The Titanic sank 100 years ago today, and Men’s Rights Activists are still pissed off about it.
They’re not really pissed off that it sank. They’re pissed off that the men on board were more likely to go down with the ship than the women. You know, that whole “women and children first” thing.
Some MRAs were so pissed off about this that they were planning to march on Washington on this very day in an attempt, as they put it, to “Sink Misandry.”
You don’t know how much I would have loved to see this, a dozen angry dudes marching in circles on the National Mall carrying signs protesting the sinking of the Titanic and demanding that in all future sinkings of the Titanic that women and men be equally likely to drown in the cold waters of the North Atlantic. For that would be justice at last!
But, alas, due to unspecified logistical problems this march was cancelled some months back, and so misandry remains unsunk.
Or does it?
For you see, it turns out that the whole “women and children first” thing was not really a thing. Oh, on The Titanic it was. But women unfortunate enough to be passengers on sinking ships that weren’t the Titanic (or the HMS Birkenhead, which sunk off the coast of South Africa in 1852) weren’t able to push ahead to the front of the line. That, at least, is the conclusion of a new Swedish study (link is to a pdf of it).
The chivalrous code “women and children first” appears to have sunk with the Titanic 100 years ago.
Long believed to be the golden standard of conduct in a shipwreck, the noble edict is in fact “a myth that has been nourished by the Titanic disaster,” economist Mikael Elinder of Uppsala University, Sweden, told Discovery News.
Elinder and colleague Oscar Erixson analyzed a database of 18 peace-time shipwrecks over the period 1852–2011 in a new study into survival advantages at sea disasters.
Looking at the fate of over 15,000 people of more than 30 nationalities, the researchers found that more women and children die than men in maritime disasters, while captains and crew have a greater chance of survival than any passengers.
Being a woman was an advantage on only two ships: on the Birkenhead in 1852 and on the Titanic in 1912.
The notion of “women and children first” may have captured the popular imagination, but it’s never been an official policy for ship evacuations. It wouldn’t be fair, nor would it be an efficient way to get as many people as possible to safety.
Nor was “women and children” strictly enforced even on the Titanic. True, my great-grandfather, the mystery writer Jacques Futrelle, was one of those who went down with the ship, while his wife and my great-grandmother, writer Lily May Futrelle made it off safely (in the last lifeboat). But there were many men who survived, and many women who died.
If you want to get mad about the sinking of the Titanic all those years ago, get mad at the White Star Line for not bothering to equip the ship with lifeboats enough for everyone on it. Blame the captain, for ordering the ship to continue plowing ahead on a dark, foggy night into an area of the Atlantic where numerous icebergs had just been sighted by a number of other ships. Blame the crew for botching the evacuation – for the strange lack of urgency after the ship hit the iceberg, for the lifeboats leaving the sinking ship with half as many passengers as they could fit.
Much like the iceberg that sank the Titanic, Elinder and Erixson’s research has poked a giant hole in the “women and children first” myth. Of course, MRAs aren’t interested in historical accuracy. They’re looking for excuses to demonize women and feminists. So I imagine we’ll be hearing about the Titanic from them for years to come.
Here’s another tragic sinking, of yet another ship without a sufficient number of lifeboats:
EDIT: I added a couple of relevant links and fixed a somewhat egregious typo.
Citations, BASTA? We’ve got ’em, but you don’t. That’s not looking so good for you, liebling.
The MRAs are innumerates who have no idea how statistics work. You are aware, Mr. BASTA (fuck you btw, that word is trademarked by us revolutionary socialists, you don’t get to use it) that there is no statistically significant difference between men and women when it comes to suicide rates or life expectancy? You are aware that the argument basically amounts to “but the sampled rates are different!” even though the margin is so negligible as to be fully explainable by typical variance (i.e. chance)? That is without going into the fact that even if there was 99% significance, ideologues like the MRAs are specifically looking for an axe to grind, and that if they examine a hundred different statistics and find one that has 99% significance, that is the number of expected FALSE POSITIVES you might get?
This is basically the entire basis of the unscientific food/agribusiness propaganda research branch of science. Test a couple hundred food products against a hundred different illnesses, then take any where you get 99% significance of a correlation and trumpet in the lamestream media that a glass of wine helps with your heart or omega 3s reduce incidence of cancer. Never mention that if you’re literally testing thousands of possible correlations, you ought find dozens of false positives.
Mostly gone after two years. What still remains in circulation is the “men are morally inferior” corollary that happened to have much greater media buoyancy, and is evidenced in many news reports you guys have provided so far.
QFT! 🙂
Oh, PASTA, now you’re not even trying, just pulling it out of your ass. Phoning it in, really. I am disappoint.
Last time I checked (which was a few minutes ago) the ratio of male/female suicide rates in the US was around 4, and that’s what I am aware of. Enlighten me please, how is that insignificant?
Plus, suicide rate and life expectancy are not just any cherrypicked variables. We focus on them because they are overall measures of misery that are immune to cherrypicking, unlike single factors that can be selected to paint any picture you wish.
Pasta! You must know, because you’re so good at research, that women in the U.S. attempt suicide 2 to 3 times more often than men do. How do you make that inconvenient fact go away?
http://www.afsp.org/index.cfm?page_id=04ea1254-bd31-1fa3-c549d77e6ca6aa37
Women attempt suicide three times as much as men. What this tells me is that suicide is on the rise in the US and that both genders are suffering.
*ducks as evidence ricochets back in my direction*
Why hello Cloudiah. Fancy being ninjaed by you here!
@Shadow, All I have to say to that is this. 🙂
I assume suicide rates are exactly the same for men of all races, classes, sexual orientations, genders assigned at birth, ability, etc., yes? Since there’s no reason for MRAs to give a crap about things like race, since men’s oppression is totes the worst oppression you guys, and suicide rates prove it?
@Viscaria
Nuance is misandry!
women in the U.S. attempt suicide 2 to 3 times more often than men do.
Dot one: ever heard about feigned suicide attempts? Dot two: women in crisis are seen as deserving help, while men in crisis are seen as losers. Dot three: feigning a suicide attempt effectively communicates to others that you are in crisis. Dot four: a credibly feigned suicide attempt makes others believe that your life is at risk. Dot five: women’s life is valued more than men’s. Connect the dots. Who will feign suicide more often, men or women?
Whereas clearly it should be the reverse.
Hey, do you think making light of people who “feign” suicide saves a lot of men’s lives? Or does it send a very clear “really do it or no one will care” message?
There are pressures on men to use more lethal suicide methods, and they’re not coming from feminists.
Pasta! Please enlighten us further. What percentage of women’s vs. men’s suicide attempts are feigned, according to your good friend Common Knowledge? About the rest of your dots, this.
So now we’ve got “feigned suicide” to go along with “false rape.” Oh-kay.
It’s also a known fact, that murders are simetimes disguised as suicides. Clearly this means that we don’t need to worry about men committing suicide because it’s probably just people caught up in organized crime.
/keyboard explodes from angry, sarcastic typing
You really are scum, you know that. You can’t just draw imaginary dots and then tell us to connect them, because all we learn is the picture you want to paint. But clearly reality and decency are feminist plots too
Besides, your dumb ass decided to tell us that the fact that men commit so many suicides is proof that men are miserable. Even if we took your reality-denying bullshit as fact, that still means that 2-3 times more women than men are in crisis. Of course those of us who have even a basic understanding of reality know that suicides and suicide attempts are not just a simple x=y situation.
This is what the cosmos thinks of PASTA!
@cloudiah
Your last link goes to a 404. I died laughing at “Then a miracle happens”
Oh, how’d that happen? Here is what the cosmos thinks of Pasta, without any HTML coding:
http://i.imgur.com/P8yTL.jpg
Clearly the sky god is angry.
So basically what you are saying Pasta is that if a woman tries to commit suicide, fails, she is only doing it for attention and not because her life has become so soul crushingly without hope that the only option she feels she has is to kill herself because nothing else will stop the pain.
Let me join in with the chorus of fuck offs and tell you to fuck right off.
Dot six – women are lying bitches by nature, so obviously they’re just faking suicide for the attention. It all makes so much sense if you start from the assumption that women are evil.
I just read BASTA’s comments on natural disasters to my husband, and his reaction was disgust. He says to stop speaking on his behalf. Nobody has treated him as if he’s disposable, and nobody has denied giving him help for being a man. In other words, BASTA, stop being an asshole that uses other peoples’ misfortunes as a beat stick against feminists.