It's a Man's World...

Something I talk a lot about with my undergrad students is that, contrary to what you might think from watching t.v. or reading most magazines, the white male is not under attack or a disadvantaged minority. In fact, the white male is still doing pretty well in the U.S. if you take income levels, wealth levels, standard of living, corporate power, academic power, political power, and several dozen other measures as proof of doing well.

But one thing the white male is being asked to do is share miniscule portions of his power with other people (mostly white women). Not give up his overwhelming power and advantages in life, mind you, just share a little bit with some other people.

This might not sound like too much to ask of a group of people who have more-or-less dominated much of the world by hook and by crook for the last 500 years or so. But then again, I don't suppose you violently colonize most of the world by learning to share, so maybe it shouldn't be too big of surprise they're not very happy about being asked to share a miniscule portion of what they have (most of which was, incidentally, stolen from these other folks in the first place, but that's another blog for another day).

Yet it remains that the poor white man is being asked to share. And if you saw this year's Super Bowl, you would think the white man has never been asked to do such a horrible thing in his entire existence. Take the above Dodge Charger ad for instance -- whereas car ads used to dance around the idea that you feel like having to give up any of your unearned advantages is horrible, they're now explicitly saying "stick it to the rest of the world with a shiny, noisy, polluting phallic symbol!"

Well, the good folks over at The Sexist made a nice little response ad to the good folks at Dodge, pointing out that maybe women don't have it as good (or men have it as bad) as they implied in their Super Bowl ad. Check it out: