Hey, Women: A Little Help, Please?

Even if you haven't geeked out over the "boy problem," you're probably aware of the well-documented evidence that boys and men are struggling.

Boys lag behind girls in school and graduate at lower rates. Women now comprise the overwhelming majority of college students and graduates. Boys are far more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, get into administrative and legal trouble, and drop out. Three to five times as many men as women commit suicide. Men and boys abuse drugs more and overdose more.

And no wonder: Dudes don't have much to look forward to. Traditionally male jobs in manufacturing, construction and physical labor are disappearing. Male workforce participation is plunging. Real wages for many guys have been falling since the late 1970s.

Proponents of equity deny reality: Jobs, money and social status are zero-sum games. Every gig, prize and pay raise that goes to a woman -- fixing the systemic injustice of sexism -- is one for which a guy has been passed over -- creating a new problem, downwardly mobile males.

It ought not to be necessary but clearly bears repeating: We're one human race and one nation. We're all in it together. Every male is a woman's son, brother, father, partner or friend; every male who fails affects everyone around him.

But that isn't the vibe.

When the topic comes up in polite liberal company, women laugh. You men have had centuries, millennia. Now it's our turn to be in charge.

Boo hoo ... men's wittle feelings are hurt? Let me get the world's tiniest violin.

One could retort -- and I have - that today's 20-year-old man doesn't have much to show for the male privilege of the "Mad Men" era. Or that revenge isn't justice. Or that our current male-bashing culture is feeding into the resentments that could fuel a future "Handmaid's Tale" backlash among men who otherwise would have bought into third-wave feminism.

Some women have been worried. "Equity feminist" Christina Hoff Sommers' 2000 book "The War Against Boys" argued that educators ignoring boys in favor of girls pathologized masculinity, feminized schools and overlooked boys' decline in test scores and college enrollment.

But the attitude of Emily Oster, the economist and parenting expert, is much more common: "Oh, men are struggling? It's harder for some of us to get our heads around it. ... Because, at the top, it's just a bunch of penises," she responded in 2024. "Men are trash" became an internet meme. A New Statesman poll finds that only 35% of British women under 25 have a positive opinion of men, and that women under 30 are three times more likely to hold negative views than those over 30. (Rates are similar in the U.S.)

Guys are in trouble -- and women don't much care.

Women and liberals don't even want to hear about it. "In the current political climate, highlighting the problems of boys and men is seen as a perilous undertaking," Richard V. Reeves, author of "Of Boys and Men" and a leading voice in this space who is also a left-leaning feminist, confessed. "One friend, a newspaper columnist, said, 'I never go near these issues if I can avoid it. There's nothing but pain there.'"

At high risk of being accused of being self-serving, I'd like to remind women that when they needed a helping hand, a lot of men reached out. Now that we're lost and broke and depressed and literally killing ourselves, is it too much to ask for you ladies to return the favor?

While female leaders drove the suffragette movement, for example, male allies provided funding, public credibility, organizational help and votes -- since only men could vote at the time.

Men like Frederick Douglass attended the 1848 Seneca Falls convention that launched the Votes for Women movement. The Men's League for Woman Suffrage, founded in 1909 by powerful men like the publisher Oswald Garrison Villard, Max Eastman, John Dewey, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and George Foster Peabody, grew to thousands of members across dozens of states. Progressives, socialists, prohibitionists and other reformers thought suffrage was essential to democracy. The 19th Amendment, ratified in 1920, passed with millions of male votes, not one from a woman.

What if we'd been a matriarchy instead, and men were denied the vote? I'm not at all convinced that men would have found many female allies in a universal suffrage movement.

Psychological research studies find that women are generally more empathetic than men. Women, if they focus on the issue, probably see that men are in trouble. They can feel their pain, especially since they've been discriminated against and, in some contexts, still are. But while women tend to be more nurturing, what the men in their lives need now is something that men themselves tend to be better at: chivalry. Men desperately need material assistance: raises, jobs, promotions, breaks, awards.

For men, right now, help is decidedly not on the way. It's not hard to see why: Women, viciously oppressed for millennia, are enjoying their change of fortune, even though -- perhaps because -- it comes at the expense of half the human race. "But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or 'sub-oppressors.' ... Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors," Paulo Freire noted in his influential 1968 book "Pedagogy of the Oppressed."

Israeli Jews are exhibit A in that saddest of all narratives, victim turns oppressor. Too many American women are succumbing to the same temptation -- if not to subject men to the rape culture and direct subjugation to which they were long subjected (not that it is by any means all in the past) -- to ignore and even mock the plight of the men and boys with whom they are destined to share the world.

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Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the brand-new "What's Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems." He co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.

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