The Voice of New Rochelle: Bias Baloney

Women have vaginas. There, I said it. And, now, since this statement coincidently applies to women only, I am guilty of misogyny, or some might have you think. Mount Vernon Mayor Ernie Davis is black. And now that he is being investigated for alleged misdeeds, allusions are being made that the local press is only covering the story because of his race, and the fact that Mount Vernon has a large black population.

The first of these anecdotes is an abstraction, of course, resulting from the dichotomy that it is such a true and intellectually absolute statement it is not really an anecdote at all. Yes, I am playing games. My secret is that I am playing games to counter the game playing that goes in the world of political correctness. It’s ironic, for all the crying the right does about things being unconstitutional, there is, perhaps, nothing more restrictive of free thought and injurious to the constitution than political correctness. This is especially so when it is used to obfuscate a simple truth or grind an agenda axe.   

My attention was drawn to a well-intentioned opinion piece in the New York Daily News by author Katherine Sharpe, who wrote a book entitled Coming of Age on Zoloft. She is upset that drug companies target women more than men in the marketing of anti-depressants. She writes that 93 percent of the ads feature women as their central figure. She goes on to note that, according to the Centers for Disease Control, 16 percent of women use anti-depressants, as opposed to 6 percent of men. I give her credit here for using empirical data. However, her conclusions dabbled in the time-worn assertion—if still true in many other circumstances—that women are stigmatized, in this case by their use of anti-depressants. 

Sharpe continues with accurate commentary of the stresses placed on women in these days of “having it all” and other vicissitudes imposed on their gender in a still male-centric world. The author also points out that men express their frustration differently and may need to take these medications nearly as much as women do.   

Well, what do you know? The real question is why all this truth is sandwiching a hissy fit?

Drug companies would advertise to iguanas if they thought they would buy and use their medicines. If beer companies could sell beer to auto manufacturers to lubricate engines they would not be marketing their product to jocks that think it is manly to drink lots of beer, eat chicken wings and pizza and yell at the television. Oh, we are so stereotyped, we poor men.

The fact is that many more women, for whatever reason, suffer from depression, or are at least more aware of it when they have it, than men. It is not right or wrong, or sexist or stereotypical—it is just so. It is also true that almost every kind of marketing directed toward women shows them smiling. I am going to be 63 years old this week, but never—not once—have I smiled while eating granola, running on a treadmill or taking an antacid. For goodness’s sake, they even have them smiling in TV ads when reading a newspaper.

In the mobbed-up neighborhood where I grew up, I learned something very early: If you wanted to know how good a baseball pitcher really was, you just asked a bookie what the line was. He is not a fan, a racist, a critic or a baloney artist. His is a business judgment, that if done without political correctness, emotion or bias, will feed his family. Today’s marketers are a lot like those old bookmakers. For whatever reason, women buy what they think will make them happy; and their emotions are targeted. Of course, not all women are this way, but enough to make others rich. Oprah figured this out—as well as women’s magazines and the drug companies—a long time ago.

One of the great ironies here is that Sharpe’s very book appears to be targeted to the same group. The headline in the news piece reads, “A Happy Pill in Every Purse.” It might have read, “A Book on Antidepressants in Every Shopping Bag.”

Closer to home is the heartbreaking story of Mount Vernon Mayor Ernie Davis. I have written at length, elsewhere, about his recent troubles with the feds. He is a man I like and admire. It seems to me that rallying to his cause on the basis of his color is a very large mistake. Certainly, the mayor deserves the presumption of innocence and, more so, is deserving of rallies to his cause on the basis of his accomplishments and long-time service to his city.

What is heartbreaking is that it has come down to this. Davis is a formidable and dignified man who can handle these allegations without the cloak of race to protect him. Davis needs the support of those who believe in him. What he does not need, in my view, is to be diminished by the assertions that bias is behind the investigations.