More and more you’ll see political pundits dip their toes into the treacherous waters of ‘men and boys advocacy’; with each wrestling words to give a quippy answer to ‘why don’t we care about men’? It’s a good question. Why, when they make up the majority of the homeless, the addicted, incarcerated, homicide victims, early deaths, and suicides; do we care so little about men and boys lives? Why do we so often step over, walk past, or look though men’s pain? And why are we so repulsed by the concept of ‘mens issues’? Often the answer pundits trot out, is the trope of ‘women’s greater reproductive value’, typically followed by a strange prehistoric analogy involving “tribes” going to war, quite literally borrowed from an era tens of thousands of years ago. Okay cool. But the year is 2024. And guess what; the spear-chucking, mud-hut-living, fireside-dancing, proto-human way of life, is long gone… So I ask – if you are a proponent of this ‘men in tribes’ meme, that aims to justify male disposability as “rightly so”, then why end there? Why not subscribe wholesale to the primitive cave man life style? I’m serious. Watching political commentators buy into the ‘men in tribes’ world view, quite literally tweeting it out from an iPhone, sat in their cushty centrally heated home, feet up, and watching TV, is a level of peak irony I’ve rarely experienced. So ask yourself – Are you living in a tribe? Are you flinging shit across your living room? Are you fighting bears, wolves, and wild boar with primitive weapons? No. Neither am I. So put the flat white down, look around you, and forgo your super-cool ‘tribes’ analogy. Let’s do better. We’re not living in caves anymore. What do you think? ~ Images by Getty

2024-02-16