Essay About Male Discrimination

What men got and what men lost
- the discrimination against men

In present age, gender discrimination, especially male discrimination is increasingly controversial. Whether the discrimination against men exists or not has sparked much debates. Personally, although men enjoyed priorities during the old times, I admit the existence of male discrimination as men are now receiving unfair treatment in many concepts of their life, such as enduring worse working conditions and taking more responsibility of their broken family life. Male discrimination is undeniable in our modern culture.

A convincing argument can be made that our conventional culture is more tolerant and forgiving towards men. To start with appellation in both eastern and western countries, in most cases, married women have to change their last names into their husbands’ names. Even if one’s husband passes away, she is still called someone’s widow. This situation indicates that our custom deeply implies that females are only accessories to males. Moreover, our language also provides some evidences for us. In English, some specific words like “postman” ”fireman” “policeman”and”chairman” are all ended with a “man”, though these jobs are shared by both men and women. In Chinese, many derogatory terms are related to females. Furthermore, it is generally believed that boys are better than girls in some developing countries. To be more specific, in China, according to the news, the birth rate of boys and girls is 117 : 100, which normal rate should be 102 : 100. This abnormal rate is certainly caused by male superiority in some rural areas, because most girl babies are killed before they come to the world. Thus, there is no doubt that conventional culture has more obvious female discrimination than men. Apparently, men enjoy certain priorities from customs.

However, in the contemporary culture, discrimination against women gradually reduced. Dose this mean that men are being discriminated against more and more? The answer is yes. Admittedly, as feminism expands today, the whole society seems to pay more attention to taking care of women:

there are more and more female employees in each field and more women rights are taken into account. By contrast, not only in careers, but also in families, men get more unfair treatments. Because of old-fashion images that men have, like tough, smart, ambitious, it is generally believed that men suffer more stress than women from their careers. Here is an example. Last year, Foxconn, a famous electronics-products firm in China, revealed that 13 employees committed suicide in only one year. Among those 13 people, 9 of them are young men. This tragedy reminds us : Are men being respected? Are men being discriminated? The extra working hours, lower payments and more stress lead to high suicide rate among males. The truth reveals that men are being discriminated in their careers.

In spite of male discrimination in careers, in family life, men also have tough time. In most cases, females act the victims in families while males play the role oppositely. Base on the data that provided in Man trouble, most divorces are called by wives, at the mean time, most women get custody of children. The author of Man Trouble, Mayer says that it is cruel to bereave a men’s child-custody only because of outmoded stereotypes which demonstrate men as strong, careless people.
In fact, men need a complete family as women do. Therefore, it can be safely conclude that men discrimination definitely exists in our modern culture.

Even so male lost a lot ( like child-custody, leisure time and fair treatment ) due to the gender discrimination, but they still got certain power to influence our world in many ways ( economically, culturally and finically ). It is unrealistic to eliminate male discrimination in general culture, thus the only thing we can do is try to make efforts to reduce it.