There are few things that chill my bones, and send a lightning bolt of fear through me, as fast as the rapidly-growing fetishization of men’s incapability and brokenness to serve the agenda that women are, of course, far more suited to everything from political office, culture, and even changing the way sexual politics may occur.
Look around the cultural landscape. Tell me the last pro-male thing you saw. The last unabashedly pro-male book, film, or television series you saw that celebrated men for the good they do, and the good and decent men they are.
Contrast that with the common way in which men are portrayed on television, films, and in other forms of popular culture. Men have been told, time and again, that they need to be reformed, to be fixed to fit the new model of masculinity. Our greatest examples of fatherhood on television are Homer Simpson or Phil Dunphy, joking simpletons who rely on their long-suffering and intelligent wives to fix every mess they make. Advertising tells us that men can’t be trusted to handle the hard work, to do the things women do every day, and eventually it’s started to be believed.
So, on this edition of the Rationalist, we discuss it. We discuss, in clear painstaking detail, if men are actually broken. And if they are, what we can do to fix the problem.
