Usually, when we talk about the patriarchy, we locate our discussions of this oppressive gender system in terms of how it materially harms women: the ever-increasing criminalization of abortion, the disproportionate rates of sexual assault and intimate partner violence, employment discrimination, the wage gap, and so on.
That point of focus obviously makes sense, but the patriarchy hurts men, too! (Not to mention non-binary people, intersex individuals, and everyone else who’s neither a man nor a woman.) For example, because of the gender binary, a key component of the patriarchy, a man might shoot himself in the balls with a powder-shooting flare at a gender reveal party, which would hurt him a lot because it is his balls.
This recently happened, in fact. A man in Massachusetts shot himself in the balls with a powder-shooting flare at a gender reveal party, which hurt him a lot because it was his balls. Check out video of the incident, courtesy of The Sun.
This happens all the time! Or at least once, recently. And nobody’s talking about it! Except for me, a writer at a national, widely read website. When will we, as a society, prioritize men’s balls? Will that ever happen? Dare I even dream? When will the balls of tomorrow’s horizon ever come swinging towards today, as they say?
Speaking of balls, this guy’s balls are fine. His wife, Kristen, told The Daily Mail that her husband, Tom, was “not permanently hurt by the accident and fully recovered within minutes.”
“Tom was just shocked that we were holding them the incorrect way,” the East Longmeadow medical sales rep said.
That is great—as is the fact that her and her husband’s gender reveal party didn’t set fire to the state of Massachusetts, as a recent gender reveal did in California. But the gender binary? No, it is mostly not great in my opinion. A brave take, I know.