Male Issues

At the Women's March

Men aren’t doing well here in the 21st century. Male life expectancy has always been lower than that of females by about five years but lately, it is declining further. Researchers cite what they call “deaths of despair” in non-college-educated white men aged 45-54. “The mortality rate for that group… increased by a half percent each year from 1999 to 2013,” according to NPR, mostly because of suicide, drugs, and alcohol, yet progressives insist men should renounce their “white male privilege.” It would appear that white men are feeling anything but privileged.

Fifty years ago, 60% of those with bachelor’s degrees were men. Today the reverse is true. Boys are behind girls in primary and secondary schools as well and according to a 2002 60 Minutes report they’ve been falling behind for a long time. Increasingly, boys simply don’t like school. For many parents, it’s a fight to get their sons to school every morning.

During my teaching career, it was clear that the culture of most public school classrooms suited girls much more than boys, many of whom found it confining and restrictive. They needed more active, hands-on activities such as a vocational school environment would provide. Unfortunately, those were reserved for high school boys only — by which time many had developed profoundly negative feelings about school and themselves that were very hard to penetrate.

Men who do go to college might be considered part of a “rape culture,” especially white men. Ask the Duke Lacrosse team. Ask the University of Virginia’s Phi Kappa Psi fraternity about “rape culture.” With no evidence, and only on the word of a single woman in each case, two large universities made these young men’s lives hell because both institutions denied the men any presumption of innocence and automatically assumed the worst. The same phenomenon led to the Kavanaugh Hearings debacle.

At the Women's March

This is not to deny that a lot of men behave abominably toward women and always have. Such men have little or no control over their sexual urges and don’t think they need to either, no matter who is hurt by their actions. Relatively recent laws against sexual harassment were much needed and overdue, but presumption of innocence and due process must be enforced at all times.

Last week’s news included articles on “toxic masculinity” and a Gillette commercial titled: “Is This The Best A Man Can Get?” Several conservative pundits objected but I saw little problem with it. It dramatized examples of men and boys bullying others and disrespecting women, but also of good men speaking up and acting to intervene.

Conspicuous by its absence in any of this was the plague of pornography to which so many men and boys have become addicted, and which contributes enormously to the dehumanization of women. That scourge was never mentioned.

At the March For Life

Last weekend there were two women’s marches in Washington. Friday saw the 44th March for Life. It was attended by a hundred thousand or more conservative women and a few men marching against abortion. Saturday it was the 3rd annual Women’s March with liberal women and many themes: Mostly it was a march against President Trump because the 1st march occurred the day after his inauguration. Second to that was a pro-abortion theme. Then there were climate change, black lives matter, and an anti-male theme. One sign called for the extinction of old white men. 

At the Women's March

Numbers were down at the Women’s March after a controversy over anti-Semitism — especially that of Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam. One of the March’s organizers, Tamika Mallory, has a close association with Farrakhan and refused to denounce his Anti-Semitic statements. Ironically, it was Farrakhan who organized the Million Man March which drew more than 400,000 in 2005 and pushed themes of black unity, personal responsibility, and respect for black women — all good things it would seem. Anti-semitic remarks by Women’s March organizer Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian Muslim, drove down numbers as well.

At the Women's March

Meanwhile, $4.4 million in taxpayer money funded an American Psychological Association study that purports to define “traditional masculinity” and especially what it sees as negative aspects of it. Psychologists from Clark University and other institutions contributed to the "First-Ever Guidelines for Practice with Men and Boys," which includes, for example, a "Male Role Norms Inventory-Short Form” by former APA President Ronald Levant — an analysis of how much “toxic masculinity” men have as determined by questions like: “Do you think men should be macho, or do you lean more to the metrosexual?” That is the highlighted question on his web site.

At the Women's March

Levant discounts biological differences between men and women, believing masculinity is entirely a social construct. I suspect that when men learn more about the APA’s new guidelines, even fewer will seek counseling from guys like Levant. They’d rather kill themselves.