Installment 18. If Men Have All the Power How Come Women Make the Rules?
Share this compelling intro to the Men's Movement with your skeptical friends.
Choice for Men
If the government has no right to force a woman into being a parent for nine months of pregnancy, why does the government have the right to force a man to be a parent for eighteen years of work and child support?
A man and woman who have sex and conceive a child are both responsible for that new life.
But the woman—and only the woman—can opt out of her responsibility by getting an abortion.
And the woman—and only the woman—can decide that the other person is going to be a parent against his wishes.
“During the 15 years I answered a Cleo advice column, I had many letters from women who were considering doing just that [tricking a man into fatherhood] and wrote seeking my approval for staging a ‘supposed accident.’”
— Bettina Arndt, Sydney Morning Herald, February 17, 2001
Generally, the young, single mothers in London’s public housing “estates” got pregnant on purpose. “There’s huge peer pressure to have a baby,” [Alan Craig, the director of the Mayflower Family Centre] says. “They want something to love. All their friends have babies; you see them pushing their prams with the babies dressed to the nines. They all want this toy, this doll.”
— derived from The Sunday Times (London), September 3, 2000
Choice for Men would allow a man to have a paper abortion: nobody dies, but the man is allowed to terminate all legal connections to the child.
But some people don’t even want to allow you to have the benefit of Choice for children that aren’t even yours!
“The truth shall set you free.”
So we certainly can’t let men know the truth!
(Feminacentrism seems to be in some people’s DNA.)
A disturbing variation on the old game “Mother May I?”
The British government’s Human Genetics Commission has proposed a law, which government officials are expected to enact, to make it illegal for suspicious fathers to get DNA paternity tests without the mother’s consent. One of the reasons: when a mother’s lie is discovered things become “terribly difficult” for her. Officials in Australia, including the chief judge of the Family Court, have proposed similar restraints on men and fathers in their country.
— derived from the Sunday Telegraph (London), May 19, 2002 and the Melbourne Age (Australia), May 26, 2002
Male Suicide
If our lives are so wonderful and women’s are so full of oppression and degradation, why do we commit suicide 4.5 times more often than girls and women do?
The male-female suicide ratio is bad and getting worse. For 15-to-24-year-olds, the ratio in 1933 was 1.54 to 1. In 1971 it was 3.0 to 1. In 1995 it was 6.1 to 1.
— derived from the US National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control
Since the mid-1970s the suicide rate involving Australian men between the ages of 20 and 39 has increased by 93 percent, growing by 18.5 per cent in just the past two years.
— derived from The Age, Melbourne, October 17, 2000
Sure, more women than men “attempt” suicide, but if they “fail” so often we have to conclude either that they’re incompetent… or they didn’t really mean to “succeed.”
“The great bulk of non-fatal [suicide] attempts, which is to say the great bulk of female attempts, were very ambivalent about killing themselves. Men, generally, don’t attempt suicide unless they are completely devoid of hope.”
— Dr. David Clark, Director of the Center for Suicide Research, past president of the American Association of Suicidology, in an interview with Jack Kammer, August 1992
“Call your mother, Gigi! Liane d’Exelmans has committed suicide.”
The child replied with a long drawn-out “Oooh!” and asked, “Is she dead?”
“Of course not. She knows what she’s about.”
— from the French novel Gigi by Colette, translated by Roger Senhouse
In southern California in the late 1970s I was an Emergency Medical Technician working for an ambulance company. One day my partner and I got a call for a possible suicide. We arrived to find a 30-ish woman on the phone, pacing in the kitchen, sobbing to her girlfriend. She had taken a dozen aspirin. We walked her to the ambulance and she rode sitting up to the hospital emergency room. The very next call was another possible suicide. My unit was the first on the scene. We entered a dark apartment and found a large male form slumped backward across a bed. Touching the man’s carotid artery to check for a pulse, I squeezed blood from his neck and saw it spilling from his mouth. He had blown his brains out.
It seems a most horrible and insensitive kind of irony that feminacentrists insist on pointing out that women “attempt suicide” more often than men do.
Blindness in Reporting Suicide
In a story about a rash of suicides at the University of Maryland, the Washington Post on July 16, 1992 reported that “six of the eight suicides were upperclass or graduate students,” that “six of the eight suicides occurred this spring” and that “none of the suicides appeared to be related.”
They never reported that six of the eight victims were male.
It seems unlikely that if six of the eight victims were female the Post would be oblivious to gender, especially if the gender factor were as startling for women as it is for men.
In covering a rash of youth suicides in South Boston, NBC News on May 6, 1997 never mentioned that all the victims were male. Neither did NPR’s “Weekend All Things Considered,” covering the same story on June 15, 1997.
Why do we ignore the gender component of suicide? Because it would force us to acknowledge that this is not a man’s world, and would require some changes our society would find difficult, inconvenient and threatening.