Jay, you misunderstand my post. I deplore violence - all violence, however, it is stupid to force only the men to have counselling, as if the female in the equation had no input. It really does take two to make a quarrel, so the female's contribution has to be taken into consideration. There is nothing more inane than someone insisting that 'He hit me for no reason.'
And how conveniently everyone forgets the other points of serious disadvantage mentioned in the article. Why, for example, are we told on the News that there are more suicides per year than road deaths and other accidents, but we are not told that 90% of these suicides are males! This is enormously important to anyone concerned about the mental and physical health of men - but I note that women are not, in fact, particularly concerned about men. They think we're wimps if we're sensitive, and beasts if we're not. The only men they tolerate are those who constantly tell them how beautiful they are, buy them presents, accept the blame for everything and apologise at least five times a day for being a male. There is a great deal wrong with our society, and silly point scoring is not going to improve anything.

ybgirp,

I disagree that women aren't concerned about men.

However, I think the mode of dependence has shifted to such an extent in modern times that it's skewed natural propensities somewhat. I go back to the point that I made earlier - that modern arrangements in the Western world mean that women are not so dependent in a physical and practical sense on men as they were in former times. The same goes for our dependence on our neighbours and our close community. Contemporary society provides all sorts of services and supports through institutional and societal constructs that weren't available in former times. These have usurped to some extent the protective essence that men provided for women and children. Society - and particularly women - have no doubt become quite blase as to their own vulnerability under such circumstances. It's possible these days to go about one's business and have very little to do in a meaningful sense with one's fellows. it's an independence we're granted because society has been set up that way. It's a society that has been fashioned by men, Women have merely jumped on the bandwagon and bought into the modern construct.....I wonder where it will lead?

Poirot, you seem to be suggesting that today men have become more or less useless [compared to earlier less protective eras]. Do you therefore think that this feeling of superfluity is a cause of male susceptibility to illness, suicide, bouts of anger and violence and all the other problems besetting them?

ybgirp,

Do you really think I'm suggesting "...men have become more or less useless (compared to earlier protective eras]..."?

That is not what I mean at all. It's that gender roles have become less well defined because we inhabit a society that is highly mechanised, so that our technology has enabled a kind of androgynous participation by both sexes...compared to the well-defined gender roles of traditional societies.

I believe this rapid evolution of changed behaviour in Western society and its consequential blurring of the lines is particularly confusing for men......although I'm not at all sure that my chosen word of "confusing" is apt - but you get my drift.

Thank you Poirot. Confused is a good word, and applies to women as well as men. Both seem torn between natural evolutionary urges that sustained and protected us until technology eased the burden of mere survival, and the current unnatural urge to be free of all external constraints, resulting in the expectation that individuals have the ability not only do whatever they want, but also the inalienable right to do it, and whoever gets in their way has to be shoved aside.
Yes, this is an egregious generalisation and obviously doesn't apply to either of us, but there is a trend in Western societies towards rejection of reality, belief in 'magic' and 'fairy god mothers' that has the predictable result of disappointment, resentment and anger.
It's a very complex problem and is only going to get worse. Previous societies have 'solved' it by locking women away, as my mother and grandmother were - not literally, but kept supervised, always chaperoned, forced to obey parents and behave 'respectably'. Muslims took this a little further and many religious sects are returning to this mould. Could our entire society see a return to that sort of treatment of females who, when I was twenty, were not permitted to open a bank account without a male sponsor?
During the last ten years neo-puritanism has reared it's ugly head and censorship is on the increase, indicating a desire for authoritarianism among certain sections. The only certainty is that the future is uncertain - especially for women. But if even the most hopeful predictions are true, we'll soon all have far worse things to worry about than gender roles... our survival seems increasingly to be in doubt

Ybgirp,
I don't believe things are going to get worse, I subscribe to the cyclical view of history not the linear one, however in hard times men need to protect women and women need to realise that they can't protect themselves from men from outside their group who want to kill or take them for their own. In the last line of your post you betray a lack of understanding of Gender roles and prove the point about tactical thinking being a uniquely male virtue. It's expected that women will daydream about these scenarios where things are going to become worse for them but it's men like me who are thinking about how to kill or drive off the outsiders, the oppressors or the transgressors. If in the unlikely event that som theocratic or ideological group did begin to "oppress" Western women the only way the situation could be reversed is if the Men Of The West physically attack the system and defend their women with their lives as they've done in the past, there's no confusion of gender roles in the minds of real Men Of The West.