I had two semesters with a radical feminist instructor, the first being a sociology course, and the second being a women's studies course. It was "rape culture" this, "male privilege" that, which, as we all know, does not exist. I can't think of a single legal privilege we have (not "the privilege to be taken seriously in the office!") that women don't, but I can think of many that women have that we don't, which you all know - the right to opt out of parenthood, the right to take a man's children from him and drain him financially and make him pay for the house the neighbor who fucked her and caused the divorce moved into, etc., but there is an atrocious lack of discussion of one thing when these feminists talk about our "privilege": War.

I will tell you a short story, a story that millions of men, either directly or by proxy, share with me because of the "privilege" we've had historically to be thrown in front of bullets by our government, only to die on the streets of homelessness and PTSD.

My grandfather was a 19 year old recently graduated high school student when he was drafted to Vietnam. I don't know where he was stationed, for how long, or what he did or saw, but I am absolutely certain of one thing: he witnessed the gruesome deaths of lots of men.

In the 14 years that I knew him before his death, he spoke no more than three sentences to me. Glued to the television or the computer, 24/7, never speaking, never smiling, never laughing. He was not living, he was just existing, in a hellscape created by the war, waiting for it to end. All the while, the government made no attempt to accomodate this man, who once was a prospective, bright young man, reduced to nothing by the hands of our putrid, disgusting, bloodthirsty government.

Whatever he saw had completely compromised him entirely. He was nothing anymore. He had survived the war, but the war in his mind never ended.

In turn, my grandfather never had a relationship with my father, and, subsequently, my father never had a relationship with me, until after my mother passed away 3 years ago when I was 16. He had never known what that kind of relationship was like, and he could not convet it to me. The war had not only ruined my grandfather, it'd passed its atrocities down two generations.

To any feminist possibly reading this, I ask you: what privilege do I have in this situation? Where is my male privilege? You tell me I take everything I have for granted. I'll tell you what privilege you have that us men don't. You have the privilege to have not been cursed by war. You may have experienced it indirectly, through the men in your lives, but you know nothing of the atrocities man has suffered at the hands of our government's direct sabotage of our lives.

You have the privilege to have a grandmother who wasn't thrown into the bloody abyss, forced to murder, and shipped back home with nothing. You have the privilege to have a healthy relationship with your mothers and grandmothers, because war is not in the picture for you as it is for men.

A great irony that we're deeply afflicted by something so sinisterly cruel, something that, in one way or another, made life prosperous for these women, and yet the "wage gap" is the worst thing imaginable in their heads.

"Us and them, and after all, we're only ordinary men."