With critical theory and intersectionality permeating the public narrative of Western nations, and their focus on the oppression of identity groups by other collectives, one would think that the women of the world were on to a roll of good things. The “patriarchy” in the Western nations has been put in its place, toxic White males are being cancelled left, right and centre – or emasculated by their female partners (think Johnson and Windsor) – and every pro-female and pro-feminist policy and ideology has the ear, approval and support of almost every ruling group, academia, celebrity entertainer and journalist in the West. And the pressure is unrelenting as every last hold-out of discrimination is identified and eradicated. In the West, at least.
But that is not how others without a Western cultural heritage see it. While “Remember the Birkenhead!” may still resonate with a significant portion of the Western population, its ideology of children first, women next and men last simply does not hold true outside of Western nations. For most of the Asia and Africa, regardless of what the “official” policies may claim, this order of precedence is unimaginable. Even in much of Latin America, which shares with the West a Christian background, it is usually invoked only in word and not in deed. The Birkenhead formula was as much the product of Protestant Evangelicalism in Britain, especially the Wesleyan, Anglican and Salvation Army revivals, as of any secularist influences – but where the rather feudally oriented mediaeval established churches were a primary cultural influence (Latin America, Southern and Eastern Europe) the sentiments it was based on was simply nowhere to be found, historically, culturally or politically.
Yet even in the West, it seems the political “liberalism” (now more of a leftism) has not only often failed to deliver but has actually so over-reached itself that it appears in reality to be making women and girls even more vulnerable than they were – think of biological males competing with females in sport, and biological males permitted into gender-defined spaces traditionally reserved for women: ablutions, spas, resort facilities, etc. These “rights” remove privacy protections from females of all ages, and unsurprisingly have earned the indignation and ire of at least the earlier corps or 1960’s feminists.
One can also think of the good-intentions of European governments banning Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), child marriages, and forced marriages (e g Sweden and the UK.) However, because these are practiced primarily by immigrant communities, that typical liberalism that refuses to judge their cultural practices has led to virtually no arrests over the last decade being made for any of these offences by local authorities – whereas they are clearly rife in certain Asian and African immigrant communities in particular. In the US state of Minnesota apparently 99% of Somalian women have undergone FGM, while not a single charge has been laid as the state has not outlawed it because of cultural sensitivity.
The virtue-signalling activists and lawmakers feel good about it – tough if you are a young woman, young girl, sportswoman or parent protecting the privacy of their female offspring.
But why in a wider context 2021 is a bad year in particular for women and girls can be distinguished in the following three contexts:
- Trafficking across open borders
In an earlier post on this blog I indicated that the change from Trump to Biden in the White House should be evaluated by Christians (who are by definition truth-seekers) by identifying those parties Biden’s election would gratify most. And not least among them are the human traffickers of Central America and the United States. And in truth this nefarious business has multiplied hundredfold as the southern border of the United States has been thrown open with few if any checks and balances as to the welfare of the masses streaming to and though the open gates. From leaving their homes in Central America (and now even further afield, reports indicate asylum seekers from 99 nations around the world have been identified at the US Border) the method of choice is to pay human traffickers to conduct them to and through the border – or if not the adults or men, then their unaccompanied children or womenfolk. And so literally hundreds of thousands arrive at the border having undergone the most brutal abuse from their “guides”, the so-called Coyotes, during the long weeks it takes to complete the journey. On arrival in the United States many are admitted to the overcrowded, unhygienic and largely unsupervised facilities set up earlier by the US government for a much smaller number of arrivals, where there is little or no protection from their on-going abuse by their fellows. However a significant number are simply handed over to local US traffickers, mainly labour or sex traffickers (with a large market for children in particular), for a life of unrelenting abuse where for instance girls as young as 10 to 14 years are expected to “service” up to two dozen male clients a day for the benefit of their handlers. All this takes place in open US cities governed mainly by liberals who pay lip service to the welfare of women and children in their ideology. It does not take much research on the internet and in the literature to find substantiation of these realities; they are rife and well documented.
Most women in Latin America live in a male-dominated culture. In many communities the culture of “macho” males expects the womenfolk to submit to their primacy in every aspect of domestic and social life. This New World reality does not present itself much differently to the relationship between men and women in most Islamic nations, many South and East Asian nations, and throughout Africa. Indeed, the nations where women and children enjoy the most freedoms, autonomy and legal protection are precisely those Western nations (and Israel as a Middle Eastern outlier) where the single most influential public narrative is how toxic their males, the Patriarchy, have made their culture. So when groups of people from the cultures who do not offer much protection for their women and children (among whom Remember the Birkenhead! would be preposterous) arrive and settle in large homogenous blocs in Western nations, they are not usually confronted with the need to conform to Western culture with its protections, as this (the liberals insist) would be imposing White cultural imperialism upon them. And so ghettoes such as the Somalian Little Mogadishu in Minneapolis come into existence, where women and children from regions that offer them neither protection nor freedom, find themselves living in cultural enclaves where for them nothing has changed and their new hosts will not compel their menfolk to let them live free… So FGM, forced marriage, honour killings, subservient domestic and social roles and restrictive garb are their unquestioned lifetime lot.
2021 has been a poor year for the women and children who have sought with their families to escape to a land of freedom – and have enjoyed nothing but soul-destroying abuse since their departure and no hope for its end in their new home.
- The collapse of Afghanistan
The Taliban faction of militant Islam came to rule post-Soviet Afghanistan with a rod of iron, imposing an extreme form of Sharia law and culture in which there was no place for women outside of a home ruled by a male patriarch. To aspire, strive or venture outside of this was an insult to their Prophet and religion and attracted the most vile reprisals and abuse. Within these homes they were subject to the whims, abuse and exploitation of the patriarch and his cronies, a horror to which there was no limit and from which no recourse or protection. While few Islamic nations would understand or choose to follow the Birkenhead call, the Taliban have to be the social group most diametrically opposed to and distant from that sentiment.
The post- 9/11 invasion by Western forces ended this Taliban rule and created a 20 year hiatus in which many, especially urban women were granted opportunity to flourish outside of their homes. Society took on a veneer of Western tolerance despite the corruption and rapacity of the new Western-sponsored rulers. A generation reached adulthood that had never known the restrictions and horrors of the Taliban. Many women flourished in a full range of achievements previously unimaginable to them, although everyday normal to women in Western countries – despite the “chains and injustice” of these spoilt Western women’s so-called toxic male patriarchy.
President Trump came to power partly on the basis of his promise to end American military adventures overseas, misguided attempts at regime- and culture-change – and to make prosperous allies start paying for their own security and military protection. In 2020 he finalised an agreement with Taliban and Afghan leaders to end the presence of American troops in Afghanistan by May 2021. In typical Trumpian fashion and to the horror of the liberal orthodoxy and establishment, he spoke a language that aggressive pre-modern barbarians understood. This was a man who had launched an aerial attack on a Syrian airport occupied by Russian aircraft on the same night he sat at dinner with the President of China. The rogues of the world took notice and from that time took the man seriously (while of course his sophisticated Western allies sneered at his crassness), and the aggressive tendencies of Islamist, Russian, Chinese and North Korean expansionists were held in abeyance by the amoral warlords, hoping that the Trump tenure would be short. Trump made it clear to the Taliban: we will leave, leaving behind nobody and nothing American that you dare touch, and we will hold you to a restrictive contract – cross any line we draw in this agreement, launch any attack or occupation of areas we forbid you, and we will most certainly hit you hard in your homes and hearths. In hindsight, and taking stock of the calibre of the people involved, America under Biden might have done well to conform to this agreement. But Trump Derangement Syndrome forbade it and today the Taliban are back (after Joe once again stuffed a sure thing up), thousands of Americans are beyond the aid of their military and diplomats, and $83 billion of military equipped has been inherited, in full working order, by the Taliban.
The catastrophe of Biden’s ineptitude has given solace and encouragement to other restrictive Islamic groups, whether paramilitary or governmental, with the inevitable subversion of women’s opportunities across the Islamic world. The sole island of hope for women in the Middle East is Israel, and they know that their previous guarantee in their partnership with the US in the face of genocidal opponents, eroded under Obama and now unlikely to be maintained by Biden, can no longer be relied on. Israel is effectively on its own.
Truly, 2021 is a terrible year for women in Afghanistan, and for millions of other Islamic women, whether in their homelands in Asia and North Africa or as immigrants in the ghettoes of the Western world where woke antipathy to White cultural imperialism protects their menfolk in their abuse.
- The termination in the womb of unborn girl babies
Medical News Today, in a report written on 4th August 2021, notes that in many nations of the world the birth of boys is preferred to that of girls. With the availability of gender identification in the womb and gender-selection in abortion, the birth of girls has been drastically reduced by abortion of the foetuses of girls, with the heavily-populated nations of China and India leaders in this trend. The one-child policy in China, in which the survival of sons was prioritised over daughters, has already provided a caution about social engineering of gender-balance in human procreation. In this nation spoilt, often overweight sons have grown up in a generation of fewer women than men, and lacking the aesthetic or social wherewithal to attract women in marriage are condemned to a solitary life. In less hive-like nations where male frustration is more likely to come to expression in anti-social behaviour, the problem of male majority generations has already become socially problematic.
This indication of a poor evaluation of women in society may not always find expression in the slaughter of female babies before birth, but is made evident in the generally low-esteem in which they are held by cultural leaders, in domestic contexts, and in provision of health and education. The HIV pandemic was rampant in many of these regions and cultures precisely because of the inability of women to control their own sexual life. As many researchers noted of Africa: this is not a continent where a woman’s “No” is of any account at all. That reality is true of large swathes of the so-called developing world, and even of some so-called “liberal” democracies in the West.
There is no indication at all that cultures in which females are seen as inferior are going to change their values, and any hope that powers in the West are going to attempt to prompt them. This 2021 research indicates the application of advances in biological science and technology brings with it little good for the role and status of women. In terms of hope, 2021 is a bad year for women.
- Conclusion
2021 is a bad year for women globally. That they are now slaughtered before birth, completely legally, solely because of their “inferior” and socially unwanted gender, is merely a logical development in misogynistic cultures that have remained unchanged for millennia, cultuers that can now utilise modern technology and biological science to prevent their birth. The so-called “liberalism” of the Western world, now morphing into an authoritarian orthodoxy that one challenges only at personal peril, now offers little or no protection for Western women threatened in their privacy and in their sports and cultural endeavours by biological males claiming the “rights” of female status. Nor does it hold out hope for women trapped in non-Western ghettoes in the West, who suffer identical abuse in identity, role and social stature to women in the homelands at the hands of men protected by woke dislike of “White cultural imperialism.”
Prevalent critical social theories in the West have constructed an intersectionality of oppression and victimhood in which those who have been most likely to assert, protect and promote the rights of girls and women (and who first made the call Remember the Birkenhead! ) figure as the most oppressive, most toxic, most evil, and most hated collective in society. An absurdity which saw feminists marching with radical Islamists protesting Trump and today increasingly sees women in media offering an apologetic for “a gentler Taliban” where the experience of women will be more hopeful. Yet the most privileged position women have ever had, probably in most of human history except for a pocket here and there, has been where the Judaeo-Christian worldview has been maintained and its ethical system practiced. It was under this, on the revival fringe of organised established religion (which tends to revert to feudal values everytime!) that the miracle of the Birkenhead took place – and only in its restoration in the West will there ever again be good years for women.
I am sorry, the outlook for women in the new order emerging from the new globalist narrative is not good – indeed, it is very poor indeed. Remember Afghanistan 2021, it will prove to be a dark moment for women all over the world.
Mathew Clark 