Freaky Friday Redux: If men had to jump through the same hoops as women, we couldn’t hack it
Healthcare? Childcare? Sexual Autonomy? Would they be politicized, stigmatized and demonized if men were on the ones drawing the short straw?
Men, we’ve been having our cake and eating it, too, since a Gazillion, B.C. When it comes to having largely guilt- and consequence-free agency over our bodies, family planning and sexuality, those with the Y Chromosomes have it made. No “vast left-wing conspiracy” could ever reverse it; Progressives just want to see some balance based on empathy.
If male healthcare was as complicated or expensive as its female counterpart, you better believe our medical needs would be completely government subsidized, socially de-stigmatized, and politically irrelevant.
No elections would hinge on ginning up female voter support to make sure that men didn’t have access to Viagra or Cialis — because there’s nothing wrong with a man’s healthy expression of his own sexual freedom, right? (Erections at age 80 are a worthwhile scientific barrier to smash, not an abomination like increasing female estrogen and progestin levels…)
No employer, church or House Subcommittee would ever support efforts to defund providers of male preventative care checkups, medicines, cancer screenings and outpatient procedures aimed at helping keep economically-disadvantaged men and vulnerable teenage boys healthy and in charge of their own reproductive health.
If our roles in reproduction were somehow switched (without changing current gender power dynamics) and MEN were the ones who bore the legal, physical, and employment-affecting burdens of childbearing (let alone the assumption of primary child rearing), comprehensive prenatal care would be as easily obtainable as a drugstore flu shot and Planned Parenthood locations would rival Starbucks in ubiquity.
Oh, and women would bear practically no cultural shame or legal responsibility for walking out on us after fertilization occurred — (because, you know, Girls Will Be Girls) — outside of sometimes having to pay us palimony.
And those women who did stick around and help raise their kids? They’d be treated like heroes.
At dinner parties, men would huddle in corners and say in wistful tones, for example, that “Anthony sure was lucky to snag one of the decent ones.”
Women seen lovingly playing with their kids in the park would have old men come up to them and shake their heads and say “it looks like your mother raised you right — do you have a sister I could set up with my son?”
Ladies would receive slaps on the back and reverent head nods from men when successfully getting a child to school on time with shoes that match and a lunch that’s packed. Meanwhile, other men in minivans would continue to inconspicuously drop off multiple kids to multiple classrooms, addressing child-specific issues with each teacher before heading to the Principal’s office for a meeting about how to save the school’s music program.
In short, if men had to put up with the same kind of institutional and cultural B.S. women do when it comes to our sexuality and roles vis-a-vis the opposite sex, I think our empowering message and measured response would look a whole lot less like a successful March on Washington (and elsewhere) and a whole lot more like Mad Max: Fury Road.
Postscript: Everyone knows what misogyny is. It is ubiquitous, pervasive…at times hiding in the shadows, at times bathed in neon. But did you know that there’s a correlative term meaning “dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against men?” No, you didn’t. It’s called misandry. It is referenced 68 times in the Oxford English Corpus. Misogyny, you ask? Over 2,000 times. Not to sound like an ‘80’s, blazer-sleeves-rolled-up comic, but let’s “do the math” and maybe ask why the disparity?
