When Men Were Men and Women Were Grateful...

Do you remember the good old days...  when men were men and women were grateful?  Long before feminist and men's activist groups.  Well, among other things, I am a neuroscientist.   Chemists have known for a long time, that what is on one side of the equation, must be on the other.   Having lived 20 years as man, and 20 years as a woman, in terms of the journey of the binary human creature to me that strongly suggests that what happens to women will happen to men and vice versa.  Consider this:

Fact: 98% of the people who die in war are men—but that’s because women aren’t drafted and women are billed as the weaker sex.    Our government drafts boys, but not girls, and if boys avoid the draft its a $250,000 fine and imprisonment.   That’s the price you pay for being on top, so to speak.  When I lived as a “woman” I didn’t need a AAA card—that’s what men were for—to change the flat tires, and rescue “helpless, helpless, helpless me.”   On the flip side of that, you had to keep a tube of lipstick, and some mascara on your nightstand in case you had to go screaming into the night—and don’t even think about equal pay or job opportunities. 

Fact: 80% of the suicides are men and boys. Now why is that?  Probably because men aren’t trained in enduring suffering, like women are—and so men tend to seek permanent solutions to temporary problems, especially if temporary is a long, long, time.  

Fact: 93% of the workplace deaths are men. That’s because the chance of dying from falling off an oil rig, being smothered in a coal mine, or getting your neck broken in the NFL is much greater than bleeding to death from a stapler mishap in an office, or choking on a pom pom fron during a cheer.  Again, it comes down to the stereotypes that we assign to men and women.  And granted, stereotypes exist for a reason—the human brain likes to consolidate and simplify information.  Most men are stronger than most women, in sheer physical strength—but not all men.  There in lies the problem—our binary roles are too rigid.   That’s why I always wonder why on the forms where they have “Male” or “Female” there’s no third and fourth choices like “all of the above” and “none of the above”.  

 Fact: Women on average live 5 years longer than men, and men die earlier and more often of every major cause of death.  Stress is a major factor in every illness—and the demand to provide and protect, especially in this world is very stressful.  

Fact: While there are several offices of the government dedicated to studying women's health, there are none dedicated to studying men's health issue.  That’s mostly because for so many years, everything in health was articulated by studies done on males.   Now in defense of medical research, it is hard enough to get funded and approved to do a study, without adding the burden of looking all over town for subject participants. And who are mostly in and around medical schools—men, and there you have it.  In general, presuming that what is true about one population is true about the general population is not good science.  Western medicine hasn’t always concerned itself with good science. That’s old news, and more about Western culture than Western Medicine—i.e., “believing it’s a man’s world, and not realizing that it would be absolutely nothing without a woman or a girl.”

Over 1 million babies undergo painful and unnecessary circumcisions each year.  All circumcisions of girls are against the law--regardless of cultural or religious practices, men’s activist groups complain.   How do you circumcise a girl?  Surely they’re not talking about vaginal and clitoral mutilation?  Sadly, many religious practices are.   

When families split, 83% of the time, women get custody of the children.   Now here’s a dicey one—because when families split, it gets ugly, and people tend to lose their heads.  The fact is, most of the time, women are better prepared to take care of the children than men because most of the time, women are more nurturing than men.  Again, that’s most of the time.   Now here’s a novel thought.  What if people didn’t get married and have children until they were prepared to go the distance to raise their children? 

Domestic violence is intolerable.  However, when it happens to men, we laugh about it--case in point--John Bobbitt.  There’s nothing funny about anybody being hurt.  At least 38% of domestic violence victims are men--that's nearly half.   Now many men would say, “well hell if you can get beat up by a bitch… then you’re a bitch, you’re not a man.”  That attitude is precisely why battered men go unrecognized.   When it comes to reproductive rights, men are totally excluded.   I've heard men say, "her body, her choice; his wallet, her choice."   DNA paternity testing reveals that about 30% of the fathers aren't actually the fathers.   Well here’s the problem with that.  People, and especially men, are too quick to have unprotected sex with people they really don’t know.  Men are also quick to “hit it, and quit it.”  The reality is a pregnancy is not as hard on a man’s body as it is a woman’s.  How many men have died during childbirth?  Probably less than a hundred—all of whom were strangled by women giving birth without anesthesia. That’s not excusing women who are deceptive about who fathered their child.  The real issue is humans are much too casual with the creation of life.   That and many times, people are too mentally ill, or emotionally disturbed to understand what it is they are doing, and why.  Been there, done that—fortunately it didn’t result in an unwanted child—as far I know—but the 70’s were the 70’s—so who knows. 

There's research showing that 40% of the rape accusations against men are false.  

When I was 13 years old I didn't believe there was any such thing as rape—my belief being you couldn’t pee in a moving hole. Having been raped 3 times, once at gunpoint, I have a different perspective.  Having only reported one of my rapes to the authorities, I know what the research cannot show is how much of the percentile of rape is not reported.

Even more disturbing to me, is the fact that most of my male friends, and many of my female friends, do not consider having sex with someone who is drunk or high on drugs to be rape. 

The fact of the matter is there are no victims only volunteers, and men and women trade privileges with each other, in a bizarre mating ritual, like some strange insect on the Nature Channel. Let’s face it, men and women have been beating up each other since the ancients, and marginalizing the people who are honest enough to admit publicly that they like it.    Holla back chirren.