Women and children first
Dear Reader,
Last week saw the tragic murder of Sabina Nessa hit the UK headlines, a 28 year old teacher murdered not far from her home in Kidbrooke, South London in the early evening as she took a popular route across the park to meet a friend at a nearby bar. Fortunately, the police have been quick to pursue the case and have arrested a likely culprit. Maybe details of the murder were few, maybe the police had asked them to be embargoed but for whatever reason the news bulletins were soon full of feminist lobby groups and even the Metropolitan Police talking about ‘an epidemic of male violence’ and ‘toxic masculinity,’ The BBC, Sky News and the other usual suspects quickly abandoned their traditional role as impartial, factual observers and reporters to undertake their modern role of amplifying bad news, catastrophising an incident to create a crisis to the benefit of marginal political movements. We have seen a similar process in the last few days as a shortage of tanker drivers, mainly affecting BP, has been whipped up into a full-scale national fuel crisis causing panic buying and real shortages across the country.
Women more likely to die from the AZ vaccine than be murdered
To return to Sabina Nessa and the ‘epidemic of male violence,’ the BBC and other news outlets need to have looked no further than the national murder statistics to have called out this accusation as nonsense. Reviewing the last 50 years of murder statistics shows that the latest figures are 11.7 murders per million people for 2019/20, up from a figure of 6.9 per million in 1970. This is little more than the chances of having a brain haemorrhage from the AstraZeneca anti covid vaccine. Of the 758 successful prosecutions for murder in 2019/20 almost ¾ of the victims were of men (551) and ¼ women (207). For women at least, with a murder rate of under 3 per million, having the AstraZeneca vaccine is a far more likely cause of death than murder.
Murder rates have been in steady decline for over 20 years
The rise in the murder rate from 6.9 in 1970 to 11.7 is a steep rise and needs explaining but closer enquiry shows that the murder rate rose sharply in the late 1990s, peaked in 1999 at 14.5 and has been in slow but steady decline since then. For the last 20 years murder rates have been declining, yet now is the time to declare ‘an epidemic of male violence’? Looking at things in the long term shows that those declaring an ‘epidemic of male violence’ are either ignorant, short-termist or pursuing an alternative anti-male agenda by consciously seeking to imbue fear into women, shame into men and division into society. We should not be surprised to discover this, it is a common tactic of the current iteration of feminism and other divisive, inter-sectionalist pressure groups.
Further diminishing the claims of ‘an epidemic of male violence’ is the well-established fact that most murders fall into one of the following categories; domestic, gang, terror or mass/serial killings. For example, in Plymouth, England this last August 12th, Jake Davison shot and killed five people before shooting himself; two women (including his mother), two men and a girl. If this is a typical ratio, one male killer to three females killed, the number of male murderers in the latest figures drops to below 70. 70 fatally violent males from a population of over 33 million, 0.000002%. Of course, murder is not the only form of violence, I am using it because the figures are much firmer and well-established; murders are much better reported, accounted and prosecuted than other forms of violence. The principle remains the same though; poor media coverage amplifies the propaganda of particular lobby groups, casting a slur on all men by reinforcing a trope of innate testosterone fuelled aggression and violence. Violence is not an innate quality of man, it is a learned trait, often learned in the most brutal of environments – just studying the backgrounds of murderers and other violent offenders reveals that. The trope of ‘an epidemic of male violence’ is as unfair and innaccurate as that of ‘hysterical women.’
Feminism’s unwise and impossible demand
One of the main thrusts of feminism is the demand for autonomy, the right to standalone from men, ‘a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle’ as the old slogan goes. It is the demand to be able to behave in any manner of her choice without regard to possible consequence, whether that be freedom from physical threat or the right to exert violent force and kill your unborn child. It is an impossible demand to fulfil, human nature will not allow it and human society is impossible with it; men and women are not autonomous units in opposition to each other but relational beings made for one another. Because of this demand for absolute autonomy there is a strand of masculine behaviour which has been much denigrated over the last few decades, though its roots are lost in history. Here are a few examples of it:
Male self-sacrifice
In 509BC the Roman Republic was created when the people of Rome overthrew the tyrant king Tarquin and established the Senate as the ruling power. In 508 Tarquin returned with a large army of his ally Lars Porsenna to recapture the city. The enemy forces stormed the Janiculum hill, forcing the Romans back and moved to capture the bridge over the Tiber and rush the city gates. With the Romans in disarray one man, Horatius, rallied the troops and with two comrades held the enemy forces at bay at one end of the narrow bridge while his troops destroyed the bridge behind him. Only when the bridge had been destroyed and the city saved did Horatius jump into the river and swim to safety.
Less than thirty years later, 480BC, the disunited Greek city states faced invasion by an overwhelming force of the Persian empire under the command of Xerxes I. King Leonidas of Sparta, understanding the desperation of the situation raised a small force of 300 Spartan hoplites (armoured infantry) for a suicide mission. All the men called were ‘sires’, veteran soldiers who had fathered children. Together with their slaves they marched to the Gates of Thermoplylae, a narrow passage in the mountainous north of Greece through which the Persians had to pass, gathering what allies they could as they marched. Altogether the Greeks numbered 6 – 7000 when they arrived, facing an army at least 6 times their size. This small force held back the Persians for a week and when the position became untenable Leonidas dismissed the allies and freed the slaves, before fighting to the death in a desperate last stand. The time won in this glorious defeat enabled the Athenians to evacuate their city and recall the united Greek fleet. The following naval victory at Salamis stopped the Persian advance and the following year the Battle of Plataea saw the Persians driven out. Never before in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.
Fast forward over 2000 years and in 1852 HMS Birkenhead was carrying troops and civilians, including women and children, from Britain to South Africa. As she rounded the Cape the Birkenhead was caught in a storm and driven onto rocks about a mile offshore. There were insufficient lifeboats. Amid the scramble for the boats the cry went up, ‘women and children first,’ quickly followed by the order ‘Stand Fast.’ The troops stood in their place while the women and children were boarded onto the boats and carried to safety on the shore. Half the men, more than 250, drowned that day.
Less than a century later in the summer of 1940, young men again responded to the call as they climbed into the cockpits of their Hurricanes and Spitfires to defend the skies of Britain against a terrible invader. One in 6 of them, well over 500 in all, never saw the summer out. Never since in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few. This was the generation of our fathers and grandfathers, still living memory for some.
A constant theme of the nature of masculinity across the millennia has been that of heroic sacrifice, the willingness of the man to die for who and what he loves. It is an expectation laid upon the boy and moulded into the man. Strength is given, and whether it is used for one momentous act of bravery or spent in long hours of labour in field or factory, it is given to be used for hearth and home, family and nation. What makes the difference between a man who will lash out in anger or stalk and kill, and a man who will knowingly spend his life or go to his death for another? It is upbringing, training, expectation and discipline, it is in the gift of mothers as well as fathers for ‘it is the hand that rocks the cradle which rules the world.’ It is the difference between the man who is lost to the base demands of his flesh or who with self-control will sacrifice his life for others. Feminists need to choose what kind of men they want, for if they do not respect the man who will lay down his life, they will raise a generation who will throw them in the water when ‘man the lifeboats’ is called.
‘Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.’ Jesus of Nazareth
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