Research with a gender lens

It could be Research with a gender lens or Research with a gender lens. The difference depends on one’s perspective and into which direction one wishes to rationalize.

Chicago Sun Times

Research with a ‘gender lens’
NORTHWESTERN | New institute will study women’s health

November 26, 2007
BY JIM RITTER Health Reporter/jritter@suntimes.com
(Full Article)

The headline of Jim Ritter’s article should have read Research with a gender lens. That is because research that is done through a gender lens is an oxymoron. It is not objective. It is of necessity biased and therefore possesses all of the aspects that puts advocacy research outside of the realm of objective and truthful scientific investigations.

If it were not supported through hundreds of millions and even billions of taxpayers’ money, gender-lens “research” would be nothing other than outright comical.

I will take the points raised in the article by Jim Ritter in the Chicago Sun Times and comment on them point by point, with a few links to some of the sources of information used to comment on and to elaborate on each point raised.

That debunking of Jim Ritter’s article will be posted to this blog when time permits. It will take some time to get around to doing that, as I am involved in something right now that will take most of my time for the next few days. The best way to be informed of when the debunking is being posted would be to subscribe to the RSS feed at this blog.

For now this comment is a somewhat less focused refutation of Jim Ritter’s ridiculous claims as to the poor state of women’s health. General objective comparisons of aspects of the status of women vs. the status of men can be found at this blog by doing a search for “gender gap”. (Go down to the end of the menu on the left.)

In general, Jim Ritter’s article is a propaganda piece, produced true to Hitler’s prescription for making propaganda successful. Hitler said in Mein Kampf that,

The function of propaganda does not lie in the scientific training of the individual, but in calling the masses’ attention to certain facts, processes, necessities, etc., whose significance is thus for the first time placed within their field of vision. …All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be. But if, as in propaganda for sticking out a war, the aim is to influence a whole people, we must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public, and too much caution cannot be extended in this direction. …

The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan….

The function of propaganda is, for example, not to weigh and ponder the rights of different people, but exclusively to emphasize the one right which it has set out to argue for. Its task is not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly.

—Hitler, Mein Kampf, Chapter VI

The ostensible need to study women’s health separately from men’s health is nothing other than an attempt (that will without a doubt in the end be successful) to rule out objective and truthful studies of the health of the sexes. Thereby the massive and deadly effects of discrimination against men is removed from view.

The truth about men’s health is that, although there is no controlling biological reason, men die on average (the world average) five years sooner than women do. That gender gap in the life expectancies of the sexes is the consequence of the sum-total of anti-male discrimination in society. If men and women were to have assumed identical and equal risks during the past hundred years, by the end of the millennium about 240 million men and boys would have been alive that had died due to the effects of systemic and systematic anti-male discrimination. That truth can be successfully hidden from public view if women’s health and other women’s “problems” are being studied separately from those of men and if men’s health and other issues are thereby being ignored.

Men are constantly playing catch-up in such discussions. It is extremely rare that men’s issues are the primary cause for an article like that by Jim Ritter. In the vast majority of cases men simply play a “me-too” game in reaction to outrageous feminist propagandistic claims. Thereby the feminists (the Jim Ritters included) drag us down to their level.

Unfortunately the feminists are winning their propaganda war against men. That could be alleviated to some extent through launching men’s studies programs at a rate that brings about an equal number of men’s and women’s studies programs/

	Search Returns
Date	Women’s Studies	Men’s Studies	Women’s Studies Program	Men’s Studies Program
2006 08 28	24,100,000	602,000	340,000	686
2006 09 14	11,500,000	398,000	330,000	636
2007 03 24	2,770,000	296,000	269,000	594
2007 04 11	2,570,000	275,000	261,000	1,110
2007 07 14	2,160,000	465,000	238,000	1,060
2007 08 13	7,580,000	675,000	239,000	1,080
2007 10 09	6,030,000	409,000	68,200	919
2007 11 25	2,300,000	388,000	77,000	69

It is even more unfortunate that in such discussions men can’t avoid being dragged down to the feminist level of intelligence. Someone told me quite some years ago, “Never argue with an idiot. He drags you down to his level. He is right at home there, and you’ll have to play by his rules. Therefore you are likely to lose every time.”

There is a good number of blogs on men’s issues. Marty Nemko’s blog on men’s issues is quite successful in presenting men’s issues not so much from a defensive as from an offensive position. It is too bad that men’s rights activists don’t promote the issues more than is the case. Rather than having men react to outrageous feminist claims, it would be far more effective to have the feminists react to the truth on men’s issues.

–Walter