Suzanne Venker has come to the defense of the most beleaguered group in America, one that is cruelly put upon from all sides, from being bashed in the media to having schools and colleges stacked against them, all the while being falsely accused of all manner of abuses while their own victimhood is ignored. She says this group has become second-class citizens.
But you don’t find them whining about their reduced status. No sir, they suffer in silence. She concludes:
From boyhood through adulthood, the White American Male must fight his way through a litany of taunts, assumptions and grievances about his very existence. His oppression is unlike anything American women have faced. Unlike women, however, men don’t organize and form groups when they’ve been persecuted. They just bow out of the game.
Yes, throughout history women have faced nothing like the oppression men face now. But being the complainers that they are, they keep going on and on about trivialities like how they didn’t have the vote for 150 years after independence, were completely shut out of most opportunities in education and careers and employment until recently, and still get raped and abused in huge numbers.
That’s the way women are, always complaining about the smallest things while not seeing the much greater suffering of non-women.
I’ve been persecuted for being young. I’ve been persecuted for being good, for working hard, and even for being a supporter of evolution in education. Being a white male however hasn’t been much of a problem for me. Maybe I’m just one of the lucky few 😉
As a white male, my blood boils at the fact that, unlike my noble forefathers, I am now constantly subject to the indignity of having to compete for opportunities with the entirety of the human species.
I’ve been a White American Male for sixty years and a bit. I think this author has changed her name from to Venker from Wanker.
Or she just knows her intended audience……
Dear Poor Oppressed White American Males.
Grow the feck up.
Love,
AoS.
I’m starting to think the best way to deal with obvious trolls like Suzanne Venker is to just blandly encourage them to keep going on about their ridiculous little idea until they’ve explained enough that nobody in their right mind would want to be associated with their nonsense.
This would be comedy gold if it weren’t taken seriously by many, at least in the USA. The only positive message to take away is that its absurdity looks like a sign of real desperation. The death throes of oppression are never gentle.
She knows well that stroking the male ego is the way to get what she wants, which is probably access to the pocketbook.
When you’re groomed to privilege, even the mildest adversity seems like unbearable persecution. What a joke.
Oh, silly me, here I thought she was talking about black transsexual lesbian Jewish atheists with dwarfism. I guess those must come in second.
From your blockquote, Mano, I seriously thought you had linked to a satire. But nope!
The Schlafley is strong in this one.
Without knowing whether Schläfli is an aunt on Venker’s paternal or maternal side it’s impossible to know whether the crazy is carried by mitochondria or otherwise. This is more of a job for PZM than for Mano.
Aside from the nonsense from Venker (the fact that it was published on the Whacknutdaily is already 4 strikes against taking it seriously), there is a legitimate argument that the current educational system discriminates against boys of all races, religious backgrounds, and sexual orientations. IMHO, the reason is that girls mature earlier then boys so placing boys and girls of the same age in the same classrooms is a recipe for the former performing less well then the latter. This is ofter cited as the reason why our current higher education system now consists of considerably more then 50% girls/women.
But as it is, it’s pure comedy pyrite.
You may have a point, but if you really want boys to grow up before they get an education, they’ll never get an education.
The differences ‘tween
Our men and our boys,
Is the hair on their chests
And the price of their toys.
there is a legitimate argument that the current educational system discriminates against boys of all races, religious backgrounds, and sexual orientations. IMHO, the reason is that girls mature earlier then boys so placing boys and girls of the same age in the same classrooms is a recipe for the former performing less well then the latter. This is ofter cited as the reason why our current higher education system now consists of considerably more then 50% girls/women.
There’s an argument but it’s hardly legitimate.
Does the presence of girls in the classroom cause the boys to slow themselves down (why, presumably are they drooling on the floor and preening too much?) and is that effect not potentially offset by how that behavior drags down the girls’ ability to pay attention, too? “It’s complicated” doesn’t even begin to cover it. Studies that show that (for example) all boys’ schools result in better standardized test scores may not control for other socioeconomic factors (was it an expensive all-boys school that performed better?) For an argument like that, it should be supported with a few links to a few studies (ideally ones that haven’t been shredded…) supporting it. Because, otherwise, it’s a pretty weak argument.
The lopsided gender demographics of the educational system could also be caused by other factors -- for example, teaching has typically been a lower-paid career; perhaps what you’re observing is that women are disproportionately represented in education because they’re not being hired for management/executive positions elsewhere and are effectively being forced to take lower-paying jobs in education.
One think I learned the hard way with the social ‘sciences’ is that you can’t take any ‘explanation’ at face value because you need to practice turning everything upside down and questioning every single assumption from every possible angle. The result of that, for me, is usually that I’m unconvinced by simple-sounding explanations because social reality is always more complicated and subtle.
One reason why there is a majority of women in most colleges is because young men who are less academically inclined often choose to enter trades, which offer a nice income, often nicer than the income offered by a college degree, especially considering the expected academic outcomes for this group (ie people who don’t like academic work or who have a history of being less successful at it). Women in similar position still try to stick to the college path because they don’t see an alternative that would offer a reasonable income. So if anyone is concerned about women taking over colleges -- encourage women to enter trades too, make the trades welcoming of women.
I’ve faced discrimination too: I’ve had professional papers rejected because what I put in them was incorrect or not interesting enough.
It is time to quit discriminating against the mediocre! 🙂
The university at which I was teaching performed an interesting experiment (probably never to be replicated) in the middle 1970s. There had been separate men’s and women’s colleges at opposite ends of town, but the men’s college decided to go co-educational. Dramatic difference: the atmosphere in the men’s college (where I was) went from disreputable frat house/barracks to normal life. The women students were pretty much par with the men, at least in the first-two-year math courses (obvs it took four years for women to work up through the classes [although students from the women’s college had been taking upper-div classes at the men’s college for years]). Later they seemed better, for reasons explained below. The men were not demoralized; the women did not seem to be there to get the Mr.S. Of course this experience may not be identical to what one would get for students in early puberty in the 20-teens, but I think it ‘s an indication. Yes, I can tell an anecdote from a statistic. No, I don’t advocate the forcible liquidation of single-sex ed; I’m just saying what happened in one relevant case.
Unforeseen consequence: the a priori better-qualified women science students apparently started to self-select for the (former) men’s college.
I agree!
But nobody discriminates against the mediocre: that’s why we have the governments we do, on both sides of the pond.
Sorry, Mano, but your class and race privilege is really quite transparent here. Check your privilege and realize the sufferings of poor and/or minority men. I am not saying they are worse than the sufferings of poor and/or minority women, but they are real and trivializing and/or mocking them is disgusting. They are the victims of violence in greater numbers than women, they are more likely to end up homeless or in prison, they are more likely to suffer from substance abuse issues, and they are more likely to commit suicide. They are more likely the victims of police brutality, etc. I could go on and on. While they are less likely to be victims of sexual assault compared to women, it still happens in significant numbers and their needs are not taken as seriously (though, it must be said, that is changing today and for the better).
Seriously, did you read the linked Venker article, or even its peroration block-quoted in Mano’s piece? Venker is all broken up over the plight of White Males, including those impoverished Yalies who were beaten up by Title-IX harpies some 40 years ago. Poor and/or minority men fly below her radar. Poor men watch Fox news, for which she works, because they are victims of a shell game.
I have no idea of the socio-economic class into which Mano was born, but if you think that privilege automatically accrues in the US to people who come from south Asia, then I would like to interest you in purchasing certain bridges in the NY metro area …
Yes, I did read the linked article. And I’m quite aware of Venker’s claptrap. But that does not change the fact that not only are the issues she cites real, but they apply with particular force to poor and/or minority men, and to trivially dismiss the article as “what about teh poor menz” is to trivially dismiss the particular issues of poor and/or minority men, and that is disgusting, and that is just what Mano did.
Now if the critique had been instead, Venker doesn’t give a damn about the plight of poor and/or minority men; she’s just using their problems as an excuse to push her own agenda, which is to ensure that white heterosexual women from the “right” background have a large pool of rich white heterosexual educated men to choose from as potential marriage partners, THEN I’d agree.
Your second paragraph basically says that Mano did not write the article you would have liked to see (and it wasn’t the one I would have liked, which might have dealt with the probably-50% of the male population--not necessarily poor and/or minority--who are by nature not the facile symbol manipulators that school (and after graduation, our age of technology) is willing to reward). Fair enough; but I found it unfair to blame that fact on his putative race and class privilege.