Women Are Different

And they're changing the way we express ourselves

The lawyer censured for writing a letter on behalf of a client warning health practitioners about the possible legal consequences of prescribing puberty blockers to young people has finally been cleared of all charges of misconduct.

Speaking to Sean Plunket on The Platform on 10 March, lawyer Stephen Franks outlined what had up until now been a secret process in which he was censured for using terms like ‘social contagion’ as regards the spread of transgenderism.

But the Law Society’s decision to censure and fine him was completely overturned in the review process. This prompted Sean Plunket to ask how they could have been so wrong.

Franks didn’t hesitate. The problem was censorious women. Many professional bodies are now dominated by censorious women who will reprimand people for not being nice or upsetting others. “Women are different,” he said

His candid criticism rattled Plunket who was prompted to interrupt Franks (shock horror I know) and mollify the audience that he wasn’t having a crack at all censorious women. Later Plunket revealed that Franks’ statement had triggered some female listeners but he did acknowledge that there is a body of evidence to support his views.

The most recent is an essay by Helen Andrews called The Great Feminization. She posited that although individually men and women differ somewhat when it comes to psychological traits, it is not by a huge margin. However there are marked differences in male-female group dynamics. When women reach a critical mass in any organisation, these differences are magnified. Women prefer to enforce harmony and suppress open confrontation (feminine) style while men air differences in a more open, robust way, that is direct (masculine) confrontation.

So when Franks says censorious women scold others for being not nice he is not wrong. Woke, being a moral crusade, is essentially female in its dynamics.

This will come as no surprise to those of us engaged in the gender war on women - being waged, on behalf of disturbed and disturbing men, all too often by other women. I see it everywhere. Like the clusters of young women who reliably turn out to support ‘trans’ youth at every puberty blocker ban protest or the hyperventilating public service women who fawned over the transvestite male keynote speaker at International Women’s Day in Auckland last week.

Or the peculiar legal decisions by activist judges such as the Community Magistrate Jan Holmes who fined the wrong sort of Maori man $16,000 for painting over the rainbow crossing in Auckland yet the Crown Solicitor decreed that the right sort of Maori man who grafitti-ed the treaty exhibit at Te Papa should not be prosecuted.

Until recently the Crown Solicitor was Una Jagose, known for her controversial prosecution guidelines. Her guidelines urged prosecutors to “think carefully about particular decisions” involving Māori or other groups over-represented in the justice system, suggesting alternatives to prosecution in less serious cases where appropriate. After a volley of criticism Jagose reissued revised versions of the guidelines in December 2024 without the contentious phrasing.

Plunket wondered aloud if it was Jagose who had made the no prosecution Te Papa ruling as a final flip-the-bird parting shot at those who believe justice should be blind. Jagose’s term as Solicitor General ended last month. He could be right.

Once you’re alert to the moralising force of women in power, whether it be in HR, the law, the media or any other institution, it’s impossible not to notice their influence.

The shifting male-female dynamic is fertile ground for a brave fiction writer and few are braver than Lionel Shriver. I’ve just finished her latest - A Better Life - which tackles immigration from the point of view of the host, not the migrant. That the protagonist is an educated incel slacker still living at home in Brooklyn, surrounded by educated progressive women aching to help poor migrants, makes for many pointed and humorous encounters.

Only on their second glass of wine did she loop back to the evening’s red-button topic. “You know, that ‘feeling’ you mentioned? The sense that migrants are making an incursion - “

“I think the word you’re looking for is invasion.”

She rapped his knees. “Too much Fox! Don’t you ever use that word.”

His mother and her ilk tended to erect linguistic taboos around the truth. You couldn’t call a “trans woman” a man because that’s what he was. You couldn’t call an unprecedented influx of foreigners an “invasion” because that’s what it was. If it weren’t an invasion, the word wouldn’t upset them so much.

“Anyway, that feeling?” his mother resumed, trying to be warm, convivial, and onside. “It’s hostility to the Other. It comes from a part of you - not just you personally, it’s in all of us - that’s ugly. It can disguise itself as national pride, but what fires it up is meanness. It’s a primitive tribal emotion that refuses to regard outsiders as fully human. I see it when locals pass migrants waiting outside hotels all the time. A look of pure hatred - even of babies!”

Nico reminded himself that this was his mother, for whom the election night of 2008 constituted the peak of her entire life.

From p 57 A Better Life. 2008 was the year Barack Obama was elected as the first black president of the United States.

The protagonist belongs to Gen Z, those born between 1996 and 2012. Shriver could not have known that the latest research about this demographic reveals that the pendulum is swinging back to a more traditional view of male and female roles. However her instincts that the young man is reacting to the ‘no judgement, open borders tolerance’ of his boomer parents and young women, is spot on.

A global study published this month by Ipsos and King’s College London revealed that Gen Z men are more likely than their Baby Boomer counterparts to believe wives should “obey” their husbands. The study, which surveyed 23,000 people worldwide, shows that as many as 31 per cent of men in their teens and twenties believed “a wife should always obey her husband”, while 13 per cent of older men aged 60 and over agreed with the same statement.

Researchers surveyed people in 29 countries - Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru, Poland, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Survey results vary drastically by country - in Sweden, for example, only 4 per cent of respondents across all age groups agreed that a wife should always obey her husband, compared to 60 per cent in Malaysia and 66 per cent in Indonesia. That should come as no surprise. Malaysia and Indonesia are majority Islam, an intensely patriarchal religion.

Other insights from the research show that globally 44 per cent of people agree that “we have gone so far in promoting women’s equality that we are discriminating against men”.

The researchers blamed young men’s exposure to online misogynistic content for such findings and also the promotion of the role of the “trad wife,” women who embraced hearth and home, rather than careers.

Although the number of younger women who believe wives should obey their husbands was lower than their male counterparts, the proportion was still higher than Boomer men.

In many respects the countries studied are so diverse, it’s hard to make global generalisations, but as they say in politics when it comes to polls, it’s not the numbers so much as the direction of travel that matters.

Research also shows that there is a growing ideological divide among Gen Z (aged 18–29). Young women are moving significantly to the left, while young men are increasingly leaning right, a trend observed across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and South Korea. This gap is driven by differing views on feminism, economic insecurity, and social media, with women prioritising social issues and men often gravitating toward conservative alternatives

What this means for declining birth rates globally and the relationship between the sexes is unclear. Let’s just say, based on this research, the future does not look promising.

Seems like that blasted pendulum never rests in the middle.