Enough About Women. Let’s Talk About the Men, Shall We?

More men are dyslexics, stammerers, beggars, alcoholics... isn’t it high time, then, that we talk about their plight?

Little do women know how bad men have it. (Photo: iStock)

Women have always harboured one belief – that men have it good and women have it bad. That men are rogues who smoke, drink, and loaf around while their wives slave away in a job or in the kitchen and look after their kids.

Little do women know how unfortunate men are.

They end up pretty badly. The proof comes from the latest data compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau, a government body under the Home Ministry. The data relates to crime, suicides and accidents in India in calendar 2014.

India’s jails contained about 95 percent male prisoners last year – as compared to 5 percent women. (Photo: iStock)

Take India’s jails, for instance. They contained 4.11 lakh prisoners last year. 95 percent of the prisoners were men. Only 5 percent prisoners were women. This ratio was also true of India’s jail detainees awaiting trial. Nine men ending up in jail for every one woman? If this isn’t a misfortune for men, what else is?

More Men Have Been Killing Themselves for Years

I looked up other numbers. Men don’t just end up in jail, they are also more prone to killing themselves. The unbearable stress of earning for a family breaks them down. Last year, some 42,000 women in India committed suicide. Male suicides were more than double – around 89,000.

A thought struck me. Was last year unusual?

No, it wasn’t. Compared to women, more men have killed themselves. Always. In fact, the ratio has worsened in recent decades. Back in 1967, nearly 40 years ago when annual data first began to be compiled, male suicides in India were only 1.5 times higher than the number of female suicides. But now male suicides have risen to become twice more.

This is nothing unusual – more men as compared to women have committed suicides over decades. (Photo: iStock)

So a question jumps to the mind. If men have it so good, why do they kill themselves?

Men Have it Hard Too

• Contrary to what women think, men end up in pretty bad shape – as recent data shows.
  
• The latest data compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau shows 95 percent of India’s prisoners last year were men, while only 5 percent were women.
  
• Men must also be burdened by the stress of being a breadwinner, for last year male suicides were more than double that of female suicides.
  
• The scene is particularly pitiful in rural India – while large numbers of male farmers commit suicide because of debts, the wife lives on.
  
• Certain feminists have made some reasonable – and some bizarre observations on gender over the years, saying that the English language itself is gender-biased.
  
• Perhaps the best place to look would be the Metro, where one would find distraught male commuters who are stuck in dead end jobs to earn for their families.

The Sad State of Farmer Suicides

The misfortune of men doesn’t end here. Men are jinxed. It seems bad things keep happening to them. Take accidental deaths from lightning, road crashes to drowning, accidental fires, falls, electrocution, food poisoning, or snake-bites. Why should these accidents kill men more? But they do. The accidents kill four times more men than women.

Same story from rural India. Farmer suicides keep hitting the headlines. Nine times out of ten, it’s male farmers killing themselves. Not female farmers. Last calendar year 5178 male farmers committed suicide compared to only 472 suicides by female farmers. When a crop fails, it’s mostly due to deficient rainfall or an insect which eats up a crop.

Rural India is no different – more male farmers as compared to female farmers have killed themselves owing to crop failures and inability to pay debts. (Photo: iStock)

A farmer is not to blame. Yet he takes his life, so humiliated he feels that he’s burdened by debts he cannot pay off. His wife lives on.

Look at human longevity. Women outlive men throughout the world. Look around for your old aunts and uncles. The uncles have gone up, the aunts survive. Look at the obituary page in our newspapers. The men who die have wives surviving. Because the wives get the ads published. But when elderly women die, they are mostly widows. Their husbands have already gone up. Most obituaries in newspapers carry a line giving the dead person’s year of birth. You’ll see that women have longer lives.

Not just this, it’s men who lose their lives in war. It’s men who fight terrorists in Kashmir – and Naxalites in Chattisgarh. Men also do the most dangerous jobs, like working in coal mines or doing deep-sea diving to repair ships. Men are more prone to heart attacks than women. Alcohol and drug addicts are overwhelmingly male as are beggars. You’ll see male midgets, rarely female midgets. Dyslexics are also mostly male. Also, most people who stammer are males.

How Feminists Forgot the Plight of the Unrepresented Man

Somehow, men end up being bad-mouthed in India. This is true not only here. It’s true of the whole world. The reason is that it’s women journalists who handle social issues for newspapers, magazines, or TV channels. And they see men-women issues from a women’s viewpoint. The male viewpoint goes largely unrepresented.

The feminist movement, when at its peak, would blame men for a lot of things. (Photo: iStock)

In western nations when the feminist movement was at its zenith, feminists would make bizarre observations on gender. They even grouched about the English language, saying it harboured a gender bias. Otherwise, why should ‘master’ mean boss while ‘mistress’ should mean a lover? Why should a ‘governor’ mean a high political office-holder while a ‘governess’ was a private teacher? Why should ‘courtier’ be an officer of the court while a ‘courtesan’ was a prostitute?

The feminist arguments were endless. Why is there only one honorific Mr for men? But two for women, Miss and Mrs? Why should women be required to reveal their marital status? Feminists also said that the word fire-fighter should replace fireman, mailmen should become letter carriers, and chairmen should become chairpersons.

You will be hard-pressed to find too many lively eyes in the many, many faces of unhappy male commuters on a Metro, going home after a dead end job. (Photo: iStock)

Some of these observations were made to arouse mirth. But if you want to see the plight of men, just get into a Metro. Nine out of ten commuters are male and their faces are worn out with anxiety. They see you with unseeing eyes. Men with dead-end jobs, salesmen in cheap shiny clothes, all out for the day to earn money for the family.

They look distraught.

(Arvind Kala is a freelance journalist.)

For a rebuttal to Arvind Kala’s article, read: Enough With the Whining, Let’s Talk About Feminism, Shall We?