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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

opinion

COLUMN: Equality is a piece of cake

This is an anxious man's world

Imagine you had a cake. It is a delicious cake, and all is well in the world because you get to bake it and eat it too. ?All of it.

Suddenly, all that changes. The people responsible for the flour, milk and eggs from which you will prepare your cake see you having all that frosted fantasticness to yourself. They demand some cake as well, but you don’t want to share. You’ve been enjoying the whole cake all this time. Since when was it not okay to have it all?

Since it became 2015, that’s when. Guess what? You’ve been suckered into another Griffin Leeds analogy: The above is what I imagine it must be like to be a conservative, straight, white, cisgender male in this day and age.

These fellas who won the intersectionality lottery still hold more power than anyone else, but the fact that they’ve lost so much of it over the decades probably feels horrifying to them.

A class of mine was discussing “Mad Men.” A classmate from the back of the room conjectured that the 1960s must have been “the best time to be alive.” My brain became a firework display of activated neurons. Sure, I thought, it was a great time provided you weren’t female, black, Asian, Latino, Middle Eastern, South Asian, Filipino, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, disabled, mentally ill, poor, really young, really old or Socialist.

I turned around to see the mouth that graced the classroom with this observation. My suspicions were confirmed. It was a well-dressed white man sitting in the back of the room.

The 1960s were basically a golden age for this country’s most privileged. And it was around this exact time everyone else was fed up with the straight, white men running everything and demanded better representation and treatment through protest and legal action.

Last week one of our columnists commented on rape culture in a relatively innocuous way. Nevertheless, aggressive naysayers flocked to the online ?comments section of her column like the sexually frustrated to PornHub. As I read these frenzied and haphazard outpourings professing rape culture as myth and women — specifically feminists — as liars, I realized these were simply expressions of fear.

The criticism of rape culture and the accountability of potential rapists is so terrifying to the men who have held tight control over our world because it invalidates the power these men once enjoyed. The idea that mere words are enough to trigger an investigation into sexual misconduct or challenge the authority they thought was God-given and unquestionable is the stuff of an apocalyptic fever dream, depending on your perspective. The grip on something will tighten the instant the hand detects it may be lost.

Consider Mike Huckabee’s recent tasteless comments about Caitlyn Jenner. This icon of the straight, white, male right can’t begin to comprehend a world where something like identifying by a gender different from the one you did before can be so simple. It’s so topsy-turvy to him he turns to dismissive jokes (“I wish that someone told me that when I was in high school that I could have felt like a woman when it came time to take showers in PE”), framing Jenner and her transgender peers as deviant and predatory.

I know a lot about humor. Jokes tend to be less funny when those with less power are the butt of the them. But when you’re part of the oligarchy on top, there’s no one but the people below to brutally ridicule.

Yes, these men used to be in control of everything. There’s no way it wouldn’t feel strange that they have to start sharing with other people. I hope they eventually realize this is the way it should be because it’s what is decent and fair.

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