A Drive-In To Diversity?

How B-movies and exploitation flicks of the 1970s helped the masses embrace multiculturalism. 

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X

The term “multiculturalism” gets thrown around a lot these days. Alike all dogmas and doctrines, its definition is loosely-defined and what it entails, precisely, fluctuates a great deal from person to person. That said, the basic premise of the ideology is that it’s communally beneficial for everybody to respect the racial and cultural background of everybody else.

Now, for all of us Gen Y and Gen Z kids, that kind of thinking is almost second-nature. Well, duh, of course you are supposed to respect the belief systems and customs of people different from you. Why in the world wouldn’t you? Alas, such a mentality is still a fairly new concept in the American consciousness, which really, remained until very recently – and in some parts of the country, still remains – locked into ethnic enclaves.

There has been a lot of conjecture as to how “multiculturalism” became an ingrained, if not wholly expected, aspect of the American condition. Obviously, the demographical changes over the last 50 years almost necessitated it, as did the expansion of international trade. Some have said it is an aftereffect of neo-neo-liberalism – with its detractors accusing it of being a Trojan horse for globalization and hyper-political-correctness – and others declare it the end result of rapid technological breakthroughs (the internet being the most obvious example) flattening the “global village” into a much more interconnected place.

But me? If anything, I’d credit it to something a little less obvious – namely, the proliferation of B-movies in the 1970s.

“You mean to tell me that grindhouse and drive-in movies from the Watergate era represents the birth of the American multiculturalism movement?” you may be asking yourself. I know, it’s an absurd premise. Regardless, the fact remains that few cultural movements had as much influence on the public’s perception of diversity as the rise of the often-foreign and always-independently-produced non-Hollywood cult flicks of the disco decade.

In 1975, there was no Internet. Nor were there any smartphones or streaming services like Netflix. For crying aloud, you didn’t even have cable television or VCRs yet. And since the network programming back then was heavily censored to comply with the FCC’s super-strict guidelines, pretty much the only place you could see (relatively) uncompromised moving images was at the local picture show – and whatever they were showing was pretty much your only unfiltered media window to the outside world.

While the local cineplex was treating you to mainstream stuff like The Towering Inferno and The Aristocats, those who ventured to the local B-venues – namely, the scummier in-town, non-chain-operated movie houses and especially the drive-in theaters – saw something completely different. Through a deluge of cheap-o productions and even cheaper acquired films from overseas, the  non-mainstream-movie-going masses witnessed a mini-cultural revolution, screening hundreds and hundreds of off-the-beaten-path flicks furtively celebrating the pro-diversity, ultra-progressivist ethos that epitomizes current U.S. culture.

With the elimination of the Hays Code in 1968 (a downright puritanical film production protocol that greatly limited what could be shown on screen), the floodgates immediately burst wide open with all sorts of artistic, poignant films with declarative sociopolitical messages that weren’t previously allowed in the medium. Overnight, visually graphic films with mature plotlines like Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider and The Wild Bunch became the new Hollywood standard, while outside-the-mainstream filmmakers now found themselves with free rein to pretty much show as much simulated sex and violence in their films as they’d like.

While this certainly allotted more thoughtful and provocative mainstream films like Last Tango in Paris and A Clockwork Orange, the relaxing of MPAA standards also proved a boon to indie filmmakers domestic and abroad. This was especially true for those who targeted the often content-starved drive-ins and grindhouses, which would screen just about any set of 35mm reels mailed to them.

America’s first flirtations with multiculturalism as a social construct wasn’t in the hallowed halls of academia or even the rapidly liberalizing mainstream Hollywood industrial-complex (which was seeing its gung-ho patriotic propaganda from stars like avowed racist John Wayne displaced by more morally relativistic and culturally critical films like The Deer Hunter and Dog Day Afternoon.) Rather, it was through all of those abstruse and obscure movies that served as the second half of many a drive-in and arthouse double feature, which not only gleamed real insight into the non-white world, but gave many people of color their first shots at financing, producing, directing and distributing their own works.

For most American filmgoers, their first encounter with international cinema wasn’t the critically acclaimed films of Bergman or Fellini. Rather, their introduction to non-American filmmaking came in the form of bloody Italian slasher flicks like Suspiria and The Twitch of the Death Nerve, Japanese kaiju flicks a’la Godzilla and Rodan and Hong Kong chop-socky masterpieces starring Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan – all the kinds of flicks ignored by chain theaters and lovingly embraced by B-movie venues. 

Modern black cinema didn’t begin with the works of Spike Lee, or even the films of Sidney Portier. Rather, the starting point for true African-American filmmaking began with drive-in baiting fare like Shaft, Superfly, Cooley High, Blacula, Ganja & Hess and especially Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song, which was marketed with one of the greatest taglines in the history of the motion picture: “rated X by an all-white jury.”

Think feminist and LGBT cinema started in the mid-1980s? One of the first U.S. movies directed by a woman to get any kind of wide release in the waning days of the Hays Code wasn’t some artsy-fartsy, pro-women’s lib screed, but rather, Stephanie Rothman’s campy, exploitative vampire opus Blood Bath in 1966. Beating her to the punch by two years was acclaimed filmmaker Shirley Clarke, whose 1963 drive-in potboiler The Cool World is now considered not only one of the greatest proto-blaxploitation films ever, but is deemed “culturally and historically significant” by the National Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. And where would American LGBT cinema be without the pioneering efforts of B-movie aficionado John Waters, whose groundbreaking late ‘60s and early ‘70s films Pink Flamingos and Mondo Trasho made their marks not in the bohemian galleries of Manhattan, but the grimy, rundown theaters and dilapidated drive-ins flanking the north Atlantic countryside?

Years before mainstream Hollywood film got on board The Silent Spring-spawned environmentalism bandwagon, low-and-no-budget shlockers like Day of the Triffids, Frogs, Kingdom of the Spiders, Piranha and The Prophecy were already indoctrinating viewers with the virtues of ecological sensitivity. And literally decades before the namesake became an inescapable academic construct, drive-in fare like The Last House on the Left and I Spit On Your Grave were getting down and dirty exploring – and criticizing – America’s “rape culture.”

That’s to say little of the genre classic that furtively explored deep, complex sociopolitical matters that mainstream film at the time didn’t have the guts to address, like rural racism (Night of the Living Dead), post-traumatic stress disorder (Deathdream) and the interwoven nature of cyclical poverty and the drug trade (The Harder They Come.)

Even the films that occupied that intersectional “safe space” between studio-backed populism and low-culture indie sleaze in the grindhouse era had a tendency to promote more progressive, anti-traditionalist values. Perhaps the ‘70s most iconic action movie star was Tom Laughlin's Billy Jack, an anti-racist, make-believe-Native-American “pacifist” who walloped bigots and spread the gospel of new-wave leftism in a series of three surprisingly lucrative films throughout the decade. Even the filmography of Burt Reynolds – the veritable John Galt of 1970s American cinema – carried a proud anti-establishment theme. Years before Black Lives Matter activists were doing it, the great mustachioed one was already criticizing mass incarceration and police brutality in drive-in hits like The Longest Yard and White Lightning.

While the double-dose of Jaws and Star Wars paved the way for mainstream cinema to strike back with less subversive and far more profitable box office rejoinders in the 1980s – which, as David Sirota observed in his book Back To Our Future, sort of swung the cultural gong back towards the side of conservative traditionalism through flicks like First Blood, Red Dawn and Top Gun – the exploitative, yet surreptitiously socially aware offerings of the drive-in age nonetheless reverberated much longer than expected. The influence of 1960s and 1970s grindhouse aesthetics and themes is evident in the work of celebrated contemporary directors like Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Harmony Korine and Takashi Miike, and it’s hard to find any critically acclaimed indie flick nowadays that doesn’t at least obliquely pay homage to one of its spiritual forerunners from 40 years ago (all of the shoutouts to the works of Herschel Gordon Lewis in Juno immediately spring to mind.)

So is it really accurate to say B-movies from the Watergate era are responsible for the proliferation of today’s pervasive, pro-diversity ideologies? On the surface, it may seem to give way too much credit to a medium usually thought of as hardly anything more than trashy entertainment. But again, each film represented a tiny inoculation of a non-majority culture, giving us just a pinch here and there of a different worldview and perspective on the modern American experience. Little by little – be it Carwash, Penitentiary, Caged Heat or The Slumber Party Massacre – we learned just a wee bit more about the cultures outside of our own purview, of the customs and beliefs and lifestyles of those superficially different from us. While mainstream filmgoers were – and to a certain degree, still are – receiving a steady diet of white, hetero and male, the drive-in and grindhouse film faithful were experiencing a greater easel of the human condition and a broader array of philosophical concepts all the way back in the heyday of bell bottoms and burning draft cards.

Sure, it’s absurd to think that today’s multiculturalism ethics – taught in schools, mandated by employers and considered a virtual social code of conduct as sacrosanct as what’s actually printed in our law books – arose from stuff like Infra-Man and Hell Up in Harlem, but without such early intercultural cinematic experiences, just how successful could the first diversity initiatives have been as heralders of today's ubiquitous multicultural Tao? Although sometimes hokey, risqué, perplexing and maybe even offensive, those 35mm introductions to different cultures and different schools of thoughts nonetheless got us thinking outside our own narrowed perspectives and looking at the world, and those around us, through less ethnocentric lenses.

The old B-movies of yesteryear let us see “the other” as something more than alien or exotic, in the process helping us understand different ways of life and thought and illuminating a larger, clearer portrait of humanity as a whole...

... yes, even when the pro-diversity message was sometimes sugar-coated with rubber monsters, kung-fu fights, gallons of fake blood and ample – if not downright gratuitous – nudity.

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The Myth of Multiculturalism?

Forget whether or not “diversity” is a positive or a negative; in today’s highly balkanized U.S. society, is such a concept even remotely plausible anymore?

“Multicultural education demands a school staff that is culturally competent, and to the greatest extent possible racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse. Staff must be multiculturally literate and capable of including and embracing families and communities to create an environment that is supportive of multiple perspectives, experiences, and democracy. Multicultural education requires comprehensive school reform as multicultural education must pervade all aspects of the school community and organization.” 

-- The National Association of Multicultural Education

“To every action, there is always an equal and opposite reaction.”

 -- Newton’s Third Law of Motion

In 2007, Robert Putnam, he of “Bowling Alone” fame, released a report titled “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century.” Within said study, he made the following cheery proclamation: “Increased immigration and diversity are not only inevitable, but over the long run they are also desirable. Ethnic diversity is, on balance, an important social asset, as the history of my own country demonstrates.”

However, in the very next paragraph, Putnam completely obliterates his own thesis: “In the short to medium run, however, immigration and ethnic diversity challenge social solidarity and inhibit social capital.”

The findings from “E Pluribus Unum” are distressing, although in realist terms, not surprising in the slightest. Per Putnam, ethnically diverse communities in the U.S. tend to have less altruism, lower levels of community interaction and greater mistrust -- even among neighbors who do happen to be of the same race, ethnicity or national origin. Although the author says new forms of “cross-cutting,“ all-inclusive social identity can ultimately surmount this temporary[?] community distrust, Putnam -- as do many of the most ardent proponents of “multiculturalism” -- remains suspiciously non-descriptive when it comes to what these one-size-fits-all social identities resemble, let alone the sort of cultural mechanism necessary to ascribe these new “definitions of self.”

The vague doctrine of “multiculturalism,” which is sometimes used interchangeably with the term “diversity,” has become one of those unquestioned de facto crusades of contemporary American existence -- this intangible quest for colorblind equality and justice that, for reasons that I have yet to hear adequately explained, serve as a social necessity.

On paper, of course “multiculturalism” sounds great: everybody accepts everybody for who they are, regardless of their ethnicities, races and cultural histories. A terrific policy, through and through, except for one thing: as a social construct, “multiculturalism” is an impossible ideal to implement, yet alone institutionalize.

The fundamental problem here -- and this is something that, for whatever reason, I never hear anybody discuss -- is this bizarre hypocritical message within the “diversity” ideology. You see, the proponents of multiculturalism say that we best ought to downplay our racial and ethnic differences as part of holistic society, but at the same time, the philosophy demands individuals to respect the distinct cultural differences of others. In essence, we are being told that racial, ethnic and national identities don’t really matter, but at the same time, they should be celebrated as individual qualities. Multiculturalism, in a way, is something of a variation on the old “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” military policy: you can be as culturally distinct as you want at home, but out and about in society, you have to curtail your own ethno-racial identity.

Universities and colleges are easily among the worst offenders here. Not only do professors yammer on and on about the moral righteousness of multiculturalism, many schools actually implement policies based upon the absurdly abstract ideals of diversity -- and depending on who you ask, there are many that allege those multicultural protocols of, ironically, being racist themselves.

Of course, that’s not even addressing the obvious cognitive dissonance going on here: although the institutions praise the gospels of “diversity” -- that is, the amorphousness of the student body -- those same institutions are also home to an endless variety of student organizations that are wholly anchored around the cultural and ethnic differences among the student body. In class, kids are told race and nationality don’t matter, and as soon as the bell sounds, all of the Korean students flock to the Korean Student Association table and the African-American students rendezvous with their chums in the Distinguished Black Gentlemen Club. That multicultural education (or “indoctrination,” if you’re to the right of the political aisle) appears to have failed in its ambitions of creating a student melting pot -- go to any college campus in the U.S., and you’re more likely to encounter a social scene that resembles an egg carton: Hispanic students in one pocket, Caribbean students in the next, and the Jewish students in another.

Really, the problem with “multiculturalism” as a practice is that it offers us something that pretty much all of us consider worse than what we have at the current. For “multiculturalism” to become a 100 percent successful ideological practice, that means complete and utter uniformity AND the elimination of history. Indeed, the only way to get people of all races, nationalities and ethnicities to meld into a singularity is to eradicate thousands of years of rich distinct cultural legacies in favor of some newfangled “shared identity” -- as consumers, or pop-culture aficionados, or tech-heads, or freedom fighters for the hard-to-describe-and-even-harder-to-implement concept of “equality.” Yes, these may indeed be important qualifiers to some, but I hardly think anyone would gladly abandon their sense of self derived from one’s religion or family heritage in favor of a blander identity centered around their mass media proclivities or disposable income expenditures.

The ironically antagonistic multicultural message, as such, has backfired in many ways; instead of fostering a pan-racial social system, it’s actually cemented core ethnic and racial distinctions even further in the United States. As Newton explained above, the scientifically inevitable has transpired: you force kids to worship at the altar of “inclusiveness,” and you wind up with a sizable subset of young folks with an incredible disdain for the entire “multicultural” ideal.

The problem with “diversity,” it appears, is that it’s an uneven attempt to institutionalize a characteristic -- that is, tolerance of intercultural differences (which, I might add, is not the same thing as “understanding,” and most certainly not the same thing as “acceptance.”) The general vagueness of the doctrine is reason alone for most individuals to dismiss it as flighty idealism, but it’s death knell is ultimately the fact that people -- of virtually all walks of life -- DON’T want to form a new “social identity,” and they most certainly don’t want to form said identity at the cost of their own distinct personal heritages.

Is it really that weird or offensive if people of similar backgrounds prefer to hang out with each other? A shared language, or a common history, or even a certain geographical familiarity is sometimes all that’s needed to form a bond with another individual, and is it really that much of a problem if people tend to associate with those that share said commonalities as opposed to those who don’t? If we’re going by the social scientific, “race as construct” ideology, it’s actually a unified, shared cultural narrative that makes up one’s ethnicity, anyway: as such, people really don’t flock with people of the same skin hue as they do people with the same social prologues that they have.

The rub with all of this “multiculturalism” hubbub is that it insinuates that race and ethnicity don’t matter, when, as apparent by the general public’s rejection of “diversity” as a social imperative, race and ethnicity does matter. Nor does multiculturalism shine a light on perhaps the true driver of social relationships in the United States, which is socioeconomic class -- a construct that is far more revealing (and institutionally enforced) in determining one’s social interactions than skin color or native tongue anyway.

At the end of the day, the unstated grievance most people seem to have with the multicultural ideal is that they view it as an imposition on who they are. Instead of reinforcing their sense of selves, the “diversity” measures (which are generally championed by those who live and work in among the most homogenous environments) appear to be goading them into a mushy, uniform identity that pays no homage to things like “history” or “tradition” or “customs.” In short, “multiculturalism” is, in their eyes, an attempt to decimate their actual identities in favor of a blander, less distinct self-conceptualization.

And in a nation of so many dedicated “individualists,” why in the world would anybody want to celebrate an ideology of depersonalization, anyway?

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The Marginalization of the Heterosexual, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Male?

Are the relatively recent cries of oppression just a bunch of bellyaching, or is there actually a granule of truth to the majority’s accusations of persecution?

The future, it appears, doesn’t look to good for Caucasian males.

According to United States Census Bureau projections, the total percentage of white people in the U.S. in 2060 will be just 43 percent -- making white people a plural “minority” for the first time in the country since white folks killed off all the Indians way back when.

According to researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, the birth rates for males in the U.S. have dropped considerably over the last 40 years, with 104.6 male births being born for every 100 girls born in the U.S. in 2001. However, in 1970, the ratio was 105.5-to-100, and among white births? The ratio dropped from 105.9-to-104.7 over the same time frame.

Those 2060 Census projections tell us that the male to female birth ratio will remain locked at 104.7-to-100 for the next 45 or so years, but at the same time, the contemporary ratio of males to females in the U.S., ages 18-to-65 right now is just 98.9 men for every 100 women. And looking at retirement-age statistics, things get even worse: regarding the nation’s current 65-and-older population, there’s just 77 men for every 100 women in the U.S.

From 2010 to 2100, the United Nation’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs predicts that the male-to-female gap will close just marginally, with the ratio predicted to increase from 97-to-100 in 2010 to about 99-to-100 by the dawn of the 22nd century. The wildcard here is the average life expectancy, which from 2010 to 2100, is supposed to jump from 81.3 to 90.8 for females, while expectancies for males are projected to increase from 76.2 to just 85.7. Coupled with a seemingly slight increase in the net production rate (the number of females born per woman is predicted to increase from 1.00 to 1.02), and you have yourselves a fairly unavoidable predicament: whatever shape America’s future takes, it’s one that’s pretty much guaranteed to have less males in it.

On the global level, UN predictions have the United States population swelling to about 400 million or so in 2100. Besides Russia and France, it’s the only country with a sizable Caucasian population to make the list of most populous countries by the time the 22nd century kicks off -- while mass population increases are predicted throughout Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, overall population totals in Europe and the Americas are expected to bottom out, and hard.

No doubt reading the proverbial scrawling on the wall, some of the more extreme-minded white folks out there have begun to pitch fits about this all-but-inevitable demographical switch-up, resulting in the explosion of both men’s rights (or “anti-misandry”) organizations and pseudo white nationalists groups over the course of what seems to be just a few years…heck, maybe even the last few months, for that matter.

On one side of the fence (and on opposite sides of the Atlantic), an expected reaction to the biological decline of whites has been nativist movements in the U.S. (where groups like VDARE declare that Hispanic immigrants and African-Americans of supposed lesser intelligence are destined to burn U.S. culture to the ground) and continental alliances like “Stop the Islamification of Europe”, who are convinced that Caucasian genes are soon to be extinct due to dwindling European birthrates in conjunction with mass Muslim immigration. To be fair, organizations of the like have been fairly visible for quite some time, but it hasn’t been until fairly recently that said organizations have taken up this deathly serious, pseudo-genetic jihad against absolutely unstoppable statistical realities.

Of course, it’s quite difficult to talk about white males without also talking about two of the utmost “qualifiers” for Anglo-Saxon-hood -- those being heterosexuality and Protestantism. Needless to say, quite a number of miffed, hyper-heterosexual, hyper non-Catholic honks have taken to the Internets in protest, accusing the proliferation of the “homosexual” and “atheist” agendas as global endeavors to eradicate “whiteness” from the face of the Earth.

With that in mind, it’s a little hard to see where all of this “persecution” is supposedly taking place: currently, homosexuals across the “gay spectrum” -- meaning, ostensibly, everyone from “barsexual” college girls that occasionally French kiss one another to post-op transsexual Ultimate fighters -- make up less than 4 percent of the national populace. By comparison, an estimated 30 percent of Americans -- including a whopping 42 percent of U.S. males  -- have suffered from alcoholism at some point in their lives, while about 3.5 percent of the U.S. population, a sum tantamount to the nation’s estimated LGBTQI populace, are purported to suffered from some form of PTSD. Despite representing a good 96 percent of the entire national population, however, this hasn’t prevented a great number of extinction-threatened white men from claiming to be victims of some nefarious plan to “homosexualize” American culture.

Even Protestants (*) -- in 2008, representing a plurality of the total American populace -- claim to be objects of persecution in this, the waning days of supposed white male superiority. This, despite projections from the Pew Research Center that assert that the number of Christians in the US is expected to INCREASE from about 250 million right now to an assumed 329 million in 2050 (and making things really interesting? The same forecast predicts China -- yes, that China -- to have the world’s second highest per capita Christian population by the midpoint of the 21st century.)

(*) Why Protestants instead of just Christians, in general? Primarily because larger throngs of non-Caucasians are Catholic rather than Protestant - indeed, outside of every predominantly Anglo-Saxon country on Earth (which is most of them), it’s pretty much a guarantee that if someone’s Christian, they’re going to be one of the Catholic denomination (or some other nationalist orthodoxy which doesn't really resemble Protestantism at all.)

In the face of such a perceived decline in global power (let us not forget that most of the world’s most powerful conglomerates are still owned by white men, and perhaps the white man’s “greatest” cultural imposition -- the English language -- remains the international lingua franca of business and politics) it’s not surprising that so many frightened white folks take refuge in these extremist ideologies. Indeed, this perceived “diminishment” of Caucasian influence has led some -- including Anders Breivik -- to retaliate with extremely deadly force. Alas, while many culturally threatened white men turn to pseudo (and sometimes, just straight-up) racist causes and organizations to quell the pain of their own envisioned downfall, others have instead been drawn to what can only be called a horrifically misguided rejoinder to feminism.

The Men’s Rights Movement isn’t necessarily a new thing -- according to the world’s most reliable source of information, it’s been a fairly sizable cause since at least the 1970s -- but it hasn’t been until recently, as in, the last five or so years, that the cultural spotlight has been focused on the matter.

Now, we're not saying that Jimmy Buffet should contact his lawyers are anything, but...

With organizational monikers like “A Voice For Men,” “The Men’s Rights Association” and “The National Center for Men,” thousands of wannabe Al Bundys have congregated together, establishing what is, in essence, their own chapters of the National Organization of Men Against Amazonian Masterhood. And unlike the protagonists of “Married…with Children,” the supporters of such organizations treat their cause as a serious political matter, tackling hard-hitting issues like domestic abuse laws and paternal guardian rights with the sort of gruff self-righteousness that would surely make Gloria Steinham envious. Well, probably more furious than envious, but whatever.

The MensRights subreddit  -- populated, as of May 2013, with almost 70,000 subscribed readers -- teems with vein-popping declarations of reverse gender discrimination.

“Female Teachers Give Male Pupils Lower Marks, Claims Study” reads one post.

“Norway’s first female admiral was hired illegally,” reads another.

“Lauryn Hill gets 3 months for failing to file taxes. Wesley Snipes got 3 years,” reads yet another.

On a “fact sheet” posted on the same forum, a number of examples of “male discrimination” are listed. Among other tidbits, the frequenters of the site note the following as “proof” that gender inequality is a reality, only tilted against those with penises:

- Circumcising male babies “against their will” is illegal, while female circumcision remains illegal. (Note how the language makes no clear distinction between the forced genital mutilation of women and the common medical practice of removing a day old infant’s foreskin.)

- Female-owned businesses receive free money from the government, simply because they are owned by females (as verified by a Reason Magazine op-ed, far and away the least biased news source in the history of humanity.)

- The majority of homeless are men. (No doubt due to some mysterious, international cabal of men-haters, and having nothing at all to do with the poor, individual decision-making of said homeless individuals.)

Of course, these organizations say nary a damn thing about the pay wage gap, which in case you haven’t heard, favors men by a ludicrous margin. Nor do these organizations bring up the fact that a majority of Fortune 500 companies are owned by males (almost exclusively of the Caucasoid variety, I might add), and that while women represent a clear majority in the total U.S. population, females only account for about 38 percent of the 113th Congress.

Now, do these men’s rights advocates have some basis in their accusation of legal and educational practice discrepancies among the sexes? Well, seeing as how 59 percent of graduate students in America are female, and that mothers receive primary custody anywhere from 66 percent to 88 percent of the time in U.S. divorce hearings, I think it’s stupid to say that they’re not onto something. That said, if there is such a pervasive bias against men in American culture in general, than how come men, despite being a statistical minority, still maintain almost utter control of the nation’s economic and political institutions?

...and I will give you one guess as to which major cable news website this little exchange comes from...

In that, you start seeing the fundamental absurdity of the “discriminated man” theory. Granted, there may be some institutional peculiarities at play, but by and large, social power is still vested, almost exclusively, in the hands of males in the United States. The same can very much be said of Christians, white people and heterosexuals -- together, a quartet of allegedly persecuted majorities that claim to be marginalized by those that are actually marginalized as peoples.

Even in the midst of all those afore-mentioned demographical changes that are almost certain to occur over the next 100 years or so in the States, the status quo doesn’t seem like it will be getting any less status or quo than it is right now. Unless the combined minorities of America form some sort of militantly anti-whitey voting bloc between now and 2050, it seems very unlikely that Caucasian Americans will lose any of their grip on national economic and political power over the 21st century. While there may be less men than women, and more non-whites than there used to, it’s not really a sure bet that this demographical change will effectively result in more women in “minority” populations obtaining political or cultural power. In fact, through the global expansion of Christianity and English, it’s quite likely that Anglo-Saxon Protestants could actually increase their worldwide, geopolitical clout over the next decade: whatever perceived cultural power the supposedly oppressed white man may lose in a hypothetical “Eurabia” or “Aztlan,” the WASP would almost certainly make up for with a heightened cultural presence in Asia and, irony of ironies, central-Africa.

Realistically, outside of a few, comparatively minor legal policies and institutional practices (which in no way, shape or form seem to have any profound influence on the gender dynamics of social power in the U.S.), there can hardly be considered a systemic oppression of males in America, at all. Rather, most of the cries of “male persecution” are nothing more than the piping of radicalized losers, who attempt to mask their own social ineptitude under ridiculous, synthetic causes such as “involuntary celibacy” or “reverse racism.”

There’s something to be said of a peoples that can be a geographical, economic and social majority -- with utmost control of a nation’s cultural institutions, to boot -- and still claim to be a marginalized population.

And whatever that “something to be said” is? I assure you…it’s probably not worth wasting your time to hear.

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