Benny Bunter
Well-known member
and you go
oh yeah right. that's just patriarchy mate.
it's just maybe not that helpful
Yeah, but who actually said this though? Not you, not me, not babboon. Of course it would be glib if that was all you said. And nobody is recommending saying that as an intervention in an individual suicide risk case, that would be absurd.
What I see happening quite a lot (not just here) is male suicide statistics getting bandied around with a lot of seriously unexamined assumptions as to how they are to be interpreted. And, unfortunately, they are often employed very cynically to shore up some very dodgy beliefs.
So, you get stuff like this, from guys like Warren Farrell
"The subtitle of the book is "Why Men are the Disposable Sex." Farrell argues that historically both sexes were disposable in the service of survival: women risked death in childbirth; men risked death in war. However, Farrell notes, there is a key difference: women's disposability emanated more from biology; men's expendability required socialization.[5]
Farrell observes various characteristics of modern US society, such as the tendency to assign higher-risk jobs - soldier, firefighter, coal miner, and so on - to men: almost all of the most hazardous professions are all-male, and segments within professions have higher percentages of men as their level of hazard increases. Other statistics, in conjunction with the lack of public outcry or mobilization around them, point in the same direction of male expendability. Men are victims of violent crime twice as often as women and are "three times more likely to be murder victims". Suicide rates are much higher for men than for women. While the death rates for breast cancer and prostate cancer are comparable, the US spends six times as much on breast cancer.[6]
These statistics, Farrell suggests, can only be explained if US society places greater value on the lives of women than of men."
Now, I'm not saying anyone here is taking it that far, but suicide figures are being used to demonstrate that the patriarchy is just a thing of the past, invented by the guardian, totally dismissed at the outset. Dodgy assumptions.