Recently, I wrote an article asking why Feminist Barbara Ellen at the prominent British publication The Guardian condones the sexual assault of schoolboys. It wasn’t hyperbole, and it wasn’t meant rhetorically. On the contrary, Ellen laid out a long argument as to why older women (sometimes much older women) who have sex with boys too young to consent should be given a free pass on account of their sex.

Today I bring you another “journalist” whose anti-male attitudes, which are unfortunately quite common among those who claim to be women’s advocates, have been offered a welcome platform at The Guardian: Bryce Covert, who describes herself on Pinterest as a “progressive Feminist.”

Before I address her article, let’s say something that should be readily apparent to everyone: gender equality is not a zero-sum game. Both sexes have issues, and they always have. We can help girls where they are behind in one area while helping boys where they are behind in another. That’s what real equality is. Equality is never something that should be begrudged others. Far from anything progressive or enlightened, such a way of thinking is actually called sexism.

With that being said let’s now take a look at Covert’s article, titled “Enough mansplaining the ‘boy crisis’ – sexism still holds back women at work.” If you’re wondering what mansplaining is, Wikipedia has a decent definition of what it is supposed to be in theory:

Mansplaining is a portmanteau of the words ‘man’ and ‘explaining’ that describes the act of a man speaking to a woman with the assumption that she knows less than he does about the topic being discussed on the basis of her gender…Mansplaining is different from other forms of condescension because mansplaining is rooted in the assumption that, in general, a man is likely to be more knowledgeable than a woman.

At least, that’s what the purveyors of the word – Feminists & Friends – would prefer that you believe it is. One might wonder how advocating educational equity for men and boys is somehow in itself a form of condescension.

It’s also interesting that Covert would choose such a word as “mansplaining” despite the fact that women such as Peg Tyre, Lori Day, Christina Hoff-Sommers, and many more have been writing on male education issues for quite a while now. Are they “mansplaining” too?

One commenter in Covert’s article who was heavily upvoted proposed this alternative definition:

Does his definition sound more accurate? Hundreds of readers apparently think so. Let’s see if you agree as we begin with Covert’s article:

A few weeks ago, David Leonhardt at the Times examined the behavior gap between young boys and girls in school. “By kindergarten, girls are substantially more attentive, better behaved, more sensitive, more persistent, more flexible and more independent than boys,” he wrote. Because the current economy rewards brains over brawn, he warned, these fidgety boys will struggle. And he goes so far as to claim that because of this, “the American economy – for all its troubles (and all of the lingering sexism) – looks to be doing pretty well when you focus on girls.”

A week later, his colleague Sendhil Mullainathan took Leonhardt’s argument a step further. Given that girls outperform boys in school on both behavior and academic standards, he said that, in 50 years, women will earn more than men. In fact, he predicted that women will not only achieve pay equity but actually reverse it, despite the reality that women currently earn on average 77% of what men do and that the gap has barely budged in the last decade.

Ah, the wage gap. Bring up men’s and boys’ education issues around any Feminist and you are inevitably treated with a “yeah, but wage gap” type of argument. Which actually isn’t so much of an argument as it is a deflection and a red herring.

Let’s do some role reversal and see if her way of thinking would hold water. Men are 85% of the homeless (sources here). So why do we even address women’s workplace issues when men are 85% of the homeless? I mean after all, some men suffer “over here,” so why should we care about women anywhere?

Of course, such a line of thinking is ridiculous – not to mention sexist. But that’s the kind of zero-sum mentality Bryce Covert advocates.

There is a substantial debate as to whether women actually earn 77% of what men earn for the same work. Carrie Lukas argued otherwise in an article at the Wall Street Journal. And there is a lot of data confirming that single women have been out-earning men for some time now.

Of course, that is not to say that women do not suffer discrimination anywhere in the workplace. But that’s irrelevant when it comes to asking whether educational equity for men and boys is something we should support. Whether the problems men and women face in this or that area can be reasonably characterized as a “crisis” is beside the point. As a commenter in Covert’s article declared, you don’t have to see men as a group fail to see women as a group succeed. And vice versa.

Continuing:

To his credit, and despite his big leap from classes to career paths, Leonhardt at least remembers to mention one big factor that might – just maybe – keep the matriarchy from creating a permanent male underclass: sexism. Mullainathan, on the other hand, makes nary a mention of how women are often held back not because they perform poorly, because they bear children, or because they may have different character traits, but because they are female.

Again, this has absolutely nothing to do with whether we should support men and boys in school. It is true that a lot more men than women go from the schoolyard to the corporate office. It is also true that far more men than women also go from school to prison – a trend aptly dubbed the school-to-prison pipeline. Men are 93% of those in prison, but that doesn’t stop us from talking about women’s issues. Nor should it.

But that’s how Covert thinks it should work when it comes to putting down men and boys. Here’s my favorite part:

If you wanted to move beyond mansplaining with charts…

So let’s get this straight: advocates for men’s and boys’ education using charts with raw data to say that we need to help men and boys is “mansplaining,” but Covert tossing around numbers about the wage gap to go well beyond advocating women’s issues to advocating against men’s issues isn’t. Why?

It’s quite simple: because women are more important than men. Get with the program, folks!

By the way, if you’d like to join me in using graphs to “mansplain” the idea that men’s and boys’ education matters (and I wholeheartedly invite you to do so), you can find quite a selection of downloadable graphs here.

If you wanted to move beyond mansplaining with charts and look at the key numbers in context, you could start with the research finding that, when women act like men in the workplace – exhibiting ambition, aggression and competitiveness – they are penalized for breaking gender stereotypes.

Both sexes can be penalized when they break gender stereotypes – yes, in the workplace too. But again, how does “women suffering over there” somehow equate to “men and boys suffering over here doesn’t matter”? It doesn’t.

Unless you’re a sexist, of course.

Or you could look at the lawsuit recently filed by a group of women who work as saleswomen for the country’s largest jewelry chain. Of the group, 13 of them allege that at some point they found out they were being paid less than men who not only had the same experience as them, but sometimes with lower qualifications. Others were denied promotions that were given out to less-qualified men. (Oh, and a handful of them experienced some pretty awful sexual harassment to boot.)

An accusation is not a conviction. This seems to be a hard concept for a lot of Feminists to understand, and in more areas than one.

So I hope we see where Covert is coming from. This is her mindset: “I am the alpha victim. Everything is always worse for me (even when it isn’t). And because I am ‘more victim than thou,’ I deserve the entirety of the attention and resources when it comes to redressing issues of concern, and I begrudge anyone even a pittance of the same.”

Now, who really sounds like they are being condescending? Who really thinks that their experiences, issues, and needs are somehow more valid and important for no other reason than because of their sex? Is it really the people Covert is pointing the finger at, or is it Covert herself?

As usual, I don’t need to tell people the answer. They see it for themselves, as you can see in the comments on her article:

I could debunk the rest of Covert’s nonsense, but it’s really not worth our time. It’s just more of the same: “yeah men and boys would be important, but women suffer over here.”

As you can see in the comments section, people are starting to wake up to the toxicity of Feminim. They are starting to embrace something that is truly progressive, truly egalitarian, and truly non-Feminist: the idea that both sexes have issues that are equally deserving of our – and they always have.

People are getting tired of the Oppression Olympics, a game in which society battles for which sex will win the title of “Alpha Victim” – supposedly in the name of gender equality – only to then turn around, use the high ground to trash the other sex, and then kick the ladder out from underneath them.

These aren’t Men’s Human Rights Activists who are opposing the kind of worldview Covert advocates. And they don’t need to be. They are everyday normal folk who see a problem and want a change. The only question for Feminists & Friends to ponder is this: what side of history do you want to go down on?

Oh, and by the way…

We are constantly told that misandric Feminists like Bryce Covert and Barbara Ellen at The Guardian are really just outliers and not part of any institutionalized presence. The fact that they are writing for the mainstream media should make us skeptical of such claims.

Bryce Covert doesn’t just write for The Guardian; according to her website she is also the Economic Policy Editor at Think “Progress,” as well as a board member of the New York Chapter of Women, Action, and Media (WAM!) – the organization that got Facebook – the largest social media giant in the world – to adopt their policies and guidance concerning what kind of speech is acceptable their social media platform.

I have preserved a screenshot for posterity: