Being a Man Today: Suspect, Guilty, and Politically Incorrect

Well, Father’s Day has come and gone. I imagine Elon Musk had a pretty busy day visiting his army of bioengineered babies. Though, to be honest, some people think it would be better if he just took financial responsibility for them… and maybe didn’t leave them in the care of Donald Trump as a nanny, considering the Epstein files. Yesterday must’ve been a sad day for Peter Parker, Bruce Wayne, and Matt Murdock.

Mother’s Day in Mexico always has a special feel to it. Many women get the day off; others at least get half a day to visit their moms or wives. Father’s Day, on the other hand, falls on a Sunday—when no one’s working. It practically goes unnoticed. It’s not on a fixed date. It doesn’t bring anything to a halt. It’s as if it doesn’t matter much.

Personally, Father’s Day doesn’t mean much to me. Though it’s common to wonder why it’s not celebrated as meaningfully as Mother’s Day. I guess it’s cultural: in our country, we deeply value mothers, while fathers… not so much. I’m sure many dads would like to feel just as important, but in this politically correct world, the left has centered its discourse around women, leaving men a bit out of the picture.

In Mexico, we take political correctness so seriously that we just had two women running for president. It was unthinkable for a man to be truly competitive in this race. The same thing is happening in the United States: even though it seems almost impossible for a woman to win in such a conservative and sexist country, the left keeps pushing women or people of color as candidates. If she’s a woman of color, even better.

I have two daughters, and it thrills me to know they can grow up believing there are no limits for them. I love that they can aspire to whatever they want, without gender being a barrier. But it worries me when victimhood becomes a shortcut to progress. People say that nowadays, men are born guilty and women are born victims. And that’s not okay. Not all men are criminals, and not all women are victims.

I don’t know if it’s related, but back in the 1980s—the golden age of serial killers—most were white men: John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramírez. In the ’90s came the school shootings, and again, the perpetrators were mostly young white men. Today, “incels,” radicalized in online forums and portrayed in shows like Adolescence, follow the same pattern: young white men. It’s like just being a man is enough to be guilty of something, to have to walk on eggshells. But we’re not all Bundy, Dahmer, Harris, or Klebold.

I recently watched Straw by Tyler Perry, a film that’s become a phenomenon on Netflix. What struck me was how blatant the stereotype was. The protagonist: a woman of color, single mother, sick daughter, precarious job. Her best friend: another woman of color, loyal to the end. The bank manager, after suffering a robbery, relates to the robber just because she’s also a woman of color. The detective: a woman of color who solves everything almost by instinct.

On the other side, we have the absent father. The indifferent supermarket manager. The overwhelmed police chief who can’t handle the situation. A detective who accuses the mother two seconds after meeting her. And, of course, an abusive cop who sets everything off by threatening her. Oh, and the FBI men… are incompetent. The worst of the worst.

Straw is a suspense film, yes, but also a manifesto loaded with a dangerous ideology. All women are victims. All men are guilty. Through that lens, we all become Dahmer or Bundy. And of course, no one mentions Samuel Little—the most prolific serial killer in U.S. history—because he doesn’t fit the profile: he was a Black man. There’s no room for nuance. Under that logic, women don’t succeed; they victimize themselves to move forward.

In 1993, actor Michael Douglas had become the perfect archetype of male victimization. Women like Glenn Close, Sharon Stone, and Demi Moore abused poor Douglas, but in Falling Down, he got his revenge—his own way. In the film, like the protagonist of Straw, he just has a very bad day. And he also decides to take up arms and unleash his anger on whoever crosses his path. But that’s where the similarities end.

While she—a woman of color, single mother, victim of the system—ends up as an admired heroine, Douglas’s character gets shot down. Literally. Just like that. That brutal.

Turns out being a woman of color does have its perks: not only do you avoid the bullet, you end up with legions of fans. Inevitably, Douglas got his fans too… though, ironically, many came from neo-Nazi circles of the time. A prophetic sign? Or the uncomfortable symptom of a malaise Hollywood was already beginning to predict?

Is that why, in the United States, politically correct Democrats can’t imagine a candidate who isn’t a woman or a person of color? And is that the reason so many white men cling to questionable figures like Donald Trump—as a desperate way of saying: “So am I guilty of something now?”