The Sad, Totally Real Feminist Oppression Of Men

The Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker has written a truly ridiculous, insulting screed against women that also strips men of all agency over their own lives.

Image via Elysian

by Justin Rosario

You may not be aware of this, but men in America are oppressed. It’s true! If you don’t believe me, you’re probably a man-hating feminist or an effeminate soy boy. Shame on you for destroying the future of American men!

Oh? Were you not aware that the future of America’s men has been destroyed? That’s because you’ve been so busy celebrating “Girl Power” that you didn’t notice. But The Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker, a completely neutral observer who is not at all anti-feminist, has come to the rescue of men. She knows how and why American men became second-class citizens and who is to blame. 

Men fall behind (because of women)

The number of women enrolling in college passed the number of men early in the 90s. Now the disparity is up to 60% women, 40% men. This, according to Parker, is a crisis caused by women. I’m still amazed that the Post allowed this to be published:

The recent surge in stories about young men abandoning higher education — college women outnumber men 3 to 2 — may have surprised a few headline writers, but the graffiti about the decline of men and boys has been on the wall for decades.

We’re merely seeing the culmination of 50 years of feminist advances combined with economic shifts that have left men unemployed and socially sidelined.

Got that? In the zero-sum game of women demanding to be treated as equal to men, the feminists are winning. That means men are “losing”, stripped of their culture and economic power. If you feel, perhaps, that I am reading more into what Parker is saying here than what she means, read on:

“Trickle down” may not work in economics but it sure does in society and culture. The lesser regard for men’s interests was also manifesting among younger-aged males as girl power seized the public imagination. School curriculums were being adjusted to become more go-girl and less boy-centric.

The column appears to written by someone who has no idea what school is like for girls. I had my girls (13 and 11) read the column and they both gagged on how insulting and ludicrous it was.

Parker claims this war on men started with divorce and custody battles in which women were more often given custody of the children. Clearly a product of feminist evil, this led to men being “sidelined”. This is a complaint often repeated by Men’s Rights Activists who believe everything is a plot to destroy men and that women and, frequently, Jews are behind it all. There is an uncomfortable amount of overlap between MRAs and hardcore racists. It’s important to understand where the hate comes from.

What neither Parker nor the MRAs Parker seems to be cribbing from mention is that men losing out in custody battles is a problem of their own design. Historically, men have ruled that a “woman’s place was in the home” and that childrearing was “woman’s work”. In our culture men have been taught that showing emotions, something essential for parenting, is a weakness. Our patriarchal society insists women are the only people capable of childrearing, so what choice do courts have when assigning custody? Why, oh why, are men being discriminated against like this!?

Parker claims that men and manliness have been targeted by feminists, resulting in “a growing intolerance toward boy behavior in general”. No mention that this often includes fighting, bullying, and sexual harassment. If you don’t think elementary school age boys engage in toxic masculinity you’ve never had your 10-year-old daughter come home and tell you about how a boy keeps pinching her ass. 

Stop Hurting (Fragile) Men!

Most noticeable about Parker’s diatribe is the disturbing way in which she blames women for all of men’s failures:

Girls born since 1980, he [child psychologist Dan Kindlon] said, are different from their mothers. They suffer no delusion that they are the second sex or, laughably, the weaker sex. They’re hands-on-hips Superwomen wondering, as New York Times writer Maureen Dowd did in her 2005 book, “Are Men Necessary?,” which Hanna Rosin answered in 2014 with her book, “The End of Men.”

Given the above, why would young men bother going to the trouble and expense of college? And they won’t if we don’t start making our boys feel as valuable as our girls.

There’s an awful lot to unpack here. The sneering disdain for women shaking off centuries of men forcing them into a subservient role is chilling. Is there an over-the-top push for girls to see themselves as powerful? Absolutely. Consider, though, the cultural messaging they are bombarded with on a daily basis: social media constantly tells them they are fat or ugly or unfashionable. Every form of entertainment constantly sexualizes them. Rape culture blames women for being sexually assaulted. Republicans want to strip their rights from them. Our major religions have institutionalized appalling sexism and misogyny. Corporations refuse to promote them. An entire movement exists that depicts women as the enemy and incites terrorist attacks against them. And when women speak up about any of this, they’re smeared as “shrill” and “unlikable”.

Even the role society tries to force on them, that of mother and homemaker, is held in contempt. Stay-at-home fathers (like me) are derided for stooping to a role meant for women. We are one of the only developed countries in the world that does not have paid leave for new mothers and we provide as little support as possible after a child is born. We demand women be mothers but then make them pay the steepest social and economic price possible. In the face of this onslaught, what choice do women have but to put their hands on their hips and fight for themselves? 

As for making boys feel as valuable as girls, the mental gymnastics required to reach this conclusion are impressive. In a world where men have most of the money, most of the power, and still dictate most cultural norms, it takes a special kind of willful blindness to think girls are considered more valuable.

Take, for instance, pop culture. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a multibillion dollar juggernaut, dominating the box office. Of all the heroes running around saving the universe, only about five of the primary characters are women. The rest are love interests or relegated to secondary roles. A single movie, The Eternals, is going to almost double the number of female superheroes in the MCU. It’s that lopsided.

It’s not just the MCU that sends a clear message that women are not as valuable as men. Movies in general are extremely male-centric, to the point that most female characters only exist in relation to the male leads. The same goes for comics, video games, TV (although TV treats women far better than their silver screen counterparts), and even toys. Boys get to be doctors, firefighters, and soldiers. Girls get to be nurses, princesses, and mommies. 

Boys are not being “devalued” and men are not being “sidelined”. Parker, like MRAs, is afraid of something quite different. 

Leveling the playing field

Right now, we are watching white people in America lose their minds and fully embrace fascism. There are multiple reasons for this transformation but one of the core reasons is that white supremacy is, for the first time in American history, directly threatened. With the loss of white supremacy comes a level playing field and that terrifies white people. 

If you ask the average white person about white privilege, they will tell you it doesn’t exist. If you demonstrate how white privilege has, in fact, directly benefited them, they tend to get very angry. A level playing field in which having white skin confers no advantage is something to avoid at any cost, even if it means burning America to the ground.

This is exactly the same dynamic in play when it comes to gender. Men are frightened by the idea of competing fairly against women. Like with race, the fear is not that women (or minorities) will dominate, it’s that we will discover that men (particularly white men) are not special.

The context here is that, for centuries, we have told men (again, particularly white men), that they are the apex of creation. “American Exceptionalism” is really “White Male Exceptionalism”. It is really easy to be the master of all you survey when the rules have been set up to either hand everything to you on a silver platter or put massive obstacles in the way of everyone else. In America, we did both and then some. 

Without all of that women will be just as successful, and that is intolerable. Women are supposed to be “less than” so removing the barriers to their success is the same as attacking men. In other words, men (and Kathleen Parker) are treating the loss of privilege as promoting women over men. 

This is like a spoiled child crying that a cookie was split exactly in half and why can’t they have more? Except when it comes to men, violence tends to be the solution which is exactly what we see happening in America.

Cry me a river

Parker is not entirely wrong. We as a society are starting to hold men accountable for their behavior. This can look like an unjustified attack if one chooses to ignore said behavior. Wealthy and connected women like Kathleen Parker can afford this luxury, but not so much for everyone else. There’s a reason I’m having my girls learn to violently defend themselves. 

For most of recorded history, men have been able to take whatever they want, hurt whomever they want, and pay no consequences for it. It is worth remembering that marital rape was only abolished in America in the late 1970’s. As you read this, the MRA movement is actively advocating for violence against women and some of them are even demanding that rape be legalized. Not just under policed and rarely punished like it is now, but actually legal.

Now that women are taking great strides towards a post-patriarchy future, they are supposed to feel bad for men who don’t know how to succeed without all the extra perks that come from having a penis.

Parker’s column about the sad, totally real feminist oppression of men is, essentially, an insult to men, casting them in the role of victims with no agency. Someday, if we’re all very very lucky, enough men will look at that kind of sexist garbage as deeply offensive and we’ll all be better off for it. 

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Democrats Are Not Cowards, So Why Are Liberals Repeating GOP Smears?

In the past 20 years, the House Democrats have approved more criminal contempt referrals than their Republican counterparts. Why the hate?

by Bob Cesca

WASHINGTON, DC -- Yes, sometimes the congressional Democrats need to be thwacked in the ass to get them revved up. But they’re no different than any other roster of politicians from any party. Undeniably, one of the animating concepts driving representative democracy involves pushing our leaders to do what we ask.

Last week, NeverTrumper and Lincoln Project strategist Rick Wilson posted a series of tweets describing how he possessed inside information leading him to conclude that the House select-committee investigating the January 6th invasion of Congress was dead on the vine, and that the Democratic majority on the panel was too “gutless” to pursue criminal contempt charges against subpoena-shirkers Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, Kash Patel, and Dan Scavino. 

A short time later, both Liz Cheney and the committee’s Twitter account wrote that Wilson’s tweets were “not true” and “nonsense,” and that the committee was absolutely considering contempt of Congress referrals, especially against Bannon. Wilson’s alleged sources were wrong, but that didn’t stop him from pulling one of the oldest tricks in the book: Wilson claimed victory, behaving as though his pushing is what triggered the committee to take action. In other words, if he had been right, he could claim victory. If he had been wrong, which he was, he could also claim victory. Which he did. Slick.

The thing that made me lose my mind was all the liberals who retweeted Wilson while repeating the decades-long trope about Democrats being weak and impotent in the face of a challenge from the other side….Continue reading here.