I read Susan Faludi's prescient book "Stiffed," on vacation and although it was published in 2000, it's worth a second look now. One of the themes that emerges over and over is that changes in the economic landscape, the ones that put labor on the defensive, that reduced manufacturing, changes that made a lot of working class men feel superfluous, are inevitably blamed not on capitalism but on feminism.
Couple that with the current difficulty of working class men finding mates in an environment that favors men with better economic prospects ( ie college-educated) and you have a recipe for backlash of the cruelest sort. Never underestimate the fragility of mens' ego as a primary cause for this revanchism. The inability of working class men to "take care" of their family financially is a humiliation they will make someone pay for.
I read Susan Faludi's prescient book "Stiffed," on vacation and although it was published in 2000, it's worth a second look now. One of the themes that emerges over and over is that changes in the economic landscape, the ones that put labor on the defensive, that reduced manufacturing, changes that made a lot of working class men feel superfluous, are inevitably blamed not on capitalism but on feminism.
Couple that with the current difficulty of working class men finding mates in an environment that favors men with better economic prospects ( ie college-educated) and you have a recipe for backlash of the cruelest sort. Never underestimate the fragility of mens' ego as a primary cause for this revanchism. The inability of working class men to "take care" of their family financially is a humiliation they will make someone pay for.