In advance of her appearance in Brussels to talk about the gender takeover of knowledge-driven institutions like the media and academia, Helen gave me an hour of sense-making on the topic. How did we get here?
She’s the advocacy director of Sex Matters, a British organisation whose objective is right there in the name. Sex Matters’ tagline is also pretty explanatory: “it shouldn’t take courage to say so.”
Unfortunately it does take courage, or at least a lot of fuck-you money, because you might get fired, sued, or forced to resign for saying it. You might also get physically attacked, mobbed, or even dunked in tomato soup by an angry man. Most likely, you’ll get quiet-cancelled and/or not-hired, or removed from the WhatsApp group, and you’ll have to resort to Substack samizdat to make everyone aware of the ongoing scandal.
In this week’s Peaked newsletter, I compare the the Athena Forum event to the official “genders” events taking place in parallel all week in Brussels, none of which will touch on this issue because the political fallout of doing so is too much to bear for elected and unelected EU officials.
Sign up to receive my regular newsletters by clicking the button (you can also upgrade your subscription if you would like me to be able to continue to cover the topics discussed):
Helen will be speaking at the Athena Forum event in Brussels from 6:3PM on Tuesday 3 November. You can follow it by live-tweet on my X account here. The event will be hosted on Athena Forum’s YouTube channel. Here are the other panellists:
