Chapter 3. Thumb On The Scale
Have guys had advantages over women through the years? Yup. In lots of ways.
Last chapter, we took a look at how men have historically been the star of the show in movies, books, cartoons, and video games. Let’s now check out at some of the ways this advantage plays out in real life.
The US Constitution was based in large part on the thing that the dudes that wrote it knew most about; English Common Law. It’s still used in Great Britain, Canada, and Australia, and it used to treat women by a thing called Coverture.
The concept is simple. A woman doesn’t have an individual legal identity. As she is growing up she is “cover”ed by her father. Once she is married, she is “cover”ed by her husband. It’s why women take on the last name of the husband once she gets hitched. Back in the day, it meant that if a woman worked, all the money she got would be in her husband's name, that she couldn’t vote or participate in government, and that the husband had the right to sex whenever he wanted… no matter what she felt about it.
Women are basically baby making/raising machines. If you’ve seen or heard of the Handmaid’s Tale, its a story about a future society where Coverture is taken to the extreme in a bad, bad way… though there are dudes now who REALLY want to make this real life (we’ll get to that later).
John Adams was one of the gentlemen who wrote the constitution, serving as the second President. His wife, Abigail, wrote him a letter during the early days of the revolution about things like the naval defense of Virginia and local outbreaks of smallpox, but it included a plea to “Remember the Ladies” as they were crafting new laws. Specifically, she reminded him that we were fighting to get away from tyranny, and that same tyranny extended to 50% of the population lacked rights because of what they didn’t have between their legs. Unfortunately for her, his responses were “I cannot help but laugh”, “You are so saucy” and ”We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems”.
So change took a while. Check this shit out.
Women didn’t earn the right to vote until 1920… almost 150 years after the letter was written.
“No fault divorce” wasn’t a thing until a California law in 1969, after which there were significant declines in female suicide, murders of women by men, and domestic violence.
Women weren’t allowed to serve on juries in all 50 states until 1973.
They weren’t able to get a bank account by themselves until the 1960’s, nor apply for and get a credit card or mortgage until 1974.
Women weren’t able to get a business loan without a male co-signer until 1988.
Dude, I was 10 in 1988. This is not ancient history.
And a ton of this garbage still happens today. Health care is a great example. I got a viscectomy a couple of years ago, and my friend Amy was pissed… not because I did it, but because it was so easy. She’s been with the same guy since college, and never wanted kids. She’s asked to get her tubes tied numerous times, but no doctors would do it because “she might change her mind”. This happens to women all the time.
But for me? I made an appointment, spent 20 minutes getting taken care of, had two weeks with swollen balls, and then BOOM, I was done. No questions asked.
Female doctors get less money from Medicaid for the same surgeries than guys do, and doctors performing surgeries on women have been shown to get 20%-30% less than comparable ones done on men.
Doesn’t seem fair does it? That’s ‘cause it’s not. And it keeps going.
Female soldiers weren’t allowed to enter ground combat in the armed services until 2016, This is really important, because you get promoted faster if you’ve served in a combat zone.
Women still aren’t allowed to be priests in the Catholic or Eastern Orthodox churches, nor ministers in many Presbyterian and Baptist denominations. They can’t be ordained as Mormon priests. Some orthodox Jewish communities allow female rabbis, but others completely ban them. Female imams face a ton of pushback for wanting to lead prayers.
More than half of women’s teams in the NCAA are still coached by men and we are frequently General Managers of women’s pro teams. And you never see sex toys being thrown onto an NFL field or NBA court during games with dudes. In the WNBA… well, crypto bros do it and think it’s funny.
To be fair, things are getting more even. A lot more women are becoming faith leaders in churches that allow them the opportunity. There are more women represented at all levels of health care, and hopefully that will eventually lead to more fairness in pay. There are now examples of women General Managers of men’s sports teams, getting interviews for head coaching positions and even actually coaching dudes on the court. Pay equity is now a thing for some national teams. Women combat soldiers are succeeding… of the six soldiers given medals for recently tackling a shooter and treating victims at Ft Stewart, GA, two were women.
And the bros who threw the dildos on courts got their asses arrested.
This progress, though, is in trouble because many guys love the Handmaid’s Tale. The best example is a real piece of work named Doug Wilson. He’s a pastor in a radical Christian sect in Moscow, Idaho who believes that:
Slavery gets a bad rap. “There has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world. The credit for this must go to the predominance of Christianity.” So Jesus thinks slavery brings harmony. Got it.
All public schools should be burned, and all teachers should be hanged. That’s not a joke. He went all in on this idea, saying “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.”
A few years ago he took a flamethrower to a cardboard cutout of Elsa from Frozen and some other things he doesn’t like. You read this correctly… A fucking flamethrower. To a Disney princess.
And his views on women are right out of Coverture. He believes their role is ONLY one of wife and mother, saying recently on CNN that “Women are the kind of people that people come out of.” He thinks a man should never apologize to a woman “unless God thinks you wronged her”... whatever the hell that means.
He is an absolute believer that women shouldn’t serve in the military and that the Dobbs decision to make abortion illegal in many parts of the country was a “gift from God”. Apparently this is because according to him “Natural revelation teaches us the natural submission of the wife to the husband. These realities are in our bones, and the revolt against them lies at the foundation of our current cultural madness.”
Why should we care? Because he isn’t just some random nutjob.
His home church in Idaho has 3,000 regular parishioners, 10% of the university town of Moscow. His Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, spewing the same beliefs he does, has franchises in 39 states and DC. Tucker Carlson loves him, and exposed his followers to the guy in 2024.
Most scarily, Trump’s Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is a member of one of Wilson’s churches and recently supported on social media a montage of him and his lackeys saying things like women shouldn’t have the right to vote. Rather, voting in democracy should happen by household… with guess who casting the vote. Hint hint, it ain’t the one who is supposed to spend her life making babies.
Hegseth is turning many of these beliefs into reality. He cancelled a women’s leadership program (signed into law by Trump in his first term) saying it was a “woke” effort by the United Nations of all things. He believes physical standards were lowered for women, even though they actually haven’t been, because he doesn’t want them in combat. He fired top female officers, and the head of the Naval Academy, for no reason.
All were replaced with men.
Hegseth, though, isn’t the only one who loves these wakadoodle ideas. US Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is a proponent of “covenant marriage”, which makes it a lot harder for women to get the “no fault” divorces they fought so hard for (you know, the ones that resulted in less suicides, beatings, and murders).
VP JD Vance wants to make abortion illegal even in the case of rape and incest, is ok with cops getting access to women’s medical records so they pry into a women’s sex lives to know when they might be on birth control, and of course believes any lady without a kid is miserable.
And of course the President of the United States says men, famous ones anyway, can just grab a woman by the pussy. Cause you shouldn’t have to apologize to a woman for assault unless God thinks you wronged her. And who’s to say what God really thinks?
There are two lessons here, at least for me. First, whenever I see things specifically helping women out, and I don’t like it because it seems unfair, I need to think about this entire fucking list detailing the leg up I’ve had all these years. I need to put myself in the shoes of women that see all of this crap going on, and think about how pissed off and scared I would be if I was told constantly that I couldn’t control my own body, or need someone else to sign my loan, or that I could only vote through my partner… if they care to ask.
And things become a bit more understandable.
The second is a little deeper, and something we’re going to explore in the next article. My role and opinion as a man is important and valid. It shouldn’t be belittled, eye rolled, or put down. AND maybe some of the advantages I, and people that look like me, have had over the years made me less tough. Maybe I need to grow a little thicker skin, and learn how to be more resilient to navigate a new world that is actually better for everyone but presents challenges to me.
And this is a way I can get better.
As always, if you have questions or comments please feel free to comment on this Substack page, whatever social media account you found this one, or email me: billmccamley14@gmail.com.
Your feedback is very welcome and truly appreciated.