Let's have some fun.
The mythical 'war on men'
By Michael Kimmel, Special to CNN, aka the mythical unbiased news site selling detergents and soaps
(CNN) -- Some years ago, I appeared on a well-known television talk show opposite four "angry white men": four men who believed they had been discriminated against in the workplace by affirmative action programs initiated, they argued, by feminist women.
So you open with an anecdote about a talk show. Do you think they chose a provocative topic for ratings perhaps? And maybe coached the guests?
Each man told his story of how he was qualified for a job or qualified for a promotion that he did not get because of this putative reverse discrimination against white men. One ended his remarks with a line that served as the title for this show: "A black woman stole my job," he declared.
Asked to respond, I had but one question for these guys, a question about the title of the show. Actually, my question was about one word in the title of the show. I wanted to know about the word "my." Why did the men think it was their job? Why wasn't the title of the show "A black woman got a job" or "A black woman got the job"? The answer, I argued, was that these men felt entitled to the position, and that any effort to make the workplace more equal was perceived, by those men, as a loss.
Why don't you ask why their job should have been made available in the first place?
I thought of those men recently while reading Suzanne Venker's addled rant against feminist women as the source of the unhappiness that saturates male-female relationships. I thought of how painful it is when you are used to having everything to now have only 80%. What a loss! Poor us! Equality sucks when you've been on top -- and men have been on top for so long that we think it's a level playing field.
In her screed against women, she argues that women are their own worst enemy, and that the rise of women has caused the "end of men," that men are wilting into angry, resentful bachelorhood because women are demanding so much from men. They're emasculating men, confounding their DNA, which seeks only to provide and protect. Women aren't letting men be men.
More like happy, carefree bachelorhood. The ones who marry are usually the emasculated ones.
Women, Venker writes, have been seduced by feminists into pushing men off their pedestal to "take what they were taught to believe was rightfully theirs." As a result, Venker continues, women have come to believe the adage "women good/men bad" -- an equation that has "destroyed the relationship between the sexes." Men, she tells us, are "tired of being told that if women aren't happy, it's men's fault."
We're just tired of everything being our fault.
But she is actually arguing that if men aren't happy, it's women's fault -- for seeking the very same exhilarating sense of autonomy and selfhood that men claim as our natural entitled birthright. How dare they?
In this case, it IS men's fault - for allowing it to happen. Power abhors a vacuum.
OK, so what's wrong with this picture? This unhinged argument fuses dreadful history with empirically baseless contemporary analysis. The result cannot help but be bad politics.
This notion of good women/bad men has been the foundation not of feminism but of anti-feminism since the 19th century. Those innocent "angels in the house" were supposed to soothe the savage beast, as men were prone to bouts of rage, drunkenness and other depravities. If women didn't tame men, the anti-feminists argued, all hell would break loose.
Where in the holy h e l l are you coming up with these caricatures? This is your empirical analysis?
Pop psychologists joined the pundits to argue, as does Venker, that if women are unhappy, it's their own damned fault. How many advice columns about "the rules," admonitions about the man shortage or effusive media prostration before three or four upper-class white female Yale grads who "opted out" (only to rejoin the workforce when their children were 5 years old) must we endure? Countless. One needn't be original to be wrong.
You got that right.
In fact, feminism reversed the equation Venker offers. It encouraged women to be bad girls -- to seek their own pleasures, to go for it, autonomously, to leave unhappy marriages, and to control their own bodies. And it encouraged men to be good -- demanded it, in fact -- insisting that men can and should step up as equal parents, colleagues and coworkers, that we stop the rape and violence that so compromised women's equality.
Feminism did all that, eh? How noble! Oh, where were we before the Almighty 60s?!
And the empirical evidence suggests that men are quietly adapting to a very new landscape. Most of the 400 young men (aged 16-26) who I interviewed for my book "Guyland" assume, without resentment, that their wives will be as fully committed to their careers as they are. Why? Because they'll need the income. And they assume, with no resentment, that they will be involved fathers, spending far more time with their families than their parents or grandparents ever did. Why? Because they actually want to be involved dads.
Self-reporting from emasculated betas hardly counts as empirical evidence. Your social science is no match for the crushing reality of biology. Furthermore, wanting to be a good dad is hardly a phenomenon borne of the Feminist age. Do you think Abe Lincoln was a crappy father? How about biblical Joseph? These guys generated their own income for them and their families.
They all have friends of the opposite sex ("When Harry Met Sally's" dictum to the contrary), which bodes well for their ability to be more equal coworkers and colleagues with women they consider their peers.
The only thing this bodes well for is attention wh0ring females and the Alpha Males who can pick their locks.
Stop the madness. There's no war between the sexes. Men and women can, and should, be allies.
Agreed. If by "allies" you mean engaging in their respective roles within the family and in coitus.
And they are becoming more equal, and happier, every single day.
How much more equal can things get? Happier - have you actually paid attention when you interview these herbs and fems?
Men aren't nearly as unhappy or resentful as Venker suggests -- because she only talks to those who feel themselves so entitled that they lament, as did Rush Limbaugh, that the re-election of President Obama was the loss of "our country."
Beta males are frustrated but don't have the stones to admit it. Alphas are having a blast. A Rush Limbaugh quote is the last resort of the scoundrel.
Truth is, in her efforts to exalt men, she actually insults us. Who says we can't be happy with fully equal female colleagues and coworkers?
Who says we can't be even happier without them? Men invented work to get away from women. Why must women constantly bang down the "men only" door? You don't see any men trying to get into Curves, do you?
Who says we can't enjoy the joys of shared parenthood?
Shared = Man provides and disciplines, woman nurtures and feeds.
Who says that we are biologically programmed to be both rapacious testosterone-driven animals
Almighty Science.
and lazy remote-hogging couch potatoes unable to lift a finger in the kitchen?
Uninterested, not unable. And the remote belongs to the man. See again: Science.
Venker paints a most unyieldlingly awful portrait of men, one that is happily belied by actual, real, American men.
You are certainly not the arbiter of "real" masculinity.
And we won't stand for the sort of male-bashing Venker offers. We want it all also -- and the only way we can have it all is to halve it all.
[Throwing up into mouth.] Have fun at the rally. I hope your "This Is What A Feminist Looks Like" t shirt tightly accentuates your man boobs.