Section 2: Issues of life, death, well-being, and safety

1. Homelessness

Overview: Men consistently make up a majority of the homeless population. They're especially common among the long-term homeless, the homeless living on the street (instead of a shelter) [1], and the homeless deaths. Despite this, we're actually less eager to support homeless men [2].

Approximately 70 per cent of Canada’s homeless are male. Dion Oxford of Toronto’s Salvation Army Gateway shelter for men tells us it is harder to raise funds for men’s shelters. “Single, middle-aged homeless men are simply not sexy for the funder,” he says.

This is likely related to male disposability. This can also be seen in an article from the British newspaper The Independent on the “growing problem” of homelessess among women [3]. The author calls it “distressing” that 1/4 homeless people in shelters and 1/10 homeless people on the street are women.

Examples/evidence: One study conducted in New York City and Philadelphia found that those who are chronically homeless are overwhelmingly male (and black). 82.3% were male in New York City, and 71.1% were male in Philadelphia [4]. UK homeless charity St Mungo's Broadway found that men made up 87% of rough sleepers in London (those on the street instead of in shelters) [5]. Another UK homeless charity provides a break-down of homeless deaths by age and gender [6].

Images: http://i.imgur.com/ZaBwbCh.png

For more, compare the number of instances of "John Doe" to "Jane Doe" in the Toronto Homeless Memorial (it's 135 to 13) [7].

One survey of homeless people in the United States found that homeless men were less likely to have access to health insurance and government benefits [8].

[1] http://bit.ly/1wQy1zt (coursepage for Sociology 498G at the University of Maryland)

[2] http://bit.ly/105BHF7 (Globe and Mail article “Should universities be opening men’s centres?”)

[3] http://ind.pn/1csgMuD (The Independent article “Homeless and broken: how women are catching up with men”)

[4] http://1.usa.gov/1E4g0lv (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration document "Current Statistics on the Prevalence and Characteristics of People Experiencing Homelessness in the United States")

[5] http://bit.ly/1EY5Ve4 (St Mungo's Broadway “Street to Home Bulletin 2013/14” report)

[6] http://bit.ly/1wd4hkF (document on mortality among homeless people from Crisis, a UK charity for the homeless)

[7] http://bit.ly/13TY55G (Toronto Homeless Memorial's list of deaths from homelessness)

[8] http://bit.ly/1GGYLhO (Healing Hands article "Single Males: The Homeless Majority")

2. Homicide, robbery, and physical assault

Overview: Although women are more often the victims of sexual assault, men are more often the victims of homicide, robbery, and the more injurious types of physical assault. Some dismiss this by noting that men are also more likely to commit these crimes, but a murder victim doesn't receive any solace from his murderer being the same gender as him. (This argument is also often applied to dismiss higher victimization rates among other groups like racial minorities: “that's just blacks killing other blacks, who cares”.)

Examples/evidence: The following table includes numbers on the gender of perpetrators and victims of homicide (using statistics from the United States [1]) and assault (using statistics from Norway on the more serious incidents requiring a visit to an urban accident and emergency department [2]).

Genders Homicide (USA) Assault (Norway)
Male → Male 65.3% 74%
Male → Female 22.7% 21%
Female → Male 9.6% 2%
Female → Female 2.4% 4%

Gender patterns in different types of violence can be seen in the 2008 data from Canada. Women are 1.2× more likely than men to be the victims of common assault, which is the less serious and less injurious form of physical assault. Men on the other hand are more often the victims of assault with a weapon or causing bodily harm (1.9× more likely), aggravated assault (defined as being wounded, maimed, disfigured, or having your life endangered: 3.6× more likely), robbery (1.9× more likely), and homicide or attempted murder (3.5× more likely) [4].

An even bigger disparity is visible in the Chicago Tribune's page documenting victims of shootings in the city. Of the 100 shootings in a one-month period in early 2015 (January 20th to February 16th), 93 had male victims---and the other 7 were listed as "unknown gender" [4].

Some studies look specifically at rates of violence victimization by strangers. In Canada in 2008, men were 80% of all reported attacks by strangers [5]. In the United States in 2010, men were twice as likely to suffer violence from strangers [6].

[1] http://bit.ly/14Scr7r (“Homicide trends in the U.S.” from U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics)

[2] http://1.usa.gov/14SpK81 (“Gender and physical violence” by Steen and Hunskaar)

[3] http://bit.ly/1BeU619 (“Gender Differences in Police-reported Violent Crime in Canada, 2008” from Statistics Canada)

[4] https://archive.is/WZvvK

(Chicago Tribune page "Chicago shooting victims", last updated 2015/2/19)

[5] https://archive.is/qB16e

("SNAPSHOT: Male Victims of Violent Crime" from National Victims of Crime Awareness Week)

[6] http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/vvcs9310.pdf ("Violent Victimization Committed by Strangers, 1993-2010" from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics)

3. Drug addiction and alcoholism

Overview: Women are by no means immune, but statistics do show that addiction affects men disproportionately. This should raise questions about what's pushing men to substance abuse. Are they dealing with traumatic events, harmful attitudes and expectations, or a lack of social support?

Examples/evidence: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 17% of men and 8% of women will meet criteria for alcohol dependence (which is a higher standard than simply binge-drinking) at some point in their lives. They also note that men “consistently have higher rates of alcohol-related deaths and hospitalizations than women” [1]. The 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health in the United States found that rates of current illicit drug use to be 11.6% for men and 6.9% for women [2], and the 2009 New Jersey Household Survey on Drug Use and Health found that “[m]ales (14%) were significantly more likely than females (5%) to abuse or be dependent on alcohol, drugs or both alcohol and drugs in the past year” [3].

[1] http://1.usa.gov/1guimo6 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “Fact Sheets - Excessive Alcohol Use and Risks to Men's Health”)

[2] http://1.usa.gov/1y5QAqF (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration “Results from the 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: Summary of National Findings”)

[3] http://bit.ly/1C0Qca7 (New Jersey Department of Human Services “2009 New Jersey Household Survey on Drug Use and Health”)

4. Suicide

Overview: Like drug/alcohol addiction, there are many women who commit suicide but the fact is that men still kill themselves at disproportionately high rates.

One study reports that although rates of fatal suicide behaviour are higher among men, rates of nonfatal suicide behaviour are higher among women. It says that women have higher rates of suicidal thoughts while there was no gender difference in suicide planning or suicide attempts [1]. The implications of this are not clear, but it is relevant to mention. Do men choose different, more deadly methods? Are they more "certain" or hopeless when engaging in suicidal behaviours, resulting in higher fatality rates? Either way, the end result is more dead men than dead women.

Examples/evidence: Suicide is the single biggest cause of death for men aged 20-45 in England/Wales [2]. In Canada in 2011, the rate of suicide among men was three times higher than among women [3]. In the United States in 2012, men were almost four times more likely to kill themselves. The graph below provides historical data on suicide in the United States [4].

Images: http://i.imgur.com/ikXWibu.png

Middle-aged men and poor men are especially at risk, according to the Department of Health in England [5]. Unfortunately, many people's response to the issue of male suicide is to be more critical than supportive [6].

The Samaritans report says most people have no idea what they can do to combat male suicide. Too many they say, simply “ 'upbraid' men for being 'resistant to help-seeking' or 'not talking about their feelings.' ”

Mental-health specialists especially, says the Samaritans report, “need to move from ‘blaming men for not being like women,’ ” to designing projects and public services that can help them.

[1] https://archive.is/ExTKL

("Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviors Among Adults Aged ≥18 Years

---

United States, 2008-2009" from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

[2] https://archive.is/qwkgF

("More Statistics, Yet Still No Strategy..." from CALM: Campaign Against Living Miserably)

[3] http://bit.ly/1u1g1mf and http://bit.ly/1BVOxVx (“Suicides and suicide rate, by sex and by age group” from Statistics Canada)

[4] http://bit.ly/1rKWJ4R (from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, which cites the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Data & Statistics Fatal Injury Report for 2012)

[5] https://archive.is/vjgx1

(The Guardian article "Suicide numbers rise sharply, especially among middle-aged men")

[6] https://archive.is/jXt36

(Vancouver Sun article "Men and suicide: The silent epidemic")

5. Life expectancy gap

Overview: Men's health is lagging behind women's health according to many metrics. The most important of these is life expectancy, where men are losing out on an average of 4-5 years of life compared to women. Part of the gap (1-2 years) seems to be biological, but there are cultural/social factors (which we can fix) as well.

Examples/evidence: My two main sources are an article “Mars vs. Venus: The gender gap in health” from a 2010 edition of the Harvard Men's Health Watch [1] and the series of papers by Barbara Blatt Kalben called Why Men Die Younger: Causes of Mortality Differences by Sex for the Society of Actuaries [2].

One piece of evidence for why only part of the gap is biological is that it has actually grown over the past 100 years. The table is from the United States, and the chart is from Canada (measured from the age of 7 to take infant mortality out of the picture).
Year Females Males Gender gap
1900 48.3 46.3 2 years
1950 71.1 65.6 5.5 years
2000 79.7 74.3 5.4 years
2007 80.4 75.3 5.1 years

Images: http://i.imgur.com/zieTb8R.png

The German-Austrian Cloister Study provides interesting insight onto how much of the life expectancy gap is biological. Monks and nuns have similar lifestyles, and so their life expectancies are less influenced by the behavioural/social factors that exist in the general population. As it turns out, nuns live just one year longer than monks [3].

The Harvard Men's Health Watch article provides various non-biological reasons for the gap.

1. Men experience more work stress/hostility, which can increase the risk of hypertension, heart attack, and stroke.

2. Men have less social support. Social support has been shown to protect against the common cold, depression, heart attacks, and strokes.

3. Men are more likely to smoke, drink, or do drugs.

4. Men are less likely to go to the doctor and make use of health-care (and actually less likely to have access to it). From the article: "Women are more likely than men to have health insurance and a regular source of health care. According to a major survey conducted by the Commonwealth Fund, three times as many men as women had not seen a doctor in the previous year ...".

Although that article does not mention it, differences in awareness, attention, and funding between men's health and women's health could also be part of the gap [4].

There are at least 7 new agencies and departments devoted solely to women while there is not one office for men or male specific ailments. Men’s health advocates long have pushed for an Office of Men’s Health to act as a companion to the Office on Women’s Health, established in 1991. Instead of rectifying that disparity, the new health care law intensified it.

[1] http://bit.ly/1vvKc7x or https://archive.is/3roDD

(“Mars vs. Venus: The gender gap in health” from the Harvard Men's Health Watch)

[2] http://bit.ly/1lDnXeg (Why Men Die Younger: Causes of Mortality Differences by Sex from the Society of Actuaries)

[3] http://bit.ly/1vBZeMo ("Causes of Male Excess Mortality: Insights from Cloistered Populations" by Marc Luy), http://www.klosterstudie.de/ (German-Austrian Cloister Study homepage")

[4] https://archive.is/OSCMy

(The Daily Caller article “Does Obamacare discriminate against men?”)

6. Workplace injury and death

Overview: Men are quite a bit more likely than women to get injured at work, and they're overwhelmingly more likely to die at work.

Examples/evidence: In the United Kingdom in 2010/11, the rate of major injuries was almost twice as high for men as it was for women (130.5 compared to 68.8 per 100,000 workers) [1]. The difference in workplace deaths is even more stark. A study of workplace deaths in Canada from 1993 to 2005 found that the number of male deaths in 2005 alone was more than double the total number female deaths in the whole 22 year period from 1993 to 2005 [2]. In the United States in 2006, men were 54% of the workforce but 92% of workplace deaths [2].

[1] https://archive.is/uj0nC

(“Reported injuries to employees by age and gender” from the UK Health and Safety Executive)

[2] http://www.csls.ca/reports/csls2006-04.PDF ("Five Deaths a Day: Workplace Fatalities in Canada, 1993-2005" by Andrew Sharpe and Jill Hardt for the Centre for the Study of Living Standards)

[3] http://1.usa.gov/1pvu0Ch (“Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries” from the Bureau of Labor Statistics)

7. Hate crimes targeting gay men

Overview: Hate crimes based on sexual orientation disproportionately target homosexual men, with homosexual women being the victims noticeably less often.

Examples/evidence: Here's the break-down of sexual orientation motivated hate crimes in the United States in 2012 [1]:

• Anti-male homosexual bias — 54.6%
• Anti-homosexual bias (i.e. gender-neutral homophobia) — 28.0%
• Anti-female homosexual bias — 12.3%
• Anti-bisexual bias — 3.1%
• Anti-heterosexual bias — 2.0%

In Canada in the same year, 80% of hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation targeted men [2]. Among all hate crimes, those based on sexual orientation were the most likely to involve assault and physical injuries.

The targeting of gay men (over lesbian women) for hate crimes is not unexpected, considering the history of state repression of homosexuality targeting gay men. In the United Kingdom, the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 (also known as "An Act to make further provision for the Protection of Women and Girls, the suppression of brothels, and other purposes") recriminalized male homosexuality as "gross indecency". Until decriminalization in 1967, 50,000 gay men were convicted, including author Oscar Wilde (sentenced to two years of hard labour in 1895) and mathematician Alan Turing (who accepted chemical castration as an alternative to prison in 1952; he killed himself two years later). Sir David Maxwell Fyfe (Home Secretary 1951-54) talked of a "new drive against male vice" to "rid England of this plague" [3] [4] [5].

A similar targeting of gay men was found in Nazi Germany, although with even more severe consequences. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "[t]he vast majority of homosexual victims were males; lesbians were not subjected to systematic persecution". Many survivors have testified that in concentration camps, homosexuals were treated especially harshly (compared to other inmate groups), not only by guards but also other inmates. Victims of the homosexual holocaust were widely refused both recognition and reparations after the war. Some even remained imprisoned by the post-war government [6] [7].

Interestingly, according to the 2012 data from Canada, men are more likely than women to be the victims of all types of hate crimes, not just those related to sexual orientation (although those had the highest disparity at 80% male victims). The other four categories were race/ethnicity, religion, other, and unknown, and they ranged from 61% to 72% male victims [8].

[1] https://archive.is/uFuaI

(FBI 2012 Hate Crime Statistics page “Incidents and Offenses”)

[2] https://archive.is/d62fo

(Statistics Canada page “Police-reported hate crime in Canada, 2012”)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Law_Amendment_Act_1885

(Wikipedia page "Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885")

[4] http://archive.is/a2CQx

(The Independent article "Gay men call for equity following Alan Turing pardon")

[5] http://archive.is/IvGnv

(The Daily Beast article "The Castration of Alan Turing, Britain’s Code-Breaking WWII Hero")

[6] http://archive.is/OHMEA

(United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Holocaust Encyclopedia page "Persecution of Homosexuals")

[7] http://archive.is/0g9Y

(United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Holocaust Encyclopedia page "Lesbians and the Third Reich")

[8] http://archive.is/EMpR1

(Statistics Canada page "Characteristics of hate crime victims, by motivation, Canada, 2012")

8. Sexual assault in prison

Overview: The fact that men make up such a large majority of the prison population means that the prevalence of rape and sexual assault in prison (and our culture's attitude of indifference) is especially a concern for men.

Examples/evidence: Different studies report quite different numbers on sexual assault rates in prison. Here are three studies that provide a range of numbers, starting with the lowest.

1. Finding: 1.91% of prisoners have experienced a completed sexual assault over their lifetime [1].
2. Finding: 4.0% of prison inmates (and 3.2% of jail inmates) reported one or more incidents of sexual victimization (either by another inmate or by faculty staff) in the previous 12 months [2].
3. Finding: 21% of inmates had experienced "pressured or forced sexual contact" since being incarcerated in their state [3].

The third study explains why findings differ so much. First, male inmates under-report sexual assault, so non-anonymous surveys give lower numbers. Second, different definitions of sexual assault change the numbers substantially. Completed rapes are much rarer than genital fondling and failed attempts at intercourse.

[1] http://1.usa.gov/17spDkI ("Prison Rape: A Critical Review of the Literature" by Gerald G. Gaes and Andrew L. Goldberg)

[2] http://1.usa.gov/1nHaS1N ("Sexual Victimization in Prisons and Jails Reported by Inmates, 2011–12" from the Bureau of Justice Statistics)

[3] http://bit.ly/17sGrbg ("Sexual Coercion Rates in Seven Midwestern Prison Facilities for Men" by Cindy Struckman-Johnson and David Struckman-Johnson)

9. Gendercide

Overview: Gendercide (gender-specific mass killing) often targets men, although the gender of the victims generally receives less attention than when women experience gendercide. Adam Jones, genocide researcher and political science professor, points out that targeting men can seem so “natural” that “almost no media commentator bothers to mention it” [1]. In the opening essay of his compilation Gendercide and Genocide, Jones argues that the group most consistently targeted for mass killings throughout history has been non-combatant men between the ages of 15 and 55, as they are typically seen as the largest danger to the conquering force [2].

Examples/evidence: In what the former Secretary General of the United Nations Kofi Annan called the worst crime on European soil since the Second World War, over 8,000 unarmed civilians [3] were massacred in the small mountain town of Srebrenica in Bosnia in 1995. Two characteristics united the victims: they were Muslim, and they were male [4].

Although Srebrenica had been designated a U.N. “safe area” three months earlier, “[t]housands of men and boys as young as 10 were rounded up and murdered ... Serbian TV footage shows woman and children being separated from the men and put on buses” [5]. The busses were searched to make sure men weren't on them [6]. According to the BBC, 23,000 women and children were allowed to leave while men aged 12-77 were taken "for interrogation"---two days later, reports of massacres started to emerge [7]. The “five-day orgy of slaughter” included 60 truckloads of male refugees being "taken from Srebrenica to execution sites where they were bound, blindfolded, and shot with automatic rifles", and other victims being “hunted down like dogs and slaughtered” and pushed into mass graves with industrial bulldozers. It was described by a war-crimes tribunal as “truly scenes from hell written on the darkest pages of human history” [5].

David Benatar also gives the Rwandan genocide as an example of gendercide. In The Second Sexism (chapter 4), he explains that Hutus "were determined to seek out and murder Tutsi boys … They examined very young infants, even new-borns, to see if they were boys or girls. Little boys were executed on the spot."

[1] http://bit.ly/179RhTW (Adam Jones' article “Terminal Sexism: Men, women and war in ex-Yugoslavia”)

[2] http://adamjones.freeservers.com/g_and_g.htm (Gendercide and Genocide book page)

[3] http://nyti.ms/1xG5lwY (New York Times article “Mladic Arrives in The Hague”)

[4] http://bit.ly/179Ro1H (Adam Jones' article “Pity the Innocent Men”)

[5] http://cnn.it/1BuQbuE (CNN article “Srebrenica: 'A triumph of evil'”)

[6] http://bit.ly/165HfD1 (document from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia)

[7] https://archive.is/gLVGY
(BBC article "Srebrenica massacre verdicts upheld at war crimes tribunal")

From the original on Reddit. Reproduced here to ensure it still exists when Reddit goes down.

The idea that "men have it great" is often treated as self-evident or undeniable, but in reality the condition of men in our society is just not that simple. Men are doing better in some areas, but they're doing worse in some very important areas too. For example, men:

• are a large majority of the homeless population, drug/alcohol addicts, and suicide deaths.

• die 4-5 years earlier than women, on average.

• are significantly more likely to be the victims of homicide, robbery, injurious types of physical (non-sexual) assault, police killings, and hate crimes (e.g. based on sexuality or race).

• are more likely to be seen as abusive in relationships, even for the exact same actions.

• receive longer prison/jail sentences (and are more likely to be sentenced to incarceration in the first place) than women, when controlling for legally relevant factors (crime and criminal history).

Many men's issues interact with issues for racial minorities. The result is that minority men are doing the worst of any race/gender combination in numerous areas (including homelessness, life expectancy, and incarceration).

Introduction

This document is intended to be a comprehensive and reliable resource detailing the major gender issues and negative attitudes facing men in the Western world. The goal is not to compare men's and women's issues and decide who has it worse, but to show that men's issues are serious enough to warrant being more than an afterthought.

We're also not interested in addressing questions of ideology or movements here (feminism, the men's rights movement, MGTOW, the red pill, etc.). Those questions are important because they involve how to solve the problems facing men, but for now we're only interested in establishing what the problems are.

This project was started in January 2015 by /u/dakru, with input and suggestions from many others since then. From August 2018 it was maintained and updated by /u/PM_ME_UR_PC_SPECS, until in August 2021 it was taken over by u/Oncefa2 and u/genkernels. Its home is on /r/rbomi, but it's also shared with /r/mensrights. For more information on men's issues beyond this page, consider the following books:

1. The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys (by David Benatar: professor of philosophy and head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Cape Town in Cape Town, South Africa)

2. The Myth of Male Power: Why Men are the Disposable Sex (by Warren Farrell: activist, men's movement icon, former member of the board of directors of the National Organization for Women in New York City, and former professor)

3. Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream - and Why It Matters (by Helen Smith: psychologist specializing in forensic issues and men's issues)

4. Media and Male Identity: The Making and Remaking of Men (by J.R. Macnamara, adjunct professor in public communication at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia)

5. Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men (by Roy F. Baumeister: professor of psychology at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, USA)

6. Self-Made Man: One Woman's Year Disguised as a Man (by Norah Vincent: writer who has had columns on Salon.com, The Advocate, the Los Angeles Times, and the Village Voice)

7. Spreading Misandry, Legalizing Misandry, & Sanctifying Misandry (by Katherine Young and Paul Nathanson: both professors of religious studies at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada)

8. Gendercide and Genocide (edited by Adam Jones: professor of political science at University of British Columbia Okanagan in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada)

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Section 1: Male disposability

Overview: Male disposability is our society's tendency to have a greater concern for the well-being of women than the well-being of men. Simply put, women's suffering is considered more tragic and worthy of action than men's suffering. It produces a stronger emotional response in us. Having greater compassion for women is so deeply-ingrained in our culture that it seems natural and unremarkable. Not only does male disposability cause many issues for men, it also leaves people less likely to care about men's issues.

Male disposability has many parallels in the realms of class, race, and nationality (e.g. citizens of non-Western countries are often seen/treated as more disposable than Westerners).

Examples/evidence: There has been enormous public outcry over the issue of "missing and murdered Aboriginal women" in Canada [1]. Aboriginal people do get murdered and go missing at disproportionate rates, but it's the men, not the women, who are victimized more. Aboriginal men are murdered more than twice as often in Canada [2], and 4-5 times more of them have gone missing in the Northwest Territories and the province of Ontario [3]. Despite this, it is the women who are the focus of the public outcry.

A second example is Western coverage of Boko Haram, the Nigerian Islamist group. It received widespread attention for its kidnapping of 200+ schoolgirls. The gender of the victims was a major focus of the coverage.

Images: http://i.imgur.com/W844OpX.jpg, http://i.imgur.com/EuQfiVS.jpg, http://i.imgur.com/ZA7o7Yd.jpg, http://i.imgur.com/f10K7m0.jpg

The numerous other incidents where the group spared the women/girls and targeted the men/boys for murder (often brutally, including burning alive) received less attention in general, and much less focus on the gender of the victims [4].

A third example comes from the research of Adam Jones, genocide researcher and political science professor at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. In Western coverage of the Kosovo War, he found that male victims are seen as "unworthy" and marginalized as victims in comparison to "worthy" victims like women, children, and the elderly [5].

A fourth example comes from Portland, Oregon. Although the homeless population there is 64% male [6], the mayor has expressed that one of his priorities is to "house all homeless women by the end of the year". He commented that "when I see a homeless woman on the street, or in a doorway, my heart is touched, and I know Portlanders' hearts are touched". Another individual in the newscast asks "do we want any women sleeping on the street when the weather gets bad and it's cold?" [7]. These quotes illustrate male disposability because although men are doing worse, women garner more sympathy.

One statement from former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is especially interesting in light of the concept of male disposability. According to her, “[w]omen have always been the primary victims of war” because they “lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat” and because they are “are often left with the responsibility, alone, of raising the children” [8]. The idea that men aren't even the primary victims of their own deaths seems to be a particularly insensitive application of male disposability.

A phenomenon likely linked to male disposability (and a similar attitude to racial minorities) is missing white woman syndrome: "when a young white girl goes missing in America, it immediately becomes a national story" [9].

TVTropes identifies male disposability in the media with a trope called "Men Are the Expendable Gender": "A female character can lose that some or even all of the audience's sympathy if they are manipulative, somehow 'immoral', ugly, or just plain evil. Male characters on the other hand have to earn the audience's sympathy by entertaining or interesting us with their their actions. If they don't, we either don't care what happens to them or want them to suffer for failing to entertain/interest us." [10]

In his book The Second Sexism (chapter 3), David Benatar mentions the fact that men are overwhelmingly the ones sent to war as an example of male disposability. He quotes a politician in the U.S. House of Representatives who spoke in favour of exempting/excluding women from combat roles in the U.S. military: “We do not want our women killed”. This attitude, he says, “partly explains why societies have been prepared to send males to war but have been extremely reluctant to send females”.

Our society's particular concern for the well-being of women can be seen in the common practice of news media and human rights groups mentioning the total number of victims of an event or tragedy and specifically singling out the number of women or girls. The BBC reported on successful efforts to save children who had been forcibly recruited for a militia in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: “[the United Nations Mission] said that since the beginning of the year, 163 children, including 22 girls, have been removed from the militia” [11]. The International Business Times reports on ISIS executions: "The Islamic State has executed 1,362 civilians, including 9 children and 19 women, since it declared a Caliphate last year in the regions under its control, a Syrian human rights monitor said on Tuesday." [12] The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported on a 17-month period of airstrikes that killed (in its words) "7902 civilians, including 1121 women, and 1679 children". The title of the the article was "More than 3500 children and women killed during 17 months of aerial bombardment" [13].

The fact that women's suffering is seen as more tragic and worthy of action is also evident in the statistics showing that crimes with women as victims receive harsher sentences than crimes with men as victims (including a greater use of the death penalty), after controlling for legally relevant factors. More detail can be found in the section on the criminal justice system.

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[1] Including from Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau http://bit.ly/Yy0oZO, NDP leader Thomas Mulcair http://bit.ly/1tWlLOz, and former Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney http://bit.ly/1uV3jpL.

[2] http://on.thestar.com/1nnaQ29 (Toronto Star article “Aboriginal men murdered at higher rate than aboriginal women”)

[3] https://archive.is/3CiRr (CBC article "Missing aboriginal men need more attention, too: N.W.T. mother"), http://www.opp.ca/media/mumip/files/report-mumip.pdf ("Missing and Unsolved Murdered Indigenous People" from the Ontario Provincial Police)

[4] http://bit.ly/1uISTeE (Mediaite article “Why Did Kidnapping Girls, but Not Burning Boys Alive, Wake Media Up to Boko Haram?”), http://bit.ly/1vnXK3H (Reddit post documenting incidents)

[5] http://bit.ly/1uvyonw (Adam Jones' article “Effacing the Male: Gender, Misrepresentation, and Exclusion in the Kosovo War”)

[6] https://www.portlandoregon.gov/phb/article/532833 ("2015 Point-in-Time Count of Homelessness in Portland/Gresham/Multnomah County, Oregon")

[7] https://archive.is/4DIXa (Huffington Post article "Portland, Oregon, Mayor Wants To House All Homeless Women By End Of Year")

[8] https://archive.is/TB5RC (Hillary Clinton's speech at the First Ladies' Conference on Domestic Violence in El Salvador, 1998)

[9] https://archive.is/mRIJL (The Huffington Post article "How Trayvon Martin Became a Missing White Girl")

[10] https://archive.is/O2ljL ("Men Are the Expendable Gender" on TV Tropes)

[11] http://bbc.in/1AqRhd5 (BBC article “DR Congo unrest: Children freed from militia, says UN”)

[12] https://archive.is/EaWCB (IBTimes article "Isis has Beheaded, Stoned and Shot 1,362 Civilians, including 9 Children: Report")

[13] http://archive.is/jOMgd (Syrian Observatory for Human Rights page "More than 3500 children and women killed during 17 months of aerial bombardment")

But my main objection is that Barbie is not really a film about Barbie at all. It’s one hour and 54 minutes of extended misandry, dressed up with a few fun dance routines and one or two (granted fairly decent) jokes.

It’s a deeply anti-man movie, an extension of all that TikTok feminism that paints any form of masculinity — other than the most anodyne — as toxic and predatory, and frames women’s liberation not as a movement based on achieving equality between the sexes but as a cultural revenge vehicle designed to write men out of the story altogether.

Every male character is either an idiot, a bigot or a sad, rather pathetic loser. If the roles were reversed, and a male director made a film about how all women were hysterical, neurotic, gold-digging witches, it would be denounced — quite rightly — as deeply offensive and sexist.

It is this kind of popular media that is infecting the minds of the young. On the surface it celebrates women, but it does so in a very shallow and toxic way. And it reinforces the misandry that has been spreading through Western society for the past 50 years.

The difference in earnings between full-time working women and men is now the narrowest on record, according to an Axios analysis of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which was published earlier this week.

Full-time working women had median weekly earnings of $1,001 last quarter, about 84% of the $1,181 median for men. It’s the smallest the gap has been since 1979, the first year for which earnings data is available. That year, women’s median earnings were 62% of men’s.

I think we should try to close that gap by getting more women into higher-earning jobs. Maybe that will help close the much wider Occupational Fatality Gap: over 90% of workplace deaths are male, especially in the logging and fishing industry. And since society cares more about women, getting women into those dangerous jobs will help improve safety for all!

Original by u/Oncefa2 on Reddit. Still very relevant today:

This is something I noticed in a thread where men were asked what it meant to them to be a man.

There was only one response, which could probably be summed up as, "meh".

And I honestly think this is how a lot of men feel.

You are yourself first, but also you're a man, if you'll even admit to it.

Women on the other hand seem to be proud of their gender and actively celebrate their womanhood. You see this in popular media and on places liked Twitter. And it even shows up in psychological association tests. Women are associated with traits like "good" and "valuable" whereas men are associated with traits like "bad" and "worthless".

Men are never told that they can be proud of who they are. And many are made to apologize just for being alive. Instead of celebrating men, we attack and demonize them on a daily basis. And I think this difference in treatment and identity has an overall negative effect on their mental health.

Society thinks we are useless, and it is time for a change!

Across the life span — from infancy to the teen years, midlife and old age — boys and men are more likely to die than girls and women.

A silent crisis in men’s health is shortening the life spans of fathers, husbands, brothers and sons.

For years, the conventional wisdom has been that a lack of sex-specific health research mainly hurts women and gender minorities. While those concerns are real, a closer look at longevity data tells a more complicated story.

Across the life span — from infancy to the teen years, midlife and old age — the risk of death at every age is higher for boys and men than for girls and women.

The result is a growing longevity gap between men and women. In the United States, life expectancy in 2021 was 79.1 years for women and 73.2 years for men. That 5.9-year difference is the largest gap in a quarter-century. (The data aren’t parsed to include differences among nonbinary and trans people.)

“Men are advantaged in every aspect of our society, yet we have worse health outcomes for most of the things that will kill you,” said Derek Griffith, director of Georgetown University’s Center for Men’s Health Equity in the Racial Justice Institute. “We tend not to prioritize men’s health, but it needs unique attention, and it has implications for the rest of the family. It means other members of the family, including women and children, also suffer.”

The longevity gap between men and women is a global phenomenon, although sex differences and data on the ages of greatest risk vary around the world and are influenced by cultural norms, record keeping and geopolitical factors such as war, climate change and poverty.

But data looking at health risks for boys and men in the United States paint a stark picture.

• Men are at a greater risk of dying from covid-19 than women, a gap that cannot be explained by rates of infection or preexisting conditions. The age-adjusted death rate for covid was 140 deaths per 100,000 for males and 87.7 per 100,000 for females.
• More men die of diabetes than women. The death rates for men are 31.2 per 100,000 people vs. 19.5 per 100,000 for women.
• The cancer mortality rate is higher among men — 189.5 per 100,000 — compared with 135.7 per 100,000 for women. Black men have the highest cancer death rate at 227.3 per 100,000. Among Black women, the cancer mortality rate is 149 per 100,000.
• Death rates for boys and teens ages 10 to 19 (44.5 per 100,000) far outpace that for girls (21.3 per 100,000). Even among infants, the mortality rate is higher for boys (5.87 per 1,000 live births) vs. girls (4.95 per 1,000).
• Men die by suicide nearly four times more often than women, based on 2020 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rate of suicide is highest in middle-aged White men, but teen boys also face a high risk.
• In 2020, 72 percent of all motor vehicle crash death victims were male. Men also accounted for 71 percent of pedestrian deaths, 87 percent of bicyclist deaths and 92 percent of motorcyclist deaths.

Advocates for more research into men’s health say the goal isn’t to steal resources from women, girls and gender minorities.

“Some people think health care is a zero sum gain and one dollar to men’s health is taking something away from women,” said Ronald Henry, president and co-founder of the Men’s Health Network, an advocacy group. “That’s wrong. We are fully supportive of women’s health efforts and improving quality of life for women.”

Derek Griffith is the director of Georgetown University’s Center for Men’s Health Equity in the Racial Justice Institute. He is also a health management and policy professor at Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. (Lisa Helfert/Courtesy Derek Griffith)

But by viewing men as the privileged default, health experts are ignoring important sex differences that could illuminate health issues across gender and minority groups.

For instance, for years the widely held belief in medical circles was that women used too many health-care resources compared to men. As a result, men were viewed as the standard for seeking health care, while women were often dismissed as hysterical or “anxious” when they sought care.

“We used to think women were overutilizing health care, and men were doing it correctly,” Griffith said. “What we realized was that women were doing it better, mostly for preventive care, and men were actually underutilizing health care.”

Explaining the longevity gap

The reasons behind the longevity gap aren’t fully understood, but the global nature of the disparity suggests that biology probably plays a strong role.

For instance, high levels of testosterone, which can weaken the immune response, may be a factor in why men, and male mammals in general, are more vulnerable to parasitic infections. Estrogen may explain why women have lower rates of heart disease throughout life — and why the gap narrows after women reach menopause. (Even though estrogen appears to be protective in women, studies in the 1970s showed that when estrogen was given to men, instead of being protective, it caused double the rate of heart attacks as those in a placebo group.)

Cultural biases around masculinity that teach boys and men to hide their feelings and not complain also can influence men’s health.

“Depression in men is quite deceptive,” said Marianne J. Legato, a physician and founder of the Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine in New York. “Men are socially programmed to not complain. Suicide is often unexpected as an early end to a man’s life compared to that of a woman.”

Cultural expectations to remain stoic can also delay men’s care. For instance, although diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and hypertension are common in men and women, men often wait longer to seek care and the illnesses are diagnosed at later stages, leading to more damage and poorer outcomes.

“It’s an interesting conundrum and in many ways it’s not well understood,” said cardiologist Steven Nissen, chief academic officer for the Cleveland Clinic. “Men need to pay close attention to cardiovascular risk factors. Treating risk factors early can mitigate a lot of the risk.”

Men also are known to engage in more risky behaviors, such as drug and alcohol use, smoking and reckless driving. While the reasons behind these trends aren’t fully understood, behavioral risks are also a reason men’s health doesn’t get studied, Griffith said.

“It’s hard to convince people that men’s health is an issue if we think it’s just because men don’t do what they’re supposed to do,” he said.

Fewer doctor visits

An oft-cited concern is that men are also less likely to visit the doctor. Although boys and girls visit the pediatrician at the same rate, the trend changes in adulthood and medical visits by men decline. CDC data show that the physician visit rate in 2018 among females was almost 40 percent higher — 3.08 visits per woman vs. 2.24 per man.

One reason is that women regularly visit the gynecologist in their reproductive years. “There is no similar pathway for men,” Nissen said.

But even when visits for pregnancy are excluded, research suggests that women still are twice as likely as men to schedule regular annual exams and use preventive services.

Doctors say that men are most likely to visit the doctor because of a sports injury or for the “Viagra” visit — when they seek treatment for erectile dysfunction. As a result, sports medicine physicians and urologists are encouraged to use those visits to check blood pressure, cholesterol and other indicators of overall health.

“Stamina and sexual health are two of the top things that men think about,” said Howard LeWine, an internal medicine physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and chief medical editor at Harvard Health Publishing. “When you’re 20, 30 and a man, you really don’t think about health. The idea of going to a doctor to prevent cancer or heart disease — I don’t think it’s in the mind of many men until something has happened to them.”

The irony is that men for years have been overrepresented in medical research, often at the expense of women, according to a seminal 1985 report that prompted more government investment in women’s health research.

“Men who were overrepresented in medical studies before are still underrepresented in terms of clinical care,” said Harvey Simon, an internal medicine physician and founder of Harvard Men’s Health Watch, a newsletter devoted to men’s health.

Lack of support

Men’s health advocates say one of the biggest factors is a lack of infrastructure to support research specifically focused on men’s health.

For years, the Men’s Health Network has lobbied for the creation of an Office of Men’s Health, similar to the Office of Women’s Health in Health and Human Services Department. Proposed legislation, however, has consistently failed to win support.

While some health systems claim to have departments focused on men’s health, the care is often focused on urologic and prostate health rather than cardiac care, mental health or other issues that afflict men at high rates.

The topic of men’s health simply hasn’t caught on as something that advocates, corporate sponsors and politicians want to get behind. While the pink ribbon has been elevated to iconic status to signal breast cancer awareness, nothing in men’s health has achieved the same level of attention.

“There is an empathy gap,” Henry said. “There are people who shrug and say, ‘Yes, men die younger. That’s the way the world is.’ It doesn’t need to be that way. If we devote attention and resources, we can change the outcomes for men.”

by Tara Parker-Pope and Caitlin Gilbert

There’s a common perception that friendships among young men are superficial – but this isn’t necessarily true.

Research shows younger men are engaging in close male friendships and expressing their feelings like never before. They are adept at negotiating the rules of masculinity. They will open up to others in safe contexts – although not all men have these safe spaces.

We believe creating more of these safe zones for young men is key. For example, it seems that by encouraging men to do activities side by side, or that have a “purpose” (such as volunteering or attending men’s sheds to create things), male bonding and important conversations naturally emerge.

Although there are concerns that some online activities and forums can be dangerous, anonymous online discussion forums can help men connect and express themselves about the things that matter without fear of judgement.

Please read the whole article.

As I psychologist, I’m concerned about mental health, especially the mental health of men and boys because it’s been overlooked for so long. Because there was so little interest in how much the negative discourse around masculinity impacts boys, my colleagues and I ran a survey. We found that around 85% of respondents thought the term ‘toxic masculinity’ is insulting, and probably harmful to boys.

My latest research has just been published. It assessed the views of over 4000 men in the UK and Germany, and found that thinking masculinity is bad for your behaviour is linked to having worse mental wellbeing. [... And] positive views of masculinity are linked to better mental wellbeing.

This is why we oppose the usage of the term toxic masculinity and any negative generalizations of men as a gender.

As egalitarians, we want all people to be treated with equal consideration. There should be no favorites. All people, be they men, women, or children, deserve the same human rights, and the same amount of support.

As it comes to gender, which is our focus here, there are still many problems to be addressed. But we call upon all, paraphrasing a famous actress: you're either an egalitarian, or you're a sexist.

What do you think?

I just stepped down as moderator from all five of the subreddits I used to moderate over on Reddit. I just can't ethically justify continued activity on Reddit, and especially free volunteer labour for an openly greedy company that is engaged in scummy behaviour, forcing mods to open protesting communities or be demoted.

So my online activism for boys and men is now focused here and on Mastodon. And I am welcoming everyone coming over from Reddit, especially from LeftWingMaleAdvocates, the sub I put in the majority of my time and effort as a mod.

Let's build something good here, as we did previously on Reddit. It appears we have a wider reach here, so let's debate in good faith and with civil manners.

Here, in this magazine (i.e. community or subreddit in Kbin-speak) we wish to discuss and spread awareness of various issues that disproportionately affect males.

We believe men are not being well-served by either side of the mainstream political spectrum. We oppose the right wing's exploitation of men's issues as a wedge to recruit men to inegalitarian traditional values. But we also oppose feminist attempts to deny male issues, or shoehorn them into a biased ideology that blames "male privilege" and guilt-trips men.

We have no objection to the genuinely egalitarian aspects of feminism, but we will criticize feminist ideology wherever it is inegalitarian and/or untruthful, especially now that it holds institutional power. Too often feminism has promoted a one-sided "equality", dismantling male advantages while exploiting, reinforcing, preserving, and downplaying female advantages - particularly in cases involving alleged abuse.

In practice this means that most of us are politically homeless. The natural home for male advocacy should be the left wing, which professes to be explicitly egalitarian. But in modern practice, men's issues are habitually ignored, denied, or even opposed.

We seek to address male issues without falling into the traps of an impossible return to the past or a disastrous sexism. Men and women have equal value, and we need to work together for a better future.

Notes for a talk at ICMI with the following title: Feminism: Not “progressive”. Not “egalitarian”. Not “liberal”. Not “left-wing”.

1. Feminism is not “progressive”: It’s regressive; it is based on misandry, sexist discrimination, hate & bias; it suppresses science (esp. on domestic violence, on female violence and on criminology in general); it is conspiracist; it asserts the existence of a non-existent entity “Patriarchy”; it is ultra-conservative, in its treating women as helpless infants. Infantilism about women is conservative, not progressive.

2. Feminism is not “egalitarian”: It demands, and achieves, preferential treatment for a privileged group (women). By definition, this is anti-egalitarian.

3. Feminism is not “liberal”: To the contrary, it is socially conservative—women are infants, without agency; it is illiberal & authoritarian; it demands increasing state power; it uses the police and institutional power as a tool of social control; it is moralistic & Puritan. More or less by definition, these are central principle of state-enforced illiberalism, social illiberalism and social conservatism.

4. Feminism is not “left-wing”: It has no interest in economic fairness (esp. those at the bottom of society); it is openly anti-working-class. Marxism and socialism are, by definition, left-wing because their primary concern is with economic exploitation, wage slavery, alienation of the worker, co-erced theft of their labour, and so on. Feminism is, in no way, “left-wing”. Feminism is a form of Identity Politics. This, in general, is an anti-left-wing position. Furthermore, it is a form of Identity Politics closely aligned with the State, policing, punishment and incarceration (so-called carceral feminism). Again, these are not “left-wing”. They have been traditionally right-wing positions for centuries.

The ICMI20 talk is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZQf1JDa28Y&list=PLOXfnai0-o0I8BtOpmjbn_3FGYBHiV64S