It’s hard to remember that guys did not rise to the top of business and political worlds passively, by dint of their hard-wired inclinations and the gravitational pull of their penises alone. Men too, even the rich, white married ones who vote Republican as reliably as single women vote Democrat—in fact, especially those men—have benefitted terrifically from government policies and practices. Call it “The Wifey State,” and come to grips with the fact that white guys have been taking advantage of it since the founding.
The government, after all, has historically supported white men’s home and business ownership through grants, loans, incentives, and tax breaks (concessions that were not, until the second half of the twentieth century, made widely available to most women or to people of color). It has allowed them to accrue wealth and offered them shortcuts and bonuses for passing it down to their children.
But more than just goosing the economic and professional prospects of men, government has depressed the economic prospects of women by failing to offer equal pay protections, paid family leave, or subsidized day care. Until the 1960s, the government did not prohibit any form of gendered workplace discrimination; until less than a century ago, it did not allow women to vote. (And while I’m writing here about the specifically gendered government support that white men have enjoyed, it’s crucial to acknowledge the ways in which they also benefitted—in which they built the country and kicked off their cycle of power and profit within it—on the Constitutionally enforced enslavement and disenfranchisement of African-American women and men.)
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