It’s always entertaining when a poorly thought-out feminist argument refutes itself, saving the rest of us the trouble.
In a widely shared moment late last week, Sen. Kamala Harris asked Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, “Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?”
The question was in the midst of Harris’ extensive grandstanding so Kavanaugh didn’t have an immediate answer. But there’s an obvious one: Selective Service.
Every American male 18-25 has to register with the Selective Service System, which maintains their information in the case of military conscription. If America is ever again in a war and needs to reinstate the draft, those male bodies will be the ones to go.
Had Kavanaugh thought of that answer, it would have exposed a hidden truth: Being female is amazing. Meanwhile, being a man does not seem like a good thing at all.
Even with the modern loss of niceties like men holding doors or offering seats for women, being a woman is still far easier and more pleasant than being a man.
It’s not just theoretical wars that men fight in if drafted. In Operation Enduring Freedom, the name for America’s ongoing engagement fighting global terrorism, 98 percent of the 2,346 military deaths as of April 2017 were men.
And it’s not just combat deaths. Men have a far higher rate of workplace death than women. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says men represent 92 percent of all workplace-related fatalities. The 10 industries with the most workplace-related deaths are almost entirely stocked with men: truck drivers, steel workers, refuse collectors, loggers, fishers. Men take the dangerous, hard, smelly jobs that most women wouldn’t consider.
Far less serious, but no less real, is the issue of discomfort. While moving homes this summer, we stayed with my in-laws in suburban Long Island. I’d drop my husband off at the Long Island Rail Road station, and he would join the throngs of men in suits in sweltering summer heat.
There were a few women, of course, luckily able to wear sleeveless dresses and bare legs more appropriate for the weather, but the vast majority of sad faces on that early morning platform were men’s. These men often leave before the sun rises and come back after it has set. The nearby beach, later those same weekdays, would overwhelmingly be populated by women.
In fact, men in America commute 23 percent longer each day than women. A 2016 tongue-in-cheek piece by American Enterprise Institute scholar Mark Perry highlights this fact and proposes instituting an “Equal Commute Day” to close the “gender commute time gap.”
Men are more likely to be homeless, too. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s latest report finds men making up 61 percent of the homeless population.
But somehow women are still hardest hit by this. Professor Erin Dej, a criminologist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, spent nearly 300 hours studying homeless men only to conclude they still practice “hegemonic masculinity.” At PJ Media, Toni Airaksinen notes how Dej “ridicules these men for everything from reinforcing gender stereotypes, to refusing to show emotion, to talking about how their ex-wives stole money from them.”
Again, these are men living on the street who are not sufficiently woke about the plight of women, presumably women who have homes.
In a piece for The New York Times last year about how Republican men are the only ones who think being a woman is easier than being a man, writer Claire Cain Miller notes that for women, “It’s catcalls on the street, disrespect at work and unbalanced responsibilities at home.”
For men, it’s far more dire. Men naturally die younger, more men are in prison than women, fewer men go to college, far more men commit suicide. No one ever asks men what they plan to do after the baby is born because the answer is always to continue working. On a sinking ship, men are the last ones off. Sexism is a real problem, but it doesn’t trump every other problem.
Being a woman isn’t easy, but that’s because being a human isn’t easy. When compared to men, though, women have it made. We may not run the world but that’s mostly because we don’t want to. Feminism tells women to strive to be just like men. Smart women should respond: “No, thanks.”