You know, folks, I was thinking the other day, well, not really thinking, more like staring at the ceiling wondering why everything feels like a bad joke that never ends, and I remembered Title IX. Nineteen seventy-one. Civil Rights Act. Some smart people in Washington said, “Hey, let’s make sure the ladies get a fair shake in school.” Sounds reasonable, right? Like giving everybody the same size bat in baseball. Except somewhere along the line the bat got swapped for a rocket launcher and now the game’s just one team hitting home runs while the other team’s still looking for their cleats.

If you draw one of those little graphs, the ones with the lines going up and down like a heart monitor on a guy who just saw his ex, it gets real ugly real fast. Women’s college enrollment? Straight up like a rocket. Men’s? Straight down like a guy who just realized the ladder was leaning against the wrong building. By 1983 the ladies were already handing out more degrees than the fellas, and they never stopped. Now it’s sixty percent. Sixty percent! That’s not a trend, that’s a takeover with better parking. And the faculty? Seventy-five percent women and climbing. Pretty soon the only guy on campus is gonna be the one mowing the lawn, and even he’ll have to attend sensitivity training.

But it’s not just school. Oh no. It’s everywhere, like that smell in the fridge you can’t quite find. Science fiction and fantasy awards? Used to be full of guys who wrote about spaceships and dragons and laser guns. Now they’ve canceled all the old heroes – poof, gone – and replaced ’em with diverse women of color nobody’s ever heard of. I guess the aliens finally landed and they’re all feminists with better agents. College admissions? Sixty percent female. Every school’s got special programs for the ladies, special clubs, special money, special hugs, special everything. Guys get a pamphlet that says “Good luck, champ, try not to cry in public.” Human Resources departments? Seventy percent women. They’re the ones deciding who gets promoted, who gets fired, who gets the good parking spot. All in the name of “equity” and “inclusion,” which, the way I understand it, means “make sure the boys sit in the back and shut up.”

And the money! Hundreds of billions poured into women’s this and women’s that by corporations, governments, the United Nations, NGOs, everybody. Male initiatives? They get a participation trophy and a lecture about how they should be grateful for the participation trophy. Meanwhile every commercial, every news show, every movie tells us the same thing: your feelings are wrong, your biology is wrong, your entire existence is basically a hate crime with a mortgage. You wanna be stoic? Toxic masculinity. You wanna lead? Patriarchal oppression. You wanna be a regular old dad who comes home from work and doesn’t cry during commercials? Bigot. You wanna do the thing your great-grandfather did without getting called a monster? Criminal. They literally made biology illegal in some places. That’s not progress, that’s just the government saying, “We know better than evolution, pal.”

Go to family court and watch the magic. Half your money, half your house, the kids – gone. And if she decides the kid doesn’t get born? You don’t even get a vote. You bonded with that little heartbeat like any normal idiot would, and then it’s just… gone. They call it “women’s healthcare.” I call it the worst episode of The Twilight Zone never made. And if you say anything? “You just wanna control women!” Buddy, I can’t even control my own TV remote.

Mention any of this out loud and you’re hateful, sexist, misogynist, probably a secret member of the Illuminati. Meanwhile the mental health numbers for men look like they were written by a depressed actuary. Guys are just screaming into the void and the void screams back, “Check your privilege.” And the cherry on the sundae? If a woman accuses you of anything – anything at all – everybody believes her instantly. Career over. Reputation gone. Maybe prison. Later they prove it was a lie (which happens more than the news wants to admit) and… nothing. She gets a book deal, you get therapy you can’t afford.

Title IX didn’t just mess with college sports and turn every campus into a estrogen festival. Nah, that was just the warm-up act. The real magic trick happened when they told women, “Hey, go ahead, get that degree, get that job, be independent!” And everybody clapped like it was the most beautiful thing since sliced bread. Except nobody stopped to ask what happens when you flood the workforce with millions of extra bodies who used to stay home and raise the next generation. It’s simple math, the kind even a dummy like me can do. One guy with just a high school education used to earn enough to keep a whole house running: mortgage, groceries, little league, vacations, the works. Mom stayed home, kids got actual attention instead of a tablet and a shrug, family formed like it was supposed to. Then Title IX hits, women pour into the offices, and suddenly the pie gets sliced fifty ways instead of twenty. Supply goes up, wages go flat. Male income just sits there for decades like a dead battery in a flashlight nobody wants to replace. Now it takes two full-time salaries to buy the same house your old man bought with one. Congratulations, everybody’s “empowered” and nobody can afford kids.

So what do they do? They tell the ladies, “Forget the crib and the casseroles – go work in an office that exists purely to move numbers around on a spreadsheet nobody will ever read.” These jobs don’t build anything, don’t fix anything, don’t even make the coffee right. They just generate income so the rent gets paid and the cat gets premium kibble. Meanwhile the biological clock is ticking louder than a bomb in a cartoon, but nobody mentions it because that would be “problematic.” Instead they hand out birth control pills like candy at Halloween and say, “Live your best life, queen!” So the flings start, lots of flings. Great for the weekend, terrible for the long game. Turns out sleeping around rewires the brain so pair-bonding gets about as easy as teaching a cat to fetch. By the time she’s thirty-five and ready to “settle,” the wiring’s shot and every decent guy looks like a downgrade.

And the guys she actually wants? The ones who make real money? There’s about six of them left in the whole country because the rest are stuck in the flat-wage trap Title IX helped create. So she scrolls the apps, sighs, and decides the options are either “settle for less” or “keep swiping.” Most pick the cat. Now we got whole buildings full of single women in their forties living alone with three rescue felines named after feminist authors, drinking wine at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday and telling themselves it’s “self-care.” The unhappiness hits like a truck, so they run to therapy, pop the little psychiatric pills that make everything feel like a warm bath, and post inspirational quotes about how “the right one will come.” He won’t. He’s busy working two jobs so he can maybe afford a studio apartment and a goldfish.

Birth rates? They don’t just drop – they fall off a cliff like Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner. Everybody acts shocked. “Gosh, why are young people not having babies? Must be climate change. Must be avocado toast. Must be the economy.” Yeah, the economy you helped wreck when you turned the entire labor market into a game of musical chairs with no chairs left. The mystery is about as mysterious as finding sand in the desert.

This whole thing’s been going on since the seventies, like a slow-motion car crash where the car is society and the driver keeps yelling “Faster!” And if any country tries to pump the brakes, even a little bit, the whole world comes down on them with sanctions, lectures, sometimes troops, all in the name of “women’s rights.” So here we are. Men built the roads, fought the wars, invented the stuff, did all the dirty jobs nobody else wanted… and now we’re told we run the world and we’re also the biggest victims of our own conspiracy. If this is patriarchy, I gotta say, we got a real masochistic sense of humor. We spent fifty years handing over the keys, cheering while the house got redecorated, and now we’re standing outside in the rain wondering why our pockets are empty.

So here we are, fifty-some years later. Title IX started with “equal opportunity” and ended with “equal misery.” It seems all quests to impose equality just lower to the level of the worst. Dads replaced by dual-income spreadsheets. Kids replaced by cats. Marriage replaced by “situationships” and SSRIs. If this is progress, I gotta say, it’s the slowest, saddest, most expensive joke I’ve ever heard. And the punchline? We all paid for it with the future. Pass the wine. The cats are thirsty too.