Dear Readers,
Here is the next chapter for you! Again, a million thanks to Bry1977 for all his efforts in checking these over for me. I really appreciate it.
~NaughtyPaladin
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Chapter 3
(Karen)
"Oh my fucking god, Karen!" Katie groaned. "This is fucking rediculous."
"I'm serious!" I protested.
"So am I!" Katie snapped. "Did you forget everything we learned in college the moment you graduated? Weren't you sitting right beside me in Professor Tallin's class? Don't you remember everything we learned? Who caused all the income inequality?"
"Men." I repeated hollowly.
"Who are responsible for the overwhelming number of violent crimes?" Katie reiterated the lines our professor had repeated months ago.
"Men." I parroted the proscribed answer. It had always been the answer. Was something wrong? Who was at fault? Men.
"And you'd do well to remember it," Katie gloated. "Gosh, you got a job in HR at that Fortune 500 company, right? Well, if I were you, I'd keep my mouth shut with this freaking MRA shit."
MRA. Men's Rights Activists. It was a term that I'd thrown around too. "MRA". Pick-me". "Trad". There were countless names I'd thrown around, and now... they were pointed right back at me.
"What the hell happened to you on your road trip?" Katie criticized. "You left a smart, sharp, independent woman, and now you're what? A whiny 'Pick-Me'? Did you find some guy on the road and you're trying to win him over or something? Fuck."
"No! No... that's not." I tried to explain, "I just saw some things and learned some things and I think we've been mis-"
"What? You saw some paradise where men aren't raping women? Where women don't earn three-quarters of the same as men?" Katie countered with a snap. "I'm not listening to this. You need to get your shit together. I'm going to dinner with my mom."
And with that Katie walked out the door, closing it loudly in frustration.
I sighed. How could she be so blind? Her mom was a perfect example of what I was trying to talk about! Her mom had married her dad who had been a successful small business owner, then had been together for seven years, and then her mom had divorced her dad, taken the house he had owned before they married, to a car he had bought her, took half of his business, and was pretty set for life, when her job as a hair stylist didn't earn her NEARLY enough to support the lifestyle she lived.
And what had happened to her dad? Well, he was slowly recovering. He had tried to buy out his wife, since she was intent on ruining him, and she'd wrung him dry to the point that when the first economic struggle had happened, his formerly successful business had folded. He was now renting a small apartment and starting a new business, but if he was lucky, he'd get back to where he was when his wife had ruined him when it was time for him to retire, if he could at all.
I sat back disappointed. That wasn't the worst result of my attempts to convince my roommate that we'd been had. It was just so frustrating. Yeah the statistics that she'd thrown at me were the same I'd been marked correct for answering on tests in college, but that's only because it was the answer the professors wanted us to believe.
The wage gap myth was just that, a myth. If I took a few numbers without context, yeah it looked bad, but it took me like 20 minutes to find the problem with the statistics. It was without context. In similar roles, the pay gap was non-existent, if anything, women were paid more.
And yes, men committed the majority of the violent crimes... if you only counted the violent crimes that men committed. And crimes by women were underreported and under prosecuted, leading to a nice statistic that feminist could wave around like a trophy. For example, the threshold on the amount of domestic violence required for a prosecution against a man was far lower than that for women. The only place that was overturned was in lesbian couples and domestic violence rates in lesbian households were sky high.
Then there were the things that you had to find people like Pearl and a few ShoeOnHead videos on Youtube to get a good start on finding information on. But quoting a youtuber who claimed women were too emotional to vote and a libertarian who seemed to flip-flop like a fish on whether she was a genius or a sellout (depending on the day and who you asked) did little to give credibility.
However, their sources were solid. Men were not okay. There were the Hikkomori in Japan, men who had been so burned by women that they withdrew entirely, giving up on happiness in society since all they could look forward to was being used and abused by women. Incels, involuntary celibates, were mocked by modern feminists, with no thought as to why they existed. I never had thought about these things before my time with my friend, as I thought of him.
I sighed.
My friend. It was a strange way to think about him. Had he knocked me out, taken me to a sex dungeon and had his way with me for a month? ...yes. But I was sure it was more than that. If he was just looking for a sex toy, why release me at all? He'd had me for two months. I'd looked it up and a kidnapping victim not found within 72 hours had a 70% chance of never being found. After 2 months, the odds were so slim it was obscene. He could have kept me in his dungeon for the rest of my life... but he didn't. He even made sure to return me with enough time to have a couple of days to pull things together before my job started.
Speaking of which, I had to head to work.
My mind churned during my drive to work. Which passed far too quickly, and I had to start working.
It had been... what, two weeks? Three? It didn't matter to me. I was going through the motions, and doing the training, and did the work, my brain was elsewhere.
Work was another problem. HR dealt with conflict, hiring and protecting the company. In our company, white men (so most of our applicants and employees) were the last picks. If anyone other than a white man made an accusation against a white man, the odds of them getting fired were ten times higher than anyone else. If white men accused each other, the odds were only double that of anyone else getting fired.
I sat at my desk. Looking through my training documentation, I couldn't help but see how our society could easily be blamed for making a poor man like my friend.