tripu @tripu@qoto.org
Technologist, Spaniard, male, 42
Joined May 2020
Happy #InternationalMensDay! This year focused on “better relations between #men & #women”.
In the 🇺🇸 #US, in 2021, #men represent only ~41% of #college students ([source](https://collegenews.org/women-outnumber-men-in-us-colleges-nearly-60-of-students-in-2020-21-were-women/)). #Women have been the majority of four-year college graduates ever since 1982.
Yet what is the debate and the media reaction (if any)? To denounce that **“men with college degrees have become so cocky that they’re ruining romance for their female counterparts”**.
(When in university, it was less than 20% females at my college, yet somehow at the time I missed all the headlines about those arrogant women playing hard to get…)
https://nypost.com/2021/11/02/men-with-golden-penis-syndrome-ruining-romance-for-women/
80% of victims of the ✝️ #CatholicChurch in 🇫🇷 #France since the 1950s are #boys (mostly #men by now).
👦👦👦👦👧
News article:
* Headline: “girls”, not “boys”.
* Focus and first sentences are on female victims.
A sign of hope, though:
> _“Female #pedophilia exists and unfortunately the media never talk about it.”_
https://news.yahoo.com/nuns-raped-girls-crucifixes-female-110940545.html
> _“Boys form the vast majority of all short suspensions (75.4%) and long suspensions (73.9%). […] This appalling reporting bias in the article ignores not only the predominate suspension of #boys from Australian schools, but the impact of this on the disengagement of boys from a hostile and misandrist Australian education system, reflected in the year 7-12 retention rate for female students of 88.0%, compared to 79.3% for boys (again based on NSW government schools 2019 data).”_
> _“This erasure of boys from an analysis that should have acknowledged the extreme gendered nature of exclusion from #schools is consistent with the erasure of men and boys from other extremely gendered issues (suicide prevention, health, family) by ideologically biased academics, policy makers and service providers, and the erasure and abandonment of men and boys from humanitarian programs run by the UN, WHO, UNICEF and NGOs (i.e. Gates Foundation).”_
> _“So, when we see […] the decreasing enrolments of young #men in universities and colleges, we must be aware, not just that the #misandry of our #education systems begins from pre-school education and continues through-out boys education experience, but that this is just one part of a larger endemic trend of erasing men and boys from analyses that should be identifying their urgent needs. An erasure that pretends issues that predominately impact men and boys are #gender neutral, or paradoxically impact women and girl more.”_
> _“At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, #women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%.”_
> _“U.S. colleges and #universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.”_
> _“This #educationgap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years.”_
> _“After six years of college, 65% of women in the U.S. who started a four-year university in 2012 received diplomas by 2018 compared with 59% of #men during the same period.”_
> _“In the next few years, two women will earn a #college degree for every man, if the trend continues.”_
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/09/u-s-a-facts-of-the-day-2.html
To clarify, this is the critique behind [my initial post](https://qoto.org/@tripu/106796492140032253), which proved somewhat controversial:
**I.** Mainstream #feminism today tends to see “patriarchy” everywhere and (consistent with that view) focuses almost solely on issues affecting more women than men, and on differences of outcome where women seem to do worse than men.
**II.** Definition of #patriarchy (in bold, my emphasis):
> _“Social system in which the father or a male elder has **absolute authority** over the family group; by extension, one or more men […] exert absolute authority **over the community as a whole**.”_
— [Britannica](https://www.britannica.com/topic/patriarchy).
> _“Social organization marked by the **supremacy of the father** in the clan or family, the **legal dependence of wives** and children, and the reckoning of descent and **inheritance in the male line**.”_
— [Merriam-Webster](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/patriarchy).
> _“Society in which the oldest **male is the leader of the family**, or a society **controlled by men** in which they use their power to their own advantage.”_
— [Cambridge English Dictionary](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/patriarchy).
**III.** According to normal definitions of the term (and also because there are important issues affecting more men than women, and differences of outcome where men are clearly doing worse than women) prosperous liberal democratic countries today are obviously _not_ patriarchies.
**IV.** When confronted with this error, #feminists often bend and distort the definition of “patriarchy” to make it a synonym of “sexism”, and (consistent with that redefinition) say that the patriarchy is also hurting men, and that ending the patriarchy will benefit men, too.
**V.** That redefinition of “patriarchy” is unnecessary and confusing. Why conflate two words with very very different meanings? Can we then say that the Taliban and the old tribes of hunter-gatherers were merely “sexist”, instead of outright “patriarchal”? Should we then lump together under the same category truly retrograde societies where a few old men are the only people _legally_ entitled to exert absolute authority and to inherit and all women are _legally_ subservient, and extremely egalitarian 21st-century Sweden? The redefinition is (conscious or unconsciously) disingenuous.
**VI.** In spite of all those issues, bona fide #feminists often accept this bizarre framing for the sake of moving the conversation forward and making actual progress against sexism, naïvely assuming that _finally we are all now talking about the same thing_ (ie, fighting sex-based discrimination, wherever it occurs).
**VII.** After making this concession, inevitably it so happens that the original denouncers of the patriarchy get back to focusing only on issues affecting more women than men, and on differences of outcome where women do worse than men — ignoring or dismissing all male issues, just as before.
**VIII.** The result is that all participants in the discussion have now agreed that our modern, developed, equal-under-the-law societies are _patriarchies_ (I invite you to re-read the three definitions above) while at the same time having made zero progress against actual sexism of any kind. In fact, participants make _negative_ progress, because this swallowing-the-patriarchy move generates a lot of guilt and resentment.
I find this recurrent pattern dishonest, counterproductive, and irritating.
There's a huge imbalance in #workdeaths, yes. In my country (🇪🇸 #Spain), last year there were 751 work-related deaths, of which 696 were men (source: [last available official report by _Ministerio de Trabajo y Economía Social_](https://www.mites.gob.es/estadisticas/eat/eat20/TABLAS%20ESTADISTICAS/ATR_2020_Resumen.pdf)).
* 1,165% more #men than #women die at work.
* Men are >12× more likely to die at work than women.
* Of all people who die at #work, >92% are men.
/cc @namark
@tripu I'm not sure if I agree or disagree with you based on this, but the work deaths stat was kind of a shock when I first heard it. iirc men are...
From the archive entitled
_“Ada Lovelace was the First Programmer in History”_
(note: [she was not](https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/technology/visionaries/ada-lovelace-original-and-visionary-but-no-programmer/)), now comes
_“The Construction of Brooklyn Bridge is Mostly a Tale of Female Empowerment Against all Odds”_
https://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/p1qk72/during_the_construction_of_the_brooklyn_bridge/
Read also subsequent comments by OP.
To me, #feminism is primarily about “equality of the sexes”, and (only after that) “especially” about “women's rights”. That's [the original meaning from the very end of the 19th century](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminist-philosophy/#FemiBeliFemiMove), and also the _current_ meaning according to [Britannica](https://www.britannica.com/topic/feminism), [Merriam-Webster](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/feminism) and [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism).
With that in mind, this is good news about the end of an outrageous inequality before the law between the sexes that still exists:
https://www.econlib.org/whats-wrong-with-registering-women-for-the-draft/
I hope everybody just had a great #MensHealthWeek (14–20 Jun)!
My #son was born one week ago, on the 13th — I couldn't have planned for a better celebration 👶 ♂️
ℹ️ [in the UK](https://www.menshealthforum.org.uk/mhw); [in the US](https://www.menshealthmonth.org/week.html)
#men #male #health #mra #gender #feminism
Technologist, Spaniard, male, 42
Joined May 2020
