Men notoriously have higher suicide rates than women. At least on the surface, this is a puzzle for feminism. If we really live in a patriarchy, if men really treat women so badly, why is it we men who are so much more likely to kill ourselves? One feminist response is to remind us that, “Patriarchy is bad for men, too.” As
I think this argument is pretty weak. I agree that it's evidence against a simple "raise up men, cast down women" theory of patriarchy, which would probably guess that women commit suicide more. But if the theory of patriarchy is something like "extremize men, mediocritize women", then you should see more male extreme success and more male extreme failure (including suicide).
It's also not obvious that this is the right metric; as commented elsewhere, the 'gender paradox of suicide' is that women attempt suicide about 50% more then men do, and men complete suicide about 100% more then women do. (Suicide attempts are about 20x as common as suicide completions.)
One thing you seem not to be aware of is that women *attempt* suicide at a greater rate than men, but the rate at which they actually succeed (unfortunate wording) is low enough that the statistics reverse when only looking at attempts that actually lead to deaths. It's also known that the genders tend to choose different methods, with men being more likely to chose methods that lead to death more quickly.
But it's hard to tell whether women are sabotaging their suicide attempts because they (perhaps subconsciously) don't really want to die, or if they simply choose different methods because of some other cultural factor (e.g. being less familiar with lethal items such as tools and weapons).
In any case, this changes how the evidence looks with regards to patriarchy and feminism.
You said: "In any case, this changes how the evidence looks with regards to patriarchy and feminism."
Not really: 93% of federal inmates are males and 80% of homicide victims are also males.
Sending you to prison or killing you (what this patriarchal society does to males) is not, precisely, the definition of "treating you well"
On the other hand, note that "suicide attemps" on the statistic you mentioned are "reported suicide attemps". The "reported" part adds possible explanations to the fact (ie males could tend to under-report "failure")
I was under the impression that religiosity decreases the suicide rate, although there can be religious traditions where suicide is considered "honorable" and so you'd expect not to get the same benefit there.
I think this is a perfect example of "when two people are fighting - both thinking the other side is taking advantage of them - it is possible they are both half right, and a third unmentioned party is taking advantage of them both." The "patriarchy", conceived as "all men", doesn't makes sense, as you point out.
But if instead of "the patriarchy" you conceive of "the powerful people (regardless of their gender) in your society" then it does become pretty obvious that a power imbalance (tautologically perhaps!) in their favor could be bad for both women and men, and also that having men and women fight each other over who is responsible for power imbalances or suicide rates also confers them even more power, as they are quite frequently called upon as a neutral party to arbitrate or rectify this argument/imbalance.
why though? Using it would just cause people to fight over "well it's not all women!" or "the matriarchy is bad for some women too!" or the other thousand things that people fight about when they want to fight over identity. Just say "power base" or "the powerful" and move on to substantive topics.
Women are happier and more connected people than men, who feel more duty to their families and are therefore less likely to kill themselves. Men are disaffected, prideful, rage full, make things into competition which are not competition and feel much lower amounts of empathy for other people.
It would be better if this was due to patriarchy rather than testosterone poisoning, because then we could fix it.
One might look closer at the actual cases of suicide and what triggers them. In highly patriarchal societies -- where women are often made to marry against their will, have little ability to divorce, control little or no personal property, and have few legal protections from abuse -- not only is female suicide much higher than elsewhere, but it tends to be higher among women at the age of first marriage and is commonly triggered by domestic abuse. In Afghanistan, it borrows from the symbolism of political struggle and is usually committed by self-burning.
If one looks at suicide due to domestic conflict in the West, the dominant pattern is not women killing themselves over abuse, but men killing themselves over breakup, separation, and divorce. (Of course, women killing themselves over abuse still happens, I'm talking about relative frequencies. Compare US to New Guinea, Afghanistan, rural Iran, or mid-20th-century Taiwan.)
Men kill themselves over downward mobility (lost jobs, social disgrace) everywhere, and I'm not sure there's a blanket difference depending on overall patriarchy.
Another commenter mentions that women commit nonfatal attempts far more often, such that the overall volume of self-harm/suicidal behavior is greater among them even in the US. True, and probably due to greater propensity of women to handle problems through expressions of distress and help-seeking behavior (compare spirit possession in tribal societies, also eating disorders and gender dysphoria in modern ones). But my impression is that the lethality of female suicide is greater in patriarchal societies. In rural China, for instance, suicide attempts by aggrieved wives are likely to result in further alienation and abuse. And in Highland New Guinea, the male kindred might just passively watch a woman hang herself without attempting to intervene, as they would with a man.
I guess I'm a bit confused about what point you are trying to make. That some feminist activists are wrong about some things? Sure, of course that's true.
Indeed, one can even more directly contradict the suggestion that somehow women are much worse off than men by combining the clear data on the fact that women have longer lifespans with the data showing men and women have about the same average levels of happiness. I mean, at the end of the day, things like money, jobs etc... are just means to the end of living happy years and those results together suggest that women get more lifetime utils.
But, that's also attacking a bit of a strawman. Yes, the gender war version of feminism (let's compare the genders and see who has it worse) is wrong and bad (we should fix unfairness/harms generally regardless of how has it worse). But, the sophisticated academic feminists and women's studies professors would agree with that claim (and define feminism as being against gendered stereotypes generally). I agree that there is an unfortunate willingness to engage in a kind of motte-bailey thing on this issue (though I also understand why...if you want to get allies on issues like reproductive rights you don't want to be pointing out how sexist they are as well)) but that needs to be addressed directly.
Maybe the bigger issue this brings up is how to fix research/publication bias in the social sciences.
It seems like any analysis of suicide ratios should begin with suicide methods, since they have wildly different success rates. Maybe poor Indian women are jumping off tall buildings because they don't have access to the pills that American women falsely assume will work?
I recommend looking into suicide attempts rather than rates. Initial indications from quick Google searches are that women attempt suicide at 1.5 - 3x that of men. Men are more likely than women to use a firearm which explains the negative/inverse relationship of attempts (lower among men) to deaths (higher among men).
Suicide attempts might be both under and over-counted for both genders so I'm not suggesting this is hard data, but I'm not sure patriarchy is the (or even a) factor here. It would not be the first rock I'd look under, anyway.
"Suicide appears to be a male phenomenon, as death rates from suicide are four-to-five times higher for men than for women across the European Union [3].
For suicide attempts, for which the rate is estimated to be 20 times higher than that of suicides [4], the gender gap is less pronounced, with females demonstrating a disproportionately higher rate of suicide attempts compared to males"
It could be argued that the sign of "patriarchal oppression" is a suicide attempt not whether you are successful or not.
Males have a higher rate of success at suicide attempts not because they suffer more in this society but just because they are better at killing (themselves or others).
In any case the fact that patriarchal societies are not kind to males can be found in the incarceration ratio (93% of federal inmates are male). Also, almost 80% of homicide victims are men.
Patriarchy seems to be extremely worse for males after all.
"In any case the fact that patriarchal societies are not kind to males can be found in the incarceration ratio (93% of federal inmates are male). Also, almost 80% of homicide victims are men.
Patriarchy seems to be extremely worse for males after all."
Are you comparing the allegedly patriarchal society to an actually existing society or an imagined, notional one?
I am questioning the idea that allegedly patriarchal western societies favour males over females based on the fact that for this to be true, in an imagined notional NON patriarchal society, the male / female incarceration ratio or the male / female homicide victims ratio, should be even higher than the ratios observed in the "favoring males western patriarchal societies". And there is little room for this ratios to be higher.
Not only do women have far lower suicide rates than men, but blacks have about one-third the suicide rates of whites. Hispanics also have low suicide rates. Could we hypothesize that suicide is a function of expected outcomes vs. actual outcomes? It's likely that the son of a millionaire is at more risk of suicide than the son of a laborer. (I know we have black and hispanic millionaires and white laborers, but consider averages here.) Consider that Marlon Brando, Gregory Peck, Marie Osmond, Paul Newman, Willie Nelson, Gloria Vanderbilt, Burt Bacharach, Carroll O Conner, James Arness, Art Linkletter, Charles Boyer, Ray Milland, and Robert Taylor all lost a child to suicide.
Or, you could use the even simpler explanation, which is that people who don't have intimate connections with other people commit suicide. Women have more intimate connections with other people.
If you want to complicate it further, then consider that suicide is often violent, and women are typically less violent.
I confess, I'm not well-acquainted with Bayesian methodology, but I have a response to the following on behalf of the feminist:
"From a Bayesian point of view, this is a baffling response. If women had higher suicide rates that men, feminists would undeniably take this fact as evidence in favor of feminism. Therefore, as a matter of basic probability theory, the opposite pattern must be evidence against. Maybe not strong evidence against feminism, but the directionality is clear-cut."
I think you're absolutely right that feminists would take the higher suicide rate of women as "evidence of feminism" (read: as evidence that society is more unfair to women than it is to men), but I wonder if it follows from that that the opposite pattern must be evidence against? Consider:
ECONOMIST: People react to incentives: that's why, when you increase the price of something, demand falls.
SKEPTIC: But aren't there goods where, when you increase their price, demand doesn't fall, but sometimes even increases?
ECONOMIST: Sure, but in that case consumers are just responding to different incentives.
You could, if you want, say that this economist's story is unfalsifiable, and I think that's right, but I don't think it's a bad thing. Positing that people respond to incentives is a theoretical commitment without which they can't even interpret the world. Maybe the same is true of feminism? (Though in that case, feminism becomes unfalsifiable, making the claim that society is unfair to women not only purely a matter of interpretation, but also compatible with the claim that it's impossible for society to not be unfair to women. *I* don't think that's a salutary outcome for a theory like feminism, but if you're a feminist, maybe thinking that it's literally impossible for society to be unfair to women keeps you in a job?)
I think this argument is pretty weak. I agree that it's evidence against a simple "raise up men, cast down women" theory of patriarchy, which would probably guess that women commit suicide more. But if the theory of patriarchy is something like "extremize men, mediocritize women", then you should see more male extreme success and more male extreme failure (including suicide).
It's also not obvious that this is the right metric; as commented elsewhere, the 'gender paradox of suicide' is that women attempt suicide about 50% more then men do, and men complete suicide about 100% more then women do. (Suicide attempts are about 20x as common as suicide completions.)
| 2. Societies with more traditional gender roles will have lower male/female suicide ratios.
Isn't it supposed to say 'higher' male/female suicide ratios? As in, more male suicide?
One thing you seem not to be aware of is that women *attempt* suicide at a greater rate than men, but the rate at which they actually succeed (unfortunate wording) is low enough that the statistics reverse when only looking at attempts that actually lead to deaths. It's also known that the genders tend to choose different methods, with men being more likely to chose methods that lead to death more quickly.
But it's hard to tell whether women are sabotaging their suicide attempts because they (perhaps subconsciously) don't really want to die, or if they simply choose different methods because of some other cultural factor (e.g. being less familiar with lethal items such as tools and weapons).
In any case, this changes how the evidence looks with regards to patriarchy and feminism.
You said: "In any case, this changes how the evidence looks with regards to patriarchy and feminism."
Not really: 93% of federal inmates are males and 80% of homicide victims are also males.
Sending you to prison or killing you (what this patriarchal society does to males) is not, precisely, the definition of "treating you well"
On the other hand, note that "suicide attemps" on the statistic you mentioned are "reported suicide attemps". The "reported" part adds possible explanations to the fact (ie males could tend to under-report "failure")
Also 95% of the people shot to death by the police in 2021 were males.
What percentage of those were unarmed, and why do men feel the need to arm themselves?
Attempts are meaningless. The majority who “attempt” suicide (male AND female, both do this) have no intention of succeeding.
Most of the comments here seem to be fixated on the idea that method of suicide explains the gap, which does'nt seem to be true(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165032711005179)
(https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-017-1398-8#Sec23)
Suicide prevention programs help females more than males in adoloscents
(https://archive.is/3MnuZ),
Regarding therapy(https://thelatch.com.au/men-mental-health-statistics-australia),
I was under the impression that religiosity decreases the suicide rate, although there can be religious traditions where suicide is considered "honorable" and so you'd expect not to get the same benefit there.
I think this is a perfect example of "when two people are fighting - both thinking the other side is taking advantage of them - it is possible they are both half right, and a third unmentioned party is taking advantage of them both." The "patriarchy", conceived as "all men", doesn't makes sense, as you point out.
But if instead of "the patriarchy" you conceive of "the powerful people (regardless of their gender) in your society" then it does become pretty obvious that a power imbalance (tautologically perhaps!) in their favor could be bad for both women and men, and also that having men and women fight each other over who is responsible for power imbalances or suicide rates also confers them even more power, as they are quite frequently called upon as a neutral party to arbitrate or rectify this argument/imbalance.
So we could use another name for the power base in society. The "matriarchy", say?
why though? Using it would just cause people to fight over "well it's not all women!" or "the matriarchy is bad for some women too!" or the other thousand things that people fight about when they want to fight over identity. Just say "power base" or "the powerful" and move on to substantive topics.
Women are happier and more connected people than men, who feel more duty to their families and are therefore less likely to kill themselves. Men are disaffected, prideful, rage full, make things into competition which are not competition and feel much lower amounts of empathy for other people.
It would be better if this was due to patriarchy rather than testosterone poisoning, because then we could fix it.
One might look closer at the actual cases of suicide and what triggers them. In highly patriarchal societies -- where women are often made to marry against their will, have little ability to divorce, control little or no personal property, and have few legal protections from abuse -- not only is female suicide much higher than elsewhere, but it tends to be higher among women at the age of first marriage and is commonly triggered by domestic abuse. In Afghanistan, it borrows from the symbolism of political struggle and is usually committed by self-burning.
If one looks at suicide due to domestic conflict in the West, the dominant pattern is not women killing themselves over abuse, but men killing themselves over breakup, separation, and divorce. (Of course, women killing themselves over abuse still happens, I'm talking about relative frequencies. Compare US to New Guinea, Afghanistan, rural Iran, or mid-20th-century Taiwan.)
Men kill themselves over downward mobility (lost jobs, social disgrace) everywhere, and I'm not sure there's a blanket difference depending on overall patriarchy.
Another commenter mentions that women commit nonfatal attempts far more often, such that the overall volume of self-harm/suicidal behavior is greater among them even in the US. True, and probably due to greater propensity of women to handle problems through expressions of distress and help-seeking behavior (compare spirit possession in tribal societies, also eating disorders and gender dysphoria in modern ones). But my impression is that the lethality of female suicide is greater in patriarchal societies. In rural China, for instance, suicide attempts by aggrieved wives are likely to result in further alienation and abuse. And in Highland New Guinea, the male kindred might just passively watch a woman hang herself without attempting to intervene, as they would with a man.
I guess I'm a bit confused about what point you are trying to make. That some feminist activists are wrong about some things? Sure, of course that's true.
Indeed, one can even more directly contradict the suggestion that somehow women are much worse off than men by combining the clear data on the fact that women have longer lifespans with the data showing men and women have about the same average levels of happiness. I mean, at the end of the day, things like money, jobs etc... are just means to the end of living happy years and those results together suggest that women get more lifetime utils.
But, that's also attacking a bit of a strawman. Yes, the gender war version of feminism (let's compare the genders and see who has it worse) is wrong and bad (we should fix unfairness/harms generally regardless of how has it worse). But, the sophisticated academic feminists and women's studies professors would agree with that claim (and define feminism as being against gendered stereotypes generally). I agree that there is an unfortunate willingness to engage in a kind of motte-bailey thing on this issue (though I also understand why...if you want to get allies on issues like reproductive rights you don't want to be pointing out how sexist they are as well)) but that needs to be addressed directly.
Maybe the bigger issue this brings up is how to fix research/publication bias in the social sciences.
It seems like any analysis of suicide ratios should begin with suicide methods, since they have wildly different success rates. Maybe poor Indian women are jumping off tall buildings because they don't have access to the pills that American women falsely assume will work?
Laura Bates is playing the classic “oh, but feminism is concerned with men's issues too; the patriarchy hurts us all!” card there:
https://qoto.org/@tripu/106796492140032253
I recommend looking into suicide attempts rather than rates. Initial indications from quick Google searches are that women attempt suicide at 1.5 - 3x that of men. Men are more likely than women to use a firearm which explains the negative/inverse relationship of attempts (lower among men) to deaths (higher among men).
Suicide attempts might be both under and over-counted for both genders so I'm not suggesting this is hard data, but I'm not sure patriarchy is the (or even a) factor here. It would not be the first rock I'd look under, anyway.
"Suicide appears to be a male phenomenon, as death rates from suicide are four-to-five times higher for men than for women across the European Union [3].
For suicide attempts, for which the rate is estimated to be 20 times higher than that of suicides [4], the gender gap is less pronounced, with females demonstrating a disproportionately higher rate of suicide attempts compared to males"
https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-017-1398-8
It could be argued that the sign of "patriarchal oppression" is a suicide attempt not whether you are successful or not.
Males have a higher rate of success at suicide attempts not because they suffer more in this society but just because they are better at killing (themselves or others).
In any case the fact that patriarchal societies are not kind to males can be found in the incarceration ratio (93% of federal inmates are male). Also, almost 80% of homicide victims are men.
Patriarchy seems to be extremely worse for males after all.
"In any case the fact that patriarchal societies are not kind to males can be found in the incarceration ratio (93% of federal inmates are male). Also, almost 80% of homicide victims are men.
Patriarchy seems to be extremely worse for males after all."
Are you comparing the allegedly patriarchal society to an actually existing society or an imagined, notional one?
I am questioning the idea that allegedly patriarchal western societies favour males over females based on the fact that for this to be true, in an imagined notional NON patriarchal society, the male / female incarceration ratio or the male / female homicide victims ratio, should be even higher than the ratios observed in the "favoring males western patriarchal societies". And there is little room for this ratios to be higher.
Not only do women have far lower suicide rates than men, but blacks have about one-third the suicide rates of whites. Hispanics also have low suicide rates. Could we hypothesize that suicide is a function of expected outcomes vs. actual outcomes? It's likely that the son of a millionaire is at more risk of suicide than the son of a laborer. (I know we have black and hispanic millionaires and white laborers, but consider averages here.) Consider that Marlon Brando, Gregory Peck, Marie Osmond, Paul Newman, Willie Nelson, Gloria Vanderbilt, Burt Bacharach, Carroll O Conner, James Arness, Art Linkletter, Charles Boyer, Ray Milland, and Robert Taylor all lost a child to suicide.
Or, you could use the even simpler explanation, which is that people who don't have intimate connections with other people commit suicide. Women have more intimate connections with other people.
If you want to complicate it further, then consider that suicide is often violent, and women are typically less violent.
I confess, I'm not well-acquainted with Bayesian methodology, but I have a response to the following on behalf of the feminist:
"From a Bayesian point of view, this is a baffling response. If women had higher suicide rates that men, feminists would undeniably take this fact as evidence in favor of feminism. Therefore, as a matter of basic probability theory, the opposite pattern must be evidence against. Maybe not strong evidence against feminism, but the directionality is clear-cut."
I think you're absolutely right that feminists would take the higher suicide rate of women as "evidence of feminism" (read: as evidence that society is more unfair to women than it is to men), but I wonder if it follows from that that the opposite pattern must be evidence against? Consider:
ECONOMIST: People react to incentives: that's why, when you increase the price of something, demand falls.
SKEPTIC: But aren't there goods where, when you increase their price, demand doesn't fall, but sometimes even increases?
ECONOMIST: Sure, but in that case consumers are just responding to different incentives.
You could, if you want, say that this economist's story is unfalsifiable, and I think that's right, but I don't think it's a bad thing. Positing that people respond to incentives is a theoretical commitment without which they can't even interpret the world. Maybe the same is true of feminism? (Though in that case, feminism becomes unfalsifiable, making the claim that society is unfair to women not only purely a matter of interpretation, but also compatible with the claim that it's impossible for society to not be unfair to women. *I* don't think that's a salutary outcome for a theory like feminism, but if you're a feminist, maybe thinking that it's literally impossible for society to be unfair to women keeps you in a job?)