You have to understand, there’s a default setting in the machinery of this new, ugly world. A quiet, simple, and completely bullshit piece of programming that runs in the background of everything. And the code is this: men are bad, women are good.
It’s so simple, so clean, you almost don’t even see it. But it’s everywhere. You see it in the commercials, don’t you? The dad is always a fat, stupid, and completely incompetent bastard who can’t figure out how to open a jar of pickles, while the mom just rolls her eyes with a quiet, knowing, and completely condescending smile.
Masculinity has been on the chopping block for a long time, and they’ve been taking it apart, piece by piece, with a quiet, polite, and completely ruthless efficiency.
And the hypocrisy of it all, Christ. It would be funny if it wasn’t so goddamn tragic. They want the old traditional courtesies, but they want to piss all over the traditional roles. “Look at me, I’m pretty, I’m sexy,” they say, with their two-hundred-dollar haircut and their push-up bra and their face full of war paint. “But don’t you dare judge me on my looks. Don’t you dare objectify me.” It’s a beautiful, perfect, and completely insane piece of doublethink.
A woman cheats on her husband, and it’s a sad, beautiful tragedy. A symptom of his neglect, his failure to be a man. She was lonely. She was misunderstood. But a man cheats on his wife? He’s a pig. A monster. A simple, ugly, and completely irredeemable bastard. There’s no nuance. There’s no story. Just the quick, clean, and completely satisfying verdict.
They can use the absolutes. “All men are the same.” And we’re all supposed to nod along, a quiet, castrated chorus of agreement. But you turn that around, you say, “All women are like that,” and suddenly you’re a misogynist. A monster. You’re “generalizing.”
And they tell you it’s all about “equality.”
What a load of horseshit.
They’re not out there, fighting for the right to be a bricklayer, or a roofer, or to crawl around in the sewer with the rest of the poor bastards. No. They want the management jobs. They want the corner office. They don’t want equal opportunity; they want equal outcomes. And to get that, they have to rig the game. They lower the standards for themselves and they raise the bar for the men. Because the quiet, unspoken, and completely foundational belief of the whole goddamn project is that men are bad, and women are good. And if the system is rigged, it’s only because they’re rigging it for the betterment of society, to take the power away from the big, dumb, and dangerous animals and give it to the gentle, wise, and completely benevolent goddesses.
And you sit there, and you watch this whole goddamn show, this quiet, polite, and completely relentless war against the male soul, and you think to yourself…
Haven’t I seen this movie before?
Haven’t I heard this song, just in a different key?
And of course you have.
Because it’s the same goddamn cookbook. The same cheap, dog-eared, and completely effective playbook that they’ve been using against white people for the last thirty years.
They take a group of people, and they turn them into a cartoon villain. “You people,” they say. “Those crackers. Those old, white Republicans.” They create a monster. And then they give everyone else permission to hate it.
White people, you’re not allowed to have anything for yourselves. You can’t have your own neighborhood; that’s segregation. You can’t have your own club; that’s discrimination. You can’t even have your own goddamn family in a television commercial anymore. It’s always a mixed couple now, isn’t it? A quiet, constant, and completely deliberate message that the pure, unadulterated white family is a thing of the past. An anachronism. A goddamn relic.
EQUAL And you ask, is this by design?
Of course it’s by design. It’s the same goddamn strategy. You take a group of people, the one that built the whole goddamn house, and you convince them that the house is a crime scene, that their history is a sin, and that the only way to atone for it is to quietly and politely hand over the keys to the people who are standing on the lawn, holding the matches.
This isn’t a new thing. It’s a slow, quiet, and completely deliberate demolition project that started a long time ago. We beat back the old racism, the real, honest-to-God, ugly racism of the past, by just… moving on. By not talking about it. By treating each other like human beings. And then, somewhere along the way, they decided that peace was bad for business.
So they brought it all back. The race-baiting, the division, the quiet, simmering hatred. And they gave it a new, clean, academic-sounding name: “social justice.”
And now, we live in the world they’ve created. A world where a man is judged not by the content of his character, but by the color of his skin, and the contents of his pants. A world where the beautiful, messy, and completely necessary business of being a human being has been replaced by a quiet, cold, and completely insane calculus of privilege and oppression.
The sickness is the same. The playbook is the same. The only thing that’s different is the target.
And you, you’re just a man sitting in the middle of it all, watching the whole goddamn circus go up in flames, and you’re the only one who seems to notice that the clowns who are juggling the torches are using the same goddamn moves, whether they’re wearing a dress or a dashiki.
You’re not crazy. You’re just sober at a drunk party. And in a world that’s gone mad, that’s the loneliest, ugliest, and most beautiful goddamn place to be.
