The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Feminist gender theory is all in good fun until a woman gets punched in the nose If the boxing match between Angela Carini and Imane Khelif tells us one thing, it’s that feminists are still allergic to accountability Janice Fiamengo “Realistically, we know that a well-trained woman, a tall and muscular woman, a woman who has learned the arts of self-defense, a woman soldier, or a woman astronaut is a match for most men. If women and men of the same size and training are matched, men may not necessarily be physically superior because women have greater endurance, balance, and flexibility”  (Judith Lorber and Patricia Yancey Martin, “ The Socially Constructed Body: Insights from Feminist Theory ,” p. 242). ** A few years ago, if one had said there were vast strength differences between men and women that mattered in competitive sports and elsewhere, that was a misogynistic remark. Feminist wisdom told us that sex differences in physical ability were predominantly caused by soc...

By Zachary Stieber January 6, 2023 A West Virginia law that prohibits people from participating on single-sex sports teams that don’t match their biological sex is constitutional, a judge ruled on Jan. 5. West Virginia House Bill 3293 ( pdf ), or the Save Women’s Sports Bill, was passed by the state legislature and signed by Gov. Jim Justice in 2021. The bill states that there are “inherent differences between biological males and biological females” and that “biological males would displace females to a substantial extent if permitted to compete on teams designated for biological females, as recognized in Clark v. Ariz. Interscholastic Ass’n (9th Cir. 1982).” The bill says that a person born male cannot participate in female sports, and vice versa. A biological male child with the initials B.P.J., who was 11 at the time, filed a lawsuit after the law’s passage. B.P.J. identifies as female and wanted to participate in female sports at a middle scho...

How Andrew Tate smashed the patriarchy What happens when you stop honouring men for self-restraint Mary Harrington I  wrote  earlier this week at UnHerd about the direct line between the erosion of sociocultural guard-rails at the hands of liberal philosophy, and the antisocial posturing of masculinist ‘influencer’ Andrew Tate, recently arrested in Romania in connection with a people-trafficking investigation. In that essay I teased out the paradox of treating Tate’s moral failure as a falling-away from liberalism, when the values he cites to justify his behaviour are really John Stuart Mill’s hyper-individualism without the harm principle. But I found Tate still on my mind having written this, for another unexamined paradox he embodies: the fact that he’s a product not of too much patriarchy, but not enough of it. To explain, I probably need to clarify what I mean by ‘patriarchy’. For this phenomenon is so regularly and casually referenced by magazine feminism today that host...