Men Die. Women Victim.
It is the last Valentine’s Day of the second millennium. Newsweek celebrates it by telling women that men’s deaths means women are victims, this time of yet “Another Biological Clock.”[1]

More precisely, there are three messages in this Newsweek snippet: Men die, women victims; women live, women victims; men die, men benefit. Check it out.

If that’s love, let’s check out war. Forty million Soviet men were killed between 1914 and 1945.[2] Some families lost every man in the family: dad, son, brother, uncle. Yet a headline in Parade, the largest-selling weekly magazine in the world, reads “Short End of the Stick” with the article explaining Soviet women are getting the short end of the stick because they are stuck with factory and street-cleaner positions[3]

In Bosnia, the civil war has wiped out men so disproportionately that only 30% of the Bosnian population are men. Do headlines tell us, “War leaves Bosnia with 30% Men”? No. Parade’s headline reads, “Women Look to Gain Power in Bosnia.”[4] The focus on the sacrifice made by men as a gender was not only ignored, but Bosnia has specifically been used as an example of the type of war in which both sexes are killed equally. When there’s a story about a man being killed, the focus is not on the sacrifice of men, but of their role. We discover the sacrifice of men as a gender only when it is needed to help us understand the new burdens on women. For example, here is the page one headline from the Los Angeles Times[5]:

Watch how carefully, and doubtless unconsciously, men’s deaths are treated as women’s victimization....

Men have died, but the headline tells of only the female effort (“Women of Bosnia Try to Rebuild”). The loss of men is explained only to tell us the burden on the women “left behind.” The focus is on the communities that are robbed (“The war has robbed many communities....”), not “Husbands, fathers and sons robbed of lives.”

Now observe how women’s new burdens are seen as men’s previous privileges. (Male privilege is implied by phrases like “In this patriarchal society....”) However, it is only as we read down into the story that we discover: “...the women must haul kindling, draw water, and till the fields.”[6] But wait...why was tilling fields and hauling kindling left out of the headline? Because tilling fields and hauling kindling would have allowed us to laugh at the use of the word “patriarchal” to describe the men!

Now return to the secondary headline. Note that the very three words that shift the emphasis to women – ”those left behind” – also shifts the emphasis to victim language: “left behind,” ... “must learn to handle,” ... “must learn to deal,” and “must survive bitter loneliness.”

There is something about women’s role that is also never mentioned. Can you figure it out? Women not sacrificing their lives in war is never discussed as female privilege, as matriarchy.

Is it possible we are still ignoring men’s deaths exactly so we can prepare men to die in war to protect women? Almost as if to answer, these three issues of Time and Newsweek arrived at my home, in deus ex machina-fashion, as I was writing this in 1999.

The two issues devoted to women were both devoted to women living (“The Truth About Women’s Bodies,”[7] and “Health for Life: What Every Woman Needs to Know”[8]). The one issue devoted to men honored men for dying (“From WWI to Vietnam: The Grunts and the Great Men.”[9]). Here is the contrast, Newsweek-style....

 

Isn’t it good we honor men for dying? Let’s put it this way: If we honored women for dying while we produced Special Issues on men’s health and none on women’s, would we ask whether that was good? Or would we intuitively sense that the appreciation of men for dying is appreciation that keeps the slave a slave?

Female Victimhood Dependent on Keeping Men’s Contributions Invisible
If female victimhood is dependent on keeping men’s deaths invisible, it follows it is also dependent on keeping invisible the contributions men make. Again, most of this is not conscious. But neither is it coincidence. Have you ever seen an article on the responsibilities of third world men? (Or men of any world!)

In the housework chapter, we saw the dynamic that kept men’s 50 areas of contributions to the home invisible. Similarly, one of the fastest growing segments of the population at the turn of the century is the single dad, but we are still keeping invisible his contributions. And in the workforce we have ignored the longer hours, more hazardous jobs, more technical fields and other contributions made by men that lead to higher pay.[10]

The incentive to keep men’s contributions invisible? Victim power is a prerequisite to everything from affirmative action to Women Infants and Children Programs.

The price we pay? Perhaps, if we studied the single dads we might help single moms? And, oh yes, might this help the children? And perhaps, if women know the 25 behaviors that create higher pay for men rather than tossing off men’s higher pay as discrimination, they would empower themselves?

Dependency on victim power is part of women’s search for security, but, ironically, the very process is leading to women losing security. Why? Many business owners have shared with me their fear of lawsuits by women, and their awareness that down-sizing and outsourcing women reduces their fear. Thus, many women, in search of security, are losing security.

Notice that in most of these cases there are five parts of the Lace Curtain working together: funding sources that finance only feminists as gender scholars (such as Arlie Hochschild, the author of The Second Shift); top universities like UC/Berkeley hiring feminist scholars, thus giving credibility to research with a built-in female-as-victim bias; the press making insignificant studies into headlines when it contains woman-as-victim while ignoring studies that defy that stereotype; men not speaking up; too few of us questioning.

Newspaper Publishing
We saw in the Canadian study of newspapers discussed above how violence against women was portrayed disproportionately to men’s, and was personalized even as men’s was at best a cold statistic

Here’s why this bias hurts women....

When only women’s suffering is personalized, it motivates us to rescue the woman and assume the cause must be the man. So in problems like domestic violence we blame the man and ignore the male-female dance that leads to both sexes battering each other equally.[11]

This hurts women because, when the man feels he is the assumed cause, he becomes resistant to counseling. He experiences the counseling as identical to his wife – unable to hear him. To him, the counseling is now part of the problem. No, it’s worse than that. Hope disappears, and cynicism appears. And it doesn’t stop there.... He feels both his wife and the system are ganging up against him. Now it’s him against the world, and that’s the set up for mass killings  followed by a suicide, which is, and will remain, the male style until men become no more or less worthy as victims than women.

To illustrate the lace curtain in newspapers, I will look at The New York Times, but parallel analyses can be made of most papers. The experience of Jack Kammer’s Good Will Toward Men,[12] consisting of many independent women explaining why they support feminism’s empowering of women but not its demonizing of men, illustrates the ubiquity of the bias. When Good Will Toward Men was published, it did not receive a single review in any mainstream newspaper in the United States. Only the San Francisco Chronicle came close. It assigned a review to Armin Brott. Brott liked the book. But, Brott explains, when he submitted it Patricia Holt, then the Chronicle book review editor, although she had not read the book, she knew enough of its thesis to tell Armin, “I don’t want this.... I don’t like this book.” She killed the review.

When I mentioned this to a friend, he exclaimed, “That’s censorship! What the Chronicle did is censorship! Doesn’t that make you furious?”

I responded, “No. Overt censorship scares me less than covert censorship – what scares me is the hundred big city newspapers that didn’t even assign it to be reviewed even as they are reviewing dozens of feminist books. And what scares me is that almost every book on men’s issues is neglected by most every paper.”

The only single newspaper whose censorship scares me is The New York Times, because it is the Pied Piper of not just print journalism, but the visual media as well. I double-checked this with Bernard Goldberg, for 27 years a reporter with CBS news. He estimated that more than 90% of television news stories are picked up from one source: The New York Times.[13] And, as will become apparent, when it comes to issues of gender, no source with even close to comparable influence is more anti-male. Take a look...

The New York Times (NYT)

Unhealthy Times
It’s June, 1998 – Men’s Health Month. The New York Times features a special section on women’s health. Coincidence? On Men’s Health Month 1997 they did the same thing.[14] Yet no Men’s Health section appeared in any month of 1997 or 1998. In fact, prior to 1999, no section on Men’s Health had ever appeared.

Oh, yes, the day the 1998 section on Women’s Health appears is Father’s Day.

Here is The New York Times headline for a story about Father’s Day, in this Women’s Health section[15]....

The story is written by Natalie Angier. See if you can find the anger:

“Today is Father’s Day...we women are supposed to...make them feel like princes while letting them act like turnips.

“The section you are reading is about women’s health. And so what better place to address the question: Are they worth it? ... Do we live better with men or without them...? ... The answer, like marriage itself, is a glorious mess.”[16]

Let’s see, now. The woman’s question on Father’s Day is “Do we [women] live better?” Isn’t that like your dad saying to your mom, “It’s Mother’s Day... what better day to ask ‘Are you worth it?... Am I better off with you or without you?’”

Angier’s anger is not Angier’s alone. The section’s first page teases “Men have Viagra. Women have outdated, inadequate data on questions of desire and arousal.”[17]

Would we honor Mother’s Day with articles saying “Women have the birth control pill, an Office of Research on Women’s Health, a seven year longer lifespan. Men have outdated condoms, hazardous jobs and male-only draft registration”?

The New York Times finally did a men’s health section of sorts in 1999.[18] Unlike the large women’s health sections, the men’s was brief. (Excluding ads, a total of about 7 pages of print and usable illustrations such as graphs.) There was nothing in depth on 33 of the 34 neglected areas of men’s health – the list of which I had sent The New York Times. Instead, articles focused on men’s tailoring, cosmetic surgery, men’s gyms, and “Confessions of a Former ‘Jake’,” as in a men’s columnist for Glamour.

While a few of the articles contained useful information, the tone was the opposite of the women’s health section: Instead of criticizing and blaming women, as the women’s health section did to men, the men’s health section criticized and blamed men. Men are told they die sooner because they self-destruct: “Why Men Don’t Last: Self-Destruction as a Way of Life.”[19] Could it also have to do with the absence of compassion?

While the women’s health section told women they were victims, the men’s told men they have lots of advantages (“Men have lots of health advantages”[20]) and all the luck (“When it Comes to Food, Guys Have All the Luck”[21]).

The attitude begins on page one, above the fold. Bored, beleaguered, or can’t-be-bothered men (with the exception of the African-American man, the only type of man portrayed with occasional empathy by the Times) reluctantly waiting to see a doctor. The subhead lectures men: “As Patients, Men Are Impatient, or Uneasy, or Both. They Need to Get a Grip, Like Women.”[22]

How does the The New York Times cover health on an everyday level, say a front page news story? The headline reads “New Cancer Cases Decreasing...But Minorities And Women Are Still Particularly At Risk.”[23]

The headline should have ended, “...But Minorities and Men Are Still Particularly At Risk.” Why? According to The New York Times’ own graphs, these special risks applied to men, not women. The graphs showed men have lung cancer at almost twice the rate of women. Similarly, the colon/rectum graphs show men’s rates were more than 50% higher than women’s. And in the only other breakdown, men’s prostate cancer rates were higher than women’s breast cancer rates for every year since 1991.

Check out the headline and illustration again. Notice anything else? The front page illustration features only a woman. Men die, women victim. Men’s risks are increased by our blindness to them.