By Aaron Palmer
Trigger warning: mentions of suicide
Today is international men’s day (well not as I’m writing this but when you’re reading this), a day for spreading awareness for men’s issues and the point of this article. The Instagram page thetinmen helped inspire me to write this article.
Male Privilege is a very heated topic in relation to both men’s and women’s rights where an overarching privilege leads to men being treated better then women in every single way, or almost every single way. First of all, this narrative being peddled is partly false. As addressed in an Instagram post made by thetinmen in which they argued that in fact there is no one single male privilege but several privileges, which women also have, such as the belief that women are seen to be precious to society, which can be clearly shown through multiple statistics such as the figure that 88% of homeless deaths in the UK were men, as sourced from the ONS, in the Titanic’s sinking 80% of the deaths were men, as compared to 25% being women, as shown by the titanic facts page, and 73% of all homicide victims in the UK as of this year have been men, which has risen to 506 victims from 399 in the last decade. These statistics bring us back to the issue of a Male Privilege being some overarching protective barrier that puts women at a disadvantage in every single way, this can be seen that men do not benefit from one singular privilege but benefit in certain areas from specific privileges, especially in the workplace.
Regarding health men also tend to be worse off than women in all forms of health whether it be physical or mental. Men have a higher risk to die of cancer by 37%, as well as 56% more likely to develop a non-gender specific cancer than women and 67% more likely to die from them, more men die of prostate cancer than women die of breast cancer, and men within the ages of 20-40 are less likely to seek medical advice or help or see their GP than women of their age, and are overall more likely to die prematurely than women, these statistics were sourced from the men and boys’ coalition. Men are found to be less likely to look for help when they fall ill or experience health problems with the issues found largely at the fault of society, from publications focused on spreading awareness for emotional and relationship issues only being aimed towards young women with no equivalent for men. Most GP services can also be found to possibly be male unfriendly, with the lack of any male staff, posters and information relating to women and children’s health more so than men’s and a lack of a government initiative to promote and educate men on their health that exist for women. Consulting a GP on a condition that could be described as “embarrassing” can also be difficult if the GP is of the opposite gender which happens to frequently be the case with men. Men are also found to receive less time and attention from doctors than women and receive very little advice with an example that only 29% of doctors routinely provide age-appropriate instructions on how to check for testicular cancer, whilst 89% of doctors would do so for women with breast cancer. This has been sourced from PMC, the link will be provided below the article. This shows a variety of ways as to how men are almost essentially neglected by the health service and left behind, as compared to women receiving more attention and gaining much higher levels of advertisement and funding into their health, which could lead in many cases to men dying prematurely and being exposed to more health problems than women.
In terms of mental health and suicide men also receive less treatment than their female counterparts with the ONS reporting that 75% of all suicides are men. To display how much of an impact male suicide can have, in the year of 2020 suicide rates were lower which in part was due to a decrease in male suicides at the start of the pandemic which was reported by the ONS. Despite the issue that suicide poses towards men very little is done about it with influencers and other people expressing men need to talk and speak out and seems to be mostly blame it on ‘Toxic Masculinity’. However when centres designed or actions taken to tackle this issue and allow men to talk they are shut down and opposed as highlighted by thetinmen in their recent post ‘Illiberal’ where it was shown in one specific example where the only university in the UK to have brought in a men’s officer to address the issue of male suicide, had to abandon the post due to harassment faced, and namely by the Head of National Union of Students Women’s Officer. Societal issues surrounding male suicide are seldom spoken about and instead just summed up as one lump of ‘Toxic Masculinity’ even though the issue does not only lie within a harmful view of masculinity as issues around this can be found to be prevalent throughout society as a whole with both men, women and non-binary people still see men in ways such as the breadwinner, which correlates with causes of male suicide, as reported by the National Violent Death Reporting System, such as job problems and financial problems amount to 14.8% and 14.4% of causes of suicide within men.
In the past I have written an article about the issues women face and how men can help overcome such issues and what can be done. This article is in no means written with the intent to undermine such issues that women face, but rather to elevate unspoken issues that men face on a day set up for exactly that purpose, to acknowledge those issues.
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