You’re a Pussy if You Think There’s a War on Men

For some men, women—especially feminists—are terrifying. Not in the normal oh-my-God-I-can’t-ask-her-out-what-if-she-says-no way that middle schoolers and characters on Friends experience, but “afraid” in the sense that women will take their money, try to get pregnant on purpose, invent false rape claims, and use feminism to generally abuse men. In this narrative, men are either an oppressed minority (or about to become one), or have to “fight back” against feminists to preserve their rights.

If you want to see what this kind of thinking looks like, take a dip into the river of the Men’s Rights section of Reddit, where a bunch of dudes go to complain about getting raped by women and talk gibberish about how their “clans” are getting attacked by “Statism and Feminism.” Currently, some of the most popular posts on the subreddit include a complaint about how if you owe more than $2,500 in child support payments you can’t get a passport (in the Men’s Rights universe, deadbeat dads are often victims of a misandrist court system); a discussion, inspired by a Walking Dead plot point, about how getting beaten up is worse than being threatened with rape; an account of some guy squabbling with an obscure feminist blogger (these guys are always getting into internet beef with feminist bloggers, and vice-versa); and a screenshot of some gobbledygook about patriarchy that probably sounded smart to the high-schooler who wrote it. Like a lot of Reddit, the Men’s Rights forum is a way for predominantly white, predominantly rich young men to pat themselves on the back for how smart they are. It gives them something to do, I guess, and it gives the Shit Reddit Says subreddit something to react against.

But the idea that feminism is harmful to men, and women have declared war on people with penises, isn’t confined to Reddit’s nether regions anymore. It’s now mainstream enough for Fox News’s website, which published an awful, troll-baiting op-ed about “The War on Men” written by Suzzanne Venker. Her thesis is that while women want to marry men, men don’t want to marry them because, “Women aren’t women anymore.” She goes on:

“Women are angry. They’re also defensive, though often unknowingly. That’s because they’ve been raised to think of men as the enemy. Armed with this new attitude, women pushed men off their pedestal (women had their own pedestal, but feminists convinced them otherwise) and climbed up to take what they were taught to believe was rightfully theirs.

Now the men have nowhere to go.”

What she’s describing is a pretty standard anti-feminist narrative: The evil feminists “convinced” women to want things like the same careers and pay and power that men had (they didn’t really want these things, see, but they were persuaded otherwise), thereby causing them to lose the status they were too short-sighted to have valued.

Venker also blames feminism for ruining men:

“The so-called rise of women has not threatened men. It has pissed them off. It has also undermined their ability to become self-sufficient in the hopes of someday supporting a family. Men want to love women, not compete with them. They want to provide for and protect their families—it’s in their DNA. But modern women won’t let them.”

Yeah, no shit men are “pissed off” about “competing” with women. It’s pretty simple—decades ago, lazy men didn’t have to worry about talented women taking their jobs because they were largely relegated to being housewives or teachers or nurses. Now that women can dictate the terms of relationships and don’t need to latch onto a man as soon as possible, they aren’t willing to start pumping out babies and taking care of a household the way some guys would like. Boo-fucking-hoo. Cry me a river.

Then Venker says that “Feminism serves men very well: They can have sex at hello” (which is confusing; I thought it pissed men off?), even though some research has shown that women, not men, want low-attachment hookups instead of relationships. Maybe “women aren’t women anymore” simply because they don’t need to pair off with worthless men like they used to?

Venker’s article doesn’t exactly match up with the Men’s Rights movement (some MRers have mildly criticized it), but it seems like it comes out of the same idea—that now men are the ones who are oppressed, that there needs to be a pushback against feminism, that men are now too discouraged to marry and have kids. But that just shows how worthless men are. If you are claiming that feminism is the reason women don’t want you, or that women are taking over, maybe the problem is that you’re fucking up your life and looking for something to blame? Men shouldn’t fear feminism or women—why worry about competing with them in the workplace if you think you’re competent in the first place? Why wouldn’t you want to have a girlfriend or wife every bit as driven as you? Venker says that “if men today are slackers… women should look in the mirror and ask themselves what role they’ve played to bring about this transformation.” If a man believes that, that’s because it’s self-serving bullshit. He’s a slacker because he’s a slacker, and maybe because men still have enough of an edge in society to get away with that shit. If you’re a man who thinks that there’s a “War on Men,” you probably deserve to get beaten by the women.

@HCheadle