Introduction

If you live in the west there is a good chance that you have been fed this narrative that women are at a disadvantage, and that men have so much privilege.You may have even heard authoritative figures give examples of these supposed privileges, but i'm gonna show you why the narrative that men are the privileged gender, and that women are the oppressed gender is a false narrative.

I'm gonna start off by showing you studies that help to explain why this narrative is pushed even when there is data disproving it.

The biased view of male victimization & female perpetration.

Man up and take it: Gender bias in moral typecasting

This research paper has six studies showing that people have a bias that makes them more readily typecast men as perpatrators, and women as victims.Here is a video of one of the researchers going over the study.There are other studies that corroborate the findings of these studies.

Moral Chivalry: Gender and Harm Sensitivity Predict Costly Altruism

Here we illustrate that across different types of moral dilemmas, and under both hypothetical and real contexts, moral choices to harm another are conditional on the social nature of the moral dyad and are thus relatively context dependent. Specifically, we show that moral behavior is modulated by the gender of the target individual, such that females are more readily protected from harm and are more often the recipients of costly altruism compared to their male counterparts.

Estimating gender disparities in federal crime cases

This paper assesses gender disparities in federal criminal cases. It finds large gender gaps favoring women throughout the sentence length distribution (averaging over 60%), conditional on arrest offense, criminal history, and other pre-charge observables. Female arrestees are also significantly likelier to avoid charges and convictions entirely, and twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted.

When a Man Hits a Woman: Moral Evaluations and Reporting Violence to the Police

We use experimental data from a nationally representative sample to examine whether gender and the victim’s relationship to the offender affect attitudes about the seriousness of the offense and whether the offense should be reported to the police. We find that respondents are particularly likely to condemn men’s assaults on women, and to favor reporting them. The pattern appears to reflect both greater moral condemnation of men’s assaults on women and the belief that the victims of these assaults are in greater danger. In general, moral judgments and attitudes toward reporting do not depend on the gender, age, level of education, or political ideology of the respondent. Condemnation of men’s violence against women, and support for police intervention when it occurs, are apparently widespread across different segments of the population.

There are also examples of this bias manifesting in real life.

Inquiry for missing & murdered indigenous women did not include men ,despite the fact the majority of missing & murdered indigenous people are men

The conscious neglect of men and boys in the war on human trafficking

Un is responsible for hundred of thousands of men starving to death through negligence

The gendering of the Rwandan genocide

The media ignoring male victims of the Kosovo war

Women and children first in humanitarian evacuation in the balkans

Men's health is given less attention then women's even though men have worse health outcomesThere is no office for men's health, and there is also less fundingfor gender specific health research for men.(see pages 55-61)

More concern given to female murder victims in Cicudad Juarez even though they are the minority of victims

Multiple examples of the media erasing male victims

Double standard in public abuse against men and women

What happens when male victims of domestic violence seek help?

The talk laughs at the story of a man who got his penis cut off by his wife

Judges told to be more lenient to women criminals

So by now you can probably see why this one-sided narrative exist.Now I'm gonna give examples of how men's issues and disadvantages are hidden to give people the impression that a lot of discrimination and suffering is gendered.

Hiding men's issues and Disadvantages

Domestic violence

Domestic violence is often depicted as a man severely abusing a women, and even in the Duluth model domestic violence is seems as something only men do to women to have power and control over them.(see the power and control wheel).

In reality domestic violence happens to both men and women, and there has been efforts made to [deny gender symmetry in domestic violence One method used is to simply conceal the evidence of women committing domestic violence against men by excluding the data.

Donald dutton who is an expert on domestic violence did a presentation debunking the narrative that domestic violence is a gendered issue.To summarize most domestic violence is bilateral meaning that both men and women are violent towards each other.When you look at unilateral domestic violence women are the perpetrators more often then men.

Rape

Rape is typically thought of as crime that men do to women, or other men.However, rape against men by women is something people overlook, or may not even consider to be real.This is because a woman forcing a man to penetrate her is not consider rape to a lot of people.This is the UCR Definition of rape.

penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim. Attempts or assaults to commit rape are also included in the statistics presented here; however, statutory rape and incest are excluded.

As you can see they don't include made to penetrate in their definition of rape.However,there was a study done that shows that when you do include made to penetrate in the definition of rape the rate of victimization between men and women is similar.

The survey found that men and women had a similar prevalence of nonconsensual sex in the previous 12 months (1.270 million women and 1.267 million men).5 This remarkable finding challenges stereotypical assumptions about the gender of victims of sexual violence. However unintentionally, the CDC’s publications and the media coverage that followed instead highlighted female sexual victimization, reinforcing public perceptions that sexual victimization is primarily a women’s issue.

Mary P. Koss had a major influence in erasing male victims of rape.She does not think men who have been made to penetrate should be consider rape victims.Here is an interview with her.

Genital Mutilation

There is a double standard in the way we view female and male genital mutilation.Female genital mutilation is met with way more condemnation then male genital mutilation.Just as an example the UN and the WHO oppose female genital mutilation, and see it as a human rights violation which is great, but I don't see them doing the same thing for male genital mutilation.As a matter fact, they even supported a campaignthat promoted male genital mutilation.These are the main justification I hear for why we treat male genital mutilation differently from female genital mutilation.

1.Female genital mutilation is more harmful then male genital mutilation.

2.The benefits of male genital mutilation outweighs the risks.

Both of these arguments are invalid and I will explain why.First off, if you look at the WHO's and UN's stance on fgm, you will see that there against all forms of fgm,even type 4 which can even include a nick to the clitoral hood.That is objectively less severe then cutting of the foreskin of the penis.So harmfulness is not a valid reason for the difference in the way male genital mutilation is treated.

Second, the studies on the benefits of male circumcision are flawed.Here is a video going over how the methodology of these studies are rigged to show that circumcision is more beneficial then it really is.Also,a lot of the benefits of circumcision can be had by using condoms and practicing good hygiene instead.

There is really no justifiable reason for the difference in the way we treat female and male genital mutilation.

Measuring Gender Inequality

The Global Gender Gap Report is a report of gender inequality.They use four sub indexes to analyze the the level of gender inequality in a country.Education Participation and Oppurtunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Enpowerment.There methodology is designed to only look at penalize cases of female disadvantages, and ignore male disadvantages.Here is a quote from the report

Hence, the Index rewards countries that reach the point where outcomes for women equal those for men, but it neither rewards nor penalizes cases in which women are outperforming men on particular variables in some countries. Thus a country, which has higher enrolment for girls rather than boys in secondary school, will score equal to a country where boys’ and girls’ enrolment is the same

The way they determine gender inequality is by using a score of 1 to indicate gender equality, a score of less than 1 to show female disadvantages, and score higher than 1 to show male disadvantages.Except when there are male disadvantages the score gets set back to 1 which indicates that there is gender equality.So the report shows that women are disadvantaged in every country

Now,If we look at a different tool used to measure gender inequality called The Basic Indicator Of Gender Inequality which was created by two psychologists, but is not backed by any major organization.You will see that the methodology is similar to the one used in Used in The Global Gender Gap Report, except they do count men's disadvantages.They analyzed 134 countries and found that men were more disadvantaged on average in 68% of countries and women were more disadvantage in 32% of countries.

They also make sure to only include measures that are representative of the entire population.So for example, they exclude measures of political power because that only applies to a small minority of the population.It's a much more fair and accurate way of measuring gender inequality, but it's not backed any major organization because it doesn't help push the narrative that only women are at disadvantage.

Conclusion

The Gender empathy gap is real, and is very well documented.I will end this post with a link to a video that does a good job of showing the empathy gap.