Remember that lyrical ballad by
Peter, Paul, and Mary? That was back in the 1960s.
Forty years later, hundreds of thousands of unmarried
American women are asking themselves exactly the same
question.
One of the reasons that so many
women can't find a husband is that millions of men
have declared a Marriage Strike.
Men believe that family courts have become so unfair
that in case of divorce, they will lose custody of
their children and their ex will take them for all
they're worth.
But there's a second reason for the
marriage gap. Most people have heard that gloomy
statistic: American women outlive men by over five
years. But maybe they haven't considered the effects
of that longevity gap on women.
Throughout his life, the American
male is relentlessly stalked by the Grim Reaper.
In his late teens, car accidents,
suicides, and homicides claim three times more male
victims than females. Beginning in their 30s, men
must face the scourge of heart disease. In their 50s
and 60s, it's the looming specter of cancer. And
men's overall suicide rate is four times higher than
among women.
It's a public health disaster of
epic proportions: For every one of the top 10 leading
causes of death, men have a higher risk of death than
women.
This demographic imbalance wreaks
havoc on the lives of American women.
Consider this fact: The Census
Bureau reports that among
Americans in their 40s, there are 523,000 more women
than men in that age group. If you are one of those
half-million women, the sad truth is this -- you may
never find your Prince Charming.
And as women age, their predicament
worsens. In their fifties, the number of American
women who have no prospect of finding their marital
bliss tops the one million mark. That's a lot of
women who must now face the prospect of spending
their Golden Years alone.
Given that politicians often trip
over each other to woo the woman's vote, one would
expect to see a stream of government programs
dedicated to helping men to live longer, healthier
lives. But oddly, that's not the case.
In fact, the reverse is true. The
litany of women's health programs reveals a gender
agenda run amok:
- The Department of Health and
Human Services sponsors five offices of
women's health, but has no office designed to
help men.
- The National Institutes of
Health spends three times more money on breast cancer research than for
prostate cancer.
- NIH-funded research studies
included only 31% male subjects in 2001, which violates a 1994
Congressional mandate to include both sexes
equally in medical research.
- Last year the DHHS launched a
campaign to educate women about heart disease, while men's risk of dying of heart
disease is 70% higher than women's.
How did this topsy-turvy situation
arise?
Beginning in the early 1990s,
feminist politicians like Pat Schroeder of Colorado
and Barbara Mikulski of Maryland began to spread the
rumor that women had been routinely excluded from
medical research. Shrill headlines began to fill the
New York Times and the women's magazines. Soon
everyone was believing the story, since everyone
knows that feminists never tell a lie.
But the claim that women were
shortchanged by medical research turns out to be one
of the biggest deceptions ever foisted on an
unsuspecting American public. This urban legend has
been debunked by Cathy Young, Sally Satel, and myself.
But the myth lives on, thanks to
groups like the Society
for Women's Health Research.
Victimhood is so important to the feminist creed that
it must be invented even where it never existed.
So for now, millions of American
women are destined to live out the rest of their
lives in solitude, betrayed by an ideology that once
promised female liberation and a gender utopia.
