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Letter to the Editor: A Reply to Carey Roberts
April 7, 2004
by Pat Taylor

In Carey Roberts' article "Where Have All The Young Men Gone?", I don't take issue with the current statistics, but with his relating them to the past.

I know that men are shortchanged these days, and that medical research is concentrating on women. I know that the risks of men's diseases, accidents, and suicides/homicides are too high in general and much higher than women's. I know that women are getting the attention while men are left to fend for themselves. I know that this is unfair, and I know that the root-cause can be found in the yelping of radical feminists over the years, and the laws and political correctness they have perpetrated on us all.

BUT... for many years (even scores and centuries) every single piece of research and laboratory work was directed only toward men. Women were not considered important enough to be a part of the statistics, and it was assumed that women were "just like men", only smaller and shorter. Even when genetic, hormonal, and neurological differences were found between the sexes, it was taken for granted that it was of little import statistically. Medications were dispensed to women, as they were to children, based solely on size. Until relatively recently insurance was rated on the income of the man, and benefits to the woman (as they may still be today) were dispensed on the assumption that the woman would re-marry.

Speaking of which, it is not about marriage that the older woman is concerned today, as Roberts wants to believe. She is much more likely to stay single by choice that the older man is. In other words, once she got a taste of freedom, like Mikey, she liked it! As for the statistic that women outlive men by five years, I can remember some 20 years ago, when it was said that same statistic was seven years. So it seems things are getting a little better for men -- slow, 'tis true, but better just the same.

My point is that Roberts shouldn't insist the current unfairness toward men indicates what has always been true for women, or that men have always been second-class. It simply isn't so. There was a *long* period of history when women were ignored, medically, politically, psychologically and socially. During that time only individual women managed to speak loud enough to be heard. Feminism reared its head in order to bring women's history on a par with the rest of humanity's -- which is to say men's history. The fact that it took a wrong (socialistic) turn in the road... the fact that women are now trying to eat men alive, does not change history, and will not uncover women's statistics that were never recorded.

Pat


 
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