The continued womanization of men

So, apparently, Frank Sinatra, John Wayne, and Steve McQueen are toxic.
That is, if the American Psychological Association is to be believed.
In the APA’s new “Guidelines for Psychological Practice With Boys and Men,” which “was developed by several groups of individuals beginning in 2005 and continuing with updates and revisions through 2018,” apparently manly virtues such as stoicism, not showing vulnerability, self-reliance, competitiveness, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure are all considered malevolent.
Thus, when millions of men see Val Kilmer as Doc Holiday utter “I’m your Huckleberry,” Batman’s gritty fights in the dark, James Bond drawing his Walther PPK, or Indiana Jones tipping his hat, what they’re actually admiring are symptoms of toxicity, of that evil patriarchy, the upholding of which continues the oppression of women (as well as all the other thousands of genders that the Progressive Left has unearthed).
Interestingly, the Guidelines early on indicated its working assumption: that “boys and men, as a group, tend to hold privilege and power based on gender.”
Unfortunately for the APA, this was immediately debunked by another study, released almost simultaneously, finding men on the losing side of discrimination worldwide vis-à-vis women.
You read that right: after decades of feminist shrieking into our collective mentality that the patriarchy has been oppressing women for decades, holding them back in their careers, creating the wage gap, and preventing them from being what they want to be, here comes a group of researchers from the University of Essex and the University of Missouri-Columbia (in their paper, “A simplified approach to measuring national gender inequality”) saying that men are actually more discriminated against than women.
Thus, countries with “medium and high levels of development are typically associated with disadvantages for boys and men. Countries with the highest levels of human development are closest to gender parity, albeit typically with a slight advantage for women.”
And yet worth noting: out of the 134 countries studied, 19 of them see men being considerably worse off than women.
Illustrative of the study is Saudi Arabia, “frequently portrayed as unfair to women in the media (but) has a relatively high level of overall average gender parity.”
Relatedly, the study makes three important points: “The first is that the lack of gender inequality does not imply that women or men have abundant opportunities in life, and neither does it mean that a country is free of sexist attitudes; all that matters for the expression of gender parity using the BIGI (or any other composite measure of gender inequality) is whether there are overall differences in disadvantages between the sexes.”
Second, “the general focus in the area of gender inequality is often on issues relevant to women, while discounting men’s issues. For example, while the issue of Saudi women not being allowed to drive has received much media attention, little is reported about issues affecting Saudi men.”
Finally, “differences in cultural and religious views may influence one’s assessment of advantages and disadvantages in life. For example, most people in Saudi Arabia subscribe to a set of societal rules that may be difficult to understand from a Western point of view and may well be seen as a disadvantage by non-Muslims.”
The crucial point: “disadvantages cannot always be defined objectively.”
Indeed, this column previously cited The Federalist’s Bre Payton’s report that: “Men account for 77% of the nation’s suicides, they (are) more than twice as likely to become alcoholics, they are more likely to die of an overdose than women, and 90% of inmates are men.”
Also: the US has unfortunately been plagued by school shootings. But what mainstream liberal media refuse to report is that most, if not all of the shooters were bereft of fathers, “whether due to divorce, death, or imprisonment,” as Susan Goldberg points out (“When Will We Have the Guts to Link Fatherlessness to School Shootings?,” February 2018).
Then there’s this: “72 percent of adolescent murderers grew up without fathers; the same for 60 percent of all rapists. 70 percent of juveniles in state institutions grew up in single- or no-parent situations. The number of single-parent households is a good predictor of violent crime in a community, while poverty rate is not” (Terry Brennan, Co-Founder, Leading Women for Shared Parenting.)
It’s time we say enough to this progressive attempt to degrade masculinity in the name of gender equality. Society has been damaged enough already.
Finally, although Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian already admirably exposed rubbish liberal research (similar to the APA Guidelines), nevertheless, the APA Guidelines’ lack of credibility is conclusively sealed by the Guidelines itself: “It is critical to acknowledge that gender is a non-binary construct that is distinct from, although interrelated to, sexual orientation.”
In short, gender is just a social construct and is no longer limited to merely male and female.
If that were true, then a study singling out men and boys is obviously utterly pointless.
 
Jemy Gatdula is a senior fellow of the Philippine Council for Foreign Relations and a Philippine Judicial Academy law lecturer for constitutional philosophy and jurisprudence.
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