- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
Here's a quote from this interview:
"Middle-class men are feeling threatened right now because women don't need men to have a life."
What do you think it feels like to hear that, assuming the author has his facts straight? Everyone needs to feel important, to feel validated, to feel as if they matter, particularly to the person they, say, marry. Just stop for one second and consider what it feels like to be informed that, no, you're not important, no, you're not essential, no, you don't make enough of a difference to be necessary. You're a nice option, like a CD player in a car, but as soon as you can't or don't deliver the goods, you're gone. God help you if you have a problem, or get sick, or need some help,or are blocked for some other reason. Commitment? Principles? Values? Nah. You don't build a life together, you sort of acquire an accessory with a penis.
Any man who wasn't mentally ill would run like his ass was on fire upon hearing something like this. This is the Maureen Dowd symdrom. Be so insecure and so cagey and so competitive that the men in your life are forever being reminded that they're replacable, and then wonder why they're gone. The entire point of a relationship is to be of service and support to the other person, in whatever way you can, and if the other party won't let you out of some adolescent concept of "strength" then the whole thing becomes impossible.
Also, men put up with incredibly high-maintenance garbage every day, and just accept it. Last night my wife picked fights over a) how I gave our children their bath; b) reading them one extra story resulting in them going to sleep fifteen minutes late; c) eating a banana after dinner. This concluded with her, literally, throwing food at my car as I left. Why: because she was premenstrual. This happens all the time, and women insist that men just live with it, which we usually do. But when a man does this, there's a book about it. Unbelievable.
