Modern American Cultural Scotoma

What is that? As defined by Marriam-Webster, a scotoma is “a spot in the visual field in which vision is absent or deficient.” In other words, it’s what’s commonly referred to as a “blind spot.” By a purely random event, I recently discovered that I had a big one—so big in fact that my perspective on many things has been drastically altered in ways I had never imagined.

The catalyst for this discovery was a 2017 documentary film I happened to watch one evening entitled The Red Pill: A Feminist’s Journey into the Men’s Rights Movement, by then self-proclaimed feminist film producer, Cassie Jaye (Jaybird Productions). The premise of the film is just as the title suggests; Cassie Jaye embarked on this project as an avowed feminist, doing research on the “men’s rights movement”— something many feminists had branded as nothing more than a group of “women-haters, whiners, victim-blamers, and rape apologists.” But the data Cassie found revealed something far and away different from what she, and most Americans, had been led to believe.

For example, the term “domestic violence” is generally conflated with violence against women. However, data from a 2014 CDC report showed that while 4,774,000 women were victims of intimate partner violence during the previous 12-month period, 5,452,000 men were victims over that same period—nearly a million more men than women. She also found that while on average, 43% of domestic violence victims are men, government funding supports over 2,000 battered women shelters nationally (shelters that do not accept men), but only one shelter in the country that serves the needs of men.

The entire notion of “patriarchy” was thoroughly and thoughtfully challenged, not with rants and raves, but with credible arguments and data. While the feminist view points out disparity in the workplace for example, as in the vast majority of corporate CEOs are men, and women only earn on average 57-77% of what men earn, the film delved into rarely considered data regarding men. Some examples of those facts are:

Men have higher rates of homelessness, drug and other addictions, incarceration, unemployment, and failure in school than women. Little notice has been paid to the fatality rates of men vs women, whereas 75% of suicides are men, 76% of all homicide victims are men, 94% of work-related deaths are men, and of course, 99.9% of combat deaths are men. And men receive 63% more prison time for committing the same offense as women.

In light of all that is happening today—Senator Mazie Hirono’s advice to men notwithstanding—I found the film to be credible, compelling, and enlightening.

I highly recommend it to anyone seeking to know if they too suffer from the all-to-common, “Modern American Cultural Scotoma.”