The title here is a quote from an article that could be found in the Ottawa Citizen this past weekend entitled It's not enough for men to be men.
The first thing that it tackled was a campaign under way at the Ontario Ventrinary School trying to recruit a higher percentage of men:
Of the 114 students who began the veterinary medicine program this fall at the Guelph campus, 87 per cent are women, according to recent media reports. The feminization of veterinary medicine is one more example of how the new century belongs to women. My question is, why is the college making extra efforts to recruit qualified male students? Really, who wants men?
This particular program is 87% female and according to the author of this article trying to do something to attract more men would be a bad idea. By comparison, across the U.S. about 20% of those enrolled in U.S. engineering schools are female and a lot of those schools seem to be running recruitment campaigns aiming to increase that percentage.
Then the article gets into the whole issue of sex-selection when it comes to babies, noting that this had shifted about 20 years ago to favor girls, now with up to a 2:1 ratio in their favor. Ronald Ericsson, the creator of a technique used to separate sperm according to the gender of any children that would result, is quoted as saying the following:
Why wouldn't you choose a girl? Women live longer than men. They do better in this economy. More of them graduate from college. They go into space and do everything men do, and sometimes they do it a whole lot better. I mean, hell, get out of the way - females are going to leave us males in the dust.
Women in this society typically do live longer - but is there any intrinsic, biological reason for that to be the case or is that more of a lifestyle thing? The vast majority of job losses during the last round of financial difficulties were male, but coming job losses due to government cutbacks appear to be likely to be majority female. More women than men graduate from college, but in the hard sciences and engineering four times as many men graduate as do women. Often women indeed do do jobs quite well, although in some cases the numbers don't quite match up. For example, men and women just starting out in the army after high school, the minimum standard for men is the female maximum in at least one area. An over-adherence to the women-can-do-everything sometimes seems to promote the a-woman-is-a-defective-man line of reasoning. Remember that indices like The Global Gender Gap Index assume all areas in which men are ahead to be the result of discrimination, and any areas in which women lead to represent equal treatment.
The Ottawa Citizen article author notes that:
Because of estrogen, they have stronger immune systems and are better at enduring pain. By comparison, men are not much more than warm storage containers for sperm.
Actually, the first sentence is there is in large part false. To quote Jeffrey Mogil, a professor of pain studies at McGill: "Females are more sensitive to pain, less tolerant and more able to discriminate different levels of pain than males" (as cited in this MSN article). That MSN article is actually pretty interesting, going into a fair bit more detail. The exception to this general rule of men having higher pain thresholds is pregnant women whose hormonal balance shifts to include a high percentage of painkilling hormones throughout the course of that.
A survey of 1000 TV commercials is then cited, with Frederic Hayward who did this study concluding that:
100 per cent of the jerks singled out in male-female relationships were male. One hundred per cent of the ignorant ones were male. One hundred per cent of the ones who lost a contest were male. One hundred per cent of the ones who smelt bad were male. One hundred per cent of the ones who were put down without retribution were male. One hundred per cent of the objects of rejection were male ...
Again, this is simply culture... does this represent reality?
Many middle-aged men are filled with anger, anxiety and aggression - traits most used to outgrow after their teenage years. Maybe it's because plenty of men are at 40 still behaving like 20-year-olds.
Is this indeed true or pure conjecture? If so, is this primarily due to emotional problems in men, or might it be seen as an outgrowth of the sexual revolution and resulting developments like no-fault divorce that may indeed produce a real lack of security and related anger and aggression issues?
