Don’t miss this terrific book! Highly recommended!

Society Kills Men: Feminism Loses When Half Are Held Back. By Kenneth T. Jolivet. Markham, Ontario, Canada: 10-10-10 Publishing, 2019. 322 pages. No price information on book; Amazon gives price as $14.99. Review by J. Steven Svoboda.

Retired Air Force officer and holder of four academic degrees, Kenneth T. Jolivet has published a book that walks the line between being an updated survey of men’s rights and a personal account of the author’s encounters with feminism.

The author starts us right off with a perspective rarely if ever presented in the literature, an analogy of sorts of our treatment of men with China’s treatment of women. Jolivet notes that in China, “8.5 women commit suicide for every 7 men…. Boys are valued more in this culture than girls…”

Jolivet possesses that all too rare ability to effortlessly see and draw connections between seemingly unrelated issues. He writes of the Surgeon General’s finding that loneliness is as harmful as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, concluding, “It’s time we stop thinking of suicide as individual acts, and begin thinking about the health of the human race!”

The extended discussion of modern dating is another example of the author both delving into issues not discussed very often and offering a perspective integrating various issues. I think Jolivet is 100% correct that it is ridiculous that modern women stop being modern when the check arrives on a date. (This was my universal experience on hundreds of dates with 45-50 different women when I was single.) And are the people talking about getting affirmative consent for every step in the courtship process people who actually know a living man or woman and who have ever actually been on a date themselves in their lives? Truly mind-boggling. As the author puts it, “drunken sex (both drunk) is not rape—it’s simply drunken sex. If you can’t drink and drive, perhaps you shouldn’t drink and date.” Another myth the author rightly implodes is this idea that all “rapes” are created equal: “[T]here’s no way you can tell me that a husband ‘raping’ his wife because she really did it out of duty, or whatever may be the case, is the same as her being brutally raped by a violent, ugly, smelly, dirty stranger in the bathroom of a bar or in an alleyway. And for feminists and others in their support of feminists, not to recognize the varying degrees of offense, trauma and damage to the victim, only denies the real victims of rape the true sympathy and support they deserve and need.”

The author is right to address the disgustingly anti-male guidelines of the American Psychological Association (APA), more or less a psychological equivalent of the extremely antimale Duluth domestic violence program. The APA is claiming through its catchphrase “toxic masculinity” that male strengths such as stoicism, competitiveness, and physical strength are linked to violence depression and suicide. Speaking of domestic violence, Jolivet discusses the extreme unhelpfulness of police towards male domestic violence victims and notes that at least 21 percent of the time (I actually suspect the true number may be higher), police refuse point blank to arrest a female, even in some egregious and repeated cases of violence.

Schools are feminized and rather than trying to make up the difference to boys for the unfriendly learning environment, boys are instead being shamed for being themselves. Shockingly, boys have now fallen behind girls in ALL seventy (!) of the largest developed nations. It all started with basically outright fraud regarding some alleged studies from Harvard’s Carol Gilligan and from the American Association of University Women (AAUW). Which brings us to our current world, with boys greatly behind girls in EVERY grade (!), yet the Department of Education advising, “The Department does not fund any initiatives that just focus on addressing boys’ underachievement” [italics added]. Of course not, because feminism, while ostensibly about “gender equity,” cares only about special rights for females.

Women now greatly outnumber men at universities and dominate twenty out of thirty of the fastest growing professions. There is a female majority among both doctors and lawyers, and an 80 percent supermajority among veterinarians. Nor do males have to wait until adulthood to experience the shadow evidently cast by their sex, as apparently now starting at age seven, both boys and girls agree that girls are smarter.

Some of the events we hear about less are really the most tragic, like Durham University’s refusal to allow formation of a men’s society that was not an adjunct of a feminist group! The student requesting the new organization “wanted to start a men’s group after a male friend of his committed suicide. He felt male depression and suicide wasn’t being taken seriously, and that men were supposed to just man up and deal with it.” In the end the group was deep-sixed with the puzzling explanation that it was “too controversial,” apparently referring to stopping men from killing themselves.

But all is not dire! In Betsy DeVos, and her efforts to draw up recommendations regarding campus trials for alleged sexual misconduct, “Perhaps for the first time in a Western Democracy, we witnessed a woman in a powerful office of state acting neutrally, rather than on the interests of women.” And today (as I write this in May 2020) DeVos, working closely with the National Coalition of Free Men), released revised and greatly improved Title IX guidelines. (Both the author and this reviewer are NCFM members.)

Jolivet queries what happened to feminists with the “inequality” of men predominating in the twenty most dangerous jobs? They manufacture the fallacious “gender pay gap” and leave unaddressed the very genuine “casualty gender gap” as the author calls it. Male babies die 30 percent more often in the first year of life. Government response? Zero. Men’s health is under far greater challenge these days than women’s health. And so we have, what, six offices of men’s health as we do for women? Or even one? Nope. Zero. Instead “there are at least three times the amount of gender specific health services for women as there are for men.” And two (two!) domestic violence shelters exist in our entire country that accept men! Stupefying.

A couple quick caveats about this excellent book: The author can get slightly petulant at times. It’s TOTALLY justified. Just would be nice if it didn’t happen. And not all of us reading this book are Donald Trump fans! Don’t force us to be that in order to agree with you!

Even as women receive preferential treatment, greater preferences are demanded, as with the push to stop incarcerating females for non-violent crimes, when they already enjoy criminally (if you will excuse the term) lower average sentence lengths and rates of prosecution.

Paternity is another of those heads-feminists-win, tails-men-lose issues, where astonishingly everything could be fixed with the simple solution the author calls for of testing all babies for paternity at birth. That way a child knows his or her real father and men are not forced to pay for children that are not theirs. Well, we know why this is not in place by now, right?

Here’s a great little nugget of information: “the court bias against men is six times worse than racial bias.” How about that?

“The term misogyny has without a doubt been weaponized to silence men. Anytime a man has an opinion that’s counter to what feminists and many in the media want to hear, they instantly revert to calling the man a misogynist or woman-hater, just for daring to point out an alternative view or facts that go against a woman’s opinion.” And again: “We’ve seen wave after wave of updated or new laws that attempt to make women’s lives as comfortable as possible, as if they’re the only ones being harmed or suffering.”

Don’t miss this terrific book! Highly recommended!

NCFM PR Director Steven Svoboda Esq. book review, Society Kills Men: Feminism Loses When Half Are Held Back