There is a dark societal blind-spot immersed in the ways we run our prison systems. Where ethics and rehabilitation comes last. This can be seen in the rampant sexual abuse of inmates who are under these institutions. Unfortunately, men suffer immensely from this element of the criminal justice system. However, a lot of it is beneath the surface, and these men are left with no recourse or empathy.

How common is it?

The short answer is we really don't know. Unfortunately, there is a massive problem of under-reporting that occurs with the sexual abuse in male prisons. This is a common pattern with male victimization as a whole. Domestic violence rates are also unjustly skewed heavily against men because of the persistent under-reporting of male victims of IPV (Intimate Partner Violence). A bit of tangent here but this behavior of how male victims are treated feeds into the larger problem of under-reporting. Here is one study that that discusses how male victims of IPV were treated after opening up to others about their abuse "Men reported experience of a range of physical, sexual, verbal, coercive controlling, and manipulative behaviors. Male victims noted how disclosure of abuse to family and friends was variously met with shock, support, and minimization. Participants also reported secondary abusive experiences, with police and other support services responding with ridicule, doubt, indifference, and victim arrest." This kind of attitude is unfortunately also rampant in our prison systems.

This problem is compounded by the fact that state prison officials continuously deny any serious problem with sexual violence occurring in their facilities. "When questioned on the topic, state prison officials report that rape is an infinitely rare occurrence. Human Rights Watch conducted a three-year survey of state departments of correction, as well as the Federal Bureau of Prisons, asking, among other things, about reported incidents of male inmate-on-inmate rape and sexual abuse. Of the forty-seven corrections departments that responded to at least one of our requests for information, only twenty-three were even able to provide such statistics, with others suggesting that inmate-on-inmate sexual abuse was so infrequent that it was unnecessary to maintain separate data on the topic. The response of Hawaiian prison officials was typical"

What are the attitudes of the inmates?

The inmates at these facilities invariably tell a different tale than the one painted by prison officials. "None of the types of prison rape described [what he calls "confidence rape," "extortion rape," "strong arm rape," etc.] are rare. If anything they are rarely reported. To give you an idea of how frequent rape is in prison, if victims would report every time they were raped in prison I would say that in the prison that I am in (which is a medium minimum security prison) there would be a reported incident every day." - This was an anecdote from one Pennsylvania inmate

Interestingly enough in that same paper there is an entire section that reveals correctional officers report much higher numbers of sexual violence in prisons than their higher-ups. This is an important revelation, given that correctional officers are at the ground level in these facilities, and often times have intimate knowledge about the relationships between inmates. "Although only a few studies have been conducted to assess guards' beliefs regarding inmates' sexual victimization, they have uniformly found a high rate of inmate-on-inmate sexual abuse. A corrections department internal survey of guards in a southern state (provided to Human Rights Watch on the condition that the state not be identified) found that line officers--those charged with the direct supervision of inmates--estimated that roughly one-fifth of all prisoners were being coerced into participation in inmate-on-inmate sex."

So, is it an epidemic?

While official statistics might try and downplay this problem, there is much more that lies beneath the surface. To end this post, I want to make it clear that this discussion was intended to highlight a clear violation of human rights. Regardless of what society may feel about these inmates, we must hold ourselves to a higher standard ethically. The state sanctioned abuse of men in the prison system is a transparent violation of human rights, & goes against ethical guidelines outlined by codes of conduct in any formal institution.

Two sides of the same coin

Imperialism and it's consequences has been talked about ad nauseam. However, there hasn't been much in the way of analysis behind the driving force fueling it, namely feminism. The feminist movement has been an integral component to imperialism. Feminist rhetoric has been used to justify all manner of military intervention, colonialist expansion, and subjugation over foreign nations. There's a very real link between the two that many refuse to acknowledge, which only serves to perpetuate a viscous cycle. There was an amazing post a while back on the PMC forum that discussed this phenomenon in depth. Recency bias has been complicit in people's tacit approval of current imperialist rhetoric. The same justifications and rationalizations being used against the Palestinians today, have been used centuries prior for countless other groups. The brain-dead Asmongold level "hot take" on geopolitics is unfortunately nothing new. However, having a proper view of the past can help shed some light on the mechanisms fueling these systems of power. In order to have a holistic view of imperialism, there needs to be an honest discussion behind the feminist engine that's been propelling it forward all-throughout history.

Manufacturing consent: Genocide through systematic dehumanization

As stated in multiple posts prior to this, recency bias obscures a lot of patterns that are present though-out history. In order to take a full account of what tactics imperialists employ, we must first recognize our own biases. A good example is the current on-going conflict in the middle east. The non-stop barrage of negative stereotypes of Palestinian/Arab men has no doubt aided in manufacturing consent for the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Decades worth of threat narratives portraying Arab men as violent, abusive, and barbaric has systematically stripped Palestinian men of their humanity:

>Palestinian men disproportionately carry the burden of demonization, and are framed exclusively as terrorists or aggressors but never as victims. Israel uses its homonationalist trope to frame itself as saving women, children and queer people from the violence of Palestinian men in order to justify genocide. Palestinian men are rarely mentioned in death tolls and violence perpetrated against them is rarely condemned. The media’s emphasis on “women and children” echoes the nationalist belief that only this group of people is powerless and requires protection. As such, it further dehumanizes Palestinian men and renders their killing not just permissible but necessary. Palestinian men are currently facing the same line of assault that's been common practice in feminist imperialist rhetoric.

This dehumanization has been used as a pretext to violate the out-group men in all manner of disgusting ways, by IDF soldiers.

>Israeli forces stripped dozens of civilian Palestinian men men of their clothes before detaining them and taking them to an undisclosed location, footage published on Thursday showed. An eyewitness said at least seven men were shot dead by troops for not complying with the soldiers’ orders fast enough. The men were reportedly rounded up from homes and schools sheltering displaced families in the northern Gaza Strip. The Euro-Mediterranean monitor said doctors, academics, journalists and seniors were among those detained.

Manifest destiny, feminist expansionism, and the Mexican-American war

The Mexican-American war is one of the earlier examples of feminist threat narratives being used as pretext for imperialist expansion. During the 1800s, an ideology began to spread across the eastern north American continent, which took root under the banner of manifest destiny. This belief was entrenched in the idea of divine ordinance and outward expansion. According to this doctrine, American settlers were preordained to expand westward across the north American continent, and annex any Mexican/Indigenous land along their path. It was originally coined by American columnist John L. O'Sullivan, who wrote: “The American claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which [God] has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and…self-government. It is a right such as that of the tree to the space of air and earth suitable for the fullnexpansion of its… destiny of growth...”

The goal was simple, expand westward and steal as much land as possible. However, like most imperialist expansion, threat narratives were a key ingredient needed to get the public stirring. It was through feminist rhetoric that America was able to justify it's resulting war of expansion. Mexican men were portrayed as uncivilized, tyrannical, and abusive towards their own women, and thus undeserving of such bountiful lands. By stereotyping Mexican men as abusive, politicians and the media were able to create a pretext for their invasion. Sounding familiar yet? This is a prime example of why looking back in history is so important to fully contextualize what's happening across the globe.

There was a massive disparity between the portrayal of Mexican men vs Mexican women during this time. While Mexican men were routinely dehumanized and commonly portrayed as lazy, abusive, and incompetent; Mexican women were quite often portrayed as the opposite. Antebellum author Thomas Bangs Thorpe famously wrote this passage about Mexican women: “the female population,” “are of a higher order of beings, and most worthy of admiration; they are possessed of all the good qualities so wanting in the opposite sex”

Now, let's contrast that line of thinking with the depravity in which Mexican men were portrayed. A famous political cartoon from the time coldly mocked Mexican soldiers who suffered life altering amputations in battle. Why would there be any empathy spared for such a lower caste of beings constantly smeared as nothing but violent abusers?

Afghanistan, and the "first feminist war in history"

The war on terror served as a framework for modern imperialism. Primarily targeting Afghanistan, this strategy was clearly masking global hegemony as liberation. Bush and his administration leaned heavily on feminist rhetoric to justify their invasion. Ironically, it's been dubbed by many as the "first feminist war in history", which again, is a prime example of recency bias obscuring our vision of the present. To say that Afghanistan was the first feminist war is to completely ignore history. The British invasion of Egypt in 1882 mere decades after the Mexican-American war, established many of the anti-Islamic/orientalist tropes of middle eastern men. The British empire started the Islamic oppression of women narrative as a means to justify their imperialism overseas. This gave the British occupation of Egypt a benevolent, and progressive veneer. Again, this invasion was only decades after the Mexican-American war, where the same threat narratives of female oppression were used against Mexican men. Afghanistan was far from the first feminist war, and it only requires a quick look at the past to confirm it.

Threat narratives about brown men victimizing women have been around for centuries. There really is nothing new under the sun in that regard. However, to circle back, I thought it was important to understand the methods that imperial powers use to justify their existence, and the role that feminism has played in fueling these conquests. This post is no-where near fully encapsulating the gravity of the topic, but there are some interesting parallels and common threads worth sharing. Not to mention, dispelling the idea that feminist wars are a recent phenomenon.

Men, the media's scapegoat.

Misandry is a horrible thing. It dehumanizes, and marginalizes. The media plays a key role in this marginalization. It actively demonizes, and alienates men on a macro scale, by pushing anti-male narratives.

There hasn’t been a lot of research done on the portrayal of men in media. However, there is one book that did an in-depth study on how mass media shapes male identity through overwhelming bias and negative representation. The study analyzed a large sample set of media consisting of magazines, newspapers, and TV programs from the U.S., Australia, UK, and Europe. Here are the findings of the study:

>1,799 different publications that reported on men and male identity were identified in media published from July 1 to December 24, 2003. The publications consisted of 1,568 newspaper and magazine articles and 281 television reports or program segments. These included news articles (63%), opinion columns (13%), TV news reports (7%), Feature articles (7%), Letters to the Editor (4%), TV current affairs reports (3%), talk show and lifestyle program segments (2%), and editorials (1%).

>Two hundred of the 1,799 media samples contained more than one subject category, making a total of 1,999 media portrayals of men and male identity. Overall, 69% (n=1,381) of media portrayals of men were Unfavorable, 19% (n=370) were Neutral or balanced, and 12% (n=248) were Favorable (Favorable: Neutral: Unfavorable ratio: 1: 1.5 :5.6).

>81.6% of the media samples portrayed men negatively, primarily as villains, aggressors, perverts, or philanderers. Positive portrayals, such as good fathers or heroes, were rare.

Misandry is so prevalent throughout society, so pervasive, and omnipresent, it becomes a normal part of every day life. People have become so completely accustomed to seeing men portrayed as monsters, that the inherent misandry doesn't even cross their minds. Male identity is unfortunately negatively shaped and molded through a lot of the social, news, and entertainment media we consume. This helps to marginalize, and paint male suffering as well-deserved, instead of a public health-crisis.

Social media reinforces misandry

Misandry takes a serious toll on men's mental health. Viewing hateful content for extended periods of time, will no doubt leave psychological residue on any one.

>Online hate is pervasive: surveys across several countries indicate that 42%–67% of young adults observed ‘hateful and degrading writings or speech online’, and 21% have been victims themselves. Online hate has negative effects on the well-being of both victims and observers, including ‘depression, isolation, paranoia, social anxiety, self-doubt, disappointment, loneliness, and lack of confidence’.

Negativity in online spaces breeds more negativity.

>Alternatively, people generate hate messages online primarily to accrue signals of admiration and praise from sympathetic online peers and to make friends. As a by-product, because social media magnify self-persuasion, their prejudices should become more extreme as they obtain more social reinforcement in response to their public hate messaging.

Its a vicious cycle that never ends.

The media marginalizes male suffering.

I’m sure it’s no surprise to anyone that men suffer disproportionately from suicide. Men account for approximately 80% of suicides worldwide. Despite this giant disparity, the media has gone out of it's way to downplay, and marginalize discussions about male suicide. Many popular news outlets have all perpetuated and framed male suicide in their articles as a result of "toxic masculinity", and male shortcomings (refusing to open up and seek therapy).

They completely ignore the societal, and structural issues that drive men to suicide. And instead, choose to victim blame and deflect. Therapy isn't going to stop men being pushed out of higher education, which damages their life prospects and leads to isolation. It's not going to stop the rampant misandry that chips away at the psyche of men and boys every-time they look at their phones, or screens.

Not to mention the hypocrisy of men's mental health initiatives remaining massively underfunded and under-researched. Despite men being constantly told to seek help, and "figure it out". There's a lack of resources available to the men who do choose to seek professional help.

In general, men need to be treated as actual human beings. This villainization, and marginalization only causes more suffering in the long term.

The case for welfare in men's rights

To the well-fed it seems cowardly to complain of tight boots, because the well-fed live in a different world-a world where, if your boots are tight, you can change them; their minds are not warped by petty discomfort. But below a certain income the petty crowds the large out of existence; one's preoccupation is not with art or religion, but with bad food, hard beds, drudgery and the sack. Serenity is impossible to a poor man in a cold country - George Orwell, 1931

The topic of welfare in men's spaces is usually a contentious one. Unfortunately, the MRM has become synonymous with right-wing politics and economics, so welfare is routinely lambasted by many MRA's. Even self described men's rights activists have peddled conservative/libertarian talking points as being beneficial to men. In this post, I want to try and build the case for men needing welfare, and why it should be an integral part to any effective men's rights movement.

The Root-Cause: Social Darwinism, Laissez-Faire Capitalism, and Eugenics

To start, let's track the origins of anti-welfare sentiment. Never has someone's work been more appropriated by far-right lunatics than that of Charles Darwin. He released his theory of evolution on November 24th, 1859 in his groundbreaking book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Darwin argued that all species develop through a system of natural selection, where the individuals with the best traits suited to their environments are more likely to reproduce. While Darwin's work has gone on to become the backbone of modern biology, and has remained one of the most robust cornerstones in science; it has also become co-opted and distorted by many.

Social Darwinism was coined and popularized by English philosopher Herbert Spencer. He was a sociologist that took the biological concepts in Charles Darwin's theory, and misapplied them to human societies, politics, and economics. In fact, it was actually Spencer who coined the term "survival of the fittest", not Darwin, even though that term gets wrongly attributed to Darwin all the time.

>Spencer believed that society naturally improves when the strong succeed and the weak are left behind. He thought helping the poor or disabled interfered with "natural progress". This idea "survival of the fittest"- Brutal as it sounds, was extremely influential. especially amongst wealthy elites who wanted a scientific reason to explain why they were rich and others were poor.

How was this theory used to peddle right wing propaganda?

>The theory was used to support laissez-faire capitalism and political conservatism. Class stratification was justified on the basis of “natural” inequalities among individuals, for the control of property was said to be a correlate of superior and inherent moral attributes such as industriousness, temperance, and frugality. Attempts to reform society through state intervention or other means would, therefore, interfere with natural processes; unrestricted competition and defense of the status quo were in accord with biological selection. The poor were the “unfit” and should not be aided; in the struggle for existence, wealth was a sign of success. At the societal level, social Darwinism was used as a philosophical rationalization for imperialist, colonialist, and racist policies, sustaining belief in Anglo-Saxon or Aryan cultural and biological superiority.

Darwin rejected such an idea

“Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.”- Darwin, The Descent of Man

It's sad to see how someone's work can be twisted, and reapplied to serve such an extreme rhetoric. Darwin's theory has been weaponized for the better part of a century to justify all manner of eugenic, imperialist, and anti-social ideas. However it's important to point out that Darwin rejected these principles on moral grounds, something that never gets brought up by ideologues, and propagandists.

>Darwin applied group selection not only to biological altruism but also to the origin of human sympathy. He reasoned that the “ape-like progenitors of man” would have developed instinctive sympathy like other social species: “[They] would have felt uneasy when separated from their comrades… would have warned each other of danger, and have given mutual aid in attack or defence.”

>Natural selection, he argued, could act indirectly in social animals by preserving traits that benefited the group rather than the individual. Sympathy, he believed, increased because: "Those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring."

>However, Darwin also recognized that instinctive sympathy was initially in-group focused. When early human tribes competed, those whose members were most cooperative and self-sacrificing would have “been victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.” Over time, however, that sympathy would have expanded beyond tribal boundaries. As small tribes united into larger communities, individuals extended their instinctive compassion to broader groups: “This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.”

The historical blind-spot

Historically speaking, welfare was never designed to help men. The modern American welfare state was explicitly created to support single mothers and their children, able-bodied men were deliberately excluded. This bias can be traced back to the 1911 "mothers pensions", which was built to aid widowed, or single mothers.

>Mothers' pensions are pension payments distributed to mothers. Introduced during the progressive era, they were among the earliest components of the modern American welfare state and were the first public cash assistance programs targeted to single mothers.

The new deal in 1935 extended this bias by strictly excluding the disabled (affecting many men) because congress feared they might not be truly disabled.

>Interestingly, although mothers whose husbands had become disabled were supported by the 1935 Social Security Act through the creation of the ADC program, the Act had no provision for support for the disabled in general. There was intense debate in Congress starting in 1936 over whether a program for the disabled should be included along with the other three. There was strong opposition to its inclusion because Congress felt that there was too great a danger that such a program would serve too many men who were not really disabled and who could obtain a job.

The carrot and the stick dichotomy

Unfortunately, this sentiment and bias hasn't changed. Many contemporary cash assistance programs de-prioritize men. Programs for low income men favor the "stick" approach like enforcing child support. This is in direct contrast to the approach of offering vulnerable men "carrots" like childcare, financial assistance, and tax credits.

>National-level anti-poverty programs have traditionally left low-income men out of the equation. Policy-makers have assumed men had jobs, or were capable of getting jobs. Financial assistance was reserved for widows and single-mothers—women who had in one way or another been, it was thought, abandoned by their paycheck-earning men.

>Those assumptions remained in place with The Family Support Act of 1988, and welfare reform, in 1996. When men came into the picture, the policy challenges centered on forcing absent fathers to help support their children.

>Unlike women, however, these men did not have access to job-training courses provided by programs like welfare, and it was harder for them to qualify for other programs that would support then as they transitioned into jobs, like food stamps.

Why men need welfare: the statistical reality

Now that we've briefly covered some of the history regarding anti-welfare sentiment, and the barriers men have faced in receiving assistance, let's discuss why welfare is a necessity for men going forward. The reality is that men live harsher, and shorter lives on average. This is born out by the data, and it only worsens when there is a lack of a welfare state. Men's life expectancy drops dramatically without welfare, far more than women's. Removing or reducing social welfare programs only serves to accelerates this mortality gap. Without the proper safety nets, low income men suffer from increased rates of "deaths of despair", unmanaged chronic conditions, and face loss of preventative care.

The most profound example of men's life expectancy dropping in relation to welfare reductions was during the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. Shortly after the collapse, there was an abrupt transition to a market economy. This is commonly referred to as "shock therapy", and it brought with it some disastrous results including hyperinflation, mass unemployment, and cuts to social safety nets. However, the life expectancy for men during this time saw a large dip. Male life expectancy plummeted by more than 6 years in half a decade. The life expectancy for men had dropped from roughly 64 years in 1990 to 58 by 1994. Men during this time were subject to all kinds of hardships, and the dissolution of safety nets in real time had their consequences. The collapse of the soviet union has to be one of the sharpest examples of men being hurt by far right economic policies.

>But behind the self destructive behaviour, the authors say, are economic factors, including rising poverty rates, unemployment, financial insecurity, and corruption. Whereas only 4%of the population of the region had incomes equivalent to $4 (£2.50) a day or less in 1988, that figure had climbed to 32%by 1994. In addition, the transition to a market economy has been accompanied by lower living standards (including poorer diets), a deterioration in social services, and major cutbacks in health spending.

>“What we are arguing,” said Omar Noman, an economist for the development fund and one of the report’s contributors, “is that the transition to market economies [in the region] is the biggest … killer we have seen in the 20th century, if you take out famines and wars. The sudden shock and what it did to the system … has effectively meant that five million [Russian men’s] lives have been lost in the 1990s.” Using Britain and Japanwith their ratio of 96 men to every 100 womenas the base population, the report’s authors have calculated that there are now some 9.6 million “missing men” in the former communist bloc. “The typical patterns are that a man loses his job and develops a drinking problem,” said Mr Noman. “The women then leave and the men die, first emotionally and then physically.”

The truth is that the absence of welfare is detrimental to the well-being of men. Unfortunately, many men turn to coping and revenge fantasies about withdrawing resources instead of facing the statistical reality in front of them. Withdrawing our resources is essentially akin to cutting off our nose to spite our face, in this regard. The most vulnerable men (low status, mentally ill, disabled or handicapped) are going to bear the brunt of whatever comes as a result of it. I’m not blind to the problems of big government but the alternative doesn’t seem like a humane solution to me, especially if our goal is to advocate for all men.

“If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”- Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle

The case for welfare in men's rights

To the well-fed it seems cowardly to complain of tight boots, because the well-fed live in a different world-a world where, if your boots are tight, you can change them; their minds are not warped by petty discomfort. But below a certain income the petty crowds the large out of existence; one's preoccupation is not with art or religion, but with bad food, hard beds, drudgery and the sack. Serenity is impossible to a poor man in a cold country - George Orwell, 1931

The topic of welfare in men's spaces is usually a contentious one. Unfortunately, the MRM has become synonymous with right-wing politics and economics, so welfare is routinely lambasted by many MRA's. Even self described "pro-male" men have peddled conservative/libertarian talking points as being beneficial to men. In this post, I want to try and build the case for men needing welfare, and why it should be an integral part to any effective men's rights movement.

The Root-Cause: Social Darwinism, Laissez-Faire Capitalism, and Eugenics

To start, let's track the origins of anti-welfare sentiment. Never has someone's work been more appropriated by far-right lunatics than that of Charles Darwin. He released his theory of evolution on November 24th, 1859 in his groundbreaking book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Darwin argued that all species develop through a system of natural selection, where the individuals with the best traits suited to their environments are more likely to reproduce. While Darwin's work has gone on to become the backbone of modern biology, and has remained one of the most robust cornerstones in science; it has also become co-opted and distorted by many.

Social Darwinism was coined and popularized by English philosopher Herbert Spencer. He was a sociologist that took the biological concepts in Charles Darwin's theory, and misapplied them to human societies, politics, and economics. In fact, it was actually Spencer who coined the term "survival of the fittest", not Darwin, even though that term gets wrongly attributed to Darwin all the time.

>Spencer believed that society naturally improves when the strong succeed and the weak are left behind. He thought helping the poor or disabled interfered with "natural progress". This idea "survival of the fittest"- Brutal as it sounds, was extremely influential. especially amongst wealthy elites who wanted a scientific reason to explain why they were rich and others were poor.

How was this theory used to peddle right wing propaganda?

>The theory was used to support laissez-faire capitalism and political conservatism. Class stratification was justified on the basis of “natural” inequalities among individuals, for the control of property was said to be a correlate of superior and inherent moral attributes such as industriousness, temperance, and frugality. Attempts to reform society through state intervention or other means would, therefore, interfere with natural processes; unrestricted competition and defense of the status quo were in accord with biological selection. The poor were the “unfit” and should not be aided; in the struggle for existence, wealth was a sign of success. At the societal level, social Darwinism was used as a philosophical rationalization for imperialist, colonialist, and racist policies, sustaining belief in Anglo-Saxon or Aryan cultural and biological superiority.

Darwin rejected such an idea

“Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.”- Darwin, The Descent of Man

It's sad to see how someone's work can be twisted, and reapplied to serve such an extreme rhetoric. Darwin's theory has been weaponized for the better part of a century to justify all manner of eugenic, imperialist, and anti-social ideas. However it's important to point out that Darwin rejected these principles on moral grounds, something that never gets brought up by ideologues, and propagandists.

>Darwin applied group selection not only to biological altruism but also to the origin of human sympathy. He reasoned that the “ape-like progenitors of man” would have developed instinctive sympathy like other social species: “[They] would have felt uneasy when separated from their comrades… would have warned each other of danger, and have given mutual aid in attack or defence.”

>Natural selection, he argued, could act indirectly in social animals by preserving traits that benefited the group rather than the individual. Sympathy, he believed, increased because: "Those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring."

>However, Darwin also recognized that instinctive sympathy was initially in-group focused. When early human tribes competed, those whose members were most cooperative and self-sacrificing would have “been victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.” Over time, however, that sympathy would have expanded beyond tribal boundaries. As small tribes united into larger communities, individuals extended their instinctive compassion to broader groups: “This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.”

The historical blind-spot

Historically speaking, welfare was never designed to help men. The modern American welfare state was explicitly created to support single mothers and their children, able-bodied men were deliberately excluded. This bias can be traced back to the 1911 "mothers pensions", which was built to aid widowed, or single mothers.

>Mothers' pensions are pension payments distributed to mothers. Introduced during the progressive era, they were among the earliest components of the modern American welfare state and were the first public cash assistance programs targeted to single mothers.

The new deal in 1935 extended this bias by strictly excluding the disabled (affecting many men) because congress feared they might not be truly disabled.

>Interestingly, although mothers whose husbands had become disabled were supported by the 1935 Social Security Act through the creation of the ADC program, the Act had no provision for support for the disabled in general. There was intense debate in Congress starting in 1936 over whether a program for the disabled should be included along with the other three. There was strong opposition to its inclusion because Congress felt that there was too great a danger that such a program would serve too many men who were not really disabled and who could obtain a job.

The carrot and the stick dichotomy

Unfortunately, this sentiment and bias hasn't changed. Many contemporary cash assistance programs de-prioritize men. Programs for low income men favor the "stick" approach like enforcing child support. This is in direct contrast to the approach of offering vulnerable men "carrots" like childcare, financial assistance, and tax credits.

>National-level anti-poverty programs have traditionally left low-income men out of the equation. Policy-makers have assumed men had jobs, or were capable of getting jobs. Financial assistance was reserved for widows and single-mothers—women who had in one way or another been, it was thought, abandoned by their paycheck-earning men.

>Those assumptions remained in place with The Family Support Act of 1988, and welfare reform, in 1996. When men came into the picture, the policy challenges centered on forcing absent fathers to help support their children.

>Unlike women, however, these men did not have access to job-training courses provided by programs like welfare, and it was harder for them to qualify for other programs that would support then as they transitioned into jobs, like food stamps.

Why men need welfare: the statistical reality

Now that we've briefly covered some of the history regarding anti-welfare sentiment, and the barriers men have faced in receiving assistance, let's discuss why welfare is a necessity for men going forward. The reality is that men live harsher, and shorter lives on average. This is born out by the data, and it only worsens when there is a lack of a welfare state. Men's life expectancy drops dramatically without welfare, far more than women's. Removing or reducing social welfare programs only serves to accelerates this mortality gap. Without the proper safety nets, low income men suffer from increased rates of "deaths of despair", unmanaged chronic conditions, and face loss of preventative care.

The most profound example of men's life expectancy dropping in relation to welfare reductions was during the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. Shortly after the collapse, there was an abrupt transition to a market economy. This is commonly referred to as "shock therapy", and it brought with it some disastrous results including hyperinflation, mass unemployment, and cuts to social safety nets. However, the life expectancy for men during this time saw a large dip. Male life expectancy plummeted by more than 6 years in half a decade. The life expectancy for men had dropped from roughly 64 years in 1990 to 58 by 1994. Men during this time were subject to all kinds of hardships, and the dissolution of safety nets in real time had their consequences. The collapse of the soviet union has to be one of the sharpest examples of men being hurt by far right economic policies.

>But behind the self destructive behaviour, the authors say, are economic factors, including rising poverty rates, unemployment, financial insecurity, and corruption. Whereas only 4%of the population of the region had incomes equivalent to $4 (£2.50) a day or less in 1988, that figure had climbed to 32%by 1994. In addition, the transition to a market economy has been accompanied by lower living standards (including poorer diets), a deterioration in social services, and major cutbacks in health spending.

>“What we are arguing,” said Omar Noman, an economist for the development fund and one of the report’s contributors, “is that the transition to market economies [in the region] is the biggest … killer we have seen in the 20th century, if you take out famines and wars. The sudden shock and what it did to the system … has effectively meant that five million [Russian men’s] lives have been lost in the 1990s.” Using Britain and Japanwith their ratio of 96 men to every 100 womenas the base population, the report’s authors have calculated that there are now some 9.6 million “missing men” in the former communist bloc. “The typical patterns are that a man loses his job and develops a drinking problem,” said Mr Noman. “The women then leave and the men die, first emotionally and then physically.”

The truth is that the absence of welfare is detrimental to the well-being of men. Unfortunately, many men turn to coping and revenge fantasies about withdrawing resources instead of facing the statistical reality in front of them. Withdrawing our resources is essentially akin to cutting off our nose to spite our face, in this regard. The most vulnerable men (low status, mentally ill, disabled or handicapped) are going to bear the brunt of whatever comes as a result of it. I’m not blind to the problems of big government but the alternative doesn’t seem like a humane solution to me, especially if our goal is to advocate for all men.

“If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”- Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle