Men Stopping Rape, Inc.

A new study to be released by the American Sociological Association at their annual conference, demonstrates that holding rigid attitudes about masculinity had a negative impact on men obtaining appropriate preventative health care.

An article on EurekAlert “the news site for the American Association for the Advancement of Science describes the research:

Middle-aged men who strongly idealize masculinity are almost 50 percent less likely than other men to seek preventative healthcare services, according to a study: ”the first population-based analysis of men’s masculinity beliefs and preventative healthcare compliance” to be presented at the 104th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.

The research actually has a Wisconsin connection:

Using a sample of 1,000 middle-aged men drawn from responses to the 2004 wave of the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, the researchers reviewed the respondents’ masculinity beliefs, socioeconomic status (as measured by education and occupational status) and receipt of three commonly recommended annual healthcare procedures for middle-aged men: a complete exam/physical, flu shot and a prostate examination. The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study is a large-scale study of the education, careers, health and aging of adolescent males and females who graduated from Wisconsin high schools in 1957. The study was administered again in 1964, 1975, 1992 and 2004.

As we’ve contended all along, examining issues of violence and gender is important for men not just because A) we’re statistically perpetrating the vast majority of these crimes, B) we know that women around us are being negatively impacted by misogynist attitudes and the violence associated with it, and C) we ourselves are negatively impacted by perpetuating gender stereotypes which de-value women and simultaneously cause us to shun our own humanness – including the vulnerability of our bodies. Still, I’m thankful for the heavy-duty numbers-crunching scientific types who put many hours in to come up with the evidence that supports this; I’m also thankful to Mr. Laxman Belbase of Men Engage-Asia who posted the link to this article in the Men Against Violence listserv.

Article: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-08/asa-mmb080409.php

Very well written piece by Bob Herbert in today’s New York Times (dated Aug. 7 online) regarding the recent, tragic shooting at a Pennsylvania health club and its linkage to a long list of such violent attacks. Mr. Herbert does a fine job of bringing misogyny to the forefront of the conversation “something that is usually buried in stories such as these; he also brings masculinity into sharp relief:

Soon after the Virginia Tech slayings, I interviewed Dr. James Gilligan, who spent many years studying violence as a prison psychiatrist in Massachusetts and as a professor at Harvard and N.Y.U. What I’ve concluded from decades of working with murderers and rapists and every kind of violent criminal, he said, is that an underlying factor that is virtually always present to one degree or another is a feeling that one has to prove one’s manhood, and that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to commit a violent act.

I have no doubts that Mr. Sondini had mental health issues; but let’s not paint this as an isolated incident, but a sign of larger, unexamined patterns of masculine behavior that desperately need to be addressed.

Fine work, worth a read…

Op-Ed Columnist – Women at Risk – NYTimes.com. [update 2022: paywall]