Patriarchy

Dear Sir,

I am addressing this exclusively to men, and in fact to a special kind of man who I know exists because I've read his comments on various websites, listened to him laugh at women MPs while she takes her turn in speaking, guys who specialise in intimidating their new female colleagues, making sure she never feels that comfortable at work. Men who clearly have done fuck all research on the sexism they are dogmatically, absolutely pontificating on, but have a second hand observation that trumps all other arguments. Yes, even the people who are reporting their experiences in the first-person, where they cite extensive academic studies, surveys, official reports and basic, everyday, right-in-front-of-you facts, even these people can't stand before the almighty authority of this one guy's anecdote. Yes, your "observation" from that one time, made a comprehensive fact in the present simple tense, that is all you have to say on the matter. No listening, no researching, no understanding. Doesn't want to. Self preservation must come first.

Because if you dare admit that things aren't fair, if you stop telling us that we are whiny bitches for wanting fair treatment, if you just say "yes, we are not on a level playing field, men have an advantage over women in almost all parts of life and we need to change it," if you were to do any of that, you would condemn yourselves.

Not men in general. No, men have such an ingrained advantage over women, culturally, economically, politically, I actually think true equality may never be possible - our collective ideas are too entrenched, they are too reinforced by the rotation of our daily rituals. Mankind is absolutely fine, strong, ahead of their female partners forever (which is a real shame for men. I will go into the benefits guys get from feminism in a later post.)

You, however, you as an individual man, are utterly fucked.

You're asking why. I think you know why. Allow me to speculate about you.

You make it obvious when you try to flip it. Most of the time, when someone is getting a raw deal, people don't insist blindly that the victim is meant to suffer because "it is the way it is," or that the crime isn't even happening or that they aren't really the victim in the situation: imagine if the white people of the deep south in the 60s tried to insist that it was actually the black people oppressing them. It's not idiocy, it's calculation. These guys explain away inequality as a gut reaction, desperately trying to squash these voices that keep telling their stories.


The more women become equal, the more of us you're running against, the lower you get ranked. Not on a basis of gender, but on a basis of skill. 50 years ago, your male elders only really competed against other men - specifically, other white men. Women and people who weren't white were relegated to offstage roles, unfit and unsuited to the working world of dogged rivalry and triumph over others. When you insulted the others, you feminised them, because to be a woman was to be weak. It must have been really, very easy to win in those days - the scale of talent must have been really, very limited.

But now, we are running exactly the same race as you. And many of us are actually doing better than you, much better than you. Actually talented guys aren't worried, they are happy to have us on their teams, their skills have stood up to the extra competition and they now see past that to the actual, desirable result of having a greater range and standard of skills.

Their confidence is fine.

 But you, Mr. Misandry-Online, are horrified - before the 70s, you would have profited from the limited talent pool, your barely-there ability made to look better by an optical illusion. Now, the sheer number of players drives you down from the top to off the radar. The men who were better than you were always going to do better, but may be before you could have become their right hand man, there wasn't a lot of choice after all. Now it is statistically impossible for you to claw your way out of the mediocre middle. Women, before quiet and non-existent in the world of work, have humiliated you by outstripping you with such seemingly natural ease.

So when women say to you, "you know, we've not got a fair deal" it makes you explode.
Give them a fair deal?! You mean they've been doing as well as you or even better with less to work with!? Christ, what would it be like if they fucking WERE equal!

And so you insist it doesn't happen, that it isn't such a big deal, that you too are being victimised by the system.

You want to perpetuate inequality.

Fear forces you to refuse. Humiliation compels you to insist it's the other way around.

And the entire time you make us feel bad about ourselves, you abuse us, tell us our looks are our currency, call us an aggressive bitch if we are too easily sailing past you. It must sting that we keep doing it, despite being hindered by history, that we so effortlessly render your obsolescence.

Night.