The Bogus Promise of Kindness

Another Way to Silence Women

New Zealanders wondering what happened to the leader who walked away 18 months after a landslide victory have had their questions answered in a soft article in Elle Magazine this month. The ‘be kind’ leader, Dame Jacinda Ardern, has turned her edict to the Covid-ravaged public into a global profession.

Mostly she is in the United States where she holds three fellowships at Harvard—as an Angelopoulos Global Public Leaders Fellow, a Hauser Leader at the Center for Public Leadership, and a Senior Fellow in the Women and Public Policy Program. The fellowships were originally meant to last for three months but have been extended.

As one of 12 leaders who each received $US20m ($NZ35m) from Melinda Gates in 2024, to be distributed to charitable organisations doing “urgent, impactful, and innovative work to improve women’s health and well-being globally,” she is no doubt occupied with that enormous task.

So far she has already founded the Field Fellowship for Empathetic Leadership “to support and connect leaders who embrace an alternative form of leadership”, a project Elle writes, that is clearly modelled on Ardern herself. In her founder's statement Ardern says she is proud to be an empathetic and compassionate leader and that Field “is a new safe home for those leaders.”

If the Field website is any indication, it is a fellowship intended for women only since all the fellows to date have been female and all the images are of women.

The gendered nature of Ardern’s vision of empathetic leadership would come as no surprise to British author Victoria Smith. Her latest book released this year is (Un)Kind: How ‘Be Kind’ Entrenches Sexism. Unkind is not intended as a criticism of kindness, empathy and compassion as such but it is a critique of how a particular interpretation of kindness functions to condition, exploit, shame and silence women and girls.

Smith writes that at the heart of what she calls ‘JustBeKindism’ is the demand that women once again embrace passivity, emotional suppression, intense self-monitoring, erosion of boundaries, self-doubt and transfer of female-created resources to males. Women are now not told they are unfeminine, but that they are unkind.

She explains it this way - when we say to children ‘be kind’ we really mean ‘be quiet.’ When we say ‘be kind’ to women, chances are we are using it as a shaming mechanism against women who refuse to toe the line, in particular when it comes to anything pertaining to the trans issue.

In New Zealand we have seen feminists condemned for not being inclusive by Green and Labour MPs because they reject men who say they are women into their spaces. Excluding trans women (men) is unkind.

In fact Smith highlights the Albert Park attack on women by the trans mob as an example of this hypocrisy. As few of us who attended that Let Women Speak two years ago can forget, an older woman was beaten, two women speakers had tomato juice thrown over them and an unrestrained crowd surged over, threatened and silenced a small group of women who had gathered to hear Kelly Jay Keen-Minshull and other gender critical women speak in a public park.

Writes Smith: “It might have looked entirely normative - female people want to organise and speak on their own terms, male people resort to violence in order to stop them, but, actually, we were told, the men were being kind. As Chloe Swarbrick, the Green MP for Auckland Central, later described it, the protest was one of ‘love and affirmation.’”

The Auckland attacks would have felt familiar to organisers of any pro-female gatherings in recent years. “Standard male aggression was being presented as motivated by empathy and open-mindedness. Image after image showed the kind of man you would struggle to imagine picking his own underpants off the floor suddenly feeling inspired to ‘smash the binary’ when presented with the chance to spit in a woman’s face. Being kind is incredibly complex if it involved giving your hand-earned cash to a women's refuge or allowing a woman's perception of her own reality to challenge your own; thankfully, it’s really easy if all it requires is assaulting women.’”

Events like Albert Park suggest that there is no shortage of men who have been desperate, for years, to have the chance to put women in their place, call them names, threaten violence, hit them, tell them they’re to blame for their responses, tell them they’re disgusting, without losing the status that comes with being one of the good guys. “The new ‘kindness’ has given them what they’ve always been looking for,” writes Smith.

Perhaps, even more egregious, the Albert Park event also demonstrated that there is no shortage of female trans allies keen to demonstrate their ‘kindness’ by dumping on other women.

And herein lies the inherent contradiction in the Be Kind script. It is a script that entrenches sexist expectations while purporting to do the opposite.

Or as writer Brendon O’Neill put it, the attack on the Let Women Speak attendees in the name of trans rights was a glimpse of the ‘the iron fist of authoritarianism that lurks in the velvet glove of “Be Kind.”’

No doubt New Zealanders who suffered under the lockdown and vaccine mandates of the Ardern government would add their grievances to the list.

Kindness is not the only virtue to be put under the academic microscope recently and found wanting. Virtuous victim signalling associated with woke beliefs was scrutinised by a research team from the University of Edinburgh and the results were damning. The paper called Virtuous Victimhood as a Dark Triad Resource Transfer Strategy demonstrated that individuals willing to present themselves as victims of the prevailing social or political order is a calculated effort to extract resources from others. In other words, woke beliefs are a heist - an organised raid on the private property and financial security of working people.

The paper revealed a connection between ‘victim signals’ and certain personality traits, especially those associated with the Dark Triad: Narcissism, Machiavellianism and Psychopathy. Not only did the data suggest that there was a strong link between high Dark Triad scores and being more willing to extract resources from others, but it also showed that those engaged in virtuous victim signalling are also far more willing to resort to other ethically dubious tactics such as lying for financial gain and making exaggerated claims of harm.

The paper concluded that this tendency is not random. It is influenced by personality and genetics. This means that the instinct to use morality as a means of wealth and power transfer is unlikely to disappear. It will simply take new forms as circumstances change.

Women, especially, must be ever vigilant and suspicious of those promoting seemingly benign virtues, particularly those that slot neatly into sexist tropes.