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Tobias Wolff's subtle, vivid memoir, This Boy's Life, was converted into a one-track movie centered on the loutish, vicious behavior of Wolff's stepfather, played by Robert De Niro. Fried Green Tomatoes, released in 1991, was a masterpiece of artfully soft-edged propaganda, a regular Birth of a Nation of antimale bias: almost all the male characters were brutes or fools or slobs except for a mute, guardian black giant, who was a sort of eunuch figure, and a sainted brother who died an awful death when young and innocent, and a little boy who has his arm severed by a passing train. In a climactic scene, one horrible man, a whip-mean, pockmarked little sheriff, literally eats another horrible man, the abusive husband, whom the ladies have barbecued and served up in their restaurant as an ingenious method of disposing of the corpse. Interesting fantasy: Render the heroic women crypto-sapphic, mutilate the men, or cook them, and reduce one to unwitting cannibal. Let the one good male in the bunch be a sort of big black watchdog, faithful and sexually neutered, probably the great grandson of Big Sam in Gone With the Wind. White women loved the movie.
And so on. From the gay and/or transvestite side come works that teach the superfluity of heterosexual maleness, indeed the gaucherie of it. These dramas, too, add to the atmosphere of contempt. They are fantasies of disassembled masculinity -- movies, for example, like M. Butterfly or The Crying Game.
The assumption is that men are fair game. Any man insulting is retributive: a payback for the years, the centuries, of male domination and oppression. And for the continuing Awfulness of Men.
In a similar way, of course, the bourgeoisie deserved every bashing it took under Soviet communism: After the revolution, the Zhivago family had to retreat to a corner of their Moscow mansion and submit to the insults of the proletariat who moved in to abuse the former masters and break up the furniture for firewood.
A man who objects to man bashing must be antiwoman, a part of what is called the "War Against Women" -- a war that is of course atrocious because women are . . . helpless? The War Against Men, on the other hand, is what men have coming to them, and high time. When women read about male bashing, the words give me a break ticker-tape across their foreheads.
For most of history, men simply assumed their own importance, indeed their primacy. With masculinity under sustained assault, men have been slow to respond, to state their case, to articulate the rationale for something they regarded as self-evidently good -- their manhood. This is the way that monarchs, bewildered and unshaven, are led out into the palace courtyard and shot, thinking to themselves, "Oh, dear!" and "Maybe the people have a point."
Men should think more about their situation and their behavior. Women should as well. Both men and women have been oppressed by the other sex, in different ways. And both have been getting away with murder.