Kropotkins_Bread [he/him]
The first upper-middle class runners
You’re conflating “white male” with “upper-middle-class,” which is inaccurate. (I’m a lazy bitch and unwilling to look up the stats, but significantly more white men are poor or working-class than upper-middle, especially depending on geographical region. Think Appalachia, the Rust Belt, the former Confederacy - any deindustrialized area.)
Anyway. White men’s life expectancy has been falling since 1999. In fact, white men kill themselves at twice the rate of every other ethnic group, excepting Native Americans. There’s two scripts here: the “traditional” psychoanalytic approach of why men kill themselves in middle age, versus the post-2000 rise in suicides.
The reasons ascribed for the “traditional” suicides are maybe sufficient for that type. The motivating factors ascribed to the “newer” type, which has driven the massive increases post-2000, are quibbled over but in some rough hierarchy it’s agreed that they’re economic (loss of industrial jobs), substance abuse (esp. opioids - think Sackler), and interpersonal (as neoliberalism drags on, their family structure continues to disintegrate).
TL;DR It’s a bit of a misnomer to think that the epidemic is among the PMC - rather, as always, it’s a massive and growing problem among working-class whites. The stat isn’t meaningless: as you say, it’s the canary in the coal mine. The takeaway is that neoliberal economic governance levels any liberal assumptions of racial “privilege” in a classed manner, to such an extent that more whites of the working class commit suicide, year after year. You’re right in thinking this is a crack in the foundation.
I’m a restaurant worker.
My dad had terminal cancer. It was almost certainly his last Christmas. I wanted to spend it with him, but was scheduled to work. I talked to the AGM, who said, “We should be able to handle that. Email me to remind me.” So I did - got the out of office auto-reply. Emailed the GM. Never heard back.
Worked up my courage, pulled all his doctors’ notes together, approached the other AGM. Launched into my spiel: “So, my dad has cancer, I brought --”
“If it’s about your schedule, I can’t help you.”
He’s dead now.
No, you just claimed that men hold the reins. This was almost certainly true once. At least in the U.S., not anymore - male mutilation has become a cultural issue as the “scientific” basis is questioned and the absolute rate drops. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/circumcision_2013/circumcision_2013.pdf
Men are just more likely to give strong pushback to criticism of the practice because it’s more personal
Do you have any sources for that argument? Or just an assertion about their psychosexual rationalizations?
It also happens to be that almost all of the medical authorities and researchers responsible for endorsing and promoting circumcision are circumcised men
Do you know that? Or do you just infer that they’re cut?
I organized a union and became a steward.