Then why aren’t white men next in line for protected victim-class status?
I believe we were explaining how certain ideals of masculinity (I can take care of myself and I never need anybody’s help) are pretty dangerous to men themselves. Those ideals mean that when a guy really is dealing with something he cannot cope with on his own (say depression or PTSD), he’s going to wind up worse off than a “weaker” person who is quicker to look for outside help. It’s not a realistic ideal, because at some point, you’re going to need other people.
Also, if women are the sex designated to cultivate social and familial relationships, a guy who believes those things aren’t his job but who doesn’t have a woman on hand doing it for him is going to wind up very lonely and isolated. You can see the upshot of this in how much more severely widowers tend to suffer than widows unless they remarry:
“While women who lose their husbands often speak of feeling abandoned or deserted, widowers tend to express the loss as one of “dismemberment,” as if they had lost something that kept them organized and whole.”
“Most epidemiological studies report that marriage tends to be protective for men in terms of depression and other mental health problems, largely because a supportive marital relationship buffers them from the negative impact of the stress and strains of everyday life. Bereavement, therefore, is more depressing for many widowers because they, quite simply, have more to lose than widows. This is based on the assumption that a man’s spouse is often his primary source of social support. Consequently,
although a widower may have been more apt to express his thoughts and feelings to his wife when she was alive, he may be equally unlikely to be so open to others. Widows more frequently use alternative sources of support that can protect them more effectively from potentially adverse effects of the loss and other stressors.”
http://www.deathreference.com/Vi-Z/Widowers.html
And would you say there are and always have been an equivalent number of terrible mothers and terrible wives? And poor families where the men equally had to take whatever they could to make money? And a roughly equal number of mothers with bad judgement, too?
Well, but the context is that we’re discussing how effective male familial protection has been for women (especially poor women), and whether it makes sense to abandon modern legal protection for girls and women in favor of informal familial protection.
It’s not a discussion about whether men or women are worse. (And frankly, I don’t see the utility of discussing throwing out legal protection for women in favor of something that doesn’t exist anymore. We can’t just eliminate 150 years of history anymore than we can say, “Hunters and gatherers had better societies!” and all turn into hunters and gatherers.)
Historically, male familial protections seems to have been least effective for girls from poor families or girls in families where the danger was coming from a male authority figure in the family.
