I remember about a year ago, I was walking with two freshmen who were friends with my little brother. We were by Heritage Halls and a pickup truck drove by with 7-8 athletic looking guys in the back. One of the girls said something along the lines of, “I’d love to get my hands on that cargo.”

I remember realizing in that moment there was a double standard. She was joking, and expressing her sexuality (albeit lightly) in a normal way. However, If a boy had said that about a truckload of girls, he would be condemned for sexual harassment or being disrespectful to women. I pointed this out to the two of them and they agreed with me.

Sometimes I feel like today’s discourse is like this:

My opinions are oftentimes discounted because I am a straight cisgendered white male. Men aren’t allowed to say anything negative about any other groups, but other groups can be as negative as they want about them.

Here’s a quote from one of my peer’s blog posts “women can be idiots sometimes as well, but let’s be honest… men are the bigger idiots, and end up doing the stupid things more often than not.”

If I were to write that women were idiots, I would be crucified. There is a double standard in our society. Duffy takes advantage of this cultural incongruity to write negative poems about men. The theme of this book is something about how terrible men are.

In The World’s Wife, Duffy smacks men in almost every poem.

• Thetis is about a rape.
• In Queen Herod, the view of men is “No man, I swore, will make her shed one tear”  Men are portrayed as entities that make women cry.
• In Mrs Midas, men are seen as selfish and the relationship was destroyed by the man.
• Mrs. Pilate casts Pilate as this pretty boy whose touch makes his wife flinch.
• Mrs. Aesop talks about Aesop as a boring, pretentious man. “The sex was diabolical” and so she threatens to cut off his penis.
• Quasimodo leaves his wife for the sexy new thing.
• Circe’s deals with men have been so embittering that she turns men into pigs.
• In my mind, the story of Pygmalion is a story of love. In the poem, he just wants sex and as soon as his lust is slaked he leaves and never comes back. Men are cast as creatures of lust.
• Mrs Rip Van Winkle comes into her own only when her husband is gone. Men are seen as a restraining foce that stop women from reaching their potential
• Mrs. Freud is more of a joke, but it treats men as penis obsessed.
• In Eurydice, she gets Orpheus to turn around by saying, “Orpheus, your poem’s a masterpiece. I’d love to hear it again…” His vanity is his undoing. Men are vain.
• In Mrs. Beast, men are beastly and only good for sexual satisfaction.
• Mrs. Icarus says that men are destroyed by their own hubris.

Why were so many negative poems about men? What do you think?