Our thanks to Gerry for this. I expect to touch on this issue in my speech at the Budapest conference in August.
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Justice for Men & Boys 
I have often wondered if the attitude to women in these matters is a reflection of the attitude of men. It’s interesting that conservative people have a higher birth-rate than liberals and feminists, especially if they are both conservative and Christian (or some other faith). This is true globally, as Professor Eric Kaufman has revealed. Men in conservative/ traditional circles tend to be more family oriented. That for me gives the game away. Women as a rule are conscious of living in a world that men have created, and which men run. So women go along with what the men in their community or cultural group seem to want. If the men in their culture/ circle spend their lives basically just faffing around and not committing to anything, and generally avoiding fatherhood and family life; or if they’re simply more interested in career, property and money; then women will get the message. As I said, I can’t help wondering.
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Two things occur to me in reading this. The first is the change is in women for in my student days (end of 1970s) political research always found women voters were generally much more conservative (though not necessarily Conservative) in social attitudes. The second is that social attitudes surveys , in the UK and in Europe, still find that the vast majority of young people actually look forward to finding a partner and forming a family (I know this because each time such surveys report feminist groups like the Fawcett Soc. go on on about how young women need “education” to change these aspirations.
It has been interesting looking at the reporting (not in our media) in Europe as growing number of European and indeed the Scandinavian countries are concerned about this. Generally in Europe things such as taxation, child care, maternity leave, housing policy even forms of child benefit are comparatively more generous than in the UK , often long pre-dating the hegemony of feminism and reflecting concerns in the latter decades of the last century that there were less and less Swedes, Danes, Germans, French…. and so on. In a period where there were some stirrings in the UK, though more about the “burden” of older people with no one to look after them.
My point being that the “practical” steps many of these European nations are implementing or debating, basically more of the same combinations of tax relief, child benefits, child care generous leave etc. looks unlikely to success because it doesn’t address the attitudinal shift as well. France is an interesting case because up to recently it prided itself on bucking the general trend.
In Italy the Prime Minister has made mention of attitudes and there has been some shift in Denmark. To looking at the “messages” to young people rather than just tinkering with existing supposed “incentives”. However I wonder how long it will be that more question the dominance of feminist propaganda in schools and universities and public services. An ideology rather neatly encapsulated by the Korean “four No” movement ” As one woman said, her friends “kind of hate men, and they are afraid of them.”
As Melanie Philips pointed out in Sex Change Society, feminism is an ideology of perpetual adolescence, a fear of growing up and taking on the reality of reproduction, relationships and responsibility. It will be interesting to get the views of the delegates at the ICMI. Not least because Hungary is one of the countries very concerned about the declining numbers of Hungarians.
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As an aside, and having eventually seen “Barbie” it was a really good exposition of the adolescence of feminism, in its American incarnation (which is no doubt hugely influential in S Korea). For Barbie land is a plastic land, literally sterile, (entirely manufactured and maintained by men in the form of a supposedly all male Mattel) where everyone plays at life, the trash bins have no trash, the road repairers have no dirt to dig or concrete to lay etc. there are no stairs even. One of Barbie’s first encounters is with a group of workmen repairing a drain, they are dirty, sweaty in the Sun and rough in manner, meant to contrast with the neat and clean and relentlessly cheery female “workers” in Barbie land, who of course have no actual drains to lay or repair.
In effect it turns out that the feminist heaven is simply a playground for sterile plastic people, entirely dependent on a real world for its very existence. Rather like the Barbies are the Eloi and men in the real world are the Morlocks. No wonder the young feminists are frightened of men!
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It was good to see someone try and poke the modern idols of feminism. Though Lord Farmer is too kind to the UK, it is in fact by far the worst European country for broken families and fatherlessness. https://www.gbnews.com/politics/tory-peer-michael-farmer-family-friendly-budget-hunt
Of course Lord Farmer’s words will fall on deaf ears because in this country the feminist demand that women and men be taxed separately so women could keep their wealth “private” was instituted in the 1980s, by the Thatcher Gov. no less. And there seems little prospect of a shift, even the recent reintroduction of a tax allowance for “couples” is so small in effect its a sop rather than a serious attempt to support family formation. What is interesting is that Lord Farmer has based his views on research. ” The funny thing is, in the 18 to 24-year-old grouping, it’s the highest level of support. It’s as if younger people want to have that stability and that fairness.” Yet again evidence that, despite all the decades of propaganda, the majority of young people still aspire to form families rather than continue for ever single. One of the thing that is strikingly different about the UK is the absence of serious policies to support family formation. Indeed you can see in the current extension of free infant care a determination to “”help families” not as a unit but through relieving them of caring for their offspring. Avoiding any notion of supporting a couple rather than “diverse family forms”. It cannot be a coincidence that even more avowedly “feminist” countries such as Sweden or Germany still maintain much more significant tax breaks for couples explicitly to address their declining birthrates. While of course others go even further, such as France or Hungary with significant additional support for couples with more that one child. Most of these countries do have a growing problem of “broken” families but none at the simply shocking rates of the UK. Which suggests that such fiscal arrangements are not a complete solution but don’t add to the problem by taking the “icon” of the single parent as the starting point for fiscal policies and effectively financially punishing people who form couples with the hope these will become families. In effect our system actively tries to undermine the hopes of our young people by making significant penalties if they try to forms families!
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