The following poster is being placed prominently in multiple cities in Canada, starting in Vancouver but also elsewhere. Similar posters with similar messages are beginning to appear in Seattle and other parts of the United States, as well as Australia and the UK. In every place so far that they’ve gone up, they’ve faced ridicule, mocking, and, worst of all, received regular vandalism and torn down in locations where it’s perfectly legal to place and display them. They have been classified by people who call themselves “feminists” as “hate-speech.”
The statistics from these posters are from the Canadian government and apply to Canada nationwide; statistics for the US, Australia, and other advanced Western nations are very similar, however. The poster reads:
40% of domestic violence victims are male
94% of all industrial deaths and accidents happen to men
42% of Bachelor’s Degrees are earned by men
90% of divorces are initiated by women
30% of those named as fathers who test for paternity find they are not the biological father
85% of all children that exhibit behavioral disorders come from fatherless homes
Government funding for Prostate Cancer is 60% less than the amount for breast cancer despite diagnosis rates being idential.
80% of all suicides are men.
63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes.
76% of homicide victims are men
97% of combat deaths and casualties since the 1st Gulf War have been men
90% of the homeless are men
90% of all homeless children are from fatherless homes
85% of all youths in prison come from fatherless homes
Fathers receive primary custody of their children less than 10% of the time.
Had enough of this yet?
Those are Canadian government statistics, but they are very similar in the United States. Furthermore, the domestic violence and general violence victim rate for men is almost certainly higher than the numbers given, since virtually all sources agree that male victims and female perpetrators are under-reported in a wide variety of violent crimes, including domestic violence and sexual assault.
In case you’re having trouble reading that, click the image to enlarge it. Or if you would like a full-size PDF of it, suitable for printing out and posting yourself, you can find it here, and may find similarly useful posters in PDF form here and here. Just be sure that if you do print and post any of these, that you are fully in compliance with the laws in your area and have the consent of any property owners.
For the record, I find conservative traditionalists to be somewhat better than radical feminists on these issues–but only by a tiny, miniscule amount, since the usual “conservative” response to these things is to say nice things about “Traditional manhood” but otherwise the same as the radical feminist response: “man up,” “suck it up,” or “men need to get their act together.” To which a growing number of men, young men in particular, are starting to lift a middle finger.
We aren’t going to accept your definition of “manning up.” We are not going to accept a “blame the victim” mentality thrown at us. We aren’t going to go away, we are not going to let you divide us by race, and we are not going to shut up. These statistics are just the tip of the iceberg, for there’s more, far more to look at and far more to be done.
If someone can tell me which of the major Presidential campaigns in America plans to do anything about any of the above, I’d like to hear it. So far as I can see, Barack Obama has nothing to say about any of it, and neither does Mitt Romney.
Further mainstream news coverage of the postering campaign and active censorship efforts against them here. Further discussion of these issues, as well as censorship efforts against them, here.
Why do I write about these things? Because I have sons I love, growing up in a world that is increasingly contemptous and dismissive of them.
Dean Esmay is the author of Methuselah’s Daughter. He has contributed to Dean’s World, Huffington Post, A Voice for Men, Pajamas Media. Neither left nor right wing, neither libertarian nor socialist.