Image via PerryUndem report
Poor men. It must be so hard being the oppressed sex.
The New York Times reported this week on the results of a national survey by PerryUndem. The good news is that 93 percent of Americans believe women deserve to be treated equally (who are you, other 7 percent??). But the report also showed that men underestimate the extent to which women are made to feel unequal in society. But the statistic that will really make you grind your teeth?
Republican men think women have it easier.
Only 41 percent of them think it’s a good time to be a man, but 51 percent think it is a good time to be a woman.
Oh, it’s a GREAT time if, that is, you want to earn less, be underrepresented in government and the media, face a heightened risk of sexual or domestic violence, and live in a culture that holds you to unreasonable standards of physical beauty.
Dennis Halaszynski, a retired police captain from Pennsylvania, perfectly sums up the white male pity party. “It’s easier being a woman today than it is a man,” the 81-year-old is quoted as saying. “The white man is a low person on the totem pole. Everybody else is above the white man.”
Each little step on the long pathway to equality seems to disturb and disgruntle men. As Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room Of One’s Own 87 years ago, men rely on women’s subordination to make themselves feel tall.
“Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size,” she wrote.No wonder men should feel threatened by the rising spectre of equality- if they can’t feel superior to half the world’s population, the fragile ego begins to develop a bit of an inferiority complex.
The full report is worth a read. My favorite new stat to pull out when my progressive male friends tell me sexism had nothing to do with Clinton’s loss?
One in four respondents said they saw or heard friends or family make sexist comments about Clinton during the campaign (bear in mind also that Republicans are less likely to interpret a comment as sexist, so this number might be even higher). Oh, and one in three men and one in four women who voted for Trump think that men make better leaders than women.
Oh yeah, sexism has nothing to do with it.
Top image via PerryUndem Report: THE STATE OF THE UNION ON GENDER EQUALITY, SEXISM, AND WOMEN’S RIGHTS
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