Equality has always been an American concern, dating back to the words “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence.
And even that phrase isn’t egalitarian enough from today’s point of view: Feminists have long opposed the gender language of “all men.”
Thomas Jefferson did not intend to commit a microaggression: in 1776, “all men” also meant women.
We know this because the Founding Fathers, should we say Founding Fathers? – discussed the mismatch between his philosophy and the endemic inequalities of his time, and Abigail Adams asked her husband John to “remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors” when it came time for the United States United States will declare its independence.
Today, however, men and women are increasingly unequal and, in one of the most basic measures of well-being, it is men who have been worse off from the start and continue to fall further and further behind.
Life expectancy has decreased for all Americans in recent years.
However, it has decreased more among men than women, producing the largest gender gap in almost 20 years.
According to a new study in JAMA Internal MedicineIn 2021, women outlived men by 5.8 years.
Much as postmodern scholars and progressive political activists deny it, there are natural differences between the sexes, and the mere fact that women live longer is not all that surprising.
For one thing, men are disproportionately employed in the country’s most dangerous jobs, including loggers, roofers, construction workers, airplane pilots, and steel workers.
And if the male propensity to take risks makes men more successful in certain executive and business roles, it also leads to more men and boys dying from misadventures and accidents.
But the longevity gap has widened by a full year since 2010, when it was at a record low of 4.8 years.
Human nature has not changed in that time; something has changed in America to make it a deadlier place for men.
COVID contributed twofold, in that the disease may have affected men more severely and they, in turn, were less likely to take their flu-like symptoms seriously.
Deaths of despair have devastated both sexes, but suicide and overdoses contribute to the gender disparity, and men are at greater risk of dying from each of these causes.
Unsurprisingly, men are also more likely to die from homicide, and unsurprisingly, when violent crime increases, male life expectancy will decrease.
But there are also less obvious forces at play.
Men are less likely to go to college or complete a degree, which in an increasingly service-oriented and knowledge-based economy translates into poorer life and career prospects, conditions that encourage deaths of despair .
Whether ironically or cynically, progressives can be quite conservative and stubborn in their assumptions about inequality: they assume that whoever was more than equal in the past must continue to be privileged today, hence the only type of inequality that doesn’t bother progressives . conscience is everything that harms groups that were previously in better conditions.
Income inequality and racial inequality are atrocities that fill the streets with Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter protesters, but there will be no protests over men’s worsening life prospects.
But then, the last thing men need is to be designated as another group of victims.
Right now, the very concept of masculinity is under attack from two directions: from those on the left who see masculinity as inherently “toxic” and from those on the right who idolize people like Andrew Tate: hedonistic teenagers raised without a shred of self-esteem. . control, much less any traditionally manly moral responsibility to family or others.
If life is unfair to men, the male remedy is not to complain about the injustice, but to be tough and mature enough to resist and thrive despite the inequality.
That doesn’t mean men don’t need help (especially when faced with despair), but a sense of social or political victimhood is only destructive: what kills men is not something that can be solved by another movement demanding equality.
As dedicated as our Founding Fathers were to equality (even to the point of recognizing in principle, if not in practice, that the words of the Declaration applied as much to women and black people as to white men), they did not They believed that everyone could or should be equal in every way.
Men and women will always be different, and the ways in which they differ will not always be favorable to men.
Instead of seeing this as an outrage against equality or overlooking it as politically incorrect, the best response is to treat men as men and women as women, both in their strengths and difficulties, and consider the strengths of men as a response to their difficult situation.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.
Twitter: @ToryAnarchist
