I’ve always found discussions of comparative victimization to be unhelpful, even damaging. I recall when there actually were public debates over which was worse: slavery or the Holocaust? How insane! More recently, we saw the debates over which was more prevalent during the 2008 primary campaigns: sexism or racism? When obviously both of these poisons were all over the place.

There is never any “objective” way to measure one group’s victimization and suffering versus another’s. Even for those who (wrongly) believe that there is, what is the prize here? Suppose you can claim that your group is the winner. Do you get a big badge showing you are the Greater Victim?

So I encourage recessionwire to avoid the pointless question of whether we are or aren’t in a “mancession.” The current recession is hurting millions of women, millions of men, millions of workers from every generation, millions of workers from every racial and ethnic group. That, in my view, is what’s important.

“The current recession is hurting millions of women, millions of men, millions of workers from every generation, millions of workers from every racial and ethnic group. That, in my view, is what’s important.”

Bob, while your view is noble, it is still very wrong. First off, a great deal of the job losses were in industries like manufacturing and mining which simply aren’t coming back even when the economy rebounds. Also, even many male heavy white collar jobs like management and IT are being outsourced to foreign countries where the labor is 50% (or less) than the American male with a graduate degree and experience commands. Third, look at the long term cultural trends: far more women are graduating from college than men. As the shift from a farming/manufacturing to knowledge/service economy completes, virtually all jobs will require college educations that men aren’t getting.

None of this gets paid any attention to by academia, who insists upon believing that as long as America is run by “the patriarchy”, men will always be around to give each other high paying do nothing jobs. Ten to twenty years from now, when a huge percentage of the male population will be unemployable for anything other than low paying unskilled manual labor and we lack an education system or culture conducive to producing a mindset in most males that causes them to work hard or compete for anything better, people are going to see what I am talking about.

I still remember when the first discussion of the huge gap between females and males entering college began to be discussed. It never would have been discussed in the first place had it not been for conservatives working outside the academic mainstream like Christina Hoff Sommers, but it was all dismissed, with the claim being made “oh that’s just because men know that they don’t need to go to college to get a high paying job, so instead of working on getting more men into college, we need to pass laws that will force daycare workers to be paid the same as truck drivers, riveters and electricians.” Well, now we see the unemployment rate for college graduates at 4%, and the unemployment rate for men whom we were told never needed college in the first place at 3 to 4 times that, and many of them only skilled or experienced in jobs that aren’t coming back, and many of them lack the educational background or mindset or the financial/lifestyle flexibility required to go earn that degree in nursing, physical therapy, social work or early childhood education thanks to an educational system that has been failing to meet the needs of males for the past 30 years.

So Bob, while I admire your good-hearted and evenhanded approach to this issue, it is still an approach that does not reflect “the reality on the ground” because it is lacking in many key facts. Two years from now, when the economy fully rebounds and these men are still out of work, you will only begin to see what I am talking about. But again, it will take 10-20 years for what I am talking about to get really prominent: when what is left of our industrial and farming base gets completely wiped out by foreign competition, when outsourced technical and managerial labor gets normalized, and when the number of males in college will be as low as was the number of females in college in the 1920s.

Realize this: when it was the males having most of the jobs, especially most of the high paying ones, they were very willing to be the heads of households and support women (not only wives but mothers, grandmothers, and other female relatives) and children (including their own male and female children well past adulthood if necessary). But 25 years from now, will women be willing to support their husbands, let alone other male relatives? As that would take a dramatic and rapid cultural shift of the likes never seen in human history, I have real doubts.