G'day Carrol ( yeah, I know you don't read my posts, but that doesn't mean
one of us can't be civil, eh?)
>The disproportion in rates of clinical depression between men and women is
>one of those facts so widely known and accepted that like the fact that
>Lansing is the capital of Michigan it does not require a source.
But it does require some elaboration. It depends on which Lansing you're
talking about. And that you DO have to make clear. If, by clinical
depression, you mean instances of recorded clinical diagnoses, yeah, the
gender discrepancy is actually much more widely known than is Michigan's
Lansing. If, by clinical depression, you mean those instances that would
be officially recorded if they'd been brought to the authorities'
attention, or hadn't been recorded as something else (coz blokes don't get
stuff like that), then you're into the stuff that ain't much known, like
perhaps the Lansings of New York or Kansas. I mean, blokes don't blow
their heads off or sink into agonising alcoholic hazes because they're
happy. They're depressed. Which is an especially terrible thing to be if
you're of an individualist can-do political culture that still implicitly
defines feminity as (inter alia) emotional and masculinity as reasonable.
The patronising and stifling insult sustained by women here seems the pick
of two real stinkers ...
>Any legitimate "challenge" to the statistical fact only strengthens the
>>feminist position.
The statistics are waaaay dodgy.
But how does that assertion strengthen the feminist position? You'd have
to define 'feminism' such that a concern for the male emancipation from the
fetters of patriarchy is included, wouldn't you (sadly, I've seen such
manouevres get famous feminists very cross indeed - the arguments in *The
Myth of Male Power*, for instance, ranged from the dodgy to the compelling,
but the whole book was excised from polite debate because it was instantly
seen as a wholesale denial of the feminist project - or at least, that's
how it played out over here)? All I see is that blokes cop it (depression
- not to mention, sound reasons to be depressed) as much as women, and, for
whatever reason, react differently. And we need a feminism (seeing as how
what is currently passing for 'masculinism' is so pathetic and scary) that
sees that and incorporates it - explicitly and articulately.
Cheers,
Rob.
