Feminism Didn’t Unmake Men

The assumptions of patriarchy did. Deal with it.

This article was in response to a piece which said men were being destroyed by feminism; the nature of feminism meant men were no longer allowed to be masculine without consequence. As I finished the article my rage grew and I knew what I needed to do. I called for help.

“Honey, where are my hip boots?”

“Why do you need them? We’re supposed to be painting a house this morning.”

“I’m putting the finishing touches on an article…”

“Painting!!!!”

“Woman, Men’s Rights Advocates are whining about their loss of rights and freedom to be men, again…”

“Why didn’t you lead with that? They’re in the hall closet.”

Equipped with hip boots, I waded into the muck and decided I wouldn’t share that article because frankly, it was men whining about how hard the world had become for them, how the legal system was turning against them, and how women were making men into something less than women while women were becoming men. Ugh. The assumptions around men would have you believe they are victims. But the statistics don’t really bear this out.

For example: wealth equality among the richest women in America quoted from the New York Times on ‘Why Aren’t There More Female Billionaires?’ :

Of course, women are still making inroads among the rich. By some measures, there are more wealthy or high-earning women than ever, both in the United States and around the world. In 2000, there were 11 female billionaires on the planet, according to Forbes; by 2016, there were 190. (Forbes and Wealth-X have different tallies for the female billionaire population.)

Yet cracking the “diamond ceiling” appears to be getting harder. According to the paper that Professor Zucman and two other economists wrote for the nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research — his collaborators were the well-known Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics and Emmanuel Saez of Berkeley — women tripled their share of the top 1 percent of earners from 1980 to 2000, to 9.2 percent. Yet from 2000 to 2014, their share grew only to 11.5 percent.

At the current pace, Professor…