Adams is the cartoonist who created Dilbert. He also appears to love controversy, perhaps due to the clicks it gives him. What he appears not to love is women, except in the sense of fried steak dinners which really should be something men can steal whenever they feel peckish. So I wasn't going to write about his most recent post on the topic of men the lions and women the steak dinners, sigh, and Jill already did a good job on all this last week. But it's too much fun to avoid and Adams has already achieved his goal of irritating and insulting people all over the place.
Strictly speaking, Adams' women are zebras and his men lions:
If a lion and a zebra show up at the same watering hole, and the lion kills the zebra, whose fault is that? Maybe you say the lion is at fault for doing the killing. Maybe you say the zebra should have chosen a safer watering hole. But in the end, you probably conclude that both animals acted according to their natures, so no one is to blame. However, if this is your local zoo, you might have some questions about who put the lions with the zebras in the same habitat.This is the metaphor Adams rides on. That lions eat zebras and don't mate with them is no serious problem for him. The metaphor is just applied to men and women:
Now consider human males. No doubt you have noticed an alarming trend in the news. Powerful men have been behaving badly, e.g. tweeting, raping, cheating, and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world. The current view of such things is that the men are to blame for their own bad behavior. That seems right. Obviously we shouldn’t blame the victims. I think we all agree on that point. Blame and shame are society’s tools for keeping things under control.The zebras are setting all the rules! Poor lions cannot eat and ravage as they would like, even though that is their basic nature. Men are predators, women are prey.
Adams then predicts that the society will use chemical castration of men in the future, to protect those zebras, and force everyone to take some other chemical to be nice and cuddly. We are gonna live in a zebra world!
Yeah, it's a pretty dismal view of men, as creatures for whom violence in sex is natural and almost unavoidable without chemical castration. It's also a view of the world familiar from some MRA sites where women supposedly rule every single thing. How that view can be supported is always been a mystery to me, but Adams appears to agree with that view.
Finally, it's a very odd view of how people actually live. Lions marry zebras, fairly often! Lions have zebra children and love them! Lions and zebras are often friends! Even the mothers of lions are zebras. None of that appears to matter to Adams. That's because the initial metaphor is wrong.
Though a zebra tattoo all over the face could be fun.