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Remember Beyond Today
... Men Deserve some Credit, some Payback for Dangerous Service

2019, Davd

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Those poppies we're supposed to wear today represent cemeteries — military cemeteries, in Europe, where Canadian (and US, and UK, and European) soldiers were buried. They represent men dying; the fraction of those killed in battle, who are women, is tiny.

Casualties, they were called. I see nothing casual about being killed in battle. They died fighting for the presumed good, safety, perhaps ambitions of the governments who sent them there. Canadian soldiers especially, died "to protect the folks back home."

Some of them were not even volunteers. In the US, in some other countries, there is "the Draft." Men go to serve in the military whether they want to or not. Many of those men die if they wind up in battles; being "drafted" does not make anyone bulletproof.

Women live longer than men, on average; and war is one of the reasons.

It's not just military service, either, not just military and policing. A web page recently listed "the 15 Most Dangerous Jobs in the U.S": Logging, Commercial Fishing, Flying, Roofing, Garbage Collection, Structural Steel and Iron Work, Trucking, Farming [including Ranchers], Construction Supervision, Grounds Maintenance, Law Enforcement, Power Line Maintenance [and construction], General Maintenance and Repair, Taxi Driving [included Chauffeurs], Athletics, [including Coaches and Referees]. Notice any female-dominated occupations in that list?

It's a good guess that they are all done more by men than women. ("Grounds maintenance" is the one where I might imagine about equal participation by both sexes1... but my estimate is that even groundskeepers are mostly men, because it is outdoor work.)

While remembering that men went to war, suffered austerity, and many of them died, to protect women and children (and perhaps serve the interests of the Ruling Class of the state that sent them), it is worthwhile to remember that danger has been men's rather than women's business2 for much longer than Canada has existed.

Long ago, women faced danger mainly in the form of childbearing. Today, the dangers of childbearing are few and small for most women; the medical arts and sciences have made motherhood safe... especially if a woman has her first child before age 25. Logging, fishing, building and repairing roofs, collecting garbage, etc. — remain dangerous — as does war.

If men's productive [and protective] work shortens our lives; and women's reproductive work does not similarly shorten theirs; then arithmetic plainly tells us, that if women enjoy equality apart from the dangers involved, men have it worse over-all [= in sum].

In fact, women enjoy better than equality, if we look at the organization and "culture" of schools (Pinker, 2008, cf. Nathanson and Young, 2006), university attendance, the Civil Service ... and elsewhere. Many Feminists, too much of Feminism, have sought and often won privilege, better-than-equal opportunity, for women and girls, and misused the word equality in the process. (Nathanson and Young, 2006, is one of the better sources documenting this). Instead of men facing greater danger than women, living shorter lives, and being compensated for that by enjoying greater liberty and-or opportunities — we suffer disadvantage consistently.

It would be more consistent in today's Canada, to say that men are sent to war because we are considered inferior to women, than to say it is noble of us to protect them.3

I argued two years ago, that preferring peace and avoiding war would be very good for men's health. That is one way to improve our situation — and everyone's. Furthermore and perhaps better, we can confront overall inequality and we can "go our own way", often as groups of brothers-by-choice rather than alone.

The notion that marriage and solitude are a man's only two choices, is nonsense. I still believe there are many good women, women "worth marrying"; but after decades of Feminist misandry, there are also many women who are not worth marrying. Solitude suits a small minority of men. Military fellowship is one alternative; but we are being admonished to remember, this day, how dangerous war is.

Perhaps it is worth looking ... sometime soon ... at how men lived, outside marriage but not in solitude, before the World Wars; and then at how we might live fraternally two generations after the Second World War ended.

Today, let us remember the sacrifices of comfort, safety, sometimes life itself, which war demands of men and not of women. Tomorrow and beyond, let us consider how work generally makes similar if less drastic demands, and what might be fair compensation for those dangers and discomforts.

 

References cited:

Brown, Grant A., 2013. Ideology And Dysfunction In Family Law : How Courts Disenfranchise Fathers. Calgary and Winnipeg: Canadian Constitution Foundation and Frontier Centre For Public Policy

Nathanson, Paul, and Katherine K. Young, 2006. Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination against Men Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.

Pinker, Susan, 2008. The Sexual Paradox: Extreme Men, Gifted Women and the Real Gender Gap. [no city listed in flyleaf] Random House of Canada; New York: Simon and Schuster.

Pinker, Stephen, 2002: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. NY: Viking. [p 344: ".. confirming an expectation from evolutionary psychology, for many traits the bell curve for men is flatter and wider than the curve for females. That is, there are proportionately more males at the extremes." cited by his sister [2008: 273]

 

Notes

1. Grounds maintenance is also one of those 15 most dangerous occupations, that is least contributory to subsistence and safety. Athletics might be the other.

2... not exclusively men's business, I should note; women are frequently allowed to choose dangerous work if they have the strength for it. But women are seldom compelled to face danger; and to recall my first blog on this site, when the Titanic sank, men were excluded from the lifeboats in deference to women.

3. No, that is not all there is to the difference. Men are 'better at fighting', 'better equipped to fight', than women, on average. Horses are better at pulling wagons and plows, than humans, too; and we still regard ourselves as superior to those big strong horses.

 

See also:

 

 

 

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18 November 2019

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