else – especially where you feel that fragility stems in part from something that is within your control, such as obesity or general unfitness;
- The importance of never centering one’s identity around potential or real victimhood or vulnerability, even where you acknowlege those are considerations.
To take the last two as an example and to make the question of values and psychology more concrete: men make up the vast majority of deaths by suicide, and a large proportion of suicides are attibutable to men feeling that they have become a burden or hindrance to those around them. If that’s how men see the world, what did it mean for them that we created a years-long period in our lives where we demanded that they impose the burden of their health as a limiting factor on the world at large?
Even men who consented to various Covid restrictions and who were in the end happy to do so will recall the tug of these impulses as restrictions took hold. So will most women of course, but as the polling reflects the feeling was much stronger on average in men. …
It’s likely that what many men took away from the crisis was that the respectable world despises your way of seeing the world, and will not tolerate it; and you need to find or make your own spaces where you can’t be reached as an urgent priority. A simultaneous rejection by and flight from respectability and the mainstream was an existing trend before Covid, but Covid turbocharged it.
Worth reading in full.
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It has been there for a while this fake division between the sexes. The Daily Mail has had two missions in recent decades – to convince the working class that they are middle class and to convince men and women that they are at war. And of course the sexualisation of pre-pubescent children by flaunting them in provocative clothes. It has worked pretty well. The paedo thing is out of control in this country, the working class think they are above money worries amazingly, and the relationship between women and men is so toxic that it hardly seems worth bothering.
Are they saying that men are more likely to be scientists?
Were scientists more sceptical about “Covid”?
It’s not science if it’s not sceptical
Medical doctors are not scientists. They just used scientific vocabulary to hide behind. With the very high barriers and hurdles to getting into medicine, people who speak out and question are disadvantaged. Medical schools thus breed yes men and yes women. The Covid crisis made this quite obvious.
I suppose they are not all strictly scientists though they have all studied branches of science and are familiar with scientific knowledge and methods. Some doctors do work as scientists, and people who develop “vaccines” are involved in science.
Anyway, I didn’t notice “scientists” opposing “covid” more vigorously than others – probably for the same reason that “medical doctors” didn’t, reasons you correctly identify.
Maybe just anecdotal evidence, but I know several mathematicians, physicists and engineers who were critical of the jab, but never a medical doctor.
Glad to hear it! One would have hoped they all would be.
Time and time again we hear reports of medical researchers faking results. The pressure to succeed is greater than the desire for truth. In precise sciences, you cannot fake a result so easily. We can measure the strength of a magnetic field to four or five decimal places, but whether somebody has a virus is a yes/no thing coming from a test that is only marginally more accurate than rolling dice. Maybe this attracts a certain type of people to that type of research.
Good point
And then there are “climate scientists”
And the union like orgs that oversee doctors etc like the bcma naturally don’t want ANYONE going off-piste with regards to having a different opinion… official narrative or you are toast
Too much state; too little family.
Socialist fascism.
Either we shrink the state or we continue down the path to anarchy and revolution; war.
The system has totally excluded males for the younger generation. You probably won’t siuvive much longer. The only thong you can hope for as a youngster is that the movement of power eastwards away from the Anglo-Americans will restore masculinity If you don’t have that hope then you might as well kill yourself unless you are happy to masturbate for the rest of you squalid little life.
Freudian slip – “thong” ??
Who are you calling squalid..??
Anecdotal evidence from me (a bloke): “Covid” brought me closer to my unvaxxed sceptic wife. The tiny number of unjabbed sceptic people we know are split fairly evenly between male and female, as are the much larger number who we’ve stopped seeing. Plenty of female sceptics on the forums I am on, some with non sceptic male partners, and plenty of the men have sceptic female partners.
Yea, “be kind” and safetyism arguably come more from the female nurturing side of our species’ tendency but I am not sure there’s much to be gained by this particular line of thinking
You’re right that fostering conflict between men and women isn’t ideal and should be avoided as much as possible. We depend on each other for the continuation of our species, after all. And life with a family is generally so much better than without it.
That said, feminism has gone too far. It is very much the experience of boys in school these days to be made to feel as of being a man or manly is somehow a bit toxic. And that’s really terrible.
So some push back is probably not only welcome but necessary, I think.
Pushback yes, and if you want we can call it feminism, but I don’t think it has much to do with equal rights under the law or what I imagine was in the minds of “feminists” back in the day which I presume would have been to want to be treated on merit and not pre-judged. It seems to me that there are as many men as women going along with a lot of the current mad stuff.
The thing is, in our society, men and women have been equal under the law for a long long time. And yet the push for “equal rights” is relentless and incessant. Whatever is is that is being pursued is being pursued in the name of feminism and with the support, if only tacit, of most women.
Vocal minority as usual I think
None of the women in my life are wanting “more rights” – but I speak to very few women, or people of any kind
It’s not feminists designing the school curriculum, it’s not feminists behind the woke mind virus or even gender ideology, it’s not feminists orchestrating the deliberate division of society through multiple agendas. I think I’ve shared enough links on here now demonstrating who the big players were and are, past and present, who are behind all of what we’re seeing in society.
The reason you’ll see the same names on here banging on about feminists this, feminists that, is because all feminists are women but not all women are feminists. They have a pathological obsession with blaming everything that’s wrong in the world ( including their ingrained feelings of inadequacy ) on women, and so their myopic focus on feminism allows them to do just that. One of the ways this highlights their delusion and how it can easily be debunked is that both women *and* men are on board with this woke stuff etc, as you said. The obsessed women-haters mustn’t acknowledge that the woke mind virus is orchestrated and pushed by both genders because the moment they do, bang goes their theory. By blaming feminists only women get the blame. See how it works?
So I agree with your comments. Unfortunately for the resident misogynists this isn’t something that can squarely and conveniently be placed at the door of women exclusively, or even feminists, and that’s a bitter pill for them to swallow, so in denial they shall remain, grinding their tired old axes for all eternity. lol
I haven’t said anything about wokeness. What I’ve written is about feminism, which isn’t quite the same thing as wokeness.
I think we are probably in agreement more than you think.
I agree that some men (low status, beta males) also push both wokeness and current day feminism, which to me is not an easy thing to define or even explain, but obviously isn’t about equal rights because those have existed for decades.
That said, it seems to be an observable fact that women are, on average, more woke than men as evidenced among other things by voting patterns.
It’s not just me saying it. That’s basically what the article is about.
That’s why I wrote “tacit”.
Tricky one
When asked to express an opinion they would do so- if you are saying that women who do not support “extremist feminism” should actively campaign against it I think that’s a big ask. I could be accused of not opposing all sorts of things vigorously enough
Same for me (and I am female by the way). I know as many ‘sceptic’ women as men.
I paid for my nephew to have sex with a prossie. Not because I like transactional sex but because he is so introverted and gormless and introverted that if sex wasn’t given to him he would never go and look for it and he was 18 and still a virgin. And I discussed the encounter in detail with the sex worker later and she said he was so shy that it took her about twenty minutes to stop him messing with his computer. With the young lads these days you have to step in to help them get their peckers up.
Alrighty, then…
Fortunate here that our relationship strengthened when Mrs Q ‘saw the light’ pretty quickly between Feb 2020, when I spotted the scam, and March 2020 when the ‘3-Ships Data’ became known [outside the MSM]. Soon to be the ‘4-Ships Data’ that proved it was all just a bad flu and data was being manipulated. Diamond Princess, USS Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle and Costa Atlantic.
And when Prof John Ioannidis published his analysis. And when Dr Johan Geisecke, Dr Reiner Fullmich, Prof Sucharit Bhakdi, Prof Karol Sikora, Dr Richard Fleming, Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, Dr Michael Yeadon, Knut Wittkowski, Prof Delores Cahill, Dr Peter McCullogh, Dr Vladimir Zelenko RIP et al started speaking out critically with intelligence and pragmatism – and all were then pilloried and silenced. Mrs Q used to work with Prof Sikora, thus, believed him and the other skilled Scientists over the Shills appearing daily upon the screens and sirens.
Don’t forget Sunetra Gupta, Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya.
Oh and El Gato Malo (@boriquagato on Twatter)
Diamond Princess did it for me, then seeing who was actually dying in Italy. However, it wasn’t until I discovered Lockdown Sceptic, I think, it’s 4th day of posting, that I realised there were loads of people like me. For that I will forever be grateful to Toby Young.
Only through his work did I discover fellow travellers.
I suspect it was far more politically non-denominational back then. I never thought of opposition to lockdown as politically polarising until much later.
I suppose it became a war between those who thought the government were both all knowing & had people’s best interests at heart & those of us who knew government to be hopeless & incapable of caring. It’s gone on from there & I see no prospect of rapprochement.
Hear hear.
Toby’s had some stick and has his detractors (even on here) as well as being loathed by many of the more frothy-mouthed lefties – but he’s a bloody hero in my eyes. Free schools, The Daily Sceptic and The Free Speech Union are 3 massive contributions he has made on behalf of freedom lovers.
As those down with the kids would say – he’s a ledge.
Nor Ivor Cummins
Boy oh boy am I lucky.
My wife and I agree on the lot.
But then maybe it isn’t luck. We both come from sceptical families who each saw their share of tyranny.
I noticed it first and she very quickly thereafter. No pandemic out the window. No pandemic in the data. So simple.
If you still have a bit of lead in your pencil then be charitable and give it to other men and boys. Although on the receiving end you’re probably at best going to be stabbing like crazy at an infertile womb. It is bleak but if we can keep the practice alive then who knows what might happen in the future.
Some cognitive dissonance in action here…
Strong Scepticism here regarding the vaxx and Big Pharma, but there’s firm parallels that can be drawn with the MIC..
Pharma industrial complex wants an ill society..
Military Industrial Complex wants war……
Stupid article full of speculations about “almost all but not really all men” and “almost all but not really all women” resting on two of the usual “miniscule group of people” surveys.
As far as I can tell, Boris Johnson-Jellyfish transitioned from “mayor from Jaws” and “take it on the chin” to “it’s people like us who get it really bad” and finally to “it’s not so bad after all, party on dudes, but we have to keep the comedy of idocies on the read for $reasons.” Absolutely not like the male stereotypes peddled by the text. In contrast to this, many a brave woman saw through the nonsense and resisted it from the start.
It comes down to Myers Briggs personality types. If you are on the
If you are an ISTJ (as I am) you are more likely to be sceptical and unjabbed. This personality type is more common in men.
Other types (INTJ and ISTP in particular) are also logical/analytical and likely to have questioned the propaganda.
If you are an ISTJ (as I am) you are more likely to be sceptical and unjabbed. This personality type is more common in men.
There a billions of men on the planet and the subgroup of those who have ever taken one of these anecdotes based tests is certainly vanishing small. So, who has determined that how?
Banging on about how hard done by men/women are by the other sex is what is driving men/women apart!
I observe that the whining and the scapegoating of the opposite sex is all very much one-sided on here, and has been that way for as long as I’ve been posting. Possibly due to the fact the posters are evidently almost all male, and we know that men very rarely challenge other men on their sexist views on women. Muslims/migrants, climate, Israel/Gaza, environment, electric vehicles…you name it. All safe subjects to challenge over, but never if a man speaks out of turn about women. It’s like they all close ranks and don’t want to ruffle any feathers. Hence, why I’ve yet to read a post by a woman complaining about or disparaging men in general. We make up but a tiny minority here on DS, although I don’t know why that is.
I do agree with you when you say “men very rarely challenge other men on their sexist views on women” – men do seem much more loyal to their sex than women are to theirs. Although in the circles I move in, it certainly wouldn’t be the done thing to be openly sexist in mixed company. God knows what they say about us behind our backs!
I also note that on The Conservative Woman, just on the front few pages, there are two articles on men’s issues:
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/starmer-steps-up-the-war-on-fathers/
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-cruelty-of-parent-alienation/
And they say we never speak up for them! Bl@@dy cheek!
To be fair, I’ve only seen two people in public demonstrate their resistance and they were both women. One is a lady at school pick-up with a badge, the other a ‘park bench’ type person with an ‘unjabbed’ t-shirt.
My wife freely admits that she might have gotten the jab if she had a different husband. I need to hang on to her as if I get dumped I’m not going to get many swipe rights (or left, whatever it is) with my ‘must be unjabbed’ criteria.
I never contemplated taking it. As early as Dec 2019 I was telling colleagues I thought this period would be known in future as the ‘great panic’. Hopefully they don’t remember!
Once they started pushing for everybody to take it that just made me dig my heels in even more. I’ll be damned if I’ll take advice from these low IQ midwit midgets.
With me it was the other way. i was fairly open minded to the jab at first but my wife was firmly against it and I went along with her. I didn’t start becoming a vocal anti-jabber until much much later.