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The initial OP posted below covers it well enough: the premise of this thread is that men's issues exist. Don't bother posting if you don't believe there is such a thing.
Here's hoping this isn't considered too redundant. I've noticed that our existing threads about sexism tend to get bogged down in Oppression Olympics or else wildly derailed, so I thought I'd make a thread specifically to talk about discrimination issues that disproportionately affect men.
No Oppression Olympics here, okay? No saying "But that's not important because women suffer X which is worse!" And no discussing these issues purely in terms of how much better women have it. Okay? If the discussion cannot meaningfully proceed without making a comparison to male and female treatment, that's fine, but on the whole I want this thread to be about how men are harmed by society and how we can fix it. Issues like:
- The male-only draft (in countries that have one)
- Circumcision
- Cavalier attitudes toward men's pain and sickness, AKA "Walk it off!"
- The Success Myth, which defines a man's desirability by his material success. Also The Myth of Men Not Being Hot, which denies that men can be sexually attractive as male beings.
- Sexual abuse of men.
- Family law.
- General attitudes that men are dangerous or untrustworthy.
I could go on making the list, but I think you get the idea.
Despite what you might have heard about feminists not caring about men, it's not true. I care about men. Patriarchy sucks for them as much as it sucks for women, in a lot of ways. So I'm putting my keyboard where my mouth is and making a thread for us to all care about men.
Also? If you're male and think of something as a men's issue, by golly that makes it a men's issue fit for inclusion in this thread. I might disagree with you as to the solution, but as a woman I'm not going to tell you you have no right to be concerned about it. No "womansplaining" here.
Edited by nombretomado on Dec 15th 2019 at 5:19:34 AM
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I agree, I was responding more to Fourthspartan56 noting that women are raped, abused etc because they are targetted by toxic masculinity.
I don't believe that rape or abuse will stop if we just reform the social concept of masculinity.
Again, I realise I might be missing something in the argument being made; if so, I'm interested to learn more about it.
There has to be a reason violent crimes are so overwhelmingly commited by men. If biology isn’t the reason (and I’m pretty sure science has disproven the idea that testosterone makes people more aggressive), then all that’s left is culture and education.
What parts exactly is harder to pinpoint though…
This thread turns to "but what about women, though?" with disappointing regularity. It's almost like there's a widespread societal attitude that harm done to women is more important than harm done to men. Weird how that works.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.If I had to guess it's a case of Men Act, Women Are. Men are taught to be more proactive, women are told to sit and wait for others to act.
It being biological I don't think can be ruled out yet (something with different brain structures, perhaps), but it's also a potentially dangerous bioessentialist argument that would need a ton of evidence before we can take it too seriously, or else it might get used by more sinister forces (such as say, TER Fs).
There's something that my Dad remarked once, and I can't say if it's actually true or not but seems intuitive to me. Basically, men are quicker to resort to violence, but are a bit more "casual" about it, pulling punches and such. By contrast, women are slower to resort to violence, but when they do it's done with pure malice.
If it is biological, I can think of an evolutionary explanation: Men Are the Expendable Gender. Generally, men dying is less destructive to a population than women dying. Also, paternal motherhood (the mom taking care of the kids actively) is a lot more common than paternal fatherhood (the dad taking care of the kids). In fact, humans are kind of the odd one out, and I'd imagine even in humans single child-raising mothers are less common than single child-raising fathers (at least until men became the primary income-earners).
So, if the above is true, then you have a situation where men are more likely to be...drifting about, while women are more likely to be taking care of children by themselves that can't survive without her. An evolutionary pressure could exist for women to avoid violence and similar dangerous situations than men usually do.
However! You must take this with, not just a grain of salt, but a spoonful of activated charcoal. This is because what I've possibly, even probably, just done is take an existing social norm and imposed it on my perception and reframed it as an inevitable and natural biological reality.
Leviticus 19:34I think the issue is that toxic masculanity and their issues is a point mostly rise and even refer as feminist taking point and while good, feminisn can be somewhat gynocentric in tendecy so it does run the problem or focus more in how it afect woman and how men need to better parners/brothers/father/etc.
I and mean....yeah that is right but it can be limitating to a degree since it focus more on how men need to be good for the sake of other instead for is own, it dosent help that any men group focus on man turn into a manosphere pretty damn quick.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"What parts exactly is harder to pinpoint though…
Men on average are far stronger than women. This biological tendency allows men to resort to physical coercion more easily than women. Therefore, it doesn't surprise me that men are more likely to commit acts of physical aggression that reach the level of violent crime.
I'm not saying it's all about biology, I'd expect other factors to also have an effect. However, I'm not convinced that it can simply be reduced to culture and education.
That somewhat explains why there’s a higher rate of male on female violent crime compered to female on male violent crime, but most violent crime is perpetrated both by men and against men.
An average physical advantage against women doesn’t make sense as a factor in men committing violence against men. Because that advantage against women doesn’t help a criminal attacking a man.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranI do wonder if part of it is caused by men being more likely to be convicted of crimes anand recieve harsher punishments when they do, but that wouldn't near account for all of it. I really dunno why it is this way.
You need blood and he's got more than enough!![]()
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In practice, some boys and men will have quite a large pool of people they can physically dominate, which will include boys or men who are either physically weaker or who they are able to intimidate.
The pool of people most girls and women can physically dominate will tend to be smaller.
Therefore, perhaps men are more likely to develop a habit of reacting to problems with physical aggression, which may lead to criminal violence.
To be clear, I am suggesting this is an influence on male violence, not what causes it. I'm sure there are many different factors involved.
It is quite simple when you look at the way boys are taught from a young age how to interact with others.
We are taught to emotionally distance ourselves from others, especially other boys. We are taught that it is “girly” or “gay” to be emotionally intimate with other boys. Otoh, we are encouraged tacitly to be aggressive, to be violent. “Boys will be boys”.
With girls the opposite is true. They are discouraged from being violent or angry lest they be dubbed “hysterical”. Otoh, it is expected that they be more emotionally intimate with other girls.
The result is that boys are conditioned to primarily express themselves via aggression.
Disgusted, but not surprisedThis thread turns to "but what about women, though?" with disappointing regularity. It's almost like there's a widespread societal attitude that harm done to women is more important than harm done to men. Weird how that works.
If it bothers you that I mentioned the harm to women caused by toxic masculinity then you'll just have to deal with it, it's directly relevant to the topic at hand.
People frame reforming masculinity as helping women because that's what it would do. That men would also be helped by that does not make it less true.
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangJust gonna say that chalking anything related to toxic masculinity up to biology is a very dangerous route to take. Biology has an impact on behaviour, sure, but it’s used as a copout to get out of having to admit that, no, we actually teach a hell of a lot of extremely toxic behaviours that aren’t anywhere near being biologically ingrained.
Men who are not traditionally masculine also commit sexual assault and related offences.
The most obvious example is assault in gay relationships where neither party cares about traditional masculinity.
I believe so much focus on 'masculinity' obscures the insidiousness of sexual assault.
The argument that it's about 'toxic masculinity' seems overly reductive, but maybe someone can tell me what I am missing.
What you're missing is that when someone says that toxic masculinity causes rape they're almost never arguing that it causes all rape.
It's true that not all rapes can be attributed to it, it would be absurd to seriously argue that the women who rape are doing it because of toxic masculinity. But that doesn't mean it can't be a major source of rape, it doesn't need to cause literally every rape to be a major contributing factor to them in-general. Which is backed up by the science
, the men who rape because they're sociopaths are far outweighed by the ones who rape because they're motivated by toxic masculinity and thus see raping women as acceptable behavior.
It's true that rape would still exist in some form even if toxic masculinity vanished but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be greatly reduced. And given the evidence there is very strong reason to believe it would.
Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Feb 16th 2023 at 4:34:08 AM
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangToxic masculinity influenced rape also includes the cases where the guy thinks consent cannot be withdrawn, that consent is just a formality or that there's no point to checking in with the other person to see how they're doing. Women can be taught to be very subtle about any changes of mind in that context (usually it's taught unintentionally) and men aren't taught about that at all.
Edited by Zendervai on Feb 16th 2023 at 8:18:57 AM
Women are taught from a young age to be accommodating of men's egos. Hence why they don't always outright say "no".
That's why a general rule of thumb when it comes to consent isn't just the absence of "no", but an enthusiastic "yes".
There's a book The Spire in the Woods (which used to be an online serial novel), where one of the subplots is that the protagonist ends up raping his crush. Even creepier, it's a first-person pov. He completely misses the obvious discomfort the girl is showing and simply assumes that her not saying "no" means she's consenting.
Edited by M84 on Feb 16th 2023 at 9:24:04 PM
Disgusted, but not surprisedWhile I can believe that there's probably a biological aspect to how our brains are wired depending on sex since sexual dimorphism
is a thing, I would really approach this with pincers because of the potential bioessentialist argument that can pop up.
Even then though, I think humanity as a whole leans more towards "Nurture" in the Nature vs. Nurture scale for this issue, so even if there were (and I say if) a biological aspect to explain why some of the things that make toxic masculinity up exist -such as excessive stoicism or an encouragement to violence- that doesn't mean society ought to encourage it.
It returns to the Lack of Empathy aspect of toxic masculinity. Because men are discouraged from being in touch with emotions or caring about them in general, it means the subtle changes of mood during intercourse can be missed or dismissed entirely.
Instead of focusing on relatives that divide us, we should find the absolutes that tie us.It's like...always take evolutionary psychology with a grain of salt, because the field has a bad habit of assuming a societal thing is a biological thing.
Most fields of psychology can easily dip into that (Behaviorism is awful at helping people who are handling toxic masculinity poorly) where they lose track of what counts as an influence or not and where a source of stress might be coming from, but because evopsych has a problem with being able to dig up evidence (because we really don't have a very good idea of how pre-agriculture humans really thought) and because the late 1800s-1970s sciences had a really nasty problem of assuming the Anglo-European approach to things was the baseline.
I think the latter thing might be part of the reason a lot of frats end up with such a fucked up culture with so many strange rituals. It creates a bunch of frameworks where it's okay to have physical and emotional intimacy with other people since, if it's a frat ritual, it's not gay, right? It's tradition! It also goes a long way to explaining why a lot of former frat members have such a strong emotional connection to their frat, because they feel like it was the only place they were able to open up at all.
Unfortunately, since the culture is defined and run by young men without a good handle on their emotions and what works or not, and usually with some toxic masculinity already in their upbringing, they end up extremely toxic cultures and viewpoints getting shared.
Edited by Zendervai on Feb 16th 2023 at 9:51:50 AM

Sure, I want claiming that’s all violent crime is linked to toxic masculinity. Though it’s entirely possible for people very obviously harmed by toxic masculinity (like gay men) to buy into and propagate elements of toxic masculinity.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran