Pity the declining male in an age of expanding female empowerment!
True, he has only himself to blame. For centuries, millennia, man lorded over woman, subjecting her to every indignity, reducing her to servitude, denying her full membership in the community of human beings. Now the shoe is on the other foot, or on the way there. It serves men right, women will say. Fair enough — but will women prove as obnoxious in their ascendancy as men were in theirs?
The early signs are not encouraging, says the women's weekly Josei Seven. "Are you guilty of 'reverse power harassment?' " it asks its readers. When the term "power harassment" was coined in Japan in 2002, it was a new description of an old situation, a boss' misuse of workplace authority to bully subordinates into fawning obedience, helpless despair or sexual compliancy. Not always but often, the boss was male and the subordinate female. But "reverse power harassment" — the torment inflicted by female bosses (there are more of them than ever before, though notoriously few by world standards) on male underlings — is, as a mass phenomenon, unprecedented.