Observation: Throughout the summer and fall of a midterm year, if the President of the United States happens to be a Republican and male, we marinate in a stew of high profile “news” stories that emotionally divide males and females. And the opinions expressed about these stories would seem to weigh in on an imagined controversy about which of the two sexes should be…something.

No one actually says “Get rid of all the men” or “Get the women back in the kitchen where they belong.” But, the observations I see people making would be pretty useless, and I think even according to them, if the issue under consideration is anything other than “Get rid of this or that sex once and for all.” It’s really a sad thing. We can’t do without the one or the other, we need both. And I think anyone with a working brain understands this.

Hey…isn’t there a song about this?

Reuben, Reuben I’ve been thinking
What a great world this would be
If the boys were all transported
Far across the Northern sea!

Rachael, Rachel I’ve been thinking
What a glad world this would be
If the girls were all transported
Far across the Northern sea!

I’m seeing a lot of people comparing the Lindsay Clancy trial to the “Cornell 7,” fists-on-hips, glowering with disdain upon men who voiced an opinion about a trial that’s been grinding away all these weeks and months about a mother who confessed to murdering her own children. And are now quiet about this Cornell incident that was thrust into the news only hours and days ago, chock full of observations made by others that contradict each other. Of course that’s wrong. Sensible people are going to be quiet while the dust is still swirling, and you have to wait awhile for the “That’s been debunked” rebuttals to stop flying thick and fast.

Are women oppressed, really? Weighed down by a “patriarchy”? Suffering from some ingrained bias that’s loud about female misdeeds like murdering your own kids, but silent in other situations where males are the transgressors? Hmmm. It’s hard to see any group of people as oppressed, when some among them seek to win arguments simply by scolding, clearly accustomed to their class instantly winning arguments merely by expressing disapproval. Is that what oppressed people do?

I’ll go along with the notion there is something terribly wrong, recently wrong, with men. We’ve been changing what it means to be a man. In times past, you looked around for one when you had to lift something heavy or cross a busy street. Now we have these victim-minded women expressing how they see men as menaces and you know, they do have some underlying evidence to offer that’s not just smoke and mirrors, and that should concern everyone.

We used to have the Boy Scouts of America. Now we don’t.

You can thank progressives and lawyers for that.

As always, if we’re going to argue about this stuff, then let’s do it honestly. This popular visualization of men as threats is not entirely based on experiences. It’s been fed to us. There are people out there, who have been given soapboxes and megaphones, who like the idea that men are monsters. They can’t get enough of it. They work hard to broadcast it when and where they can, based on nothing but their attraction to the idea; they fetishize it.

And they destroy company stocks with it:

These people who are so enamored of the idea that men need a good Internet-scolding to put them back on the straight and narrow, or to “overthrow patriarchy,” or banish all the boys to the Northern Sea, are not all women. What they really are, by and large, is cowardly. “Men are bad” is the one thing you can say in an uncontrolled forum that isn’t likely to pick up any energized dissent, and if it does, you can be assured you’ll win and the dissent will lose. Ankle-biting the male sex is punching down, even though a lot of people like to see it as the opposite. Castigating men is quick, easy, fun, socially uplifting and doesn’t cost anything.

But comparing the Cornell situation to the Clancy trial is lunacy.

I see a lot of resentment expressed toward anyone who advances a defense of men beginning with the three words “Not All Men.” As in, not all men are gang rapists, or protectors of rapists. Supposedly, the Cornell incident is an indictment against that, as some fifty frat boys were aware of what was happening and did nothing to stop it. This is not beyond dispute. Time will tell.

But you know, not all women are on board with this man-scolding, and not all women are defending Lindsay Clancy or trying to get her acquitted.

People would do well to remember that for the last hundred years give or take, this friction between men and women has been engineered. It’s “Astroturf”; looks like a grassroots movement, really isn’t. People aggravate these tensions so they can sell things. It works.

That’s a reliable boilerplate-explanation for when you see things over and over again, that should go away, but don’t. That’s the reason why, usually. You’re seeing it over and over because it works.