YOU MEAN, WE NEED MEN?  WELL, YEAH – AT 9:24 A.M. ET:  A new study by the University of Michigan – not exactly a conservative bastion – suggests the staggering possibility that men are of some value to society.  You might want to put a plain brown wrapper on this story before reading it in a public place.  You know, people are watching.  From the Deseret News: 

Youth violence shoots up when males are missing from the neighborhood, concluded researchers at the University of Michigan in a new study released last week.

The study centered on Flint, Mich., the former auto manufacturing center that is now one of the most impoverished and violent cities in the country. Researchers broke the city down by zip codes, comparing the number of males in the area to the number of assaults committed by young men.

The results were striking. Researchers found an enormous chunk of the difference between a neighborhood with lots of youth assaults and one with relatively fewer could be explained by “male scarcity.” While a difference of 3 to 5 percent would have been significant, Daniel Kruger of Michigan’s Public Health Department and one of the study’s authors, found that 36 percent of the difference was explained by lack of adult males in the neighborhood. Add one other mammoth variable — high school graduation rates — and you get 69 percent of the variation in assaults committed by young men.

In Flint, Kruger said, the absence of males can be traced to three factors: men who left to look for jobs; young men who have died in gang violence; and men who are incarcerated.

“When we don’t have men as positive role models, we get much higher rates of violence,” Kruger said.

It's a vicious circle, the authors say. When young men get caught up in crime, they are more likely to end up incarcerated, which results in fewer adult males in the community, which leads to more dysfunction.

COMMENT:  This is common sense, something too many Americans took leave of in the late 1960s.  Traditional values didn't become traditional because they failed.  They became traditional because they succeeded.

I am all for women's rights and opportunities.  Absolutely.  But being for equal rights does not mean neglecting the needs and aspirations of young men, and that often happens these days.  Unless the male-absence issue is solved in many communities, those communities will simply die, or become wards of the state.

But I doubt if too many fashion plates in journalism or the academic world are listening.

January 6,  2014