David Wong hits it out of the park on misogyny
by David Atkins
David Wong (alias of Jason Pargin) at Cracked has a tremendous and brutally honest explanation of misogyny in the modern world. Having grown up in a seriously patriarchal household with a great deal of misogyny among friends and family, I can state fairly unequivocally that most of what he writes hits very close to the mark. We both apparently also spend a fair amount of time browsing Free Republic, which provides a considerable insight into the unvarnished conservative American (usually male) mind.
Wong’s basic points boil down to mostly the same thing: men, especially those in more conservative cultures, are continually obsessed with winning over and impressing women. But conservative men also resent women for 1) supposedly “making” them do dumb things to impress them; 2) not being easily “won” enough; and 3) supposedly changing the rules of the game in which men have all the agency, and women have none.
Wong/Pargin takes on several aspects of this dynamic, but gets at something very central with this:
Do you see what I’m getting at? Go look outside. See those cars driving by? Every car being driven by a man was designed and built and bought and sold with you in mind. The only reason why small, fuel-efficient or electric cars don’t dominate the roads is because we want to look cool in our cars, to impress you.
Go look at a city skyline. All those skyscrapers? We built those to impress you, too. All those sports you see on TV? All of those guys learned to play purely because in school, playing sports gets you laid. All the music you hear on the radio? All of those guys learned to sing and play guitar because as a teenager, they figured out that absolutely nothing gets women out of their pants faster. It’s the same reason all of the actors got into acting.
All those wars we fight? Sure, at the upper levels, in the halls of political power, they have some complicated reasons for wanting some piece of land or access to some resource. But on the ground? Well, let me ask you this — historically, when an army takes over a city, what happens to the women there?
It’s all about you. All of it. All of civilization.
So where you see a world in which males dominate the boards of the Fortune 500, and own Congress, and sit at the head of all but a handful of the world’s nations, men see themselves as utterly helpless. Because all of those powerful people only became powerful because they heard that women like power.
This is really the heart of it, right here. This is why no amount of male domination will ever be enough, why no level of control or privilege or female submission will ever satisfy us. We can put you under a burqa, we can force you out of the workplace — it won’t matter. You’re still all we think about, and that gives you power over us. And we resent you for it.
That accurately describes most of the men I grew up around in deep red Riverside County. Men, especially conservative men, are terrified that if women are given the agency to do as they please, none of the attitudes and skills they’ve honed will be necessary or useful in attracting them/controlling them. The key to breaking this down is to convince these men that women actually have and deserve agency in their lives, and that there’s no need to take all these repressive steps toward domination.
It’s tough to do and it may take generations, but it’s a crucial step in societal evolution.
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