When society erases the male voice, a toxic backlash is the inevitable result

Telegraph

01-05-2025

If anything signals the dawn of a dystopian age, it's surely the launch this week of Britain's first male-only publisher. Conduit Books is planning to tackle the marginalisation of male writers in the female-dominated industry. Predictably, its launch has been met with liberal derision. But in truth it is a serious warning sign that something has gone deeply wrong. While the movement for female equality has made great strides since the Suffragettes, we should admit it is now going too far – and is feeding male resentment.
After a series of momentous victories – from securing the vote to abortion rights and the outlaw of marital rape – the feminist movement is now overcorrecting. And it is becoming grotesquely hypocritical in the process.
While the worlds of finance, tech and science are lambasted for their failure to recruit more women, it is customary to openly fete the purging of men in the creative arts. In publishing insiders admit 'the word is out that there are agents who just don't bother taking on men'. The theatre director Kate Gilchrist's proposal for a year-long ban on staging the works of white male writers at the Soho Theatre captures the zeitgeist.
Nobody complains on hearing women are dominating a particular industry. Nobody questions when high-flying female executives promote other women, while male counterparts are heavily scrutinised by their HR overseers if there is the faintest whiff of unconscious bias. Too often women are speedily elevated at the expense of equally competent male colleagues.
But what we might term 'toxic femininity' is proving bad for business. Gripped by groupthink, the top publishing houses have lost their edge. It is the smaller independents which are snapping up the talented male writers who go on to win prizes like the Booker and the Pulitzer. Fixated with identity politics, the world of literature has almost completely ceased to produce works that have mass appeal. While the British 'state of the nation' novel has died a death, bookstores are cluttered with woke pulp that is lucky to sell a few hundred copies.
Publishing is not the only female-dominated industry that is failing. As male teachers flee the sector, boys are underperforming. Social care is in crisis, with dire shortage of male staff meaning elderly men suffer the indignity of being washed and dressed by caregivers of the opposite sex. The HR industry has an excessive focus on fighting culture wars through staff networks rather than tackling the flatlining of worker productivity. As one care industry expert confessed to me: 'If you google social care then you basically get women in lilac uniforms delivering cups of tea to old men.'
Then there's the female-dominated marketing industry, which is failing to target men in ways that resonate with their experience. As Fernando Desouches, the managing director of ad agency BBD Perfect Storm told me:
'We have made huge progress with how we advertise to women. But our approach to men is still quite narrow and materialistic. The way we build male aspiration is adding pressure to men in the same way female beauty was (and maybe still is) hurting women's confidence. The data shows that the way we are portraying men doesn't resonate with them. They are an underexploited growth opportunity for brands.'
Toxic femininity is not only bad for industry but society. 19th-century feminist pushed for a more equal world, in which people are judged by their character, not biology. But the movement has gone far beyond its original purpose, and now actively pits the sexes against each other. Too many women believe they must engage in zero-sum wars for resources, status and respect.
But a backlash against the war on men is now underway. Polling shows that more than half of men think the promotion of women's equality has 'gone too far'. Women might be tempted to retort that these men are surely hallucinating, for it is still a man's world. Thanks to the motherhood penalty men still earn more than women. They still dominate board rooms. Yet the men who increasingly feel they're living in a woman's world do have a point. Women aged 22-39 are paid more than men, and girls outperform them in school on almost every metric.
Female-only fiefdoms are allowing women to subtly build the world in their own image. The pro-female slant to publishing means that the most promoted, and thus powerful, writers are increasingly likely to be women. With women dominating HR, all workplaces are becoming increasingly feminised. The push towards hybrid working, for instance, seems to be shaped by female preferences, with some research suggesting that men fear its impact on their promotion prospects. According to the ONS, men who work part-time are paid less per hour than women.
Resentment is building up most notably among Gen Z males. It is hardly surprising that young men are getting sucked into incel societies when you consider how mainstream society mocks and marginalises them. It is little wonder that teenage boys become enraptured with online misogynists inspired by Andrew Tate, given the dearth of male role models and authors writing intelligently about the trials of coming of age, J D Salinger style.
It is no great shock that adolescent men are embracing these nastily sexist archetypes, when the male caricatures that they are bombarded with by advertisers are nastily misandrist – by the own admission of industry insiders, oscillating between 'the comedy buffoon who doesn't know how to turn on the washing machine or the Stoic provider'.
And it is little wonder that men from working class backgrounds feel like they have no prospects, when the biggest sources of mass employment in the post-industrial era, such as social care, are again hyper feminised.
There are many who are keen to interpret the growing tensions between the sexes as a problem of 'toxic masculinity'. When the crisis is framed in this way, the temptation is to simply double down on the feminist cause while demanding ever more robust safeguards to protect women from male anger. Labour's latest calls for a teacher in every school to 'tackle violence against girls' is typical of this attitude.
Perhaps worst of all, the relentless negativity towards men is distracting us from the real issues still facing women in Britain today: the rise in domestic violence, the reported increase in FGM. By broadening the 'problem' to encompass all men, we are not confronting the truly menacing few.
Feminism has overreached. The consequences are proving dangerous and divisive. We ignore this at our peril.