A Letter to Post Columnist Karen Attiah About Her “Tragedy and promise of #BringBackOurGirls” Article

Dear Ms. Attiah,

I have little doubt that you’re aware of my efforts to get the Post to recognize its imbalanced coverage of gender. I’ve been writing letters to Post columnists since 2018, after the Post published it’s Why can't we hate men? article.

I have previously sent open letters to you about your articles on female bodybuilders and men killing women’s plants. I have also cc’d you and other Post “gender offenders” to announce new letters I’ve posted to my Letters to The Washington Post Substack.

I respectfully ask that you take the time to read this letter about your recent column, The tragedy and promise of #BringBackOurGirls, and to thoughtfully consider what I say here.

Although this recent article isn’t as overtly misandrist as your prior ones, its tale of the Nigerian girls kidnapped by the Boko Haram terrorist group is gender biased because it completely ignores the even worse tragedy that befell Nigerian boys only months before.

There was international condemnation and a global “Bring Back Our Girls” campaign started when more than 200 girls were kidnapped in April 2014. Even First Lady Michelle Obama was photographed holding a “#BringBackOurGirls” sign.

But there was scarcely a trickle of media attention when Boko Haram killed hundreds of boys — many burned alive — only a few months before. Please view this video where men’s rights activist Karen Straughan discusses the hypocrisy and double-standard about how the media covered these two terrible tragedies.

But how the media ignored the murder of these boys by Boko Haram is just one example of how the mainstream media reports on the injury or death of men and boys versus the way that they report on that of women and girls.

When men are injured or killed, they are often referred to as “workers”, “soldiers” or even “people”. When women are injured or killed, they are usually referred to as “female” or “women”, and their gender becomes central to the story.

Just one example of this phenomenon from an endless supply of them is a 2022 CNN article, 40 killed, dozens trapped by explosion in Turkey coal mine. In response I posted an article that asked What’s Wrong With This CNN Article?

The answer is that the article refused to state the obvious: the people trapped and killed were all men. The article never even used the word “men”.

The refusal of the media to recognize male death and suffering in its reporting is a main example something 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.” [From a video clip of anti-feminist Janice Fiamengo talking about the empathy gap]

The empathy gap is why thousands of articles just like yours focus only on women, completely oblivious to men’s far greater suffering, despite easily obtainable facts.

Males:

· live six years less than women

· suffer 94% of workplace deaths

· are 80% of the homeless

· are 80% of deaths by suicide

· are 76% of homicide victims

· are more likely than women to be charged with crimes, receive 63% longer sentences on average, while women are twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted [from Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases]

· form the only group who, via the Forced Labour Convention of 1930, is still subject to a type of slavery (aka “military conscription” — the law exempts “able-bodied males between ages 18 and 45 from the ban on slavery and forced labor”)

· finally, males are at least 50% of the victims of domestic violence (just ask Johnny Depp or golfer Tiger Woods, or comedian Christopher Titus, or model Lewis Burton, or baseball player Chuck Findley, or John Bobbitt) and yet are nearly 100% ineligible from receiving assistance from taxpayer-funded DV shelters. If you don’t believe that women perpetuate at least 50% of DV, please read this law review article (PDF), written by a woman.

Despite these well-documented male disadvantages, feminists have convinced many that men instead have “male privilege”. If you believe that men are privileged, please view this video.

But the gender empathy gap is even more insidious and widespread than just these undeniable facts, and this gap has always been, quite literally, right in front of us. As the late men’s rights activist Marc Angelucci once wrote,

“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.” [from Gender Bias Toward Males Frequently Gets Overlooked Daily Bruin Online, 2/20/01]

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Ms. Attiah, before you write another gender biased column that decries the mistreatment of girls or women, may I politely suggest that you also consider the often worse mistreatment of boys and men? You might first want to read the book The Myth of Male Power to open your eyes to the disadvantages of males in our culture.

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?

Who knew that some fifty years later feminists would begin a process that would turn these men from noble heroes into “patriarchal oppressors of women”?

Sincerely,

Stephen Bond

Publisher of "Letters to The Washington Post" Substack