It's Rough Being A Man. Or Not.

I had a conversation with a friend of mine yesterday. This middle-aged woman is the definition of the word moderate in all parts of her life. She was reading some kind of feminist Latin American history, though I don't know what exactly. She started talking to me about how it was anti-male and asked if that stuff bothered me.

The answer was an emphatic No! Why should that bother me? Whether in history or contemporary society, how exactly do men not get a fair shake? How do men not oppress women for their own advantage? Isn't analysis of these problems a complete positive? Anything we can do to promote gender equality, whether as scholars or as citizens is a good thing. If a book comes off as anti-male, it's probably because men deserve it.

This same critique relates to race analysis. So many men talk about how liberals are anti-male and anti-white. Oh, this book is so negative to white people. Boo Hoo.

Yeah, it's real hard being a white male in today's world. We don't have any power at all. God, you can't even call a woman a slut because she won't sleep with you anymore without the bitch charging you with sexual harassment. I can't tell a joke about the darkeys without some National Association for the Advancement of Communist People drawing up a lawsuit against me. What a burden my white skin and testicles are in modern America.

Give me a break.

There are lots of wonderful men and wonderful white people out there. But you simply cannot deny the way gender and race defines power in modern society with a straight face. Or at least I can't.

So bring on the anti-men books. And the anti-white books too. No doubt they are well-deserved and long overdue.