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Unconventional Wisdom | A bookshelf of wounded manhood

If you haven't heard, war has been declared on men.

Guys are being discriminated against and marginalized by evil feminists and their liberal sympathizers.

If you're not careful, she-devils will abscond with your manhood, your money and your children, leaving you hollow and bereft.

Women are taking over everything, man.

I know all this stuff because I've been perusing the Witches Are Sapping Our Juices section at the bookstore.

The latest tome in the growing library of misogyny is the fifth revision of Richard Doyle's Save the Males (Poor Richard's Press), a follow-up to his 1976 classic The Rape of the Male.

"The male of the species is under increasing attack - legally, politically, economically and culturally," says Doyle, founder of the much-needed Men's Defense Association. "Restoration of men's rights is the best route back to a civilized society."

Other fear-mongering books echo Doyle. Their titles say it all: The War Against Men, by Richard Hise (Elderberry Press, 2004); The Rantings of a Single Male: Losing Patience With Feminism, Political Correctness . . . and Basically Everything, by Thomas Ellis (Rannenberg Publishing, 2005); Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture, by Paul Nathanson (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006).

The boys are restless and their message is simple: Women don't just want equality. They want it all.

Once-proud American males are being made into demonized, second-class citizens, conservative writer Paul Craig Roberts says.

That old social pendulum has swung too far in the wrong direction, and manliness is being eradicated. We live in a . . . gulp . . . femin-ocracy.   

Well, there might be a hole or two in the boys' arguments.

Nearly all Fortune 500 companies are run by men. Most partners in big-time law firms are male, as are the majority of surgeons, publishers, pilots, scientists, movie-studio executives and senators. And women still make less money than men.

The model for success in this country is male in all aspects: To get ahead, one must be competitive, autonomous, ruthless, egoistic.

To be nurturing, compassionate, open to other points of view - that is, to be female - is to be weak.

Feminism is not stealing children from men during divorce, as many of these books contend. Feminism helped bring about gender-neutral laws, which led to joint custody of children being considered the best option in today's family courts.

Thirty years of equal-rights talk has gotten the women haters nostalgic for the old days, when our moms vacuumed like demons, baked cookies and lost their minds alone with the kids all day.

There's no going back, fellas. Embrace the horror. Gender equality isn't even close to fruition. Women are going to be bugging you a little while longer.


Contact columnist Alfred Lubrano at 856-779-3919 or alubrano@phillynews.com.
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