I’M still at the beginning of writing a book entitled The Criminalisation of Everything. One of the problems is that new laws or demands for new laws hit the news on what seems like a daily basis. It’s genuinely hard to keep up.

For example, before the paint had dried on the Scottish Hate Crime Act, a new committee looking at ways to outlaw misogyny was set up in Holyrood. But before this latest criminalising committee has had a chance to extend the policing of everyday life in Scotland, in England, Home Secretary Priti Patel appears to have stolen their thunder by announcing a possible new crackdown on wolf-whistling.

It is unclear if wolf-whistling has suddenly increased or if there is a new epidemic of misogynistic attitudes and behaviour. What has unquestionably increased is the number of feminists who now use the term “toxic masculinity” and who are calling for more laws and police protection of women from more and more things.

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The term “toxic masculinity” was invented in the late 1980s but was barely used until around 2013 when there was an explosion in its use. Also, in 2007, concerned about the rise of feminists who push for ever more laws, policing and the imprisonment of offending men, Elizabeth Bernstein created the term “carceral feminism”.

One of Bernstein’s concerns was that feminists, who previously had pushed for more freedom for women or who looked at problems that women faced as social problems, were now simply calling for more men to be locked up.

Bernstein is an American sociologist, but a similar trend of feminists demanding more laws and who use the term “toxic masculinity” can also be observed here.

Looking at the shift in feminist thought in the UK, one would think that attitudes in society towards women are getting worse by the year. However, if anything, the opposite would appear to be the case.

For example, the British Social Attitude survey has noted that whereas in 1987, 48 percent of the public agreed that “a man’s job is to earn money, a woman’s job is to look after the home and family”, by 2017 only eight percent agreed with this. In other words, what could be seen as a more sexist or at least stereotyped and limited view of women has essentially collapsed.

I would suggest that sexist attitudes in society have significantly declined over the last three decades and, consequently, it is unlikely that women today are experiencing an epidemic of wolf-whistling men as they walk the streets.

What appears to have gotten worse is not the behaviour of men but the outlook of modern feminists, many of whom think of men and male behaviour through the prism of toxicity.

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In other words, it is not men that have become more degraded, but the imagination of carceral feminists who see threatening and dangerous men wherever they look.

As well as leading to the criminalisation of behaviour, like wolf-whistling, that previously was seen as insignificant, this approach risks elevating the anxiety of young women about men and, in the process, infantilising them.

Unfortunately, when we look at which women sit on the committees pushing for these new laws, we find that it is almost always feminists, and more particularly, it is almost always carceral feminists.

Rarely, if ever, do we find feminists like Camille Paglia or Christina Hoff Sommers, who ridicule what they call “victim feminists” and who call for an end to their “obsessed, moralistic” and “puritanical” approach to public life.

For years, Paglia has railed against victim feminists who she sees as wanting a “risk-free state-controlled world”. She believes that most ordinary women do not want the patronising protections being proscribed. However, she also is concerned that modern feminists are helping to create a toxic image of men and encouraging a climate within which young women increasingly come to expect a chaperoned existence.

She has a point.

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