Wake Up

One of the more disturbing reports came from the American Psychological Association, which released a set of guidelines ‘to help psychologists work with men and boys’ in which aspects of traditional masculinity were condemned as ‘harmful’. Specifically, it stated that male traits like ‘stoicism’, ‘competitiveness’, ‘achievement’, ‘eschewal of the appearance of weakness’, ‘adventure’ and ‘risk’ should be discarded in favour of finding potentially positive aspects in traits like ‘courage’ and ‘leadership’. It basically implied that a lot of the common ideologies surrounding masculinity can lead to problems elsewhere in the social sphere.

As David French, a writer for the National Review, put it in a withering response to the report, ‘The assault on traditional masculinity – while liberating to men who don’t fit traditional norms – is itself harmful to the millions of young men who seek to be physically and mentally tough, to rise to challenges, and demonstrate leadership under pressure. The assault on traditional masculinity is an assault on their very natures. Are boys disproportionately adventurous? Are they risk-takers? Do they feel a need to be strong? Do they often by default reject stereotypically “feminine” characteristics? Yes, yes, yes and yes.’

One of the very worst things about radical feminism is the scourge of pathetic male virtue-signallers that urge them on. As an obvious (or so I thought) tongue-in-cheek joke on International Men’s Day two years ago, I tweeted, ‘Happy #InternationalMensDay! Stay strong lads, we’re not illegal – yet.’

Most people reacted in the way I would react if someone else had tweeted that – by laughing. Others weren’t so amused, bombarding me with hateful abuse about my supposed ‘toxic masculinity’. A man named Box Brown, who has a verified Twitter account and claims to be a New York Times-bestselling cartoonist, replied simply, ‘Die.’ How laughably hypocritical; this angry little clown races to attack what he presumably perceives to be my aggressive maleness – yet does so by saying he wants me dead.

While I may have joked about International Men’s Day, of course I understand and appreciate there is a very serious side to it too. The stats tell the grim story: 76 per cent of suicides are by men, 85 per cent of homeless people are men, 70 per cent of homicide victims are men, men serve 64 per cent longer in prison and are 3.4 times more likely to be imprisoned than women when both committed the same crime. And wars are still fought by male-dominated armed forces. So, it’s not all a patriarchal bed of roses being a man.

There is also no doubt women have historically been treated unfairly in terms of equality, and that many women continue to be treated unfairly. I also fully accept that women have been subjected to far more harassment, sexual abuse and domestic violence than men. That is where the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements have performed a valuable public service in highlighting and exposing genuinely bad, unacceptable and in some cases criminal behaviour. In fact, I don’t know any of my male friends who wouldn’t agree with that.

However, what I refuse to accept is that all masculinity is therefore now automatically a bad thing, or that being a man is suddenly something to be ashamed about. Nor do I believe that most women actually want the kind of emasculated, papoose-clad, weeping, permanently apologising doormats that radical feminists are trying to make us become. And once again, a very important and legitimate movement – feminism – has been hijacked and its momentum redirected towards something as trivial and misguided as a war on masculinity, or on a beloved pop culture figure like Bond.

Let me therefore offer some friendly advice from a man who loves women. We don’t want to be told we can’t appreciate a female star’s beauty because it’s offensive to feminists, then see feminists like Ellen DeGeneres openly objectifying famous men’s bodies at awards shows – to no complaint. We don’t want to be informed that James Bond has to stop hitting on women because it’s now deemed politically incorrect, especially as none of the women he ever hits on seem to be anything but ecstatically thrilled about it. We don’t want to be disapprovingly frowned at for opening doors for women, or standing up for them on trains or when they walk into a room, or paying the bill for dinner if we want to.

Chivalry remains a good, not oppressive thing. We want to pride ourselves on being a protective modern-day hunter and provider, in whatever capacity that manifests itself to the benefit of a woman or family – without promptly being labelled a ‘dinosaur’ or ‘caveman’. Some of us – in fact, most of us, I suspect – like to preserve the right not to be seen blubbing in public every five minutes just to prove we’re in touch with our emotional side. In short, we’d just like to still enjoy being men, if that’s OK? Just as we’d like women to enjoy being women.

Those seeking to ignore this advice do so at their peril. For 30 years, Gillette’s commercials had unashamedly celebrated men and masculinity. They used the tagline ‘The best a man can get’ to persuade people like me to part with large sums of money for their expensive shaving blades and foam. We watched them and felt good about being male. Not just because they made us aspire to be a winner and successful achiever, but because they also encouraged us to be a good father, son, husband and friend. As a result of this consistently upbeat and positive marketing style, Gillette grew into the most successful razor firm in history, generating annual sales of $6 billion a year. I was one of its most loyal customers, buying Gillette products for over three decades. I didn’t do so because their stuff is significantly better than their main competitors. (I’ve tried them all, and they’re not especially.) I did so because I liked Gillette’s brand and what I thought it stood for. Then, suddenly and inexplicably, in another depressing act of corporate virtue-signalling, Gillette decided to turn on men, and specifically ‘toxic masculinity’.

In January 2019, the company released a new commercial, a short film entitled ‘Believe’, with the new tagline, ‘The best men can be’. Gone was the celebration of masculinity. In its place came an ugly, vindictive two-minute homage to everything that’s bad about masculinity. The film asked, ‘Is this the best a man can get?’ before flashing up images alluding to sexual harassment, sexist behaviour, the #MeToo movement and bullying – interspersed with a patronising series of educational visual entreaties about what men should do in various unpleasant situations. The subliminal message was clear: men, all men, are bad, shameful people who need to be directed in how to be better people. It was truly one of the most pathetic, virtue-signalling things I’ve ever endured watching.

Gillette said the purpose of the new campaign was to urge men to hold each other ‘accountable’ for bad behaviour. Right, because the one thing that’s not happening right now in the world is men being held accountable for bad behaviour! I don’t seek to diminish the importance of the #MeToo campaign, which has shone an important and long-overdue light on completely unacceptable sexual harassment, bullying and abuse. But why should all men be tarred with the same monstrous brush in the way this Gillette campaign sets out to do? It is the assumption that we are automatically culpable – that we have done something wrong by just existing as men – which I find so offensive. Particularly as, if a commercial was made with the same inference about women being collectively awful until they proved otherwise, outrage would soon ensue.

There was only one thing Gillette really wanted to achieve with this new campaign, and that was to emasculate the very men it had spent 30 years persuading to be masculine. As one male customer’s Twitter response, which quickly went viral, said, ‘Just used a Gillette razor blade to cut off my testicles. No more toxic masculinity for me. Thanks Gillette!’

He was not alone in his fury. The YouTube version of the ad was watched many millions of times but attracted ten times as many ‘dislikes’ as ‘likes’, fast turning ‘Believe’ into one of the least popular commercials in US history. Gillette – which believes so much in women’s rights that at the time of this commercial it had just two women on its board of nine directors – thought it was being clever by tapping into the radical feminist assault on men and masculinity. In fact, it was being unutterably dumb.

In a massive global two-fingered response, Gillette’s male product sales collapsed in the space of just a few months, causing a staggering $8 BILLION write-down in the company’s value and a humiliating U-turn back to macho commercials starring burly firemen who risk their lives. Gillette learned the hard way that most men don’t actually want to be snivelling, apologetic little snowflakes.

Somewhere in this whole masculinity debate, common sense got lost. I don’t know any woman who really wants her man to be anything but masculine, as the word was intended. Yet now they’re being encouraged by companies like Gillette to find the whole concept of masculinity repellent and to think that being ‘masculine’ means to damagingly suppress emotions, maintain a fake impression of macho hardness, and to use violence as a means to illustrate physical power and gender superiority. What a load of bollocks.

FRIDAY 17 JANUARY

The actor Laurence Fox is at the centre of a firestorm after appearing on the Question Time panel last night and getting into a fierce debate with a mixed-race audience member who called press coverage of Meghan Markle ‘racist’.

‘Let’s be really clear about what this is, and call it by its name,’ said Rachel Boyle. ‘It’s racism and she’s been torn to pieces.’

‘It’s not racism,’ replied Fox.

‘It absolutely is,’ Boyle insisted.

‘We’re the most tolerant, lovely country in Europe,’ Fox said. ‘It’s so easy to throw the charge of racism at everybody … and it’s really starting to get boring now.’

‘What worries me about your comment is you are a white privileged male,’ said Boyle, a comment that prompted widespread groans and boos from other audience members.

‘Oh God,’ sighed Fox, ‘I can’t help what I am, I was born like this, it’s an immutable characteristic. So, to call me a white privileged male is to be racist. You’re being racist.’

Fox then said racism should be called out when it is ‘seen, when it’s obvious and when it’s there’ and that ‘throwing racism around’ was dangerous.

There’s been a furious reaction to the clash, led by Femi Oluwole, a prominent pro-European activist, who tweeted, ‘So when Laurence Fox calls it racist to point out that he’s a white privileged male, when he’s trying to downplay racism, even though, as a white privileged male, he has even less of an experience of the adversity racism causes than I do as a black privileged male. Apparently, we should only call out racism when it’s seen and obvious … So subtle racism behind closed doors … Absolutely fine. Cheers Laurence Fox!’

This struck me as an absurd overreaction and a direct threat to his freedom of speech. Fox was right to say the Meghan media coverage hasn’t been driven by racism. He was also right to say that he has no control over his skin colour, and for someone to use that as a stick to suppress his view of racism is in itself racist and denies him the right to express a freely held opinion.

That’s not to say there aren’t racists in Britain – of course there are. Sadly, we saw all too many of them rear their ugly heads in a horrible manner during the Brexit campaign. But that doesn’t make Britain a racist country – recent polls do suggest we’re one of the least racist and most tolerant countries in Europe – nor does it mean media criticism of a high-profile black person is necessarily driven by racism. And if the woke brigade use Twitter to cancel and silence anyone and anything they deem to be racist, even when it’s patently not the case, they are furthering divisions and making things worse, not better.

Laurence Fox has been hounded mercilessly since Question Time aired, in the most disgusting and vicious way. All because he refused to accept the media coverage of Meghan Markle has been racist. He may not have personally experienced the kind of racism a black person endures, but that surely doesn’t disqualify him from discussing it. Just as Annie Lennox said about feminism, for true racial equality to succeed it will need white people to come on the journey too, and for that to happen open discussion and debate are absolutely critical. That’s what a proper liberal would call for, isn’t it?

Even more worryingly, there have now been calls to ‘cancel’ Fox’s acting career. And incredibly, they’ve come loudest from minority representatives of the actors’ union Equity, which fired off a series of accusations on Twitter against Fox, saying he wanted to ‘berate and bully women of colour attempting to discuss issues of race and gender discrimination’, was ‘playing to the gallery, a populist tirade, with women of colour being used as cannon fodder’ and ‘occupied a highly advantaged position’ while trying to ‘damn any recognition of that privilege as the very racism he claims is exaggerated when people of colour try to discuss it’. This is such a sinister attack on free speech. And where does the logic of it leave us? Can nobody now have an opinion on anything we haven’t personally experienced?

‘Cancel culture’, as it’s become known, is one of the very worst things about modern society, and it’s driven by the same woke liberals who profess to stand for tolerance. They would do well to listen to Barack Obama, who is celebrated by liberals worldwide but finds cancel culture ridiculous and harmful. Speaking in Chicago at his own Obama Foundation Summit in 2019, he warned, ‘This idea of purity and that you’re never compromised and you’re always politically woke – you should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting might love their kids. One danger I see with young people, particularly on college campuses … there is this sense sometimes of the way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people and that’s enough. Like, if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right, or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself. That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change. If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far.’

SATURDAY 18 JANUARY

The Queen has sensationally ordered Harry and Meghan to drop their HRH titles and repay the £2.4 million of public cash spent on Frogmore Cottage, as part of their ‘severance deal’ with the royal family. Harry will even have to give up all his military titles. It’s being billed as an ‘amicable settlement’ but it’s very clear there’s nothing remotely amicable about it. This is a bitter divorce, and like King Edward VIII, Harry’s giving everything up for his wife – a woman who seems to specialise in dropping people.

‘Only surprised it took her so long to get Harry to ditch his family, the monarchy, the military and his country,’ I tweeted. ‘What a piece of work.’ Feminists reacted with fury. TV presenter Beverley Turner said the phrase ‘piece of work’ is ‘almost uniquely aimed at women … its [sic] dehumanising and belittling.’

‘Oh Beverley, cool your “SEXISM!” jets. A “piece of work” is non-gender-specific,’ I replied. ‘People say it about me … often for very good reason.’

One of the many irritations of radical activists is their fervent desire to banish perfectly anodyne words because they’ve been weaponised. These PC language cops don’t just want to control how we think but also how we speak. By playing the victim to common-usage words, women are surely being the opposite of empowered. It just makes them look weak, and slightly pathetic. I’ve been called far worse than any of this, for a very long time, and often found it hugely empowering. It also, again, takes the focus away from very real feminist issues like the ongoing gender pay gap, which was 17.3 per cent in the UK in 2019. By ranting away about trivial nonsense like banning words, at the expense of meaningful structural change in the way women get paid, feminists shoot themselves in their stilettos.

TUESDAY 21 JANUARY

A fascinating debate erupted today over the word ‘woke’. It began when Guardian journalist Steve Rose claimed it had been weaponised by the right, like the phrase ‘politically correct’ before it, so it’s now come to be interpreted as the opposite of what it was originally intended to mean.

‘Technically,’ he wrote, ‘going by the Merriam-Webster dictionary’s definition, woke means “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)” but today we are more likely to see it being used as a stick with which to beat people who aspire to such values, often wielded by those who don’t recognise how un-woke they are, or are proud of the fact.’ He added, ‘Criticising “woke culture” has become a way of claiming victim status for yourself rather than acknowledging that more deserving others hold that status. It has gone from a virtue signal to a dog whistle. The language has been successfully co-opted – but as long as the underlying injustices remain, new words will emerge to describe them.’

Rose is right about what’s happened to the word ‘woke’ but not about the culprits. It’s the wokies who have wrecked their own word by being so absurdly illiberal to the point where even many liberals like me find them laughable.

Freddie Gray in the Spectator responded to Rose by saying the word ‘woke’ has degenerated into ‘a meaningless term of abuse’. He argued, ‘The whole idea of being woke – suddenly alert – to racial or social injustice is not real, and never was,’ and went on to say, ‘and therefore the movement against it is similarly fake. Right-wingers have the same concept and call it “redpilling”; in both cases, it means a sort of lobotomised enlightenment for people who only enjoy feeling aggrieved. Scratch the surface – go beneath the endless viral spats between trolls on social media – and you realise that nobody means what they are saying. Nobody is actually redpilled. And nobody, come to that, is woke.’

Gray was right that these labels on both sides of the political divide have become tribal partisan badges more than a reflection of genuinely held beliefs. He was also spot on about what drives wokery, which in many instances is just blind allegiance to issues regardless of any real intellectual rigour, and a desire to be liked.

‘Many of my friends spend hours virtue-signalling (another word that is fast approaching redundancy) on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram,’ he said. ‘But if I ever ask them about it, they’ll explain that they only shared the sanctimonious meme because everyone in their office did, or they just thought that is what you have to do. […] At some point the mask becomes the man, as in the story of the Happy Hypocrite. We are what we emote. If we spend our lives hectoring and censoring each other online, that will eventually bleed into everyday life. But it’s useful sometimes to remember, as we all gorge on offence culture every day, that most people don’t mean it, and nobody is really woke.’

I don’t think that last point is true. There are many people fighting for racial and social justice who are principled, decent human beings that are knowledgeable about the issues and prepared to engage people in democratic debate about how best to fix the problems.

THURSDAY 23 JANUARY

China has now identified the mystery pneumonia-like disease in Wuhan as a new SARS-like coronavirus. It has already killed 17 people and is causing so much concern that the entire city of 11 million people has been shut down to try to contain it.

The World Health Organization, having tweeted on 14 January that there was no evidence of ‘human-to-human transmission’ with the virus, now says that is happening and has recommended avoidance of large gatherings, isolating infected people and extensive hand washing as the best way to combat its spread. It all sounds rather worrying, but in a statement to the House of Commons, Health Secretary Matt Hancock reassured MPs that it presents little danger to the UK. He said Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty has advised that the risk to the UK population is ‘low’ and that ‘while there is an increased likelihood that cases may arise in this country, we are well prepared and well equipped to deal with them’.

Hancock added that the UK ‘is one of the first countries in the world to have developed an accurate test for this coronavirus and Public Health England has confirmed to me that it can scale up this test so we are in a position to deal with cases in this country if necessary’. And he declared, ‘The public can be assured that the whole of the UK is always well-prepared for these types of outbreaks.’

In response, on behalf of the Opposition, Shadow Minister for Public Health Sharon Hodgson said, ‘There is a chance that a global pandemic can be avoided if governments across the world take the right measures in a timely fashion.’

SUNDAY 26 JANUARY

The government has continued refusing to put up any ministers for interview on GMB. It’s all been very petty, but I assumed the ban would be lifted now there appears to be a rather serious global health crisis developing with the coronavirus from China.

‘Tell the government we expect them to put up the Health or Home Secretary tomorrow,’ I emailed the GMB production team this afternoon. ‘It is their duty to appear and talk about this.’

‘We don’t have anybody to put to you for tomorrow,’ came the response from Number 10, with the patronising additional aside, ‘Thanks for checking in.’

I was so angry I tweeted, ‘As #coronavirus threatens to hit Britain, we asked the British government to put up a cabinet minister to speak about it & reassure GMB viewers. They said “nobody is available”. Shameful dereliction of duty.’ I copied in Boris Johnson for good measure.

MONDAY 27 JANUARY

Most of the show was dominated by the awful news of US basketball legend Kobe Bryant’s death in a helicopter crash, and a new interview with Thomas Markle in which he emphatically denied the press had been racist to his daughter. We also interviewed a British ex-pat, Ian Thompson, who is locked down in Wuhan and painted a disturbing, almost apocalyptic picture.

‘It’s extremely strange,’ he said, ‘and very scary too. The streets are completely empty, there’s no one walking around, and everyone’s been told to stay in their houses. There’s no transportation anywhere, and all the restaurants, bars and most shops are closed down. Local stores are open at the moment which are being supplied by special trucks coming in. The amount you can get is quite limited because everyone’s rushing and panic buying.’

Susanna and I were both shocked by what he told us. ‘Wuhan’s as big as London,’ she said during the next commercial break. ‘Can you imagine that happening here?’

THURSDAY 30 JANUARY

The WHO today declared the coronavirus – now named Covid-19 (short for Corona Virus Disease 2019) – a ‘global public health emergency’. An hour later, my youngest son Bertie posted a photo to our father and sons WhatsApp group of a man in a full white hazmat suit walking outside his halls at Bristol University.

‘What’s this?’ I asked, assuming it was some kind of student joke meme playing off the news.

‘One of the students has gone down with flu-like symptoms and been taken to hospital,’ he replied. ‘It’s scary, there were people in these suits all over the place. There was an ambulance too. If it’s coronavirus, we’re being sent home.’

‘This thing is no joke,’ my eldest son Spencer replied. ‘Look how fast it’s spreading and watch the movie Contagion.’

I looked at the photo again. It does resemble something out of Contagion – a film about a deadly virus pandemic that ravages the world. But this is obviously very real, and increasingly unsettling.