All posts tagged: men’s rights

Time to Stop Using Suicide For Political Point-Scoring

Published by Louise Perry

The writer and influential feminist Chidera Eggerue caused outrage recently when she callously dismissed the problem of male suicide. In response to a question she had received from an audience member about why “some men have it so hard,” Eggerue wrote in a series of tweets that she didn’t “have time to think about the reasons why the system you created at my expense to benefit you is now choking you. If men are committing suicide because they can’t cry, how’s it my concern?” Eggerue later apologized for her comments, but not before her tweets had gone viral and triggered a predictable backlash, including from some feminists. The Guardian’s Zoe Williams described Eggerue’s attitude towards men as “anti-feminist, anti-humanist, anti-intimacy, anti-everything I care about.” This uproar is part of a larger conversation about the gendered nature of suicide. It is well known that men are more likely to die by suicide than women are. The exact figures vary from country to country, but worldwide the suicide rate for men is almost twice as high as …

The Last Place Men Can Settle Things Like Men

Published by David Ley

In the middle of a dry, dusty desert in Nevada, I rode my bicycle down a street that wasn’t there a few weeks ago, and would be gone again in just a few days. C is a main street in Black Rock City, the Burning Man gathering that springs up in the alkali playa a few hours from Reno. At “Camp Settle This Like Men,” I parked my bike, donned a thick, stiff kimono and pants, and stepped onto the mats. I’d not brought my belt from home, so strapped on a loaner white belt, and invited a burly, bearded man with a huge smile and a brown belt to roll. A few minutes later, we stopped for breath. “You’re a black belt aren’t you?” he demanded. “Yeah,” I said, smiling. “What gave it away?” Mike and I became friends, in life and on Facebook. We know a lot of the same people, it turned out. The Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) community is large and growing, but at higher ranks, it is still a close-knit, …

Alternative, Scientifically-Literate Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men

Published by Gregory Gorelik

The American Psychological Association’s “Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men” have received much criticism from journalists and professional psychologists. Much of the opposition has centered on the guideline’s attack on “traditional masculinity” and the privileging of activism over evidence-based treatment. One of the few redeeming features of the guidelines is their acknowledgement that men face unique physical, psychological, educational, and social challenges and are less likely to seek psychological treatment to meet those challenges. But the guidelines fail in their targeted goal of preparing therapists to help the men under their care.   Throughout the entirety of the APA’s guidelines, discussion of evolutionary influences on men’s psychological development is either unintentionally neglected or willfully avoided (“testosterone” appears nowhere in the document and, out of more than 400 citations, only four mention either hormones or anything brain- or neuro-related). Whatever the reason, the fact that a sharp distinction is made between “sex” as biology and “gender” as “psychological, social, and cultural” experience suggests that the authors of the guidelines subscribe to the fallacy of …

Twelve Scholars Respond to the APA’s Guidance for Treating Men and Boys

Published by Quillette Magazine

Introduction — John P. Wright, Ph.D. John Paul Wright is a professor of criminal justice at the University of Cincinnati. He has published widely on the causes and correlates of human violence. His current work examines how ideology affects scholarship. Follow him on Twitter @cjprofman. Thirteen years in the making, the American Psychological Association (APA) released the newly drafted “Guidelines for Psychological Practice for Boys and Men.” Backed by 40 years of science, the APA claims, the guidelines boldly pronounce that “traditional masculinity” is the cause and consequence of men’s mental health concerns. Masculine stoicism, the APA tells us, prevents men from seeking treatment when in need, while beliefs rooted in “masculine ideology” perpetuate men’s worst behaviors—including sexual harassment and rape. Masculine ideology, itself a byproduct of the “patriarchy,” benefits men and simultaneously victimizes them, the guidelines explain. Thus, the APA committee advises therapists that men need to become allies to feminism. “Change men,” an author of the report stated, “and we can change the world.” But if the reaction to the APA’s guidelines is …

How My Toxic Stoicism Helped Me Cope with Brain Cancer

Published by Jonathan Church

Under normal circumstances—e.g. in a time when the American Psychological Association (APA) has not released guidelines questioning whether norms associated with “traditional masculinity” (e.g. stoicism) are harmful to the mental health of men, and a shaving commercial is not being run that criticizes “toxic masculinity”—I would be reluctant to publicly share a story of personal adversity that, as a sometime aficionado of existentialist philosophy, I know I must ultimately face alone. But in the spirit of opening up, here goes. I have brain cancer. Not the kind that killed John McCain, Ted Kennedy, or Beau Biden. At least not yet. I am afflicted with a low-grade glioma (specifically, a grade-2 infiltrative astrocytoma). My neurosurgeon informs me that experts do not distinguish between benign and malignant brain tumors. Instead, they distinguish between low-grade and high-grade tumors, the point being that all brain tumors naturally progress to death. There is no cure. High-grade simply gets you there faster. In the words of one study, “all low grade gliomas eventually progress to high grade glioma and death.” In …

Reversing the Descent of Man

Published by Geoff Dench

On virtually every indicator that anyone might want to consider, men in Britain and various other Western states seem to be performing very badly at the moment, both for themselves and for the communities in which they live. Not that this is particularly unusual. Throughout history, men have been inclined towards being social outsiders. Their usefulness to communities varies much more than women’s, and depends greatly on the way in which social institutions define and reward their roles. Whereas most cultures seem to recognize this, in the West we have increasingly pretended that it is not the case. And we are now paying for our mistake. Many people are asking themselves whether some of the radical social experiments attempted in recent generations are viable in the long term, or should now be ditched. It is not too late to face up to the problem. But we have such an accumulation of policy errors to deal with that we require a thorough re-orientation of public discourse before we can expect any specific measures to have much …

Mobs on the Menu: Restaurateurs and the Culture War

Published by Andy Ngo

Last month, the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia attracted international attention when the owner turned away White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her family. The episode shocked many Americans, especially Donald Trump supporters. But in this era of aggressive ideological mobbing, such episodes have become common—even if most of the victims are not nearly as famous as the press secretary. A hip bar in the Atwater Village neighborhood of Los Angeles has become the latest business caught up in this phenomenon. And unlike the owner of the Red Hen, the operators of The Griffin found themselves accused of bias by critics on both sides of the political spectrum. Last weekend, The Griffin was forced to shut down when a group of social media-mobilized activists swarmed the bar upon hearing news of a meet-up by Trump supporters in ‘MAGA’—Make America Great Again—hats. For days afterward, activists from both ideological camps followed up by filling the web with negative reviews and hateful comments. A visit to the business’s Yelp page shows a banner indicating the …