by Paul Craig Roberts
November 11, 2025 - Over the course of my lifetime I have watched the role of men taken away. The role of the male as provider, defender and disciplinarian is no more. It was destroyed by
feminists.
To clarify “feminist”: in the past when I have criticized feminists, older women who had careers asked why I thought women shouldn’t have careers. Their idea is that a feminist is a
woman who has a career.
However, women have always had careers as mothers, homemakers, grandmothers, schoolteachers, nurses, secretaries, writers, artists, musicians, scientists, and even spies such as Eve Gordon who made during World War II 112 parachute jumps into occupied Europe.
Even in pre-feminist days, one of my aunts, despite being married, had a career outside the home. She enjoyed the discipline of getting to work on time, the interaction with other people, and meeting new people.
By feminist, I mean a person with an ideological agenda of obliterating the difference between men and women.
When I was young, men were raised to respect women. When a woman entered a room, the men stood. Doors were opened for women, and their entrance proceeded the man’s. Car doors were opened
for women who were then helped in and out of the vehicle.
At the dining table, men stood until the women were seated. In those days men still wore hats. A gentleman passing a lady on the sidewalk was expected to tip his hat in respect. A man who struck a woman or used a four-letter word in a lady’s presence suffered a ruined reputation.
Feminists derided the many ways in which respect was shown to women as “placing women on a pedestal.” Showing respect for women was somehow undervaluing them and treating them unequally. Feminists insisted on women being pulled down into the gutter with men.
Big brothers were taught to protect little sisters. It was little brother’s job to learn to protect himself, and fights on the school playground were part of the learning process.
Today, men are no longer taught to protect women, though it is a natural inclination in men. Studies have concluded that the introduction of women soldiers into conflict causes a loss of cohesion and focus, because men become distracted by concern for the women.
Feminists were not happy until they destroyed men’s colleges, male leadership in politics, military and business, men’s clubs and male organizations such as the Boy Scouts, which was forced to take in girls. Even the military has been taken from men. How is there a band of brothers when the commander is female?
Men have lost their role. They are no longer the provider. The wife might have, thanks to gender preferences in university admissions, employment and promotion, the better job bringing in
more income. Studies conclude that boys suffer depression from loss of a role. Reportedly, the suicide rate of boys and young men has been rising.
What the feminists have established is a new form of male deference to women. Males must stand aside and give up their role to women.
Feminists were not content to only destroy men. They also destroyed women. The idea of a chaste woman was objectionable because it held women to a higher standard than men.
Helen Gurley Brown, editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine, used the magazine to encourage women to be harlots. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Cosmopolitan was a fixture in the waiting rooms of doctors and dentists. I often wondered what my mother and grandmothers would have thought of a woman’s magazine, the cover of which heralded articles titled, How to be unfaithful to your husband without being caught, How to find a sex partner when on vacation without your boyfriend, or How to manage multiple sex partners.”
Today, young women support themselves with their porn sites. Women brag on social media about having had 150 sexual partners, sparking rivals to vow attaining higher levels of wantonness. Female schoolteachers get themselves pregnant by their underage students. Mothers have 12-year-old daughters on birth control pills. School children are sexualized at an early age to get them ready for the legalization of pedophiles, now euphemized as “minor attracted persons.”
I often refer to the United States as a Sodom and Gomorrah Tower of Babel, which is what we have become. It will be a big chore for President Trump to rescue us from this predicament.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is the chairman of The Institute for Political Economy, former
associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, U.S. Undersecretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, and an author of many books. He is a regular contributor to the Herland Report news site as well as the Herland Report TV interviews on YouTube. He has had careers in scholarship and academia, journalism, public service and business. He has been awarded the
Treasury Department’s Meritorious Service Award for “his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy.”
