Alright so if any of you have actual academic articles on this sort of thing send em cause I’m just speculating and word vomiting here.

In anthropology there’s a historical philosophy of it called evolutionary anthropology, which believed all societies went through the stages of savages-barbarians-civilized. This idea is now no longer popular and seen as racist and flawed. It’s also an idea that was used both as rationality for capitalism and communism as both used the idea to say they were the final stage in human civilization, at least historically.

So where this comes into men’s rights is that people seem to have retained this view in regards to progress and civil rights. We tend to see the world as countries being various stages of reaching “equality” (this also applies to lgbtq and especially racial/ethnic issues but I won’t go into thar now.) Women’s rights are generally seen as the measuring stick for this, and because of the dominant framework being patriarchy, I think this tends to limit people’s abilities to see men’s issues as having existed historically, worsening, and not being addressed. Because under this progress assumption, most if not all male issues (that aren’t co-opted as actually misogyny in disguise) should be solved, and in patriarchy they shouldn’t really exist.

Of course we know from places like India, which is generally viewed as being low on this evolutionary progress scale, as men face many issues still and many stem from feminist/progressive action it seems. This does mean that women don’t face very legitimate issues, rather it means that the needs and issues of men and women are different everywhere and that progress does not happen smoothly or linearly