Jack
Is it me or does the confected ‘Offence Olympics’ surrounding Laurence Fox and the attempted Chinese Communist Party-style media circus cancelling of GB News hold rather a stench of the Roger Scruton Tapes scandal about it?
The parallels are evident.
Four-and-a-half-years ago it was George Eaton, the then-deputy editor of the New Statesman magazine, who manifested a 900-word article following a taped interview in Scruton’s own home to declare, essentially, one of the country’s brightest and best Conservative thinkers a “right-wing racist and homophobe”—a celebratory sentiment shared by Eaton via his personal Instagram account (below) after Scruton was fired by the then-Conservative cabinet as an unpaid ‘housing commission’ advisor for the misrepresented comments perpetuated in Eaton’s bad faith piece.
As Douglas Murray would go onto expose in The Spectator at the time, this, indeed, was a “modern hit job” swiftly executed by a “modern outrage mob”.
Today, Eaton’s mantle as the outrage mob’s snide conductor can perhaps be held by Ava-Santina Evans, a former producer of LBC Radio’s James O’Brien Show (need I say more?) and current “political correspondent” at PoliticsJOE—a self-described “social media lifestyle network serving the interests, passions and curiosities of the modern man.”
Really?
If that were true, it’s rather odd to me that one of their more familiar reporters (if truth be told, I’d never heard of Santina until watching Murray query her [lack of] “career” on TalkTV), would be able to find so much indifference to the gravely real epidemic that is male suicide by discussing it in terms of “feeding into the culture wars”. I mean, in what twisted universe could such a reaction be deemed as serving the interests of the modern man?
Coming to a head on BBC’s Politics Live just last week, it was left to Geoff Norcott, a fairly familiar nationwide comedian, to bravely take up the baton in favour of the government’s potential prospect of creating a new ‘Minister for Men’ to oversee and find solutions to the very specific issues and disparities that affect men, young and old, across the country, including suicide.
Flanked by Santina and joined by Conservative MP Damian Green and Labour’s Baroness [Frances] O’Grady (who quite despicably rounded up the debate haranguing Norcott about his perceived lack of action against female sexual harassment), the pointed angle of the seven-minute exchange was set up from the start when presenter Jo Coburn, turning to Norcott to ask about his new book, led with the question,
“Men have obviously, and arguably, taken a lot of flak, rightly, in the past few years many people would say post-hashtag ‘MeToo’, is this an attempt to rehabilitate the image of an average bloke?”
A lovely little dig at us ‘average blokes’ as a whole to begin the discussion, I’m sure you’ll agree. Heaven forbid we forget the idea that we’re merely one homogenous bloc of potential Hollywood rapists just waiting to pounce from the shadows.
Asked if he’s in favour of the ministerial proposal, Norcott bluntly went on,
“What’s interesting about that is the hostility it sometimes faces whenever it comes up…I thought if you flipped those things, i.e. it’s the biggest cause of death of men under 50 is suicide, men are less likely to go to the doctors, men are less likely to maintain friendships…If it was for women, we’d often look at why is society making that happen, whereas with men, the argument is often why are they doing that to themselves. I’m not like totally wedded to the idea but the hostility to the idea I find instructive.”
Showing all the tact necessary of a JOE Biden word salad to prove Norcott’s “hostility” point for him, Santina swiftly deflected his argument into a rant about mental health in general, highlighting a “seven million”-strong waiting list for childhood mental health prescriptions.
“It’s a crisis that’s endemic throughout the country, not specific to men”, she said, still sitting there as the official serving the interests of the modern man representative.
The irony was palpable. And in more ways than one.
After all, this was a contributor of PoliticsJOE, no less, a predominantly pro-lockdown*, trans-ideology-pushing* media channel for young people—two of the world’s foremost drivers, in recent memory, of…childhood mental health (*see links for details).
But the absurdity didn’t stop there.
“If we look during Covid”, Norcott attempted to explain, “men were literally more likely to die from Covid”, an unchanged fact backed up quite substantially around the world since the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“But who was doing all the work during Covid?” Santina objected. “A lot of the time if you looked in people’s households, it was the women who were taking on the laundry, the school care, all of that, alongside doing their jobs.”
Oh, but of course. It was the men’s fault that women were safely at home folding shirts and not dying, unlike the stone-cold men in the morgue. Sure. How dare they.
Norcott tried again, “I mean, literally, the biggest killer of men under 50 is suicide, that is an arresting statistic and if that doesn’t warrant specific attention—”
Stopped in his tracks and interrupted, again, hands clasped and shoulders back in her chair, Santina’s pretentious nonchalance sought to serve the interests of the modern man one final time,
“I have to say that is because women are unsuccessful [committing suicide], a lot of that feeds into that statistic.”
The one-upmanship of suicide statistics, of all things, spewed and spat out like one endless stream of “progressive” projectile vomit.
Yet the rightly arresting statistics remain.
Men, both in the UK, and similarly, worldwide, unfortunately account for the highest proportion of suicide deaths compared to the female population.
As per the most recent 2021 analysis from the UK government’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) in England and Wales, approximately 74 per cent of all annual suicides registered (5,583) were men (4,129).
Looking at trends since 2010, men aged 45 to 64 years have had the highest age-specific suicide rate over time, with 20.1 deaths per 100,000 males in 2021; comparatively, across the same age range, also highest in women, data showed 6.7 deaths per 100,000 females.
Other key findings that correlate with the tragedy of male suicides, such as substance abuse, homelessness, and mental health attitudes prove stark reading:
According to the latest government records measuring the breakdown of drug and alcohol services between April 2021 to March 2022, there were 289,215 people in contact with interventional treatment centres; more than two-thirds of this group, or 67 per cent, were men, compared to 33 per cent of women.
Across all four substance abuse categories for opiates (heroin), non-opiates (cannabis, crack cocaine, or ecstasy), non-opiates plus alcohol, and alcohol-only, men accounted for an average of 67.5 per cent of all users.
As for homelessness, a notoriously difficult problem to assess with pinpoint accuracy, ONS data in England alone from 2018 regarding “rough sleeping”—just one of many devastating forms homelessness can take—found that 84 per cent of rough sleepers were male and around 94 per cent were aged over 25-years-old.
More recent figures from the UK government’s Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities Autumn 2022 “Rough sleeping snapshot in England” report, which estimates the number of rough sleepers in one single night, tends to back up the same trend with 83 per cent of rough sleepers found to be male, 82 per cent of whom were over the age of 26.
Combined with the added disparity of only 28 per cent of UK-based men willing to access mental health support services versus 71 per cent of women, sadly, plenty of fuel is consistently primed to meet the fire.
All this, just the tip of the iceberg, of course, but do you know what matters more?
The ego and “victim” mentality of the supposedly “physically sick” pub posing PR programme-hopper, Ava-Santina Evans, a woman on-record for revelling in anticipation for any man falsely accused of rape, just so long as they’re “frightened” to even flinch within any woman’s presence.
My goodness. We men deserve better.
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