What if I were to tell you that our empathy was socialised? That our very view of men was warped through a cognitive distortion, where the evil, violent, and heinous acts of men get sent up by the media like a red flare, and the kind, brave, self sacrificing acts of other men, fall upon deaf ears, and fly under the radar. You’ll see it in the language our media uses, with words like ‘knifeman’, ‘gunman’, ‘male violence’ and so on, highlighting the gender of the assailant; and yet when men step in to intervene, to protect bystanders from such a threat, they experience the opposite, gender neutralized with “local hero”, “Good Samaritan”, “bystander” and similar. What about if the media did the same within victimhood? We’ve all read the headlines like: “900 killed in earthquake, including 200 women and children!” But who stops to ask who those invisible 700 are, and why they are never mentioned? And of course, there is the realm of “privilege”; a word that feels naked unless prefixed with the word “male” (and/or white), but never is it asked if the opposite exists, “male disadvtange” despite men falling behind in education, dying earlier, and vastly outnumbering women in countless societal ills. Combined, we call these four distortions “gamma bias”, a lens that distorts the good and bad of men, and once you see it, it’s hard to ignore… So let’s take a look. - BPS https://tinyurl.com/yp2a7x8n

2025-09-03