Nick Timothy on the Boys and Men Crisis

There's a "men and boys are in crisis" article by Nick Timothy in the Daily Telegraph. He's a former political advisor to Theresa May and to judge from his articles seems to have sound views on many subjects. The article is a mixture of Islington Dinner Party appeasement - he actually says "women undoubtedly bear the brunt of the crisis of masculinity", which is right up there with "women have always been the primary victims of war" as a head-slapping idiocy - with some familiar Men's Rights stuff about suicide rates and similar. I quote his final paragraph...

We need to stop seeing masculinity as a retrograde culture from which we must escape, and instead find a way of reconciling the reality of who and what boys and men are with our society today and the economy of the future.

That's what I call having it both ways. Spend almost all the article running men down by listing every way they are doing badly and every way women are doing better, then conclude by saying something that sounds good but is lacking detail.

What the article should have done was start with that conclusion and move to the programme of work.

I'm not the person to do that. We old folk don't give a stuff about the future, because we won't be there, and as for the time we have left, there's not much incentive to take part in the present.

Also, I don't believe in a "crisis of men-and-boys". Everyone I see is doing just fine. Young men have jobs and get married, just like they should, often to women who appreciate what they have taken on as (say) the wife of a builder, because her father was a builder. Men know what they are supposed to be, even when they choose not to go that way. Provide, protect, love your wife and kids, work hard and take pride in doing a good job, be a contributing member of your local community, and play a sport of some kind. Freemasonry is optional. Depending on where they live, military service may be needed as well.

The people who believe in the crisis work in the media. A brief sidebar about the media. Back in, say 1950, the official view of mainstream life was a monoculture with significant shared values, with a lot of shared experience in many people's lives. The media did not need to go too far from the reservation to find a freak-show-from-the-margins story to titillate or distract the readers. In 2023, when the official view of mainstream life is a diverse, multi-national, multi-cultural, multi-sexual, multi-cuisine, multi-lifestyle society with a very few shared values, in that circumstance, the media has to go way into the wild-lands before it can find something that will raise people's eyebrows, without offending some minority culture with a good PR agency.

Indeed, that is so difficult that it is easier for the media to invent marginal social segments. This is where the Mid-30's Girl Boss Who Can't Find A Man comes from. There are about five thousand of them in the whole country, none outside the M25, and everyone just loves the schadenfreude of reading about the inner failure of their outer lives. That's why the media run those stories. It's also why the media discuss Incels, Andrew Tate and the Red Pill - all more deep-in-the-wild-lands marginal activities.

Men are doing as fine as they ever did, which was always a bit patchy. The only Government intervention we need is one that eases the misandrists and misandry out of education, social work, universities, media, advertising, Family Courts, local councils, the Civil Service, and the Houses of Parliament.

And everyone really needs to stop playing the Societal Victim Card, which now I say it, was what I really disliked about Nick Timothy's piece. But until money stops following victimhood, everyone will line up to claim victim status. Except certain groups of men. Those men aren't allowed to be victims, even when they are. They don't want to be, either. It offends their identity. Women are victims, children are victims, minorities are victims. The Victim Money is reserved for women-and-girls-and-minorities. If we want to improve the lot of some men, it has to be done without Victim Money. Men aren't victims, even when we are. Until all the Nick Timothy's start from there, they won't get very far.