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In her response to Jeff Burhams' silly letter "Language police
erasing ‘man' from vocabulary, society" Megan Hall tells Burhams
to "keep your mouth shut" because "your life is easier because
you are male" and that said males are the "oppressors in our
society" ("Use of ‘Man' overlooks half of population,
Daily
Bruin, 1/20/99) Hall no
doubt has looked up at the top of our society--the senators, the
owners of large corporations, etc., and seen (correctly) that
they are overwhelmingly male. The problem is that, while looking
up at the top of our society, she fails to look down, at the
bottom. There she would find quite a different picture. For
example: 1) Every year
6,000 people are killed in
workplace/industrial accidents--95% of them male. Of the 25 jobs
listed as most dangerous by the U.S. Dept. of Labor, 24 of them
are largely or exclusively male.
2) Over 80% of the homeless people in the U.S. are male.
3) Over 80% of the suicides in our society are committed by
males. 4) Over 70% of
the victims of violent crime (murder, rape, assault, etc.) are
male. 5) Men live six
years less than women do.
6) Over 90% of our prison population are male--tens of thousands
of them imprisoned for non-violent drug offenses. Men often
receive 1.5 times or even twice the prison sentence that women
do for the same crime--a stunning ‘gender gap'. Under
California's idiotic "three strikes" laws--which makes
insufficient distinction between violent and non-violent crimes,
males are being given 25 years to life sentences for stealing
aspirin or a slice of pizza.
7) Male high school students are far more likely to be expelled
from school, to drop out of school, to be murdered, or to commit
suicide than females. Females are more likely to graduate high
school, enter college, and graduate college than males.
8) Men work 90% of the over-time hours in this country. The
average full-time employed male's work week is 48 hours,
compared to only 40 for women. Men have the longest commutes,
the most dangerous jobs, and are the most likely to work at
night or far away from home. Incidentally, these realities--not
discrimination--are the principal reasons for the male-female
wage gap. 9) Of the ten
leading causes of death in the U.S., men lead in all of them.
Men dominate in stress-related diseases and cancers, often
because of their work and the dangerous substances they are
exposed to or breathe in. A woman is several times more likely
to live to age 85 than a man.
10) Over 80% of the AIDS sufferers in the US are male.
11) In family court, the most discriminatory institution in all
of the United States, men are routinely robbed of custody of
their children. This is despite the fact that a mother is
statistically twice as likely to murder her own son or daughter
as a father is. Women also commit the vast majority of child
endangerment and child neglect.
After the (losing) custody battle men are saddled with punitive
child support payments (not to mention punitive ex-wives) which,
remarkably, they usually pay. Ironically, men are better at
meeting court-ordered child support obligations than women are.
Perhaps Hall will respond to my letter with a litany of famous
feminist statistics detailing female victimization. What readers
should know is that almost all of these studies and
statistics--from rigged and hideously misleading rape and
domestic violence surveys to the "rule of thumb", "Super
Bowl/Abuse Bowl" and "Wife-beating a major cause of birth
defects" hoaxes to the self-esteem studies and beyond were
blatant falsehoods pushed by a group of feminist ideologues who
succeeded (for awhile) in hoodwinking the major media. Since
then newspapers and magazines have become a
little more guarded about rushing into print with
sensationalized stories of female victimization. These feminist
canards have been thoroughly annihilated by serious
scholars and dissident feminists, the best example being Who
Stole Feminism? by Christina Hoff Sommers.
Hall is correct in
stating that women have and do continue to suffer in this
society. Where she is wrong (and this is typical of the modern
feminist) is that she self-centeredly focuses only on female
suffering while ignoring the reality of male suffering. If Ms.
Hall looks at the bottom of society as well as the top, she'll
see that women have no monopoly on suffering.
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