Biden Will Be a Disaster for Boys and Men

Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Biden said:

What I'm most proud of in my entire career is the Violence Against Women Act. It showed we can change people's lives, but the change is always one person at a time. There are many more laws and attitudes that need changing so women are treated with equal opportunities at work, in the classroom, and in our health care system.

As I've documented in a number of previous posts and articles (To see them, click on the Men's Issues and Men's Studies labels in the tag cloud in the right margin of this blog,) each of those statements is unfair to men and boys:

1. A wealth of studies make clear that roughly half of serious domestic violence is initiated by women. Biden's Violence Against Women Act specifically excludes violence against men.

2. Women, on average, are treated at least equally to men in the workplace. For example, the oft-cited statistic that women are paid less than men is terribly misleading. Here's just one way: Full-time-working men work 4 to 10 hours longer per week than "full-time working" women, yet the studies, almost all of which are sponsored by feminist organizations or conducted by women's studies professors, don't acknowledge this*, and the media, which is diligent about vetting studies that draw pro-male conclusions, are somehow unwilling to vet pro-woman findings. But Biden wants to make the workplace even more anti-male.

Appropriately, the media more carefully vets a study on the effects of a drug if it is funded by the drug's manufacturer. It more carefully examines a tobacco study's findings if funded by the tobacco industry. Yet in the case of gender-related studies, the media seems to accept uncritically the findings generated by women's advocates.

3. Boys are treated unfairly in today's schools: Competition is replaced with so-called cooperative learning, books of male heroism and adventure are replaced with stories of heroines and connection. Recess is increasingly replaced by yet another round of phonics, just one example of how boys--more active, on average than girls--are forced to sit still for ever more hours at a time, for more than a decade. And if they can't, they're often put on a chemical leash: Ritalin. Boys drop out of high school and commit suicide at much higher rate and attend and graduate from college at far lower rates. But Biden wants to make schools even more biased against boys.

4. Men live 5.3 years shorter than women and live their last decade in worse health, yet the vast majority of gender-specific health care research and outreach over the last 50 years, has been done on women. We, for example, see a sea of pink ribbons for breast cancer yet none for sudden heart attack, which kills many more men, much younger. And Biden wants to make our health care even more biased against men.

I believe Biden will accelerate the tidal wave that is drowning men.

Sigh.