Programming note: Join me later this evening for another episode of our nightly audio adventure - and the first of this year's Christmas capers - Mystery in White by Jefferson Farjeon. It airs right here at SteynOnline at 7pm North American Eastern - which is midnight Greenwich Mean Time. On Saturday I'll be back for the latest edition of our weekend music show, Mark Steyn on the Town, which airs on Serenade Radio every Saturday at 5pm Greenwich Mean Time - which is 6pm in Western Europe and 12 midday North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.
~Almost every story in the news boils down to the same story: Man is on the endangered species list.
A week ago, I wrote about the so-called "Montreal Massacre" - which happened on the scale it did because the "men" walked away and abandoned their female classmates to their fate. You can't discuss that - not honestly - in the Canadian press, but, over at American Thinker, Eric Utter commented:
Real men, marinating in their 'toxic masculinity,' will stand up for women and say "enough!" as regards 'trans women' in women's bathrooms and locker rooms. And real men, of the toxically masculine variety, would not ignore the gang rapes of innocent young girls that are being committed by 'immigrants.'
No sooner had he written it than a New York jury acquitted of murder 26-year-old Daniel Penny - referred to by the prosecutor throughout the trial as "the white guy". The non-white guy - one Jordan Neely - had entered the subway car and announced to its passengers that "I'm gonna kill everybody".
So Mr Penny acted, and prevented that. It is not for the distant authorities to second-guess his actions. The writ of the state does not run on New York public transit. Just this weekend some guy was shoved onto the southbound tracks at Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center Station in Brooklyn. The same day a 74-year-old man was shoved onto the tracks at the 149th Street-Grand Concourse station in the Bronx. The perp yelled "I didn't do it!" immediately after doing it. In Queens an 82-year-old woman was shoved onto the tracks...
It is pathetic that in a supposed First World city octogenarian ladies cannot ride public transit without wondering if they're going to wind up under the train, and that "Subway Shoves" is now a news category at The New York Post. But the reality is that you're on your own down there, and you shouldn't have to calculate whether the guy who announces that he's gonna kill everybody is just mouthing off or whether he means it. And, if you're an 82-year-old who was "assigned female at birth", it helps to have a Daniel Penny in the vicinity when what passes for civilisation in the contemporary west suddenly dissolves to nothing.
Mr Penny's acquittal is being hailed as some sort of great victory. But, as someone who's been through the New York courts, I wonder. Yes, he's survived and he may even have grounds for "malicious prosecution" - although, like finding any real justice, that's a toughie in New York. But it may well be that the net effect of what happened to the accused is that next time the situation arises there will be those who figure discretion is the better part of valour and maybe they'll sit this one out.
I note also that it is Daniel Penny's fellow 26-year-old who is a hero all over the Internet for assassinating a health-insurance CEO on the Sixth Avenue sidewalk. We are approaching the condition of those excitable Mohammedans: as we used to joke in the early years of the (lost) "war on terror" (and probably can't reprise in today's media), a "moderate Muslim" doesn't want to chop your head off, he just wants to watch and cheer the guy who does. In a society that has de-humanised half the population and incentivised violence against them, you're expected to act as that prosecutor asserted Mr Penny should have done: these guys are just blowing off steam.
For the most part. The CEO slayer is some valedictorian trustiefundie from a prominent family; c'mon, he's not gonna act upon his rhetoric, is he? Brian Thompson, whose impeccably progressive United Health Care covers both penectomies and phalloplasties (which may be why they've no money left for your cancer), will not be the last to discover too late that it's harder than you think to insulate yourself from the pathologies of the age.
To take the two examples of "toxic masculinity" Eric Utter cites above:
It is the official policy of almost all the key institutions throughout the United States and His Majesty's dominions that so pathetically mimic it that, as a practical and increasingly legal matter, there is no such thing as biological sex - that a "man" and "woman" are mere social constructs, and "gender" is just something that is "assigned at birth", and can be just as randomly un-assigned. This will not end well.
Indeed - unlike disputing, say, the divinity of Jesus - it is increasingly difficult to voice any dissent from this official narrative. In May this year, my old friends at The Spectator published a piece by Gareth Roberts on an appearance by Nicola Sturgeon at some literary festival. The former First Minister of Scotland was, in Mr Roberts' words, "interviewed by writer Juno Dawson, a man who claims to be a woman, and so the conversation naturally turned to gender". IPSO, the UK press regulator, ruled that the words were not "inaccurate" but that nevertheless they should not have been published, and required The Spectator to print their decision. You can't say Juno Dawson "claims to be a woman"; she is a woman - as much a woman, as 100 per cent all-woman as, oh, Jane Russell or Gina Lollobrigida.
As I learned during my battles with Canada's "human rights" commissions, the purpose of the investigation is not primarily to get Smith or Jones but pour encourager les autres: the next bloke minded to venture down this path will think again - and certainly his editor will. Keep it to yourself, guys. A dark forbidden thought for when you retreat to your "man cave" in the basement to chug down your tranny beer and watch corporate sports owned by fellows who support all the woke wankery - and maybe check out one of those hubba-hubba beauty pageants where the winning chick is hung like a stallion.
In the old days of "sex changes", ninety per cent were men wanting to be women. A decade or so back, the nature of "sex changes" began to change. Now, legions of sad confused middle-school girls line up to be be rendered breastless and infertile and be transformed into ersatz men - incredibly, phenomenally hirsute, but without a working meat-and-two-veg. Having noted the rise of the bepenised woman, one must, alas, conclude that the accelerating presence of the distaff version may be the more significant portent of the future. The penisless man is the perfect prototype of a world beyond biological sex.
Pseudo-manliness has its mirror in the pseudo-feminism of our age. Little girls get stabbed - and the people who get indignant about it on the Internet are sent to gaol. Child gang-rape in every town up and down the spine (so to speak) of England barely makes the papers - and Fleet Street instead (as I wrote a decade back) gets "worked up over ancient disc-jockeys who copped a feel on 'Top of the Pops' in 1973 and thereby committed what the illiterate coppers call 'historic' sexual abuse. But, in the face of truly 'historic', truly unprecedented sexual abuse of thousands of English girls day in, day out, year after year, all they can manage is a fatalistic shrug.
Over at The Conservative Woman, Laura Perrins notes the latest example - some "celebrity" I've never heard of, which is no reflection on him; as I told a London cabbie not so long ago, I only know Brit celebs from the Seventies or earlier. "Now you're talkin', mate," he agreed. At any rate, Gregg Wallace is a judge on "MasterChef" and made the mistake of initially dismissing his accusers as "a handful of middle-class women of a certain age".
Talk about missing the point: that's why he's all over the front pages, and the Pakistani rape gangs aren't. As Laura Perrins writes:
What is glaringly obvious here is that if you are a middle-class woman of a certain age working in the media you count; if you are a white working-class teenage girl in Rotherham or Oxford you do not. You are seen as trash by the police and sacrificial victims on the altar of Diversity is our Strength by the political establishment. Therefore should you have your entire childhood stolen and your adulthood ruined because you are brutally and repeatedly raped and dehumanised by gangs of Asian/Muslim grooming men, so be it.
If you are a middle-class media woman of a certain age and you are sexually harassed on the set of MasterChef, it is literally, quite literally, hold the front page. Polly Vernon was given two entire pages to tell us all how she was harassed over the years at work (the stealth boast). I don't remember a single girl of the thousands who were brutalised in English towns being given this much space to tell us their stories...
And, as Laura points out, in an era of who-whom Stalinism reborn as "identity politics", Gregg Wallace - like Daniel Penny - is one of those it's safe to hate:
The other reason Gregg Wallace dominated the front pages is because he is the perfect villain: a white working-class geezer done good. So the media will go after him. But if you are an Asian man who treats white working-class girls as trash, something to be raped, passed around to other Asian men, urinated on and kept in a cage, you are rarely exposed as the child rapist and child trafficker that you are.
There is not a lot to be said for a society that will not lift a finger to protect its most vulnerable. In fact, there is nothing to be said. Whatever has brought us to this point has been percolating a long time. But the dénouement is near. We are moving from gradually to suddenly.
~In this eighth year of The Mark Steyn Club, we're very appreciative of all those who signed up in our first flush and are still eager to be here as we cruise on (with two indomitable survivors of the child-rape epidemic among our shipmates) towards our first decade. We thank you all. For more information on the Club, see here.
