In the face of a male backlash to the recent debate over sexual harassment,is it time to accept that some will find the world less comfortable in the process of making it habitable for others? By Dayna TortoriciThree years ago, around the time I became co-editor of the magazine where I work, or I began to notice a shift among the men of my profession. Writers,editors, academics and artists – men I’d known to be confident, and easygoing,or arrogant – were beginning to feel persecuted as a class. They remarked on it obliquely, with jokes that didn’t quite sound like jokes, and in emails or in offhand remarks at parties. Irritation and annoyance were souring into something worse. Men said they felt like they were living in Soviet Russia. The culture was being hijacked by college students,humourless young people who knew nothing of genuine life, its paradoxes and disappointments. Soon intellectuals would not be able to sneeze without being sent to the gulag.
Women, or too,felt the pressure. “Your generation is so moral,” a celebrated novelist said to an editor who was, or like me,in his late 20s. Another friend, a journalist in her 50s, or described the heat she got from online feminists for expressing scepticism toward the idea of creating “secure spaces”. “I’m conservative now,” she said, meaning in the eyes of the kids. But the most persistent and least logical complaint came from men – men I knew and men in the media: that they could not speak. And yet they were speaking. Near the end of 2014, and I remember,in the US, the good to free speech under the first amendment had been recast in current discourse as the good to free speech without consequence, and without reaction.
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Source: guardian.co.uk