A couple weekends ago I had an unpleasant run-in with a men’s rights activist, in a private forum which I help administrate. He made various arguments about how men are systematically disadvantaged in fairly specific ways. Some of his arguments were good, some were bad, but all of them were marred in the minds of his audience when he eventually lost his temper and started in on people with the usual sexist slurs. In the end, I had to kick him for violating the first and most fundamental rule of civil discourse, which was unfortunate because I sincerely believe ideological diversity makes us stronger.
I say all this as preface, because every time I try to discuss “men’s issues” in nearly any context there immediately ensues a battle between the men’s rights folks and the women’s rights folks, firing at each other from highly-fortified, well-traveled, previously entrenched positions. People quickly lose their tempers and close their minds, and no progress is usually made. I suspect that this endless cycle played some role in Ally Fogg’s recent decision to stop arguing about International Men’s Day:
…the participants turn back to soak up the applause of their own side, gurning with smug pride at their great achievement before their next team member steps forward to repeat the exact ritual, and so it continues until the time zones of the planet have rolled around and everyone can go back to bed.
I am sympathetic to this line of argument and commend Fogg’s article to your reading, but as an evangelical skeptic, I can never go along with the “not up for debate” approach to any contemporary controversial topic. Also, it seems woefully premature to pretend International Men’s Day is a settled issue at this point, especially given recent events at University of York.
Twitter continues to condemn the university that cancelled #InternationalMensDay https://t.co/HMfdkHeJOU
— Indy Students (@IndyStudents) November 19, 2015
Which brings me to the fundamental question at hand today: Are there at least a few good reasons to set aside a day to focus on men’s issues? (I mean serious issues, here, not covering up urinals at conventions.) The theme for this year is “Working To Expand Reproductive Options for Men” and I’m having trouble taking that issue too seriously, since most men produce viable gametes throughout most of their lives and never have to worry about getting pregnant.
If I had to pick one social problem which strikes me as a distinctly and demonstrably men’s issue, it would probably be the disposability of young veterans. Here are the baseline rates for suicide among several industrialized nations:
(Notice that the U.S. has leveled off around 10 suicides per 100,000 per annum.)
Now here are the rates for young men who served in uniform, from this recent VA report:
Young men who served in the military are far more at risk of suicide than the general population here in the U.S. and (as of the most recent data update) this has been trending for the worse. This is a very weighty problem, undoubtedly worthy of our attention as a society, but it remains unclear to me whether it helps to treat it as a gendered issue. Male veterans make up the majority of veterans and are two to three times as likely to kill themselves as female veterans (see pages 5-6 of the VA report) but even though the statistical disparities are ineluctable, the social, medical, and psychological response to the problem should be the same regardless of gender.
What I’m getting at here is that even when the statistics make it completely obvious that a given social problem is falling disproportionally on one gender (or age cohort) it does not necessarily follow that we should treat the problem as a gendered issue, rather than coming up with solutions which work well for everyone. This is as true on International Men’s Day as on any other.
Disagree? I’m more than happy to have the argument here in the comments.
