It seems like a lot of people have a real problem with the idea that some things are better for women now than for men. It's unthinkable, ridiculous, not even worth considering. A friend on here a while back told me there's nothing men suffer from 'simply because they are men' and at the time I went quiet because, like everyone else I know, I've been educated to believe that life is worse for women in pretty much every way. It's just a given. That said I know I've really struggled with the way the world is set up and many women I know have done much better than I have - they have more money, more status, more security. The idea that they have less power than I do, and I should act like I have the advantage over them seems like a bizarre thing to do. I just don't. And I know I'm not unusual. I've known plenty of men who have also had a hard time of it.
So, me being me, instead of taking my friend's word for it, I decided to find out whether what he said was really true. It took a while because deep down I also believe that men are supposed to be big and tough and that complaining about our lot is just whingeing. I should man up - pull myself together – grow a pair. As it happens though, I found a few ways in which men are seriously worse off than women.
The first one is that men are more likely to die young than women by every means except childbirth - by accidents, suicide, addiction, crime... That seems like quite a big deal to me. If it were true of women it would be a major plank of the women's rights campaign, and yet somehow, it doesn't seem to matter that much. It's just life.
For a start, men have always been expected to do the more dangerous jobs. Men were always the ones sent down the mines, out to sea, off to war. Somehow the ruling class has convinced us that these jobs are respectable, honourable, admirable, when actually they’re unspeakably horrible. Health and safety and mechanisation have meant that a lot of the old dangerous jobs are gone but still men are the ones operating heavy machinery, working on the roads, on building sites, in warehouses and still getting crushed and mutilated and poisoned and burned. Driving is one of the most dangerous things any of us do and it's mostly a male job. Simply being out in all weathers strimming the verge or collecting the bins is pretty tough and still dominated by men. Despite 100 years of feminism I don’t see many women wanting these jobs (I certainly don’t want one). I've seen a couple of memes poking fun at men who complain about how tough their lives are but the men in the pictures are invariably affluent middle-class men, presumably complaining about the pressures of executive life. I have a feeling that modern progressives simply don't notice the people who do most of the hard graft. Women's work may be menial and tedious but it's rarely life-threatening. Recently there was a tribunal for women working in a shop to get equal pay with the men in the warehouse (which I applaud - working class people deserve all the help they can get). But the two jobs are not the same. In the warehouse we have heavy machinery moving about and heavy goods on tall shelves. The worst the shop workers have to face is an abusive customer, when they call the (usually male) security staff. An exception that's come to prominence recently is the genuine dangers care staff - mostly female - face, nursing Covid patients, but it's unusual. Generally female dominated jobs are not dangerous. Prostitution is another example sometimes cited, with women asking why these women didn't have training for careers, like men, but the male equivalent is not well paid skilled tradesmen - the male equivalent is drug dealers and thieves - men who have no choices in life but to do something illegal. It's important we compare like with like in these debates.
The other huge problem is traditional (or toxic) masculinity which requires young men to prove themselves by doing exciting and dangerous things. In some cases this might be extreme sports or challenging careers, but for the less privileged it means driving too fast, drinking too much, pulling idiotic stunts, and getting into fights - trying to impress both their mates and the girls. The obvious reply to this is that they don't have to do all this stupid stuff - it's their choice, but then so is the endless dieting and worrying about their appearance that women do - making themselves sick with eating disorders and cosmetic surgery. The assumption is that men have more choice than women in this and could simply stop if they wanted to, whereas women are compelled by irresistible social pressures. My 'lived experience' however is that we're subject to the way the world is set up.
This brings me to the next thing which is that men are far less able to deal with their problems because men are just not allowed to talk about how they feel or even think about it, far less ask for help. Mostly we get drunk and make a joke of it. The result is 'self-medication', self-harm and ultimately suicide. Again I suspect the fact that a lot of progressives don't recognise this is because it's essentially a middle-class movement and most of them have a fair bit of education and time to think. Most men don’t have that. One I spoke to told me “There’s plenty of literature out there" as if the lads off the estate know anything about that. It's just not in their culture. It's not part of their lives. They're too busy surviving. And they're the majority - not some tiny irrelevant minority.
Men are twice as likely to be murdered as women and as likely to be the victims of violence. A lot of progressives I've spoken to simply refuse to believe this, but murder is the best recorded crime - almost no murders go unrecorded, and men almost certainly don’t report most violent crime (I certainly didn’t – it would have been their word against mine and the police would probably have told me to learn to stick up for myself). Why do we not care about this? Do we think men are ‘asking for it’? or that we're all as bad as each other, so it's a kind of consensual violence? They speak of us 'getting into a fight' when normally it's a bunch of hard lads randomly attacking some poor soft boy. Never have I ever 'got into a fight' but I've been attacked a few times.
Men are also more likely to be homeless. It’s true, women are more likely to be living in poverty but that's more single mums who receive some sort of accommodation and benefits. Men are more likely to be destitute – on the street, addicted, turning to crime to survive.
It feels like we're inured to male injury and death. Every action movie, crime drama, western, and super hero movie there are men being shot and killed, beaten up or tortured, all over the place. It's fun. Bloodied men limp away with a flinch and wry smile. Hollywood is strewn with the bodies of dead men, but if you want to make a film that really disturbs people, have female victims (a serial killer most likely), where you can really feel what's going on. People campaign against violence against women and girls but they are far less likely to be attacked by a stranger in the street than a man. Men should be scared to go out at night but of course we're not supposed to show fear, whereas women are raised to be scared of all sorts of things - snakes and spiders, mice and men, and to be free to express their fear with screams and running away. It’s even considered attractive. Any man who expresses his fear is likely to be ridiculed or excluded. You pretty quickly learn to act like you're not scared of anything, with predictable results.
At the start of the Ukraine war a story emerged of a woman raped by Russians in front of her children. It was atrocious of course, but the fact that her husband who had been trying to defend them, had been killed hardly warranted a mention. The mother will go on to try to help her traumatised children. The man simply won't be there at all.
It's almost like we still believe that rape is a fate worse than death. Suggesting there's some sort of comparison between sexual assault against women and the killing of men is considered deeply offensive because crimes against women simply are considered more serious than crimes against men. For most people that goes without saying. Men dying or being injured just doesn't matter all that much. I know two men who have permanent brain damage from being kicked in the head. People probably assumed they were asking for it. It's women and children first. Around the time Sarah Everard was killed I remember a young man called Bill Henham was savagely beaten and pushed out of a window at a party in Brighton and died, and I think maybe I heard two mentions on national news. I noted at least two other men were killed about that time and got a mention in the local press. Sarah Everard's death provoked a national campaign against violence against women and girls. Does anyone even know who Bill Henham was?
There are also homophobic and racist attacks to consider - black men, gay men and transwomen are far more likely to be attacked than their female counterparts. A big story that appeared in all the papers a while back was of a pair of lesbians being attacked on the tube but it was a big story precisely because it's so rare. Women simply aren't attacked by strangers in public places anything like as often as men are. The violent crime stats for women are almost entirely about domestic and sexual violence in private places, by someone they know.
Finally, men tend to have weaker immune systems than women, so when they were talking about groups that were more likely to die of Covid, they mentioned certain ethnic groups but ignored the fact that men are more likely to die than women. Women being more likely to get long Covid though (because they have stronger immune systems) has been portrayed as yet another way women are disadvantaged. I have long covid as it happens and it's a pain, but I'd rather that than death.
None of this means I'm against women's rights, or that I think women are oppressing men, or even that men are overall worse off than women. Sometimes it seems people believe that conceding that men suffer in any way at all somehow implies that women don't. Maybe they think it devalues women's suffering - because men's suffering doesn't really matter that means women's suffering doesn't either. We all know the myriad ways women suffer in this world. Feminism has done an incredibly good job of alerting us to the many ways women are oppressed. We’ve been steeped in women's grievances since we were teenagers, and I don't really feel I should have to repeat all that here. There's an immense literature about how women's lives fall short and I don't feel the need to add to it, so I'm taking it as read. Nobody doubts women have had a bad time of it in all sorts of ways. This series of essays is written to tackle the assumption that men don't suffer in any significant way. My point is not that women don’t suffer, but that we all suffer, and almost all of us are powerless to change things. We are all oppressed by the way the world is set up. As always what I'm saying is that we're all in trouble and we should be getting together to change this - not bickering over who is more oppressed.
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