U Not Gonna Like This

Here's an article from International Mens Network called Invisble Men (link):


by Bruce Walker


Ralph Ellison, the great black author, more than fifty years ago wrote a poignant, haunting book, The Invisible Man, which describes how black Americans were invisible to the rest of American society during that long period of Jim Crow and segregation. The great horror of white mistreatment of blacks was not so much deliberate and vicious crimes, but rather the general indifference of whites toward those black Americans who did the dirty work of society.




Womenists are identical in amoral passivity today. Who collects the garbage and drives the garbage trucks? Who cleans muck from the sewer lines and drains the septic tanks? Who spends freezing nights repairing power lines? Who buries the dead? Men, like Helots of an earlier age, do the work that is dirty and thankless.



Women do much valuable work in modern society and much of this work - nurses, for example - is hard and demanding. But it is not invisible. Nurses are rightly respected in modern culture as important parts of medical care. Less likely to be noticed, except as the butt of a joke, are orderlies. Unlike nurses, who are overwhelmingly women, orderlies are overwhelmingly men.



Teachers are glorified almost obsessively by our culture. Good teachers are great benefactors of society, without any doubt. But what about the school bus drivers, who get up for work much earlier than teachers and who receive hoots from students and complaints from parents? These workers, overwhelmingly male, are unpersons.



What about the janitors, who mop up vomit and clean the restrooms of public schools? Whose absence would be noticed more quickly, the Assistant Principal or the school janitor? Which is more likely to be a woman and which more likely to be a man? The janitor is much more likely not only to be male, but more likely to be suspected of some sort of deviant sexual behavior.



If men do the essential, unpleasant and unappreciated work of modern life, do they not also do the glamorous and dangerous work? Is this not all part of the "guy thing" about us men liking physical hardship? Perhaps, but this certainly does not show up in my young son's early reader books.



These same early reader books - like Sesame Street shows, Disney Channel programs and all the other politically correct media of entertainment, education and information - do not show fathers as acting as nurturing parents. Instead, mothers are celebrated and teachers (almost invariably female for younger children) are celebrated. Men are invisible...or worse.



Those noble professions of life in which men actually predominate - scientists, policemen, firemen, astronauts and surgeons - invariably have a perfect balance of women and men in modern entertainment and education. This is pure fiction, of course, but deception that portrays women as contributing equally with men in, say, the liberation of Afghanistan or the suicidal heroics of New York firemen, is a "good" lie according to Womenists.




If the notion thirty years ago when Womenism because to consciously engage in pious lies about the composition of society was to provide equal opportunity in all aspects of economic and social life for both sexes (i.e. if Womenism meant what it said: both sexes had been held in constricting roles) then the logical consequence would have been to have books in which children come home from school saying "Hello dad. I sure love you."




Evening television programs would show vicious mothers abusing children, who were protected by courageous fathers. Not only would this particular characterization rectify any stereotyping of men and women, but it would in fact reflect reality. Most physical abuse of children is committed by the mother; most victims of physical child abuse are the sons; and fathers are the most common protectors of children.




Womenists, of course, are more than happy to let a false stereotype exist and persist, if the consequences are merely misery and injustice to men and to children. They are even willing to exaggerate a dishonest portrayal. All human life, except adult women, are untermenchen to Womenists, or as their philosophical mentors put it so succinctly, men and children are "Life unworthy of life."




So where are the ditch diggers, the road crews, the water purification workers, the long haul truck drivers, the hazardous waste technicians, the sanitation engineers and all those other people whose work is really important to our lives? These are invisible men, who spoiled suburban housewives and secretaries in air conditioned office buildings look right through.