Christine Flowers: The war on poor white boys

Article here. Excerpt:

'The people I worry about are the young men, the boys really, who attract the same sort of vitriol as Kavanaugh. Recently, the Wall Street Journal had a story that highlighted the shocking fact that at the end of the last academic year, there was a huge enrollment gap between the genders: 59.5% of college students are female, while only 40.5% male. Of course, there were a number of reasons cited to explain the deficit, but one stood out: a sense of hopelessness. In fact, the article was entitled “A Generation of American Men Give Up On College: ‘I Just Feel Lost.’”
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Beyond the fact that the last 50 years have been spent empowering women and creating a force field called “Girl Power,” something from which I’ve unwillingly benefited, there has been an equally strong yet diametrically opposed trend toward diminishing boys. When I say “boys,” I mean males from toddlerhood to young adulthood. Race changes the dynamic, drastically, so we can add “white” to the mix.

The vitriol aimed at Brett Kavanaugh wasn’t because women suspected him of rape. It wasn’t because he might cancel their right to terminate unwanted pregnancies. It wasn’t because he liked beer.

If you listened to the questioning from Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar, there was a palpable anger at his prep boy identity, at the fact that he represented the power differential that they might have experienced in their own lives, that he was young and successful and white, and he had a penis. Harris, in particular, seemed to truly despise him and her questioning had the palpable subtext of a woman of color who was going to use her position of authority to tear down a symbol of everything she hated.'