You Will Comply and You'll be Happy
The rise of the career woman and why troublesome men are no longer needed by The Machine
This week, after several increasingly passive aggressive reminders from our HR team, I completed my ‘annual compliance training refresher’. This delightful requirement ensures my adherence (and that of all my colleagues) to both the statutory obligations and the ideological whims of The Machine. It consists of several mind-numbing online training modules, so banal in their corporate vernacular, and so oozing with ersatz sincerity that they literally drove me to drink.
Almost four hours of bile-inducing newspeak and pompous pontification I endured – and this was going at double speed, for many of the modules so closely resemble the compliance refreshers of previous years that I was able to skip through much of the turgid preamble and go straight to the quiz sections. Nevertheless, by the end of it I was in a state of near hysteria, firing off enraged missives to my close work buddies in our private external chat group, cursing at the monitor, and thumping the desk in time with my staccato expletives.
It's a good thing I still get to work from home for most of the week – though the compliance standards for this too are slowly shifting back in the direction of pre-COVID times, as I predicted in my essay The Company Wants You Back in the Office.
It was not the compliance refreshers as whole that so infuriated me this year – for these are something all of us at The Company must endure on a yearly basis and is just one of those things you miserably resign yourself to and get through as quickly and painlessly as possible, usually on a slow and uninspiring Monday.
This year however, a new section had been slipped in – a lengthy and patronising sermon on Sexual Harassment.
We’ve had sexual harassment modules in these compliance refreshers in previous years, but they’ve always been brief and, I must admit, reasonable – if indeed tiresome and trite. They would always cover the expected terrain – the forms that sexual harassment can take, the avenues available for dealing with it (should it occur – which in my long experience it very rarely does), and indeed an acknowledgement that anyone can be the victim of sexual harassment.
But this year’s module was an entirely new beast.
I won’t recount it at length, such is my lingering disgust at the affrontery of this experience, but its core feature was that it took aim squarely at men.
It began by positing a ludicrous and completely uncited assertion – that 89% of women experience sexual harassment.
Immediately I was brought to mind of the now well-debunked claim that helped kindle the hysterical Me Too movement of a decade ago – that 1 in 5 women in US colleges are the victims of sexual assault, and straight off the bat I knew what I was in for: not the benign and apolitical box-ticking exercise of years past, but a woke struggle session infused with Fourth Wave Feminism and misandry. The 1 in 5 claim was spurious enough – 20% would appear a ridiculously high proportion for enlightened Western liberal democracies where men have been so neutered by the culture at large that most are too afraid to even ask a woman out for fear of being MeTooed, let alone commit an actual indecent assault – but where now have they pulled this 90% figure from?! It is utterly laughable.
I searched for a source, but the training module offered none – received wisdom at its best. Trust the experts, my lad, and complete your compliance refresher like a good little boy.
I gritted my teeth and ploughed on, and a few pages down I hit the jackpot.
In the quiz section – where they test our ‘knowledge’ and upon which our passing the training module is dependant – there was a question that read: ‘Which of the following are effective measures to reduce instances of sexual harassment?’
There were multiple choice answers, any or all of which could be selected. In my haste to bypass this odious module I failed to snag a full screenshot, not knowing that this experience would later form the kernel for my next essay (inspiration for which has eluded me these past two weeks, and for this, dear reader, I apologise). But they were (as shown below):
More women and people from underrepresented groups in leadership positions
Listening to the targeted person and referring them on to appropriate support
And the other two (from memory) were something along the lines of:
Provide training for team leaders and management to effectively deal with reported instances
Do nothing and hope the issue goes away
I considered the question and selected numbers 2 and 3.
A big red X bloomed before me on the screen and a message that almost appeared jeering in nature: “No! That’s not correct. In fact, the most effective measure to reduce instances of sexual harassment is more women and people from underrepresented groups in leadership positions.”
I was wrong. I was not compliant.
I had to go back and restart the module and enter the CORRECT answer – and then I received a big green checkmark, and I passed the test.
Again, no source, no body of work, no study or data set was provided to validate this assertion – it was simply proclaimed axiomatically.
Can anyone explain to me how having more women and people from underrepresented groups in leadership positions will reduce instances of sexual harassment?
This strikes me as the same kind of magical thinking that permeated the BLM saga where activist politicians advocated for defunding the police and replacing them with social workers. Utter lunacy and entirely indicative of the burgeoning managerial class which staffs the bureaucratic strata of the Woke World Order.
It’s always an appeal to authority with these people, isn’t it? If we could just get more of OUR kind of people into positions of authority, then we could make the world a perfect place.
It is, fundamentally, a tenet of Marxist/Maoist revolutionary thought. And herein lies the truth: the technocrats who create these online learning modules, or at least the masters they serve, are not remotely interested in reducing instances of sexual harassment in the workplace, their motivation is to fundamentally transform the workplace – to revolutionise it.
It is important to note, by way of personal anecdote, that I cannot recall one serious instance of sexual harassment across my various placements in the corporate world over the past 15 years. This is not to say there have not been instances of it – after all, such things are generally handled discretely – but it is plain to see just by observing the day-to-day culture in any given organisation how permissible and widespread any such behaviour is. And in my experience, it is simply not a problem of any meaningful magnitude. As I said earlier, men in the 21st Century are neutered almost to the point of opting out of the dating game altogether, so fraught have the sexual politics become, thanks to the incessant messaging of the woke global media and marketing machines.
Add to this the fact that women in leadership positions are now so commonplace in the corporate world that, by my reckoning, the fairer sex now threatens to topple the traditionally male-dominated C-suite, not to mention middle-management where in some departments, within my organisation at least (a large publicly listed financial services company), women in leadership roles outnumber men by perhaps three-to-one. Virtually every woman I work with (not to mention my recent ex-girlfriend and my ex-wife) earns more than me, and I am by no means on a ‘low’ income – though with the ever-increasing cost of living, a six-figure salary now has a fraction of the purchasing power it did even a decade ago.
So what is the big crisis here that necessitates such alarmist insertions into our compliance modules? Assertions that 90% of women experience sexual harassment and the way to deal with this is to get more women (and people from underrepresented groups?!) into leadership roles…
There is no crisis – at least not the one they are attempting to depict. The crisis, as they see it, is masculinity itself. And, dare I say it, white masculinity.
It is well known that during the 60s and 70s the Rockefeller Foundation bankrolled the Second Wave Feminist movement. The permutations of this cynical social engineering program masquerading as an early form of social justice could furnish an entirely separate essay and have been discussed at length by more worthy commentators than me. But to cut a long story short, what was the upshot of the great feminist victory of last century that saw hundreds of millions of women (newly liberated by way of the birth control pill) enter the workforce over the subsequent decades?
Firstly: a virtual doubling of the tax base which enabled governments around the world to embark on ever-expanding entitlement programs (buying votes, in other words) and to expand the state indoctrination system otherwise known as public school into early childhood education as young mothers everywhere embraced their true calling, as secretaries and typists within the corporate machine.
Let us not forget also, that this groundswell just happened to coincide with the removal of the gold standard and the subsequent fractional-reserve debt bubble that has since swelled to such monumental proportions that now only the wealthiest families can afford to own even a modest sized home.
But perhaps even more significant were the results that feminism rendered for the private sector: the stagnation of wages across the board due to the sudden oversupply of labour.
What a win for the government, and what a win for the corporate superstructure. There must be a catchy phrase for something like that… hmm… Something like Public-Private Partnership maybe?
But the rabbit hole goes deeper and here’s the real kicker.
It is not a diabolical plot to kill real wage growth and maximise corporate profits, and to rake in more tax receipts to buy votes and fund foreign wars and underwrite the ever-expanding financial bubble… I mean, it is all those things, but it is something more sinister and sublime also.
The Machine no longer needs men. Indeed, and increasingly, it does not even want us, and would in fact prefer it if we were not here at all (for the most part). Naturally, the echelons of the highest order and certain key functionaries within the upper ranks of the managerial class will always be staffed by men – here where the real business gets done the biologically preeminent traits of men are required in order to keep The Machine rolling: aggression, competitiveness, ruthlessness, ambition, and indeed, in many cases – psychopathy.
But from executive management on down, we are becoming surplus to requirements. Just as The Machine does not want independent, capable men starting their own businesses to challenge the hegemony of the corporate superstructure, nor does it desire independent and capable men within its own ranks – challenging the dogma, questioning decisions, innovating and looking to supplant their mediocre bosses… and indeed calling out the blatant indoctrination contained within its compliance modules.
Women are more agreeable; less likely to make waves; less inclined to question authority; more inclined to accept received wisdom – and less likely to ask for pay rises. This is not simply my opinion, nor the sour rantings of a misogynist (for the record: I’m all for women being in the workforce, and excelling therein – provided that is what they TRULY want from life, as opposed to something they’ve been convinced of through propaganda) – the science around female trait agreeableness is well documented and has been discussed at length by Jordan Peterson among many others.
The Machine wants women to staff its institutions. Corporations are no longer entities that desire creativity and rebelliousness, competition and innovation – the agenda has been set: Sustainability, Inclusivity, Net Zero… Stakeholder Capitalism.
Once a centralised top-down agenda is in place, the traits best suited to implement it are not those biologically inherent in men, but those most commonly displayed by women.
This is why our new compliance module states that more women and people from ‘underrepresented groups’ in leadership positions will reduce instances of sexual harassment. It is not because The Machine has any interest in reducing sexual harassment, it is because The Machine desires agreeable, well-oiled cogs to facilitate its ongoing smooth operation. And let us be clear – when they say ‘leadership positions’ they’re simply referring to the gatekeepers at middle management, executive, and board level. For let us not delude ourselves into thinking that these corporate positions have anything to do with leadership in the true sense of the word – these roles do not lead, they administer. The same is true in the public and government sectors.
This is why we are seeing more and more female (or at least effeminate) world leaders; this is why companies everywhere are openly declaring gender quotas for management and board of director positions; this indeed is why the company where I work ousted its conservative male board chairman two years ago and installed a progressive woman who has since steered us directly down the path of Sustainability and Net Zero.
The mandarins of the New World Order at the WEF have set the agenda and, as the slogan goes: The Future is Female.
The future is safety and kindness. The future is Sustainable. But most importantly – the future is compliant.
