If you’ve been wondering why I bothered to repost this 18-year-old piece, it’s because of this superior essay, posted today:
“Men still don’t do enough housework!” The headlines shout it every few months like clockwork. Another viral study, another think piece, another round of finger-wagging at husbands who supposedly leave too many socks on the floor. I’m sorry, but it’s getting harder and harder for me to muster outrage over laundry when things like the Selective Service System is still at play, registering only men for a potential draft.
We live in a culture that demands “gender equality now!”—but only in the arenas where it benefits women. The moment real danger knocks, the script flips. Suddenly, biology, history, and cold necessity remind us that men and women are not interchangeable. And nowhere is that truth starker than when war arrives.
Look at Ukraine in 2022. A nation that had been marching toward progressive gender policies slammed the brakes the second Russian tanks rolled in. Every man aged 18 to 60 was barred from leaving the country. Wives, mothers, and daughters could flee to safety across the border; fathers, sons, and husbands had to stay behind to fight, die, or wait for the call-up. I tweeted that day in raw frustration: “I never want to hear anyone complaining about ‘manspreading’ ever again!” The replies were predictable—some cheered, some seethed—but the point landed. When the gender war meets real war, the gender war loses.
Please read it all.
War has a clarifying effect. It compels us to ponder our priorities against a scale whose poles are life and death. That doesn’t make war desirable, nor the appropriate yardstick for all comparisons. But as regards the badly strained relations between the sexes, it makes plain how trivial are feminist whines about men.
Yes, there are women in America’s armed services. One of them is a young friend whom I’ll call Jane. Jane has been a soldier for barely six months, yet she’s already overseas and functioning in a dangerous, high-stress environment. Her courage and sangfroid are remarkable, the more so as her detachment was hit just yesterday, with multiple casualties and extensive destruction. Her reaction? “I'm a soldier. I signed up for this.”
So I’m not denigrating our female warriors. Nevertheless, Lisa Britton’s point stands: When war is in prospect, it’s the men that governments round up to be thrown into the furnace. We expect our men to “step up” – and they do:
If World War III ever breaks out—and the way the world is trending, with proxy conflicts, great-power rivalries, and crumbling alliances, it no longer feels impossible—it will be our sons, brothers, husbands, and boyfriends who receive the call first. They will leave our homes, our beds, our futures, and step into the elite’s power battle. And when they do, the same voices that spent years calling masculinity problematic will suddenly post heartfelt memes about our “real men.”
We can’t keep doing this. We can’t keep devaluing, blaming and shaming men for everything. It doesn’t look like the expectation of male sacrifice is ending anytime soon, so we must honor, love, and respect our men in peacetime, not just when the sirens wail. That means rejecting the cheap shots—the endless articles blaming men for every social ill, the cultural sneers at “toxic masculinity,” the refusal to acknowledge that male sacrifice still underpins our safety. It means teaching our daughters that a good man’s desire to protect is not oppression but a gift. It means telling our sons that their strength is needed, valued, and worthy of gratitude.
God bless and keep you, Lisa. What you’ve said has needed to be said for some time now. But don’t expect the promulgators of militant feminism to agree. They’ve made the war between the sexes into an occupation, an income. We can’t expect them to overturn their rice bowls for the sake of honesty.
Peace is purchased with men’s blood. No other currency will serve. Decent Americans of both sexes – yes, there are two and only two – should keep that firmly in mind, after the conflicts in progress today are a receding memory.
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