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Men and Women Suffered Alongside Each Other Throughout History
The feminist belief that men are fundamentally oppressors is itself an act of oppression
Women have endured immense hardship throughout history. But so have men. For most of human history, life was brutal— war, disease, famine, and intensely cruel, exploitative labor.
Many men oppressed women, but many men also protected them — within families, in their homes, from rapists and invaders.
Women also played the role of oppressors of men, as I will expand on further below.
Most importantly, I have no interest in playing in the oppression Olympics. This article is not about dividing people into groups and contrasting their suffering.
The Nazis played the oppression Olympics in Germany with the Jews, and so did the Communists in the Soviet Union with the bourgeoisie. Both cases led to the stacking of corpses in the holocaust and gulag camps.
Instead, I wish to investigate the truth about patriarchal oppression.
Yes, men indeed benefited from patriarchal structures. Despite this, the rhetoric that men are solely responsible for women’s suffering is oppressive in itself because it is untrue.
