Miranda Devine: Stop telling boys to act like girls

IN this era of women-only parking, women-only trains, women-only apartments and transgender bathrooms, it seems the only acceptable man is a man who wants to be a woman.

IN this era of women-only parking, women-only trains, women-only apartments and transgender bathrooms, it seems the only acceptable man is a man who wants to be a woman.

The job of pathologising masculinity continues apace.

There’s the government’s new domestic violence campaign which portrays little boys as aggressive misogynists.

There’s the undergraduate newspaper Honi Soit, which claims that rugby teams at private boys’ schools foster a “rape culture”.

Or what about the Sydney preschool which bans four-year-old boys from dressing up as Batman for fear superhero costumes will make them “violent”?

Yes, the only way men can find forgiveness for their dark, brute natures is to denounce other men, or otherwise to swap sexes, a la Caitlyn Jenner.

If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em!

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Succumbing to Stockholm syndrome and turning on your fellow man is certainly easier, especially if you still have a chip on your shoulder about the alpha jocks at school who effortlessly attracted the attention of all the hot alpha girls.

It’s probably been that way since caveman days, when the sweaty warriors came home full of bravado and testosterone. Only, now, our society actually values the nerdy guys who stayed behind to write poetry and pick berries with the ladies. Look at Bill Gates. And Mark Zuckerberg. After millennia of evolution, we’re living Revenge of the Nerds. You’d think they’d be grateful. But no.

Take Pranay Jha, a former student of the prestigious King’s School and a ­bespectacled GPS debater, who has penned a tour de force of craven self-loathing in the Sydney University campus organ Honi Soit.

Becoming Caitlyn Jenner suddenly seems a sensible option.

It comes with a trigger warning, naturally. Far be it from me to say he has an inferiority complex about the more popular, athletic, physically disciplined boys who played rugby or rowed in the First Eight at his alma mater, while he toiled away thanklessly in the Seconds Debating team.

They had “the ability to get girls, be invited to parties and to hold a reserved seat at the Royal Oak Double Bay”. No wonder he’s upset!

But his message is brutal. He has smeared all boys who play those sports at a handful of private schools as rapists.

“Perpetrators” he calls them at one stage, without a skerrick of actual proof.

His incendiary claim is based entirely on vague anecdotes from three anonymous female friends, “Lucy”, “Emily” and “Hannah”, who he claims had their “consent” “violated”.

“If that’s not a a culture of rape I don’t know what is,” is how he puts it.

Having dispensed his casual defamation, he returns to his favourite theme, bemoaning a “deeply entrenched culture that glorifies rowers and rugby players (and sets them) on a pedestal.

“It would always be the boys who hooked up with as many girls as possible that would be celebrated, and not those who stood for the rights of young women,” he says.

The psychological trauma at the heart of Pranay’s complaint is revealed when he writes about the Hogarthian horrors of the Head of the River.

“On the Friday morning before the race, the school hall is filled with chatter about how each crew is shaping up … The seniors bellow a war cry. The rest of the school joins in. A thousand students lean back and scream at the top of their voice, as the eight ‘heroes’ walk in. Their eyes are forward, heads held high, chest out: they are the pinnacles, the ‘ideal’ GPS boys.

“At that point, the juniors understand what it means to be a student at this school … Inextricably linked to this are rigid and destructive constructions of masculinity.”

Well poor Pranay needn’t worry. Masculinity of the alpha kind that he so resents is already on the endangered list, thanks to decades of toxic grievance feminism which casts women as helpless victims and men as brutes — unless they surrender and become self-flagellating male feminists.

That’s pretty much the message of the federal government’s new domestic violence ads, too.

Launched by Social Services Minister Christian Porter last week, the ads ­demonise little boys to send a message about “respect” for women.

In one scene, a good little girl is carrying a bowl of food. A bad little boy deliberately slams a door in her face, causing her to fall on the floor. The boy doesn’t apologise, just glares at her malevolently.

Her mother helps her up and says, “He did it because he likes you”.

What planet are they on? No mother would be so pathetic. No boy would be such a cartoonish villain.

Some boys are thoughtless and ­unruly, as are some girls. Some boys are gentle and kind, as are some girls.

But the government is dividing them by sex into virtuous and evil. Victim and perpetrator. Punishing boys for being born with a Y chromosome.

Hear that message enough and it’s no wonder some boys don’t want to be boys.

Becoming Caitlyn Jenner suddenly seems a sensible option.