If you wanted this so bad, why didn’t you do something about it?
You asked for it, so here it is. After years of complaints, “Craccum is too girly”, “where are the sports”, “Stop wasting my student levy on pink ink”, and at least one hospitalisation stemming from a healthy expression of rage; we’ve caved to the testy masses. Masculinity issue is here to soothe you, like the mother you’re constantly looking for in your relationships!
While masculinity issue will last but one short week, men’s issues won’t be going anywhere so soon. Thankfully as anyone who’s ever spoken to a man can attest, we have a solution for everything. To make sure we get it right we’ve kicked the girls out, and got the other white man on the team to help crack this nut. He’s here to bring a little extra to the team— though he’s not sure that it’s masculinity per se.
To be fair, it’s not just you who’ve noticed some disparity. When I was hired as co-editor my then boss told me how exciting it was to have some diversity on the Craccum team—some white male diversity. The modern media is really missing that distinctive voice that comes from benefiting from patriarchal privilege.
But is it really a privilege? Are men not just as disadvantaged as everyone else? Sure, we can walk around at night, reject someone without fear, get paid more, avoid the vast majority of sexual harassment, be afforded more respect, and generally be celebrated for the bare minimum sometimes. Of course, there are other factors at play here, how you present and identify tend to alter it.
There’s this increasingly prevalent idea that being a man is a disadvantage. There’s an entire genre of podcast where men just…complain. It’s healthy to get it all out there, but on the other hand, are any of us actually doing anything? For all the talk about child custody, male friendship, and the chronic lack of the boyz in Craccum, where is the action?
Or are we all just a little bit afraid that you’ll turn over all the problems, all the issues, and see that the real problem isn’t any one or us. Barring some particularly monstrous examples, there are a spectrum of things we have normalised that are just not ideal. It’s the system, the society billions of dead people have built for us, dropped on our head.
Perhaps it is time to stop shouting from the couch and actually take charge of the situation, that’s what men are supposed to do right? Write that sports column, submit some non-pink art, talk to your friends about more than just the new Nolan film. But that does sound like a lot of work, so why dont you dig into some nice man issue content to start with?
Ask yourself Are YOU a High Value Man? Feeling a bit down after that? Flip over to I can’t help it. I love how men love and see that maybe there’s a little good in it all. A love letter to Masculinity lies in between the Arts pages, A Tango with Gender itself in features; and of course, if you just want to get away from it all, the conclusion of the Law School investigation is in the News.
Read on with regards,
The boyz.