The Expendable Male (6 mins)
August 10th is Prison Justice Day.
Back when I was a guest of the state all those decades ago (not a period that I am particularly proud of, but it is what it is…) we would grub for every food advantage, often finishing each other’s meals.
An extra dessert was bargained for like contraband.
But on the 10th day of August, we pushed back our trays and refused to eat the ‘Jug-up’ that was usually a highlight to the dreary days despite being food of consistently low quality.
So no food for me today. Coffee is fine, water is plenty.
The ratio of male to female prisoners is 10 to 1. It’s testosterone.
Like they say in French, “nous avons tous les défauts de nos qualités,” which translates as “we all have the faults of our qualities.”
Women can be both gifted and burdened with higher empathy and negative emotion. It helps them spot sickness in those around them (especially children) and danger in their environment.
This blessing is often overwhelming (that’s where you come in to help her balance things – see Team Human below).
There’s a meme that floats around the internet listing predominant male roles such as roofer, logger, veteran, plumber, mechanic, carpenter, coal miner, firefighter, iron worker, truck driver, oil rig worker, police officer, cement mason, power lineman, crane operator, highway worker, garbage collector, construction worker from 80% male (truck drivers) all the way to 97% male (plumbers).
I’m still waiting for the day a couple of gals will show up in spring and clean out my septic tank. I won’t hold my breath (while I hold my nose – just kidding, I don’t really do that… despite the stink).
Cops are something like 85% male. War deaths are 85% male. If there is a work place fatality in North America, 90+% of the time that tragedy will involve the loss of a man’s life.
She is the burdened female precious creator of life.
He is the expendable male powerful defender of life.
With overlap, they are Team Human.
Sometimes, in context, our gifts bite us in the ass.
True for men too as much as for women.
More boys die in childbirth and are born with problems. Preemie girls are almost twice as likely to survive as do boys. A plethora of conditions affect boys more than girls including attention deficit, Asperger’s, dyslexia, etc..
Even more so than it is with girls, a boy’s relationship with his mother as primary caregiver is especially critical to his development.
In Canada, child psychologist and professor of pediatrics, psychiatry and psychology at The University of Montreal, holds the Canada Research Chair in Child Development and won the 2017 Stockholm Prize in Criminology for his work studying delinquents.
Recounting his days studying aggressive boys in the Montreal school system during a podcast last year, he said his early research surprised even him.
If a mother has problems like depression, anxiety, drug or alcohol addiction, her male child has a greater propensity to aggression and later juvenile delinquency.
If she has only a female child, the aggression only shows up when that little girl grows up and has male children of her own.
Tremblay had good success intervening with mothers, having a positive effect on her children.
Studies have been done on men and women playing a contrived game where profits could be shared at a player’s discretion. The twist is researchers added the ability to electric shock each other.
Brain imaging revealed that male subjects who observed the selfish players being zapped registered pleasure in their brains while empathy areas were not activated.
Not so the women, who showed empathy for both the good guys and the bad guys in the game.
At Rooster Acres, my Missus can clean and gut culled animals but leaves the killing to me.
Because of testosterone, men have less ability to hold off competitive, aggressive and vengeful impulses.
Workplace shootings are almost always male, school shooters are male.
Accidents are number four on the list of things that kill men, occurring at twice the rate of females.
We also kill ourselves at four times the rate. The annual Darwin awards are typically going to be male “winners” … as losers.
And more of us end up inside.
Add in attachment theory John Bowlby’s finding from many years ago about male children being separated from their mothers under the age of four and having a higher likelihood of becoming antisocial later on.
A more recent study from Nevada said teens in trouble with the law whose mothers stood by them tended to grow up fine. Those with no mom standing in their corner had a higher rate of antisocial personality disorder as adults. One of our men is a “juvee” guard and confirmed this recently.
The famed Grant Gluek study tracking almost 800 Boston men since the late 1930s found men with warm maternal relations made more money as adults. Those without… had a four fold increase in dementia.
My old man said his parents both broke his heart. He died of dementia.
So while there are some bad ass muthas that should probably stay inside forevermore, most guys inside are not antisocial or psychopathic.
We are people makers and typically the men I did time with were males with fucked up backgrounds coping the best they could. Many were addicted as well as immature (I was both).
Dealing with many men on the fringes of society for four decades, I’d say a lot of them just take a long time to grow up. The more prosocial values they are exposed to as they age, the better they do.
Look at the Titanic deaths: women, 434; children, 112; men, 1680 died for a survival rate of less than 20%.
If my Missus had to choose between me dying and either of my children, I’d be out of there. That’s how it ought to be.
We are the expendable males. And just as no woman has a choice over her burden as a woman, neither do men get to question nature’s wisdom.
It’s women and children first.
This is my personal view of things:
For all its advantages—like a 95% reduction in starvation deaths in my lifetime, or how it lifted 6 out of 7 billion people beyond the dollar per day existence of 200 years ago by 2017—capitalism subsumes relationships, families, cultures, govts, professions, ecosystems, and anything else in its path.
This has especially weakened the male population worldwide. We did this to ourselves.
It is men who teach men how to be men.
So today I’ll skip food. No “Jug-up” for me. I’m not asking you to do the same, just to recognize and appreciate male expendability.
And if you feel up to skipping dessert, more power to you.
I send you blessings of power and love…
true and free,
cw
Reach me if you want to talk.
I sometimes agree to work with a man…
