The era of mythical misogyny vs real harms to women and girls

[womendeserveequalhumanrights]

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/08/30/the-era-of-mythical-misogyny/

Brilliant article in spiked by Georgina Mumford and really resonated for me.

What's the point of spending who knows how much public money on the cringeworthy 'maaate' campaign (with as far as I know no actual positive impact) if you're not going to actually do anything about all the state services turning a blind eye over grooming gangs and the courts letting rapists off with slap on the wrist, or more commonly rapists not be charged at all in the first place.

@womendeserveequalhumanrights

As a man living in the north west of England within walking distance of a kebab shop where the industrial grooming of girls happened. Yes really actually happened.

I at times despair at the whataboutary on MN regarding this topic on a predominantly (possibly the biggest) female forum.

I really hope your thread doesn’t get taken down and you keep fighting, Women and girls need women like you even the ones who are blind.

It's deliberate though isn't it, just as all the performative handwringing over the entirely fictional Adolescence was deliberate - a distraction from real harms that they're enabling.

Alongside the inclusion of the passport photo page of a child 'she's legal though, this type of girl is ok' message from the government. Let's get the middle class women talking about how John from accounting calls grown women 'girls' sometimes and opens the door for them rather than the rape gangs and the systematic abuse of working class girls, the enablement by the police, social services and the Labour party (honorable exceptions such as Ann Cryer who received death threats for standing up for these girls)

I don't really know if I'm middle class or working class these days but I do know that I'd rather a bit of old timey male sexism (like a man opening a door for me - the horror!) than rape of children.

The lanyard class are lost and evil on this issue.

We need to name this evil for what it is.

In my view they are using Adolescence as a vehicle to introduce more internet censorship.

It amazes me that so many adults hold 14 year old boys more responsible than the adult men in their lives when it comes to how they treat women.

I thought the piece made some good points, and the comparison of Adolescence and Three Girls was very apt. I'm sure low-level sexual assault is much more common in the UK than she suggests, though, immigrants or no immigrants. And I don't think the likes of Tate should be taken lightly, though of course how effectives these measures are... The stuff about immigrants and statistics will surely be something the govt will keep backing away from. Jess Phillips can't say a word.

Exactly what I just muttered under my breath

I nodded along to some points , but then it all turned into what about the poor , innocent boys and immigrants. It pretends to be female centred , when it isn’t at all. It’s more “don’t look here, look there.”. When we should be looking everywhere.

Perfectly put.

'It's not this, it's that.' Which interestingly is ChatGPT standard phrasing and argument style.

It's all connected. You don't have to say sexist old white men or boys harassing girls in school or following incel content are not problems to argue that fucking grooming gangs are. They're ALL facets of the same problem.

Rape is old timey make sexism.

Call me cynical, but I think a lot of it comes down to cost and effort and the need to feed the political news cycle. Putting another thing on the list of tasks that teachers have to cover is simple and cheap and quick. Ditto some posters on the underground. Tackling a decade of underinvestment in the criminal justice system is long and expensive, and telling the electorate "we need to spend more money on lawyers" is not a vote winner. They just want quick wins and are, by and large, in privileged positions where the real life consequences of the actions and inactions will not affect them or anyone close to them.

I wonder if this is why everyone has been so quick to agree with 3rd wave feminism, because their objectives are easy to slot into policies and the news cycle:

Equal pay by 2050 (or whatever, it keeps shifting)
Violence against women is bad (but the threshold depends on who he is)
Lean in (be more like men)
You are your career (SAH Mums are numpties)
Women can have it all (if they do it all)
Sex work is work!
Pornography is Empowering!
Trans women are women (let's be inclusive!)
Consent matters (but we need 3 male witnesses, and also, we don't need your consent to allow men into your spaces because see point above)
Grooming gangs and family court injustice should be fully investigated and enablers held to account...

Get in the van.

There's a lot of mockery and political cynicism about attempts to get men themselves to challenge sexism and misogyny - the 'maaate' campaign, posters on the Underground, putting consent on the school curriculum. I doubt if anybody thinks they'll be 'quick wins', but at least they are putting it up to men to look at their own behaviour, instead of requiring women to monitor ours.

Of course the legal system needs overhauling, and all of the men who rape and abuse women and children should be tried, convicted and punished - although that may be tricky - a detective investigating online child sex abuse said on a TV documentary that if they arrested all the men who abuse children online, and then sometimes in real life, there wouldn't be enough jail cells in the whole country to hold them all..

But does that mean we ignore the source of violence against women as the social, global scourge it is, and wait to handle it at the very end when/if the perpetrators get caught?

This article illustrates the danger of dividing up violence against women into boxes - this box is nasty strangers who hop out of bushes at night; this box asylum seekers; this box on a university campus; this box is British boys; this box is clergymen; this one is serving police officers; this box is your school-pal's father; this box your own father...

The danger is that the boxes get stacked in order of seriousness not by what has happened to the common denominator: the woman or girl who has been abused, raped or murdered, but, as in this article, by some other criteria, into 'real harms to women and girls' and 'mythical misogyny'.

And in all the boxes are men. But somehow the author has an issue with the idea that the problem IS men. Funny that

I don't disagree, MariedeG, and I should have put "quick wins" in quotes myself, I meant more in the sense that politicians can point to these things and say "look, we did a thing" rather than admitting that to move the dial is likely to require so much more, or to admit that there are plenty of problems that remain unaddressed, ignored or covered up.

I'm highly cynical of the advertising campaigns that run on the TFL, particularly when you understand that TFL have banned a lot of adverts (fast food, sugary treats, Ricky Gervais' vodka etc), that they need their own adverts to mask the fact that there's a lack of private companies advertising.

There have been recent stories of women trying to report harassment/sexual offences on the tube network, but struggled to get anywhere with it. TFL can spend the money on advertising, but not actual services.

Had they used a boy's passport this would have suggested homosexual consent - which is fine, that's 16 too. But afaik there is nothing in law about boys being over 16 to be able to consent to engage in heterosexual sex as the law originally was to protect girls. Up till the 1880s in the UK the age of consent for girls was 12 and for boys 14. As far as I know only the girls' age of consent was changed and it had a specific intent, to stop the traffic in very young girls into prostitution and especially the trafficking of British girls into maisons close in e.g. France (which was a form of sexual slavery for the women involved in this particular type of prostitution). Boys were not mentioned at any point (this is the Stead and Butler campaign on the age of consent - Stead went to prison because he 'trafficked' a girl of 12 to show what was happening - afaik the girl did not end up in a brothel, it was a stunt). If this is so (and not withstanding recent legislation on the age of marriage and on the age of consent where the adult is in a position of authority/responsibility for the young person), then it is accurate to show a girl and would be inaccurate to show a boy.

yeah but..

I'm gonna say when giving pointers about the kind of people you can sleep with (for heaven's sake) and then showing the passport of a child is at best incredibly ill judged. at worst (and this is my interpretation), it points to an attitude on the part of the person who designed that page and the people who signed it off of 'here you go, these are the women for you'

Passport in the name 'Janine Cooper'. Not Emma Cavendish? Not Henrietta Percy? Not Venetia Neville? why ever not?

This is false. Sex with a child under the age of 16 is illegal.

The offence is Sexual Activity With A Child and it applies equally regardless of the sex of the adult, the sex of the child and the nature of the sexual contact.

I'm going to defend Adolescence, it's a much more nuanced show than the activist version of it. (Though it doesn't help that it's one of those sad cases where even the writer has climbed onto the activist bandwagon of oversimplifying the story.) The article's summary "a teenage boy so enveloped in incel culture that he kills a female classmate" is not really a fair representation - the show doesn't actually make all that big a thing of "incel culture" and the motivations for the murder are rather more complex, and indeed not entirely clear even by the end.

I'm not sure I really agree with much of the article's bigger point either; whilst there was indeed something of a public overreaction to an entirely fictional murder, I think the manosphere, incel culture etc. are real problems we should be doing something about (even if they aren't actually major concerns of Adolescence the show!). So of course are the rapes and the grooming. But very few teenage girls actually have to deal with being targeted by grooming gangs or raped by asylum seekers - very large numbers have to deal with schoolyard misogyny on a daily basis. The article is right though that this sort of thing isn't going to be solved by posters or by making boys watch Netflix dramas.

We mustn't ignore that a lot of this is tied up in the wider immigration debate, and an anti-immigration stance is obviously a major factor in this article being written and published. Of course the anti-immigration activists want to argue that it's foreigners who are the real problem, and good old native British misogyny pales in comparison! But equally the left needs to stop using a pro-immigration stance as an excuse to ignore the issues.