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Two recent threads on social media site Reddit provide a healthy dose of schadenfreude to dish out on the feminist left. Both threads featured women wailing about men’s behaviour in the workplace, when the behaviour in question is a direct result of women’s recent actions. Women have spent the last decade screeching ‘MeToo’ and ruining multiple innocent men’s careers with unhinged witch-hunts. Now, they profess to be shocked, shocked, that men have adapted protective behavioural strategies.
Why are men like this, you wail? Because you made the world, ladies, where men have to be ‘like this’, if they don’t want to be destroyed.
The first Reddit thread features a professional woman complaining that her new male manager will not meet with women alone.
New manager arrived three months ago. He has a policy of not meeting any women alone unless there is another man present or the door is completely open. He will meet with men alone and frequently does. It’s created a situation where male members of the team quickly walk in, close the door, chat and get stuff done. Meanwhile, the women have to first email him, book an appointment slot, find someone to accompany us and then have our meeting […]
Can I ask for some advice on what to do next? It feels incredibly infantilising to be treated this way.
Well, suck it up, babe. This is the world feminism created. Your manager sounds like a smart cookie. He’s clearly not prepared to have his life and career blown up by an accusation against him that will predictably be taken as unalloyed truth.
The response from the feminist peanut gallery was even more predictable: call in the HR Karens and weaponise discrimination law against the very safeguards men have adopted to survive the world women created.
The second thread is even more revealing. A 19-year-old woman in a male-dominated tech role is outraged that older married male colleagues refuse to drive alone with her in a van to job sites. They cite the obvious risk.
The past two days while we’ve been working on the projects I’ve coincidentally caught a ride in personal vehicles with other project leads, who were women. At the end of the project today though, the women either were driving straight home or had to leave early for meetings. I was then stuck with riding with one of the helpers back to the office […] so I started asking who I could ride back to the office with. All of the men in the room, except the one I ride with often, said no. Including my assigned helper that I was told to catch a ride with.
Their reason was because they didn’t want to be alone with a woman. They said they wouldn’t care if the vans could hold three people so that another male could ride.
Do they think this because they’re sexualizing me?
Don’t flatter yourself. No, they think that because they’re protecting themselves. That they have watched too many careers end over unverifiable allegations and have decided self-preservation comes first never seems to occur to her.
The MeToo moment began with genuine complaints about a handful of powerful predators, men like Harvey Weinstein whom influential women in Hollywood had spent years fawning over and protecting. Meryl Streep led standing ovations for him. Many of the same voices who later posed as brave truth-tellers had spent decades enabling the very behaviour they suddenly discovered was intolerable. But like every other modern witch-hunt, the movement rapidly escaped any connection to actual crime. Innocent men were dragged through the mud on the basis of decades-old he-said-she-said claims with no corroboration. Others were destroyed for nothing more than clumsy flirting or awkward compliments. Entirely fabricated accusations – Mattress Girl’s grotesque performance art at Columbia, the Duke Lacrosse team railroaded by a lying stripper and a rogue prosecutor – were treated as gospel until the lies collapsed.
Anyone who works with children is explicitly instructed never to be alone with a child. The rule exists to protect the adult from false suspicion as much as to protect the child. Men have simply applied the same logic to adult women in professional settings. If a single closed-door meeting or a lift in a van can end your career on the word of someone who later decides the interaction was “uncomfortable”, then rational men will refuse to create that opportunity. This is not sexism. It is basic risk management in an environment women themselves demanded.
This is the world feminist activism built. It insisted that due process was an obstacle to justice, that feelings outweighed evidence and that any man who objected was part of the problem. Once that standard was established, men responded exactly as any sentient creature responds to a new and dangerous environment: they minimised their exposure. Now the same women who cheered the destruction of due process are furious that men will not pretend the old rules still apply.
If you do not like a workplace in which men treat every interaction with a woman as a potential career-ending allegation, then stop creating the conditions that make that treatment rational. Stop pretending that false accusations are vanishingly rare. Stop demanding that men ignore the incentives you spent a decade putting in place. The men who refuse to be alone with you are not the villains of this story. They are the predictable consequence of the story you wrote.
