The Unbelievable Tale of Male Victimhood: Fear & Loathing of Women

Let me juxtapose a few things before I go on a full-on rant about Stephen Marche’s Esquire article: “The Contempt of Women; The rise of men. And the whining of girls.” The rise of men?  When the hell did they ever fall?  Did my paycheck and I miss something?

Consider superstar athlete and gymnast Gabby Douglas whose gold medal wins were greeted by racist and sexist comments about her hairstyle.

As the controversy surrounding Gabby Douglas’ hair drags on, we’re left wondering: how did it get to this point?

It’s still shocking that while Douglas was busy rewriting Olympic history and making the country proud, a string of negative Twitter comments about her “unkempt” hair stole the spotlight. Some are blaming the media for that shift in focus to Douglas’ hair, while others see the story as a segue into a much broader subject: black women’s hair.

Black women’s hair has always been a hot (and often, touchy) topic–inspiring documentaries, books, movements, and full-blown debates. So it’s no surprise that after Douglas’ meteoric rise to the public eye, opinions of her hair would be shared via social media outlets and beyond. However, the problem lies in the fact that those comments have somehow out-shined the Olympian’s gold medals.

Then, there’s this delightful tidbit of news from the likes of suffering white christian men everywhere as reported by Raw Story: “Man with Bible threatens to rape woman during ‘Gay Day’ in Michigan”.

Police in Grand Rapids, Michigan say that there was nothing they could do after Bible-preaching protesters threatened to rape and murder pro-LGBT activists at a “Gay Day” event over the weekend.

In a video posted to YouTube, several protesters with Bibles can be seen shouting at a woman celebrating in the inaugural “Gay Day” celebration, an event organized by the human rights group Tolerance, Equality and Awareness Movement (TEAM) to showcase the community’s diversity.

“Back in the day there was no free power, there was no going to the mall,” one protester tells the woman. “There was, ‘sit your ass in this house until I bring my ass home.’”

“And if your ass get to going out there like you said, guess what?” a second protester adds. “You get raped. And that’s what’s going to happen to you. … Keep your pussy clean, that’s all you need to do. Do you understand?”

After one man claims, “the Lord said that,” the woman challenges him to find the corresponding Bible verse.

He responds with Isaiah 13: “Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished.”

Here’s a video that has me in mind of  exactly what girls and women are taught to avoid daily.  This one has a happy ending because the little girl in this elevator–who could have been a victim of who knows what–went full metal backpack karate kid on the sceevy old dude (via Edinburgh Eye).

Now, given what we ALLLLL know and since I just grabbed a few of this week’s outrages to illustrate just how far we’ve come, baby, let’s read some tidbits about how dudes are beginning to feel redundant and put out. The poor, long-suffering darlings!  Bless their little victimized hearts!!

Contempt for men has become so widespread and acceptable that it’s a commonplace for politicians’ wives. Michelle Obama loves to describe her husband’s morning breath and struggles with smoking and failure to put away his socks. Her pull quote: “He’s a gifted man, but he’s just a man.” Got that, boys? You can be editor of the Harvard Law Review,first African-American president, director of the assassination of Osama bin Laden, loving husband and father, and an innovator of “absorption marijuana ingestion” to boot, but in the end “just a man.” Michelle uses that hokey line because it inevitably provokes warm ovations and knowing laughter. The wife of the British prime minister, David Cameron, has borrowed the technique, moaning about how Cameron “makes a terrible mess” when he cooks and can be “quite annoying.” This is what the political operatives call “humanizing the candidate”: Contempt for men is what ordinary women understand.

There’s a well-developed intellectual expression of contempt for men, too, encapsulated in the idea of the “masculinity crisis” — men are doomed, in this argument, by their own inherent natures to flounder in the emotionally complex, predominantly social postindustrial world. Dozens of books have circled around or near the concept, but none had actually made a persuasive, research-grounded argument until Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men and the Rise of Women. The book begins with a somewhat expected girl-powered farewell to male power. The American middle class, she writes, “is slowly turning into a matriarchy, with men increasingly absent from the workforce and from home, and as women make all the decisions.” Her numbers make a case: Women now have half the jobs in the American workforce. Three quarters of the 7.5 million jobs lost during the recession belonged to men. Of the top fifteen growth industries in America, twelve are almost exclusively the preserve of women. In the postindustrial economy, men’s physical strength becomes more or less irrelevant. And women are also setting the groundwork for the curve to continue: “Women now earn 60 percent of master’s degrees, about half of all law and medical degrees, and about 44 percent of all business degrees,” writes Rosin. Three years ago, more women than men earned Ph.D.’s.

 This isn’t because men are inherently stupid or broken.

Oh, really? It seems to me that this article makes the case for the contrary argument to that last statement; not for it as Marche insists.  Here’s more about the poor put out man who is just a victim of self-loathing and I guess, its companion, low self esteem. Don’t forget to read the part about how certain parts of the country have miniscule rape statistics. The men must just be really put out there!!!

President Bush was proud of being small-minded, proud of being ornery, taking the maximum number of vacation days possible, proud of never traveling, not knowing other languages, and just in general not knowing and not caring. He fit neatly into a pattern with the other recognizable men on television. In advertising, the lumpen male idiot is the go-to. Other versions of male self-loathing are more sophisticated. The best and most refined comedians of the moment all take it for granted that the masculine is inherently the stupid, the obese, the miserable, the lazy, the selfish. Take Louis C. K. — his hatred for his own hungers is his best material. Much of Daniel Tosh’s material, both on his show and on tour, is about men’s selfishness, irresponsibility, and general grossness. Extreme pornography, the avoidance of fatherhood, and Stone Age sexism are defining traits. Male self-hatred is the comic cliché of the moment — the L. A.-is-like-this-but-New-York-is-like-that, white-people-drive-like-this-but-black-people-drive-like-that, what’s-with-the-peanuts-in-airplanes of the moment: Can you believe how gross men are? Male comedians go to this safe material for the same reason they do anything: for the approval of women. Rather than resist the contemptuous gaze of women, they have learned to share it.

It’s just hard to know where to start on all of this.  I’m sure you’ll have some choice comments that will be far wittier and rapier than mine.  I would just like to say that when we start discussing Phelp’s hair instead of his future career plans, when little girls or women don’t have to fear what will happen when left alone near men, and when all the pay gaps, discrimination cases, and sexist, misogynist ads and “joke” banter about women goes anyway  then I will have a chat with this poor, put out white dude. Oh, and I stuck in one of those gratuitous Hillary-bashing cartoons so you’ll be reminded of all those poor put out men that had to run against her and her monstrous cankles.

Until then, I will just shoot him a HUGE look of contempt AND raise him one Kiss my Vagina, you Asshole!!