17.
“Having our issues constantly compared to women’s issues, with the conclusion that they always have it worse.”
“Or the frequency with which it will be brought around to ‘men’s problems are caused by men’ before dropping any consideration for men at all.”
“There was a men’s rights activist on UK television a good few years ago now, but in a nutshell, his thesis was that men are also subject to sexism on a regular basis.
The problem with it was that the presenters’ first question was essentially ‘Do you just hate women?’ — they then also had a ‘feminist’ on the segment who did nothing but denigrate his arguments with ‘what about women?’
Now, as far as I can recall, the bloke was very fair in the presentation of his views and was using his voice to try to raise awareness of men’s issues. The problem was that it was automatically seen as dismissing women’s suffering, which he wasn’t doing.
It’s things like that that leave me completely unsurprised about the rise of the Andrew Tates, and manospheres in the western world.”
“Man, I just had this exact experience listening to NPR over two days. The first interview was with a male researcher from the UK talking about the ‘male loneliness epidemic/crisis,’ which, from what he presented, is basically all of the top comments in this thread, backed with some data and also going into some suicide data, and other factoids. He basically boiled it down to the fact that men have few avenues toward meaningful relationships with others, and the areas where historically relationships could have been made for guys have disappeared or been co-opted by manosphere bs.
It was a good interview, but then the next day, the host had on a woman who came on just to kind of denounce everything the guy said. The host was laughing and jovial, basically just completely negating any serious attempt to talk about issues men are facing today.
The thing that really gets my goat about these conversations and the usual redirecting of them to women’s issues being more important, or men’s issues not really even existing to some, is that that ignoring these problems is just going to create more hurt men in the world who hurt others.
If people want men to be better, then they need to take their problems seriously, because the alternative is to let things keep getting worse for everyone.”