Arthur Silber: Disempowered White Men Are Very, Very Pissed

Silber's essay is about some men's resentment of gender role changes, but it could be about anything being contested in the culture wars. I feel the right wing taps into this resentment of lost power...on the part of men vs. women, whites vs. non-white, Christian vs. non-Christian. Everywhere you look, the current renegotiation of these social contracts is very distressing to those who thought they were 'calling the shots.'--Dictynna

August 16th, 2005

Intriguingly enough, many issues related to the following article have just come up in connection with the Cindy Sheehan story, as I discussed here: Cindy Sheehan: A Better Man Than Many Men. For a lengthier treatment of the subject, you might be interested in this essay: Living on the Inside…and Living on the Outside.

Those two pieces of mine dealt with this subject in a serious vein. But this is pretty damned funny. It’s also rather sad, and notably delusional (my comments are interspersed in brackets and in bold):

The veteran BBC newsreader Michael Buerk has complained that “almost all the big jobs in broadcasting [are] held by women,” and that men have been reduced to “sperm donors”. [Since women were nothing but “baby makers” for eons, that would only seem just, if it were true—which it isn’t.]

The former Nine O’Clock News presenter, who now reads the news on BBC World, also said that the “shift in the balance of power between the sexes” has gone too far, saying that “life is now lived in accordance with women’s rules”. [Which “women’s rules” are those exactly? Specificity is a virtue, unless you simply wish to vilify an entire sex. I’m certain that isn’t Mr. Buerk’s intention, aren’t you? Of course you are.]