Male Disposability – Myth or Reality

Male Disposability – does the term strike any resonance with your thought process? Or is it that before striking any resonance do I need to ask the basic question – Do you even realize what Male Disposability is? If yes, then you probably know what’s going to be in the article. If no, read on to know it.

Male Disposability is a psychological behavioral and attitudinal syndrome that considers Men as “Disposable and Expendable” and invests very low emotional resources with males which ultimately leads to an environment insensitive to the problems of the male world or one that automatically eliminates weak men (or men finished off with their utility) viewing them as liability.

Since time immemorial, be it the life-endangering activity of hunting or saving the country-land or guarding the parameters of geographical boundary or maintaining law and order situation in the society – the latter two correlate to hunting human life – this role has always been attributed to men who have donned the same willingly boosted by their testosterone and chivalry. In a nutshell men have been hunters primarily and that is a defunct role in today’s era of pacification and intellectual progress.

However, the traits of history are hard to remove and the hunter’s traits have continued into today’s men as well who are actually a misfit in the society with their hunting background and their genetic and evolutionary affiliation to a hunting tribe. No wonders problems of men have skyrocketed and courtesy the Male Disposability Syndrome, no one is bothered about it.

Before talking more on Male Disposability, I would talk a bit on its genesis, taking cue from the article, Paradigm Shift in Male Identity: Freedom from Being a Hunter. During the hunting days, when men used to go on long hunting expeditions, any hunter talking of a minor leg pain or a slight backache was detrimental to the morale of the hunters and was silenced, trivializing his pain.

Even today the society has been pretty much the same for men. Earlier it was hunting, in today’s world its taking huge risks – financial, intellectual, emotional, physical, political – to name a few, that men are expected of and in such a situation, talking of small problems like an emotional turmoil in a relationship or facing lack of freedom of choices will bring down the morale of other risk-taking hunters and thus men are discouraged from expressing their pain.

This leads to a lot of psycho-emotional suffocation within men which has a direct bearing on their lifestyle, life-expectancy, health and suicide rate as visible from the following data collected from various sources of the Government.

Interestingly, in this so called MALE DOMINATED WORLD, the DOMINATED MALES never get a voice as corroborated by the following figures.

Life Expectancy Data:

Plotted as a Graph looks something like,

The data about suicides is also not very welcoming but a true and sad reality to which currently the society is insensitive and cold.

Plotted as a Graph, looks something like

The above data clearly points to the stress in men’s lives due to which they not only commit suicide in large numbers (approaching double that of women) but who survive the turmoil, live shorter. That being the reality, there is also another grim reality and that is

NO SOCIAL / LEGAL / PSYCHOLOGICAL SUPPORT STRUCTURE AVAILABLE FOR MEN.

Quintessentially the problems of the male world are oblivious to the society and as long as men are discharging their duties no one really needs to bother about them and can readily dispose them off, after all even Mother Nature produces them in abundance; what with the normal gender birth ratio being 950 females : 1000 males.

Choice is left with readers to decide whether Male Disposability is a Myth or a Reality?