A corrosive brand of advocacy percolates across social media; one that willingly, and even joyfully, looks the other way as men and boys sink further into the silent quagmire of inequality. “Men ran the world for thousands of years!” They’ll say. Or, “men had their go, it’s women’s turn now!”, being another stick bashed over men’s heads. “Big deal! You’ve been in control for millennia!” Sneers the brave social justice warrior to the 12 year old boy. A boy child, who has never known such a time, or experienced such an advantage; who today, in reality, is slowly falling behind, and dropping out of school at record-breaking numbers. It’s a funny old world. People talk to me like I am an omnipotent, thousand-year-old warlord, the king of the world, and a multi-billionaire Fortune500 CEO. That I, personally, as a man; write all the laws, started all the wars, rule the world, and have done since time began. And so the idea that I might face systemic failings too; is a joke, worse, an insult, and an unwelcome distraction, from the true, authentic issues faced by women. This isn’t equality. “Advocacy of Revenge”, I call it. One that betrays two equally-bigoted views; the first one punishing men of today, for times they never knew; and the second, one that piggybacks off the oppression of other women, who lived generations ago, as if the proponent of such a cartoonish worldview were there too, and personally harmed themselves. “We’ve been oppressed for thousands of years!” “We?” You’re thirty, you write a blog, live in Hackney, and haven’t spent a single day of your life “oppressed”. You were not ‘there’ at all. And nor was I. So no – There is no pendulum to be swung. There is no “catching up exercise”, or “reverse sexism”. There is no making permissible, the pain and struggle of men and boys of today, because their great-great-great-grandad had it easy. Such worldviews are a race to the bottom, that is beleaguered by increasingly shitty remakes, of history’s greatest failures. And nobody wants that sequel. So – are you an advocate of equality, or an advocate of revenge?

2025-07-02