A Response to Newsweek's Call for a "New Masculinity"

The current Newsweek cover story, "Why We Need to Imagine a New Masculinity," insists that men must do more child rearing and aim for more female-centric jobs like nursing and teaching.

That's no fairer to men than to insist that most women must direct their job aspirations to the likes of plumbing and roofing and spend their evenings playing with power tools in their workshop.

Of course, some men would be well suited to such changes just as some women are well-suited to be plumbers, roofers, etc. But for a Newsweek cover story to suggest that men overall need to make such a change is merely the latest in an endless series of insults to and invalidations of men.

Men are More Valuable Than Women?!

As I've documented elsewhere on this blog, so many books and articles (not to mention jokes) argue that the world would be better without men.

This video makes the politically suicidal assertion that men are more valuable than women, much more valuable. And it makes it convincingly.

Yes, I wish it didn't start off with a woman's orgasm. Yes, I wish it acknowledged women's contributions, but I believe it's a must-watch, especially for beaten-down men and for boys in the process of being brainwashed by schools, media, and females that they are decidedly inferior.

Job Bias Charges Jump

According to the U.S. Equal Opportunity Commission, job bias charges in 2008 hit an unprecedented 94,402, a 15 percent increase over the previous fiscal year.

Do you think that is more the result of increased racial/gender bias or increased tendency to play the race/gender card, perhaps because of the bad economy?

Men, the Disposable Sex

Most people say they want to be fair...and yet:

Men die 5.2 years younger than women, spend their last decade in worse health, and die earlier of all the leading causes of death. For example, before age 65, twice as many men as women die of heart disease--100,000 more male human beings dead, early, every year. That's thirty times more men than have died, total, in the Iraq War!

Yet, where are the ribbons for early heart attack? The only campaigns I've seen are the American Heart Association's Wear Red campaign to increase awareness of heart disease in women and the Oakland A's initiative on women's heart disease.

And for years, we certainly see ever more pink ribbons against breast cancer. For example, today, I walked into Safeway whereupon I was immediately enveloped in breast cancer activism: (Click on these images to get a better feel for how it dominated the store)

• I entered the store under a canopy of pink breast cancer signs.
• Underneath the canopy, a giant sign touts that Safeway and General Foods are sponsoring this breast cancer initiative.
• Underneath are free-standing displays of Kraft and Nabisco products, most of which have been repackaged to look like pink breast cancer signs, with a notice saying that part of the profits from the sale of those items will go to breast cancer.
• Nearby hangs another prominent sign listing other corporations that are sponsoring breast cancer initiatives.
• Next to that is a table offering free drinks to all who donate, and selling breast cancer shopping bags.
  
  
  
• Throughout the store, countless products have been repackaged to look like breast cancer posters, with signs saying that if the item is purchased, a breast cancer donation will be made.
• Every 30 to 60 seconds, an announcement is heard on the loudspeaker: "Another shopper on checkstand X has made another generous donation of Y dollars to fight breast cancer."
• When I reached the checkstand, I saw that the credit card reader is framed by a pink breast cancer sign.
• The clerk then asked me, "Would I like to donate to breast cancer?" I said, "Did you know that every year, 100,000 more men than women die early of heart disease, yet have you ever seen Safeway or anyone else mount a campaign against that?" She said, "I never thought about that."

At that point, I decided to write this op-ed and send it to Safeway's president Steven Burd (steve.burd@safeway.com.)

Safeway has made a small effort against prostate cancer but that and other corporations' male-oriented initiatives are dwarfed by those on women's health. Here, for example, is the list of corporate sponsors of the Susan B. Komen breast cancer fund.

Have you seen corporations do much to address the more prevalent early heart attack, which disproportionately kills men? Even companies whose products disproportionately are bought by men are unfair to men's diseases. For example, the aforementioned Oakland A's have donated $1,000,000 to breast cancer but dramatically less to prostate cancer. Even more dismaying, the A's initiative on heart disease specifically excluded men. Wells Fargo (which has far more men-owned money under deposit) often has breast cancer ribbons at their ATMs and sells an entire line of breast-cancer checks and checkbook covers, but I could find nothing that Wells has done to fight prostate cancer or heart attack.

Of course, I want to see breast cancer cured, as quickly as possible. But the nearly complete ignoring of men dying younger and spending their last decade in worse health than women makes me feel sad, scared, and yes, angry. When women have a more minor deficit, for example, so-called underrepresentation in engineering, massive redress efforts are initiated. But when men have the deficit, even the ultimate deficit-- they die younger--all we see is the pink-ribbon tidal wave grow ever more massive.

Today, no matter how many sewers men repair, no matter how many fires men put out, no matter how many medical discoveries men make (Indeed, nearly all breast cancer treatments including the state-of-the-art Herceptin were discovered by men,) no matter how many technical discoveries men make (for example, Google, computers, televisions, cell phones, refrigeration, and even this blogging software,) no matter how many roofs men replace, no matter how many Safeway shelves men stock, no matter how bravely men defend our nation, men are, as Dr. Warren Farrell says, the disposable sex.

P.S. When I came home and poured myself a glass of milk, an entire side of the container was devoted to--you guessed it--breast cancer.

Family is Overrated

Politicians, clerics, and just plain folks extol family as our most important institution.

I believe family is overrated. So many people suffer inordinately from family. Of course, there are the obvious examples:

• Child abuse
• Spousal abuse
• Incest
• Psychological abuse

But much more often, there’s less dramatic but still painful family-induced misery:

• Other than pleasantries, your adult child refuses to speak with you.
  
• Your spouse has fallen out of love with you, yet fear, inertia, and shared history preclude a dissolution. So you trudge along in your lackluster life.
  
• Your parent is still trying to control or demean you even though you’re already an adult.
• Your nine-year-old regularly screams, “I hate you, mommy!”
• Your adult child is back on your sofa still trying to “find himself” (with the assistance of drugs or alcohol.)
• You're not capable enough to compete with a sibling or parent, which dispirits you.
• You make major efforts to care for your aging parent, motivated mainly by guilt. Privately, you resent how much time, energy, and money it takes.
• Your spouse doesn’t earn enough income or do enough around the house.
• You suffer the effects of an impaired, alcoholic, drug-abusing, gambling, or just plain lazy and parasitic family member.

Millions of people don't even speak with a family member. Millions more spend years and fortunes on therapists, trying to undo the ills that family perpetrated on them.

All this shouldn’t be surprising. After all, unlike with friends, we are placed in our family of origin at random, with no say in the matter. We do choose our spouse, but hormones seem to preclude our doing a very good job of it--witness the 50% divorce rate.

While it’s unseemly to discuss, money is part of the equation as we evaluate whether family is overrated. It costs a fortune to support kids, let alone a stay-at-home spouse. To pay for it, many people choose lucrative careers that are far less enjoyable than those they’d otherwise choose. Do you think that, if it weren’t for the need to support a family, as many people would choose to sell insurance, be pest control workers, sewer repairers, or bond traders? Wouldn’t many of them choose a career, for example, in the creative arts, in a nonprofit, or as a computer game maker?

Of course, I can envision some readers thinking:

What? Are you advocating a society without children? Encouraging my readers to think more carefully before having children is hardly going to lead to a world without children. I am merely asking people to be more circumspect, not reflexively fulfilling society's expectation. Besides, environmentalists argue that overpopulation is the greatest threat to the environment. A few less children wouldn’t hurt the world and its seven billion people.

Life is even more difficult to live without the support of family. I’m not saying that people don’t need support. I’m arguing against the automatic assumption that you have greater obligation to support family members than others. For example, when your ne’er-do-well sibling asks you for money because he or she is unemployed, rather than succumb to the reflexive guilt that society imposes because “he’s family,” you'd be wise to view the issue in fuller dimension: in terms of the net effects on you, him, your family, and, yes, society. For example, does giving Sammy the Slug the money yield a greater net good than, for example, investing in a startup developing a drug to prevent sudden heart attack, the leading killer?

My main message is to resist automatically succumbing to convention, and instead, to make your choices consciously, based on what will ultimately yield the greatest good en toto: for you, your family, and society.

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.

Career Advice for Men

That's the title of my latest column on Kiplinger.com.

An Article That Made Me Want to Cry and Hug Its Author

What a smart, hard-working, and superbrave woman is Christina Hoff Sommers. Her dispositive article on the substitution of gender equity for merit in science careers is so worth reading, whether you're a feminist, an angry male, or simply someone interested is seeing how America's future is being derailed by gender (and race) victimization politics. I urge you to read it.

While I'm no John McCain fan , (I'll be voting Libertarian although I so wish they had a better candidate than Bob Barr?!) I believe that the election of Obama or Clinton will result in ever more replacement of meritocracy with reverse discrimination.

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.

The Double Standard Strikes Again

Today, I received a press release from an outfit called Part-Time Pro. Its core assertion: "Women should not have to sacrifice personal desires for professional aspirations."

What?!! Let's say two people aspire to be promoted. The first one doesn't "sacrifice personal desires for professional aspirations" while the other person rarely leaves early to watch their kid's soccer game, in fact often stays late so s/he can answer emails in a timely manner, who reads while on the exercise bike, chose to take difficult statistical modeling classes to improve their work skills, and accepted a transfer to some God-forsaken place so s/he could acquire important experience. In any world other than Alice's wonderland, shouldn't the latter person get the promotion?

Yet women's advocates constantly argue that people who choose to work less (what they term "work/life balance," which is a focus-group tested phrase designed to elicit maximum sympathy) should have an equal right to promotions. And when fewer women are then promoted, feminists blame it on a men-created glass ceiling rather than that women more often make choices to work less and in less demanding areas.

The feminists' intended trump card is to play the "Children need mommy at home" card. As I've stated in earlier posts, the data on that is equivocal and, logically, it is better for children to see a role model of mom who holds a job other than housewife. Too, the stay-at-home mom (cynics would say "play-at-home mom") is more likely to be a helicopter mom (hovering) thereby denying their child opportunities to develop self-efficacy.

Ironically, the people who attribute the low percentage of women in top positions to a glass ceiling are also likely to insist we do more to try to stop global warming. Well, environmentalists agree that the greatest threat to the earth is overpopulation, so should we be subsidizing the having of more children by telling women, "You shouldn't have to sacrifice your personal desires for professional aspirations?"

Can we please stop with the double standard and remember that, ultimately, the greatest cure for all that ails us is meritocracy, whether a person has an xy or xx chromosome.

I Truly Believe That Men Need to be Wary of Women

I suspect that some readers will respond to this post with some unjustified put-down like "sexist!" or "misogynist!" but I'm trying, in my blog, to not let fear of excoriation preclude me from writing what I honestly believe.

My guest today on my radio show was Carnell Smith, an expert on paternity fraud. He claimed that 30% of men who went to blood banks for paternity tests found that they were not--as the child's mother claimed--the father. Smith went on to say that in most states, DNA evidence, in many cases, is inadmissible. He estimated that, currently, one million men are paying child support for kids they did not father.

Of course, it's outrageous that 30 states would enact such unfair-to-men laws. But why would a woman falsely claim that a man is the father of her child when he isn't, thereby forcing him to unfairly pay many thousands of dollars in child support, and manipulate him into spending 18 years involved in raising a child he didn't father? Smith says that these are the major reasons:
-- He had the deepest pockets among the men she slept with
-- She was trying to chain him to the relationship
-- She thought he'd make the best father
-- She was trying to lash out at the man

Of course, some men do despicable things to women. That's not the point. The media has made us aware (ad nauseam) of the ills men perpetrate on women. In this post, I'm trying to bring to light the much underreported ills that a surprising number of women perpetrate on men so that men can protect themselves.

While most women, like most men, are good people, women are unfairly cruel to men more often than many men think. It needn't be as extreme as paternity fraud. For example, it can simply be your wife or live-in girlfriend dissembling (consciously or not) that she's not viable in the workplace so she can only work part-time on some pleasant job like giving flute lessons, and that you therefore must be the beast of burden, working 40-60 hours a week on a job you might not like, but you're forced to accept to fund her expenditures.

I want to reiterate that I believe that the majority of women, like the majority of men, behave ethically and lovingly to their romantic partner. But many don't. And many guys are naive to that because the media focuses on the ills that men do to women but not vice versa. Men have also been conditioned, unfairly I deeply believe, to think they're oppressors of women.

So, men, be vigilant to being taken advantage of by a woman, and if you believe it likely that you are being treated unfairly, don't--before being convinced you're wrong--cave when she pulls out the ploys: crying, withdrawing, yelling, and yes, playing the gender card by calling you "sexist" or "misogynist."