Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
— William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

I’m not an old fogey — all right, an aging fogey — but I did grow up in a time before pocket computers, video games, progressive education, and social media. If I hadn’t, then perhaps I would be just as deep inside the Matrix as the younger generations. Instead, I read a lot and immersed myself in old movies. This has had a minor and major effect on me. The former is it put words in my mouth that no one else uses, like “swell” and “Say …” The latter is a clear window on the deteriorating relationship between the sexes, driven almost entirely by leftist ideology, specifically feminism. Consequently, a recent poll citing the political widening gyre between young men and women did not surprise me. But it does sadden me because it’s all so unnecessary. And it’s mostly the women’s fault.

The poll found that 44 percent of girls ages 18-29 identified as liberal compared to only 25 percent of men the same age, creating the largest gender gap in half a century. What else can one expect when the entire leftwing culture from academia to entertainment has intentionally sown this division, turning women against men the same way it has turned mothers against their unborn children. And both things are connected, because both diminish men and the prime blessing of women — their nurturing, supportive nature.

There’s little I can do about academia. The American university system has become a veritable anti-male sanctuary wherein minority identity — even for the majority species, women — takes precedence over traditional education, making the current male to female student ratio 60 percent to 40 percent. It’s up to parents and government leaders to retake that battlefield, as they have begun to do in the lower grades and states like Florida, by taking over school boards and banishing Critical Race Theory and transexual indoctrination.

The arts are my stomping grounds as a fiction writer and culture correspondent. Thus, I can point out the significance of a recent Sky News Piers Morgan interview with Dr. Jordan Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos). Morgan asked Peterson to respond to an offensive remark about him by sexy starlet turned feminist director (of course) Olivia Wilde. Promoting her latest girl power dud, Don’t Worry Darling, Wilde named the inspiration for the villainous guru played by Chris Pine in the film:

“We based that character on this insane man, Jordan Peterson, who is this pseudo-intellectual hero to the incel community. You know the incels?… They’re basically disenfranchised, mostly white men, who believe they are entitled to sex from women.… They believe that society has now robbed them — that the idea of feminism is working against nature, and that we must be put back into the correct place.… But this guy Jordan Peterson is someone that legitimizes certain aspects of their movement because he’s a former professor, he’s an author, he wears a suit, so they feel like this is a real philosophy that should be taken seriously.”

Peterson teared up when replying to Morgan, which led to mockery by the “sensitive” leftists. What they could never comprehend is that Doctor Peterson — who has intellectually pulverized countless liberal champions much smarter than Wilde — shed those tears not for himself but for the thousands of psychologically displaced young men who turn to him for help and hope.

“It’s very difficult to understand how demoralised people are, and certainly many young men,” Peterson said. “And you get these casual insults, these ‘incels’ — what does it mean?… All these men who are alienated it’s like, they’re lonesome and they don’t know what to do, and everyone piles abuse on them.”

In Hollywoke land, a nothing but a pretty face like Olivia Wilde can reduce the brilliant scholarship of a man such as Jordan Peterson to a vacuous character in her stupid movie. Wilde is a creature of the dystopian Marxist elite now in power, the product of an unnatural system that can only collapse into itself like a black hole, the epitome of equity over merit by virtue of her sex.

And I can tell you who these “incels” are. They’re boys bereft of the literary and screen heroes we had growing up — cowboys and cops and starship captains — because the glitterati and literati deem their very masculinity toxic. And they are toxic, only not to the great American society they could bolster, but to the ruling class of jealous metrosexuals and spiritually ugly feminists like Wilde. All they need is a little guidance, and respect from the opposite sex, yet Hollywoke will make sure they don’t get either.

But if they ever look up from their iPhones, questionable videos, and computer games, they can find the same old heroes I did on page and screen. They’ll find women who actually like men — who can handle them with intelligence and understanding rather than nonexistent combat superiority. I just watched one on TCM — Glenda Farrell in I Love Trouble (1947). Her PI boss (Franchot Tone) comes into the office aware he was tailed there. “Ever get the feeling you’re being followed?” he asks Farrell. “Not nearly enough,” she says. A real woman responding to a real man.

For the underreported good news in the new poll is not that women are becoming more liberal but that men are becoming more conservative. And when more of them find the right stuff, the right women will come around.