Are Men Ok? | Peter Boghossian & Nina Power
Philosopher and writer Nina Power is senior editor and columnist at Compact Magazine. She is the author of One Dimensional Woman (2009) and What Do Men Want? Masculinity & Its Discontents (2022). She left her position as Senior Lecturer of Philosophy at Roehampton University after more than a decade in academia.
Peter Boghossian spoke with Nina about the current manifestation of the “battle of the sexes,” where men have become a socially permitted target of hatred and blame. Nina discusses the curious ideal of a homogenous human being, an aim to un-gender the sexes to make men and women interchangeable. She says it is a mistake that traditional masculine virtues—strength, judgment, responsibility—are being coded as right-wing values that must be dismantled alongside “the patriarchy.”
Peter and Nina also discuss sex differences, male suicide, Nina’s break with the Labour Party, the state of philosophy, Aristotle’s categories of friendship, intellectual conformity, Ivan Illich, Rebecca Tuvel, activist attacks, leftism, the beauty of changing one’s mind, and more.
Nina received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Middlesex University and an MA and BA in philosophy from the University of Warwick. She was a senior lecturer in philosophy at Roehampton University and has taught at various British universities. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a member of the British Philosophical Association. She cohosts the podcast The Lack with Helen Rollins and Benjamin Studebaker.
This was an interesting and entertaining (however depressing!) conversation. It made me think of an article–The Ethical TransRiddle–I wrote on the trans insanity (particularly rabid in Iceland, where I'm from) and managed to get published in Iceland's conservative and oldest newspaper (and once most widely read, before internet) in March 2022; I'd sent it to all my former journalist/reporter colleagues at the liberal "news" outlets, but without success. Before I moved to the US, I'd worked in Icelandic TV (and other media) for years, so many people of my generation and older may know who I am–big fish/little pond. The day after the article was published, my photo was on the front page of one of the country's main newspapers with the headline: "Morgunblaðið publishes Íris's propaganda against trans people!" When I realized that this was not satire, I had said front page framed. "Of course, human beings cannot change sex any more than they can make themselves invisible," I wrote later in another article (that wasn't accepted for publication anywhere in Iceland): "Imagine that expressing disbelief and outrage at the insane trans ideology should be the subject of a front-page 'news' article, instead of the madness itself! It is a sad testimony to 'Icelanders’ illiteracy when it comes to all kinds of propaganda and baseless image-building'" (quoting Iceland's Parliamentary Committee's Black Report on the causes of the 2008 Bank Collapse). https://irislee.substack.com/p/icelanders-still-illiterate-when
If it's not clear, the attack on men is part of a larger plan to destroy healthy male/female relationship's. Why? This will in turn end teh nuclear family leaving a society of individuals and a a society of individuals instead of families is easier to manipulate and control. How so? Family members may exhibit some of the most hated relationships but blood runs thick and family backs family. If the government tries to go after a member of a family it will find that much harder then if it was an individual with no family. Generally speaking, individuals have no support structure; families do. Encourage a society of sexually open non-committed persons while still encouraging reproduction and you have such a society. The promotion of homosexuality and transgenderism are all a part of this. Anything that helps to promote the opposite of normal healthy male/female relationships. It's a war against the populace using psychology.