Opinion Polls: Men Need Not Apply

When responsible polling organizations like The New York Times supposedly poll both sexes' points of view, they, in fact, poll women at more than a 2-to-1 ratio to men. Why? Here’s The New York Times’ own explanation: “So that there would be enough women interviewed to provide statistically reliable comparisons among various subgroups of women."[1]

What did The New York Times just do? They rationalized their discrimination by telling us how they discriminate. They avoided the issue of subgroups of men. As if men, well, men need not apply.

The result? The New York Times devoted eleven paragraphs to the views of black women. Not one word on the views of black men.[2]  Racist? Yes. Sexist? Even more so. African-Americans were not undersampled in proportion to the population. Men were.

When Roper conducted a study to discover women’s and men’s perspectives on the other, they too oversampled women – this time by a ratio of 3 to 1.[3] Yet, over 90% of these women were in favor of marriage. Presumably to men. The headlines, though, told a different story: “Survey Has Message for Men: Shape Up, You Oversexed Pigs”[4] and “Women: More Men Are Pigs.”[5]

The articles following the headlines not only focus almost exclusively on women’s perspectives, but on these types of women’s perspectives: “Most men are mean, manipulative, oversexed, self-centered, and lazy” and women are “fed up.”[6] Some men silently wonder, “Exactly what am I being married for?” 

Five Ways of Ignoring What Men Do Say

What’s happening here? Actually, five methods are used to ignore what men might say if we asked, or what they do say when we ask. First, the undersampling of men leads to our having data on men, feelings on women. Second, using only women’s perspectives to create the headlines. (Men’s perspectives were not turned into headlines such as “Sex Up, You Overweight Pigs.”) Third, funding. The poll was sponsored by Virginia Slims. Comparable polls are not sponsored by Marlboro. Fourth, attitude. If Marlboro had paid, they would never encourage headlines saying “Message for Women: Shut Up, You Gold-Digging Cows”.....

Fifth, the press release. When men are polled, the most negative perspectives on men are also conveyed in the press release. When Gallup did a worldwide poll in 1996 to discover the characteristics associated with each sex, the headline in Gallup’s own press release read “Women Seen as Affectionate; Men as Aggressive.”[7] Gallup took the most positive findings about women and the most negative findings about men and made those the headline of their press release. Judge for yourself....

The actual findings showed the women were seen as more emotional, talkative, patient and affectionate. Isn’t “affectionate” the best? The men were seen as more courageous, ambitious and aggressive. Isn’t “aggressive” the worst? Gallup’s own press release read: “Women Seen as Affectionate; Men as Aggressive.”

The result of these five steps is that when feminist perspectives do not define our view of relationships, women’s perspectives do. And it’s not just women’s perspectives, but the angriest of women’s perspectives.

From these source we receive the news....

News

The covers of news magazines are the only news medium that puts all our focus on one fixed visual image. Unlike the front page of a newspaper, there aren’t thousands of words and a dozen headlines competing for our attention.

See if you notice a bias common to these four fixed images on the covers of Time and Newsweek[8]:

When Time apologized for the darkened photo of OJ Simpson it acknowledged the appearance of racism. When Newsweek was criticized for the beautifying of the mother no one saw the sexism. But nothing is common to all four photos other than the sexism: that is, only a man was doctored to make him look less appealing and therefore less sympathetic; only a woman was doctored to make her look more appealing and therefore more sympathetic. Neither man’s photo was doctored to make him look more appealing.

The real life result of this blindness? Here’s a consciousness-raiser. Test yourself. For forty years, the US Public Health Service’s Tuskegee Syphilis Study did not tell 399 black men that they had syphilis.[9] (When syphilis is not treated in its early stages, it eats away at bones, the liver, the heart and the brain, and often leads to paralysis, deafness and blindness.) These 399 black men were denied penicillin and other treatment so the government could experiment with them. It was not until newspapers uncovered the crime that the government stopped the experiment. Years later President Clinton apologized for the racism.[10] What’s your take – was Clinton’s apology miss something?

President Clinton failed to see the sexism: disposing of 399 black men is blatantly racist and blatantly sexist. When we see only the racism we are blind to the African-American man’s double jeopardy. Had racism been the only issue, African-American women would also have been subjected to the Tuskegee experiment. The sexism is apparent in the fact that not a single African American woman was. But the deeper sexism is our blindness to it. And the deeper issue is that we haven’t been using the lessons we learned from racism to spot dehumanization.

Our blindness to the way we make women look more sympathetic and men less sympathetic allows the media to also be blind to the way it gives women special advantages even as they highlight women’s victimhood.[11] For example, as I write this, Newsweek magazine uses the almost naked appearance of Nicole Kidman in a Broadway play to catapult her to the front cover of Newsweek.[12] Rather than see this as an unfair advantage of female beauty power, she is portrayed as a victim fighting for her privacy. Excuse me. Would we portray a man who strips on Broadway as fighting for his privacy?! Similarly, instead of saying her career has taken off since her marriage to Tom Cruise, creating for her an advantage not available to any man, she is portrayed as a victim overcoming the barrier that her Mrs. Tom Cruise status has been to her becoming a star on her own.

When we offer our daughters both sex and beauty power and the compassion accorded a victim, it just encourages our daughters to use Monica Lewinsky-type power rather than Mother Theresa or Margaret Thatcher-type power. Why spend a lifetime earning income when you can seduce a man at age 22 and earn a lifetime’s worth of income from the spin-off of the seduction?

Newspapers create these biases more with words, especially front-page, above-the-fold headlines. In the 1994 election, when men were the disenfranchised voters, they were condemned as “Angry White Men.” In the 1996 election, when women were the disenfranchised voters, they were acknowledged as “Worried Women” or Concerned Women.

The impact of labeling a woman concerned and a man angry? When a woman is worried or concerned, it catalyzes a man’s desire to be a problem solver, a savior, her ally. When a man is seen as angry, it stimulates a woman’s fear, her desire to protect herself against him, to become his enemy. Men want to listen to a worried woman; no one wants to listen to an angry man. Notice that the men were not labeled angry before they spoke (with their vote), but as soon as they did they were labeled so we could ignore them, and return to our focus on worried and concerned women.

This is what makes men afraid of speaking up: men feel no one can hear what men do say.

The labeling bias also reveals itself in the double standard of our treatment of domestic violence. When domestic violence occurs against men, it is often as a joke. Here is a headline from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.[14]

When a colleague confronted the editor, she responded, “It was supposed to be an upbeat story.”[15] Excuse me. Have you ever seen an “upbeat story” about domestic violence against women? Editor, bite your lip.