Ladies First:
Steve Moxon’s The Woman Racket

2,324 words

Steve Moxon
The Woman Racket
Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2008

The woman racket is the McCarthyism of the 1990s. — Norman Mailer

Women. You can’t live with ‘em and you can’t kill ‘em. — Mad Dog and Glory

This millennium we have become used to new myths. Islam is a religion of peace, trans people are facing “genocide,” and blacks invented trains, planes, and automobiles while dodging the bullets of a racist police force. These instituted falsehoods come off the production line just as quickly as white liberal professors can assemble them, and the media does the rest. The only criterion for these box-fresh myths is that they should function to the detriment of white, heterosexual, kufr men, preferably Christian. Women, as with so much else, get a pass.

Men have been told for decades that they are oppressive patriarchs, both privileged over and naturally oppressors of women, and that everything from biology to work practices to rape to pornography has been structured around this forced advantage. According to Steve Moxon in The Woman Racket (WR), published in 2008, women have never had it so good; in fact, they are “universally and perennially privileged: over-privileged.” This is changing, as we shall see, but 15 years ago there was no other threat to women than a perceived one from all men. In 2008 the West was too busy with bank defaults to see LGBTQ coming. But WR is a snapshot of its time and an exercise in the debunking of myths.

Prior to WR, Moxon had achieved minor and contentious fame as a whistleblower, in this case parting company from Britain’s notoriously incompetent Home Office concerning which his book, The Great Immigration Scandal, ultimately caused the resignation of a government minister. For his second outing, Moxon chose the eternal battle of the sexes, although he changed his plans for a “P. J. O’Rourke-style polemic” when he “came to realize the astonishing extent of the scientific findings that underpinned my arguments.”

Up until a relatively recent twist, the woman had been used as the figurehead of the oppressed, the Jews of gender, with the man cast as the eternal oppressor. This, Moxon argues, is based on a misreading of evolutionary psychology and ultimately leads to faulty legislation, biased media coverage, and a change in society’s attitudes whereby men actually become oppressed in the shadow of “the privilege afforded universally and unconditionally to women.”

Moxon begins with the sociopolitical context of sexual difference, and traces the advantages women increasingly enjoy over men to a school of thought which, although we are by now quite familiar with its role in our current cultural decline, was still being uncovered 15 years ago: the Frankfurt School. This cultural Marxist alliance led to the work of Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Michel Foucault. Moxon holds Marcuse’s book Eros and Civilization­, which he refers to as “the book that put the seal on the wedding of Marx and Freud,” responsible for ruinous cultural relativism.

This critical perspective saw feminism not as a polite social request, but as a vital tool, a radical political movement with the potential to alter social institutions by restructuring consciousness. It was time for more myth: Welcome to the patriarchy.

Moxon devotes a chapter to genetics, and fiercely opposes the “selfish gene” theory postulated in Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book of the same name. Rather than profligate disseminators of seed, men are required biologically to “get shot of genes made faulty in copying . . . [and] are in effect ‘quarantined’ away from the female half of the reproducing group.” This is not the type of aggressively dominant genetics we have been led to believe obtain:

Males are driven to behave in ways that expose any genetic defects they have, and females then choose the better of them . . . Inevitably the female is valued and the male devalued.

Now, any book which involves itself with both social science and genetics will compete against more literature and viewpoints than any layman could ever begin to cover, and Moxon’s quoted research can undoubtedly be countered, but it is the job of a writer to present his readers with the necessary disciplinary background to substantiate his claims, and Moxon covers his ground well.

The book pulls no punches — even for women — and there are many forthright statements in WR guaranteed to kick the hornets’ nest of feminism as it was in 2008, although may curiously not cause such a stir now as women are being increasingly ostracized by the freakish phenomenon of transgender women. But then, when WR set its sights on something the black caucus have recently learned — how to airbrush history until it is to your ideological taste — he starts with something blacks need to be told, and for the same reason: “Scholarship with a feminist bent is almost as inept when it comes to history as it is at selectively ignoring what is most relevant in science.”

One of British feminism’s centerpieces has always been the Suffragette movement, which sought the vote for women. Moxon provides the kind of context modern feminists would rather, as ladies might say in a nineteenth-century novel, was not talked about. The campaign, for example, was for universal suffrage for women, despite the fact that most men could not vote, quite apart from the small detail that many of them were then dying in the hellish trenches of the First World War. Emmeline Pankhurst, figurehead of the Suffragette movement, is singled out: “How could Emmeline Pankhurst of all people have had the hypocrisy to actively campaign for conscription at a time when the majority of those who could be conscripted did not have the vote?”

You Can buy F. Roger Devlin’s Sexual Utopia in Power here.

As Moxon points out, the Suffragettes were an upper-class affair. Even the most famous — and only — casualty of the movement was Emily Davison, who was killed running in front of the King’s racehorse, which failed to stop as a woman such as Ms. Davison might have expected from her experience growing up among Daddy’s stables. Her death was certainly not the suicide it is often touted as.

Four areas Moxon takes on were always going to be a minefield for a man writing about women: rape, prostitution, pornography, and domestic violence. Moxon shows that post-rape trauma is deliberately exaggerated in order to engineer longer sentences for rapists. Also, at the time the book was written, there were an estimated 200,000 male prison rapes in the United States, some four times the figure for female rapes nationwide and unreported in the media. In Britain, “the prison service simply refuses to acknowledge [the problem] and doesn’t keep any data, not even in connection with the many cases of prison suicide which are likely to be rape-related.”

Prison rapes that detain the media now, of course, are part of the new myth of the reality of transgenderism. Moxon deals with all the cardinal points feminists have always caviled at: false rape allegations, false memory (Moxon adheres to the memory-as-part-construct theory), post-rape trauma, and rape as purely sexual rather than an exercise in power relations. The destruction of the lives of countless men due to false allegations of rape is also highlighted. Rape is a weapon for both sexes.

Prostitution and pornography are part of familiar territory for feminists looking to bolster the exploitation myth, and Moxon faces down both. Prostitution, he writes, is a social interaction like any other, and the perpetual victimization narrative is just another anti-male construct. The unquestioned narrative that cross-border prostitutes are trafficked is also false, and “[t]he vast majority move voluntarily to countries where earnings are higher.”

As for pornography, which Moxon calls a class of erotica, it “no more objectifies women than it does men.” The supposed link between pornography and violence is debunked, and the former can even be a palliative for the tendency of the latter: “[D]angerous sex criminals are found to have been exposed to little if any erotica, and generally to have led a sheltered existence.”

Again, male lives have been ruined by allegation and stringently anti-male legislation. Moxon examines the British police’s Operation Ore, which led to many innocent men being persecuted on child pornography charges.

As for domestic violence, this has long been supported by the falsehood that it is predominantly a male-on-female phenomenon, when it is in fact equally divided, the difference being that whereas with men it is a pure expression of violence, women use violence — whether receiving it or giving it — as a controlling mechanism. Control is at the center of this critique, whether of one sex by the other or of the narrative.

The workplace has always been a sexual arena. When I last worked in a (mostly female) office 20 years ago, flirting was unthreatening and rife. Now, it is probably the equivalent of jumping into a snake pit. There is, of course, and as you would expect, a whole spurious psychology around women and work geared, as always, to denigrating men and male status. Work appeals to men, says WR, because of their devotion to a dominance hierarchy, which is not affected by the presence of women in combative terms: “The silly notion that men perceive woman at work as some kind of threat is just feminism-inspired wishful thinking.”

Men and women are “programmed” very differently, with dominance being intrasexual rather than intersexual. Men operate naturally in “dominance hierarchies,” women in social networks. Moxon often quotes British clinical psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, who writes of male “systematizing” and female “empathizing.”

Moxon looks briefly at the semiotics of advertising, in which “countless television advertisements . . . proclaim a contest of male ‘dimwits’ versus female ‘smarties’.” Note that this privileged position in the hierarchy of advertising tableaux is now taken by blacks. Here, incidentally, is a recent ad for your education, explaining how women invented beer.

Moxon’s key to any mismatch in the workplace is, again, fine-tuned to produce a wailing and a gnashing of teeth among feminists: “The problem is female mediocrity, which appears virtuous and high-achieving, especially by contrast to how men are seen, because of the prejudices born of the social psychology of ‘cheater detection’.”

The pay gap, writes Moxon, is “far less than it should be,” and “if any sex overall does more work, it’s not women but men.” Also, men will take any job, broadly speaking. Not so women:

Women’s jobs are not regarded as low-value because women fill them, but because the jobs women do are more easily filled. Women eschew work that compromises female dignity.

Women don’t want to be garbage collectors and truck drivers, although that won’t stop cries of “sexism” concerning those fields of employment.

Moxon uses evolutionary psychology as his compass throughout, and the transpositions of genetically hard-wired instinctive group behavior allows him to use a basic behavioral binary of categories to map out the workplace realistically:

Work is the main arena where men compete with each other for status, which men have to if they are to have any ‘mate value’. This does not apply to women, whose ‘mate value’ is inherent.

The whole tide of WR flows towards men as the denigrated party in the battle of the sexes, and males are not fighting actual women but rather the legislative and cultural power of the government and its provisional wing in the media. The destruction of the family is not an innovation of our modern totalitarians, as Moxon shows by quoting Anatoly Lunacharsky, Soviet Commissar of Education in the 1930s: “Our problem now is to do away with the household and to free women from the care of children.”

The Soviets targeted the nuclear family because devotion to it was deemed rather to be owed to the state, and the family thus an ideological distraction. But Lunacharsky’s solution to a Soviet problem was to “free” women from the household and its demands, while today — at least in the 2008 of WR — the stratagem has altered, although the desired result remains the same: “The separate worlds of men and women are starkly apparent in so many ways, but nowhere more so than in the determination to keep men out of the family.”

When Moxon appeared at a parliamentary committee on business in 2011, he reiterated some of WR’s main points, saying among other things that “[t]here’s no surprise that women have difficulty in the workplace, not only do they have difficulty but they don’t want to be there in the first place,” The Huffington Post reported. Part of Moxon’s argument is reinforced by the reaction of a feminist at the time to his testimony. Her reply is a showpiece of cognitive dissonance:

Laura Bates, of the Everyday Sexism project, told The Huffington Post UK: ‘There’s a big difference between taken [sic] into account the opinion of people with a broad range of backgrounds and views and taking into account the opinions of someone who has expressed views which sound prejudicial.

The Woman Racket is, writes Moxon, “an unashamedly campaigning text,” and it is one feminists would do well to read as it may explain their bewildered position now that another myth has replaced theirs. The attempt to force the hand of nature is a risky business and, as always with modern myths of oppression, its resultant diktats are ultimately beneficial to neither sex: “We live in a society based on a particularly bad combination: a rigorous ethos of egalitarianism, but one which inverts the truth of the most fundamental structures and interactions.”

And so the book is partly a lament. WR’s motivation is refreshingly humanistic in an era where all traces of nature are being effaced:

What the book is about . . . is that men and women don’t know themselves, and still less do they know each other; but the complementarity of the sexes works so that both the partners can better know themselves through the other.

Evolution, both physical and psychological, knows best. We have become so inured to the ideologies brought to the fore in every aspect of human existence being remade and remodeled that it is bracing to hear nature’s voice through the babble.

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