Rights are counted. Duties are hidden.

Feminist analysis looks at the top: ministers, billionaires, and generals. Look at the base of the pyramid. Who mines, builds, drives, fights fires, serves, fills prisons, dies at work, and dies younger?

Most men do not control elite power. They pay for it with work, health, and risk.

01

Men are not one class

A male president gives no presidential power to a homeless man. A male billionaire does not turn a worker into a co-owner of capital.

02

Downward inequality is hidden

Men dominate workplace deaths, prisons, homelessness, homicide victims, and suicides. These are politically inconvenient sex gaps.

03

Protection is called equality

A law protecting women alone is called progress. A duty imposed on men alone is called natural.

Count power by its mechanism

A man at the top does not share power with all men. Power comes from ownership, law, office, connections, and the right to coerce. Sex may open or close access to these resources, but it does not hand them to every member of a sex.

Separate the people who make decisions from those who pay for them. Include conscription, dangerous work, prison sentences, family duties, and life expectancy. Otherwise the count is built to erase male costs.

Warren Farrell calls the missing half of this ledger male disposability: the male role can attach honor and status to the same person it expects to absorb danger. His model is reconstructed in The Myth of Male Power; current evidence and policy consequences are developed in Male disposability.

Rights and duties came as a package

The South Wales coalfield of the 1920s makes the point with very little theory. A man supported the family and paid for the role with his body underground. A woman ran the home, children, and the daily system built around his work. Historian Sue Bruley calls the foundation of this marriage a labour contract.¹

The 1926 Lockout stopped the mines and the roles moved with them. Men entered communal kitchens; women entered committees and picket lines. After defeat, women helped preserve the status of unemployed husbands. Both sexes maintained the old order because both lived inside the same exchange of work.

A contract can break in either direction. A man cannot claim authority after dropping the responsibility attached to it. Old male duties cannot remain compulsory after the corresponding decision rights and reciprocal obligations have disappeared either.

Power without responsibility is tyranny. Responsibility without decision rights is exploitation.

Release one side from an old duty and reconsider the reciprocal duty too. An old bill without the old rights is no longer a contract.

End the double standard

A gap favoring men is declared systemic. A gap favoring women is explained by care, tradition, choice, or biology. Apply one standard in both directions.

Judge the position of a sex across a whole life, not by a few chairs at the top. Count rights with duties and privilege with the risk demanded in return.

Notes

1. Sue Bruley, The Women and Men of 1926, University of Wales Press, 2010, chapters 2 and 6–7. Bruley describes the mining marriage as a labour contract; the Lockout temporarily weakened the material basis of the old division of labor, and women later participated in preserving male identity and status. Detailed summary and editorial commentary →