Notorious feminist troll Clementine Ford is back with another book. She released ‘Fight Like a Girl’ in 2016 which aimed to be a modern feminist manifesto. She has just released ‘Boys Will Be Boys‘ which attacks so called ‘toxic masculinity’ and details characteristics she believes the next generation of boys should have.

The book is more philosophically deep than her ‘kill all men” tweets or stunts such as refusing to take questions from male students at a school presentation. But Ford’s feminist dogma is still ever present throughout the book and through extracts that have been released its argument is that masculinity as we know it must go. She claims to care about boys arguing that they are victims of our patriarchal society as well.

Ford argues in the book that society shapes boys’ “toxic masculinity” from the moment of what she terms the “gender reveal” of a child. She blames “the embrace of online abuse, rape culture, men’s rights baloney and even the freezing out of women from government and leadership” for boys being socialized with and learning about harmful male behaviors. She also takes aim at “toxic male spaces and behavior” that “codify male power and dominance”.

Ford’s solution to boys’ induction into “toxic masculinity” and the affects it has had on women and men is to raise the next generation of boys feminine. To do this Ford has started with her own son as she has written a letter to her own son in the book titled ‘A letter to my darling boy‘. Many were curious when they learned that Ford was mother to a boy (or surprised that she was a mother at all) about how she would seek to raise him, we now have the answer.

She begins by describing how cruel the world can be to girls, and that this cruelty in turn affects the boys who don’t conform to what it is people expect them to be”. She laments that there is shame in a boy acting feminine “To be girlish as a boy is to be deficient in some way” and boys who are deemed ‘too feminine’ are subjected to the “twin tyrannies of homophobia and misogyny”.

Ford wants boys to be more open about their emotions “It’s okay to hug another man. It’s okay to cry in front of each other. It’s okay to say you love each other” and the values she wishes for her son to embrace are “Respect women. Seek intimacy. Embrace sensitivity” and wants him to understand that “Power is not gained by taking something from another person” and “Violence is not the way to solve your problems”.

While thankfully Ford’s book is not a man-hating diatribe it is clear that she views traditional masculine traits that have existed throughout history as bad and destructive and feminine traits should reign supreme into the future. Part of the feminine revolution is to reshape popular culture to view female stories and work as inspirations for everyone and not just girls.

Nevertheless Ford manages to still insert into her book instructions on how women should shun men. For example heterosexual women should only invite men “into our houses as guests occasionally” as there is “no pleasure to be had for a woman cohabiting with a man”.

All w0uld agree we don’t want a society based completely on masculine or feminine traits and that a blend of each is what is needed for society to flourish. Masculinity helped build and shape the modern world, claiming the future is female puts society on an uncertain path.

Forcing boys to act more feminine is not just skewing our society too far one way but is actually counter to their nature and can be physiologically harmful to young minds. While Ford is thankfully more intellectual in this book, her vision of society is still not one to implement or one that is healthy.

Tim Wilms http://timwilms.com Tim Wilms is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of theunshackled.net, he is the Host of the WilmsFront live internet show, and co-host of The Uncuckables and Trans Tasman Talk shows. He based in Melbourne, Australia where he also conducts field reports. See author's posts

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