Cry Me a River White Boy
Re-visiting the war on white men
[Note from Craig Nelsen to readers: 2024 gets off to a great start with the addition to Odysseus Unsheathed of contributor, Anna Cordelia. I invited Anna to join our publication because I believe she will add value to what we offer our readers as well as to what we offer to the public discourse.]
I don’t remember her name, but I will never forget the button she used to wear on her lapel.
The young woman and I were both members of an informal group of feminist university students – the year was around 1990. She was sort of a friend of friends. I’ll call her Ameerha. She was attractive and smart, and from a well-to-do Pakistani-Canadian immigrant family.
The button Ameerha wore on her lapel was small and black, but the white lettering could easily be read from several feet away: CRY ME A RIVER WHITE BOY.
We all thought it was so edgy.
“Intersectionality” was not a word on the tips of our tongues (yet), but we all understood exactly what Ameerha was doing: using her sex, coupled with her skin colour, to call out what we’d come to believe was the penultimate reason for any struggles we were coming up against as brave young Wimmyn: The Patriarchy. And more specifically, The White Patriarchy.
At first, we weren’t quite sure we agreed with the sentiment on the button. But as time went on, we all became more comfortable – and confident – that the slogan was worthy of our fealty. Even the white guys in our politically correct circle quietly nodded their approval.
Looking back on this small episode from my young adulthood, I am perplexed as to how all of us who tacitly approved of Ameerha’s button could have been so stupid. There is an unmistakeable irony in the act of a Pakistani girl criticizing white boys. You’d think we had rocks in our heads not to see that.
Ameerha came from a culture that had nowhere near the kind of respect for women that, as Westerners, we had grown up taking for granted. Sure, we were only vaguely aware of honour killings, and it would be a few years before the Pakistani grooming gangs of the United Kingdom would get into full swing. The 2014 documentary Pakistan’s Hidden Shame, which describes how street children in that country are considered fair game for sexual predation, had not yet been released. Still, given our worldly opinion of ourselves, shouldn’t we have had some notion about these things?
Shouldn’t Ameerha have known?
So why was she so proudly sporting a button that implicitly attacked young white men?
You could argue that the button was saying, “I’ve had it way worse than you’ll ever know.” And that might have been true if Ameerha had been a street kid in the land of her forebears. Or if her male relatives had been planning to torture and murder her for dating the wrong guy. But that wasn’t Ameerha’s situation. And even it if was, why the overt animosity directed specifically at white boys?
She had come to live in a Western country whose infrastructure had been dreamt up, built up, and kept up by white men. Whose relative wealth, cleanliness, and fairness had been established, long before her family arrived, by men and women of European heritage. She had been welcomed, given full citizenship in a country she did not help to build, and this was how she showed her thanks: by wearing a button that said, cry me a river white boy.
A button that said, if you’re white and male, you don’t know what it is to struggle. You don’t know what it is to feel pain. You don’t know what it is to make sacrifices for other people.
Uhmmmm… I think that’s pretty much what white men, and white boys, have been doing all along. It’s what has brought us to the level of ease and comfort we have in our society. Even in a day and age when many women work outside the home, it’s still men doing the most dangerous, unglamourous and demanding jobs when it comes to the nitty-gritty of keeping the lights on.
And the upside of shouldering all that responsibility is that once in a while, some guys get to appear powerful.
But I don’t think these were the kind of thoughts that were traipsing through young Ameerha’s pretty head all those years ago. And since I never actually asked Ameerha what compelled her to wear her button, I’ll just make a wild guess: Ameerha had figured out that in the culture of victimhood taking root in our society, she got not one, but two legs up for simply being female and brown. What’s more, in the victimhood Olympics, she could score bonus points by mocking white boys.
That’s right, a button she should have been ashamed to wear was a ticket to higher social status. She was building a better life for herself in Canada, and what better way to get even further ahead than to be ungrateful and callous toward the group that had made her family’s new life possible?
It’s one thing for me to try to imagine what possessed Ameerha to wear a button with such a poisonous message. The more painful – and shameful – thing for me to do is ask myself, why did I think it was so cool?
Why wasn’t I angry at her for showing such blatant disrespect for the boys and men who shared my heritage? Make no mistake, she wasn’t just putting down white boys – her button referred to both men and boys, and by calling men boys, she was doubling down on the insult.
But instead of being reviled, me and my white feminist friends thought Ameerha was being bold and provocative. What had gotten into us?
To Ameerha’s credit, she never wore a pin that said, cry me a river brown boy.
Why didn’t I feel the same loyalty towards my own group?
Looking back, I realize now that I was “woke” before we had a word for it. There is no logic in the woke philosophy, and it seems to germinate best in the fertile ground of our universities. It makes your head spin if you think too hard about it, but that is the upside-down reality we are living in.
Take for example the term “Women’s Liberation.” That was what the supposed fight for women’s rights was called before the word feminism became more palatable. I wish we’d stuck with the old term, because I think it illustrates the absurdity of the movement better.
What I’ve come to understand is that Women’s Liberation is anything but. It doesn’t free women at all. It enslaves them to a false ideology – one that promises women the sun and the moon, but ultimately leaves them out in the cold, alone and confused.
And this might get at why young women like me were so ready to attack our own – or at very least, to not defend our own.
Stripped down of all the academic jargon, feminism is a formula for telling young women to hate what they essentially are. It’s completely misogynistic. Take all the things women are naturally good at, like being nurturing, tender, and cooperative… according to feminism, any woman who strives to develop those qualities in her relationships, her career, whatever, is just acquiescing to The Patriarchy.
I will never forget hearing a twenty-something-year-old female university student declare in a public forum (I think it was a talk on Goddess Worship) that she had “become” a lesbian as part of her feminist commitment, and she thought women who continued to pursue sexual relationships with men were “betraying the sisterhood.”
Beyond indoctrinating women to deny their most basic instincts and intuitions, feminism tells us we need to be like men if we are to have any worth. Of course, the admonition comes cloaked in clever slogans, like “anything a man can do, a woman can do better.” Or pithy little epithets like “you go girl!” But what feminism is really saying once the BS is stripped away is that women who behave like real women have no worth. To be valuable, you must be like a man.
And once a young woman has imbibed that kool-aid, she is headed down a very dangerous path. She has been set up to compete with men, not to cooperate with them. And she has been set up to fail, because women can no more “do anything better than a man” than a man can take on traditional women’s roles and expect to be a happy, fulfilled, successful human being.
What happens to young women who are set on such a course of inevitable failure? They get frustrated. They get angry. They start to turn on the young men they are competing against, and who always seem to make it look so easy… they seem so privileged.
And that is why Ameerha was able to get away with wearing her button, even amongst a crowd of supposedly intelligent young university women who should have known better. And look where allowing these attacks on our men has got us.
Rampant drug abuse, deaths of despair, stunning suicide rates. As Craig Nelsen pointed out in his piece about the white boys of Baltimore, white males make up just 30 percent of the USA’s population, but they account for 70 percent of the nation’s suicides. Interestingly, it’s difficult to get statistics specifically pertaining to white men and boys in Canada, but the overall suicide rate of men in this country is 3-4 times that of women.
Yeah, cry me a river white boy.
I always thought I’d grown up in a country that was experiencing peace time, but I’ve been living through a war my entire life. A war with a death toll. A war on white men.
And I was turned into a weapon in that war.
What would our personal lives, and those of the men and boys we love, look like with less divorce, less daycare, less drugs? Less self-loathing all around? Less talking back and more listening? More support, more encouragement, more simple kindness? There is much hand-wringing these days about our tax dollars being spent on weapons to kill and maim people in other countries – and rightly so. But what about when we are the weapons being aimed at the men and boys in our daily lives? We don’t need to stand against anyone so much as we need to just stand up for our own.
The truth is, Ameerha was never the real problem in the story I’ve told. She was just a bellwether for a bigger issue - that women like me had already been groomed to disdain and disrespect our men, paving the way for her to simply up the ante. The Ameerhas of this world can never keep our men down – but us white women? Yes, we can do that.
And we can un-do that. If we have been part of the problem, we can be an even bigger part of the solution. The real “liberation” of women will take place when we see the enemy of feminism for what it is – and our men for the friends they’ve always been.
Welcome, Anna ! Glad to see a woman standing up for white men with such passion.
We are an endangered species and any attention can heal those wounds.
As I read this article, the anger of my youth echoes as I lived this era of degradation. I can't count the number of arrogant self serving females who wouldn't take the effort to participate in a relationship. I dated a couple for 3 months during which time those princesses never once called me or took initiative. I stopped calling; I never heard from them.
I was a machinist during those days; fit, smart, financially capable, and not spineless. I can't believe how many princesses found me intimidating or shrunk in fear when I just said Hi. I do despise most of this class of so called women -- now and then.