Baskerville: "Women on Top"

Article here. Excerpt:

'Gender politics is becoming too conspicuous to ignore. Triumphalist proclamations of female political dominance now appear in ostensibly detached scholarly journals. The trend is real, but it represents much more than ‘the macho men’s club’ getting its just comeuppance for causing the financial crisis, as Reihan Salam writes in the prestigious journal Foreign Policy. On the cover of the august Wilson Quarterly, Sara Sklaroff sees fresher salads and smaller bus seats as evidence that ‘women are taking over.’ That journals with pretensions to serious scholarship address on this frivolous level what may be the most profound power shift since the fall of the Roman Empire demonstrates that important questions are not being asked. Salam, Sklaroff, and other prophets of a feminine future are quick with predictions, but they ignore the trends already well advanced in the present. The sexualisation of politics — and the politicization of sex — is the most profound social trend of the last forty years, with roots going back at least a century. In importance it far exceeds (though is also connected to) the challenge radical Islam presents to Western society. The emergence of women into top positions of power is only the tip of the iceberg. More far-reaching are the vast shifts in political power at all levels from the family to the United Nations.
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The feminization of politics and law enforcement is global. Quasi-governmental organizations like the United Nations and the European Union were created to prevent armed aggression and war. As they prove themselves either incapable for that task or irrelevant, they have found new missions for themselves, creating their own social work bureaucracies similar to those found in Western governments, which they also propagate among less developed countries. Most of these emphasize the politics of women and children. Here too we see, on several fronts, attempts to criminalize ideologically incorrect behaviour, even matters not previously considered crimes and even when beyond the reach of any effective judiciary. Innovations like the International Criminal Court, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and measures against human trafficking are all efforts to take complex political, economic, and social problems such as underdevelopment, poverty, and war and reclassify them as crimes whereby alleged malefactors can be prosecuted by politicized tribunals that lack the detachment and due process protections found in developed judiciaries.

‘The axis of global conflict in this century will not be warring ideologies, or competing geopolitics, or clashing civilizations,’ writes Salam. ‘It won’t be race or ethnicity. It will be gender.’ He may well be right. But cheerleading for political trends is seldom a constructive substitute for unbiased inquiry. If we are to avoid the ‘very violent’ future Salam predicts as a result, we should stop gloating and start understanding.'