I.

For years, I have been spoiled rotten by a man I’ve never known, a man who has made certain there is a newspaper on my porch every morning, usually right at the door. Now at an age when I appreciate that convenience even more, it seems someone other than my faithful delivery guy is performing that task. For the past couple of months, the paper has been landing farther and farther away. One morning, it never even made it into the yard, lying out on the sidewalk instead. My wife reflected upon the fact that the paper had remained there for us to find; she noted there was a time when it would have been taken, a time – not that long ago — when many more people still read newspapers. Most people who read them still do so in print (according to what I read in the Pew Research Center’s 2016 report on the subject), but even the growth in traffic to newspapers’ websites was not enough to prevent this assessment: “Overall, however, the industry continues to shrink…”

That has been going on for a while. I grew up in a time here in Washington when there were three major papers vying for readers. Two were evening dailies: The Evening Star (the city’s newspaper of note) and The Washington Daily News. The one morning daily had been two, The Washington Post and its rival the Washington Times-Herald, but the former had absorbed the latter and had become The Washington Post and Times Herald; the Post, in its continued nod to the Times-Herald, did so in increasingly diminishing typeface until the name disappeared entirely in 1973. The Star absorbed the Daily News in 1972, but ended its run in 1981 after 128 years. In the decade between 2004 and 2014, the nation saw the loss of 126 daily papers.

Growing up, it was the Post that was delivered to my family’s porch each morning, although it was not unusual in the evening to find a Daily News someone had picked up on the way home from work. The Post in those days was not delivered by grown men driving in from the suburbs in the wee hours. Boys served the paper, boys who periodically came around in the evening, ringing the doorbell and calling out the familiar “Collect for the Post!” and patiently waiting as their customers scrambled to gather the necessary change or told them to come back. My best friend had a Post route in Columbia Heights. I helped him in the dark of one morning just to see what it was like as he served the houses and apartment buildings along his way. I admired his tenacity; it was not something I would have wanted to do.

II.

I don’t recall when I began to take an interest in what newspapers had to offer, but I remember two lessons learned from having done so. One taught me that I could discover information useful to my personal benefit. I learned this in 1967 near the end of 10^th grade, the end of my first year of what was supposed to be a mandatory three years in Junior ROTC. I had played the part of the dutiful member of the squad so well that the platoon leader told me to get corporal stripes for my uniform. To this day, I wonder if he could see the “You-crazy-if-you-think-I’m-doing-that-shit” thought I tried to keep from my face. I never went to get the stripes, and the matter never was raised again. I thought it was ridiculous playing soldiers and resented having to do so. Then, one day, there was an article in the paper explaining that Junior ROTC was – in fact – not mandatory. I learned also that the boys at the two high schools west of Rock Creek Park where most white students attended had been made aware of this while the rest of us had not. The ranks thinned the following year; I never took part again. No one ever could explain why I and others continued to get “Fs” on our report cards for a class we weren’t taking; we just were told not to worry because they wouldn’t count.

The other lesson learned from a paper had occurred a couple of years earlier. It taught me that the adult world operated on a level where the things a 13-year-old thought would be strictly taboo were not. This happened the day I stared in disbelief at an ad for a movie, stunned by the name of one of the film’s characters: Pussy Galore. I understood and appreciated the pun and its vulgarity, but wondered how it was possible that it could appear in a newspaper. That ad for the movie “Goldfinger” began questions about the nebulous boundaries of what grownups found acceptable, leading me to understand that certain proprieties need not always be observed — not quite “anything goes,” but some things.

III.

I have metaphorically travelled all the way around the barn by telling you all of this, as none of this is what I intended to write about. I had in mind something I recently read in the Post that highlighted the petty discrimination women continually face in a myriad of ways – even when it comes to reading the newspaper – and how I as a male have been a beneficiary.

Even though I wouldn’t want to be one, I have great respect for reporters (a profession practiced by my wife’s father). I prefer saying things the easy way, the way adopted by the rest of us to varying degrees. Rather than report, I prefer to opine (as evidenced by five years of blogging). Sometimes, I do that in The Washington Post, the very forum that occasionally drives me to voice an opinion. There are times I’ve read something there and thought, “Aw, hell nah! That shit cain’t slide.” Not wanting to seem like a crazy person writing letter after letter, I usually resist the urge by keeping in mind someone else will much more cogently respond. In those times when that effort fails me, I try to be as rational as possible — so as not to rail – and will whip up a missive to the paper’s editors. In the past decade, the Post has afforded me the courtesy of publishing nearly every letter sent, eight in the past seven years alone (two last year); the one this year was not quite three months ago. To me, this has been a sign of a local paper being responsive to its subscribers.

It was a letter that appeared two weeks ago in the paper’s Saturday “Free For All” section that provided a different perspective. Christine Lawrence, a reader in Bethesda, Maryland, wrote about something she has observed. Here is an excerpt:

“I enjoy reading and writing letters to the editor because they reveal what thoughtful citizens are thinking as opposed to the online comments, which often seem dashed-off and angry. But male writers clearly dominate this section as well. Let’s look at who was published in the letters section in the past five days. June 3: James, Bruce, Robert, Tapio, Hamish and David. June 4: Richard, Patrick, Bradley, James, Peter, Michael and Jon. June 5: Doug, Ray, Robert, Keith, Peter, Henry and Nicholas. June 6: Robert, Michelle (finally!), Thomas, Anders, Paul, Warren, Bob and Chris. June 7: Alex, Herb, Michelle (yay!), Edward, Ted, Paul and Teri (yay!). Each day maybe one woman’s letter is published while five or six men are heard. I am beginning to think I should sign my letters as Chris, rather than Christine, in order to get them published.”

Of course, after reading that, I immediately turned to that day’s “Letters To The Editor.” There is no need to guess what I found: five letters, four by men. Today, two weeks later, I checked again: five letters, four by men. Wow. Is there any way to explain this as being anything other than what it appears? This thing quacks and waddles and should give folk at the Post something to seriously think about. If they can’t show it correlates with the volume of letters by gender, how else can they justify this pattern?

I am now disabused of the notion that I’ve had the luck-of-the-draw on my side, alerted once more to the ways, large and small, that I am served by the phenomenon of male privilege in direct proportion to how it underserves women. One bright side is that – in this particular instance – I and others have been reminded of this by something found in a daily newspaper.