International Men's Day, November 19

From: Colin Fowler
To: E-Male Matters Mailing List
Subject: Invitation to a Free International Men's Day 2020 Webinar

Dear Colleague,

As you probably already know, International Men's Day (IMD) takes place on the 19th of November each year. This day offers an opportunity for everyone to celebrate the important contribution that men and boys make to their families, friends, communities, workplaces, society and the world. However, it is also a time to highlight some of the key issues facing males, and to provide practical support and positive encouragement to overcome these.

To mark IMD 2020, HSE Health and Wellbeing - supported by the Men's Health Forum in Ireland (MHFI) and the Centre for Men’s Health in IT Carlow - is organising a webinar which explores the impact of COVID-19 upon the mental health and wellbeing of men and boys. Titled 'Men's Mental Health in these Challenging Times', this free event will ...

• begin at 11.00am;
• look at issues such as farming, older men and young men;
• include a mix of research presentations, personal experiences and discussion.

If you would like to participate, you can register at: https://ims.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_QlnhU5CZSMaI9QhEyrkF1Q

All the best,

Coli

PS: Apologies if this is the second time that you have received this message!
_________________________________



Colin Fowler
Director of Operations
Men's Health Forum in Ireland (MHFI)
Email: colin@mhfi.org
Web: www.mhfi.org
Facebook: www.facebook.com/MensHealthForumIreland
Twitter: www.twitter.com/MensHealthIRL

Our Stand By Your Men campaign, which is part of our award-winning mental health campaign Lighten The Load, has been raising awareness about how vital it is that men talk as openly about their struggles as we do on Loose Women. International Men’s Day is the perfect opportunity to bring that message to the forefront and our Loose Men Marvin, Iain, Roman and Ronan are just the panel to do it. They'll also be joined by Hollywood legend Matthew McConaughey, in what's set to be a show like no other."

UcdLaw22 wrote: »

Some of those statistics are shocking. Always forget that the percentage of male victims of domestic violence is so high - really shouldn't be seen as solely a women's issue.

The only statistic I'd be slightly wary of is the one about men being more likely to be imprisoned for the same crime - comes across a bit like the problem of most "pay gap" data where they don't take into account the differences in hours worked.

I'm not denying that gender can definitely have an effect on sentencing (with judges being human and having their own internal biases) but a huge aggravating factor in sentencing is the existence of prior convictions/offending behaviour. As men commit the vast majority of crime, it would stand to reason that they are much more likely to have prior convictions (or more priors) than a woman facing a charge for the same crime, which would result in a more severe sentence - not due to gender bias. So it's not exactly comparing like with like. You'd really need to compare men and women with similar offending backgrounds e.g. both first time offenders. If anyone happened to know of any studies where they've done this I'd be really interested in reading it!

If you're a criminal defendant, it may help—a lot—to be a woman. At least, that's what Prof. Sonja Starr's research on federal criminal cases suggests. Prof. Starr's recent paper, "Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases," looks closely at a large dataset of federal cases, and reveals some significant findings. After controlling for the arrest offense, criminal history, and other prior characteristics, "men receive 63% longer sentences on average than women do," and "[w]omen are…twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted." This gender gap is about six times as large as the racial disparity that Prof. Starr found in another recent paper.

There are other studies that have shown gender disparity in criminal cases, but not as pronounced as Prof. Starr's findings. This is because she is looking at "a larger swath of the criminal justice process" in her analysis, she said. The paper states, "Existing studies have typically focused on single stages of the criminal process in isolation"—in particular, the judge's final sentencing decision. These studies compare actual sentencing outcomes after controlling for the recommended sentence associated with the defendant's ultimate conviction. The problem with this, Starr explains, is that "the key control variable is itself the result of a host of discretionary decisions made earlier in the justice process"—including prosecutors' charging and plea-bargaining decisions. Starr's research incorporates disparities found at those earlier stages, and finds that "more disparity is introduced at each phase of the justice process."

After estimating the amount of disparity left unexplained by the arrest offense and other control variables, the paper explores "why these gaps exist—and, in particular, whether unobserved differences between men and women might justify them." Prof. Starr explores several potential mitigating factors, such as the "girlfriend theory" (that "[w]omen might be viewed as…mere accessories of their male romantic partners"), the role of women as primary caregivers to their children, and the "theory that female defendants receive leniency because they are more cooperative with the government." Although each of these theories found some support in the data, they did not appear capable of explaining anything close to the total disparity that Prof. Starr found.

Prof. Starr emphasized that it is not possible to "prove" gender discrimination with data like hers, because it is always possible that two seemingly similar cases could differ in ways not captured by the data. Given the size of the apparent gender gap and the richness of the dataset (which allowed many alternative explanations to be explored), however, Starr believes that there is "pretty good reason to suspect that disparate treatment may be one of the causes of this gap."

If men and women are being treated differently by prosecutors and judges, what should be done about it? Prof. Starr leaves that question to policymakers, but she does note that the solution "is not necessarily to lock up a lot more women, but perhaps to reconsider the decision-making criteria that are applied to men. About one in every fifty American men is currently behind bars, and we could think about gender disparity as perhaps being a key dimension of that problem."

iptba wrote: »

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/does-international-men-s-day-diminish-women-s-struggle-for-equality-1.4412914

So, in summary, the author admits that the issues being raised in the context of International Man's Day are worthy and unobjectionable, but creates a straw man in order to attack it anyway.—

Oh dear. This is really just an attack of men having the temerity to want recognition of issues that affect them, by a feminist who feels threatened by not having full control of the narrative around gender issues. 

And as for this :“The fact remains, however, that there is a plain imbalance between the genders in work, society and at home.” 

The imbalance is not so plain. Yes, there are many metrics under which women are doing less well. But there are many metrics under which men are doing less well, and pretty important ones at that: men die younger; men are more likely to be homeless; men have poorer health outcomes; men have poorer educational outcomes; men are more likely to be imprisoned, to commit suicide, etc.

So, in order to be worthy of an official day, or month, you must be oppressed! Straight out of the bankrupt ideology of grievance studies and critical race, gender and queer theory What's wrong with a mere celebration of achievement if that's what people want to do?

Still, I suppose men are getting off lightly here. After all, if saying White Lives Matter is racist, then, by analogy, having an International Men's Day must be misogynist. I guess we're lucky logic isn't the strong suit of the woke brigade! «

yawn......this only proves that for some feminists.......equality is not the end goal..

And, of course, the Women’s Movement, while well intentioned, may unintentionally give a platform to dyed-in-the-wool man-haters.

The feminists are getting very worried these days because their monopoly world view is being challenged over a whole range of issues. The whole woke agenda Is under attack.

“These barriers include discriminatory social norms, the gender pay gap and violence against women.”

The first is so vague as to be meaningless, the gender pay gap argument is beneath contempt at this point and simply confirms this author’s ignorance of how it was debunked time and again. The third is more insidious because it is supported by a deliberate media-driven campaign to continuously suppress facts about domestic violence. There has never been a proper discussion of this sensitive and emotive issue. The facts, supported by overwhelming evidence show that men and women perpetrate DV at comparable rates, women are just as likely to initiate the violence, even the physical kind, women are just as controlling as men and most of DV is reciprocal. In other words the black and white, exclusive binary view of victim and perpetrator is simply wrong.

Some more facts: Tusla the principal state funding agency is currently spending 25 million euro on services. Of this Men’s Aid got 240,000 euro. It cannot operate even a skeleton service; it is restricted to a 9 to 5 service Monday to Friday. There are no shelters for men. Men’s Aid got 3500 calls during the pandemic, 43% came from Dublin yet Dublin has no call centre for abused men. Since there is nowhere for them to go they end up sleeping in cars or else on the street. Many are suicidal but Who cares?

The main media in this state refuse to acknowledge these facts. RTE has interviewed women’s groups at least 9 times since March. Not once did it interview the CEO of Men’s Aid to find out their situation. It dares to call itself a public service broadcaster and is currently begging the state for more money to do more of the same.

The Irish Times is no better. It has never devoted an opinion column to an impartial examination of the issue. Nor has it interviewed Men’s Aid once; neither during the pandemic or in the past 10 while it continually deplores the "discrimination" against women.

There is a day of reckoning coming.

She also got the suicide figures wrong; the male female ratio has been steady at 4 to 1 for decades; it reached 5 to 1 in 2011, 2012 during the height of the recession. The state paid no attention.

“Consumers and investors today expect companies to have a corporate social responsibility strategy and to take a stand on social justice issues such as gender equality”.

Indeed, the rush to show how much they care has caused Pepsi to spend $400 million that includes everything from “mandatory unconscious bias training” to adding “100 black associates to our executive ranks.” Chevron and others do likewise.

Here AIB collaborated with Women’s Aid to produce a video, the Abusive Teller Machine, which purports to address the problem of financial abuse. In its haste to display its wokeness it relied on a figure, supplied by Women’s Aid, of 198,000 women who suffer such abuse each year.

Problem: The figure is false; the source supplied by Women’s Aid contains no such figure. It may well be out by a factor of 2. Of course men were ignored in this exercise in sanctimoniousness. Yet the video still sits on their website.

One single, solitary day in the year that is for men - and the Irish Times just has to turn it into another female victimhood story.
Why does this newspaper hate men so much?

Even on International Men’s Day they picked a woman to write about it. Says it all.

They want gender diversity in the cushy jobs in heated offices. Most of the women who wanted to be solicitors do not want to be in a competitive sector. Instead, they are in state filled positions or in banks, credit unions, legal aid board...and the like where they are in a vast majority. No calling for quotas there. Or in primary school teaching comprising 90% females. No call in for quotas in building labourer, farmworker or refuse collector jobs.
—-
Reply to X: Absolutely, X. Feminism is not about equality. I was a secondary school teacher for 12 years and worked with female teachers who openly stated that they saw their job as being to educate "our girls" and freely admitted that they had no interest in educating the boys who were in their care.—-

A disgrace of an article which exposes the perpetual whine of the feminist movement. No surprise to see the beta males at the Irish Times editorial team approving this rubbish.—-

Y: , They'd be terrified not to. Career suicide these days in "liberal" workplaces.

Ahh, the gender pay gap. The average pay - averaged over all ages and all sectors of the economy is different for men and women because - wait for it - men and women are different!

Different career choices, different degree majors, different hours worked, different propensities to commute, different amounts of overtime worked, differences around family life, different levels of agreeableness (important in salary negotiations), differing attitudes to part-time work, etc. etc. Difference in equals difference out. Accounts for almost all of the mythical gender pay gap.

After the author's reference to this myth, I'm afraid I had to stop reading, lest I be led deeper into mythological territories

Skippyme wrote: »

In terms of International Men's Day - TOXIC MASC. IS HARMING MEN therefore men such as me want it discussed too.

If we can't have discussions or people get angry at the mention of the topic then there is no hope for anyone struggling because others are happy themselves.

There was a time when people didn't talk about inequality they weren't heard when they did. It takes somebody to voice it without giving up but even then things can seem impossible, flat earth, women voting, racism all things that have had a long term place in societies.

Those days are NOT gone, Young men still beating this relentless drum ... Stigma placed on guys struggling with Social Anxiety by OTHER MEN

What do you call it when it's men doing it to men & even themselves ??? Sometimes it's not healthy competition it's being an ego centric bully.

Imagine a guy suffering with Social Anxiety among other men. Men treat other men like a skunk in this scenario

Please have a read especially 1st PARAGRAPH, also PGs #1,#7 & #11

SEE LINK TO TOPIC ON MEN HARMING OTHER MEN

https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2058042337