Feminists must have every issue as their own. Domestic abuse, health, education, STDs, sex, beauty standards, workplace treatment, pay, and even sleep have all been claimed by feminists. Even non-issues majestically transform into feminist issues. But that’s what happens when an industry like feminism feeds on trumped up charges of misery and inequality. Feminists are paid to find these things, and they’ll root them out like truffle-sniffing piglets. For men to challenge that we suffer in any of these categories leads to crybaby taunts and penis-size speculations.
But feminists don’t apply the same ground rules to themselves. Or at least they’re not doing so in their analysis of a recent study conducted of suicides carried out by female military veterans. What’s worse is that they’re either lying or too lazy to conduct due diligence in the meme they’re spreading.
The study, conducted of veteran and non-military women in 16 states, found that the suicide rate of veteran women was three times higher than that of non-veteran women. A couple of powerful feminist websites have run with the story. Feministing calls the study “devastating”. Yes, the high suicide rate of veterans is devastating. But, oh, Feministing only cares about the 8% of military personnel who are women. Jessica Valenti, at her own site, carried a link to an analysis of the study conducted by self-proclaimed ladies’ site, The Hairpin. The opening salvo, which Valenti used as the byline to her link, begins:
“A new study suggests that women vets are almost three times more likely to commit suicide as their male counterparts.”
This is a wholly wrong interpretation of the study which only compares veteran women to non-veteran women. The danger in this “misinterpretation” is that Jessica Valenti is a mover and shaker within the feminist community. Her spreading this false meme is like Shaquille O’Neal farting in a Hyundai. I’m here to roll down the windows.
This study found that, among the 18-34 year old cohort of women in 16 states, 1-in-7,465 veterans committed suicide while 1-in-22,763 non-military women did so too. This is the three-to-one ratio figure that is being spread – and wrongly at that. If the comment that this news is devastating is meant to imply that it is all of a sudden news that veterans commit suicide at a high rate, I’d wonder where the commenter has been during the past decade. Suicide is “devastating”, but to say that to a new study that merely reaffirms that this devastating act is endemic only after it applies to women in the military implies an agenda. And Chuck don’t like agenda.
In 2007, suicide rates within the 18-34 year old cohort of male veterans was 1-in-1,761 which makes veteran men 4.24 times more likely to commit suicide than veteran women. According to suicide.org, men, in general, commit suicide at 3.85 times the rate that women, in general, do. If anything, it is devastating that veteran men are actually committing suicide at rates slightly higher than would be predicted, relative to women, if “normal” suicide rates were extrapolated to soldiers.
And there’s a good explanation for the higher rate of male veteran suicides. If fatality numbers are any indication of the rates at which men and women witness death and experience various levels of fear, men would be vastly more prone to taking their own lives. In Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, 98% of all fatalities were men. Fourteen percent of all military members are women – as are eight percent of all veterans. Given their separation from combat, female soldiers don’t experience the haunting memories of being “in it” to quite the same degree as men. Male veterans face a double-whammy. Not only are they 92% of the veteran population, they commit suicide at 4.24 times the rate of women. This is a matter of scale and scope, and it is a men’s issue.
For this analysis to be devastating for female veterans, we’d have to acknowledge that there is something specific to women that makes their higher than expected rates of suicide specific to them. Since they don’t experience the rigors of combat and seemingly come less close to the fallout from war, there is really only one explanation for this fact: women aren’t cut out for war.
Women and feminists really shouldn’t be ashamed of that fact, but feminists serve a higher purpose. While they’d be good to just oppose war at all – which many MRAs and myself would support – feminists prefer to knock down gender-based shibboleths where they exist. The only place they are more prevalent is on sports fields. For feminists to admit that women don’t hold up in war the same way men do would be like them admitting that men are better athletes than women. Some will maintain both. If they admit that natural sexual differences exist between men and women, a giant plank of their platform is taken out from under them. And instead of hunting for truffles, they are forced to hunt for more wood – wood that is much more scarce than truffles.
