Equality has always been an American preoccupation, right from the words “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence.
Yet even that phrase is not egalitarian enough by today’s lights; feminists have long objected to the gendered language of “all men.”
Thomas Jefferson didn’t mean to commit a microaggression; in 1776, “all men” meant women, too.
We know this because the Founding Fathers — must we say Founding Parents? — argued about the mismatch between their universal philosophy and the endemic inequalities of their time, with Abigail Adams asking her husband John to “remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors” when the time came for America to declare independence.
Today, however, men and women are becoming increasingly unequal — and in one of the most basic measures of well-being, it’s men who keep falling further behind.
Life expectancy has declined for all Americans in recent years.
It’s fallen more for men than for women, though, producing the largest gender gap in nearly two decades.
According to a study in JAMA Internal Medicine, as of 2021 women were outliving men by 5.8 years.
As much as postmodern academics and progressive political activists may deny it, there are natural differences between the sexes, and the mere fact that women live longer is not so surprising.
For one thing, men are disproportionately employed in the nation’s most hazardous jobs, including as loggers, roofers, construction workers, aircraft pilots and steel workers.
And if a male propensity for risk-taking makes men more successful in certain executive and entrepreneurial roles, it also leads to more men and boys dying young of misadventure and accident.
But the gap in longevity has widened by a full year since 2010, when it was at an historic minimum of 4.8 years.
Human nature hasn’t changed in that time; rather, something has changed in America to make it a deadlier place for men.
COVID contributed twice over, to the extent that the disease may have affected men more severely and they, in turn, were less inclined to take its flu-like symptoms seriously.
Deaths from despair have ravaged both sexes, but suicide and overdose do exacerbate the gender disparity, with men at greater risk of dying from each of those causes.
Unsurprisingly, men are also more likely to die by homicide, and when violent crime escalates, male life expectancy will predictably fall.
But there are less obvious forces in play, too.
Men are less likely to go to college or complete a degree, which in an increasingly service-oriented and knowledge-based economy translates into worse life and career prospects — conditions that foster deaths from despair.
Whether ironically or cynically, progressives can be conservative and hidebound in their assumptions about inequality: They presume that whoever was more-than-equal in the past must still be privileged today, and so the one kind of inequality that doesn’t prick the progressive conscience is whatever harms groups that were formerly better off.
Income inequality and racial inequality are outrages that fill the streets with protesters from Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter — but there won’t be any protests over men’s worsening life prospects.
Then again, the last thing men need is to be designated as another victim group.
Right now, the very concept of manhood is under attack from two directions: from those on the left who see masculinity as inherently “toxic” and those on the right who idolize the likes of Andrew Tate — overgrown adolescent hedonists without an ounce of self-control, let alone any traditionally manly moral responsibilities for family or others.
If life is unfair to men, the masculine remedy is not to complain about unfairness but to be tough enough, and mature enough, to endure and prosper despite inequality.
That doesn’t mean that men don’t need help, especially when facing despair, but a sense of social or political victimhood is only destructive; what kills men is not something that can be solved with another equality-demanding movement.
As dedicated as our Founding Fathers were to equality — even to the point of recognizing in principle, if not in practice, that the words of the Declaration applied to women and black people as well as to white men — they did not believe that everyone could or should be equal in every way.
Men and women will forever be different, and the ways they differ will not always be favorable to men.
Rather than seeing this as a betrayal of equality, or overlooking it as a politically incorrect fact, the best response is to treat men as men and women as women in their virtues and hardships alike — and look to men’s strengths for the answer to their plight.
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Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review. To read more by Daniel McCarthy, visit www.creators.com
COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS.COM
“The best response is to treat men as men and women as women in their virtues and hardships alike — and look to men’s strengths for the answer to their plight.”
Enter the advent of the American birth control pills and abortion on demand,,,the two greatest weakenings of both sexes by allowing women to behave as sexually irresponsible as men, whose job as the human gatekeepers of life was abandoned in male-like pursuits of prioritized immediate gratifications, which likewise allowed men the power and access to loose women with no accountability left, no reason, nor passion for men to protect women from the very same self-destructive passions that destroy men’s ability to self-control. When women stepped off the pedestal of male admiration into the morally degraded swamps of social equity, men became no longer able to look up to the now fallen women, who used to stand morally head and shoulders above them. It was the confused mind misgendered children who paid the price in moral and mental decay, are now individually unable to even determine what sex they were designed to be, and how to act like either male or female, which collectively created an inability to reproduce/sustain a national population, now only propped up by illegal foreigners who have no generational experience or upbringing in the concepts of American SELF-governance, nor personal accountability for their own created failure.
John F. Kennedy once said” Where CIVIL RIGHTS opponents went off the Rails was when they ( Justly demanded Equal Rights to ( UNJUSTLY DEMANDING EQUAL OUTCOME…”)
Several other aspects.. DIVORCE COURTS for one, and domestic violence issues for another. I’ve lost track of the # of times i’ve heard or read of a case of a guy getting shived in prison, after being SENT THERE for “Suspected DV”, when it was the WOMEN HITTING HIM< BUT he 'struck her back' when trying to restrain him.
OR instances where a guy had his whole live upended, lost his home and guns, because someone ELSE claimed he was a wife/kid beater.. AND EVEN WITH VIDEO EVIDENCE to the contrary, he still got shafted by courts.
“In the Bible, the principle of eyewitness testimony plays a significant role in establishing guilt or innocence. According to Deuteronomy 19:15, it states:
“One witness is not enough to convict anyone accused of any crime or offense they may have committed. A matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.” 1
Then the Seculars threw God out of the courtroom, and ignored the image of Moses on the walls of the Supreme Court, and men went to jail on false accusations.
And the suckiest part i find in all of that, is all too often, even if it IS established that the claims were FALSE, the guy is STILL SHANKED Over, by the stigma of having the charge against him, AND THE WOMAN WHO made said false claim, NEVER EVER EVER EVER gets charged with anything.