I'm glad this chapter shed a little more light on Arata's situation; people were dunking on him pretty hard after the first chapter but I get the feeling that he's just as tired of going through the motions as Yukako. He can't even hang out with his 1 friend at work without someone making a big deal out of it.
Arata's situation illustrates something feminism knew very well in the 60s (before it got corrupted and rotten) that is: men are also victims of the capitalist-patriarchal social establishment, and suffer because of it as much as women.
Those were the days. In modern times, it's like societies are on a downward spiral of stupidity. You made me remind something I read once about the reactions to the discovery of the polio vaccine.
In the first half of the 20th century, people lived in fear of the incurable paralytic polio disease. By the early 1950s, tens of thousands were infected each year. It hit especially hard the children; one in ten died, the rest ended up horribly crippled. The disease was the terror of families everywhere. On April 12, 1955, researchers at the University of Michigan called a press conference that was broadcast by radio stations to all of America: they announced they had found a polio vaccine that was safe and effective. All across the country, in every town and city, church bells rang out to celebrate the news.
Think about it: churches all across America ringing their bells, not for God or religion, not to call for prayers, but to honor science. Priests using their churches to pay homage to the glory of science. Those were the days, indeed. Today, we count ourselves lucky if churches don't call their flock to fight COVID vaccination as a tool of Satan.