Predawn light bleeds through your windows. You do your hair carefully for the day—you’ve noticed the guys at work who use nice products are taken more seriously [1]. You settle for hair gel and cologne: $20 total, $4 more than the women’s versions. Masculinity apparently costs extra [2].
Winter air bites through your pocketless slacks [3] as you head to the bus. It’s very early; the only runners out are women [4]. When one jogs past, you tense, clutching your belongings more tightly.
The bus means relief. The female driver weaves through traffic, past giant trucks and construction crews staffed completely by women. You imagine a world where men do these jobs, then dismiss it. You don’t want to wake at 5 a.m. for back-breaking labor. Still, it’s unnerving, walking alone by all those women. Last month one catcalled you, describing what she wanted to do to your body. That made you uncomfortable, especially when she followed you down the block.
Work is fine. You’ve discovered that flirting with your all-female bosses makes them like you more [5]. This tactic feels manipulative to you, but your guilt dissipates when the boss relegates you to reception—again!—while taking the female intern on a sales call. The boss thanks you for being a “team player” and “the very best” at reception.
You answer phones for hours until your girlfriend texts. Your university’s dance team—its best-funded, most-watched program—has qualified for the Pop-Tart Dance-Off. You don’t care for dance, but you’ve been to every competition. It’s what girls like, after all, and campus social life chiefly revolves around girls’ entertainment interests. Skipping dance events would make you a social dud.
You head to campus later. The university is mostly male [6], but your business program is overwhelmingly female [7]. It feels isolating sometimes. And again, it makes dating challenging. Most girls want guys who will be stay-at-home-dads [8]. Luckily, your girlfriend seems flexible, but you secretly worry she expects you to eventually relent to the default—to shelve your ambition to concentrate solely on family, while she gets to do both [9].
You try to forget these frustrating thoughts when your friend picks you up from campus. Time for guys’ night—football.
Martinelli’s sparkling cider flows freely tonight, meaning your friends lose their inhibitions. John, to no one’s surprise, brings up men’s rights. He’s political, philosophical, and passionate—in short, he has a somewhat feminine personality. “High-maintenance and undateable,” a girl once told you, while saying John shouldn’t talk so much about men’s rights. “Men can vote, and the wage gap is almost closed [10]. What’s left to work on?”
Tonight, he talks about President Dawn Trump, now in her second term. Some say she’s a champion of free speech [11]. You mostly remember when she called a male reporter a toothpick [12]. And when she was convicted for sexually assaulting a male author [13]. And when she lied about her friendship with a notorious abuser of young boys [14]. That abuser was female, as were many of her associates, some of the world’s leaders [15]—abusing only boys, of course, because men are disproportionately the targets of sexual assault, with 1 in 5 men raped at least once to 1 in 71 women [16].
It’s hard to know if the rumors are true about those female politicians. While you tend to trust the dozens of male voices against them [17], most people trust the politicians; most people take women’s voices over men’s, though false rape allegations are extremely rare [18].
John finishes talking, but your mind is ruminating over threads where he left off, knotting them together. Why can’t men be in charge for once in a mostly male country [19]? Why are men still characterized as over-emotional and incompetent [20] when women are the ones turning politics into wars, markets into crashes?
And would you even notice, or care, what these women were doing to men—if you were a girl?
Your girlfriend picks you up at the night’s end. When she asks you how your day was you just say it was good.
On the tip of your tongue is a piece of all this. But you’re unsure what she’d say if you let on how your soul was breaking under the pressure of living as a man in a world made for women. If your girlfriend would still think you were nonchalant, masculine, if you told her it felt like you lived in an alternate universe, where women ruled everything, made up the majority of professors and businesspeople and politicians [21], where men were paid less and raped and murdered more [22].
It seems to you there must be another universe out there where men, not women, are in charge. And maybe they would do a better job—behave less cruelly towards women.
But surely there’s a third universe out there, where things are equal.
Where women represent themselves; men go to jail for sexual assault; neither fathers nor mothers are professionally held back by familial pursuits; men and women are paid equally; and men don’t catcall little girls. In that fantastical place, men open up to one another and solve their own loneliness epidemic [23]; women aren’t afraid to walk alone in the dark; husbands do chores without wives instructing them [24].
Surely there’s a universe where men and women treat one another like equals. Like, actually.
But it surely isn’t this one.
