by Bettina Arndt, The Daily Sceptic
It must be completely disorienting. A young man from Syria or Morocco or Afghanistan risks everything to reach Europe. He arrives in a civilisation that surrounds him with female flesh on a scale his culture considers obscene – on billboards, on public transport, on his phone. And every centimetre of it is legally mined — one misread signal, one drunken encounter, and he becomes not a man who made a mistake but a criminal.
The man is broke, he is foreign, and to the women surrounding him in their skimpy gym wear, he is either invisible or a threat — rarely anything in between. If, by some miracle, he stumbles into a relationship he may end up in a marriage where his wife holds every legal and cultural card — including the power to withdraw sex, his children, his assets and freedom. He traded a society where men rule to arrive at the bottom of one where women rule. A better life? In some ways, perhaps. But when it comes to the thing that matters most to young men, he may have made the worst trade of his life.
What we are witnessing is not a clash of civilisations in the grand geopolitical sense, but something more intimate and more combustible — a clash of sexual civilisations. Two utterly incompatible systems of rules about men, women, power and desire – colliding on buses and street corners, in bars and bedrooms, and the consequences playing out in courtrooms across the Western world. One system gives women all the power and calls it progress. The other gives men all the power and calls it God’s will. No one is talking honestly about what happens when they clash.
The consequences should be front page news but are usually buried. Writing just last month on his Substack Uncharted Territories, data analyst Tomas Pueyo compiled Eurostat figures showing that between 2014 and 2024, while the EU population grew by less than 2%, sexual assaults across Europe increased by 72% and rapes by 150%. A doubling of rape in a decade, in some of the most prosperous and supposedly civilised societies on earth.