Over the last two centuries, American society, and moreover Western cultures as a whole, have made remarkable strides toward social equality: The Fourteenth, Fifteenth and Nineteenth amendments have paved the road to fair treatment, reforms of systems with outright or systematic bias, and the steady erasure of thusly increasingly archaic boundaries linked to skin color and gender. Now more than ever in human history, people are judged by the content of their character.
But even the most zealous optimist must admit that there’s work to be done. American women on average still make somewhere between 70 and 80 cents for every dollar men make, depending on the source and mitigating factors considered. Fortunately, the public is very much aware of women’s issues. We’re reminded by public service announcements, shelves of books, countless articles in popular print magazines and specialist journals alike, radio and television specials, and even entire University departments of the complex challenges that modern women face. To wit, we know that in 2003, the United States led the 55 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe member nations in rape incidents per capita, with 32 reported cases per 100,000 population. And, as is oft-recalled, some 33.7 percent of single mothers live in poverty, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
But the best news for the erasure of undue bias and disadvantages, misogyny and violence against women is that the doors of dialogue about women’s issues are wide open and often flooded. But herein lies a systematic and self-feeding double-standard. In our culture’s mostly beneficial and successful education of women’s issues, societal forces have largely neglected issues faced specifically by men, and in the process sometimes created new but often undiscussed disparities.
But what kinds of issues are men’s issues?
Well, the foremost is that such a question feels so alien. While media coverage of women’s issues is widespread, issues exclusive to men garner almost no attention at all. We’ve heard disturbing statistics about violence against women as a gender-specific problem and rightfully so: The issue demands our society’s dedicated attention. But, we hear little about violence against men as an issue distinct from generic violence; this disparity is all the more disturbing after learning that men were 20.5 percent more likely than women to be victims of a violent crime in 2001-02 (that figure is down from 34.2 percent the previous biennium).
Men seem to be bear the brunt on the other end of the criminal justice system, too. In each category of offense, men see longer average prison terms; when convicted of violent crimes, the average male is sentenced to 39 months more than the average female, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics bulletin “Women in Prison.” (Those figures discount life and death sentences.) Once men reach prisons, they are often grossly overrepresented, compared to their conviction rates: Some 87.0 percent of robberies in 1988 were committed by men, reported the National Crime Survey, but men accounted for 97.8 percent of prisoners serving time for that crime. (The figures are similar for aggravated assault and murder.)
In 1990, Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., complained that the National Institutes of Health spent less than 14 percent of its research budget on projects specific to women’s health, a figure often cited as an example of neglect toward women. If that number is insufficient, then certainly the mere 6.5 percent of the NIH budget spent on male-specific health issues is downright and dangerously paltry, as reported by Dr. Andrew Kadar in his excellent 1994 Atlantic Monthly article, “The Sex-Bias Myth in Medicine.”
Suicide, too, is a problem that disproportionately affects men: In 1995, there were 4.5 male suicides for every female suicide in the United States (the 18th-highest rate among the 76 countries for which statistics were compiled at NationMaster.com, a geographical statistics database), but resources dedicated to investigating this discrepancy seem slim. Incidentally, women attempt suicide more often than men do but tend to be less “successful.”
Why, then, is there such disparity in the sheer quantity of presented information? The answer is complicated. The feminist movement of the last half-century galvanized women (and concerned men) to identify “women’s issues” and organize political and social instruments to tackle them. Men, by contrast, have formed no widespread movements (there is no National Organization of Men or League of Male Voters), in part, no doubt, because most changes in men’s roles in society in recent decades have been passive consequences of the active changes in women’s roles. But the discrepancy runs deeper that that: Societal standards for the value of men — say, independence and the ability to solve problems without appeals for help — discourage wide-scale movements.
Moreover, the lack of societal and media attention to male issues seems to have burgeoned into a cultural consciousness not concerned with negative male images. While men are often portrayed in the
media as decisive leaders and often positive role models, they are also cast as archetypally insensitive, socially and sexually selfish or simply stupid — characterizations that would never be tolerated if applied as regularly to women.
“The business of helping men negotiate that distance is made infinitely more difficult by media-promoted lies and distortions which exaggerate men’s deficiencies and play down their personal talents and achievements,” the Sydney Institute’s Bettina Arndt wrote in The Weekend Australia. “The reality is that neither sex has a monopoly on vice or virtue but men have real work to do to restore their damaged reputation.”
Negative depictions of males are sometimes less subtle. While most feminists I’ve met have an enlightened view of gender-related issues geared toward understanding and cooperation, a few are less tolerant.
Robin Morgan, the former editor in chief of Ms. magazine, sees men, evidently without reasonable qualification, as shameless oppressors, asininely opining, “I feel that ‘man-hating’ is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them.”
American author Marilyn French was more specific, telling People magazine that “All men are rapists and that’s all they are.”
Andrea Dworkin, author of “Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant,” implicated men as misogynists, even in the context of consensual sex, incoherently arguing, “Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women’s bodies.”
These notions, while representing the frayed, onanistic edges of radical feminism, are still culturally damaging, and at least as much as notions that women should be denied education and confined to homes.
Unfortunately, misandry has found its way — thankfully in a much more moderated tone — into public institutions. Former Rep. Barbara Jordan, D-Texas, addressed what she perceived as male incapability.
“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,” she said. “He’s just incapable of it.”
These messages send a disturbingly adverse message to men of all ages about their value and their role in society.
Sexism, double standards and negative portrayal in the media plague both genders, but only by recognizing that can our society fairly address those problems in a fair and totally productive way.