(...)The courts and prisons bulge with men. When it comes to aggression, delinquent behaviour, risk taking and social mayhem, men win gold.
And yet, for all their behaving badly, they do not seem any the happier. Throughout North America, Europe and Australia, male suicides outnumber female by a factor of between 3 and 4 to 1. The rise in the number of young men killing themselves in much of the developed world has been rightly termed an epidemic.
(...)
(...) We have become accustomed to thinking of 'real' men as those who labour in the iron, steel and coal industries, in shipbuilding, lumberjacking, pre-mechanised farming. Our martial heroes have been almost entirely male, in the fantasies and the realities of hand-to-hand combat, of sheer physical guts, the will to survive, athletic derring-do. What price all that brute strength, might and energy now, when more people are employed making Indian curries than mining coal, when computerised robots and not sweating men assemble cars and when the male predilection for violence, far from saving national pride, threatens world survival?
(...)
Male preoccupation with their pen1ses would appear to be based on fear, right enough: not on the Freudian fear of castration, but on the Adlerian fear of ridicule. Are we up to it? ask today's men anxiously, peering at their shrivelled pen1s and analysing their social skills; are we up to competing, succeeding, achieving, conquering, controlling, asserting, pontificating, as well as getting it up?
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Originally Posted by David Jamieson
