It's a Man's World!

[slomo]

Maybe misogyny exists, maybe misandry exists. Child abuse definitely exists.

Maybe I am too simple-minded about this, but if feminists do not want to be thought of as a weaker sex, then why do they want their travails to be given special priority? Do feminists honestly, truly think they are suffering disproportionately to men? Or is it about payback?

As far as I have gleaned, admittedly not reading all of it and none of AD's posts, this thread is about the reality of men being exploited, oppressed, and abused by the so-called Patriarchy, and in relation to that, the over-emphasis, and possible exaggeration, of the dire-ness of conditions for women in the western world of 2015? Does citing an example of a MRA group with misogynist leanings really address this question? If so, does slomo or someone else citing a feminist group that preaches misandry then redress that imbalance, until someone else can bring out another example of male misogyny, and so on? Is it about keeping score to see who comes out on top, as the most victimized victim?

These are just questions, & not meant as provocations, as I try to get a fix on something that keeps changing every time I lean in to look at it.

Good questions. I'll just state that the extremist examples trotted out by AD and others can be matched by other extremist examples trotted out by moi. Neither tells you anything about either group. The only thing that allows you to judge the positions of either side is the merits of the arguments themselves. As I have mentioned, I am indeed swayed by convincing arguments that cite evidence. Until I started looking into the literature, I would have told you that the wage gap is a total fabrication. I now believe that it exists on the order of 5% to 10% (adjusting for relevant variables). As Karen Straughan explains in the video you embedded, this 5-10% could be explained by factors that are difficult to measure (e.g. promotion as reward for working overtime), but it's reasonable to maintain skepticism about this explanation until further data are available. The other factor she mentions may help explain the gap? Willingness to negotiate salary. Fine: encourage women to attend negotiation seminars. From what I understand, the whole idea of the Lean In brand is exactly that: teach women to be better negotiators. It's a practical solution to a practical problem. And it'll do more for women than bitching about a mythological Patriarchy.

[tapitsbo]

The SPLC could itself be described as a hate group, and that's being charitable - even American Dream has a disclaimer about it being a sketchy source on one of "their" blogs.

If slomo's "recruiting" here I see 0 people taking the bait.

[guruilla]

Not sure which thread this belongs at and also reluctant to just copy and paste a bunch of stuff but on the other hand, it's relevant and new to me so here it is.

THE BACKLASH AGAINST “PATHOLOGIZING WIFE ASSAULT”

The main resistance to accepting personality disorders as important
explanatory criteria for wife assault comes from sociological feminism.
The feminist perspective on wife assault complains that wife assault
was being pathologized, which deflects attention from social causes
and from the radical social restructuring needed to end patriarchy (Yllö
& Bograd, 1988). Yet the data reported earlier in the chapter clearly
show that personality disorders are central to intimate abusiveness
in North American samples. Gender studies handle this empirical
disconfirmation by simply ignoring it, a tendency that is at odds with
academic values of free inquiry and the construction of empirically
testable and falsifiable hypotheses. The analysis offered by feminism is
a paradigm that would be unacceptable if applied to any other social
problem. Imagine researchers suggesting that they wanted to study
“why blacks in general were violent” or “why women in general
became rock groupies.” These proposals would, with good reason, be
vilified. Yet feminists continue to ask why men in general beat their
wives. Data about female abusiveness, lesbian battering, and female-
perpetrated child abuse all exist (Dutton, 1994; Archer, 2000), yet
continue to be willfully ignored by dogmatic feminist analysis.

page 14, Through a Psychological Lens; Personality Disorder and Spouse Assault; Donald G. Dutton and Mark Bodnarchuk


Recognition by researchers of the importance of personality disorder
(PD) as a causative factor in spouse assault has been delayed
largely because PD falls outside the major paradigms created by broad
spectrum theories that are currently in vogue. [sociobiology and feminism] Dutton (1994, 1995) surveyed the main explanations, particularly feminist and sociobiological approaches, put forward to account for wife assault when the issue achieved prominence in the 1970s. Dutton (1994) pointed out that
“broad spectrum” explanations like sociobiology and feminism had difficulty explaining the skewed distribution of spouse assault incidence—that is, that the majority (about 80 percent) of males are non-violent, another 12 percent are violent once, 8 percent are repetitively and severely violent (Straus & Gelles, 1992). Both theories see “male violence toward women” as the defined problem. Hence, individual differences in male violence (among other things, such as female violence or gay violence) are ignored or disregarded.

In surveys of wife assault incidence (for example, Straus & Gelles,
1992), the majority of males, according to their wives, are not abusive;
a smaller group is abusive once; and a still smaller group is repeatedly
abusive. This latter group probably constitutes 8–12 percent of the male
population, large enough to constitute a significant social problem, but
too small to be explained by gender analysis or evolutionary theories
(Dutton, 1995).

An explanation attributing spousal assault to “maleness” would lead to a prediction of a normal distribution of male violence, not the highly skewed distribution found in national surveys. It certainly would not predict that 88 percent of males would be described by their female partners as not physically abusive.

Feminism cannot consider individual differences in males, since it is committed to a generic view of males or “maleness” per se as the cause of wife assault. As Bograd (1988) wrote in Feminist Perspectives on Wife Assault, all feminist researchers, clinicians, and activists address a primary question: “Why do men beat their wives?” (p. 13), and further, “Instead of examining why this particular man beats his particular wife, feminists seek to
understand why men in general use physical force” (p. 13).

Despite the feminist claim that their sociological view can be combined with more fine-grained psychological analyses, it rarely is. In fact, there has been a resistance to examining psychological factors connected to spouse assault because such examination is incompatible with “gender analysis,” the paradigm of feminism.

Feminist theory has also resisted the study of female violence, husband battering, lesbian battering, and gay violence, since these forms of intimate violence are also incompatible with gender analysis, despite a considerable empirical basis documenting these forms of abuse (Dutton, 1994). Studies such as the survey by Lie, Schilit, Bush, Montague, and Reyes (1991), showing lesbian verbal, sexual, and physical abuse rates to be higher than heterosexual rates, are simply dismissed, as are studies showing female intimate violence to be equal or higher in incidence than male intimate violence (Magdol et al., 1997; Archer, 2000). The essence of feminist theory has been to preserve its own ideology at the cost of ignoring or dismissing empirical data that do not serve its ideological ends. The notion that special characteristics of a small group of males may generate intimate violence is incompatible with gender power ideology. Similarly, any work showing that male violence stems from a psychological feeling of powerlessness is ignored (Dutton, 1994).

Personality disorders are defined as self-reproducing dysfunctional patterns of interaction (Millon, 1997). In some cases, they are general to all social relationships; in others, they manifest primarily in intimate relationships. Dutton (1998) described an “abusive personality” characterized by shame-based rage, a tendency to project blame, attachment anxiety manifested as rage, and sustained rageful outbursts, primarily in intimate relationships. This “abusive personality” was constructed around a fragile core called “borderline personality.”

A variety of researchers have found an extremely high incidence of personality disorders in assaultive populations. Studies have found incidence rates of personality disorders to be 80–90 percent in both court-referred and self-referred wife assaulters (Saunders, 1992; Hamberger & Hastings, 1986, 1988, 1989; Dutton & Starzomski, 1994), compared to estimates in the general population, which tend to range from 15 percent to 20 percent (Kernberg, 1977). As the violence becomes more severe and chronic, the likelihood of psychopathology in these men approaches 100 percent (Hart, Dutton, & Newlove, 1993; Dutton & Hart, 1992a, 1992b).

Across several studies, implemented by independent researchers, the prevalence of personality disorder in wife assaulters has been found to be extremely high. These men are not mere products of male sex role conditioning or “male privilege”; they possess characteristics that differentiate them from the majority of men who are not repeat abusers.
[...]

In a series of studies on what he called the “abusive personality,” Dutton (1995, 1998) described a number of associated psychological features of abusiveness that clustered around Oldham et al.’s (1985) measure of BPO. The BPO scale assessed a disorder of the self-characterized by feelings of inner emptiness, a terror of being alone, temporary deficits in reality testing, and tendencies to use projection and splitting as defenses against anxiety. The associated features, all of which correlated significantly with BPO, include a fearful attachment style (Dutton, Saunders, Starzomski, & Bartholomew, 1994), high scores on chronic anger (Dutton & Starzomski, 1994) and trauma symptoms (Dutton, 1995), a tendency to construe intimate conflicts as due to the personality of the intimate other, and a negative attitude toward women (Starzomski, 1995).

With its basis in BPO and with its clinical signs of impulsiveness and hyper-emotionality in intimate relationships, the abusive personality described in this work seems more closely aligned with Impulsive or Type 2 batterers. Tweed and Dutton (1998) confirmed this in a comparison of “instrumental” and “impulsive” batterers; impulsive men had BPO scores of 75 (identical to Oldham et al.’s (1985) reported mean for borderlines), while instrumental and control batterers had significantly lower BPO scores. More recently, Edwards, Scott, Yarvis, Paizis, and Panizzon (2003) found that measures of Borderline and Antisocial Personality Disorder were significantly correlated with physical aggression (spouse assault) in a forensic sample (43 men convicted of wife assault, 40 convicted of nonviolent crimes). Their high-violence groups had higher scores on all pathology scales of the Personality Assessment Instrument (PAI: Morey, 1991). The authors relate personality disorder to spousal violence via the mediating variable of impulse control.

Some studies have also found BPD to be predictive of intimate violence in female perpetrators. Zanarini et al. (2003) found that BPD symptomatology increased with sexual relations and included intimate abusiveness for both male and female subjects. Fortunata and Kohn (2003) found that lesbian batterers were also more likely to report both borderline and antisocial personality traits on the MCMI-III.

[...]

Dutton (1995, 1998) found evidence in retrospective reports of abusive men for a triad of developmental factors contributing to BPO: witnessing abuse in the family of origin, being shamed by a parent, and insecure attachment. It was hypothesized that the modal family constellation for producing abusive men was an abusive and shaming father and a mother incapable of providing consistent attachment (probably due to dealing with the abusive father). The transmission of abuse by this personality type occurs through a conjunction of two primary personality features: the inability to modulate arousal, generating extreme volatility and anger, and the tendency to externalize blame onto the intimate other, providing a target for the unmodulated rage. This latter feature appears to develop through a failure in “object relations” (Dutton, 1998; Celani, 1994) or through an attachment disorder (Dutton et al., 1994; Dutton, 1998).


http://www.corwin.com/upm-data/5158_Los ... pter_1.pdf

[semper occultus]

.....are you familiar with Erin Pizzey Slomo...?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Pizzey

http://whiteribbon.org/domestic-violence-law/refuting-40-years-of-lies-about-domestic-violence/

[guruilla]

I have now!

Pizzey has been the subject of death threats and boycotts because of her research into the claim that most domestic violence is reciprocal, and that women are equally capable of violence as men. Pizzey has said that the threats were from militant feminists

At the risk of being incendiary:

[brainpanhandler]

For the sake of easier referencing I have compiled all of Slomo's posts in this thread which contain data/evidence to support the following stated goals:

I think the facts and figures speak for themselves: there are a number of social spheres in which it can easily be demonstrated that men are systematically disadvantaged relative to women. This does not contradict the existence of other social spheres in which women are disadvantaged relative to men. However, it does contradict the totalizing Patriarchy narrative that claims everything in western societies is systematically set up to benefit men over women. It's demonstrably not true that the world works that way. The purpose of this thread is to show that.

The goal of this thread is to use data to undermine a narrative I believe is false and harmful (Patriarchy)...

Data/evidence posts:

... a thread in which slomo dumps men's rights copypasta, AD-style. I'll flesh this out over the next few days, but I'm going to start with this graphic:

The ‘Equal Pay Day’ factoid that women make 78 cents for every dollar earned by men

Few experts dispute that there is a wage gap, but differences in the life choices of men and women — such as women tending to leave the workforce when they have children — make it difficult to make simple comparisons. That’s what’s so facile about repeatedly citing “78 cents” or “77 cents.”

Democrats are relying on a simple calculation from the Census Bureau: a ratio of the difference between women’s median earnings and men’s median earnings. (The median is the middle value, with an equal number of full-time workers earning more and earning less.) That leaves a pay gap of 22 cents.

But the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the gap is 18 cents when looking at weekly wages. The gap is even smaller when you look at hourly wages — 13 cents — but then not every wage earner is paid on an hourly basis, so that statistic excludes salaried workers.

Annual wage figures do not take into account the fact that teachers — many of whom are women — have a primary job that fills nine months out of the year. The weekly wage is more of an apples-to-apples comparison, but it does not include as many income categories. (Still, we should note that the wage gap likely would increase if part-time workers were included in the statistics, as is done in Canada.)

June O’Neill, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who has been a critic of the 77-cent statistic, has noted that the wage gap is affected by a number of factors, including that the average woman has less work experience than the average man and that more of the weeks worked by women are part-time rather than full-time. Women also tend to leave the workforce for periods to raise children, seek jobs that may have more flexible hours but lower pay, and choose careers that tend to have lower pay.

Indeed, BLS data show that women who do not get married have virtually no wage gap; they earn 95 cents for every dollar a man makes. (Another interesting fact: Women who are members of unions make almost 91 cents compared to their counterparts.)

In 2011, economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis surveyed economic literature and concluded that “research suggests that the actual gender wage gap (when female workers are compared with male workers who have similar characteristics) is much lower than the raw wage gap.” They noted that women may prefer to accept jobs with lower wages but greater benefits (more flexible parental leave) so excluding such fringe benefits from the calculations will exaggerate the wage disparity. One survey, prepared for the Labor Department by the CONSAD Research Corp. during the George W. Bush administration, concluded that when such differences are accounted for, much of the hourly wage gap dwindled, to about 5 cents on the dollar.

Why Men Die Younger: Causes of Mortality Differences by Sex

Abstract: It is generally accepted that, on average, women live longer than men. Few, however, are aware that there is an underlying and consistent pattern of factors contributing to the sex mortality differential. This paper attempts to synthesize the evidence supporting and refuting the hypotheses for the sex mortality differential. The extent of the sex mortality differential is examined. It has existed since at least 1750 and occurs at all age groups—even prenatally—in nearly all animal species studied and for almost every major cause of death. Evidence supports both the biological/genetic and the social/cultural/environmental/behavioral schools of hypotheses, as well as interactions between the two, but the determining component may revolve around the differing chromosomes and hormones between the sexes. Behavioral distinctions, especially cigarette smoking, also affect the sex mortality differential.

Lower Levels of Antiretroviral Therapy Enrollment Among Men with HIV Compared with Women — 12 Countries, 2002–2013

Equitable access to antiretroviral therapy (ART) for men and women with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection is a principle endorsed by most countries and funding bodies, including the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) Relief (PEPFAR) (1). To evaluate gender equity in ART access among adults (defined for this report as persons aged ≥15 years), 765,087 adult ART patient medical records from 12 countries in five geographic regions* were analyzed to estimate the ratio of women to men among new ART enrollees for each calendar year during 2002–2013. This annual ratio was compared with estimates from the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS)† of the ratio of HIV-infected adult women to men in the general population. In all 10 African countries and Haiti, the most recent estimates of the ratio of adult women to men among new ART enrollees significantly exceeded the UNAIDS estimates for the female-to-male ratio among HIV-infected adults by 23%–83%. In six African countries and Haiti, the ratio of women to men among new adult ART enrollees increased more sharply over time than the estimated UNAIDS female-to-male ratio among adults with HIV in the general population. Increased ART coverage among men is needed to decrease their morbidity and mortality and to reduce HIV incidence among their sexual partners. Reaching more men with HIV testing and linkage-to-care services and adoption of test-and-treat ART eligibility guidelines (i.e., regular testing of adults, and offering treatment to all infected persons with ART, regardless of CD4 cell test results) could reduce gender inequity in ART coverage.

Summary pitched at a lay audience...

Gotta love it when a scientist does the AD thing — a true data dump. If contradictory data exists, I hope that it, too, will be welcomed here.

I absolutely welcome opposing views -- as long as they are provided with evidence. Here, "evidence" means academic papers or well-research white papers by reasonably well-known sources, or else news articles or blogs that use them as principal sources. These should be reasonably quantitative papers, i.e. not literary criticism or anything else that leans heavily on critical theory, deconstruction, Marxist theory, etc. (or if they do, theoretical statements are backed up by actual data).

I'll give you all a head start:

Salary Differences Between Male and Female Registered Nurses in the United States

We determined salary trends by gender using nationally representative data from the last 6 (1988-2008) quadrennial National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses (NSSRN) (discontinued in 2008). This mail, electronic, and web survey selected a state-based probability sample of currently licensed RNs from data provided by state boards of nursing with a sample size of more than 30 000 RNs per year and a response rate of approximately 60%. We also used the American Community Survey (ACS; 2001-2013), a household survey with a response rate exceeding 90%, to extend time trends to 2013 and establish that unadjusted salary differences by gender were not limited to NSSRN data. The sample consisted of full-time employed RNs working 50 or more weeks per year and 35 hours or more per week. The outcome variable of annual salary was measured continuously in both surveys.

Using ordinary least-squares regression and employment information in the NSSRN, we assessed how much of the annual salary differences could be accounted for by demographic factors, work hours, experience, work setting, clinical specialty, job position, survey year, state of residence, and other factors. Analyses were performed using Stata version 13.1 (StataCorp) and a 2-tailed probability value of <.05 indicated statistical significance. The study was deemed exempt by a research ethics board.

...

Male RNs outearned female RNs across settings, specialties, and positions with no narrowing of the pay gap over time. About half of the gap was accounted for by employment and other measured characteristics. This gap is similar in magnitude to the salary differences found for physicians.2,3

Study limitations include survey data that are subject to reporting biases and the lack of detail regarding specialties and positions in the NSSRN.

I've been holding off on this one, because it's controversial and sure to piss people off. But in light of AD's most recent copypasta, it's probably time. (Note: I barely skimmed AD's post, because he's clearly not interested in engaging thoughtfully, so he's not worth wasting precious space in my beautiful mind.) Note that this is a meta-analysis of a large number of studies.

Thirty Years of Denying the Evidence on Gender Symmetry in Partner Violence: Implications for Prevention and Treatment

Abstract: The first part ofthis article summarizes results from more than 200 studies that have found gender symmetry in perpetration and in risk factors and motives for physical violence in martial and dating relationships. It also summarizes research that has found that most partner violence is mutual and that self defense explains only a small percentage of partner violence by either men or women. The second part of the article documents seven methods that have been used to deny, conceal, and distort the evidence on gender symmetry. The third part of the article suggests explanations for the denial of an overwhelming body of evidence by reputable scholars. The concluding section argues that ignoring the overwhelming evidence of gender symmetry has crippled prevention and treatment programs. It suggests ways in which prevention and treatment efforts might be improved by changing ideologically based programs to programs based on the evidence from the past 30 years of research.

For the record, this article actually surprises me. While I absolutely believe that a non-negligible fraction of partner violence is perpetrated by women, I'm a bit surprised that it is as close to 50% as this article seems to suggest.

Here's more on violence in general (not partner-violence in particular), from the WHO:

Almost twice as many men as women die as a result of injuries and violence each year. The three leading causes of death from injuries for men are road traffic injuries, suicide and homicide, while leading causes for women are road traffic injuries, suicide, and fire related burns. For each type of injury (except those resulting from fires), death rates are higher for men than for women.

And while we're on the subject of injuries, let's talk about the deadliest jobs (as determined by the BLS and reported by Forbes):

The 10 Deadliest Jobs:
1. Logging workers
2. Fishers and related fishing workers
3. Aircraft pilot and flight engineers
4. Roofers
5. Structural iron and steel workers
6. Refuse and recyclable material collectors
7. Electrical power-line installers and repairers
8. Drivers/sales workers and truck drivers
9. Farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural managers
10. Construction laborers

Notice a pattern? Male privilege...

[brainpanhandler]

Before I spend inordinate amounts of time I don't have to spare digging through each and every one of the various strands of data/evidence (Fuck it's hard not to put quotation marks around those words) provided by Slomo in this thread I would like to respond to the following post by Slomo, to whit:

The goal of this thread is to use data to undermine a narrative I believe is false and harmful (Patriarchy), but my real interest is psychology. [TW: the following is opinion without sourceable evidence.] The Patriarchy narrative, and feminism in general, locks the male psyche into its most atavistic archetype, that of male-as-aggressor, when in fact there are other archetypes available: male-as-protector, male-as-rescuer (I realize these are overlapping, not distinct, archetypes), i.e. the father archetype in contrast to the adolescent warrior.

Maybe. I don't know. While you may not be able to give me sourceable evidence for this you could at least provide me a few examples so I can read it myself. I am guessing that radical feminism in fact focuses on the male-as-aggressor archetype, but that's only a guess. I haven't done any reading of radical feminism. I might even have the suspicion that "feminism in general" leans in that direction and possibly skews the perception of it's advocates and supporters towards a negative view of men in general. But I really wouldn't know exactly what you believe exemplifies this without some examples provided by you.

The ultimate effect is to remove hope from young men, to remove any sense of purpose.

Regardless of what examples you may or may not provide the above claim is a prima facie oversimplification. Young men (how many?) have no hope or sense of purpose because the patriarchy narrative and "feminism in general" have locked the male psyche into the most atavistic male archetype? Really? Feminists did that?

This in turn leads to many of the social abominations we see currently, and directly feeds the forces that deliberately stoke "the angst of young men ... in an effort to make them want to fight violently for various control systems." You think the solution is more feminism, more totalitarian policing of language and desire, to make young men feel even worse about themselves? I think not.

See above since this rests on that.

Feminism acknowledges only the outermost surface of the male psyche, the mask men wear for society and for almost all women. It does not acknowledge a deeper layer of humanity...

Maybe. But using the term "Feminism" in this fashion is so vague as to make this statement meaningless. I guess I just don't know what you mean by "feminism". I think it would be more accurate to say, "Our culture acknowledges only the outermost surface of the male psyche, the mask men wear for society and for almost all women. It does not acknowledge a deeper layer of humanity...".

a layer that is mostly not shown to anybody other than a handful of male friends and a significant other (if a man is lucky enough to have a loving partner):

Nice touch.

Feminism fails to see men as human at all.

Really? That damn "feminism". I have read and heard people who describe themselves as 'feminists" say outrageously dehumanizing things about 'men', but since I am a man and those shoes don't fit me I don't take it personally. Do I think that sort of rhetoric is constructive? No. I think it's downright harmful to the cause of justice and equality under the law for all. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to discover there are attempts to badjacket feminism by deliberately creating examples of such rhetoric.

Can you provide me with examples of self identified feminists dehumanizing men? I would be curious to know what you consider solid examples of this.

So, the easiest counterargument to make is to point out the obvious fallacies of Patriarchy theory, to point out the many spheres in which men have it demonstrably worse than women

I'm glad we agree that we can choose to use the easiest arguments to make. Whew. That will make things much easier for me when I go digging into the evidence you've provided in this thread.

But, you apparently believe that if you can heap together enough evidence that "men have it demonstrably worse than women" that will effectively refute "patriarchy theory"?

Forgive me if I missed it somewhere in the various threads ongoing on these topics, but can you give me your definition of "patriarchy theory". I assume given the context it at least includes the idea that men have it demonstrably better than women and that is by the design of men?

AD seems to insinuate that I have some hidden agenda, and he's right in one sense: I seek to undermine Patriarchy theory as an attractive ideology, to advocate its abandonment by both women and men.

Curious... presumably you agree that at some time in the past at least Patriarchy as a social system of male dominance in the political establishment, social privilege and control of property has prevailed. If not, let me know and I will have to completely reevaluate my assessment of your knowledge of history and research abilities. But going on the assumption that you will agree patriarchy as defined above has existed in the past then at what point do you believe patriarchy dissolved as a social force?

Once we all recognize that men and women are all, at a deeper layer, souls looking to find a meaningful place in the world, only then can the world have any hope of healing.

Agreed. But if we don't see the obstacles to this goal clearly what hope is there?

[slomo]

Thanks, BPH, for concentrating the signal and filtering the noise. I'm adding Jack's contribution from another post, which shows mortality disadvantage for white middle-aged men, but explains that disadvantage in terms of specific life choices and/or mental illness. Thus it provides an opportunity to discuss the extent that choice influences outcome (and I'm not taking a side on this one, I view it as intellectually legitimate to argue either way):

.

This probably explains a lot about what is happening with men and this country as well (though it's certainly not about slomo).

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/healt ... .html?_r=0

nytimes.com
Death Rates Rising for Middle-Aged White Americans, Study Finds

Gina Kolata

Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.

That finding was reported Monday by two Princeton economists, Angus Deaton, who last month won the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, and Anne Case. Analyzing health and mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from other sources, they concluded that rising annual death rates among this group are being driven not by the big killers like heart disease and diabetes but by an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids.

The analysis by Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case may offer the most rigorous evidence to date of both the causes and implications of a development that has been puzzling demographers in recent years: the declining health and fortunes of poorly educated American whites. In middle age, they are dying at such a high rate that they are increasing the death rate for the entire group of middle-aged white Americans, Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case found.

The mortality rate for whites 45 to 54 years old with no more than a high school education increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014.



“It is difficult to find modern settings with survival losses of this magnitude,” wrote two Dartmouth economists, Ellen Meara and Jonathan S. Skinner, in a commentary to the Deaton-Case analysis to be published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Wow,” said Samuel Preston, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on mortality trends and the health of populations, who was not involved in the research. “This is a vivid indication that something is awry in these American households.”

Dr. Deaton had but one parallel. “Only H.I.V./AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this,” he said.

In contrast, the death rate for middle-aged blacks and Hispanics continued to decline during the same period, as did death rates for younger and older people of all races and ethnic groups.

Middle-aged blacks still have a higher mortality rate than whites — 581 per 100,000, compared with 415 for whites — but the gap is closing, and the rate for middle-aged Hispanics is far lower than for middle-aged whites at 262 per 100,000.

David M. Cutler, a Harvard health care economist, said that although it was known that people were dying from causes like opioid addiction, the thought was that those deaths were just blips in the health care statistics and that over all everyone’s health was improving. The new paper, he said, “shows those blips are more like incoming missiles.”
Dying in Middle Age

Death rates are rising for middle-aged white Americans, while declining in other wealthy countries and among other races and ethnicities. The rise appears to be driven by suicide, drugs and alcohol abuse.

Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case (who are husband and wife) say they stumbled on their finding by accident, looking at a variety of national data sets on mortality rates and federal surveys that asked people about their levels of pain, disability and general ill health.

Dr. Deaton was looking at statistics on suicide and happiness, skeptical about whether states with a high happiness level have a low suicide rate. (They do not, he discovered; in fact, the opposite is true.) Dr. Case was interested in poor health, including chronic pain because she has suffered for 12 years from disabling and untreatable lower back pain.

Dr. Deaton noticed in national data sets that middle-aged whites were committing suicide at an unprecedented rate and that the all-cause mortality in this group was rising. But suicides alone, he and Dr. Case realized, were not enough to push up overall death rates, so they began looking at other causes of death. That led them to the discovery that deaths from drug and alcohol poisoning also increased in this group.

They concluded that taken together, suicides, drugs and alcohol explained the overall increase in deaths. The effect was largely confined to people with a high school education or less. In that group, death rates rose by 22 percent while they actually fell for those with a college education.

It is not clear why only middle-aged whites had such a rise in their mortality rates. Dr. Meara and Dr. Skinner, in their commentary, considered a variety of explanations — including a pronounced racial difference in the prescription of opioid drugs and their misuse, and a more pessimistic outlook among whites about their financial futures — but say they cannot fully account for the effect.

Dr. Case, investigating indicators of poor health, discovered that middle-aged people, unlike the young and unlike the elderly, were reporting more pain in recent years than in the past. A third in this group reported they had chronic joint pain over the years 2011 to 2013, and one in seven said they had sciatica. Those with the least education reported the most pain and the worst general health.

The least educated also had the most financial distress, Dr. Meara and Dr. Skinner noted in their commentary. In the period examined by Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case, the inflation-adjusted income for households headed by a high school graduate fell by 19 percent.

Dr. Case found that the number of whites with mental illnesses and the number reporting they had difficulty socializing increased in tandem. Along with that, increasing numbers of middle-aged whites said they were unable to work. She also saw matching increases in the numbers reporting pain and the numbers reporting difficulty socializing, difficulty shopping, difficulty walking for two blocks.

With the pain and mental distress data, Dr. Deaton said, “we had the two halves of the story.” Increases in mortality rates in middle-aged whites rose in parallel with their increasing reports of pain, poor health and distress, he explained. They provided a rationale for the increase in deaths from substance abuse and suicides.

Dr. Preston of the University of Pennsylvania noted that the National Academy of Sciences had published two monographs reporting that the United States had fallen behind other rich countries in improvements in life expectancy. One was on mortality below age 50 and the other on mortality above age 50. He coedited one of those reports. But, he said, because of the age divisions, the researchers analyzing the data missed what Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case found hiding in plain sight.

“We didn’t pick it up,” Dr. Preston said, referring to the increasing mortality rates among middle-aged whites.

Ronald D. Lee, professor of economics, professor of demography and director of the Center on Economics and Demography of Aging at the University of California, Berkeley, was among those taken aback by what Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case discovered.

“Seldom have I felt as affected by a paper,” he said. “It seems so sad.”

http://fair.org/home/black-lives-matter ... t-graphic/

fair.org
Black Lives Matter? Not in an NYT Graphic
By Jim Naureckas

Dying in Middle Age: NYT chart

Quick–who’s missing from this New York Times chart (11/2/15)?



The point of the chart, based on one in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is that US non-Hispanic whites aged 45-54 have a rising mortality rate, unlike the similarly aged groups included for comparison purposes: Hispanics in the US, and people in France, Germany, Britain, Canada, Australia and Sweden.

The most obvious omission is African-Americans, who make up about 12 percent of the US population. They are left out of the chart not because they don’t support the point—they, too, have a falling death rate in the 45-54 demographic, unlike US whites—but presumably because they would require a larger graph, since the black mortality rate is still well above whites in this age group: 582 vs. 415 per 100,000.

That deaths among middle-aged whites are rising while they’re falling among other groups is a remarkable story—particularly when the disparity is explained, as the PNAS study indicates, by rising rates of drug and alcohol overdoses, alcohol-induced liver damage and suicide. But the story is complicated, surely, by the fact that the shocking news is that middle-age whites in the US now die 71 percent as often as blacks—as opposed to 56 percent as often, like they did 14 years ago.

Perhaps it would have been worth making a bigger chart to make that point?

Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org.

You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com, or write to public editor Margaret Sullivan: public@nytimes.com (Twitter: @NYTimes or @Sulliview). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

http://blackagendareport.libsyn.com/

Middle Age White Male Die-Off: When Skin Privilege is Not Enough
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

“A generation of poorly educated white men who came of age in the Seventies and Eighties are suffering dramatic levels of psychological instability.”

It appears that white middle aged men with no more than a high school education have not adjusted well to their declining economic and social status in the United States. That seems to be the logical conclusion that can be drawn from a study by two Nobel laureates in economics who found that the death rate for white men of lower educational attainment between the ages of 45 and 54 has been increasing, while every other racial, gender and economic group has been living longer. The study was conducted during the 15 years between 1999 and 2014. The findings came as a shock – not just because the life expectancy of non-college educated white middle aged males was going in the opposite direction than everyone else, but also because the heightened mortality rate of this particular cohort is not due to the most frequent killers, like heart disease and diabetes. Instead, these low-income white men are committing suicide or dying from the complications of substance abuse at previously unheard of rates. So many of this group are dying by their own hands, or from illnesses based on self-destructive behaviors, that they have dragged down the life expectancy of the entire white middle aged male population, regardless of education and income.

“These low-income white men are committing suicide or dying at previously unheard of rates from the complications of substance abuse.”

Clearly, we are looking at mass psychological problems, rooted in class, race, and gender at a particular point in history in the United States. These suddenly at-risk white men are by no means the most endangered U.S. demographic; Black and Hispanic men still die much younger than whites, but their life expectancies are gradually improving, while the opposite is true of the at-risk white cohort. Even more intriguingly, white relatively uneducated males who are older or younger than the 45 to 54 group are not dying at such high rates from self-destructive behavior.

What the numbers are telling us, is that a generation of poorly educated white men who came of age in the Seventies and Eighties are suffering dramatic levels of psychological instability, so that they drink or drug themselves to death or kill themselves outright. The death rate for this group rose 22 percent during the study period. The researchers noted that the incomes of households headed by people with only a high school education fell by 19 percent during the same period. But, that’s true for less educated households of all ethnic groups and both sexes, and only the white males of a certain age began dying at alarming rates – as if much of their group had been emotionally destabilized.

Working class people of all ethnicities have lost a great deal of economic ground under late stage capitalism in America, but the uneducated white males have also lost what they were led to expect was their special place in the racialized pecking order. Late in life, they find that white skin privilege can’t buy security or serenity in the age of austerity – and their worlds fall apart.

You might say they died from a White Lie.

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

[guruilla]

Glad to see this thread is being taken a bit more seriously. I am cross-posting this also, as it seems highly relevant here, and once again it somehow ended up at The Thread That Jack Built.

I've also added something at the end from Wikipedia about feminist psychology, which I did not know existed as an actual discipline and practice until last night. It is interesting for a number of reasons, probably most striking (for me) being that it weds psychology with ideology in an overt way, and in the process, largely exteriorizes it (i.e., removes the psyche from psychology). But that's just my (initial) reading.

From the Erin Pizzey interview (thanks semper!):

From what I saw when I was in these great big collectives was really Marxism. We were all organized into groups in our own homes and told that we must have consciousness-raising sessions. And I remember the woman who came to our consciousness-raising and when she finished, I said this has nothing to do with women, this is actually Marxist. I said so we’re supposed to go to work full-time and put our children into care provided by the state—like the Communist government—and why are we calling this liberation? And so very quickly I was booted out and went off to open a community center for mothers and children. And then I knew, once the donations came in, once the press picked it up—because the local paper—because my refuge by that point was full—I knew very well the sound of the feminist boots coming down to actually hijack the entire domestic violence industry and turn it into a billion dollar industry. Which they’ve done.

. . . .

Yes, but most of them don’t even know anything about the beginning of this movement. And the thing I have to point out, very simply, the beginnings of the women’s movement happened way back when a lot of women were fighting for the rights of people, of Americans, to end the apartheid that was going on at that time. When they had finished marching for the civil rights movement—There’s a whole storied history that you can read it. They came back and decided that the leftist women wanted their own movement. So instead of it being Capitalism, which everyone was against in the left-wing movements, they simply changed the goal posts and said it was Patriarchy. Everything was because of men, because of the power that men have over women. And then the second part of their argument was that all women are victims of men’s violence because it’s The Patriarchy. And that is such a lot of rubbish. Because, we know, and everybody in the business knows, that both men and women in interpersonal relationships can be violent. And that’s in every single study all across the Western world. . . .

To be clear, much of this (particularly that last point) is as surprising to me as it will be to others, and I know at least one person here has already rejected it as dangerous fantasy (Pizzey addresses that in the interview). The notion that women are equally as violent as men is also there in the Dutton material I quoted, which was also completely new to me. No one has commented (constructively) on it yet besides slomo, who was already familiar with it, and I think the reason is that it's simply unthinkable to most of us, a real thought-stopper. I also think this itself bears thinking about.

And my whole concern is, it is generational violence, and if we don’t save this generation of children we simply have more and more violent people. Because, until we understand we cannot blame men for everything. Women have to look at themselves and be honest about their own violence. And also, to understand what you do to a child’s brain when you actually fight each other, scream, yell and hit children, it causes brain damage. And we know that now from MRI scans. They can see what it does, particularly to the frontal lobe, the right frontal lobe, which is the seat of all our emotions.

. . . of the first hundred women who came into my refuge, 60 percent were as violent as the men they left. Or, they were violent and the men weren’t.

. . . Dean: But, people become either frightened or enraged or laugh when you suggest that there are violent women. Where do you think that comes from?

Erin: Most people who are violent don’t think they’re violent because it’s been their reality from a very early age.

...

I was also at the American Embassy when Betty Friedan recanted what she’d said and she said, “I apologize. We, as women have gone to the male, for the throat over economics and that isn’t what we should have done. We should have built the relationship between men and women.”

Dean: Betty Friedan said that?

Erin: Yes, she did, in the American Embassy about 1980, ’81. And I just remember looking at her and thinking, “Look at the damage you’ve done with what you’ve said over the years!” It’s all very well everybody recanting, but the damage is done.
...
Dean: Susan Brownmiller published a simply horrible screed about rape and how …

Erin: No she has since then written a book … we’re friends, I know her … she’s since then wrote a book and just said, “I was wrong.”
...
Dean: That’s actually good for me to hear because her original writings on rape about it being this … I don’t know … men have been raping women for millions of years and … very upsetting stuff! It’s good to hear that you’re friends and that she’s recanted her views on that. I’d probably like to talk to her some time. But it seems to me as if people either want to see women as exclusively victims or as somehow angelic figures.

Erin: That’s mostly men. Women know. We know each other. And privately, they’ll say what they really believe. But an awful lot of men will not hear a word about violent women. They like women on pedestals. It makes them feel safe.
....
Dean: Harriet Harman [PIE-affiliated], she’s a Member of Parliament there in Britain, yes? From what I’ve read about her, she seems very hateful. She is a feminist, yes?

Erin: Well, I tried to reason with her once. We were both at the conference and I just said to her, “Look, Harriet, you’ve simply got to accept the figures about violent women.” She just swung around on me and her face changed. She said, “The amount of men who are beaten up is miniscule.” And I just looked at her, and I thought, “There’s nothing I can do with you because your mind is closed.”

Dean: Well, the government’s own figures don’t even show that to be true, do they?

Erin: Yes, the British Home crime figures show virtually equal between men and women, domestic violence.

Dean: Wow.

Erin: It doesn’t matter how often you say this, or you point it out. You tell a lie long enough, Goebbels said, you can brainwash the entire community. And that’s what’s happened here.

Dean: Now there are those who be accusing you of being a conspiracy theorist or some sort of crazy person to suggest the domestic violence industry is a billion dollar industry.

Erin: That’s not too difficult. Just look at the figures, if you can get your hands on them....

Of special interest to Canadians, Erin claims that "the most frightening country in the entire world is Canada":

I did a six-week tour, with Senator Anne Cools, all across Canada. And there were some wonderful (there was one in Windsor was wonderful) uh, men’s groups, just struggling to keep going. And as we traveled and talked to men’s groups, we realized how terribly dangerous it is because it’s almost as though the entire government and the judiciary—the same people—had been infiltrated by very radical feminists out to get men. And I talked to people all the way across Canada. You know my mother was Canadian, and I’m half Canadian, and it hurt actually. See I was a child in Toronto, and my feeling as we went through is real fear. I remember I was working with Anne in the Senate and I walked in to the lift, and this man who was in the lift with me was cowering over in the corner. And I came out and I said to Anne, “What on earth was that about?” And she said, “Men are frightened. They just don’t know when they’re going to be told they’re sexually harassing somebody.”

On men's movements that seem to be considered fair game for scorn, and worse, at RI:

Dean: That’s an interesting thing, because I noticed on Facebook, you said something, I don’t have an exact quote, but you were despairing that men’s groups never seem to go anywhere or get any traction. Are you still finding that to be true?

Erin: Yes, I do find that to be true. I really do. And it’s a great sadness because the only way we’re going to heal what’s happened between the anti-male, misandry, and ordinary normal people in loving relationships, is for men to take their lead in what’s happening and make their opinions known and stand up as otherwise there’s this deepening divide in relationships between men and women.

Example of a consequence of the rule against men being allowed into refuges:

Erin: Well there was a case the other day—I was talking to the mother. She was completely bloody after she’d been beaten up. She got to the police station with her children. Her boy was 16 and … when women’s aid came to collect her, they said, “You can’t take your 16-year-old son.” She said, “What can I do then?” “Well you’ll have to make accommodations.” She said, “I left my son in the police station for the Social Services to collect him because I knew I couldn’t cope after finding my own accommodation and I wouldn’t be protected.” I said, “You’re quite right. How would that poor child … he’s only 16 and seeing his mother beaten up, how many times he couldn’t count—left.” That’s as far as I am concerned, cruel.

Dean: It seems to be and also may be teaching him a message to internalize his father’s anger and his father’s violence and think, “Well this is just what men are.” Right?

Erin: Yes.

Dean: On the other hand, I have a good friend, obviously I won’t name him … he was in a relationship where his wife was very violent with him and very violent with his children and he stayed in that relationship even though it was going on for years because he feared to call the police for help. He was certain he would be arrested.

Erin: He’s right.

Dean: He was right, wasn’t he? Almost any man would be.

Erin: Listen to this: Who trains the police? Women’s Aid.

Erin: Yeah. All across for 40 years, they have been doing educational packages which they then sell to, whether it’s to the police or social services, and the message is always there: it’s all men, it’s all men, it’s all men.

Dean: And it’s a lie, isn’t it?

Erin: It’s a massive lie. Yes. And it’s a very, very, very—a lie worth telling because you get billions out of this. This is more about money than it is about caring for anybody.
...

Erin: Well, look at it this way: Baby P was a big, big case here just recently, a child, a beautiful little boy … was hideously battered by a violent mother and her boyfriend. He was taken into hospital and he died. Everybody across the country was weeping over Baby P, because it made the newspapers. And I said then, “Right, when this man grows up, this child, had he been able to grow up, he probably would have been a monster and then you would hate him.”

Sorry: I kept thinking I have got to enough quotes & then I kept finding more stuff that just blew me away.

Dean: Well and one of the patterns I’ve seen and read about is that you’ll get these women in violent relationships and they’ll be the ones who actually start the hitting.

Erin: Yes, they do, because the majority of violent women bank on the fact that most men don’t hit women. And they don’t.

Dean: And most men don’t hit women.

Erin: Yeah then …

Dean: And so then a woman will hit, and hit and hit … and then finally he loses his mind turns and punches her, and now she gets to be a victim right?

Erin: Yeah. Sometimes she doesn’t even have to wait to provoke him to where he loses it. She bangs her head on a wall and calls the police.

Dean: Now that’s going to make some people angry. You just suggested women will intentionally injure themselves.

Erin: And some men. I mean, it’s not just women or just men; it’s what you learned in childhood. A lot of these women I deal with have severe personality disorders. As do the men. And whoever gets involved with them, even by accident mostly, is going to get … it’s a train crash. Because it takes time for the loving partner to realize what they’ve taken on. And an interesting thing about men, when they see what they think is a very, very—what would the word be? A very fragile woman. And this is a classic. A narcissistic exhibitionist—there’s the woman, the whole crowd at the party are looking at her. She’s usually very well turned out because she’s narcissistic. She looks good and she’s incredibly warm. It isn’t until he gets deeper into the relationship that he realizes that there’s nothing inside that woman. What he saw was… the harmed child in the woman and he wants to make it better. He wants to defend her and take care of her, and then suddenly he realizes that the mask of sanity … he sees through it and it’s too late.

Dean: Because everybody else sees her as …

Erin: Wonderful! Life of the party! And he’s drawn in by that! Men love to have the woman on their arm that everybody else would love to own.

Dean: Vivacious, pretty, etc. …

Erin: Like my mother, narcissistic exhibitionist, and they’re very, very dangerous and there’s no treatment.

I think in about 20 years perhaps—I don’t know if I’ll still be alive—that we will look at these last 40, 50 years as the dark ages for human relationships.
...
Dean: You use the phrase “equity feminism.” Are you using that to describe women who think of themselves as feminists, but really only want fairness and equality?

Erin: Yes, absolutely.

Dean: Perhaps even the word “feminism” isn’t right at this point for them. They’re really more humanists and don’t realize it?

Erin: Yeah. I think that’s right. But then you see we’ve had nearly 50 years now of brainwashing, and this lie has been standing out there.
....
Dean: But, it’s almost like this radical feminism is underground, people don’t know that it’s there. And you try to tell them and [they say you think] it’s a conspiracy. But it’s not a conspiracy, is it? It’s just reality of what’s in the university and a lot of these government departments, right?

Erin: That’s where it came from. That’s where it all started. And it’s interesting though because many of those Women’s Studies are being shut down.
. . .

Dean: I seem to recall you mentioning something about how perhaps 40, 50 years ago in the 70s there were violent women protesting you and the police told you they were afraid of them?

Erin: That’s absolutely right. I was at a luncheon for Women of the Year at the Savoy, and there was all this shouting. I had to get through the pickets. And the funniest one was “Pizzey is the pits!” But they also had the ones, “All men are rapists” “All men are bastards” and I went down to the police and said, “Look, if this was men, you’d arrest them all.” And there’s a great big copper and I said, “Why aren’t you arresting them?” He said, “Well it’s women,” and there’s a terrified look on his face. And I had to have a police escort all around England.

Dean: And you had to have a police escort because why?

Erin: Death threats. Listen, police don’t give you an escort, because it costs a lot of money, unless they’re worried about it.
...
Dean: And they hate you for saying that women can be violent or that domestic violence is often or usually mutual?

Erin: Yeah. And also that I say that it’s a fact that it’s a multimillion-, billion-dollar industry. That’s one that absolutely outrages them, because they don’t want anyone to know how much money they’re getting.

Dean: It’s funny, and I happen to know that even in the States there is no accounting for where that money goes. I guess it’s marked as going to women’s shelters and that’s it—it’s like a black box.
...

Dean: I think men are, contrary to the stereotype, actually, generally fairly gentle creatures.

Erin: I think that’s true as well, and much, much simpler than women. It’s much easier to talk to men, because men … men explode with rage, right? I can deal with that. Well some men. It’s women implode. And women will actually, ’tis true, they will sit quietly and they will plot for what they want. And that’s very female because you implode with rage. Different chemicals.
...
Dean: So … interesting, interesting. So we’ve evolved to be different, and perhaps we’ve evolved to want to protect women.

Erin: Of course, that’s what you’ve done since the beginning of time. The woman has actually evolved to nurture the children and to nurture a family setup. That’s why she collects the food, on the ground food, but not plowing … men go out, from early days, and bring home the bacon, whether it’s a piece of bear or whatever. What isn’t healthy though, is, it takes … you know in an ideal world the mothering and the fathering under one roof with the children is the best way a child can grow up—being nurtured by each parent. Yes, other people can nurture a child but that biological bond between the mother and the father is the best that you can offer your child.

Dean: I think the nurturing impulse in men is underrated. I think men have a very strong nurturing impulse too.

Erin: They do.

Feminist Psychology

Feminist psychology is a form of psychology centered on social structures and gender. Feminist psychology critiques historical psychological research as done from a male perspective with the view that males are the norm.[1] Feminist psychology is oriented on the values and principles of feminism. It incorporates gender and the ways women are affected by issues resulting from it.

Gender issues can include the way people identify their gender (male, female, genderqueer; transgender or cisgender), how they have been affected by societal structures related to gender (gender hierarchy), the role of gender in the individual’s life (such as stereotypical gender roles), and any other gender related issues. The objective behind this field of study is to understand the individual within the larger social and political aspects of society.[2] Feminist psychology puts a strong emphasis on women's rights.

...

Relational-cultural theory

Relational-cultural theory is based on the work of Jean Baker Miller, whose book Toward a New Psychology of Women proposes that "growth-fostering relationships are a central human necessity and that disconnections are the source of psychological problems."[21] Inspired by Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique, and other feminist classics from the 1960s, Relational-Cultural Theory proposes that "isolation is one of the most damaging human experiences and is best treated by reconnecting with other people," and that therapists should "foster an atmosphere of empathy and acceptance for the patient, even at the cost of the therapist’s neutrality".[22] The theory is based on clinical observations and sought to prove that "there was nothing wrong with women, but rather with the way modern culture viewed them."[23]

Feminist therapy

Feminist therapy is a type of therapy based on viewing individuals within their sociocultural context. The main idea behind this therapy is that the psychological problems of women and minorities are often a symptom of larger problems in the social structure in which they live. There is a general agreement that women are more frequently diagnosed with internalizing disorders such as depression, anxiety, and eating disorders than men.[1]

Feminist therapists dispute earlier theories that this is a result of psychological weakness in women and instead view it as a result of encountering more stress because of sexist practices in our culture.[1] A common misconception is that feminist therapists are only concerned with the mental health of women. While this is certainly a central component of feminist theory, feminist therapists are also sensitive to the impact of gender roles on individuals regardless of sex.

The goal of feminist therapy is the empowerment of the client. Generally, therapists avoid giving specific diagnoses or labels and instead focus on problems within the context of living in a sexist culture. Clients are sometimes trained to be more assertive and encouraged to understand their problems with the intent of changing or challenging their circumstances.[12] Feminist therapists view lack of power as a major issue in the psychology of women and minorities. Accordingly, the client-therapist relationship is meant to be as egalitarian as possible with both sides communicating on equal ground and sharing experiences.[13]

Feminist therapy is different than other types of therapy in that it goes beyond the idea that men and women should be treated equally in the therapeutic relationship. Feminist therapy incorporates political values to a greater extent than many other types of therapy. Also, feminist therapy encourages social change as well as personal change in order to improve the psychological state of the client and society.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_psychology

[tapitsbo]

Ah, I remember vanlose kid's thread where he reviewed Ioan P. Culianu, whose thesis was that soft sciences like psychology are an outgrowth of early modern magic.

Guruilla I definitely don't want you to stop doing what you're doing here but I'm getting a little puzzled by where you're going with "ideology". My sense is that we all have our own ossified belief systems that we repeat without thinking them through, "exteriorizing" stuff in the process.

These feminist projects may have been manipulated, may have been wrong about some things and right about others, but at least they were trying to re-think ideas usually taken for granted.

I guess I'm trying to get a better sense of where you're going with this "ideology" stuff. I don't see why feminist psychology would be any more ideological. I think we should be free to question different versions of feminism but these feminist projects were basically on to something, I believe, when they said the status quo of institutional disciplines wasn't "neutral".

Glad you bolded "there's nothing wrong with women". In my experience women do indeed get sorted into "good" and "bad" even by the doctrinaire people who say they're infallible. Women who really do dissent from the status quo have to contend with both the mainstream or old model of what they are supposed to be, and the feminist one.

And while we're talking about the patriarchy or lack thereof, it always strikes me as funny that people don't bring up Freemasonry more, which is all-male in the anglosphere, in this context (I know there's a thread about it on your discussion forum). For some reason it doesn't usually come up during talk of "fascist masculine cults" and the like.

Of course many 19th-Century feminists were tied to elite occultism themselves, and in the 20th century a lot of feminists in leadership roles were tied to groups like the Fabian/Occult Yorkshire milieu you've been sketching.

[slomo]

^^^^ From the wiki entry on feminist psychology, I don't see any problem with it.

Statistically speaking (i.e. acknowledging variation at the level of individuals), men and women do tend to have different psychological makeup. It makes sense to study female psychology without bringing bias from what is known about male psychology.

[guruilla]

I don't see why feminist psychology would be any more ideological. I think we should be free to question different versions of feminism but these feminist projects were basically on to something, I believe, when they said the status quo of institutional disciplines wasn't "neutral".

Of course not, but countering covert or unconscious ideology with overt hardly seems a solution. My point, as i said at first pass, about this form of feminist (I feel like it needs quotes becoz I am discovering more and more how unspecific that word is) psychology is that it reverses the usual understanding by trying to attribute a person's, or rather a woman's psychological problems to external circumstances (generally relating to men and the supposed Patriarchy).

My own belief, tho I'd rather call it experience, is closer to Lloyd De Mause's model, which is that as a general rule, external circumstances can be mapped back and in, to internal patterns caused by formative childhood events.

I am a bit puzzled by your question, tho, because if Wikipedia's breakdown is accurate, feminine psychology acknowledges being more ideological, and that it is built into its basic structure.

You made some other interesting points but I'll have to leave it at that for now.

[tapitsbo]

Well obviously there's a feedback between external and internal. I'd be wary of any breakdown that favors one side of the equation to the exclusion of the other...

[brainpanhandler]

It's very clear to me that you refuse even to engage in this discussion in the way of any intellectually honest discussion (i.e. with citations and evidence to back up claims, and refuting evidence either by disputing its factual basis or else disputing its implied significance).

I'll be using the above as the basis for my assessment of the evidence presented in this thread by slomo.

1. citations and evidence to back up claims

2. refuting evidence either by disputing its factual basis or else disputing its implied significance.

It may take me some time, but I'm committed to it, so consider this a place holder.

[guruilla]

^^^^ From the wiki entry on feminist psychology, I don't see any problem with it.

Statistically speaking (i.e. acknowledging variation at the level of individuals), men and women do tend to have different psychological makeup. It makes sense to study female psychology without bringing bias from what is known about male psychology.

That wasn't the part that stood out for me, but the part about assigning women's psychological problems to external domestic and social factors in the present, and the accompanying bit about gearing the therapy towards political activism, i.e., putting it in service to an ideology. Just to be (triply) clear, and not wanting to hijack the thread over it.