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In her elegant, feminist cri de coeur, A Room of One's Own, written in 1928, Virginia Woolf wondered why men, who have so much power in the world, always seem to be so angry. She did not get it that in addition to men's natural male-beastly competitiveness, they get irritated about being such a disposable class of human beings in the world. If women are the victims, why is it the men who wind up dead? Not so long before Woolf wrote, for example, World War I destroyed an entire generation of European men on the battlefield -- 8.5 million of them. Woolf and her sisters did not fight in that war. Similarly, the names of more than 58,000 men are on the wall of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington -- and those of eight women.
Feminism's stated goal of real equality between the sexes will begin to be credible when females are required to register for the draft at 18, as males are, when 50% of combat units must be women -- in short, when women are paying 50% of the real price, not only in war but also in society's other sacrificial exercises.
Why -- aside from the fact that they are jerks -- do men get angry? Does it have something to do with the fact that they die seven years earlier than women do, with rates of heart disease, ulcers, suicide, alcoholism and other stress diseases considerably higher than those of women? Are they angry because something in their conditioned or instinctive social roles as men revs them up in order to expose them to the worst dangers, like dying in war, like being killed in the line of duty as policemen and fire fighters, or otherwise doing the dirty, dangerous work; 93% of people killed on the job are men. The more dangerous the job, the greater the percentage of men who are doing it. Federal, state and local governments spend hundreds of millions of dollars protecting women workers from sexual harassment, while millions of men are still left substantially unprotected from premature death by industrial hazard.
Actually, the real reason men get angry is not the danger or premature death. It is mostly because they feel unappreciated. Men are fairly simple creatures.
Warren Farrell has made men's case admirably in a book called The Myth of Male Power. Farrell for some years was the country's leading male feminist advocate. But he came gradually to the conviction that the feminist take on men left out an important part of the story: the real powerlessness of most men. In any case: "Feminism suggested that God might be a 'she,' but not that the devil might also be a 'she.' Feminism articulated the shadow side of men and the light side of women. It neglected the shadow side of women and the light side of men."
The quarrel lies not with feminism per se, but with feminism incompletely or dishonestly or opportunistically pursued. Women must do their share, not just take the share they find attractive. Equality must be equality in all things, not just in the professional opportunities that white middle- and upper- middle-class women wish to exploit. Equality is a matter of real responsibility and risk, of accepting the liabilities as well as claiming the assets.