Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This weekend, we talk about the infamous anti-male attack ad that rocked the world.
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I don’t have a son, but if I did, this is how I’d raise him in a world where women like Sarah Huckabee Sanders reign.
I’ve been thinking about her terrible welfare ad all week. The one with the young white guy named Brad sitting on the beanbag, cheese balls in one hand, controller in the other, while the governor explains that people like him are the reason the rest of us work.
We can talk all day about the statistics showing that young white men are the lowest percentage of welfare recipients in the country, but that point has been made enough, and it’s not even the biggest issue with the ad. At some point our society made the collective decision to allow male hatred to be the official policy for every major institution.
I kept picturing the boys I actually know. They aren’t anything like the guy in the ad, even the ones who play video games. The ones who spent their elementary years getting told their normal, active behavior was a cause for concern. Their predominantly female teachers wanted them medicated so that they would sit docile for their lectures on how women should rule the world. They were told over and over that their sex and their skin color made them a threat to an orderly society. None of them looked like the baffoon in the commercial. Most of them, however, looked tired and weighed down by the constant attacks.
And what do you do as a mother when you find yourself raising a boy in this environment?