A self-described feminist at the Daily Telegraph begins to have second thoughts:
I was half asleep in the front seat the other day, coming back from some exhausting tour of an educational establishment, and in the back seat were two twentysomething female graduates. They were talking about men, so I tried to focus, while keeping my eyes cunningly half closed.One of them made the eternal feminine complaint. “All men are useless these days,” she said. “Yeah,” said the other. “The trouble is that they haven’t risen to the challenge of feminism. They don’t understand that we need them to be more masculine, and instead they have just copped out.”I am afraid that, at this point, I copped out myself, and slid into unconsciousness. But before I went under I thought, hmmm, this is interesting; and I think back to that conversation as I read that women continue their astonishing dominance of university admissions.
Look at those girls go! Women now make up 57 per cent of university entrants, and they outnumber men in every subject — including maths and engineering….Speaking as an ardent feminist, I expect that this will have many wonderful results: a culture that is more feng shui and emotionally literate and altogether nicer, and an economy that benefits from unleashing the phenomenal energy and talents of British women who are — if GCSEs, A-levels and university entrance results mean anything — currently giving the male sex a good old intellectual thrashing.Obviously a neanderthal corner of my heart worries about some aspects of the coming feminisation. Will we all become even more namby-pamby, elf-n-safety-conscious, regulation-prone and generally incapable of beating the Australians at anything than we already are? Hmm? And even if the feminist revolution is good and unstoppable (and it is both), we should perhaps consider some of the downsides — and the most interesting is that greater equality between the sexes is actually leading to greater division between the classes. Here’s how.Since the emergence of our species, it has been a brutally sexist feature of romance that women on the whole — and I stress on the whole — will want to mate/procreate with men who are either on a par with themselves, or their superior, in socio-economic and intellectual attainment. A recent study shows that if a man’s IQ rises by 16 points, his chances of marrying increase by 35 per cent; if a woman’s IQ rises by 16 points, her chances of getting hitched decline by the same amount.Now look at those university entrance figures again, feed in that basic human prejudice, and some recent social phenomena become intelligible. If you have a sudden surge in the number of highly educated women — more women than men — then it is not surprising that you have a fair few Bridget Jones-type characters who are having a tough job finding Mr Darcy. It is a gloomy truth that 40 per cent of female graduates born in 1970 are likely to enter their forties childless.
Needless to say, the future cat ladies of Britain are too short-sighted to see any problem with this:
As a very well educated, highly career-oriented, straight, single-ish woman in my early 20s – why ever should I want to get married and have kids? Far too many other things to be doing, thanks.
Posted by Jenny on February 1, 2007
Oh, I don’t know, perhaps because living under the regime of the more demographically friendly societal structure that replaces the unsustainable status quo is likely to prove rather less pleasant than the traditional Christian society that was abandoned in favor of equality and feminism.But it is encouraging to see that even those who have led the cheers for feminism in the past are beginning to recognize that it is a societal dead-end. Post-feminist society has not yet been fully articulated, but the significant trends are developing well in advance of the chattering classes. These are some of the probable developments:
1. The decline of the traditional university degree. Degrees are already scorned in a leading technology industry, the games industry, this trend will spread as more individuals, mostly men, realize that wasting 4-6 years and tens of thousands of dollars on a ticket to a dead-end job is a stupid investment.
2. Educated women will find it increasingly difficult to find a man who will even date them, let alone marry them. This is not yet a conscious trend, it will become one soon. I was one of the first guys I knew who wouldn’t even go out on a first date with a career girl, this is becoming an increasingly common dealbreaker among the younger crowd.
3. Society will increasingly provide psychological rewards to women who bear children and penalties to those who don’t. This is already the case in dying European countries, where people will literally stop families in the street and congratulate them on having more than one child.
It took seventy years for the fundamental flaws of communism to cause communist society to collapse. Full-fledged feminism has only been in the ascendance for 34 years; while it is even less sustainable than communism, it still has another 25 years or so to go before it collapses entirely. I think an 8 to 12-year experience of female leaders is necessary to demonstrate the scope of feminism’s virulence in a final gasp before women finally accept that it is a poisonous ideology and abandon it en masse.