That is to say, and kinda what I was trying to get at, while yeah, patriarchy hurts guys, and yeah, gender-essentialist and defining horsehockey like this article aren’t good for men or women–at the same time, as a guy you can feel all that, and not do anything about it, because, well, you have it pretty damn good.

Or more bluntly: it’s easy enough to ignore all the bad stuff that comes with male privilege (like, how it is constructed as a privilege to begin with) because it is so, well, privileged: you don’t have to care about the degradation of women or how half the human species tends to occupy a social rung between pack animal and useful servant in the vast majority of places around the globe. You don’t have to if you don’t want to. And if you do care, or at least express some interest in caring, there’s no upside to it: in all too many cases, to be a guy interested in gender inequality does little more than to cause other men to threaten your privilege. And privilege is hard to give up, even if the only way we will save this sorry planet is to voluntarily start to renounce privilege, and soon.

This isn’t limited to just male privilege–pretty much everything in the previous graf could be applied to white, or first world privilege; but while I may not be totally convinced of the radical saw about the transhistoricity and absolute uniqueness of male privilege, there’s no doubt that it is ubiquitous in a way that almost no other privilege structure is–since all of the other ones tend to be about privileging a minority of people, and the smaller (more exclusive) the better.

All of which is to say, I feel your venting, share in it, and minor amelioration to the contary, I really can’t get too worked up about the hardness of being a guy. And frankly, you’re getting this from the horse’s mouth, know what I mean?

I mean, did he even READ that paragraph? Of course no one LIKES doing that part of parenthood – at least not as much as, you know, the actual fun part of things. What a selfish douche.

Anyway. This was a fab takedown, & I feel like there’s also something in here about the way women are sold marriage/relationships as The One True Path to happiness, and there’s this cultural narrative about Your Husband being all you need, or whatever, and so maybe some dudes do think lots of ladies besides the person they’re with are hot, and maybe some of those ladies do freak out about this, and maybe this would be less of a problem if we could all just admit that being in love with one person doesn’t mean other people stop being attractive to you, and more importantly the fact that other people are attractive to you doesn’t mean you are not in love with this person. (not to mention what everyone else has said re: polyamory/open relationships, the fact that some ladies might also feel this way and not all dudes do, etc.)

i too think it’s interesting and valuable to try to expose the fact that men are also losing out in traditional gender roles. good work.

and the polyamory stuff y’all are talking about is also SO true.

I just wanted to design a virus to replace all instances of Delingpole with this link:

http://www.xeromag.com/fvpoly.html

And then see how long it takes for Shit to Go Down™.