The Despicable Man: Feminism’s Politically Correct Punching Bag
“There is no industry run by women for women in which men are turned into despicable objects for use and abuse.” — Sheila Jeffreys, Uprooting Male Domination: Dispatches from the Sex Wars (2025)
Actually, feminism is an industry in which men are turned into despicable objects for use and abuse. Feminism Inc. has become a global cultural enterprise. Its signature product is the Despicable Man stereotype and the narrative that “misogyny” is his state of nature. That, and exploiting women, because they are women, is his principal occupation.
Over Gloria Steinem’s generational run, which included involvement in CIA-funded Cold War cultural operations, feminism grew into a sprawling institutional field encompassing NGOs, publishers, universities, government agencies, media outlets, and professional experts. Feminism’s global ascent coincided with capitalism’s neoliberal turn and the displacement of class politics by the politics of recognition.1
Efforts to “smash The Patriarchy” could coexist quite comfortably with elite plans to restructure the economy. Globalization and deindustrialization devastated much of men’s industrial employment in working-class communities across the West, while women entered the burgeoning service economy and professions in growing numbers. Feminism’s emphasis on sexual liberation, representation, and combating “male violence against women and girls” saw men’s reactions to this upheaval as patriarchal resistance to women’s emancipation. In short, neoliberalism reorganized the geography of production, uprooting established livelihoods and social relations; its feminist flank recast the resulting class contradictions as antagonisms between the sexes, not least through its go-to morality play: the Despicable Man threatened by the independent Woman.
Sexual Politics Is a Battlefield and Business
Sexual politics and sexual ethics are contested, overlapping social fields in which competing actors struggle to define the legitimate terms of relations between the sexes. Since the 1970s, organized feminism has moved from challenger to incumbent within these fields in the West.
The central stake is symbolic power: the authority to determine what counts as sexual exploitation, violence, discrimination, privilege, and oppression.2 Institutional feminism has been particularly successful at elevating its categories, concepts and tropes into an authoritative framework organized around the axiom that men’s structural domination of women—The Patriarchy—is the root cause of inequalities and antagonisms between the sexes.
Careers, budgets, moral authority, and political influence flow from the power to define the problem and prescribe its remedy. The accumulation and conversion of economic, cultural, and symbolic capital, in Bourdieu’s terms, help reproduce feminism’s hegemonic position within the fields of sexual politics and ethics. Feminist interpretations prevail in the field’s negotiations and skirmishes, but more than that, they increasingly set the rules of the game—what counts as a legitimate problem, a credible interpretation, and an acceptable remedy.
Feminism establishes categories through which ever more experiences can be recognized as manifestations of male domination. These classifications circulate as cultural products, generating demand for further expertise, intervention, and denunciation, which in turn reinforces the authority of the institutions producing them. The Despicable Man is feminism’s signature trope-cum-commodity.
The “sex wars,” once played out on Jerry Springer, have been mainstreamed. Through news, entertainment, publishing, and social media, the Despicable Man is endlessly repackaged as the villain of the latest moral sex panic. Outrage generates engagement, engagement generates advertising revenue, subscriptions, and donations. The more controversies that can be identified, the more content, expertise, and intervention there is to sell.
The battle of the sexes—and its very successful spin-off, the sex/gender wars—has become a profitable cultural franchise. The manosphere, femosphere, and queersphere increasingly resemble professional wrestling: rival factions, theatrical outrage, recognizable villains, and spectators. Each confrontation generates content for the franchise. Case in point: the brouhaha that erupted in the stands during the Portland Thorns–North Carolina Courage National Women’s Soccer League match on 23 October, involving “Save Women’s Sports” campaigners and trans rights supporters. The footage promptly became fresh meat for fans of the online sex/gender wars.
Jeffreys and Spinifex Press are part and parcel of this enterprise. Jeffreys supplies the diagnosis—it’s The Patriarchy!—and Spinifex packages and sells it. Both their moral authority and commercial interests are served by keeping male domination at the centre of the explanation, regardless of how relations between the sexes change. New manifestations, such as “mankeeping” and “microaggressions,” and underlying causes, such as “toxic masculinity,” can always be identified. The business is not so much to uproot The Patriarchy as to keep uprooting it. There will always be another weed to pull, another root to excavate in their garden.
Let’s pause to appreciate the lack of self-awareness—dare I say feminist privilege—it takes for Jeffreys and Spinifex to invoke the spectre of male depravity to sell a book insisting that no female-oriented industry exists for the degradation of men. Granted, this isn’t pimping. But the representation of men can also be put to work, made politically useful, and sold. Feminists clearly represent men in ways that serve their gynocentric ends. Turns out treating men as means rather than ends is fair play if one’s a feminist.
From Providers and Protectors to Male Chauvinist Pigs
The first big cultural hit in the Despicable Man franchise was the 1970s “male chauvinist pig.” Like Barbie, this cultural figure gets periodic makeovers and new sidekicks to keep the expanding market in denunciation, awareness-raising, and promises of future liberation from The Patriarchy well stocked with a model for every occasion and demographic.
The Despicable Man—especially the white model—functions as the late-capitalist sin-eater or scapegoat of a deteriorating progressivism. By transferring guilt and recrimination onto this convenient figure, the professional-managerial class, which has no shortage of feminists, gets to preserve its own virtue and innocence. The Despicable Man is the ultimate politically correct punching bag, reproduced in seemingly infinite guises: the frat bro, the debate bro, the mansplainer, the incel, the man in a dress, and so on. A creature to be freely and publicly reviled or, in today’s parlance, cancelled. He is always already guilty, always already asking for it. The suffering of men so stereotyped doesn’t register as suffering at all, but rather as “the loss of privilege” or “being held accountable.” So much for dehumanization and stigmatization being exclusively male wickedness.
Men in this feminist imaginary are limited to the pornographer, the pimp, the john, the lazy husband, the domestic abuser, and the rapist. Their collective, intergenerational project? Maintaining The Patriarchy through periodic “rape culture” updates.
“You know what happened never? 20 women got together and built a boat and traveled to a distant land.” – Jordan Peterson
Noticeably absent from this coterie of deplorables are the men who built and maintained the material foundations of civilization, provided for their families, and assumed the risks of protection and defence. Their labour and sacrifices helped make possible the very civilization in which feminism became possible—thinkable, even. Yet these contributions are rendered suspect, reinterpreted as expressions of male domination rather than as the fulfilment of obligations assigned to men by their sex and social rank.
Skewed Feminist Accounts of Social History
What happens to the historical ledger when men’s contributions are entered as evidence of their privilege, while the costs of making them are written off as the natural price of being male? Within feminist discourse, masculine contributions are not merely overlooked amid women’s grievances and victim-to-survivor odysseys. They are reclassified as expressions of male supremacy rather than understood in terms of the historical obligations and social relations that produced them.
Providing becomes economic control. Protecting becomes domination. Marriage, love, and family become institutions of exploitation, unpaid labour, and something approaching indentured servitude. Historically, male-coded responsibilities, become evidence of male supremacy.
“If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.” — Camille Paglia
As if most men weren’t peasants, serfs, laborers, artisans, or slaves, struggling to survive and provide for their families—men who were themselves subject to exploitation and domination by higher-ranking men and women. Turning their struggle for survival into a collective historical mission to subordinate women is an ideological move. One fare removed from a good faith account of their “lived experiences”.
It’s not just women who have a “second shift”. Men have off-the-job, home, sex based burdens. Crucially, in the form of willingness to confront danger expected of them outside paid employment. And there’s the dangerous, dirty, and physically punishing work men overwhelmingly shoulder. Men accounted for 93% of fatal workplace injuries in Great Britain in 2025.
The feminist ledger of male domination is remarkably attentive to men’s putative privileges and remarkably silent about their sex-based burdens. Warren Farrell, a former board member of the National Organization for Women (NOW), challenged the identification of masculine roles with personal freedom in The Myth of Male Power: Why Men Are the Disposable Sex (1993). Fulfilling the obligations of husband, father, provider, and protector can substantially constrain a man’s autonomy. Responsibility for others and freedom to do as one pleases are two different things.
The physical and emotional sacrifices involved in feeding, housing, and protecting families receive little recognition in feminist accounts populated by Despicable Men. Masculine obligations are reclassified as privileges, protection as domination, and male suffering as the natural cost of belonging to the supposedly dominant sex. Of course, neither masculine responsibility nor the sacrifices it entails legitimizes the harm particular men have inflicted upon particular women. But neither does the existence of abuse justify rewriting the history of masculinity as a catalogue of women’s oppression by men.
What kind of equality demands that men relinquish the authority and status historically associated with masculine roles while continuing to fulfill their obligations? Many of the fruits of masculinity remain desirable, even necessary, while the cultivation of masculinity and its social status become increasingly suspect, even “toxic,” in the post-industrial West.
Men are still expected to provide, protect, and endure, as though masculinity were a self-renewing resource requiring no care or replenishment. Indeed, men’s emotional and social needs, insofar as meeting them involves women, have now been rendered suspect under the rubric of mankeeping: a new entry in the feminist ledger identifying women’s unpaid labor in maintaining men’s social networks and emotional well-being as yet another burden imposed by gender inequality. In other words, the care and support that help sustain men in fulfilling their obligations to others are recast as evidence of male dependency, immaturity, or exploitation of women. No wonder many men are, to paraphrase Truvy in Steel Magnolias, so confused they don’t know whether to scratch their watches or wind their butts.
A Few Good Men Reboot Fantasy
To close, let’s imagine Jack Nicholson’s famous courtroom confrontation in A Few Good Men, except with Sheila Jeffreys replacing Lieutenant Kaffee as Jessup’s interrogator. There sits Jessup, an absolute embodiment of the male domination she wants to uproot. [Fade to dream sequence.]
Jeffreys stands confidently before him, demanding that he tell the truth about The Patriarchy. Half the courtroom is packed with feminists on the edges of their seats, anticipating Jessup’s confession of the sins of his sex class. The Colonel launches into his indignant defence of men prepared to perform the dangerous and unpleasant duties on which even the comfortable lives of political lesbian feminists depend.
JESSUP:
You want answers?
JEFFREYS:
I think I’m entitled to them.
JESSUP:
You want answers?!
JEFFREYS:
I want the truth!
JESSUP:
You can’t handle the truth! We live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded. Who’s going to do it? You, Sheila? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for the weak, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You call all that male privilege and expect me to prostrate myself, trade in my uniform for an I’m With Her T-shirt. Hard pass, Sheila. That’s a hard pass…
Of course, Jessup is no innocent. His abuse of military authority is exposed when he admits ordering the prohibited hazing that led to Private Santiago’s death. The film shows how appeals to duty, discipline and honour can rationalize cruelty and abuse. But the abuse of authority does not negate the necessity of the responsibilities that authority is supposed to serve. Nor does the existence of abusive husbands or fathers establish that fatherhood, provision, protection or masculine responsibility are primarily instruments of female oppression.
Men’s historical roles cannot be reduced to domination for domination’s sake. They also involved obligations, discipline, danger, and sacrifice, often imposed upon men who possessed very little power themselves. Women’s contributions and burdens belong to this same history. Neither can be properly understood when relations between the sexes are reduced to a history of women’s oppression by men.
The Truth Is in the Whole
An account of sexual history and ethics that records only what men have taken from women—or received at their expense—while discounting their obligations, contributions, and sacrifices offers a distorted, and thus false, account of relations between the sexes.
The problem extends beyond historical interpretation. The categories of feminist discourse do not simply reflect lived relations between the sexes; they organize how those relations are perceived and judged by institutions and the wider public. Institutional feminism has acquired a monopoly on determining what counts as male domination, “toxic masculinity,” or “rape culture,” and whose experiences can be recognized as evidence of them.
The Despicable Man franchise is both a product of this authority and a means of reproducing it. An entire sex, with its achievements and failures, virtues and vices, tenderness and brutality, is compressed into a morally contemptible abstraction, endlessly repackaged and put to work in the service of institutional and commercial interests. The point here is not to demand a fairer feminist accounting. It is to challenge the categories through which the accounting is done.
Coda
Toni Morrison remarked in a 1993 interview about racism and identity, “If you can only be tall because somebody is on their knees, then you have a serious problem.” One wonders whether feminists could feel quite so tall without the figure of the Despicable Man to berate?
Footnotes:
See Nancy Fraser, “Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History,” New Left Review 56 (March–April 2009): 97–117. Fraser argues that second-wave feminism’s shift from redistribution to recognition coincided with neoliberalism’s ascent, allowing aspects of feminist critique to be appropriated in the service of capitalist restructuring. In particular, the emphasis on identity, cultural recognition, and individual emancipation became increasingly detached from the critique of political economy.
See Pierre Bourdieu, “Social Space and Symbolic Power,” Sociological Theory 7, no. 1 (1989): 14–25, especially 20–23. Bourdieu argues that struggles over symbolic power are struggles over the legitimate classification of social reality. Dominant actors seek to impose categories of perception through which social relations, identities, and divisions become recognized and understood. Such classificatory authority is itself a form of political power.
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Tara van Djik is a GenX failed academic, aka independent scholar, aka overeducated gig worker. She is a mother of 3, and an American living abroad, interested in cultural critique and geographical political economy. You can support her by subscribing to her soon-to-be unmothballed Substack, or by buying her a coffee. She is on X @TaravoidDijk.
Jennifer Bilek is an investigative journalist who has tracked the funding of the gender industry for over a decade. She is author of the The 11th Hour, a platform highlighting the connections between technology, transsexualism, and transhumanism. Her research into the philanthropic backers of the gender industry has been utilized for legal briefs, and platformed in myriad publications, films, and other media in the US and internationally. She has appeared on The Megyn Kelly Show, Steven Bannon’s War Room, and James Patrick’s Big Picture, and on various other platforms and podcasts. She has been featured in films such as No Way Back (2023), Gender Transformation (2023), and The Gender Delusion (2023). Her work has been published in numerous books and magazines, among which: First Things, Tablet, Human Events, The Spectator World, The Federalist, The American Mind, and in the anthology Female Erasure. She is the author of Transsexual Transgender Transhuman: Dispatches From the 11th Hour Now, also available in Portuguese
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