A Letter to Post Columnist Christine Emba About Her "Men Are Lost" Article
Although Well-Meaning, Emba Doesn't See Her Own Anti-Male Prejudice
(Article author’s note: as it is my intent is to challenge feminist hatred while staying out of politics, this post was modified after original publication to remove some overly partisan references.)
Dear Ms. Emba,
I have little doubt that you’re aware of my efforts to get the Post to recognize its imbalanced coverage of gender. I’ve been writing letters to Post columnists since 2018, after the Post published its Why can't we hate men? article.
You might recall that in November 2021 I wrote to you about your article on “condom stealthing”. This new letter is in response to your recent article, Men are lost, a blockbuster analysis of “an era of male crisis” currently faced by men.
Ms. Emba, in your article you said that you care about the men in your life and that you love men “as friends, romantic partners and members of my family”.
If you truly care about men, I respectfully ask that you take the time to read this “blockbuster reply” to your article and to thoughtfully consider what I say here. You just might discover the biggest story of your life.
Let me begin with an observation: although you did a thorough job of describing the symptoms of today’s crisis of masculinity, you completely overlooked the obvious cause of the crisis you bemoan: a relentless, hateful, sixty-year feminist campaign of political, legal, and cultural indoctrination directed against men and masculinity.
Your analysis is similar to a doctor who proudly declares a patient’s symptom as “a simple headache”, while completely overlooking its actual cause, a lemon-sized brain tumor.
Although you, like this doctor, missed the obvious explanation, one woman didn’t. Forensic psychologist Helen Smith perfectly summarized the problem in her book Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream — and Why It Matters:
“American society has become anti-male. Men are sensing the backlash and are responding. They’re dropping out of college, leaving the workforce, and avoiding marriage and fatherhood at alarming rates. The trend is so pronounced that a number of books have been written about this man-child phenomenon, concluding that men have taken a vacation from responsibility. But why should men participate in a system that seems to be increasingly stacked against them? [emphasis added]
“Most men aren’t dropping out because they are stuck in arrested development; they are acting rationally in response to the lack of incentives society offers them to be responsible fathers, husbands, and providers. In addition, men are going on strike, either consciously or unconsciously, because they do not want to be injured by the myriad of laws, attitudes, and hostility against them for the crime of happening to be male in the 21st century. Men are starting to fight back. Men on Strike explains their battle cry.”
Your article – and tens of thousands of others like it that reflexively echo a feminist worldview – remind me of the answer Ernest Hemingway gave when once asked what quality was most needed to be a great writer: “a built-in, shockproof, crap detector”.
By that measure, you, and many other writers at the Post and throughout the Western media, are terrible writers.
It’s not that you’re unable to put your thoughts coherently into words – you’re clearly a masterful wordsmith – rather, it’s that you’re unable to recognize how much feminism has poisoned your worldview, making you no longer able to separate truth from feminist propaganda.
And this leaves you unable to see your own sexism and anti-male prejudice. For example, your article shows that you’ve fallen prey to a warped feminist perspective:
You describe “incels” as men “…spewing self-pitying venom online”, but without recognizing that this description also applies in reverse to many feminists and without realizing that the original incels were women. You really should visit Feminism is a Hate Movement: In Their Own Words for examples of women spewing feminist venom.
You describe the “manosphere”, as a “…web of misogynistic communities”, but without recognizing that feminism itself is a web of misandrist communities, and without understanding that the manosphere also includes “women of the manosphere”, women and female-led organizations who are speaking out against feminist lies and hatred of men. I’d bet that you know nothing about Erin Pizzey, the woman who opened the world’s first battered women’s shelter or her book, Prone to Violence, or the work of prominent anti-feminists like Janice Fiamengo, Bettina Arndt, and Karen Straughan.
You parrot the hateful feminist slogan “smashing the patriarchy” – a “conspiracy of men oppressing women” – without realizing that if the patriarchy actually existed, it would have to be the most incompetent conspiracy in history: its members, by far, are the major victims of their gender roles. Men are, for example, 99% of war casualties, 93% of workplace deaths, and in nearly every way are worse off then women! You might also want to contemplate the similarity of “patriarchy” to the Nazi’s “Jewish Conspiracy”.
Finally, despite what I feel is a sincere attempt by you to help men, your entire article actually serves as a feminist-inspired affirmation that there is something intrinsically wrong with masculinity, when the only thing wrong with men today is the War on Men and Boys that has been waged against them for the past 60 years (or 175 years if one counts from the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention).
Ms. Emba, if your concern for men is genuine – and I believe it is – I respectfully ask you to take a long, hard, honest look at what feminism has become. The widespread, uncritical allegiance of the Western media to feminist dogma has blinded you and millions of others to the most significant civil rights injustice since the end of Jim Crow.
To start, what would you say if The Washington Post were to publish an article titled “Why can’t we hate women?” or “Why can’t we hate Negros?” (The link refers to a racist 1896 Post article.)
You would, obviously, be against both.
Then why do you and all others who work at the Post, by your collective silence, acquiesce to the gender bigotry of the Post’s 2018 “Why can't we hate men?” article?
Let me pose to you the same questions I asked in a letter I sent to the Post’s editorial board:
“Do you think that it was appropriate for the Post to have published it? Do you think, as some of the article’s more than 3,300 (vastly negative) commenters responded, “just change ‘men’ to ‘Jews’”, is a fair summarization of this hateful diatribe?
“Do you think that the article echoes anything from the ugly history of Europe in the middle of the 20th century?”
How does a premier newspaper like the Post, whose slogan is “Democracy Dies in Darkness”, print an article that mocks its own slogan and that can only be characterized, by its very title, as “hate speech”?
The short answer is:
“Feminism”.
The long answer is:
“Feminist indoctrination”.
Or the complete answer is because the Post — and nearly every other media organization throughout the world — which are supposed to serve free societies as a bulwark against oppression and tyranny, have been co-opted by a dishonest, decades-long campaign of feminist political, legal, and cultural indoctrination — with a clear bias against men.
An example of this bias can be found in the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearing of Clarence Thomas. In that hearing Thomas claimed that he was a victim of a “high tech lynching for uppity blacks”. But Thomas was only partly correct. His high-tech lynching wasn’t because he was black – it was because he was male.
This high-tech gender lynching also occurred during the 2018 hearings for another male, Brett Kavanaugh. Gender partisans, worried about Kavanaugh’s position on abortion, couldn’t get him in any other way, so they gender-lynched him for a claimed sexual assault from his teenage years. Hypocritically, at roughly the same time, during the height of #MeToo, Monica Lewinsky was being forgiven for her presidential indiscretions, mostly due to her young age.
This gender lynching of men has only gotten worse and more widespread since Thomas’s hearing.
Ms. Emba, if you would only turn your crap detector back on, you would discover one of the biggest stories of the past 60 years. Below I provide a partial, yet necessarily incomplete summary of what you and others in the media have completely missed.
Feminism is Founded on a Mountain of Lies
The Post’s Fact Checker tracked and reported that Donald Trump made more than 30,573 false or misleading claims while in office.
But the Fact Checker should also spend some time examining the damaging lies that feminists have foisted on the public for more than six decades.
Here are just some of these lies, taken from my article Feminists Lie. All. The. Time.:
They lie, like Amber Heard, about their own abuse of men.
They lie about a “wage gap” between men and women. In 2009 the federal government published a report that said ““… the raw wage gap continues to be used in misleading ways [emphasis added] to advance public policy agendas without fully explaining the reasons behind the gap.” Isn’t the phrase “used in misleading ways” just a polite way of saying “they’re lying”?
They lie that women don’t falsely accuse men. Just recall the Duke Lacrosse Rape and UVA’s A Rape on Campus false rape hoaxes.
They lie that women don’t rape, denying the reality of female sex offenders, including mothers who molest their own sons and teachers like Mary Kay Letourneau who rape boys.
They lie about children’s real fathers, i.e., “paternity fraud”
They lie about the existence of a “Patriarchy”
They lie about how “oppressed” women are without giving any thought to how men are much more “oppressed” by the demands of the male gender role.
They lie about a “War on Women” even as they continue to wage a 60-year War on Men.
Finally, they chauvinistically lie that women don’t lie, asserted under the false flag “Believe women”.
But feminism’s biggest lie, by far, is about domestic violence. For decades, feminists have refused to acknowledge and have threatened DV researchers who have revealed that women perpetuate at least 50% of intimate partner violence.
Don’t believe it? Then please read Domestic Violence: Feminism’s Big Lie or visit The Partner Abuse State of Knowledge (PASK) website.
A result of this provable feminist lie is a law as reprehensible as any law passed during Jim Crow, the Violence Against Women Act. As I expressed in an open letter to the “father of VAWA”, Joe Biden,
“History will ultimately show that, with [Biden’s] active support and assistance, the United States Congress, in passing the Violence Against Women Act, enshrined into American law an Act that shares the same ideological parents as the Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany: hate and prejudice. This law is not worthy of a nation that needs to present itself to the rest of the world as a ‘fair and just democracy’”.
Feminism Has Become a Hate Movement
I began my article The Feminist Conscience by saying,
“I’ve been a lifelong supporter of equal rights for women. Even as a young child, well before Betty Friedan and second wave feminism, I intuitively supported equality for women because I recognized that my own mother would have been happier not being limited by her gender role.
But over time, I gradually began to harbor doubts about feminism. It appeared to me that like most other “social justice” movements, feminism had lost its way, forgetting about its original, noble goal of freeing women from the constraints of their gender role into a movement that is now more motivated by the hatred of men than of working towards true gender equality; a movement that was completely oblivious to how men suffered even more from the heavy expectations of the male role, as currently exemplified by the men — both Ukrainian and Russian — who are compelled to fight and die in that awful war.”
If you are honest with yourself, you should also conclude, as I reluctantly did, that feminism has lost its way, and has transformed into a hate movement. For evidence, see Feminism is a Hate Movement, or In Their Own Words for a list of hateful quotes made by feminists over the past 100+ years.
This hate is even directed at boys. See Feminists Even Hate Boys for examples. How do you feel about the following image, taken from a girls’ clothing line?
Feminism Propagates “Idiot Hypocrisy”
Feminists have mastered an incredible Jedi mind trick ability to convince the world of things that are obviously false. I have published a number of short, image-based examinations of feminism’s “idiot hypocrisy”. Some examples:
Hillary Clinton’s claim that “Women have always been the primary victims of war”
“Women Are Oppressed by Men”: examines the feminist
mythlie that men oppress women“Stop Treating Us As Sex Objects!”: examines the feminist myth that men treat women as “sex objects”, even as women objectify themselves by dressing provocatively, willingly participating in prostitution, and appearing in pornography
The Idiocy of "We Don't Need Men": Rebuts another feminist-inspired folly, the claim “We don’t need men”
The Idiocy of "Slut Walks": illustrates the feminist-inspired insanity of female “slutwalks”. As one young woman put it,
The Idiocy of Feminists Dressing Up As Their Genitals: illustrates a new pinnacle for feminist-inspired insanity, females dressing up as their genitals, “Mad-hatters” wearing “pussy hats” or even donning vagina costumes. So, does the following picture represent female power or female insanity?
A final example of idiot feminist hypocrisy is that “gender is a cultural construct”, i.e. there are essentially no differences between the sexes, a preposterous idea that even a 5-year-old intuitively understands “just ain’t so”. Here’s how sex researcher Dr. Debra Soh, author of The End of Gender - Debunking the Myths About Sex and Identity in Our Society summarized this lie:
“I challenge the erroneous belief that sex and gender are socially constructed; that there is an infinite number of genders; that young children with gender dysphoria should be allowed to transition to the opposite sex; and that trans women are quintessentially no different from women who were born women.”
You might want to invest a bit of time reviewing my other examples of idiot feminist hypocrisy to see the shocking foolishness that has been propagated by feminists in the name of “gender equality”.
The Damage Caused by Six Decades of Feminism
In addition to missing the above idiot feminist hypocrisy, the Post and most other media outlets have also mostly missed the obvious, widespread damage that has been caused by feminism over the past six decades. Following is a brief synopsis of just some of this damage.
Destruction of the Family, Marriage, Fathers
How many people know that one of feminism’s often-stated goals is the destruction of family and marriage, and the removal of fathers from both? Evidence can be found in feminists’ own words or in a consciousness-raising session held by feminist author Kate Millet.
That they’ve largely succeeded can be found by declining rates of marriage (aided by a feminist-indoctrinated media that encourages women to avoid marriage), and increasing numbers of fatherless children, and the risks to these children.
Slanting the Legal System Against Men
“If it happens we have to go against each other, remember, I look innocent. Impression is worth as much as facts.” — American serial murderer Carol Bundy, to her male co-conspirator, from jail during her 1982 murder trial.
Even though women have, due to chivalry, for centuries been treated far more leniently than men by Western legal systems, feminists have been slanting the legal system even more in their favor by a combination of lies, a long torrent of feminist propaganda, and by taking advantage of the “groveling chivalry” of gullible men.
For example, as shown in Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases men are more likely than women to be charged with crimes, receive 63% longer sentences on average, while women are twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted.
Nowhere has the abuse of males’ legal rights been more pronounced than under the US Department of Education’s horrible misuse of Title IX, the primary federal law intended to prohibit sex discrimination in all American schools, from kindergarten through graduate school. In April 2011 the gender bullies at the U.S. Department of Education, under the presumed authority of Title IX, issued a “Dear Colleague Letter” to American colleges and universities. This letter directed these schools, under penalty of losing all federal funding, to institute draconian changes to the way sexual assault accusations were to be handled.
As described in a book, The Campus Rape Frenzy — The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities,
“… the federal government, joined by virtually all colleges and universities, has mounted a systematic attack on bedrock American principles including the presumption of innocence, access to exculpatory evidence, the right to cross-examine one’s accuser, and due process.”
Anyone who still thinks that feminism is a fair movement that only strives for “equality” needs to read Twisting Title IX, a book that documents the outrageous abuses done in the name of Title IX and “equal educational opportunity”. Pay particular attention to the chapter titled “OCR’S Unlawful Assault on Due Process and Fair Procedures”.
Turning American Universities into Liberal Bastions via Women’s Studies Programs
Anyone who doesn’t realize that women’s studies programs have been a primary factor of the extreme political liberalization at American colleges and universities needs to read the book Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women, that describes the gender indoctrination that occurs as part of “women’s studies” programs at America’s institutions of higher education. Here’s how the book’s author, Christina Hoff Sommers, describes this indoctrination:
“A parent should think very carefully before sending a daughter to one of the more gender-feminized colleges. Any school has the freedom to transform itself into a feminist bastion, but because the effect on the students is so powerful it ought to be honest about its attitude. I would like to see Wellesley College, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Mills, and the University of Minnesota—among the more extreme examples—print the following announcement on the first page of their bulletins:
“We will help your daughter discover the extent to which she has been in complicity with the patriarchy. We will encourage her to reconstruct herself through dialogue with us. She may become enraged and chronically offended. She will very likely reject the religious and moral codes you raised her with. She may well distance herself from family and friends. She may change her appearance, and even her sexual orientation. She may end up hating you (her father) and pitying you (her mother). After she has completed her reeducation with us, you will certainly be out tens of thousands of dollars and very possibly be out one daughter as well.”
Here’s a Washington University women’s studies professor, Joyce Trebilcot, admitting to this feminist indoctrination:
“If the classroom situation is very heteropatriarchal—a large beginning class of 50 to 60 students, say, with few feminist students—I am likely to define my task as largely one of recruitment … of persuading students that women are oppressed.”
Do you think that feminism and the resultant over-liberalization of America’s colleges and universities may be one of the reasons why conservatives are so supportive of Donald Trump?
A recent poll shows that few Americans say conservatives can speak freely on college campuses. One passage reveals this support for Trump:
“If you’re a Republican or lean Republican, you’re unabashedly wrong, they shut you down,” said Rhonda Baker, 60, of Goldsboro, North Carolina, who voted for former President Donald Trump and has a son in college. “If they hold a rally, it’s: ‘The MAGA’s coming through.’ It’s: ‘The KKK is coming through.’”
Feminism Has Helped Create Donald Trump
Whether or not you accept what I’ve said above, you should recognize that feminism has helped create Donald Trump and that he, conservative men who “complain about attacks on traditional masculinity”, as well as the many men’s rights advocates and women of the manosphere are all reactions to six decades of feminist tyranny.
The best proof I can offer is a 2018 article by Andrew Sullivan in New York magazine, #MeToo and the Taboo Topic of Nature. Sullivan does a marvelous job showing how “idiot feminist hypocrisies” described above have helped in the rise of Donald Trump. If you haven’t clicked any of the links in this letter to you, I can’t suggest strongly enough that you read Sullivan’s article and click the links in it to fully understand the anti-feminist tidal wave that is coming.
“All differences between the sexes, we are now informed, are a function of the age-old oppression of women by men, of the “patriarchy” that enforces this subjugation, and of the power structures that mandate misogyny. All differences between the genders, we are told, are a function not of nature but of sexism. In fact, we are now informed by the latest generation of feminists, following the theories of Michel Foucault, that nature itself is a “social construction” designed by men to oppress women. It doesn’t actually exist. It’s merely another tool of male power and must be resisted.”
“They know enough not to push their argument into places where it will seem to be, quite obviously, ridiculous. But it is strikingly obvious that for today’s progressives, humans are the sole species on this planet where gender differentiation has no clear basis in nature, science, evolution, or biology. This is where they are as hostile to Darwin as any creationist.”
“And when left-feminism denies nature’s power, ignores testosterone, and sees all this behavior as a function entirely of structural patriarchal oppression, it is going to overreach. It is going to misunderstand. And it is going to alienate a lot of people. If most men are told that what they are deep down is, in fact, “problematic” if not “toxic,” they are going to get defensive, and with good reason. And they are going to react. So, by the way, are the countless women who do not see this kind of masculinity as toxic, who want men to be different, who are, in fact, deeply attracted to the core aggression of the human male, and contemptuous of the latest orthodoxy from Brooklyn.”
“And men, especially young men in this environment, will begin to ask questions about why they are now routinely seen as a “problem,” and why their sex lives are now fair game for any journalist. And because our dialogue is now so constrained, and the fact of natural sexual differences so actively suppressed by the academy and the mainstream media, they will find the truths about nature in other contexts. They will stumble across alt-right websites that deploy these truths to foment an equal and opposite form of ideology, soaked in actual misogyny, and become convinced that every sexual interaction is a zero-sum battlefield. They will see this as a war between the genders, not as a way to advance the freedom of both. They will fight back, and in this tribalized culture, the conflict will intensify. Suppress debate, ban ideas from civil conversation, and you won’t abolish these ideas. You will hand them to the worst bigots and give them credibility.”
Ms. Emba, again, with all due respect, you and the rest of The Washington Post’s staff need to turn your crap detectors back on.
Before the tidal wave hits.