Warum bringen sich Männer so viel häufiger um?

Passend zu meiner heute morgen gebloggten Forderung nach mehr Rollenfreiheit für Männer, bin ich heute Nachmittag auf einen Artikel gestoßen, der die Folgen des archaischen Rollenkorsetts näher beleuchtet. Ein Auszug:

In 2014, clinical psychologist Martin Seager and his team decided to test the cultural understanding of what it means to be a man or woman, by asking a set of carefully designed questions of women and men recruited via selected UK- and US-based websites. What they found suggests that, for all the progress we’ve made, both genders’ expectations of what it means to be a man are stuck in the 1950s. "The first rule is that you must be a fighter and a winner," Seager explains. "The second is you must be a provider and a protector; the third is you must retain mastery and control at all times. If you break any of those rules you’re not a man." Needless to say, as well as all this, ‘real men’ are not supposed to show vulnerability. "A man who’s needing help is seen as a figure of fun," he says. The conclusions of his study echo, to a remarkable degree, what O’Connor and his colleagues wrote in a 2012 Samaritans report on male suicide: "Men compare themselves against a masculine ‘gold standard’ which prizes power, control and invincibility. When men believe they are not meeting this standard, they feel a sense of shame and defeat."

In the UK and other Western societies, it sometimes feels as if we collectively decided, at some point around the mid-1980s, that men are awful. One result of the battle for equal rights and sexual safety for women has been a decades-long focus on men as privileged, violent abusers. Modern iterations of the male, drawn in response to these criticisms, are creatures to mock: the vain metrosexual; the crap husband who can’t work the dishwasher. We understand, as a gender, that we’re no longer permitted the expectation of being in control, of leading, of fighting, of coping with it all in dignified silence, of pursuing our goals with such single-mindedness we have no time for friends or family. These have become aspirations to be ashamed of, and for good reason. But what do we do now? Despite society’s advances, how it feels to be a success hasn’t much changed. Nor how it feels to fail. How are we to unpick the urges of our own biology; of cultural rules, reinforced by both genders, that go back to the Pleistocene?

Hier findet man den vollständigen Artikel.