Confidential Memo
To: All Men
Re: Operation “Feminist Movementâ€Â
Men, our long twilight struggle with the opposite sex is over. Our victory is total.
Can you believe the way things used to be? Remember when our fathers and grandfathers would drag themselves to mind-numbing jobs every day, having the sole responsibility for the feeding, clothing, and housing of their entire family?
And things were no easier before marriage, when men’s quest for sexual satisfaction was all too often hampered by the widespread moral code which taught women not to give out the “milk†for “free.â€Â
Well, that state of affairs just wouldn’t do. So we men came together and did what we do best  formulate and implement a plan. First step, design the perfect world, the perfect male world. We decided such a world would consist of two things: less responsibility and more  and no-strings  sex.
Brothers, have we succeeded.
The amazing thing, really, is how easy it was, how fast the old world of obligation and responsibility dissolved. The first, crucial step, of course, was convincing women that they had it bad, that our jobs were “intellectually stimulating†and not the soul-crushing monotony that they in fact were.
It worked, and soon women were clamoring to join us on the job. It seems never to have occurred to them that we could have so easily prevented them from doing so  and yet we didn’t. We sidestepped without much fuss, actually, which had to have constituted the largest voluntary abdication of power in history. This alone should have tipped them off that something was amiss.
Right away, women at work began to solve our problems. First, men and women interacting more frequently inevitably led to hanky-panky, which led to the breakup of families, which led to less responsibility for us.
But that was only a start. To really fix things, we had to root out that old bourgeoisie mentality that had in previous times kept girls frustratingly modest and chaste. And what better way to do that than to convince women that the most reckless elements of our sexuality  the promiscuity  were in fact the correct behaviors, which had to be imitated in order for them to be “liberated�
Amazingly, they bought that, too.
Unfortunately, our sister selves are less suited to such behavior, which can cause painful and lasting tears in the feminine soul. But no matter  we were also able to convince them that there was no such thing as a “feminine†soul, any more than there is a “masculine†soul, and that both sexes are equally suited to all things.
(Many of you said that women would never buy this, that the accumulated history of our species speaks to the deep and abiding difference between the sexes, a difference which has benefited both sides from time immemorial. But I was sanguine about our ruse  have I not been vindicated?)
Men, “Operation Feminist Movement†has worked, and more swiftly and completely than many of you thought possible. Mere decades ago, we spent endless hours and countless dollars before marriage courting and wooing; after marriage, we shouldered the entire financial burden for our families.
Now, after marriage, women can be expected to pay for half of everything, which is to the good, because video games are expensive. But, as more and more of you are discovering, why bother with marriage at all anymore? You can stay up all night, hang with your buds all the time, secure in the knowledge that on any given night you can be sure to find a willing woman, a woman who has likely been taught, conditioned even (by other women!) to expect nothing from you in return  and that this is a good thing.
Is it any wonder that, according to recent research, women these days are “becoming less happy relative to men†across all age, income, and marital levels? No, this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, although the unhappiness of the modern woman seems to be taking many of them by surprise. After all, don’t they “have it all�
No  it is men who now have it all.
Congratulations, brothers. Our day is at last at hand, a day of no responsibility and easy mating access as far as the eye can see. Best of all, women are convinced that they have done this themselves, and for their own good.
Sure, there are downsides. Civilization has now entered into free fall; those masterpieces of art and science and literature, for which men have been almost exclusively responsible, have ceased to issue forth from our minds and hands  and is it any wonder? Such pyrotechnics are no longer necessary to impress women, which, really, was the only reason we bothered. High culture seems a small price to pay, though, for the loosening of morals and duties which has brought our present Sex and the City-fueled bounty.
So sit back, men, and enjoy the slide. It’s Miller time.
Matt Patterson is a National Review Institute Washington fellow and the author of “Union of Hearts: The Abraham Lincoln & Ann Rutledge Story”. His email is mpatterson.column@gmail.com.
