Telegraph: "Wenn sich Frauen so oft umbringen würden wie Männer, würde man uns das ewig vorwerfen"

If three to four times as many women as men killed themselves, we would be hearing about it every day. Every feminist columnist and commentator would be raging about this incontestable proof that women suffer unbearable disadvantage in a society organised by horrible men for their own benefit. (...) What do we hear from men when the subject in question is men? Not a peep.

Perhaps this is, indeed, conclusive proof that men aren't very good at expressing their feelings; but I take it more as evidence that men don’t think of themselves as members of a social collectivity called "men" in which they share mutual interests. Women have been parading a sororal solidarity with all women for the last 50 years which now seems to entitle all women to speak on behalf of all women at any moment because they all, supposedly, share the same interests and outlook. Most men don't begin to see other men in that light at all.

They are likely to care about their sons and grandsons. They probably care about their fathers, their brothers and their cousins. They often care a lot about their friends, their colleagues and their team-mates. But men, as a whole, couldn’t give a stuff about the notional idea of men as whole.

(...) If they are brothers, lifelong friends or military comrades, a man might risk his own life to save another man from killing himself; but he probably won’t raise an eyebrow or lift a finger over the abstract figures for male suicide – even though those figures are certain to get even more terrible.

Suicides by women peaked in the mid-1960s at around 2,400 a year and have fallen gradually ever since. By 1990, when I first wrote about this subject in a national newspaper, about 3,000 men a year were killing themselves. At that point, the number of female suicides was a little more than 1,100 a year.

Drawing attention to the fact that those 3,000 male suicides were greater in number than the total figure for deaths on UK roads, I asked if we should question whether something might be going seriously wrong for men in general that wasn’t happening for women. Those 3,000 suicides have now risen by more than a third in 25 years. Meanwhile the figure for women has barely shifted from around 1,100. The question remains unanswered.

(...) Above all, why don't men, as whole, care about this question? Why haven't they got anything to say for themselves?

Hier findet man den vollständigen Artikel von Neil Lyndon. Seine zentrale Frage ist natürlich genau die Frage, die sich die Männerrechtsbewegung seit zwanzig Jahren stellt. Warum erzeugt eine politische Bewegung, die das Leben zahlreicher Männer retten möchte, bei so vielen Desinteresse und bei einigen (Kimmel, Kemper, Rosenbrock, Gesterkamp etc.) sogar blanken Hass?