>Although men die by suicide at a higher rate, women have a higher rate of attempting suicide.16 This pattern is evident among youth and persists over the lifespan.
Why is this? I've read before that modes of suicide tend to be gendered -- ie, gunshots to the head for men and overdoses for women. Is this the entire story? Are women more likely, consciously or unconsciously, to be social signaling for support than men when they attempt suicide?
I lost my brother to suicide three years ago. I began attending counseling this year after a protracted period of personal turmoil in its aftermath, and it's a topic I spend a lot of thought on. When I was younger and less psychologically moored I thought of suicide as the ultimate lever I could wield over my own fate. Not so much these days, though.
This is a complex issue. There are a few things to keep in mind when thinking about suicide attempts.
The first thing is that the paper cited in this article to back up this claim actually does not say that females have a higher rate of attempting suicide, but rather that they have a higher rate of deliberate self-harm. These two things are not equivalent.
The second factor to consider is the availability and accuracy of self-harm or suicide attempt statistics. Males are far less likely to seek professional help, as noted in the article, so it stands to reason that far more male suicide attempts and actions of deliberate self harm go unreported, even if this data is gathered independently, as males are in general less likely to share such things.
Suicide attempts are often unsuccessful. It's harder to complete than is the general belief. Success rates are something like 5%. If we were to assume that the base incidence rate of suicide attempts for males and females was the same, we would still expect more men to die by suicide because of the related statistics about seeking help/treatment. I'm not saying that the base levels are the same, I'm just giving a hypothetical to show how the variables interact.
This is not a simple picture. The personal and cultural stigma around suicide makes things like this very difficult to untangle.
I went though my desk drawers, etc. I found some pills, maybe decongestants, and decided that would probably not kill me. I found an exacto knife in my art supplies and decided to cut my wrist with it. I failed to hit a major artery. There was very little blood.
In contrast, I believe my brother's room had a gun, a bow and an encyclopedia of true crime. Had he attempted suicide while locked in his room, there would have been dramatically greater access to effective means and useful information for actually ending up dead.
I will suggest that women generally have less access to effective means, generally have less exposure to subjects relevant to figuring out how to end a life, and that women are typically subjected to a greater amount of social control that limits their ability to act.
Men are more likely to be infantrymen, police officers, hunt as a hobby, etc. Thus, they are just more likely to know how to kill something.
Additionally, successful suicides occur when you are alone. Men seem to have more opportunities to actually be alone, an observation I made years ago on a different forum about a different subject.
Women typically make less money than men, so they are less likely to be able to afford a place of their own. They tend to have roommates. Following a divorce, women are more likely to get custody of the children. So, post divorce, men are more likely to be living alone, women are more likely to be living with kids.
Etc.
If you attempt suicide with other people at home, you need to keep it a secret. If they find out, they will stop you. Simply having other people around is a deterrent to succeeding. It is hard to very quietly, secretly off yourself.
So, I think one factor is that women are less likely to have sufficient privacy, for lack of a better word, to succeed.
I don't generally like evolutionary "just so stories", but men are the more expendable sex, when you get down to it. Historically, only half of men ever passed their genes on, whereas nearly all women did. It makes sense that men should tend to be shorter-lived, less squeamish, more violent (to men, women and themselves), and more willing to take life-threatening risks - all of which the homicide, suicide and accident rates bear out, worldwide. If you consider the difference between sexes for the homicide rate, it's surprising the female suicide rate is as much as half of men's.
> men are the more expendable sex, when you get down to it
This is far from as clear as people think it is. Foragers - as we were for the vast majority of our evolutionary history as humans - don't have lots of kids. They usually keep on the move, and that means carrying children, until they are maybe 4 years old. Having a life-mate to help you carry a four year old probably helps a lot.
It remains that humans are the most monogamous animals alive, by a mile. Other pair-bonding animals, like pigeons, cheat a ton compared to humans. When you look at pair-bonding animals, it's often those where the males are crucial to the offspring's survival, and where raising offspring demands a lot of resources from the parents. Human children are unable to survive on their own until the age of ten, at the most optimistic. So both the evolutionary story and the observed facts in forager societies (and our own too, in many ways) suggest that fathers matter a lot.
> Historically, only half of men ever passed their genes on
If I recall that paper correctly, of the men living at a certain point in time, only half have descendants today, whereas almost all the women have. This difference, over thousands of years, may have arisen from very small differences adding up over the generations for all we know.
This seems to be American centric, though. Even when the means (eg hanging and poison mentioned earlier) are readily available to both sexes there is still a sexed difference.
The means are readily available, and the UK has seen an increase in women chosing more violent means, but it seems that women tend to chose less violent methods.
The office for national statistics has great data. It's particularly useful because they define what they mean.
I don't know why you would think that poison or hanging are equally available to both genders. In the aggregate, there are significant differences in not only career choices but hobby choices and other aspects of lifestyle. It in no way surprises me this impacts aggregate statistics on methodology.
I posit that many supposed gender differences are rooted in the different life experiences of the sexes:
I'm assuming I don't know, which is the truth. I'm also assuming none of y'all do either without building on this study. Assumptions kill in these cases.
"The UK suicide rate was 10.8 deaths per 100,000 population in 2014. The male suicide rate was more than 3 times higher than the female rate, with 16.8 male deaths per 100,000 compared with 5.2 female deaths"
These statistics do not show attempt rate. It does show a gendered difference of poisoning (19% male vs 37% female) and hanging (55% male vs 44% female).
While I don't have a link, it is often reported that women are more likely to use poison/overdose for suicide attempts in the U.S. - it is a reasonable to assume it is the same case in the UK.
Chosen method is probably important, and in the UK we're seeing more women die by suicide because they're choosing more violent methods.
There's some other stuff going on too.
Possibly women have better social support networks; they're possibly better than men at asking for help and talking about the problems they're having. (This is one reason people keep banging on about getting men to talk).
Possibly women find it easier to get psychiatric help. Men tend to see doctors less often, and tend not to talk about some subjects when they're there. Women see doctors more often, and talk about emotions more readily.
Men are more vulnerable to some "triggers" -- relationship breakdown (partly because they sometimes lose contact with children and for the social network stuff mentioned above) or loss of job.
I think especially with the types of methods men vs. women use, a lot of men are much more committed to their actions when they choose suicide. By hanging oneself (something that probably isn't any more difficult for one gender or the other), you basically "guarantee" your own death. Making the decision to overdose on something gives you a chance to stop earlier and gives others more time to step in. I think this is an unconscious factor based on the causes that the decision stems from -- for example, it seems that women with bipolar disorder get more depressive episodes. Since they're more likely to try suicide during these episodes, that would explain the increased rate. Yet because a higher ratio of the men committing suicide are not suffering from bipolar disorder, it might mean that they've had depression for a larger period of time (making them take a firmer decision on how to end their life).
To survive an attempted gun suicide is such an unspeakably, crippling and horrendous thing, it's almost unbearable to contemplate. It is certainly not something that could easily be hidden.
No, it's really not. It's like having a "hunting accident" with someone you don't like. Most guns get cleaned after use. That's a lot of instances of guns being cleaned, maybe hundreds or thousands of times over the life of the gun. People say they were "taking it apart to clean it" when they're being careless or plain dumb. If it was actually a malfunction or easy to make accident then it would be widely known that some guns are more or less user friendly (idiot proof) than others. While I don't doubt some people have genuine accidents they're fewer and farer between than carelessness disguised as an accident.
I have experience with suicidal women (no, I do not attract a certain type): it is definitely attention-seeking behavior. Not in the way like dressing provocatively in the wrong contexts can be attention seeking (think clubbing outfits to go grocery shopping) but attention seeking nonetheless.
Yes, it's a data point of a handful, but I am thoroughly convinced that women are generally way too self protective to actually commit suicide. Now if a woman does actually do it.... She was seriously gone.
I've never known a suicidal man, does not mean they don't exist, just that they don't talk about it.
> Are women more likely, consciously or unconsciously, to be social signaling for support than men when they attempt suicide?
No they are not. You answered your own question. Women are more likely to use non-violent methods, men are more likely to use violent methods. Violent methods are more likely to kill the victim, therefore more men die by suicide as a percentage overall.
Now your question becomes. Why those methods? And the answer I believe is not social signalling. Or at least it is not the main factor. I believe the answer is to do with aggression (being higher in men than women due to testosterone) and the unwillingness to cause disfigurement (because of social reasons). Source, I read a scientific book on it.
Male suicides are up in the US, too. The US has about 40,000 suicides a year. "Suicide is concentrated among those whom our society values least."[1]. The big jump is among white, middle-aged men and women.
"The states with the highest suicide rates tend to be clustered in the South and the Mountain West... This suicide belt is also defined by what psychologists have dubbed a “culture of honor.” ... That means higher murder rates but even more-exaggerated suicide rates, a fact he attributes to millennia of old masculine codes meeting a disappearance of blue-collar jobs unlikely to reverse itself. Give me honor, or give me death was a safer personal motto when honor could still be readily found." - Newsweek
Will this be the fate of today's "brogrammers" in their 40s?
> Will this be the fate of today's "brogrammers" in their 40s?
Even if software eats software development, today's "brogrammers" will still be in good shape, having a working knowledge of technology.
The people who are currently in good shape who are more at risk, in my opinion, are the millions of Accounting and Finance professionals who use Excel all day.
I don't think so. For example, newspaper profits were near their all time high in 2008[1]. Following trends of newspaper profitability would not have lead an observer to predict the massive collapse of that industry in the subsequent years.
The statement is unconditional and timeless. It says something about the concept of "current trends", but it does not reference current trends to bolster its argument. E.g., examining current trends now isn't held to be less useful than examining them fifty years ago would have been.
The statement could still be wrong, but not for the reason you cite.
The term "brogrammer" has always sounded like sour grapes to me. It smacks of "oh, they're just letting ANYBODY be a programmer these days, all you have to do is go to school and be good at it, you don't have to be borderline socially awkward to do it anymore," and, if anything seems to be more judgemental and exclusionary than anybody in the "brogrammer" camp would be.
The problem is at least partly societal. A large portion of life is made up of social interaction, and men and women have very different experiences of this. People are generally nicer to women. Men are treated as being less important than women (think: women and children first). With this in mind, it's not surprising men are more likely to kill themselves.
I can only offer anecdotal evidence (I don't know how you'd even begin to measure this), but it's absolutely true that your average person is more likely to jump to the defense of a woman, or be more appalled at violence or injustice perpetrated against a woman.
Violence against men seems to be much easier for society to stomach, probably due to frequency and the perception that a man is stronger/tougher and should be able to protect himself.
Males bear the burden of a lot of aggresivity hormones. That and the fact males are stronger would explain men commit more violent crimes, hurt women more often than the other way around and also suicide more often.
I don't think men are treated as less important. The "women and children first" is more of a societal compensation for the fact that men can go first because we're, on average, stronger and more aggresive.
And more disposable. Anyone who's even tangentially familiar with sexual dimorphism, selection and Bateman's principle can recognize why females enjoy favorable treatment in that regard.
Minor point, but "women and children first" is mostly a romantic fiction, with couple important historic occurrences (like the Titanic, obviously) which kind of cemented it in popular culture, if not in "actual practiced fact". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_and_children_first
There are several sources for comparable US data. Examining page 6 of the PDF below demonstrates that the suicide rates for middle aged to elderly Caucasian males in the US is higher in 2014 by a factor of ~3 or in cases more compared to women and other ethnicities. Despite the prevalence of suicide in this group the issue is seldom covered by the media or addressed in public policy debates.
I think that to a large extent this has something to do with the (mostly terrible) educational system just about everywhere in the world. Your education kind of sets a course for the rest your life and it's a travesty that very productive years are basically squandered because the system is setup for maybe 19th century.
The statistics and data aggregation seem pretty robust. Most governments publish data reinforcing that suicide is a huge risk factor for men.
I don't think It's a silent epidemic as much as It's just not an important epidemic. Society doesn't necessarily rank the problem of male suicide high enough to fix or fund.
Men are more likely to succumb to gambling problems[1]
An estimated 84% of homeless are male in the UK[2]
Alcoholism and gambling are some choice indicators of inequality that Tony Judt liked to reference in Ill Fares the Land[3]. The gender disparity is well documented at the top (e.g. Gender diversity for C-level) but this is the 1% of the 1%. I'm not denying that the lack of diversity is alarming but these men are the men that bested many other men. However the fact that there is a lack of diversity on both sides of the spectrum seems to be an inconvenient truth that most prefer to avoid.
It's bound up in the concept of male disposability.
As a society we're arguing about whether or not to let women in the military (we should), whether they should have the same standards are men (they should), whether they should be allowed to serve in combat roles if they meet that standard (they should), and whether we should value their service equally (we should).
However, any time anybody raises the banner to go to war we don't stop to think about the thousands of men, ripped apart from the life they know, ripped apart from their families, sent off as fresh meat to the grinder, sent off into a hailstorm of bullets, mortars, rockets, missiles, and bombs to kill or be killed, maim or be killed. Nobody but their immediate family cares whether or not the come home, and nobody but their family cares what they went through while they were there. Society is perfectly fine with throwing away men, shaming them into making the ultimate sacrifice for their county. Why would they care if a few thousand off themselves every year?
"Silent" here means in part "a lack of public awareness, a paucity of explanatory research, and the reluctance of men to seek help for suicide-related concerns".
The assertion is that the low ranking you mention is made through general societal ignorance.
Compare, for example, to the high number of deaths caused by driving. Those risks are well known, taught in schools, and discussed often. This is a much more informed ranking.
It might also be because people are wary of talking about suicide because there is some evidence that making people think about it more may make it occur more.
Also, it might be because society sort of accepts that old men are allowed to kill themselves. The highest suicide rate is for 75+ year old men.
Is the incidence increasing over time? That wasn't clear from what I read. It says the incidence is high but doesn't include data about how it changes over time.
There is a decent documentary that watches a few teams respond to "Gun Violence" (1). It was basically a tour of people shooting themselves or their family. A bizarre left turn into mental health questions and responsibilities. It is clear that, of ~33k gun deaths (2) - most are suicides. Meanwhile, homicide is almost non-exisitant (3) - but it is all i see on the news :(
11K deaths from homicide isn't "almost non existent". Now it is true the burden is concentrated in young males, especially black males. This is not to say a death from homicide is intrinsically more important than from suicide, that firearms aren't linked to higher suicide rates, or that gun suicide isn't worth preventing - clearly it is.
As for why the news focuses on homicide, especially spectacular mass murders, "if it bleeds it leads".
I don't know about other countries, but in New Zealand, the media specifically doesn't report on suicides (or omits the cause of death, if it's a high profile death by suicide). This is because of the fear of copy-cat suicides.
One reason for the lack of coverage is the propensity for media coverage of suicide to lead to copycats. There's an interesting question here about how to have a rational discussion about gun suicide without provoking more suicides.
Homicide accounting for a third of gun-related deaths in the US, and a homicide rate four times higher than other western democracies... is "almost non-existent"!?
It is true that most Americans are very unlikely to be murdered. This homicide rate varies widely over age, sex and race, and (as per CDC) homicide is not a leading cause of death for most demographics. Young black males are, unfortunately, the exception.
> homicide is not a leading cause of death for most demographics.
That's a downplaying, dismissive phrase. Most western democracies have a homicide rate of 0.5-1.5/100k population/year. The US is an outlier amongst this group at ~4.8/100k/y. But even in Honduras, with the runaway worst homicide rate in the world at around 85/100k/year, an eye-gogglingly high rate, homicide is not a 'leading cause of death for most demographics'.
It is not dismissive to put death rates into perspective. It is noteworthy that homicide is the number one cause of death for US Black males, 15-34 years old, as per 2013 CDC data. The death rate from homicide for age 20-24 is about 86.6 per 100,000 per year, worse than the Honduras average. This is true for no other demographic group surveyed in the United States.
Why do we get mired with the attempts quagmire? If you look at depression and suicidal thoughts as a disease, the death rate is gendered.
Men die more from suicide yet society shows more sympathy and support for women. That makes sense since society was basically built to protect women and ensure that offspring had stable diligent parents. This leads to society enshrining the protections of women and children at the (relative) disadvantage of men.
Because if women start to use more lethal methods we'll see their rates of death overtake men. We care about attempted suicide, and self harm, because we want to reduce the rates of attempted suicide and of completed suicide.
I am a guy. I narrowly avoided suicide around 18. I should first note that I'm doing much better these days.
If there is anything scarier than attempting suicide, it would be the thought of surviving it. Permanent disfigurement, crippling, or chronic pain would only make life all the worse - and a second attempt would be made all the harder by well meaning family, police, and doctors. One thinks to be thorough, or to not try at all.
Scarier than keeping quiet about your demons, is the thought of being forced to confront them. You don't want to talk and dwell on such a depressing subject, when depression is the very thing you're trying to run from. Outward silence mirrors a desperate attempt to achieve inner silence.
Manly ideals such as the ability to shoulder burden, and self reliance, can worsen the problem. Why share such deeply personal problems, if you think others can't help you with them? After all, if even you yourself can't lick the problem - you who surely best knows yourself - what chance do others have? You'll only depress others. You'll only depress yourself further.
.
I survived the peak of my first depression thanks to a fear of hell. The second, by knowing my ex still cared about me, even if she did not still care to be with me. I couldn't be that selfish.
A decade later, and long walks are for exercise and a break - not an excuse to cross tall bridges. I fight the good fight: I try to exercise. To eat well. To sleeping well and fully. To socialize regularly. To enjoy the sun. To enjoy nature. To eliminate stress. I have a career. I rarely crunch.
Medication would probably help. I'd still like a meaning to life. Maybe Love, again, but love is hard work - and even after all this time, is it prudent to risk a third heartbreak? I'm better now, and take care of myself better, but in doing so I've also learned a healthy amount of selfishness...
.
It's 7AM, and I should sleep. Back to silence. I will sleep well, and wake refreshed tomorrow. Be kind to and take care of each other, and do the same for yourselves. Make friends instead of enemies, even if that means funny hobbies instead of important politics sometimes. Smile, laugh, and try to share the joys of life. They may not always shine as brightly, but it's easier to find your way towards life if the path is at least lit.
Right, men tend to take on jobs that are physically demanding, or may have more dangerous aspects at higher rates. The reasons are complex. Pressure to support a family or make more money despite potential harm to themselves, unwillingness to turn down difficult assignments to avoid seeming weak, valuing personal strength and "toughness," less dangerous jobs are unavailable for their experience and/or location and they have to take whatever's available (again, social pressure means they "have" to work in the first place, no matter what the job is). Social stigma towards blue collar workers and manual laborers, and getting trapped in these jobs due to an inability to find safer employment while doing them.
Women tend to take on jobs that pay less, have fewer responsibilities, or they take more time away from the workforce. The reasons are complex. Pressure to devote more time and energy towards family and childcare directly, and conversely, less pressure to support the family financially -- sometimes even before children enter the picture. Inability to get childcare support from spouse/family/outside sources, not wanting to seem too "tough" or "aggressive," avoiding social stigma towards working mothers, pulling out of the workforce to avoid restrictive maternity leave policies, difficulties re-entering the workforce afterwards.
Men are disposable. This idea is wired inside the deepest, most primal part our brains. There are a few possible solutions to this. We could evolve ourselves and change our brains. We could tip the gender population ratio in favor of women, so that men would be more sought after. The easiest way to achieve the latter is by simply giving parents the power to choose their kid's gender. Assuming parents are rational agents, they will choose the most valuable gender for their kid, which will bring the genders into an equilibrium.
Parents in those countries choose male children because male descendants are better for the parents. A girl in these countries is seen as a burden. She must be taken care of, and then hopefully married off, so that the husband will take over the burden.
A man on the other hand, is supposed to, by cultural standards, support his parents their whole life.
This is something you and the parent poster seem to miss. And also why "getting rid of all men" would probably have the opposite affect on society as you proclaim.
Frankly, you're a fucking idiot, and it's about time someone told you that.
It's interesting that China turned out to be so misandrist in the end. By skewing the gender ratio way towards men, it literally dooms millions of them to be at the bottom of the ladder, pushing them towards crime or suicide.
Aborting all boys is a bit extreme. Instead, what would happen if you systematically disempowered and imprisoned western men in favor of women, over the course of decades? Then, when only "empowered" women and feminine nu-males are left, their hearts will reach out to the poor people of the third world who they will welcome with open arms into their utopian multicultural society free of evil white men. At which point, the (especially in comparison) hyper-masculine immigrants will rape and pillage and destroy everything you tried to create. They won't want to "integrate" and castrate themselves, they'll happily take advantage of your weak, pathetic pushover of a "society" and attempt to turn it into that of their own. At which point, perhaps we will be completely doomed and we will regress into a dark age where opinions like your own will get you beheaded faster than you can say "toxic masculinity." Or perhaps, the real men of your society will rise up to fend them off, and the real women will return to the home to preserve their bloodlines. And in a few generations, if by chance you aren't already paste on the pavement, you and all of your castrated friends will look quite foolish. A generation of non-breeding suicidal idiots that almost killed the only society that would ever accept them.
If you really want to fix humanity, I'd advise getting rid of men.
Not sure if you're a disgusting sexist or just a troll. Maybe the male suicide rate is up because men have become self-hating and spread misandrist propaganda, instead of taking a human for a human - a being that requires fair treatment and love to stay mentally healthy.
> sexist societies will continue to choose male children even when women are scarce
The preference for a male child over a female child is not limited to what you dub to be 'sexist societies'[1] (thus inadvertently revealing your selective antagonism towards the said societies--India and China). It is actually global phenomenon, the USA included: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_selection#Preference_for_s...
> If you really want to fix humanity, I'd advise getting rid of men.
This strange advice of yours depends on the fervent belief--a sexist one, I might add--that women are incapable of the wiles of humanity.
[1] It would be far more reasonable to suggest instead that this preference is but the other (evolutionary) side of men being the more expendable sex (i.e., the more expendable they are, the more of them need to be birthed to account for their greater number of deaths)
> This strange advice of yours depends on the fervent belief--a sexist one, I might add--that women are incapable of the wiles of humanity.
Are facts sexist? Men tend to be much more violent than women. Nearly all rapes and homicides are committed by men, men are much more accident-prone, and men make up nearly all the fighters in wars. With advances in biological technology, humanity may no longer need men to survive. If we were to re-engineer humanity with harm reduction as a priority - and that is one big 'if', but it's your premise, not mine - there is a case for phasing out males.
"In asking 40,000 households about rape and sexual violence, the survey uncovered that 38 percent of incidents were against men."
"A recent analysis of BJS data, for example, turned up that 46 percent of male victims reported a female perpetrator."
"Women were more likely to be abused by fellow female inmates, and men by guards, and many of those guards were female. For example, of juveniles reporting staff sexual misconduct, 89 percent were boys reporting abuse by a female staff member. In total, inmates reported an astronomical 900,000 incidents of sexual abuse."
I believe women are just as violent and competitive as men. Due to reasons of biology, the aggressive behavior of women just manifests itself differently. While men are more inclined to express it physically, women are more likely to express it through spreading harmful gossip or political maneuvering.
I don't have any data to back up what I just said, but if you are a woman, and you are saying we should "phase out males", then this extremely aggressive suggestion would strengthen my belief.
No, but yours is not a fact; it is a belief (if it was a fact, it needs no believing in). Your belief is that men are solely responsible for the wiles of humanity, hence your advice being to get rid of them in order to “fix humanity”.
> Men tend to be much more violent than women.
If--note ‘if’--men tend to be much more violent than women, as you say, it does imply that women are capable of violence. Thus a society of full of women is no solution to fixing the wiles of humanity as their female denizens are still capable of violence. If I may ask? Since both men and women are capable of violence, why not get rid of all humanity?
> Thus a society of full of women is no solution to fixing the wiles of humanity as their female denizens are still capable of violence.
As ever the perfect is the enemy of the good. A male-free society would be expected to have a much lower violence rate.
> Since both men and women are capable of violence, why not get rid of all humanity?
A robot assigned with the task of setting the harm to humanity to zero would probably recommend this (and so would an anti-natalist philosopher like David Benatar). We have "humanity has to continue to exist" as a boundary condition.
> As ever the perfect is the enemy of the good. A male-free society would be expected to have a much lower violence rate.
How about we consider a different demographic group? It's well known that African-Americans are disproportionately responsible for violent crime in America. Would it be "good" to get rid of them too?
There's no point in responding seriously to this inflammatory post. Sex-selective childbirth (which is legal in the US) and genocide are a false equivalence.
You didn't mention sex selection in your previous posts. You said:
"Labs can make sperm from stem cells, so there's really no need for us anymore."
That statement is ambiguous. You could have been referring to how a post-male, post-genocide society would be able to function.
I agree that sex selection is a much less radical position to take. It's still wrong.
American society is becoming more and more multi-racial. It's not hard to imagine future parents selecting for phenotypes that are strongly associated with various racial groups today. Blonde, or curly black hair, for example.
Do you think it would be advisable for parents to use contemporary crime statistics to decide which "race" they want to pass on to their children? Do you understand why some people who are already alive might consider such rhetoric dangerous?
We're talking about the biodiversity of the human genome here. It shouldn't be winnowed so carelessly based on current societal conditions.
> A male-free society would be expected to have a much lower violence rate.
I did gather that conclusion from your "Men tend to be much more violent than women" belief ... yet, a conclusion stemming from a belief is no more valid than the belief itself. Try contemplating on the nature of violence itself ... as a starting point, look up 'female aggression subtle' on your favourite search engine. Here is just one article picked from a cursory glance: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/insight-therapy/201401/...
"These explanations suggest that when compared with suicidal women, men who reach the point of suicidal action are: [More X, More Y, More Z].... Despite some limited theoretical and empirical support, we currently lack strong evidence to support these explanations."
So the reason men kill themselves is "because, men?" I get that is sufficient for the sort of people for whom, "because, women," or "because, men," is explanatory, but maybe something social changed in the last 40 years?
When you control for hard drugs like the mari-huana, heavy metal music, D&D, violent video games, rap music, marylin manson, the fast and the furious sequels, and toxic masculinity, surely there is something that must shake out.
I wonder why an analysis of comparative rates of male/female self-murder seems to ignore that men murder others (in the U.S.) at around 5 or 6 times the rate of women. The differences seem comparable and very related. I see postulation that men have unique problems, but not any consideration of the fact that men have shown a greater urge to kill in general.
I think the way you're using "actual murder rate" here is by definition an unknowable number. Do you have the actual comparable likelihood of the conviction of women and men with the same evidence?
Is there actually any real question that men kill far more than women do?
Why is this? I've read before that modes of suicide tend to be gendered -- ie, gunshots to the head for men and overdoses for women. Is this the entire story? Are women more likely, consciously or unconsciously, to be social signaling for support than men when they attempt suicide?
I lost my brother to suicide three years ago. I began attending counseling this year after a protracted period of personal turmoil in its aftermath, and it's a topic I spend a lot of thought on. When I was younger and less psychologically moored I thought of suicide as the ultimate lever I could wield over my own fate. Not so much these days, though.