Update 2018 08 18: Tried, in essence unsuccessfully, to mitigate broken links.
Does divorce harm men’s health? Never mind.
Divorce harms women’s health. Does it harm men’s health? Never mind.
Imagine how much good this study could have done if the deterioration of men’s health after separation and divorce had been investigated and studied as critically as that of women was, but men need not apply, not even if concern and compassion for them would not require manufacturing.
AMES, Iowa — There’s a popular belief among spouses in bad marriages that divorce might relieve their stress and lead to a happier life. But divorce actually increased chronic stress and produced greater physical illness over a 10-year span, according to a study of 416 rural Iowa women by researchers from Iowa State University’s Institute for Social and Behavioral Research.
Fred Lorenz, K.A.S. Wickrama, Rand Conger and Glen Elder produced the latest paper on their research titled “The Short-Term and Decade-Long Effects of Divorce on Women’s Midlife Health,” which was published last summer in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, a professional journal. (Full Story Note 2018 08 18: Link is broken. No replacement could be found. However, the paper is accessible via a pay-walled link. —Walter)
The study report gained wide-spread attention in the media, throughout the world, even in China. Here is an example of media coverage: Divorced Women have more Illness. (2018 08 18: Link is now broken. —Walter)
Divorce harms women’s health, in the context of women as victims, draws without fail the unquestioning crowds, even if in the manufacturing of concern for women it is obvious that one side of the argument glares by its absence. Men’s health? Never mind.
So, at the danger of being considered to be a party pooper (as Sally Jacobs from the Boston Globe, for example, surely would see me to be), let me ask whether divorce doesn’t usually involve two parties, one of them being the husband, a man, that is (with the once-usual children being–at first–a distant third party)?
Why was men’s health after divorce not worthy of an equal amount of attention by the study report’s authors? (Even someone as old as I knows the answer to that one: “A study of divorced men would not have received any funding.”)
Is it truly wrong to garner some of the social capital and expend it on sympathy or a little bit of concern for men? Is that not the right thing to do, and is objective social research no longer the object of academic endeavours in our brave new world?
#DivorceHarmsWomensHealth #MensHealthNeverMind
See also:
- What’s wrong with having equality for women AND men?
- Abortion — Deadly Politics
- Research with a gender lens
- The Head of the Medusa — Chapter 4: Slander, vilification, discrimination, persecution, and consumerism
- Index to Health Issues of Interest to Men and to all People Who Respect Men and Families
- Austria’s Program for the Examination of the Status of Men
- Deaths from Heart- and Cardiovascular Diseases
- Death by Numbers
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