Meghan Daum

Do We Give the Patriarchy More Power Than It Really Has?

We should be looking down on misogynists, not paying them attention they don’t deserve

For several years in my twenties I shared a rambling, roach-infested but otherwise quite desirable apartment in New York City near Columbia University. There were three people in residence at any given time, and though we were usually all women there were also a handful of male roommates. Periodically someone would move out and the remaining roommate and I would advertise for a replacement by stapling fliers onto telephone poles around the neighborhood. Competition was tough — the bedroom most often up for grabs rented for less than $500 — and we often set aside a day during which candidates would file in for interviews like actors on a casting call.

There was one applicant in particular I’ll never forget. The year was 1995 or so, and the remaining roommate and I were both in graduate school and working any number of side hustles to pay the rent. I was registered with a number of temp agencies and routinely blew off my campus job to do secretarial work in midtown offices, which paid twice as much. We probably interviewed a dozen candidates that day, most of them students, or struggling artists, or people in entry level jobs; people a lot like us. One man who came was different, though. Balding and slightly stoop-shouldered, he was probably in his thirties, but my roommate and I perceived him as dodderingly old. Eager to sell himself, he had a proposition for us.

“How about you girls do the cooking if I pay for the food?” he asked.

My roommate and I were afraid to even glance in the other’s direction lest we make eye contact and collapse into fits of laughter.

Suffice it to say we were not offended. We were in fact worried about offending him. Was this because we were too blind to our own oppression to fully register his chauvinism? Hardly. It was because his chauvinism utterly disempowered him. He stood before us as a pathetic creature, a human-shaped dust bunny being swept, before our very eyes, into the trash bin of history. This had nothing to do, by the way, with being an adult in his thirties and needing to live with roommates (there is…