A while back, a friend online told me what he thought the difference is. “Ok, men suffer” he said, “but not because they are men.”
Me being me of course, I didn't take his word for it - I checked. The first fact that changed my view is that men get murdered twice as often as women. This seems like quite a big deal. When there's such a huge disparity it's hard to argue that it's not somehow 'because they're men'. Further - men are as likely to be the victims of male violence as women, usually by strangers in public (women mostly by men they know in private) and yet somehow because it's male-on-male violence it doesn't really count. "He got into a fight" they say, as if it’s somehow consensual violence, but that's not how it is. I think there's an assumption that men are all more or less equally able to handle themselves but I suspect people who believe that have been watching too much TV – too many bar-fights and superheroes. I was a soft sensitive lad. I’d never been in a fight with anyone, so when I was attacked (as we all were at one time or another) my reac-tion was to just take it because if I fought back or tried to escape things would have undoubtedly got worse. I didn’t report it for exactly the same reason women don’t re-port it – because it was their word against mine and I didn’t want reprisals.
I see no reason to believe that violence against men is somehow less serious than violence against women. There is no reason to assume that men are less traumatised by violence than women, even if we don’t talk about it as much. I believe all attacks against anyone should be taken equally seriously. That doesn’t seem very controversial to me. Women however seem to want sex crimes and domestic violence to be taken more seriously than any other sort of crime, presumably because they are the crimes that mostly affect women. For some women it seems sexual assault still is a fate worse than death.
Near the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine there was a story of a woman raped in front of her children by Russian soldiers. This was undoubtedly terrible but the fact that the child’s father was shot outside, presumably for protecting his family, was hardly mentioned. The fact that she will be there to help her children recover from their terrible experience and he won’t doesn’t seem to count.
Then I discovered that men are just generally more likely to die young than women by every means except childbirth. (All this is from ONS data). If any of these facts were true of women they'd be major planks of the women's rights campaign, but as it's men it doesn't seem to matter that much. Men traditionally get the dangerous jobs (heavy industry, building, heavy machinery, and of course, going to war), so accidents at work are a major contributor. Then young men feel they have to prove themselves by taking stupid risks (drinking too much, driving too fast, extreme sports), is another. Then men not being allowed to talk about their problems or ask for help leads to ‘self-medication’ (addiction), ‘self-harm’ (suicide), crime, homelessness and the rest. Basically, masculinity is a huge problem for men, and the cultural conditioning is every bit as powerful as for women. Women complain about the portrayal of female victims in crime drama, while men are tortured, beaten and killed in vast numbers in the movies without apparently upsetting anyone at all. We all grow up believing men’s deaths don’t mean anything very much.
One reason women don’t want to hear this is because they also think men should be tough and manly and not make a fuss. Men who are hurt and sensitive have ‘fragile egos’. It’s a strange confluence of feminism and toxic masculinity. Women also think that men talking about their issues somehow takes away from the women’s cause – as if it's a zero-sum-game. So it’s essential to only talk about women’s issues – any dissent is seen as anti-women, anti-feminist, and possibly misogynist. Any other point of view is mansplaining or hijacking the conversation.
No comments:
Post a Comment