Estimated reading time: 18 minutes
Dr. NerdLove,
I’ve recently been set off by a new T-shirt being sold at Target that literally says “Dump Him.”
Imagine if Target also sold a shirt that said “Dump Her.” There would be outrage. Articles. Think pieces. Corporate apologies. Probably a recall within a week.
But “Dump Him” is fine. It’s funny. It’s empowering. It’s a joke we’re all expected to laugh at.
And that’s kind of the problem.
This isn’t about one shirt. It’s about how casually and openly society accepts contempt for men in ways that would be unthinkable if the genders were reversed. Men are the only group where you can publicly mock, belittle, or generalize them and still be considered progressive, enlightened, or even morally superior.
We see it everywhere: “Men are trash.” “I hate men.”“Dump him.” Dating advice that is built on the assumption that men are defective until proven otherwise. There was literally an article from a couple of months ago that asked if having a boyfriend is embarrassing! No wonder the Human race’s birthrates are declining. It’s like Children of Men voluntarily…
And before the obvious rebuttal: yes, men have historically held power. Yes, misogyny exists and is real. But acknowledging those truths doesn’t magically make blanket hostility toward men healthy, productive, or fair, especially for young men who are growing up after many of the legal and cultural battles have already been fought. Why do I have to suffer for shit that other humans did before I was born?
What’s frustrating is that this kind of rhetoric doesn’t help women either. It doesn’t create better relationships, more trust, or healthier dating dynamics. Instead, it just normalizes resentment as humor and teaches men that they should expect suspicion, contempt, or dismissal as a baseline, and thus creates more bitterness between the sexes. You keep telling people (such as myself in previous letters I’ve written to you) that people need to touch grass. Well, all the people on the metaphorical grass don’t want to even be talked to in the first place anymore, thanks to “jokes” like these, and when they do, they are already judging.
Then we turn around and ask:
Why are men withdrawing from dating?
Why are so many young men bitter, defensive, or checked out?
Why do men feel like they’re constantly auditioning for basic human decency?
When you grow up seeing your gender treated as a punchline or worse, as a problem to be managed, you internalize that. You either shut down, lash out, or become overly self-policing to avoid being labeled “one of the bad ones.” How do you think this will affect young boys between 8-13, seeing stuff like this?
I’m not asking for men to be coddled. I’m asking why we’ve decided that equality somehow includes the right to publicly sneer at half the population without pushback. Why is the cultural response to male loneliness, confusion, or frustration is so often “work harder” and be quiet instead of “let’s examine what we’re doing.” It’s like women still just want Gary Cooper (a Gary Cooper that has a broccoli haircut and drinks matcha).
At what point does “punching up” just become punching? And how do we course-correct without immediately being accused of defending sexism simply for wanting basic fairness?
What About The Men?
Well, it’s been a while since someone’s tried to launder men’s rights talking points on here. I guess we were due for a letter like this one.
But man, I wish there was some actual originality or effort put into it. Or even an actual problem.
But hey, I’ve got deadlines to meet, word count to hit, and sometimes the question bucket gets a little low. So, y’know, send in your dating advice questions, folks, because the dead horse beatings will continue until question quality improves.
OK, so here’s how this is gonna go, my guy. We’re gonna break things down so you realize just how absurd this argument is, point out all the places that are rather clearly bullshit, which ones are attempts at rhetorical tricks, answer some of the questions you clearly didn’t intend to be answered, and then tell you what the real solution is.
Because, quite frankly, if you’re honestly and sincerely triggered by a t-shirt that’s a throw-back to a shirt Britney Spears wore more than twenty years ago after breaking up with Justin Timberlake, and has been a staple of Millennial women’s Halloween costumes ever since, in a section of Target that you don’t shop in or visit, and are borrowing talking points from self-proclaimed Men’s Rights Grifter Advocate Lisa Britton, then you have too few problems in your life and you should really go find a real issue to work on.
Which is to say: I don’t believe this actually bothers you. Sorry. I don’t. You’re looking for an axe to grind and you didn’t even find your own; you had to borrow someone else’s. Multiple somebodies, judging by the bouillabaisse of bullshit you’re making.
Leaving aside that “Tu Quoque” is a hackneyed fallacy, I don’t have to imagine if Target sold “Dump Her” shirts, because Target and many, many other retailers have sold “Game Over” shirts showing cutesy stick-figures of wedding toppers where the man is either in hand-cuffs or wearing a ball and chain or in one memorable case, pointing a gun to his head for decades. Or variations of “I Support Single Mothers”, with images of pole-dancing women. Also, multiple versions of shirts showing guys shoving people aside for “sexier” women, shirts reading things like “FBI: Female Body Inspector”,” “If you Can Read This, The Bitch Fell Off”, “As Long As You’re Here, How About A Blowjob?” and for those of us who grew up in the 90s, a seemingly infinite number of iterations on “Big Johnson” jokes.
And that’s without getting into, say, advertising that makes jokes about men who eat salads, who drink diet soda, advocating blowing smoke into women’s faces to make them fall in love with you, treating women like possessions or literal prizes and telling you that a gun is a substitute for your penis, especially when you’re feeling emasculated by a t-shirt that has been a staple of millennial women’s Halloween costumes for close to two decades.
Or the various posts online about how hard it is to be a man because you have to be a jacked millionaire in order to date someone who has a “body count” of 15, with the additional context that this is the work you have to do to get a “used” woman and the implication that a woman with even fewer past partners (or an actual virgin) is a feat of Homeric legend and not something that can be done by anyone other than a demigod. Or the far-too-many-to-count videos about why women don’t know their place, why it’s unfair that some men just don’t “get” to have children or why women have it so much easier in dating.
The problem here is that you’re not actually arguing with facts to back yourself up. The argument that “this is the only group that can be made fun of with impunity” falls rather short when fatphobia not only still exists but is actively encouraged culturally and on social media, as do the poor and unhoused, when “edgy” comedians get Netflix specials specifically to make fun of anyone who isn’t straight, cisgendered and sufficiently “manly”, the richest man in the world uses his social media platform to mock queer people, people of color and immigrants, and the US government is making fun of “triggered libs”, using stereotypes that were stale and outdated ten years ago. Or did you miss the President, Vice-President and various cabinet members talking about the plague of “wine moms” at protests?
I would even point out that there are multiple high-profile podcasts and YouTube channels that exist specifically for angry young men to watch the hosts insult women to their faces and offer their listeners the opportunity to pay money for the privilege of having their insults read, either by the host or text-to-speech apps, before then putting said women on scales in order to compare their weight to their supposed rating on a 1-to-10 scale.
So, y’know, apparently your issue is mostly not knowing where to turn to find sufficiently anti-female, anti-queer and anti-woke material to counteract the supposed misandry, which sounds like a skill issue to me.
But I mean, what’re a few bad-faith arguments between friends?
See, the problem here is that you’re mouthing arguments without actually understanding them, pulling out one-liners that you think win the argument for you with neither thought nor context behind them and otherwise letting other people’s pre-digested and pre-chewed rhetoric do the talking for you.
After all, to say that the “cultural battles have been fought” would imply that said battles aren’t still going on, which is quite the belly laugh considering that the Supreme Court rolled back abortion rights in 2022, states implemented laws that violate people’s rights to privacy regarding sex and birth control, tried to revive the Comstock Act, attempted to restrict women’s right to travel and have imprisoned women for having miscarriages, just to name a few.
And this is before we get into laws regarding drag shows, trans people trying to exist, and multiple pundits, influencers, religious leaders, elected politicians and cabinet members not only rolling back women’s rights to serve in the military, but also to do things like vote, work outside the home or have a purpose outside of raising children. To be honest, I could just point you to the many places where you could read about The Heritage Foundations “Project 2025”, which lays out these goals in great detail.
See, the little rhetorical trick of saying “men held (past tense) the power” implies that this is no longer the case. But seeing as in 2023, only 32% of state representatives were women, 25% of US senators were women, 29% of the House of Representatives, and exactly one (1) woman who’s ever served as Vice-President and 0 as President, it doesn’t seem that women have overtaken the levers of power yet. Similarly, only 20% of Fortune 500 CEOs were women, and 30.4% serve on boards of said Fortune 500 companies and approximately 33% served as president of US colleges and universities. While a massive improvement over the arc of history, that still would seem to bely the idea that women now have the power – politically, socially or economically.
Now, I could answer the question of “why should I suffer for the shit other humans (again, nice rhetorical trick here) did before I was born” by talking about how men benefit from systems set up and still in place (which, incidentally, the current administration would call “DEI” and thus “illegal”, which is the reason why they’ve pressured colleges, universities and private businesses from pursuing diversity initiatives that would bring more equity between the genders). But instead, I will simply point out that you’re using the past tense, as though the battles have already been won and done.
Except the problem with saying that these were all battles of the past would imply that it’s the long-ago days before our enlightened era would be the fact that women didn’t have the right to things like having bank accounts and credit cards in their name until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed in 1974, a year which is still within living memory of your parents and grandparents. Or that it was legal to fire women for getting pregnant until the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 and additional laws – including the Family and Medical Leave Act (passed in 1996) and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (passed in 2023) – were found to be necessary to close loopholes that employers were exploiting to discriminate against any employees who got pregnant or chose to start a family.
Oh and spousal rape wasn’t illegal in all 50 states until 1993, and even then, not treated the same as non-marital rape until 2019 in some states, and many states – including Nevada, Mississippi and Idaho still won’t call it rape if it doesn’t involve “forcible penetration”.
So, y’know. It’s still an on-going problem, not something that happened a long time ago, in a far-away land. Which is precisely the problem with your “but what if things were reversed” argument. In a world where we had achieved true equity and parity between the sexes, then yes, it would be equally bad. Except we haven’t, and so these comparisons have to be made in the context of the world as it actually is. And in this world, shit ain’t equal.
Especially when on one side, you have hurt feelings and the other, you have people looking at how to rescind the 19th Amendment.
Now, claiming that this sort of humor “doesn’t help women” is kinda funny, seeing as how “helping” isn’t the point. It’s venting frustrations that women feel, almost always to other women and people with similar experiences, and because the alternative is screaming.
So unless you want to try to insist that these aren’t things women actually feel or deal with (and if you do, please give me ample time to get to a safe distance first), you’re kinda missing the point of the humor in the first place. Unless you genuinely think that those aforementioned “Game Over” t-shirts and dudes paying literally thousands of dollars to send their questions into “Whatever” are meant to help men.
The great irony of it all is that you could, in fact, make an argument about how the state of the world for men is bad. Because it is! It’s rather horrible for men, especially young men growing up right now. Except the reason why it’s horrible for young men is entirely due to other men – the men who push, promote and encourage toxic, restrictive hegemonic notions of what it means to be a man and how men are supposed to behave.
Why does (supposed) dating advice presume men are “deficient until proven otherwise”? Well, because men have been taught, directly and indirectly, that emotional intelligence is for pussies (a term I use deliberately, here), that sex enhances men but degrades women, that men can’t be friends with women because sex gets in the way, but also can’t be close friends with other men because that’s gay. That men have no value outside of violence or money, that social status is dependent on your capacity for both and that the role of women is to be the supporting character in a man’s story. That admitting to having problems or experiencing emotions like anxiety, fear or sadness makes you weak, that liking women makes you a “simp” and nobody actually respects women, they just say so to get laid and/or are gay.
What do I think the effects of growing up feeling like your identity is a punchline? I dunno my dude, I’m a straight, cisgendered white man; the entirety of my existence has been one of nigh-constant unearned praise and validation and often old-fashioned stolen valor. You should probably be asking people of color (particularly black men), queer people (especially queer men and trans people) and women in general what it’s like instead.
Or you could actually pay attention to all the ways that boys 8-13 are insulted, belittled, mocked and told that the way they feel and behave is wrong and needs to be corrected or else and how that affects them?
Well, as it turns out… it causes them to have stunted social skills and emotional intelligence, few close friends and a reduced ability to make new friends or foster emotionally intimate relationships, reduced empathy, impeded ability to manage or maintain romantic relationships, increased incidents of violent behavior, substance abuse, sexual misconduct and poor mental health.
In fact, to answer some of the rhetorical questions you posit:
- Men aren’t “withdrawing” from dating, they’re not dating. This isn’t even a “male” issue, it’s Gen-Z overall. Even the whole MGTOW schtick isn’t a thing anymore; it peaked in 2017 and has dropped like a rock ever since. And they’re not dating in part because boys are taught that “soft skills” are useless, given fewer and fewer opportunities to socialize freely with their peers, and also an entire generation had their formative years disrupted by a global pandemic that forcibly isolated them from friends and classmates.
- Because men have been told that to expect status and power by following a particular social script that has been increasingly out of date and reliant on an economy and social structures that haven’t existed for more than 60 years, and are then being blamed for “failing” when they don’t manage to achieve said status or power. Moreover, they’re told that their status and power has been “stolen” from them or is otherwise being withheld from them by – depending on which bobble-throated slapdick you care to listen to – women, “feminism”, immigrants “the Matrix”, or “The Globalists”.
- Leaving aside that you don’t have a functioning definition of what you mean by “basic human decency”, they’re being held to standards of “be a goddamn person” and many of them are failing miserably, refusing to examine the suppositions and presumptions that lead them to fail, and are actively encouraged to blame other people for not following social norms that actively harm them and not existing in an economic system that hasn’t existed in over 80 years and was actually an aberration based on the fallout from World War I and World War II.
See the issue here is “misandry” in as much in that it’s disgust for men… it’s just coming from other men and the small handful of women trying to exploit a vulnerable audience.
I mean, shit, even you get in on the mocking and belittling men. You couldn’t even make it through your letter without making a joke about men with “effeminate” hair styles and drinks. And then you compound it by implying that the only response men could possibly have is to break down and fail in the face of not-having-all-the-praise, instead of, I dunno, examining what’s being said, seeing if it actually applies, working on the things that do and otherwise disregarding the shit that doesn’t.
I mean, after all, you can’t possibly think that men and boys can’t recognize the difference between hyperbole and actual social criticism, nor tell when criticism applies to them vs. when it doesn’t. Right?
You don’t even manage to get three sentences past “I’m not asking for men to be coddled” before making the comparison that this is “like women still only want Gary Cooper”. Ok, so? What’s the alternative? Demanding that women be into someone else, regardless of how they feel?
No, seriously, if it were true that all women only wanted One Type of Guy – it’s not, but let’s just roll with it – then there comes a point where you basically have to work on being that guy if you want to get a date. I hate to be the one to tell you this but if women only want to date Gary Cooper, maybe you need to get your Gary Cooper on. If you expect to get jerked off by the Invisible Hand Of The Free (Dating) Marketplace, you have to supply what people demand.
You also do the very stereotypically “guy” thing of not actually listening when folks explain the problem with “the male loneliness epidemic” (it’s male in as much as it’s self-imposed by men) and act as though being told that the answer is “stop treating emotionally intimate relationships with other men as being sus, and stop demanding that women solve the problem for you” as “sit down, shut up and stop complaining”.
The answer is, in fact, “work harder”, because the work men need to be doing is develop their social skills, cultivate their emotional intelligence, talk to more people and have friendships with other men that actually encourage closeness and intimacy without fear of being called faggy.
Oh and also to recognize how often you do the “sneer at other people with no social pushback” yourselves; you just pat yourself on the back for being edgy and iconoclastic for doing so, as though there were penalties besides other people thinking you’re kind of a dick for doing so.
(And to forestall the inevitable, I will point out that Louis CK is touring and headlining comedy festivals, Dave Chapelle had two Netflix specials and raved about how much crowds in Saudi Arabia loved his trans jokes, Kill Tony has approximately 2.2 million subscribers on YouTube alone and the Comedy Mothership exists. So cancelation and social pushback only seems to count if you’re Roseanne Barr.)
The issue isn’t women getting free reign to hate on men, my guy. The issue is that you don’t like feeling as though you’re being treated the way that men treat women. Moreover, you’re upset that not only are women saying “hey, this sucks and most of the way society is set up is actively harmful for us and men”, but also that women are looking at what they’re being offered and saying “nah, thanks”, because we’re at a point in history where women’s survival isn’t dependent on being in a relationship with a man.
More to the point, however, is that you’re complaining about social rules and standards that have been handed down to you by men, enforced primarily by other men, and that only benefits certain men. When people try to make changes to the system to make it more equitable, men treat it like an affront – complaining about men in dangerous jobs while simultaneously preventing women from doing those jobs, just as an example. Kinda hard to complain about how men do all the fighting and dying in wars when the current Secretary of Defense is busy trying to purge women (and people of color) from the military entirely.
You are, quite frankly, being exploited by the very men who benefit from this system the most, who want you angry and confused and upset, because that allows them to manipulate you and sell you bullshit cures that don’t actually work. I would point out to you that “patriarchy” doesn’t mean rule by men”, it means “rule by fathers”, and most men will not be allowed to become the fathers. Unless you think that Andrew “I scam everybody” Tate honestly has your best interests at heart.
If you want shit to be better, then you’re going to have to be one of the people fighting to make it better. It means recognizing that you were sold bullshit and told that it was steak, the fact that it isn’t steak is your fault for not being sufficiently manly, and the only way to turn it into steak is to eat it up yum yum and then man even harder than before.
The path to things being better means leaving those toxic, hegemonic ideas about masculinity behind, fostering greater emotional awareness and fluency, stronger social bonds, pro-social values and actual genuine equity… without complaining that it’s unfair that you have to do so in the first place. It may be the system that you were born into, but that doesn’t excuse you or me or anyone else from ending that system and building one that’s better for everyone.
But sure, blame it all on a t-shirt. That doesn’t make you sound unreasonable at all.
