Gender Empathy Gap Day was chosen to be 11th July because, in 1995, that was the first day of the Srebrenica massacre (though the slaughter continued for over two weeks). The town was supposed to be under UN protection, but the UN troops made no attempt to prevent the Serbs entering the town. The UN troops had facilitated women and girls being removed to neutral ground but were unconcerned about the fate of the men and boys. The Serbs then set about slaughtering 8,372 Muslim men and boys.
Despite precedents like this, the media and the UN itself continue to downplay harms to males. This is the gender empathy gap.
This day, whose purpose is to raise awareness of the reality and consequences of the gender empathy gap, has been marked now for 7 years. You can read relevant material here.
I have been watching your ICMI presentation and would like to be added to your list.
The most morally bankrupt thing of all is that the decision to abandon those poor souls to their horrific fate would probably have been made (predominantly) by other men.
To those men of the UN responsible (and those who didn’t oppose them) hold your heads in shame.
I had no idea Gender Empathy Gap Day existed. Now it’s in my calendar as an anniversary event and I’ll be telling everyone I know about it.
They’re going to love me at dinner parties from now on but tough!
The Psychology of this is that human males show little “in group preferencing” in attitudes in numerous studies. Whereas human females have a strong preference for females in the same studies. Interestingly human males show similar levels of preferencing females!. An example was two huge multinational studies of ” gender bias” in teacher assessment and exam marking. Both found that girls benefit from a bias in their favour, in effect inflated marks in assessments and exam marks where the sex of the student is known or can be surmised. Though the size of the bias varied the remarkable thing was that this was in every country, from ever so gender sensitive Norway to “patriarchal” Pakistan. And the bias was shown as strong in male as female teachers. Both the size of the data sets and the fact that the researchers hypothesis was that they would find gender bias in favour of boys suggests the reliability of the findings.
I can easily believe that, as depressing as it is.
As time goes on, and the abuse of men and boys increases, there will be ever greater conflicting forces at work.
History has shown us that oppressed groups strengthen their bonds over time.
The French peasantry leading up to the Revolution
The “brothers” of black liberation during the Martin Luther King era
Entire nations during times of war with other countries.
The unkown here is that the oppression of men by women is a novel phenomenon (in its overt form anyway), and so the bonding effects of oppression exampled above have never been tested against something as ingrained as gynocentrism.
I hope that history has the greater say, but perhaps that’s just desparate optimism.
I’d like to think that most of the men in those studies simply haven’t yet had it bad enough to make the connection between their attitude and their rights, along with the fact that no one has a loud enough voice to point it out to them.
What I do know is that experiences can overcome “customary behaviour”. My personal conformity to “the gynocentric order” has certainly changed radically over the course of the last decade or so, mostly in consequence to how I and my fellow men, are being treated. I suspect at least some others here might say the same.
I’m hopeful that it can be done.
Do you have a link to those particular studies please? I’d be interested to see them.
“History has shown us that oppressed groups strengthen their bonds over time.”
Which is why feminism is so keen to deny male only spaces for boys and men.