How Much to Sacrifice for Love?

My PsychologyToday.com article today consists of the text of my "children's picture book," Venus and Iris.

It invites thoughts about these questions:

• How much we should sacrifice for love?
• Should men be expected to sacrifice more than women?
• Does lookism affect how much we're willing to do for others?

Are Men Treated Fairly Relative to Their Merit?

Are men treated fairly relative to their merit? My article in PsychologyToday.com today makes the case that they are not.

In Defense of Men: a woman's perspective

THIS article, In Defense of Men, lends a woman's perspective to the issue.

It's NOT a Man's World, and Hasn't Been for a Long Time

F or a book she's writing, Former New York Times career columnist, Marci Alboher, asked me about the differences between male and female career changers.

I think you'll find my response instructive, not just about career changing, but about why I deeply believe that "It's still a man's world" is an utter canard.

Here is my response to her:

Of course, any generalizations across an entire sex will have many exceptions. That disclaimer made, here is what I have observed over the 3,800 career coaching clients I've worked with over the past 25 years:

Many men today are scared. They feel it's women's era. For example, the unemployment rate is 25% higher for men than for women, and the media and colleges disproportionately present men as inferior to women. Those are just a couple of reasons why fewer men than women try to change careers. They feel they're lucky to have what they have, even if it doesn't feel great.

Here's an even more prevalent reason why fewer men than women try to change careers. Despite societal changes in expected gender roles, many men still feel--perhaps encouraged or manipulated by their wife--to remain the primary or sole breadwinner. So they believe that the risk of making a radical career change, especially to follow their (unlikely to be remunerative) passion, is too risky to their family's financial security. So they stay put. They usually rationalize, "I'll follow my passion when the kids go off to college, when I retire, etc."

But in our economy, which is so fragile and unlikely to turn around for the foreseeable future, and with talk about cutting Social Security for future recipients, many of these men may never afford to retire.

Except for the top few percent of earners (rich executives, doctors, etc) most men will have to work on that non-passion-inducing job until they drop, which is 5.2 years sooner than women--There are 4+ widows for every widower. For so many men within the middle and working class, Death of a Salesman, isn't a play, it's reality.

Marci then asked for more on male career changers. Here was my response:

1. Most men feel they must make their career change FAST. As mentioned, they feel the need to bring home the money. His wife may contribute little or no income but expects that paycheck to keep coming, unreduced. (Remember, women do 85% of the consumer spending.) If a man's attempt to make a career change forces him to cut back on how hard or how long he's working on his current job, he may fear that risks his losing his job or of a promotion and the additional money he feels pressure to get. Such men feel they can't afford to leave their job until they have another source of good income. So they work hard at making the career change for a month or two. But if, after a month or two, there aren't signs that their career change efforts will pay off, scared of the loss of income, they usually give up.

2. More men than women look down on networking. They view "networkers" as people who are trying to substitute a smile for substance, people who do favors for others only so they can get something bigger in return. Such men feel they're more worthy if they put their time into working and into developing their skills rather than in networking. That's one reason why, for example, more men listen to a self-help book on their iPod as they jog rather than, as more women do, jogging with a friend or networking target. My doggie Einstein and I walk around a three-mile lake every day. I notice that when men are in pairs walking/jogging, they're more likely than women to be talking about work. The women much more often talk about friends, clothes, vacation, etc.

On average, men spend less time networking than do women unless absolutely necessary, for example, when trying to change careers. Unfortunately, by then, it's usually too late: For a career changer's networking to pay off, those networking relationships usually need to be deepened over months if not years. That's another reason why male career changers have such a hard time of it.

3. There are tremendous barriers to men setting up men's networking groups. Perhaps the biggest impediment is that they'd be attacked as sexist and pressured, with media support, to shut down. But for reasons beyond the scope of this email, women are not only allowed to set up women's networking groups so without reprisal, they're encouraged to.

4. As I wrote, far fewer men than women allow themselves to even consider a "dream" career that would be low-paying, for example, writer, actor, musician, artist, etc. Following their dream is too unlikely to allow them to keep bringing home that big-enough paycheck consistently. So most men suppress their dreams until retirement, a retirement that is unlikely to ever come. What often happens is they die, leaving enough money to their wife that the wife can, if she hasn't already, pursue her low-pay dream of being a writer, artist, singer, etc.

Why do so few men assert what legitimately should be a right, equal to women, to pursue their low-income-producing dream? My hypothesis is that society's main mind-molders, the colleges and the media, have done such a good job of portraying men as inferior to women, that many men have come to feel inferior and that to justify their existence, men feel they must BE a paycheck, a beast of burden. So they stay on a job, any job. How many women, compared with men, would stay on a job as a pest remover, plumber, roofer, ice fisherman, or even a traveling salesperson who must fly around the country to God-forsaken places to try to sell some widget, or even move their family to places like Montgomery Alabama to get a promotion?

Truly, the most important difference between men and women career changers is that fewer men contemplate it and fewer still feel they can afford to take the often years it takes to make a radical career change. After their 20s, most guys tend to just keep their nose to the grindstone so they can support their family. Career changing usually inhibits their ability to do that.

Marci's response to that email encouraged me to write this explanation for why it's so difficult for men's groups to form. More important, I then go on to explain why it is, nor has been for a long time, "a man's world."

Many opponents of men's groups who nonetheless applaud women's groups, sweep away their double-standard with a cheeky, "All other groups are men's groups."

Marci, that has long been untrue. Nor is their assertion, "It's a man's world" as self-evident as feminists would have us believe.

For example, if it were a man's world, men would have the full range of career options: from stay-at-home non-income earner to actor/writer/artist to CEO. But while women have all those options, a man who chooses the former two is widely viewed as lazy. It would be socially unacceptable. So most men don't even allow themselves to consider such options. Women feel greater freedom to do so. Men are made to feel they must BE the paycheck. If it were a man's world, a man would have freedom to make important choices about their careers. They don't. Women do.

Other examples of how it's far from a man's world:

• Only men are allowed to serve in direct combat in the military, and 99% of the deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been men. Perhaps that's surprising in light of the media's unrelenting attempt to hide that fact with such phrases as "the men and women who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan."
• giving women preferences in Small Business Administration female-set-aside loans,
• women but not men allowed to have caucuses in corporations and government to facilitate women's advancement
• having many social-service programs just for women, almost none for men
• having "targets," virtual quotas, for women hired and promoted to al levels, but not for men
• having female-set-aside scholarships but not for men, even though there are many more female college students.
• women's networking and other organizations are encouraged while men's organizations are attacked as sexist with media-trumpeted demands they be disbanded.
• If a man impregnates a woman, even if she falsely claimed to be on birth control, he's stuck with 18 years of financial and temporal responsibility. Only she has the choice to abort.
• 93% of workplace deaths occur to men.
• And in a most painful example, when women have a deficit, for example, they're "underrepresented" in science, massive nationwide redress is undertaken, even though a recent two-decade study reported recently in the New York Times found that women in academic science fare as well or better than men. But if men have the deficit, even the ultimate deficit, they die 5.2 years younger, all we see are more pink ribbons or other women's health initiatives. There are seven federal agencies on women's health, none for men. 39 states have offices of Women's Health, none for men. Even more unfair, a PubMed review, indicates, as mentioned, that over the past 60 years(!), 95+% of gender-specific medical research has focused on women's health issues. Women claim this is because men don't take care of themselves as well: "If only they'd see the doctor." Well, would those women say that to minorities, who also "don't see the doctor" and smoke and drink at much higher rates than men?
• and perhaps most important to the next generation, a school system that has replaced boy-friendly competition with girl-centric collaboration, boy-friendly adventure stories, with soporific-to-boys tales of girl relationships, and history textbooks disproportionately extolling women from Sacajawea and Pocahontas to Simone DeBouvier and Sally Ride while sparing no pages to pound home the evils of white men from Hannibal to Hitler, Joe McCarthy to Timothy McVeigh, and perhaps worst of all, an insistence on ever more seatwork, which when active boys can't endure, are put on a Ritalin leash at a ratio of eight boys for every one girl.

Rather than it being a man's world, men are beasts of burden, the target of ridicule in the media, and the disposable sex.

I'm glad you said that my previous emails give you a lot to think about. I hope this one does too, Marci.

The Anti-Male Ethos Accelerates

A car was parked in front of a public school in the San Francisco Bay Area, the epicenter of "gender equity."

The care bore a bumper sticker, Girls Rule, Boys Drool" with a picture of a girl stomping on a face-down boy.

When I got home, I googled, "Girls Rule, Boys Drool" and there were 239,000 results, most of them text and 16,400 images. Here are some I found particularly interesting.

Imagine that you were the parent of a boy. How do you think you'd feel? He'd feel?

Your comments?

On Men at Valentine's Day

This was sent to me by an anonymous reader:

It's that time of year again: Valentine's Day. It's a time when men are castigated for being unromantic, too obsessed with sports, uncaring, and just not that "loving."

In the minds of the female-focused mainstream media and retail industries, it's a great way to guilt-trip men into buying more jewelry, flowers, restaurant meals, and whatnot. But never mind that we've commercialized another holiday that's not supposed to be commercialized.

What's this about men not being loving? Nothing could be farther from the truth. Men, in my estimation, are actually very loving. They just don't show it in the way that the media-and-retail-industrial complex portrays it. So how do men show their love? Here are just a few ways that few people notice or give men credit for:

Men show their love by waking up at 2 AM and schlepping to the store in the rain to buy a quart of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream when a late night craving strikes.

Men show their love by checking out the things that go bump in the night, whether they're stray dogs or burglars.

Men show their love by not only obvious acts of chivalry, like opening doors, but also scraping the windshield, shoveling the sidewalk, dispatching the spiders, and taking out the trash to spare their women from these and other unpleasant jobs.

Men show their love by working in jobs that are boring, difficult, risky, stressful, dangerous, and even life-threatening so that their wives can work in jobs that are comfortable, safe, fun, and easy - or not at all.

Men show their love by worrying about what's going on in the world so their women don't have to.

Men show their love by doing those things on their "honey do" lists when they'd rather be watching the game.

Men show their love by fixing the things that are broken, whether it's a faucet or a heart.

To make a long story short, men show their love through their actions. After all, actions do speak louder than words. So ladies, if you think your man isn't romantic or loving, think again.

A Reader from Pennsylvania (It's sad that we live in a society in which he feels he had to write this anonymously.)

Warren Farrell on How Women and Men Should Change

When I write about men's issues, I tend to annoy more than convince.

Far more circumspect and perhaps wiser is my co-president of the National Organization for Men, Warren Farrell.

HERE, he writes about how women and men might wish to change, to the betterment of both: in relationships, work, and in creating a better society.

Why Men Don't Listen to Women

Women often complain that men, especially their domestic partner, don't listen to them. Many of these women claim that men can't communicate. A woman said to me today, "All men want is a blow job."

Women would be wise to recognize that many men decide it's unwise to engage in certain conversations.

For example, a man may decide that listening to his wife or girlfriend "process her feelings" will not make things better. It will more likely exacerbate her illegitimate feelings of victimhood, often at the man's expense.

For instance, if a man forgot his wife's birthday, she might go into a tirade about how it makes her feel unloved. Often she exaggerates how bad it makes her feel so she can extract maximum guilt and recompense from him. To gain still more brownie points, she'll bring up some past faux pas he committed--for example, she caught him watching porn or, "John, and this is not the only time. Just last week, you insisted on watching that stupid football game when you knew it was important to me and the family that we visited grandma. I feel totally not loved. I don't count at all!" (Another deliberate exaggeration to extract maximum goodies from him.)

In such a conversation, he's aware she's overreacting, and to allow her to vent uninterrupted would give undue legitimacy to her grievance. Yet if he defends himself, for example, pointing out examples of her selfishness, she'd accuse him of expanding the argument. Nor is she likely to be assuaged if he offers examples of the many ways he has shown his love. She'll likely feel or assert that she's unheard, invalidated: "Does that really justify your watching porn or forgetting my birthday?! Just listen. Stop defending yourself! I just want to be heard. Can't you just listen for once?!" He's in a Catch 22; he loses either way. So understandably, he wants to avoid the conversation, whereupon the women incorrectly believes then men can't communicate, that all men want is a blow job.

Indeed, many women demand being listened to and that the man dare not offer a solution to her problem lest he be denying her her agency. "I just want to vent. I want to share my feelings. When I'm ready to solve the problem, I will."

Many men get frustrated when the woman he loves has a problem he could solve but he's forced to sit there with duct tape over his mouth. Rather than being frustrated, he preempts or short-cuts the conversation, or simply spaces out, whereupon the women often says or thinks, "Men can't communicate. All they want is a blow job."

A study by Georgetown gender communication specialist Deborah Tannen debunks the conventional wisdom that women talk more than men. Fact is, men talk approximately the same amount--16,000 words a day.

The difference, I believe, is that men more often talk when a constructive outcome is likely--Men are not as dumb as women proclaim. Nor is a blow job sufficient to manipulate a man...although it couldn't hurt. ;-)

Little-Known Truths About Boys and Men

Here, I adapt a letter I received from the Foundation for Male Studies.

Would society tolerate these statistics if they pertained not to males but to females?

• According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 1.5 million more women than men graduate from college each year.

• According to the National Institute for Mental Health, the male suicide rate is 300% of females'.
  

• Boys regularly fail academically, repeat grades and are punished more often than girls in elementary and secondary schools.

• 82% of the US jobs lost in the current economic downturn were to men, according to the US Department of Labor.

• In the U.S., only men are required to register for a draft. Only men are allowed to serve in direct combat. 99% of the deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan war have been men.

• In 90% of the cases, custody of the child is awarded to the mother.

• 8 out of 10 children medicated for behavioral problems are boys. Often these drugs are prescribed to quash boys being normally active. The real problem lies in the schools—geared to girls' learning styles.
  

• The National Institutes of Health reports that the annual amount of federally funded research on women's health was $3.4 billion, ten times as much as on men's--even though men live 5.2 years shorter!

Former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan wrote: “I believe that women have a capacity for understanding and compassion which a man structurally does not have, does not have it because he cannot have it. He’s just incapable of it.”

That remarkable statement is but a droplet in an endless river of anti-male voices. Such voices are already well embedded in the very institutions we trust, and the situation is not improving.

How can we start turning things around for the benefit of everyone?

Please send The Foundation for Male Studies your gift in any amount. Whether $5,000.00 or $5.00, your gift will be wisely invested in meeting enormous and crucial objectives. Simply visit http://www.malestudies.org/donate and fill in the form to choose your gift online. You can also mail a check here:

The Foundation for Male Studies

333 Mamaroneck Avenue - 444

White Plains, NY 10605 USA

The Foundation for Male Studies is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, so if you donate before December 31, your gift is fully tax-deductible for your 2010 tax returns as allowed by law.

Looking Forward,

Edward M. Stephens, MD

212-327-3055
www.malestudies.org

Female Clark U Prof: Many victim feminists' statistics are wrong

A female Clark U professor's blog asserts that much research showing women as victim is misleading or bogus: http://is.gd/j87bs

The Beginning of Men

Imagine a world without men. You wouldn't be able to read this: no computer, no computer screen, no Google, no Blogger, and no this blogger. Probably no chair you're sitting on, no air conditioner/heater that's making you comfortable in your room. For that matter, you wouldn't have a room--It and its materials were likely developed and installed by men: from the sub-floor to the roof. So are the penicillin that cured your venereal disease, the birth control pill that kept you from getting pregnant, the refrigerator that kept your baby's formula and your food fresh, the car that gives you freedom or the mass transit environmentalists prefer. Beyond necessities, men have given us information transmitters from the printing press to the television to the iPhone to the aforementioned Google, wisdom from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Wittgenstein, Victor Davis Hanson to Christopher Hitchens. And let's not forget our revered Barack Obama. And lest all work and no play make dull boys and girls, men have given us entertainment from Shakespeare to Spielberg, Beethoven to Basie to the Beatles to Bono, Rembrandt to Rothko. You couldn't even defecate without men: What percentage of toilets would you guess were built, installed, and repaired, not to mention sewer lines cleaned out, by women? No less than lesbian feminist, Camille Paglia, wrote, "If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts." Here's a video that makes that point

Yet over the past 50 years, as a horrible side effect of the appropriate increase in women's opportunities, there has been an accelerating effort to diminish men. Indeed, the oppressed have become the oppressor. Previous posts have cited many examples but a few recent manifestations of that acceleration include President Clinton's Press Secretary Dede Myers', "Why Women Should Rule the World." and "New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd's bestseller, "Are Men Necessary?"

But a recent and most troubling example is the The Atlantic Monthly's 2010 annual ideas issue. Picador-timed to anger the bull, it was released just before Father's Day. (Can you imagine a mom-bashing cover story preceding Mother's Day?) One of its stories: Are Fathers Necessary? by Pamela Paul. Despite a rich research literature demonstrating the importance of fathers, for example, this report from the federal government's Children's Bureau, based on merely one journal article, the author concludes that kids may well be better off raised by a single mother and even better by a lesbian couple than by a father. To make such an assertion is a head-shaker but to have such an assertion based on such flimsy evidence published in one of the nation's most prestigious magazines speaks to the pervasiveness of the accelerating chic of unjustified male bashing.

Remarkably, the Atlantic cover story (see picture above) goes even further. And perhaps not surprising, it is The Washington Post's "Story Pick." Its title: "The End of Men." Its core contention: men are better suited for the Neanderthal Era or at least the Industrial Revolution age--brawn and individual testosterone-poisoned competition. The article argues that today's success requires the woman's touch: collaborative, intelligent, reflective. And to think, all of the aforementioned modern discoveries were created by butt-scratching, hyperactive, cognitively crippled troglodytes without benefit of women's wonders.

The problem is that the male-bashing not only dispirits the intellectual men who read publications such as The Atlantic. Average men and boys receive an ever accelerating diet of male as boorish, sleazy idiot shown the way by wise women. We're in our seventh decade of man-as-oaf media: from Ralph Kramden to Homer Simpson. Even in the majority-male Superbowl audience, commercials present man as cretin: hopelessly impotent men who are literally in the doghouse, cowed by their woman master. Or they're mumbling supplicants begging for a woman judge's charity. Lest you think I'm cherry-picking, watch commercials: How often is the man superior to the woman?

Twenty-five years ago, when I began helping people choose their career, both sexes were equally optimistic about their future. Today, most of my female clients correctly believe the world is their oyster (except at the C-level, at which few women are willing to work the 70-hour weeks and move their families across the country to get the necessary promotions.) And my male clients are disproportionately despondent and/or angry--and not going to college. In 1960: the male:female ratio of college degree holders was 61:39. Today, in an era in which a college degree has become a virtual necessity, a mere hunting license for most decent employment, the ratio is 41:59 and projected to be 39:61 by 2020. (Source, U.S. Dept of Education, IES, 2009.) The male unemployment rate is now 20% higher than for women. (Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.) For the same work (in quantity and quality) women, on average earn the same as men. Indeed, even the article, "The End of Men" points out that among Fortune 500 CEOs, women earn 40% more than do their male counterparts. And in the ultimate example of the pendulum having swung too far, despite men living 5.2 years shorter, most gender-specific medical research and outreach, for the last 50 years(!) has been spent on women. Since 1920, the average lifespan advantage of women has grown 400%! While, of course, one can point to examples of unfairness to women, it's simply dishonest to assert that today, men, on balance, have an unfair advantage.

The world is better when both sexes are valued. For every wife-beating, customer-cheating, sexual harassing guy, there's at least one ethical man, working hard to be productive and to support himself and his family. For every manipulative, hormonally crazed, girls-just-want-to-have-fun woman, there's at least one woman diligently striving to have it all: career, family, and a personal life. Good people all. People with real potential to make a better society for all.

Perhaps it might surprise the author of "The End of Men," Hanna Rosin, who overreachingly wrote that men's rights groups have an "angry, anti-woman edge," this head of a men's rights group, The National Organization for Men and my co-president, Dr. Warren Farrell, per our mission statement of advocating for fair treatment of men and women, believe it's time for a truce, one that's fair to both sexes:

1. We should end the gender-bashing, male or female, in the schools, colleges, and media, for example, statements that Rosin makes in her Atlantic cover story such as that men are "women's new ball and chain." and "Maybe...(male) DNA is shifting. Maybe they’re like those frogs—they’re more vulnerable or something, so they’ve gotten deformed.”

2. It's time to end intentional discrimination against both women and men: If we are to be honest with ourselves, isn't it time to stop:

• giving women preferences in Small Business Administration female-set-aside loans,
  
• requiring only males to register for the draft and to serve in direct combat (99% of US. deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been men)
  
• women but not men allowed to have caucuses in corporations and government to facilitate women's advancement
• having many social-service programs just for women, almost none for men
• having "targets," virtual quotas for women hired but not for men
• having female-set-aside scholarships but not for men
• Women's networking and other organizations encouraged while such men's organizations called sexist with calls for the being disbanded.
• and perhaps most important to the next generation, a school system that has replaced boy-friendly competition with girl-centric collaboration, boy-friendly adventure stories, with soporific-to-boys tales of girl relationships, and history textbooks disproportionately extolling women from Sacajawea and Pocahontas to Simone DeBouvier and Sally Ride while sparing no pages to pound home the evils of white men from Hannibal to Hitler, Joe McCarthy to Timothy McVeigh, and perhaps worst of all, an insistence on ever more seatwork, which when active boys can't endure, are put on a Ritalin leash at a ratio of eight boys for every one girl.
  

3. To the extent that men could use better communication and processing skills and more modern, collaborative leadership styles to accompany the more goal-oriented individualistic ones, instead of dismissing such men as unable to communicate, let our schools, colleges, and workplaces offer such trainings.

4. We appropriately celebrate women having options other than being a stay-at-home mom. Women absolutely should have the right to, on the merits, compete for jobs from carpenter to CEO. But we must now legitimate the full range of options for men: from at least short-term stay-at-home father to 80-hour-a-week scientist. The latter should not be pathologized as a "workaholic" but revered as a hard-working contributor to society. This should be the era of the multi-option man as well as of the multi-option woman.

5. It's time for serious Men's Studies programs at universities that aren't merely a male-bashing accompaninent to female-extolling women's studies program.

6. Is it not appropriate to pay due homage to men?: who do so many of the yucky jobs women won't do (from rodent remover to roofer) invent the things that women would likely not have invented. Should we not honor the contributions fathers make to parenting. for example, they often balance many mothers' tendency to not enforce limits. They often leaven mothers' protective instinct by encouraging reasonable (okay, occasionally not so reasonable) risk-taking. Here's to fathers and to, not the end of men but to the new Beginning of Men: the fairly treated, multi-option man.

Finally a Book on Men that Doesn't Ridicule Them

Save the Males has been published for three months now, is a wonderfully written and significant book,  and I'll bet you haven't heard of it. As usual, the media censors anything pro-male. 

I'd bet that if it were written by a man, it never even would have been published, let alone by Random House. Fortunately, it was written by a woman, syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker.  

The book makes clear (and entertaining) how badly, how unfairly, men and boys have, for decades, been treated by the schools, colleges, media, and courts, all, ironically, in the name of gender equity.

I do have some problems with the book:

Her main motivation to write the book is not to be fair to men, but because daughters and society need men to be brave, hard workers. Men aren't worthy merely as humans; they must be beasts of burden.

She deifies family unduly. I believe that family, along with higher education, are America's most overrated icons. I've seen so many people's lives hurt more than helped by family.

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.

How David Got Manipulated into Marrying

The client who just left my office--we'll call him David--said that his girlfriend--we'll call her Vixen-- got him to marry her with such statements as:

• "The problem is your fear of commitment." In that ploy, Vixen pathologized David's decision, which invoked in him a sense of insecurity and guilt. In fact, as David and I discussed things, it became clear that his not wanting to marry had nothing to do with "fear of commitment." He had committed to many projects and people in his life. David was reluctant to marry because he knew it offered little benefit but in a divorce, under California law, he'd likely be taken to the cleaners, forced to support an ex-wife for years.
  

• "You're unwilling to progress." Why is it progress to get a piece of paper (marriage certificate) that increases your chances of impoverishment if you break up. But David, who is a pleaser, felt guilty that he was "unwilling to progress."

Vixen took that ploy right out of liberals' playbook: Liberals--with the media's help-- converted the term "liberal" to "progressive," knowing that the term "liberal" implied big-spending, but who could be against progress? Would anyone prefer to be a regressive? Vixen's ploy made David feel guilty that he was being against progress.

• "You're just not willing to plan for the future." A marriage certificate doesn't increase your ability to plan for the future, but like the previous accusations, this one can make a guy who was moderately insecure to begin with, feel the need to cave.

And David did cave--with a $40,000 wedding. And while David is not unhappily married, if, at some point, he joins the 58% of married couples who divorce, he'll have to support the woman he divorced for years afterwards.

Dear readers, I'm not against marriage. Indeed, I've been married to my wife for more than 30 years and don't regret it. My daughter is happily married (and now pregnant for the first time.) But marriage should be a decision made with open eyes, not coerced by manipulative ploys.

Why It's Not a Man's World

Grace, one of the regular commenters on my blog, asked me to opine on why it's a man's world.

Grace, it's not.

Yes, more men have leadership positions, but as I'll argue, that doesn't make it a man's world. And the reason more men have leadership positions is overwhelmingly not because of some male-erected glass ceiling. It's primarily because more men than women are willing to trade work/life balance and do what it takes to get and succeed in positions of major influence. They believe that doing so results in a more meaningfully-led life than if they stopped work at 40 hours so they could see their kids' soccer game and play Monopoly with them on a regular basis.

So, these men are, for example, willing to put in the 60+ hour workweeks that typical CEOs and congresspeople put in. They're more often willing to move their family across the country to some god-forsaken place so they can learn how to run a plant. They're more willing to pursue risky business ventures. The book, Why Men Earn More, describes 25 such reasons, which explains the misleading statistic that women earn less than men. For the same work, on average, women earn at least as much.

But just because more men are in leadership positions doesn't mean it's a man's world. Women have much more power than is widely recognized. Women have lifestyle power: Women and their advocacy groups have persuaded society to give women many more choices than men have. Society will not denigrate women for becoming a CEO, doctor, lawyer, holder of a low-level full-time job, part-time job, or no job at all. Most men do not have as wide a range of options.

In addition, many other things ensure women's control. Examples:

• If a woman fails to use birth control and gets pregnant, the man is on the hook for 18 years of child support. A woman can have an abortion and end any responsibility, but a man cannot force a woman to do so. Therefore, in inserting his penis without a condom in a woman, he takes a far greater risk than she does.
  
• If women have a deficit, for example, are "underrepresented" in engineering, there are massive efforts at redress. Yet when men have the deficit, for example, that fewer than 40% of the 2008 college graduates are men, there is little or no redress.
  
• Even when men suffer the ultimate deficit--they live 5.3 years shorter than women and spend their last decade in worse health, the vast majority of gender-specific medical research over the last 50 years has been on women. Almost all the gender-specific health-related non-profits are for women. For years, we've been seeing a sea of pink ribbons against breast cancer, but none against sudden heart attack (Think Tim Russert,) which kills many more men, much earlier.
  

Women's advocacy groups have pushed-through policies that ensure women have all these advantages. In contrast, as co-president of the National Organization for Men, I can say with certitude that nearly all efforts to ensure fair treatment of men have been rebuffed or censored, usually unfairly derided as mere whining by the hegemony.

In reality, it's far from a man's world.

More on the Resurgence of Gold Diggers

I've previously discussed that in the past decade, I've seen a great increase in the number of my female clients and friends who would like to not work and, instead, find a guy who'll support them.

That anecdotal experience has been supported by the spate of recent books on how to find a rich husband, a seminal New York Times article and a more recent Reuters report that even large percentages of women physicians and Stanford MBAs are wanting to not work or to work minimally. Perhaps that is because they saw their first-wave-feminist mothers not find working outside the home to be as pleasurable as they thought it would be.

A recent CNN article explains that the desire to be a stay-at-home woman, extends not just to the women who claim their motivation is to spend more time with their kids, but even to the childless.

Guys, if you don't mind assuming all of the financial burden associated with a live-in woman and perhaps children, fine. Some men don't mind. But many others have unwittingly been manipulated into being beasts of burden by women who use the techniques summarized in the above-referenced books and articles.

Make sure you're making the huge decision to bear all the financial responsibility with fully open eyes.

A Man Who Gives All for Family...Is it Worth It?

I have a male client who's married to a stay-at-home wife. To fund her big-spending ways, he's had to take a job that few people would describe as inordinately rewarding, especially in today's market: He sells real estate. Not surprisingly, he's having a tough time making a living at it, a cause of great stress: His wife is hounding him to make more money lest they lose their suburban mini-mansion. He tries ever harder because "What do you expect? I have to support my family."

His wife had a child from a previous marriage who has "issues:" This 24-year-old sits in an apartment smoking pot all day. waiting for her boyfriend to come home. My client spends large amounts of time trying to help his stepchild. He's a kind, patient man, and his drugged-out stepkid yells at him for "not giving me space, and coming down on me." He continues to try to help. He says, "What do you expect? It's my family."

Now, it appears his sister, who has been a lifelong professional student and hoarder/pack rat has decided to move near my client. He says, "I'll do the best I can for her." I ask him, "Do you really need to do that?" He says, "It's family."

Yesterday, he thought he was having a heart attack. It turned out to be a false alarm, but I'm betting he's at-risk.

What is his wife doing to help reduce his stress? Is she getting a job to help share the financial burden? No: After his heart attack scare, her response was, "I think you should take out more life insurance." Is that what a family member should say?

This client is one of the more extreme examples, but I have found many men who give it all to family, including paying the ultimate price, and derived far too little in exchange. Especially for many, although certainly not all men, I believe family is overrated.

Two Under-the-Radar Ideas for Improving the World

A book (and then a TV special, column, and radio talk show) called America Talks About Race. Barack Obama is calling for an open dialogue about race. So did Bill Clinton. So does every diversity trainer. Yet, to date, it hasn't really happened. I see the need for a book called America Talks About Race, based both on a survey and perhaps 30 Americans' (white, black, Latino, Asian, Native American and mixed-race) stories about their experiences regarding race and their recommendations for how race-related problems might best be improved.

I might decide to write it but prefer if someone else did: I have more projects I'd like to take on than I could complete in a lifetime.

A lawsuit demanding men's studies programs. Women's studies departments have done much to advance women's causes. It has been said there's no need for men's studies departments because men are hegemonic. I believe that's unfair. With boys doing worse in schools than girls, graduating from college in far fewer numbers, in prison in far greater numbers, with many men of all income levels feeling alienated, and spending their last decade in worse health than women and dying 5.3 years sooner, there is a real need for men's studies programs.

Efforts to start men's studies programs have met with resistance from universities. I believe that advocates of men's studies programs need to take a lesson from women's advocacy groups: When women's groups couldn't get what they wanted using persuasion, they sued. I believe it's time for an equal protection lawsuit: Just as Title IX legislation mandated equalized funding for women's and men's sports in colleges, there should be equal funding for men's and women's studies.

Anyone want to spearhead that suit? Again, I might do that but prefer if someone else did.

Horrendously Biased Anti-Boy Study, of course, widely and uncritically reported

Articles in the Washington Post (front page) and New York Times report uncritically, a horribly biased study, which will kill the deserved concern for boys' badly lagging girls in school and being Ritalinized en masse.

The media should have gotten the first clue of its being biased when they noticed who funded it: the American Association of University Women. If a study on smoking was funded by the tobacco industry, would you give it much credibility? At minimum, wouldn't you vet it carefully?

Yet regarding gender issues, the media has a double standard for how it vets and reports pro woman/minority research vs pro male (let alone, pro-white) research findings : It censors the latter and reports the former uncritically and as thought it were fact, to wit, the title of the article, "No Crisis For Boys In Schools, Study Says."

Here are the problems with the AAUW study:

1. It says, deceptively, that both boys and girls scores have increased. Why did the study (or at least the reporting) omit is that girls' scores increased much more? In a world in which ever higher-level skill is required, does it mean there's no crisis for boys if their scores have increased a bit while girls' have increased much more? Why did the media not probe that finding as it surely would have if it were a pro-male finding?

2. The study says there's virtually no gap between boys and girls who enter college. Of course not---the requirements for getting into college are roughly equal for boys and girls. What the study (or the reporting) fails to say is that many more girls than boys go to college. Why did the media not probe that finding as it would have it were a pro-male finding?

2a. The study reports that since 1982, 57% of the college graduates are women. Why do the study's authors go back to 1982? To hide the fact that the gap is larger today. For the class of 2008 the ratio is 60/40 and is projected to increase further. Wouldn't the media have probed that finding if it were pro-male?

3. The study reports the terribly deceptive statistic: "Among all women and men working full time, year-round, median annual earnings for women were 77 percent of men's earnings in 2005." Of course, the study (or the reporting) doesn't mention that a far smaller percentage of women are working full-time. And it doesn't mention that women disproportionately avoid the high-paying fields: engineering, computer science, coal mining, sewer repair, etc. And that even those who work full-time work, on average, far fewer hours than men who work full-time. Or that women in corporations are far less likely to do the things required to be promoted to higher-level jobs, such as move their family to a far-flung place (Montgomery, Alabama anyone?) As reported in the book, Why Men Earn More, FOR THE SAME WORK, women earn the same or more than men. Why does the media give a free pass to such as misleading statistic as "women earn 77 cents on the dollar?" Wouldn't the media vet that claim if the statistic favored men?

4. The study omits the fact that eight times as many boys as girls are put on the methamphetamine-like Ritalin and similar drugs. If it was a pro-male finding, wouldn't the media have made the effort to interview and quote sources that would have presented that? But because the AAUW study advocates for females, the media somehow didn't bother.

5. The study omits that the suicide rate for boys is 400% of girls'. If it were the reverse, wouldn't the media have made the effort to interview and quote sources that would have presented that? But because the AAUW study advocates for females, the media somehow didn't bother.

6. The study omits that boys drop out of high school at a significantly higher rate. If if the reverse were reported, wouldn't the media have made the effort to interview and quote sources that would have presented that? But because the AAUW study advocates for females, the media somehow didn't bother.

Truly, I don't understand why the media would be so relentlessly unfair to boys and men.

Why Husbands Should NOT Do Half the Housework

I just read an article on MSN in which the author, Leslie Bennetts, urged wives to yell, nag, withhold sex, whatever it takes, to get their husbands to do half the housework.

What she fails to recognize is that the out-of-home work that the average man does is more difficult and more stressful, and takes many more hours than what the average woman does. Study after study show that even when the wife works full-time (and many women don't), the man works more hours and is more likely to have a more stressful and/or dangerous job. Those factors need to be taken into account when deciding how much housework the man should do.