From: obermark@symcom.math.uiuc.EDU (Jon Obermark)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Draft red herring
Date: 20 Aug 92 04:13:57 GMT
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana


  Yes, I am registered with the selective service.  And yes I consider
this totally irrelevant.  The draft issue is a total red herring, and
has about was much relevance today as long historical surveys of the
plight of women in the 17th century, which is, in my opinion -- not
very much.

  But the fact is that there are truly "men's issues," only no one
wants to focus much on them, because for men to focus on their
problems seems to make both sexes quite uncomfortable.  I pointed out
earlier to someone asking what misandry is that if you go to a poor
neighborhood and listen to women sit on the porch and talk about
'their men' you'll find some.  Likewise, if you go to a poor
neighborhood and count the wounded, you will find adequate evidence
that this society is more dangerous to men than women in many ways.

A few facts from random places:
1) Men are 3 times as likely to be murdered as women.
2) Men are 6 times as likely to be injured through no fault of their
     own.  (This is a composite statistic including sources from
     injuries in industry to street shootings.)
3) Men are 4 to 5 times as likely to develop chronic or permanent
     mental disorders at a young age. (Again this includes everything
     from stuttering to severe autism.)
4) Men are 3-5 times (depending upon social class) as likely to be
     incarcerated at some point in their lives.
5) Men are also 3-5 times (again depending on class) as likely to die
     of stress related diseases before the age of 40 (although
     professional-class women earning the primary income in a
     household match similarly situated men in this category.)
6) The rate of addiction to both legal and illegal drugs is much
     higher for men, and the death rates for addiction-related
     diseases put them among the leading causes of death among men,
     but not among women.
6) In the city I am writing from, there is a Women's Emergency
     Shelter, it is open year round, though inadequately funded.
     There is also a Men's Emergence Shelter, which is open four
     months of the year.  I have yet to see a homeless woman asleep on
     the street in this city.
7) Men are twice as likely to be attacked on the street as women,
     contrary to the conventional wisdom.  I live near some pretty
     rough territory, and women sometimes ask that I walk them home.
     I do so because it is my fault that they have to go into this
     area in the first place.  (I am a student only because I want to
     be, so to some extent I have chosen to be temporarily poor.)  But
     I consider it ludicrous that they expect me to protect them, when
     I am twice as likely to be assaulted on the way home as they are
     on the way out.  My flatmate does similarly and I consider him
     insane, because he looks small and frail, and is a flaming Queen,
     a set of random abuse attractants if I ever heard one.
8) Again, contrary to the conventional wisdom, men get raped, at
     one-tenth the rate that women do, and boys get sexually abused,
     at almost half the rate that girls to.  The rape of a man or the
     abuse of a boy is much more likely to involve the extreme forms
     of violence: gang rape, multiple penetrations or painful methods
     of binding.  And there are NO support services available.  I am a
     sexual child abuse survivor, and have been dealing with the issue
     alone since I was about 17.  There was no help available.  In
     this city, the Women's Shelter provides counseling for victims of
     violence, and there are ISA groups here.  But the ISA groups are
     FOR WOMEN ONLY and there are no abuse counselling services for
     men.  Looking at the ways I have seen such things dealt with, the
     only way that I can see that I could have been identified as a
     sexual abuse victim, would have been for me to be
     institutionalized for violent behavior.  The extreme end of this
     is that when one of my abusers confessed, no one believed her
     either.  She needed mental treatment, BADLY; she was a mess, I
     think she was dangerous...

  I should stop here, because I am getting a little carried away.  My
point is that women focussing on women's issues is a good thing, but
to deny that men's lives are made more difficult in specific ways
merely by the accident of their being born male is to blind oneself.
To actually put time and energy into denying it is beyond silly.
  All of the above are the effects of physical and mental abuse.  It
is simply more acceptable to abuse a man in this society than to abuse
a woman.  This has its roots in the past, (in things like war
conscription...)  Women have no more obligation to act on these issues
than men have to act on "women's issues."  I personally DO feel
obligated to work on "women's issues," and I think feminists SHOULD
feel obligated at least to think creatively about issues that
disproportionately affect men, solely because they disproportionately
affect one gender.
  I have never seen a good analysis of gender and crime, for instance,
or of feminist reflections on the institutions of working-class work.
Why are the middle classes seen as more feminine/effeminate than the
lower classes?  Are these not obvious questions?  Are they not aspects
of gender?  Are they not the domain of feminism?
  Of course we need men to think on these issues as well, perhaps
first (but I am not sure -- there is a group of women who have a
generation's advantage in genderal terms, they can probably do good
work here sooner than men just starting out).  But those men cannot
GET ANYWHERE if women keep loudly denying that the issues they are
addressing exist.


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