In Ben Elton’s Popcorn, a character remarks of their “recovered memories”, “I was off the hook…I could do what I liked — take drugs, sleep around, steal stuff, be a total loser — and none of it would be my fault because some hypnotherapist had granted me victim status”. In our modern culture, victimhood is ultimate trump card. If you’re a victim, you can get away with anything. Which is why the left are addicted to their spurious ideology of “intersectionality”: the idea that people are a congerie of victimhoods.
So victimhood is eagerly sought out by leftists, often in not only an absence of any evidence but in full denial of the facts. The left is unshakably convinced that women are the eternal victims of a nebulous “patriarchy”. The evidence, though, says otherwise.
We’ve all heard about the war on women…But what about what might equally be called the war on young men?
Haven’t heard of it? Well, this is not the best time to be a young man, believe it or not.
From education to employment, young men are getting the short end of the stick at every level. The demographic facts of the United States are being repeated all across the West.
The Congressional Budget Office, in an alarming new demographic report, explains why: One in six young men age 18 to 34 are either jobless or incarcerated. That’s roughly 17%, a stunning number…
That’s perhaps not surprising. Another study, this from the National Center for Education Statistics, notes that today women make up 57% of the college population, vs. 43% men. In 1972, the ratio was flipped — with 57% of college students being men, and just 43% were women.
In an eye-opening piece in the online Fiscal Times, Marc Joffe nails it: “The debate over women’s health, equal pay and family leave will continue to obscure an underreported fact: As a gender men are in relative decline.” And he has the numbers to prove it. At one time, postgraduate education was almost entirely dominated by men — and no, that wasn’t a healthy state of affairs, either. But in 2012, women earned 60% of all master’s degrees and 51% of all doctorates. And those numbers will likely increase in coming years.
Yet universities continue to promote “opportunities for girls”. When Milo sponsored a single scholarship program exclusively for young men, leftists lost their minds. Just as they do the instant they spot a footling imbalance towards men in glamour fields like science – yet ignore the almost-complete gender bias towards women in other fields. Nor does it trouble their consciences that all the dirty, dangerous and worst of all, deadly, jobs are being left to men.
More troubling is the basic attitude toward men, who have become a kind of cultural whipping boy for the progressive left…Damning men for being men has become de rigueur in our culture…Men are now criticized for being men.
The left demonises “toxic” men in ways they would never countenance for an instant for any other group. The same left who rush to piously intone, “Not all Muslims” after every Islamic terror attack immediately pin the blame on all men when – a rare and increasingly rarer occurrence – one man murders a woman.
The left has also fostered the cradle-to-grave welfare state and culture of irresponsibility which has devastated families – and wrecked the lives of boys.
A third of all boys now grow up in fatherless homes. They have no active male role models in their lives. So the breakdown of the family has to be a major cause.
But our culture has also marginalized boys and young men.
A feminised education system rewards feminine behaviour and punishes masculinity. School texts range from the merely “girly” to the outright man-hating, such as The Handmaid’s Tale. Radical gender-theory indoctrination programs like Safe Schools encourage boys to dress and act like girls.
Schools no longer have lengthy recesses and have slashed vocational education programs, both to the detriment of young boys.
investors.com/politics/commentary/war-on-women-ok-but-what-about-the-war-on-men/
Possibly the ultimate insult to boys is the media portrayal of depression and suicide. These are largely male problems (men in the West are four times as likely to commit suicide as women), yet almost any given media portrayal of suicide will almost invariably feature a tragi-porn image of a fetchingly sad young female.
In fact, much of the poor behaviour used to demonise all men can be at least partly attributed to poor mental health, which men tend to externalise as psychosis, rather than internalise in the popular image of “depression”.
But, hey, that’s just “toxic masculinity”.
