Peggy McIntosh, a homely woman at any age, is famous for her essay “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” which urged white people to divest themselves of their allegedly unearned—and apparently imperceptible—privileges ASAP lest they suffer the hell-pangs of eternal racial guilt. In the same misguided spirit of that essay, I would like to suggest that rather than enjoying unbridled and unchallenged privileges, modern males are laden with several distinct disadvantages that we carry around in our invisible scrotums like granite stones weighing down a stretched-out wineskin. Hence, “The Invisible Nutsack.”
‘Tis a nutsack that weighs so heavily upon our fortunes, we tend to die much younger than you do. Even in this allegedly racist society, black women have a longer life expectancy than white men. While male NFL players are forced to wear pink cleats to fight breast cancer, men quietly die in larger numbers from prostate cancer. But perhaps as the saying goes, men die before women do because they want to.
