Imagine this scenario.
Your ancestors have lived in Britain for centuries, most likely for millennia. They were not the landowners or politicians or empire-builders or slave-traders. They were just the ordinary people who ploughed the fields, milked the cows, worked down the mines and in factories, and who went off to fight in whatever futile war the government told them to go and fight in.
Your father is a minicab driver and your mother works in a factory. They divorce when you are a baby, so you never have a proper father figure growing up. Nobody ever teaches you how to swim or ride a bicycle or defend yourself.
You were born with Attention Deficit Disorder (the inattentive type, not the hyperactive type), but nobody notices this until you are thirty years old, so it never gets treated.
You grow up in the capital city, in an area where one third of the inhabitants are indigenous white British people. At school, and among people your own age, you belong to a racial minority. Your ethnic group is outnumbered by Pakistanis. In the mid-1990s, long before any war on terror, groups like Al-Muhajiroun are walking your streets, sticking up propaganda saying that Islam is the future for Britain.
You do not fit in well with the rest of your community. You are not particularly interested in street music, television, gambling or football. You are artistically minded. You are a pleasant, good-natured boy who wants to learn. For this reason, you are bullied at school.
Your school is a shithole, where your education is constantly disrupted by other people’s antisocial behaviour. The choice of subjects is poor. You would like to learn German, or maybe Spanish. But the only choice of foreign languages is French or Urdu. You pick French. It is taught parrot-fashion, with no explanation of how grammatical tenses work, so after five years you still don’t understand French.
You go to university, where almost everybody comes from small monocultural towns, has the same politically correct liberal-leftist opinions, and is middle-class. Some of these people have never even met a Muslim or a black person before. But they are all experts on racism, apparently.
You try your best to make friends with these people, and you really do want to be able to like and respect them, but most of their conversations at some point involve them trying to prove that they are morally virtuous people who are not at all racist, sexist or homophobic. They are all desperate to be accepted and are hugely concerned with what others think of them, whereas you couldn't care less.
None of these people really interest you.
You struggle at university because of your Attention Deficit Disorder, but you scrape a second-class degree in English Literature. You have no idea how to get a career. There is nothing that particularly interests you apart from reading and writing poetry. You make money by working in shops and bars. The best job you ever have is working for some archaeologists, scrubbing mud off bits of old pottery in a bucket of water with a toothbrush.
You have nothing substantial in common with anybody you have ever met. You have never met a woman who you can really relate to. You remain single and lonely for years. Eventually you move back to London and meet a working-class girl who is artistically minded and doesn’t just spout propaganda from the Guardian. It seems to be true love. However, she has a serious psychotic illness. She doesn’t explain this to you. You have a petty argument and she never speaks to you again. You try to patch things up with her, but she just ignores you, sends her father to your house to threaten you, and calls the police. Everyone tells you to simply move on and find somebody else. But there isn't anybody else.
There isn't anybody else, because you are surrounded by self-righteous conformists who are constantly trying to prove that their opinions are the correctest ones possible.
Various people also tell you that threats of domestic violence made by women should never be taken seriously (no matter how big or psychotic a woman is), whereas similar threats made by men (in retaliation and self-defence) are unacceptable and immoral.
(So the breakup was YOUR fault, apparently).
By now you feel completely alienated from the rest of society. You start to go off the rails and end up, at the age of thirty, living in a squatted building, snorting ketamine every day and eating food which you scavenged from supermarket dustbins. You are unemployed and struggling to find work of any kind.
It’s at this point that a bunch of middle-class Feminists turn up and tell you that you are “privileged”.
Yes, apparently you are more privileged than these well-brought-up, well-supported, well-adjusted, healthy middle-class Feminists, because you have a penis.
Even though this is Western civilisation in the twenty-first century, where women possess exactly the same rights as men, men are still much more privileged than women, you see. Even though discrimination is illegal in this society, even though it is illegal to pay somebody less because of their gender, even though companies are unlikely to hire men to do the same job for more money, so it doesn’t make any logical sense that women would be doing the same job for less money, even though there are just as many problems in society that disproportionately affect men as affect women, for example much higher rates of workplace death, much lower rates of child custody, and much higher pressure to succeed leading to much higher rates of suicide, women are still vastly less privileged than men, apparently, and men, including you, must apologise and pay for this.
Also, according to these middle-class Feminists, you are privileged because of your skin colour. You are privileged because of your cultural heritage. This isn’t the USA or Australia, this isn’t a country which white people stole from natives who were there before them. This is Britain. This is Europe. This is white people’s homeland, where they have lived for millennia. And the fact that people with the same skin colour as you, who have lived in this country for millennia, possess on average more socio-economic power than people who have lived here for sixty years, means that you are “privileged”.
You are so privileged, apparently, that you ought to be ashamed of who you are and where you come from. You ought to be ashamed of your maleness, and should try to be more like a female. You should be ashamed of your whiteness, and should try to be more like a black person. And no, this isn’t sexist or racist, apparently, because it is impossible to be sexist towards a man, or racist towards a cracker.
You should enthusiastically welcome Muslim migrants into the country. When jihadist terrorists blow people up at pop concerts or on trains, or cut people’s heads off in pubs, you have to just shrug it off as the price we have to pay for living in a wonderful, free, open, diverse society.
Even though you have always unquestioningly respected women, you still don’t respect them enough, apparently, and you are not allowed to use words like ‘cunt’, ‘twat’, ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’ as pejoratives. Women however are perfectly entitled to continue using words like ‘prick’, ‘bollocks’, ‘tosser’ and ‘wanker’ as pejoratives.
Any kind of masculine behaviour is morally wrong. Sitting with your legs more than twenty centimetres apart is morally wrong. You must never do this. It is a huge problem.
Every kind of feminine behaviour, meanwhile, is brilliant.
It is not acceptable for men to make disparaging remarks about a woman's physical appearance. But it's fine for women to mock men about their penis size. This isn't a problem.
You must stop “mansplaining”. This is when a man talks down to a woman by explaining things in a patronising manner. It is only men who do this, you see, never women, and men only do it to women, never to other men. This is because all men belong to a clandestine brotherhood called “The Patriarchy”, which seeks to hold women back in all areas of society and bring them down.
In spite of all these demands made by Feminists that men must talk, sit, urinate and generally behave more like women, women have every right to choose aggressive, chauvinistic, incredibly masculine men as their sexual partners. This is not hypocritical, apparently. Women can sleep with whoever they want.
This is how it is, say the middle-class Feminists, and you must do what they say. If you don’t agree, then you are a misogynist, and a racist, and a bigot, and a far-right white male supremacist. And you are very stupid and uneducated and not worth speaking to.
Now then.
Imagine that everything I have just said has been the reality of your life.
How would you feel about Feminism?
