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.
RE: Kyrie
Yeah, it’s this creepyass thing where I simultaneously hold the opinions that I am a good worthy human being who is beloved by many who don’t want me in pain, and that I’m also a useless sack of shit who doesn’t deserve the resources needed to keep me alive.
The cognitive dissonance ALONE makes me nuts.
You know what has kept me from comitting suicide so far? The fear that people would go through my stuff and thus find out how fucked up I really am. Alive I at least can pretend to be just somewhat “different”; dead it’s hunting-season.
What I mean to say is, before I die, there needs to not be any alcohol in my flat, nor any books that aren’t up to scrutiny, and I need to be “properly thin”. I need to be the “perfect victim”, otherwise people will be disappointed and laugh at me. Which shouldn’t matter, as I’d be dead, but there it is.
It’s just, there is noone who loves me enough, that they would be too upset with my death for me to do it. It just makes me scared of dying accidentally. Because I haven’t yet sorted that shit out.
As someone who has, quite seriously, had the thought, “I can’t kill myself today – I have a pimple on my nose,” I understand this all too well. Depressive brains do the weirdest shit to you.
I am not saying that this is always the case, only that there are lots of cases when “doing it for attention” works for a woman, but wouldn’t work for a man in a comparably bad situation.
‘doing it for attention’ seems to be working pretty well for you right now, cowboy
PASTA! You’re back after 4 days just to keep proving that you’re an idiot? That’s persistence! In case you missed it, the sky gods have a message for you:
http://manboobz.com/2012/04/15/a-titanic-mistake-new-research-sinks-the-women-and-children-first-myth/comment-page-5/#comment-147113
Indeed? And I’m sure you cited a mountain of evidence that WordPress just happened to swallow. Fucking WordPress eh?!
Basta, I worked for 3 years on a psychiatric unit of a hospital. We would frequently get men who threatened suicide, but didn’t attempt suicide. Suicidal ideation is enough to get you an involuntary admission. One guy tried overdosing on caffeine pills and called the hotline. Would you call that “attention seeking?”
The “attention seeking” that you guys try to misrepresent as just some tactic that women use to receive sympathy is a load of shit. Suicidal ideation and suicidal gestures are a way to let people around them know that they’re in distress and need some fucking help.
Also, you have to take into account any Axis II diagnoses. In cases of, say, Borderline Personality Disorder, a suicidal gesture may be a tactic employed to manipulate someone but it’s a symptom of a much larger problem which is not just attention for the sake of it.
But to answer your question, when we got men who made suicidal gestures, we gave them the attention they needed, namely professional help and intervention. We did not discard them because they were men.
If you really want to help psychologically troubled men, why don’t you work on removing the social stigma that exists that presures men to not ask for help when they need it because manly men are tough and strong and don’t need anyone’s help. I can assure you, feminism is not responsible for that social stigma.
BASTA: HAven’t had enough yet?
One set of points
Which includes comments from the UN Report on Haiti which you found too hard to find for yourself
And Another set of points which includes an observation on your sense of double standards.
BASTA: What separate lines? Lines for women and lines for men? That would be more than OK with me. In fact that’s precisely what I considered proposing as a tertium to the false binary of everyone for themselves vs. women first. But that’s not what news reports about the policy say.
WAIT!!!!! Stop the presses! BASTA believes the press when it says men are being “opressed”, but he refuses to believe the press when it says that the reason for that, “opression” is that the men were acting badly.
We have a winner in the Hypocrisy Sweepstakes.
ozy, I think you’re making a mathematical error by thinking that if men kill themselves 3x more often by suicide, and women attempt suicide (roughly) 3x more often, that means it evens out.
It doesn’t. What it means is, men are (roughly) 9x more likely to “succeed” at killing themselves (when they try) than women are when they attempt suicide. (“Success” being in air quotes in this case, given the dubious nature of the goal.) As noted, women are much more likely to try, though.
Ballgame: I think you are making a semantic error with the issues of ratio.
If there are 100 men who kill themselves, and 300 women who try… which is the group with the greater need for intervention?
I’d argue that the needs are the same. One could argue the needs of men are greater; and that the targeted message should be one that reduces the efficacy of the methods they use when they try, so that the rates of success begin to even out.
At which point the number of attempts by women would be far more likely to be seen as a greater problem.
The real question is what are the motivating factors which lead someone to make the attempt? I suspect those are different, and as such there is no simple means to address it. I would also guess that the rates of attempt vary by region, and by the nature of the community (i.e. the urban/suburban/ex-urban/rural communities all have different ratios, and further that the differences in those communities in the interior southwest is different from that of the coastal west, as from the Great Lakes as from the Mason-Dixon South as from New England,etc.).
Making it an issue of ratios is reductionist, and I think, whether intentional, or not, diversionary from the greater issues.
This thread will never, ever die. And I am doing my part to make sure of that! 🙂
An interesting article on the challenges of researching what treatments are most effective at preventing people from killing themselves is available here: http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v18/n2/full/nm0212-190.html (I don’t think this is paywalled, but possibly I am getting access via a proxy server; my apologies if it is off limits.)
I’m not making any errors, semantic or otherwise, pecunium. I was merely correcting a factual misstatement that ozy made.
The question you raise is interesting, but it wasn’t the question I was trying to address with my comment.
You weren’t “merely correcting”. If you were doing that you should rather have said, “as a mathematical expression the relative rates are actually”, and left it there.
You went on to say imply the ratio made a substantive difference. That is a semantic difference. I don’t say it because I find semantics to be trivial. I say it because I think them decidedly important.
So, what is your actual point.. the one you were trying to raise with your elaboration on the, “factual misstatement” A statement which BTW, I take some issue with, as the facts of the matter are that men commit suidice at three time the rate of women attempt it. i.e. for every 300 women who attempt it, there are 100 men who succeed at it. A ratio of 3:1, completely correct.
It’s a question of directionality. If one cuts a price by 50 percent, one has to raise it by 100 percent to come back to the same price as before. If one adds the same “fifty percent” one removed to the base price, the price has only been raised by 33 percent; even though in all cases the absolute value of the change is the same.
Your formulation also fails to take into account the women who succeed (and leaves out the men), so the relative rates you mention are also not correct. Forgive me if, given your poor work in analysing the study in question I am less than sanguine about both your motives, and your numbers.
So I looked at it again, and as I look at it again, you have made a conflationary error, and counted the factors incorrectly.
Men are three times more likely to succeed at killing themselves. One can look at it either as women try three times as often, or men succeed three times as often. It’s a 1:3 ratio, or a 3:1 ratio.
You took it as if it were both. You multiplied that single, reciprocal ratio, as if it were two different things.
So yes, it’s more than a semantic error, and it’s a mathematical error, but the apparent error is on your side, not ozy’s.
pecunium: You are wrong. The ratio of completed male suicides to completed female suicides in the U.S. is 4:1, according to the World Health Organization, and the statements about females attempting suicide three times as often as males are clearly comparing suicide attempts to suicide attempts. Please see my post at Feminist Critics for a more complete explanation.
Only here because of ballgame’s post. I’ll just repost the comment I made there over here in this cesspit of baboon bullies:
I take great issue with people equating suicide attempts with actual suicide. They are nothing like the same thing. Not only does it ignore fake suicide attempts, it also ignores unintentionally successful suicide attempts (a family member of mine died this way).
Another thing it ignores is how an unclear number of people use suicide threats and/or attempts to emotionally terrorize loved ones and get sympathy. This too, I have experienced first hand. It is one of the worst things you can do to someone who loves you. And pretending that such things never happen (ozymandias) is a slap in the face to those who have suffered from it not to mention completely unsympathetic to anyone who doesn’t wear the required type of victim label.
It also ignores those people who THINK they really want to kill themselves but are unaware that it is not what they want. Suicide is as emotionally charged as it gets. Reducing every suicide attempt to a definite “wanted to die” is simplifying things to the intellectual level of a 3 year old.
The human body is frighteningly fragile and easy to kill. In fact, just doing nothing will kill you within a few minutes. The fact that men are more “successful” at it is not some insignificant detail. It is in itself a very strong sign that suicide is a disturbingly male phenomenon.
This discussion is a horrible demonstration of how unsympathetic and uncaring these ideological fascists can become when they’re confronted with facts that contradict their political agenda.
Shame on you!
I’m not returning to this threat so anyone who has something to say to me, should do so on ballgame’s post.
@Adi
Um, what? I’m pretty sure you don’t die if you do nothing for a few minutes, a few days maybe, but not a few minutes. Unless you’re including breathing in the things you are not doing, but you don’t have to constantly remind yourself to breathe, it just happens, it takes more effort to stop breathing than to continue doing it, plus, you’re more likely to pass out before you die.
Also, yes, people sometimes use their suicide attempts to try and manipulate other people, someone can be both suicidal AND an asshole, I don’t think anyone here is denying that, but if someone is attempting suicide in the first place, then that’s indicative of a serious problem.
Now, there can be people who threaten to commit suicide and use that to manipulate others, but there’s a difference between threatening to do something and actually attempting it.
Also, what on earth does this mean:
If people think they really want to kill themselves, then they really want to kill themselves. Their reasoning for doing it may be wrong, but in that moment, I’m pretty sure they want to die. I don’t understand what you mean here.
Ok, so you admit that it’s not 9:1.
Which changes nothing of the rest of what was said.
And no. I am not going to go slog through your post there. If you want to make the claims here, you get to support them here.
Adi’s idea of starting a conversation: “You’re a cesspool of baboon bullies! Don’t try to respond; I’m running away!” (I love this thread.)
Cloudiah: It looks more as if it’s Ballgame’s idea.
1: Make a false accusation of mathematical error.
2: Get called on it.
3: Go make your own blog post
4: Come back here and explain that his brilliant takedown is too good to share here, so we should either go to his place or just accept that he’s right.
5: Adi reads it, and comes here to, “tell us how it is.”
Yes they are. If a person wants to die, they want to die and if they fail in their attempt it is not a “oops! I was just kidding” it is “I suck at even doing this.”
And what is an “unintentionally successful suicide attempt?” If someone is saying “I want to kill myself” and DOES that is not unintentional, that is intentional.
I don’t buy the “I shall come to a blog I have never commented on before to make a grand accusation of the horribleness of the blog because of a post made by someone I apparently like well enough to follow and defend BUT I shall never come back to see what you reply to my post so don’t even bother,” even with the “come to this other blog.”
I ain’t going to the other blog, and I’m not going to respond directly to somebody who pulls this sort of preliminary flounce–but I just wanta say–I bet they’ll be back to see what response their post gets even if they can somehow restrain themselves form posting.
HAH!
It’s a standard variation on not sticking the flounce. 🙂
I gotta say, this really doesn’t sit well with me. It comes across as so fixated on writing off suicide attempts as “fake” that they’re actually dismissing a successful one as fake somehow.
Seems like a shitty thing to say about a family member.