You would have to be wilfully blind not to acknowledge the successful attempt to feminise men in recent decades. Geoff Dench noted it back in 1996 – how it’s been driven politically by radical feminists stemming from their determination to change the place of men in society, even to eliminate them from the family.

He warned then that ‘patriarchy’ was not the enemy it had been made out to be. He explained and warned, too, of the downside of abandoning the asymmetry in gender relations. This was not, he argued, the result of social conditioning or of particular institutions but was inherent in any partnership between men and women:

‘The foundations of social reciprocity are being shaken by determined efforts to draw up direct exchange rates with strictly comparable obligations and performance indicators of both men and women. Something is bound to give’.

It did and as Geoff predicted:

‘Men themselves become deprived of their own sense of being needed, and learn that they don’t need women either. Modern independent women soon create modern independent men. Equilibrial patterns of sexual reciprocation, and with them the chains of interpersonal dependency ad effective means of female control over men, dissolve into faint historical memories.’

The term ‘toxic masculinity’ was not around then, but this was the groundwork for it. An optimist, Geoff hoped he was starting to witness a counter-revolution once the costs of male indifference were noted by women, even for their own independence. Sadly that fightback has taken a long time coming.

Geoff is no longer with us to see this PragerU video. In it, Allie Stuckey argues that if you try to make men more like women, you don’t get less toxic masculinity, you get more.

What women pine for today is ‘real men’, not female impersonators. My take on this is that feminists have cut off women’s noses to spite their faces. Doomed to disappointment in the society of their making, women have become ever angrier. And unfortunately that resentment is what feeds feminism and what feminists exploit. This is the destructive cycle we need to break.

Demonising masculinity, which the #MeToo movement has brought to a veritable crescendo, is not the solution, but the problem. Allie is spot on and so is the video: