QUESTIONS NOBODY IS ASKING: Can White Men Finally Stop Complaining? For 50 years, we’ve been hearing from men who feel threatened by the gains of women and minorities. Now that the manosphere is in charge, the victim mentality has to go.
The manosphere won. Bro podcasters top the charts. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg declares his company needs more “masculine energy.” Elon Musk shares a post saying only “high-status males” should run the country. The White House kills diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, and so do multiple companies, from Target to McDonalds.
OK, men, so will you finally quit complaining?
In 2021, Joe Rogan famously said, “It will eventually get to straight white men are not allowed to talk…It will be, ‘You’re not allowed to go outside’…I’m not joking. It really will get there, it’s that crazy.” But Rogan’s complaint is actually an old one that has exploded as a rallying cry every decade or so for more than 50 years. White guys have blamed others for their job losses, educational failures, economic problems and drug addictions.
Somebody else is always at fault. The mighty white guy, it turns out, is quite the delicate flower.
“The white male is the most persecuted person in the United States,” a retired marketing executive declared in a Newsweek cover story in 1993. The magazine cataloged a litany of white men’s gripes: a culture that demonized them, diversity programs run amok, women and Black people getting jobs that were rightfully theirs. “This is a weird moment to be a white man,” it reported. “Suddenly white American males are surrounded by feminists, multiculturalists, P.C. policepersons, affirmative-action employers…all of them saying the same thing: You’ve been a bad boy.”
Sound familiar?
Racism and sexism are as old as time. But the “oppressed white man” trope is a relatively modern invention, with roots in the civil-rights and women’s-rights victories of the 1960s. Protests and lawsuits followed, with aggrieved white men turning the language of civil rights on its head. “Talk about rights; we’ve got no rights!” a crowd of white Detroit police officers chanted in 1975, protesting a court ruling in favor of the department’s relatively few Black and female officers.
The TV character Archie Bunker, the oppressed white guy’s avatar, captured that spirit in a 1974 “All in the Family” episode, when he complained about a female colleague whose pay was equal to his: “What’s the point of a man working hard all his life, trying to get someplace, if all he’s gonna do is wind up equal?!”
The Wall Street Journal has apparently decided to boldly go where Pinch Sulzberger of the New York Times went before in the mid-1990s.
Interesting choice of artwork to accompany Joanne Lipman’s article, though. Archie Bunker was a leftist Hollywood parody of the typical Nixon voter in 1970 created by Norman Lear. Michael Douglas’ William Foster, aka “D-FENS” of Falling Down was a leftist Hollywood parody of the typical Reagan/Bush voter by Joel Schumacher and his writer, Ebbe Row Smith. Rogan, Zuckerburg and Musk were all staunch Obama voters until he tried to make a power grab for Silicon Valley in his third term.
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