A Letter to Three Post Columnists About Article “The crisis in American girlhood”

Dear Mses. St. George, Reynolds Lewis, and Bever,

I respectfully ask that you take the time to read this letter about your recent article, The crisis in American girlhood, and to thoughtfully consider what I say here.

Please note that I’m a proud lifelong reader of the Post who has long noticed the paper’s gender bias, most notably its imbalanced coverage of domestic violence.

But my pride in the Post turned to quiet outrage after the paper published two horrible, undeniably gender-biased articles in 2018: Why can't we hate men? and Amber Heard’s infamous op-ed that defamed Johnny Depp and ultimately embarrassed the Post.

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In response, I’ve been sending letters to Post columnists who have written articles that perpetuate this same feminist-inspired bias. 

Your article is another example of this bias, this gender prejudice.

Please don’t misunderstand. Having had a brother who committed suicide and personal experience with depression, I can empathize deeply with the suffering of the teenage girls described in your article.

But I have even more empathy for teenage boys, as they are twice victimized: first, they’re affected by most of the same problems as girls, but their suffering is almost completely ignored by articles like yours – and by society at large. Here's how the late men’s rights activist Marc Angelucci described this blindness to male hardship:

“We simply don’t care much about men. In fact, the devaluation of male lives is so entrenched in our psyches and endemic to our system that we refuse to see it — even when it’s smack in our face.”

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Males are casualties of what is known as the “gender empathy gap”.

Like most Americans, you have likely never heard of it. This empathy gap is “… the striking and disturbing indifference of our culture to the suffering of men and boys in stark contrast to our evident concern for the suffering of girls and women.”

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The empathy gap is why articles like yours, a prior article by Ms. St. George about teen girls being “engulfed in violence and trauma” (Feb. 13), and a later article, ostensibly about “entertainment for teen girls” (March 11)

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focus almost exclusively on the anguish of females, completely oblivious to far greater male suffering, despite easily obtainable and documented facts.

I have already posted and sent an open letter to Ms. St. George about her preposterously-titled article. That letter provides additional information about the gender empathy gap. Mses. Reynolds Lewis and Bever, with all due respect I implore you to read it.

One section of my letter to Ms. St. George bears repeating here, however:

“It is a well-known fact

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that, while females more frequently attempt suicide, often as a cry for help, by far more males actually succeed in killing themselves. This is echoed by Riana Alexander, the high school student you quoted: “As a group, girls tend to struggle more openly, she said, while boys “tend to struggle in silence.”

“I would only add ‘… and then quietly kill themselves’.”

“Although the CDC reporting sample is too small to include a section for “Completed Suicides”, perhaps your report would have been less biased if you had mentioned this huge gap between girls and boys. Following are two charts from an easily-found

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Time magazine article that you could have referenced:”

That your article reports that girls attempt suicide twice as often as boys, but neglects to mention that boys succeed in actually killing themselves nearly twice as often is yet one more example of the gender empathy gap.

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Ladies, I can only hope that you’ve read this far. If so, I thank you. I pray that I’ve opened your mind to the gender bias that is reflected in tens of thousands of articles like yours.

If I have, please help me to convince reporters, columnists, and management at the Post that they need to reconsider their entire coverage of gender-related issues to eliminate the feminist-inspired, anti-male bias that proclaims the suffering of girls while ignoring the similar suffering of boys.

In closing, allow me to provide a quote by Supreme Court justice — and three times-wounded Civil War veteran — Oliver Wendell Holmes:

“All societies rest on the death of men”.

If you really think about it, he was right, don’t you think?

Sincerely,

Stephen Bond

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FOOTNOTES

1. Especially with articles like this online:

“A publication with any semblance of ethics might have asked Depp for comment about the sexual violence claims before running with the allegations — then subsequently spiked the op-ed or sicced its reporters on the case for more fact-finding. But not The Washington Post.

“That paper, which loves to blather in its self-important tone about how “democracy dies in darkness,” didn’t bother to turn the lights in the direction of Heard’s claims. Instead, it gave her a free pass to air her dirty laundry against her ex-husband and consequently enabled her to paint herself both as a victim and a crusader of the Me Too era.”

2. Gender Bias Toward Males Frequently Gets Overlooked Daily Bruin Online, 2/20/01.

3. From video clip by “anti-feminist” Janice Fiamengo talking about the empathy gap, starting at about 6:25

4. I don’t object to articles that are only about girls or women. The March 13 article was included in this letter because its purported theme, “entertainment for teen girls”, was hijacked for the purposes of spreading the message of “females in distress”.

5. For proof, just Google “female attempt suicide” or see this article

6. This article was just among the first of many easily found by Googling “suicide rate among teens females and males”. Another was Gender differences in suicidal behavior in adolescents and young adults: systematic review and meta-analysis of longitudinal studies from the National Library of Medicine that stated “Females presented higher risk of suicide attempt … and males for suicide death”.