a male [...] does not experience a constant physical danger (and the associated stress of being aware of said danger) whenever he leaves the house.
With the exception of rape, which tends to be a special case in most senses, men are overwhelmingly more likely to be the victims of every other type of violent crime including homicide. In addition, men make up 92% of workplace deaths (and presumably a correspondingly high proportion of the injuries) and are also significantly more likely to die in an accident off the job (again, presumably a similar distribution of injuries).
The idea that men are somehow protected from physical danger by “male privilege” is simply a preposterous notion.
There’s a very big difference between men being part of violent crime and dangerous jobs and needing to worry for your physical safety as you walk down the street. No one is claiming men are protected from “physical danger” as if they have some sort of DND “Immunity to nonmagical weapons”. The fact that men are involved to a much greater extent in violence and prison and whatnot IS a big deal but it’s not actually opposed to the problem of women being on average smaller than men and a target for rape.
There’s a very big difference between men being part of violent crime and dangerous jobs and needing to worry for your physical safety as you walk down the street.
No, no there isn’t.
Most crimes, including most violent crimes, are not rape. Aside from rape, men are much more likely to be the victim of a crime, especially a violent crime. So if you’re talking about how much someone should be worried about being the victim of a violent crime… how exactly is maleness supposed to protect someone when it predicts a much higher likelihood of being targeted by criminals?
And even beyond that, even mundane stuff like being hit by a car while on the shoulder of the road is more than twice as likely to kill a man as a woman. With no malice at all, a man is still in significantly more danger of dying or being injured just going about his everyday life, whether driving to work or walking down a flight of stairs. Again, no “dangerous job” needed; men are in greater physical danger even in commonplace situations.
Women have every reason to fear for their safety, and rape is a very serious problem, but it boggles the mind to see attitudes that men couldn’t possibly understand how dangerous it is to be a woman when those very same men are the ones much much more likely to be hurt or killed “whenever he leaves the house”.
I think you’re being disingenuous when you talk about men being targeted by criminals. Men make up more than 90 percent of gang members (http://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/survey-analysis/demographics) and something like 90 percent of violent criminals (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_crime) in the first place. Something like half of violent crimes are gang-related (http://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/survey-analysis/gang-related-offenses). This means that with no “targeting” needed, men are already WAY more likely to be injured or killed through violence if you look at sheer demographics, and yet the average man doesn’t need to worry about being shot by an opposing gang member when he walks down the street at night. This is exactly why you immediately abandoned your point about workplace violence, since workplace is self chosen. You can’t simply look at an inequality of outcome and totally discount the nature of the populations concerned.
Similarly, you can look at the ratio of male to female prostitutes (http://sex-crimes.laws.com/prostitution/prostitution-statistics) and see that a prostitute is far more likely to be female than male. We can talk about what this means for both women and men, but I think it would be terrible to simply list it as “Obviously women are very badly off, way more have to become prostitutes than men!” and ignore the fact that men are by far more likely to be customers of prostitutes. Reality is complex.
I think it’s important to recognize that men are channeled by society into more violent and dangerous careers in crime and coal mining etc. I don’t think those are nonissues. But I also think the average man walking down the average street at night is significantly safer than the average woman doing the same
You seem to ascribe a fair amount of bad faith to me and I’m not sure why. Maybe because this line of argument pattern-matches to MRA thought?
Anyway I didn’t “abandon” the jobs point so much as point out that men are universally, even ignoring job choice, more likely to get into and be hurt in accidents. Accidental death and injury being far far more common than homicide and assault, that alone blows the “physical danger” argument out of the water. Not quite as dramatic as an industrial accident or a robbery-gone-wrong sure, but then again shark attacks are more dramatic than dying of heart disease.
And with regards to crime, your statistics do not say what you think they say. The national gang center says half of law enforcement agencies reported an increase in gang crime, not that ~50% of violent crimes were committed by gang members. Looking at the FBI unified crime reports, I can only find clear breakdowns of victims / circumstances in homicide, but it looks like even subtracting the entire number of gang-related deaths from the male death total still leaves them with more than three times the number of homicide victims that women have (9,917 male victims − 884 gang/institutional murder victims / 2,834 female victims = 3.19). And remember, the homicide rate today has been masked by medical advances for decades; male victimization rates are actually much higher than crime statistics indicate, and again most of these guys are ‘civilians’ rather than career criminals.
The whole point of my original post was this; it doesn’t matter if you look at crime victimization or workplace injury or accidents or all of them or something else entirely, because by any and all reasonable measures a man is in more “physical danger” in his everyday life than a woman is (yes, even the mythical Average Man/Woman). There are a handful of crimes which women are at special risk from and need to be cautious of, but men will disproportionately die or be injured in pretty much any other way you could imagine.
(BTW, I’m not the one downvoting you. One of those times when an anonymous karma system is more of a pain than a positive.)
But I also think the average man walking down the average street at night is significantly safer than the average woman doing the same
Most sexual assaults are not committed by random strangers on the average street at night. IIUC, if we exclude sexual assault, gang-related violence, and random fights/brawls, victimization rates for men and women are similar, and probably still higher for men.
In 2010, males experienced violent victimizations by strangers at nearly twice the rate of females (figure 2). The rate of violence against males by strangers was 9.5 victimizations per 1,000 males in 2010 compared to 4.7 victimizations per 1,000 females.
It goes on to say that the disparity seems to be shrinking, with crime against men falling more rapidly than crime against women.
Sexual assault by random strangers? Then is not a significant risk, at least in most parts of developed countries. Assault for other purposes? Then AFAIK women don’t have a higher victimization rate than men.
One wonders if some of the difference in outcomes (as in the being hit by a car on the shoulder example) isn’t partly a product of women generally taking less risks than men because of the fear of sexual assault.
The situation is made more complicated because women are encouraged to take risk seriously while men are encouraged to downplay risk, so you get different results depending on whether you’re looking at risk or fear.
One might say that this sexist bias is the problem, and one that the original blogger seeks to exacerbate.
One might, but I certainly wouldn’t. I believe that violence against men is a very serious problem, and one which has barely begun to get addressed.
I would like to see a serious attempt to oppose violence against people, but no one seems to have figured out that it’s worth doing and/or found a way to organize it.
Once you’ve decided that both goals are worth pursuing, an important question is whether violence against women might be reduced by different means than violence against men.
Well, people are far less likely to die (per mile travelled) in car crashes than in plane crashes, and yet ISTM more people are scared of flying than of driving. Which means… Okay, taken literally Locaha’s claim is incorrect, but it’s not that hard to steelman it into a valid point.
With the exception of rape, which tends to be a special case in most senses, men are overwhelmingly more likely to be the victims of every other type of violent crime including homicide. In addition, men make up 92% of workplace deaths (and presumably a correspondingly high proportion of the injuries) and are also significantly more likely to die in an accident off the job (again, presumably a similar distribution of injuries).
The idea that men are somehow protected from physical danger by “male privilege” is simply a preposterous notion.
There’s a very big difference between men being part of violent crime and dangerous jobs and needing to worry for your physical safety as you walk down the street. No one is claiming men are protected from “physical danger” as if they have some sort of DND “Immunity to nonmagical weapons”. The fact that men are involved to a much greater extent in violence and prison and whatnot IS a big deal but it’s not actually opposed to the problem of women being on average smaller than men and a target for rape.
No, no there isn’t.
Most crimes, including most violent crimes, are not rape. Aside from rape, men are much more likely to be the victim of a crime, especially a violent crime. So if you’re talking about how much someone should be worried about being the victim of a violent crime… how exactly is maleness supposed to protect someone when it predicts a much higher likelihood of being targeted by criminals?
And even beyond that, even mundane stuff like being hit by a car while on the shoulder of the road is more than twice as likely to kill a man as a woman. With no malice at all, a man is still in significantly more danger of dying or being injured just going about his everyday life, whether driving to work or walking down a flight of stairs. Again, no “dangerous job” needed; men are in greater physical danger even in commonplace situations.
Women have every reason to fear for their safety, and rape is a very serious problem, but it boggles the mind to see attitudes that men couldn’t possibly understand how dangerous it is to be a woman when those very same men are the ones much much more likely to be hurt or killed “whenever he leaves the house”.
I think you’re being disingenuous when you talk about men being targeted by criminals. Men make up more than 90 percent of gang members (http://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/survey-analysis/demographics) and something like 90 percent of violent criminals (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_crime) in the first place. Something like half of violent crimes are gang-related (http://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/survey-analysis/gang-related-offenses). This means that with no “targeting” needed, men are already WAY more likely to be injured or killed through violence if you look at sheer demographics, and yet the average man doesn’t need to worry about being shot by an opposing gang member when he walks down the street at night. This is exactly why you immediately abandoned your point about workplace violence, since workplace is self chosen. You can’t simply look at an inequality of outcome and totally discount the nature of the populations concerned.
Similarly, you can look at the ratio of male to female prostitutes (http://sex-crimes.laws.com/prostitution/prostitution-statistics) and see that a prostitute is far more likely to be female than male. We can talk about what this means for both women and men, but I think it would be terrible to simply list it as “Obviously women are very badly off, way more have to become prostitutes than men!” and ignore the fact that men are by far more likely to be customers of prostitutes. Reality is complex.
I think it’s important to recognize that men are channeled by society into more violent and dangerous careers in crime and coal mining etc. I don’t think those are nonissues. But I also think the average man walking down the average street at night is significantly safer than the average woman doing the same
You seem to ascribe a fair amount of bad faith to me and I’m not sure why. Maybe because this line of argument pattern-matches to MRA thought?
Anyway I didn’t “abandon” the jobs point so much as point out that men are universally, even ignoring job choice, more likely to get into and be hurt in accidents. Accidental death and injury being far far more common than homicide and assault, that alone blows the “physical danger” argument out of the water. Not quite as dramatic as an industrial accident or a robbery-gone-wrong sure, but then again shark attacks are more dramatic than dying of heart disease.
And with regards to crime, your statistics do not say what you think they say. The national gang center says half of law enforcement agencies reported an increase in gang crime, not that ~50% of violent crimes were committed by gang members. Looking at the FBI unified crime reports, I can only find clear breakdowns of victims / circumstances in homicide, but it looks like even subtracting the entire number of gang-related deaths from the male death total still leaves them with more than three times the number of homicide victims that women have (9,917 male victims − 884 gang/institutional murder victims / 2,834 female victims = 3.19). And remember, the homicide rate today has been masked by medical advances for decades; male victimization rates are actually much higher than crime statistics indicate, and again most of these guys are ‘civilians’ rather than career criminals.
The whole point of my original post was this; it doesn’t matter if you look at crime victimization or workplace injury or accidents or all of them or something else entirely, because by any and all reasonable measures a man is in more “physical danger” in his everyday life than a woman is (yes, even the mythical Average Man/Woman). There are a handful of crimes which women are at special risk from and need to be cautious of, but men will disproportionately die or be injured in pretty much any other way you could imagine.
(BTW, I’m not the one downvoting you. One of those times when an anonymous karma system is more of a pain than a positive.)
Most sexual assaults are not committed by random strangers on the average street at night.
IIUC, if we exclude sexual assault, gang-related violence, and random fights/brawls, victimization rates for men and women are similar, and probably still higher for men.
The U.S. Department of Justice has a special report, Violent Victimization Committed by Strangers, 1993-2010:
It goes on to say that the disparity seems to be shrinking, with crime against men falling more rapidly than crime against women.
we are talking about assaults by random strangers though.
Sexual assault by random strangers? Then is not a significant risk, at least in most parts of developed countries.
Assault for other purposes? Then AFAIK women don’t have a higher victimization rate than men.
One wonders if some of the difference in outcomes (as in the being hit by a car on the shoulder example) isn’t partly a product of women generally taking less risks than men because of the fear of sexual assault.
I think that likely explains some of the discrepancy.
I routinely walk across a park late at night that women I know avoid.
The situation is made more complicated because women are encouraged to take risk seriously while men are encouraged to downplay risk, so you get different results depending on whether you’re looking at risk or fear.
Yes, everyone is encouraged to take violence against women much more seriously than violence against men.
One might say that this sexist bias is the problem, and one that the original blogger seeks to exacerbate.
One might, but I certainly wouldn’t. I believe that violence against men is a very serious problem, and one which has barely begun to get addressed.
I would like to see a serious attempt to oppose violence against people, but no one seems to have figured out that it’s worth doing and/or found a way to organize it.
Once you’ve decided that both goals are worth pursuing, an important question is whether violence against women might be reduced by different means than violence against men.
Well, people are far less likely to die (per mile travelled) in car crashes than in plane crashes, and yet ISTM more people are scared of flying than of driving. Which means… Okay, taken literally Locaha’s claim is incorrect, but it’s not that hard to steelman it into a valid point.