If you’ve never heard of Marty Nemko, I suggest you head over to his site and browse through his articles. He has written some great stuff that ranges from career advice to current events. I particularly liked this featured article titled “Men Don’t Have It Easy Either“. Excerpts and my commentary are below…
True or false
The majority of medical research and outreach has been done on men.
False. Despite the death gap between men and women having grown from one year in 1920 to 5.2 years now, with four widows for every widower(!,) a U.S. General Accounting Office study found that most gender-specific health care research has been done on women. When I searched PubMed, which indexes 3,000 medical journals over the past 60 years, there have been 43 articles on “women’s health” for every one on “men’s health.” Where women have been excluded from studies, it usually was because of one or more of the following: studies were done on prisoners (which are mainly men), men were more willing to volunteer for risky treatments,, or because researchers did not want women of childbearing age to be subjected to experimental drugs meant for adults that could damage a fetus.
Also, the overwhelming majority of gender-specific health outreach has been to women. Although sudden heart attack kills more men and kills them younger, most of the heart-disease public relations campaigns have been aimed at women. And although almost as many men die of prostate cancer, we see a sea of pink ribbons for breast cancer in our supermarkets and advertising campaigns but rarely the ribbon of prostate cancer. (Do you even know what color that is?) There are seven federal agencies for women’s health, none for men.
I would really like to see a study on how much money the plethora of combined breast cancer foundations have acquired in the last few years since the pink blitzkrieg has strafed every avenue of our culture. You can’t buy olive oil without donating to breast cancer. Not that this is necessarily bad on its face, but when we are being bombarded with cries for more attention and funding to women’s health issues it makes you wonder where these resources are going. And he is right about men’s health. When was the last time the HHS has come out with a report on the lack of men’s health programs and statistics on how many men die because of the lack of them.
The vast majority of severe domestic violence is initiated by men.
False. The media mainly reports the misleading police reports, which grossly underestimate the amount of female-initiated domestic violence because men are far less likely to report abuse. One reason: men are embarrassed to say their wife abused them. In contrast, women are considered heroes for reporting their abusing men. In broader population surveys, including a recent definitive one from Harvard, the evidence is unambiguous that women initiate roughly 1/3 of severe domestic violence. A California State University metaanaylsis of 200 studies with an aggregate sample size exceeding 200,000 “demonstrates that women are as or more physically aggressive than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners.” Yet much female-initiated abuse is ignored by the police and shelters overwhelmingly serve only women.
This is an especially eye-opening fact when you consider all of the literature and ad campaigns about the suffering of women everywhere from domestic abuse. I think this point can be proven by personal experience as well as facts. How many times has a wife or girlfriend, at some time in your life, “abused” you either physically or emotionally in a way that would horrify a Lifetime Movie audience if the same thing was done to a woman?
Girls do far better than boys in school.
True. Male school achievement used to exceed female. Today, however, by high school graduation, girls are reading 1.5 grade levels higher than boys, a far greater gap than the tiny edge boys have in math. Boys are eight times as likely to be put on a chemical leash such as Ritalin, nine times as likely to be disciplined, twice as likely to drop out. The situation is grim for minority boys but not good for white boys. The American Council on Education reports that the fastest growing gender gap of any group since 1995 has been in white working-class students, with males particularly hard hit. At the end of high school, 23% of the white sons but only 7% of the daughters of college educated parents scored “below basic.” This means that one in four sons of college-educated parents cannot read a newspaper with understanding.
…
Fifty years ago, when the achievement gap favored boys, massive pro-girl programs were implemented: replace boy-friendly competition with girl-friendly “cooperative learning,” self-esteem programs, science programs, math programs, more female role models in curriculum, special science recruitment programs, and pressure for teachers to call on girls more, boys less. Today, the response to boys’ falling far behind girls is too often for boys to be told to sit still for ever more seatwork, as recess and other physical activities, which used to allow boys to drain energy, are cut. Otherwise, it’s a trip to the principal, a suspension, and/or placement in special education and/or that Ritalin leash.
This one hits me personally. I am an avid reader. Love all kinds of books, from classics to modern thrillers. But up until I was about fourteen, I hated reading. It was boring and tedious. Years later, after I acquainted myself with wonderful stories of Stephen King, Mario Puzo and Dostoevsky did I realize why; my first experiences with deep, meaningful reading (via public school) was Laura Ingalls Wilder, Black Beauty, and Heidi. What eight, nine, or ten-year old boy wants to read about a girl and her horse, a girl out on the plains, or…a girl? None. And I firmly believe that this seed of disdain for reading that was planted so many years ago continues to keep men back from learning the beauty and insight in some of our greatest pieces of literature because nobody has told them that it existed throughout their tenure at public girls-school. My generation has seen the girls get the institutional edge while the boys were being harangued about doing perfectly healthy and normal activities like being hyper and aggressive.
Men comprise 80 percent of completed suicides.
True, yet there are many programs aimed to prevent women from committing suicide, almost none for men.
Another personal fact that can be proven by personal experience: how many suicide and crisis hot-line advertisements feature men? How many women?
Women earn less for the same work than men.
False: For the same work, women earn, on average, the same. According to the book, Why Men Earn More, based on a decade of analysis of government and other statistics, reasons for the “women earn 80 cents on the dollar” figure include that men more often choose careers that are more dangerous (e.g., police and firefighter), uncomfortable (from sewer repairer to crop duster), isolating and difficult (e.g., engineer and programmer) and work longer hours. The average man who says he works full-time works more than six hours a week longer than the average woman who says she works full-time. In addition, men are more likely to work evenings and weekends. For a promotion, more men are willing to move to places that fewer people desire. An offshore oil rig in Montgomery, Alabama, anyone?
Even comparing salaries in the same career tends to be biased against men. For example the Bureau of Labor Statistics lumps together all medical doctors but men are more likely to pursue higher-stress specializations with unpredictable hours such as surgeon whereas women are more likely to be a lower-stress pediatrician, and thus women physician salaries are lower.
…
Too, women are more likely to prioritize work-life balance and to work fewer hours. Many such women claim that’s necessary because their husbands are unwilling to do 50 percent of the childcare and housework. But even Arlie Hochschild, the feminist researcher who has studied “the second shift” for decades, found that in families in which the woman earns more than the man, men do more than 50% of the housework.
The “women only make $.70 to a man’s dollar” is a lie that needs to die a horrible death. I’m sick of hearing this idiotic falsity parroted around while I watch young, urban women get into their brand new SUV’s to leave their beautiful homes and go to their $40K/year office desk job while the maintenance man at where I work uses his last dollar to ride the bus so he can pick up his heart medication that was prescribed after his most recent heart attack.
And I’m willing to bet that even in households where the man earns more than the woman that the housework is split fairly evenly. Leave It To Beaver was a television show, people.
While women’s employment rates remain steady, one in five men ages 25-54 are now unemployed, the highest percentage since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started collecting data in 1948.
True. Between December. 2007 and June, 2009, 78 percent of jobs lost in the United States were held by men. The current recession has been dubbed a hecession.
According to the Dept. of Defense, 99% of U.S. soldier deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been men.True: You might ask, “How could that be? The media and government constantly say, ‘Our men and women fighting in Iraq.’ Media interviews with soldiers are roughly 50/50.” Fact is, only men are allowed to serve in direct combat and only men must register for the draft.
I lumped these two together because I feel that the “Women’s Liberation” movement was about equal rights without equal plights. I can’t believe that society was suckered into believing that we should give women all the same opportunities, but then become responsible for protecting them from the ugly side of it all. Wanna fight? Sign up for the draft. Wanna earn the same pay as the man who works for the same company? Then you have to climb the high tension wires to fix the power lines instead of answering the phone call from the customer. Wanna become part of the working class? Be prepared to have it all taken from you when the economy goes to hell.
If a Martian read the above information, he’d reasonably infer that to be treated this poorly, men must be the inferior sex. And some hard-line feminists indeed believe that, making such assertions as, “Testosterone-poisoned men create all the wars.” Of course, men have also done remarkable good: invented everything from the printing press to Google, the birth control pill to Herceptin, the most effective drug against breast cancer. More average men sweat in foundries to create our steel. They build our buildings, fix our toilets, and make our cars, planes, computers, even the seat you’re sitting in as you read this. The list is endless. Where are the women in such unpleasant jobs? For example, flush your toilet. Do you think more men or more women process the waste? Feel the heat in winter, the air-conditioning in summer, the roof over your head. Who invests, builds, and maintains them to keep you warm and secure? Yet rather than praise men for doing these tasks, we begrudge them any extra dollars (often trivial after taxes) they may earn and cover our front pages for decades with such grossly misleading statistics as “women earn 80 cents on the dollar.”
Imagine you were the mother of a boy. Knowing all the above, how would you feel?
So basically, when the shit hits the fan, remember who will be cleaning it up before you believe the crap about an oppressive patriarchy.
More or Less 