The moment I knew we had passed over into complete Covid infantilisation occurred last May 2021, when Dr. Bonnie Henry, British Columbia’s chief health officer and a much-celebrated ‘woman who led us through the pandemic’ announced that she was mulling a special British Columbia Hug Day. Those of us who had supposedly been waiting throughout the previous 14 months for government permission to hug were to be grateful for Dr. Henry’s ongoing, compassionate guidance.

For well over a year we had been instructed non-stop about distancing, self-isolating, quarantining, sheltering in place, masking, sterilising, following arrows in stores, and keeping within our ‘bubbles’. We had been sternly lectured against holiday gathering with more than 5 or 6. Some adult children kept away (or were kept away) from their parents for months, waving to them through a window pane or leaving care packages at the door; many people suffered and died alone in consequence. 

Where we lived on the Fraser River in New Westminster, the city set up a taxpayer-funded ‘path monitor’ to direct foot traffic on a narrow part of a popular outdoor walkway so that no one would pass face-to-face. British Columbia health authorities even went so far as to advise using ‘glory holes’ for safe sex.

Now we were to be told when and, presumably, how we might embrace in government-approved fashion.

In the end, BC Hug Day was quietly shelved for reasons that were never made clear. It wasn’t because BC residents responded with jeers of derision, telling Covid Leader Henry to butt out of our personal decisions. At least some number of British Columbians were triggered by the announcement, fearful of being hugged without their consent and so traumatised by the pandemic that they preferred to wait months longer, if not years, before they would be psychologically ready for such contact. Their concerns were respectfully reported in a local paper.

It’s possible the government was concerned that any uptick in Covid cases would be blamed on an increase in sanctioned hugging, and thus BC’s record of stern but motherly caring would be tarnished.

Whatever the thinking, the discussion about hugging, coming on the heels of the previous 14 months of warnings, scoldings, tearful and quavering-voiced announcements, and praise of Canadians’ compliance made it crystal clear that whatever autonomy we might once have thought we possessed was a thing of the past. And this is not even to touch the state-sponsored hate-mongering, fantasies of exclusion, and mass punishments that erupted over vaccine passports a few months later.

If Covid was a war, as it was frequently depicted as being, it was one in which none of the typical masculine virtues required by war were in evidence. Gone was the valorisation of stoicism, courage, forgetfulness of self, rational risk assessment, and the curtailment of emotionalism. In their place came generalised anxiety, self-righteous vindictiveness, and the longing for (an unattainable) safety at all costs.

In his book United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis, American psychiatrist Mark McDonald noted the disappearance of men from the Covid state as a key factor in our descent into social psychosis. Of course men remained in existence, but their roles were reduced to enthusiastic compliance with even the most trivial of health rules.

As a psychiatrist with extensive clinical experience, McDonald was uniquely positioned to diagnose some of the underlying causes of Covid panic. He notes in the book that women, evolved to be hyper-attentive to the needs of infants and simultaneously aware of their own vulnerability as maternal caregivers, tend to be far more susceptible to anxiety disorders than men. Women evolved over millennia to look to men for protection of themselves and their children (p. 30-31), and men evolved to provide it.

Yet as Covid experts encouraged us all to worry about the safety of our families, with daily case counts and endless updates on (de-contextualised) death numbers, ‘men failed […] dismally in their duty to provide a sense of safety and security for the women in their lives’ (p. 41). When some women insisted fearfully on rules to protect themselves and their loved ones – even irrational rules such as outdoor masking and limitations on how children played together – men, whose traditional role has been to ‘calm and ground women’s fears’ (p. 39), either did nothing or went along. Some men, of course, led the charge.

The emasculation of men had been prepared for a long time, and under Covid it came to fruition. Men could not reassure the women in their lives or stand up to the infantilising Mother State. They could not speak out to put the Covid threat in perspective. Most of them couldn’t even decide independently whether to go to work in the morning. McDonald is well aware of the social forces that have contributed to the feminisation of men – he notes especially how ‘healthy expressions of masculinity […] have all been redefined as universally unhealthy’ (p. 52) – but even he does not fully understand the depth of the anti-male attack that prepared the ground for Covid-enforced male passivity.

For decades now, with the advent of no-fault divorce, mother-favouring custody laws, the determination to stamp out (subjectively defined) alleged sexual harassment, and the mandate to ‘Believe Women’, it has been made clear to men that their lives and careers remain intact entirely at the pleasure of feminist ideologues or potentially vengeful ex-wives. One wrong move, an inappropriate comment, a gaze that is too intense, a tone-deaf request for a date, a sexual encounter where the woman is left unhappy, or merely having married the wrong woman, can lead – and too often does lead – to the ruination of a man’s reputation, a forced psychiatric evaluation, the garnisheeing of his wages, imprisonment on false charges, and the judicial kidnapping of his children.

Scholar Stephen Baskerville has extensively documented the injustices in his devastatingly compendious Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family and his more recent The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Governmental Power. For a heartbreaking and fully researched personal account, see Greg Ellis’s The Respondent: Exposing the Cartel of Family Law.

For well over 20 years, it has been made more and more difficult for men to respond as men once did, firmly and unplacatingly, because many men now know that everything they have built in their lives – and their ability to continue to build, to contribute their gifts, to live a normal life, to be a father to their children – now hinges on their avoiding the fury of a state-supported complaining woman. It is this bedrock vulnerability, the reality that even guiltless men can be imprisoned on a woman’s word and can lose their life savings and children, that more than anything else has silenced and paralysed many decent and brave men. 

Of course, messaging during Covid built on this reality, reminding men every day of their status as potential wrongdoers held up for public scorn. Countless articles and reports during Covid berated men for failing to take the pandemic seriously enough, for allegedly having poor hand hygiene, for having a weaker immune system than women and thus dying or being hospitalised in higher numbers, for endangering others with their alleged carelessness. It was seen as the height of selfishness for men to want to keep their business open during lockdowns. Men (and women, though it was primarily men) who protested the lockdowns were dismissed as Yahoos by an (allegedly pro-business!) Ontario Premier Doug Ford. Over and over, Covid policies struck at the heart of masculine authority and being. It denied men the fundamental opportunity to work, to lead their communities, to make decisions for their families. And the regime wouldn’t have been so successful if it hadn’t already been the case that any man who has been paying attention over the past decades knows that he no longer controls his own life.

The pandemic demonstrated that even for a virus posing a minimal threat to the general public (see the infection fatality rate here), the new dispensation would elevate government-defined ‘safety’ as the sole good and would insist on control and compliance, eliminating individual autonomy, demonising (and in some cases criminalising) forms of dissent (even alternative forms of caring such as feeding soup to the poor), and ensuring near-total reliance on the Mother State.

Despite the tears in their eyes and the tremors in their voices, the all-caring Covid Mothers such as Bonnie Henry evince a highly selective compassion and an unabashedly partisan sense of social justice that is willing to destroy those it deems a threat.

If this is our female future, it is grotesque and terrifying to behold.

This article was first published at The Fiamengo File.

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