Gay Men Stat Scarce and HIV Rife

Recent research from the United Kingdom suggests that there are markedly less pewfs than some of us might have thought. Apparently, in the UK at least, 1.5% and shrinking, even as we speak. Does that mean that within a few short years, staid straight society will be spared all that silly pill-popping, disco dancing, shorty shorts and buffed bodies? I hope not. The usual outcry from the gay community that ‘we were robbed!’ and the equally usual triumphalism from gay haters inc. (‘we told you that they were sick and dying out!’) detracts somewhat from the fundamental issue, that is, that each and every citizen has a right ‘to be’. It matters fuck-all whether gay men are a statistically insignificant minority or whether every Tom, Wan or Jose is a flaming queen. Rights should not be allocated according to numerical status and, in fact, it is an immutable characteristic of any robust democracy to ensure the protection and promotion of rights for all. Clearly, many gay men in the UK are utterly terrified to be open and honest about their sexuality, which is a tragedy for many reasons, including the awful hurt such repression can cause.

Consequently, I am sure that there are many, many more fags in the UK than this research has uncovered and I am sure that many of those fags would, if asked, vigorously deny their sexuality. However, this research and the debate that it has re-ignited reminds me of the nonsense that is associated with the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade, where every year promoters completely exaggerate the number of spectators and those gay haters at Salt Shakers, amongst other fuckwits, respond with a completely ridiculous revised-down crowd count. It is as if in proving numbers something so essential as sexuality can be legitimated, or de-legitimated. Meanwhile, as heads continue to get counted, the necessity that so many gay men still feel to live a clandestine existence has its inevitable corollary in news from the USA, where it has been revealed that up to 1:5 gay and bisexual men in 21 major cities across that great land are HIV+ and moreover, nearly half of them do not know it. Stigma remains a powerful and persistent deterrent to coming out, whether it be to honestly answer a survey question, ‘are you gay?’ or to deny that you are a man having regular, casual sex with other men…

Update…

Over the coming days, weeks and months, a lot of attention will be paid to the unfortunate suicide of Tyler Clementi. While nothing can ever ‘compensate’ for the needless death of that young man, I hope that other young gay men who are freaking out about their sexuality might come to realise that being gay is a beautiful and wonderful thing…

Foodies Eat Masculinity for Breakfast

Cairns, K., Johnston, J., & Baumann, S. (2010). Caring About Food: Doing Gender in the Foodie Kitchen Gender & Society, 24 (5), 591-615 DOI: 10.1177/0891243210383419

Like many people here in Australia, I was surprised when the 2009 series of Master Chef was won by Julie Goodwin and not by the woman she beat for the title, Poh Ling Yeow. While Julie is a competent cook, she is, by her own admission, ‘home style’ in the tradition of 1960s culinary guru and living legend, Margaret Fulton. Poh, on the other hand, is brilliant, creative, chaotic, and dare I say it, perhaps a bit too much to handle. Standing in judgment before three super blokey blokes (even the one who wears a cravat and brightly coloured pants is deadly machismo), it was clear that Poh had transgressed the homosocial hegemonic domain of the professional kitchen.

Women challenging that domain, not good…

Women dutifully cooking for their husbands at home, excellent…

I found this article by Cairns et al. (2010) per chance and when reading it discovered several little gems. For example, that loathsome TV chef, Jamie Oliver, represents a brand of ‘culinary masculinity’ whereby men who cook do so as if on a permanent summer holiday (Hollows, 2003, cited in Cairns et al. 2010, p.594). Women, who cook, on the other hand, are routinely cast in the role of how to instructively break down the competencies required to correctly boil an egg (2010, p.594). An insidious sexual division of labour thus operates in which men are to kitchen as high art, and women, as domestic necessity (although, of course, even Tom Cruise loves a good roast leg of lamb)…

Yes, contrary to what John Mendoza might think (see Breaking the Silence… 2010, p.56), we actually ‘do’ gender (2010, p.595). Every second of every day in every way imaginable and several others besides, men and women make choices on how they constitute their gender and that includes, how they cook and how they eat (2010, p.595). The practice of food is, therefore, a defining characteristic of class, culture, and gender. We can immediately define someone by her or his culinary gear: three hats vs. KFC, bangers and mash vs. tabouleh, international celebrity vs. quiet success. I would agree with Cairns et al. (2010, p.596) that when looking at the emerging phenomenon of ‘foodies’, we must do so with regard to the context in which those foodies operate.

So what did the authors (2010) find by talking with foodies?

1. That female foodies loved food as passionately as their male counterparts did and so, put paid to that fiction that women cannot derive pleasure from anything (2010, p.599).

2. That the handing down of egg-boiling techniques from mother to daughter was a powerfully persistent legacy that doggedly defied 21^st century reality checks (2010, p.601).

3. That childhood memories of cooking involved ma working hard to prepare meals with love and care while da put his pig-ignorant feet up on the sofa (2010, pp.601 & 602).

4. That female foodies displayed elitist tendencies, in that they castigated those mothers who failed to provide quality (sic expensive) food for their families (2010, p.603).

5. That conversely, male foodies seldom talked about food with reference to its perceived or actual health benefits (2010, p.603).

6. That female foodies were torn between cooking for care or pleasure while for the majority of male foodies, cooking was always a leisurely pursuit (2010, p.604).

7. That male foodies adopted a technocratic, instrumental, and highly stereotypical approach to their work, highlighting functionality and process adherence (2010, pp. 606 & 607).

In conclusion, Cairns et al. (2010) argue that ‘[w]hile foodie discourse opens up possibilities for both men and women to retool gendered performances’ (p.610), many women are effectively ‘stuck’ on several fronts. For example, to concurrently try to be the ideal cook at home and the aspirational celebrity chef in the public domain. Moreover, the less social capital available to any woman who cooks, the less likely it will be that she can affect a presence among the toady A-list of plate-up specialists. And we still wonder why most celebrity chefs are men…?

New Bent Freak: Social Work Radicalism Repels Childhood Adversity…

Click here to open…

Australian Men Emasculated by Talking

Putting any shortcomings in the reporting to one side, to read here that Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, has declared that ‘Australian men find it emasculating to talk about their problems’ serves that dual purpose of both tagging what is wrong with so many men in this country while also reinforcing its normality. Ms Gillard is a lawyer and therefore, I would not expect her to know that much, if anything, about the complexities associated with men’s help-seeking behaviours and the responses they get from others. However, I cringe whenever I see ‘men’ clumped together under one enormous catholic heading, as if we are talking about all men, and further, all problems, in all situations.

More reassuring was that Ms Gillard recognised that ongoing work pressures, sic, any external pressures, can damage the mental health of men, including male politicians. The dog eat doggy world of Federal politics is supposed to bring out the best in democracy but in so doing, it chews up good men (and women) for whom back-stabbing and full frontal insults are not part of their routine shtick. The Prime Minister’s statement that Parliament House can be a lonely place resonates with my belief that the essential factor in protecting and promoting good mental health is genuine social connectedness. In that regard, I would caution against Andy Hardy type strategies of ‘let’s put on a show together’ (or kick a ball around the park) as representing sufficient comraderie.

Men, most if not all men, require connections of sustained substance…

US Man Care Baby Love Nursing

There is so much absolute rubbish around about the crisis of masculinity, and other such bunk. That rubbish is woefully short on hard evidence and excruciatingly long on boring, boring whining. Take, for example, those arch enemies of positive change, the inappropriately named, ‘men’s rights movement’, squealing as they persistently do like pigs waking up to the smell of bacon cooking next door. All those twisted pundits can offer is gloom upon doom, hate upon anger, and misogyny upon homophobia as the solutions to what allegedly ails men today. You would think from their mindless rants that men were the most oppressed majority in the history of the universe. So where, oh where is the truth, and, why do we struggle so desperately to hear it? Newsweek takes a shot at answering those major assignment questions in a series of articles about the US man…

• Labour market participation rates dropping
• Tertiary education participation rates dropping
• Higher rates of ‘suicide, homelessness, violence, and criminality’…

Yes, being a US man, like being a man in many other developed nations, can be tough. However, revisionist thinking, which advocates for a return to some non-existent golden period of manhood, fails to consider two essential points: 1) that culture can only move inexorably forward, and 2) even if we could turn back time to the wonderful 1950s, would men be any better off anyway? I think not. The ultra-conservative stance adopted by the men’s rights movement and other assorted doomsayers, imagines current challenges to the hegemony of masculine ideals as irrefutably misconceived. That movement categorises every glimmer of hope as threat, derides women for driving this positive change agenda and harangues any man brave enough not to wear the faded uniform of real man macho.

Rather than leap back into a smelly historical pit, which I would argue did nobody much any lasting favours, men, or women (although prima facie, some men at least seemed more privileged), Newsweek suggests that the US man could learn something from his Swedish counterpart. In Sweden, generous paternity leave provisions and other pro-active government social policy initiatives have rattled the sexual division of labour almost if not quite fully, to its rightful demise. No longer hung up on the notion of who stays at home and cares, who goes to work and does other stuff, many Swedish couples now mix and match to at once provide an ideal work-life balance and moreover, provide their children with an A-grade combination of love and support.

As Newsweek laments…

‘the U.S. is now the only wealthy country that doesn’t bankroll a bonding period for either parent’…

In addition to urging the US Federal and State governments, and big-ticket corporations to get serious about paid parental leave, Newsweek calls upon the US man to think long and hard about his own behaviour and attitudes. For example, why is it that he can be so resistant to caring for baby at home and even more resistant to engaging in any outside work that might reveal his human kindness? Why is it implausible bordering on contemptuous for real man macho to be nurses, teachers, or social workers? Equating kindness with weakness and therefore as converse to masculine ideals is an insidious gaffe into which too many men willingly stumble. Strength is not derived from deliberately shutting yourself down to the possibility of genuine emotional connectivity with others. Indeed, the greatest strength the US man might ever display would be to break free from his self-imposed isolation…

Smile…!

Update:

Ruminating on a hypothetical, sweet dream past that never was and thus, never could be, is such a no-no and yet, is so evident in this survey of US men by Cosmopolitan Magazine…

New Bent Freak: Gay Men, Not Suffering Spectacularly…

Click here to open…

Suicide Equality for Women and Men

When reading the New South Wales (NSW) Suicide Prevention Strategy 2010-2015 (the ‘Strategy’), I had to remind myself that the often highly aspirational language that characterises this 64-page document must ultimately take form within a public mental health system that is archaic, regressive and dominated by big psychiatry. That system epitomises Goffman’s (1961) garage shop model of service delivery, in that acutely unwell citizens crash, are forcibly hospitalised in bleak, sterile institutions, drugged up to the eyeballs on psychotropics, and then without a tad of respect, booted out the door. In such a repressive clinical hegemon, the rights of consumers/survivors are crushed and the considerable therapeutic expertise of other on-site health and well-being practitioners, notably psychologists and social workers, is lost to the psychiatrists’ one trick pony of ‘getting the dosage right’.

As if getting the dosage right should be the only consideration, and as if psychiatrists actually ever get the dosage right, besides…

The Strategy lays bare an inherent contradiction between a service delivery model, within and supplementary to public mental health in NSW, that is built on treating sickness, and the lofty goals contained within the Strategy, that seek to improve individual and community resilience (p.11). Until there is a massive paradigm shift (love that cliché!) in the culture of health and well-being service delivery here, those lofty goals read like a convoluted stream of cleverly crafted weasel words (pp.37, 40, 52). Moreover, as is the way with the incumbent NSW State Government, reason, and logic are not amongst its finer points. That leads to disjunctions such as the proper recognition in the Strategy that child abuse trauma contributes significantly to later suicidal behaviours (pp.18-19) but then, a failure by government to provide or plan for any accessible, appropriate therapeutic services for the adult survivors of child abuse.

With specific respect to men, not once in the Strategy is that taboo term, ‘masculinity’ mentioned. It is, as if hired goons should immediately take out anyone who dares to publicly utter those ominous five syllables. Further, while acknowledging the grim maleness of suicide deaths in NSW (p.11), the Strategy declares that ‘suicidal behaviour is an equally serious problem for both women and men’ (p.11). Yes it is, but for mostly different reasons. To shut down any critical analysis of and discussion about the role that masculinity plays in suicidal ideation and actions renders as hypocritical the heavy emphasis placed by the Strategy on improving the evidence base for suicide prevention (p.25). After all, how can you improve the evidence base if, in advance, certain germane topics have been barred?

Calls then by the Strategy to ‘apply the evidence base of interventions to encourage men’s help-seeking behaviour and emotional openness’ (p.28), reverberates with the aforementioned pattern of mindless disjunctions, in which the NSW State Government is so adept. Yet again, reducing the immense problem that is male suicide to the $2 solution that is getting men to speak up, and spill their beans if not their hearts, defies the complexity of how and why men choose to practice emotional expressivity and help-seeking in any particular social setting (p.29). Equally telling is the fact that the Strategy leaves untouched that rather prickly puzzle of whether current health and well-being services in NSW can suitably meet the needs of men who are, or who might become ‘suicidal’. It assumes, bombastically, that those services can, and they will…

I really loved the weasel word directory on p.53 of the Strategy. Three of my favourites were…

1. Imminent risk (that point when ‘suicide is extremely likely in the near future’ (p.53), which can be ascertained by asking everyone with whom you come into contact, ‘are you going to kill yourself, and if so, will it be within the next 24 hours?’).

2. Risk factors (which the Strategy lists as ‘biological, psychological, social, cultural, distal, genetic, neurochemical and proximal’ (p.53). In other words, almost anything can be a risk factor for suicide).

3. Tipping point (no, not that moment when you fork out the cash to your gangsta’ bookie to bankroll some corrupt cricket team, but rather, a negative life event and/or deteriorating mental health. As per ‘risk factors’, above, almost anything can be a tipping point for suicide)…

New Article on Men: Cheating Men Love Their Girlfriends More…

 

Click here to open…

Masculine Men at Greater Risk of Suicide

A new report on how to improve suicide prevention in Australia was launched last weekend at the oddly named ‘LIFE Awards’. Of course, as soon as I opened up the PDF copy of that Breaking the Silence Report (2010), I did a word search for ‘masculinity’ and discovered, without surprise, that amongst the 220 pages of what the authors pompously call a ‘seminal report’, was but one mention of that critical term (p.82). Moreover, there was half a measly page dedicated to the topic of ‘men’ (2010, p.75) and suicide. So how can that be? How can you gather the glitterati of the suicide prevention industry in Australia, cobble together all of their ideological beliefs and collective wisdom and yet somehow, mysteriously, omit any critical analysis of, or discussion about the central role played by masculinity in male suicide deaths?

That for decades now, men in Australia have been topping themselves four times as often as women do (2010, p.20) is dismissed in one factually incorrect statement in this report, that is, that…

‘[m]en are far more likely to choose a more lethal means of attempting suicide (eg. hanging, firearms) than women, who tend to choose less lethal means (eg. drug overdose)’ (2010, p.75).

The reality is that for both men and women in this country, hanging is the preferred method of (self) checking out and the use of firearms, while a significant contributing factor to suicide deaths in gun-toting countries like the USA, plays a minor and ever-diminishing role here (Olav & Neilsen, 2010; ABS, 3303.0, 31/03/2010). Perhaps some useful insight into the almost complete lack of reference to masculinity in this report can be gleaned from the mind-blowing comments contained therein with respect to gender (2010, p.56). When I first read those comments earlier today, I wrote on my rough notes, in huge black letters, F-U-C-K! To describe gender, as is done, as a ‘non-modifiable’ (2010, p.56) risk factor which is ‘extremely difficult’ or impossible to change, is to hark back to the days of the dinosaurs…

You know, when men were men and women were women and gender was immutable and defined absolutely by sex. Ergo, gender was sex! In this report, male gender is described as a ‘risk factor’ (2010, p.56) and female gender, a ‘protective factor’, which not only denotes false biological determinism but further, invites the instant critique…

• If being female is, of itself, a protective factor against suicide, how can it be that women attempt suicide about twice as often as men do?;
  • Is it to imply that women do not actually intend to kill themselves and that as such, their attempts are merely a pathetic cry for help?; and therefore,
  • Is it to, ironically, construct suicide as the ultimate, hyper-masculine act, in which men can demonstrate their ascription to masculine ideals through success, in dying?

So much about the Breaking the Silence Report (2010) is retrograde thinking. Not only do the authors (2010) deliberately expunge ‘masculinity’ from the pages, but they also pitch their arguments on dated and discredited concepts like crisis intervention (p.17) and risk identification (p.16), and the assumption that suicide is predominantly caused by mental illness (pp.17 & 48). Repeatedly throughout this report, ideology trumps evidence to arrive at, for example, crushing statements by family members, certain that their dead son or daughter was ‘secretly’ mentally ill at the time of their suicide. The reliance on archaic language and terminology adds painfully to the already, ‘way past its use by date’ clunk of this report…

• ‘warning signs’ (p.46)
• ‘suicidal episode’ (p.46)
• ‘suicidal cues’ (p.46)
• ‘imminent risk’ (p.55), etc…

I would argue that amidst all the complexity and variation that suicidal ideation and actions encompass (2010, p.14), two of the best ways to prevent male suicide are to:

1. Support the healthy emotional development of boys, into men, across the lifespan;

-which necessarily incorporates-

2. Encouraging boys, and men, to practice gender in more positive, life-fulfilling ways…

Yes, gratefully, we can indeed change how we do gender…

Zero Gains Re-Counting Suicide Deaths

De Leo, D. (2010). Australia Revises its Mortality Data on Suicide. Crisis (The Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention).

In this recent editorial in Crisis…, Pr Diego De Leo made the following observations…

‘On June 24, 2010, at 4.30 pm, the Australian senate inquiry into suicide made available on the web its final report (The Hidden Toll: Suicide in Australia). A few minutes later, journalists started calling for comments and preliminary impressions. The delivery of the report was much awaited in the country. The inquiry officially started on September 10, 2009. Chaired by Senator Rachel Siewert, the Committee involved 10 more senators, 6 of them as regular members. The Committee received 258 public submissions plus a number of confidential reports. Between March and May 2010, the Senators held 12 public hearings in all capital cities of Australia. In essence, an enormous volume of information (of different natures, contents, and qualities) was addressed to Committee members and efficiently condensed by them in 199 pages (2010, p.169).’

As I have reflected upon previously on this blog, the entire Hidden Toll Report… process was an orchestrated sham by the Senate Committee, in which it employed the standard tactic of such committees here in Australia, that is, by restricting entry into the consultative process mostly to the usual suspects. The usual suspects, in the main, are those service providers and other hangers-on who the government funds or otherwise supports. For example, if you look at whose voices got a mention in the Hidden Toll Report… and whose voices got a chance to be heard at the incorrectly labelled ‘public hearings’, you will note a sycophantic pattern of ‘aren’t we all doing a swimmingly good job, and all we need to do is more of the same’…

Embarrassingly excised from the Hidden Toll Report… was any critical analysis of why suicide in Australia has been and continues to be a highly gendered phenomenon, with men outnumbering women in terms of suicide deaths by 4:1. I would argue that this purposeful ignorance, ably supported as it is by the puppets in the suicide prevention industry, fundamentally exists because the powers that be (governments, big pharma, big psychiatry, etc.) do not want the truth to be told. So long as suicide can be falsely constructed as the product of individual psychopathology and that suicide prevention remains an evangelical mission to spot and save lost souls, any unpleasant reflections on the socio-cultural milieu can be conveniently avoided.

While improving the accuracy of suicide reporting data will inevitably demonstrate that suicide is underreported in Australia (2010, p.169), I cannot see any utility in merely producing ‘bigger numbers’. What continues to be absent in the aftermath of any suicide death is an objective, evidence-based assessment of what might have led that man (or woman) to take their own lives. Too often, death certificates simply have ‘depressed’ or some such other useless information scrawled upon them, and so, we are deprived of ever knowing why one of our fellow citizens might have felt that pressing need to end their own life. Further, existing autopsy procedures make the critical methodological flaw of presuming, usually in the absence of evidence, that the suicidal person must have been mentally ill.

I should wait until the cows come home, to paraphrase Pr De Leo’s colourful turn of an old Irish phrase (2010, p.171), for any substantial shift in suicide prevention policy and practice here in Australia. ‘Groundhog Day’ is entrenched government culture, and besides, the ideological forces against genuinely exploring why 1600 men and 400 women choose, or alternatively, feel compelled to kill themselves each year are immense. In such a heavily censored environment, particular pertinent truths stay silenced…

• The pivotal role of child abuse in the later suicidal ideation of men;
• The pivotal role of masculine ideals upon the suicidal ideation of men;
• The non-existence of appropriate, whole-of-life support services for men; and therein
• The non-existence of appropriate, therapeutic services for men…

In light of the above, and that list was by no means exhaustive, counting or re-counting the number of deaths by suicide seems somewhat macabre, and akin to counting lifeboats on the Titanic…