A Letter to Washington Post Columnist Donna St. George about Article on “Teen girls ‘engulfed’ in violence and trauma”
Dear Ms. St. George,
I respectfully ask that you take the time to read this admittedly long letter about your recent article, Teen girls ‘engulfed’ in violence and trauma, 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 undeniably gender-biased articles in 2018: Why can't we hate men? and Amber Heard’s infamous op-ed that ultimately embarrassed the Post1, cost Heard millions, and proved beyond doubt men can be victims of violent women.
In response, I’ve been sending letters to Post columnists who have written articles that perpetuate this same gender bias.
Your article is, unfortunately, an extreme example of this bias, this gender prejudice.
Please don’t misunderstand. I have the utmost sympathy for the difficulties faced by today’s teenage girls as documented in the CDC study described in your article. These girls are exposed to some troubles barely imaginable in my long-ago teenage years.
But I have even more sympathy for teenage boys, as they are twice victimized: first, they’re also affected by most of the same problems as girls, but then their hardships are almost completely ignored by your article – and by society at large. These boys are victims of what is known as the “gender empathy gap”.
You, like most Americans, 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.2
The empathy gap:
Is why a former presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, showed a selfish disregard for overwhelmingly male military sacrifices by declaring that “Women have always been the primary victims of war”. This article explains why Clinton’s statement “…isn’t a different perspective. It’s a lie”.
The empathy gap is why thousands of articles just like yours focus only on females, completely oblivious to far greater male suffering, despite easily obtainable and documented facts.
Over their lifetimes, boys will:
· live six years less than the girls you focused on
· suffer 94% of workplace deaths
· become 80% of the homeless
· become 80% of deaths by suicide
· become 76% of homicide victims
· be more likely than females to be charged for similar crimes and on average receive 63% longer sentences, while their female cohorts will be twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted.3
· form the only group who, via the Forced Labour Convention of 1930, will still be subject to a type of slavery – aka “military conscription” – and unlike their female peers, be forced to register for the draft or face serious, life-altering penalties
· finally, unless legal changes are made, these boys will become at least 50% of the victims of domestic violence4 and yet will be mostly ineligible to receive assistance from taxpayer-funded DV shelters. It’s truly Separate and Unequal Domestic Violence Victim Services!
This gender empathy gap has been thoroughly documented in a nearly 700-page book that should be required reading for all Post columnists Americans: The Empathy Gap: Male Disadvantages and the Mechanisms of Their Neglect.
Despite these many obvious and well-documented male disadvantages, feminists have deceitfully convinced millions that men instead have “male privilege”. If you believe this feminist myth, please take the time to view this video.
Your article, the CDC report, and the statements made by the people you interviewed provide further examples of this empathy gap that values girls’ well-being while devaluing that of boys:
· To start, although it may appear to be insignificant, when the sex of students could be determined in the report’s photographs, they are by far mostly girls, 85% to 15%. Isn’t it fair to ask if this doesn’t reveal an underlying gender bias?
· Next, even the title of your article is itself indisputable evidence of this indifference to male hardship. Why did the title only say “teen girls”, and not “teen girls and boys” or just “teenagers”?
The CDC report included significant negative statistics for boys, but in your zeal to proclaim the trauma and victimization of girls, you almost completely overlooked these boys’ similar victimization, sending the implicit message that boys don’t deserve equal sympathy.
· It is a well-known fact5 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-found6 Time magazine article that you could have referenced:
Even beyond the gender empathy gap your article, as in tens of thousands articles like it, have the unmistakable fingerprints of more than fifty years of feminist political and cultural indoctrination on them. That you’re completely oblivious to this indoctrination is proof of its devious effectiveness.
Your article:
· Uses hyperbole like “engulfed in a growing wave of violence and trauma” to distort, magnify, and prey on men’s natural inclination to protect females. People in war zones or gun-saturated inner cities are “engulfed in violence”, not, by far, most American girls.
· Misappropriates and overuses words like “sexual violence”, “rape”, and “survivor” (the last two were present in your article but not in the CDC report), or my favorite, uttered by Heather Hlavka of Marquette University, “victim-survivor”. Why not just “victim”? Such hyperbolic excess is a classic example of “feminists crying wolf”.
Another example is provided by Riana Alexander, the aforementioned student who, talking about sexual violence, said “I’ve yet to meet a teenage girl who has not had something disgusting said or done to her by a man”.
Is this really “sexual violence”? If it is, it's so extremely subjective – whenever a female believes that a male does or says that she considers offensive – then every man in America can somehow be considered guilty of sexual violence by any woman or girl.
· Maximizes male culpability while minimizing female misbehavior. You quoted Kathleen Ethier, director of the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health, who said “… it’s important to determine who is perpetrating the violence … and how it can be stopped”.
Who could possibly be the unnamed guilty perpetrators?
The obvious answer is, of course, “males”.
But what about the girls who you lament are “engulfed in a wave of violence”? Are they capable of violence as well?
Before you again write about female victims, you really must read a book written by a self-described feminist that thoroughly demolishes the stereotype of men as violent aggressors and women as innocent victims, When She Was Bad — Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence:
“Women commit the majority of child homicides in the United States, a greater share of physical child abuse, an equal rate of sibling violence and assaults on the elderly, about a quarter of child sexual abuse, an overwhelming share of the killings of newborns, and a fair preponderance of spousal assaults.”
But one passage is particularly applicable to this discussion:
“This was in the late 1970s, around the time that Stephen King’s novel Carrie came out and introduced the world to gothic cruelty in teenaged girls. In a 1993 survey of Ontario high school girls, the community psychologist Fred Matthews put the following question to them: Defining violence as broadly as they wished, who were they most afraid of? Overwhelmingly, they responded, ‘Other girls’.” [emphasis added]
So the girls you claim to be “engulfed in a wave of violence” are also likely perpetrators of a good portion of this violence.
· Finally, your article, and so many like it, unwittingly contradicts the feminist narrative of females as “powerful and confident”. So, which is it? Are women and girls powerful or helpless victims?
The answer lies in understanding something that a Frenchwoman, Marie Anne Du Deffand, said some 250 years ago:
“Women are never stronger than when they arm themselves with their weaknesses.”
As long as feminists can gain sympathy by playing the victim and appealing to men’s chivalric nature, the more lies they can get away with. It really is that simple.
Your article instinctively uses the “damsel in distress” ploy to garner sympathy.
Ms. St. George, 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 “50 years of feminist political and cultural indoctrination” 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 their hateful, feminist-inspired, anti-male gender bias.
Do it in memory of the victims of the “gender empathy gap”: the men of the Titanic, who willingly gave up their lives so women and children could live; the more than one million American men7 who have died in wars protecting us at home; the 4,140 male 9/11 first responders (85% of total)8 who died that day; the thousands of nameless men who are injured or killed on the job every year to support their families — 94% of workplace fatalities. Finally, do it for the tens of millions of men who, despite being assailed by feminist hate for decades, continue to support, care for, and love women.
But most of all, do it for the CDC study’s teen-aged boys who you overlooked and undervalued.
Sincerely,
Stephen Bond
For other letters to Post columnists see my Letters to The Washington Post list:
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.”
From video clip by “anti-feminist” Janice Fiamengo talking about the empathy gap, starting at about 6:25
For proof, just Google “female attempt suicide” or see this article
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”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war. Note that because more than 99% of these deaths are male, the entire sum for all wars has been used as “males killed”
4,140 male, 709 female first responders data found at https://www.cdc.gov/wtc/ataglance.html