A Letter to Washington Post Contributing Columnist Richard Reeves About “Men’s Health Crisis” Article
Is this a sign of a crack in the Post's long-standing wall of gender bias?
Dear Mr. Reeves,
Please allow me to express my sincere appreciation for your recent article in The Washington Post, Men are having a health crisis. Why aren’t we paying attention?, your book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to do About It, and your organization American Institute for Boys and Men, all of which are bringing attention to the long neglected problems of men and boys.
As a brief introduction, I’m a lifelong reader of the Post who nevertheless has long noticed the paper’s anti-male gender bias, provable by its decades-long imbalanced coverage of domestic violence1 and made undeniable by its 2018 publication of the op-ed Why can't we hate men?
Since then, I’ve been sending open letters to Post columnists who have written articles that perpetuate this feminist-inspired bias.
Normally, in my letters this is where I tell columnists that their recent article is yet another example of the Post’s gender bias, followed by a (sometimes lengthy) explanation why.
Instead, I want to praise your article because it is unusual for the Post: it boldly tells the truth about the detrimental effects of more than five decades of feminism on the health and well being of men and boys.
It may also be a sign that the Post is finally beginning to acknowledge its long-standing gender bias against males.
Although your article is a welcome and long overdue change to decades of the Post’s biased views on gender issues, it is but one small step in challenging the man-hating feminism that has gone almost completely unchallenged throughout the world’s media for the past half century.
The proof of this media bias was made completely undeniable by the publication of the aforementioned Why can’t we hate men? op-ed, where the Post provided a platform for a radical feminist to broadcast to the world a Nazi-like hatred for men.
Mr. Reeves, in your book and in a YouTube video2 you mentioned that many people warned you about writing a book about men and boys because doing so would take attention away from women and girls.
Thank you for having the courage to go ahead and write that book – and your Post article – anyway.
You have my utmost respect and admiration.
Sincerely,
Stephen Bond
Publisher of "Letters to The Washington Post" Substack
This observation was confirmed by a February 2023 report by The Coalition to End Domestic Violence that described a 10-Year Suppression of the Truth on Domestic Violence by the Washington Post.
“A number of people warned me about writing a book about boys and men because it’s such a fraught subject, particularly in politics right now, and because so many people were afraid that merely drawing attention to the problems of boys and men was implying somehow less effort being paid to girls and women; that it’s framed as zero-sum. And it’s sort of a ‘Who’s side are you on?’ question and you have to be on one side or the other, rather than being on the side of human flourishing.” – Male inequality, explained by an expert