"Military Age Males"
The media, politicians and activists are very inconsistent about when it's ok to be afraid of men and the threat of male violence
In the Irish Examiner last week, Mick Clifford wrote about the origin of the term “Military Age Males” and its creeping use in Irish society in the context of immigration. The phrase is often used by restrictionist protestors about international protection applicants in Ireland. Much like the flying of the tricolour, its adoption by this group has caused a lot of distress in the mainstream, which often seeks to de-emphasise the proportion of single males in new arrivals.
The article concludes that this “ugly trope” originated during the war on terror as an American way of presumptively designating young men killed in drone strikes as legitimate targets. A government activist quoted by the piece “tracked the use of the phrase by British white supremacists… around 2015… (they were tweeting) about “a tsunami of Muslim men of fighting age” en route to the UK. Others immediately locked onto the phrase and it spread throughout far-right circles.”
Fears about outsiders, the sudden enforcement of demographic change, and competition for scarce resources are amongst the most basic ones a human can experience. So it’s notable that the government and their informal spokespeople feel the need to outline an explanation for the country’s reaction to immigration that only dates back a decade or two. It’s doubly notable because they themselves have spent the last few years warning about the out of control nature of male violence in Ireland. If you were wondering why people would react with alarm to the sudden arrival of a group of men in their community, there’s no need to invoke the spectre of the British - all you had to do was leaf through couple of editions of the Irish Examiner itself. Some sample headlines:
It’s not difficult to draw a concrete link between the two topics. This study from the Lancet indicates that the “past-year intimate partner violence prevalence estimate” for women in North Africa is about four times worse than for women in North Western Europe. (Table 4 indicates the relevant figure for North Africa is 16%; and 4% for Western Europe.) To be clear - that’s four times worse than a country in the grip of “an epidemic of gender-based violence”. The North African country of Algeria is one the most common origins of those seeking international protection in Ireland.
I make no judgement on how bad domestic violence is in Ireland or elsewhere, how misogynist we are as a society, whether those factors should be considered as part of our immigration policy, or even whether protesters against housing immigrants are truly concerned about these issues or something else. Maybe this is all irrelevant. What’s of interest is the way male violence appears in the eye of the Irish press. For them, it has a kind of holographic quality; it can be non-existent, or ever-present, depending on how you position it and what use you need to put it to at a given moment.
This inconsistency reflects a wider one in relation to law and order, and crime and punishment generally on the part of people who think of themselves as progressive. When is it ok to be scared, and for the state to take action against that fear? When the issue of hate speech arises, the media are often the first to warn of sinister forces brewing to threaten the safety and corrupt the health of the community, that must be stamped out with the force of law. When the Irish media agitates for hate speech laws it often cites low conviction rates, implying that punishment is at least a significant part of the solution to this perceived threat. Again, the Irish Examiner has led out on this, declaring previously that “Hate Offences Act must be implemented as a priority”.
Say what you want about the dunderhead right wing approach to law and order, which is “lock ‘em up and throw away the key”: at least it’s consistent. We live in the midst of an epidemic of male violence against women which needs to be addressed with the full force of the law, but also there is no reason to be concerned about men arriving in your community from countries where violence against women is verifiably much worse. If the latter is not true (and I’m certain most journalists and politicians would consider it dogwhistling, racist bullshit), great. But then neither is the former.
Of course, there is an underlying consistency to the more progressive, activist-driven approaches on public safety fears. If the suspected perpetrator group can be portrayed as vibrating with the sacred light of structural oppression then it’s a moral panic; if potential victims are from those groups then it’s a national crisis that we must come down on with an iron fist, passing laws, locking people up, compulsory programmes of re-education and so on. This consistency doesn’t even need a full sentence to describe it, because you can do it in a two-word phrase. That phrase is “who? whom?”
We had a similar case of leftist cognitive dissonance in Britain after the murder of Sarah Everard.
Politicians and columnists arguing that it was quite understandable that women walking home alone at night might consider any man she sees as a likely attacker, and that a curfew for men might be the best way to alleviate these fears.
But many of those same pundits regard it as totally irrational that a female would be concerned about being followed into the ladies toilets or a changing room by a transwoman.
Just wait until you start having rape gangs like we have! I find the best way to shut feminists up is to point out how much they complain about Trump and how little they complain about the rape gangs in the North of England.