If we had the same percentage of safety inspections per capital each year as Japan, we would save the lives of 6,000 men and 400 women each year. They say that a woman is beaten by a man every twenty seconds, but fail to tell us a man is beaten by a woman every eighteen seconds. Farrell speaks carefully and is quick to crack a joke or poke gentle fun at himself, men, or women. But he is deadly serious about the importance of transforming the current highly polarized gender-based identity politics into a thankfulness for men's unique contributions and a compassion for their struggles to complement our concern for and appreciation of women. Because, Farrell answers, our instincts do not lead us to learn about male vulnerability, even where it exceeds women's.
Female victims attract men, but male victims repel everyone.
So we protest disproportionate capital punishment of blacks relative to whites but not the stunningly more disproportionate capital punishment of men relative to women. We protest corporal punishment of black boys but not of boys. Astoundingly, we learn that the greatest single predictor of the level of punishment for the same crime is the perpetrator's sex. He notes the ten glass cellars of male existence, including suicide, prison, homelessness, the death professions, earlier death from all fifteen leading causes of death, greater vulnerability to death from accidents, circumcision, corporal punishment, capital punishment, and the draft. Surpisingly, Farrell manages to retain some optimism about the future of relationships between men and women.