Do women with brothers understand the struggles of men better

Pola_Lita · 2025-02-02T11:25:34+00:00

I don't know how it could be avoided, in the same way that men who grew up with sisters are likely to have a better understanding of women. Or even having had a set of twin siblings.

How could anyone spend the most formative part of their lives with one type or other without gaining some solid insight?

Anecdotal: I grew up with only sisters (lots) and men continue to baffle me.

Disastrous-Chart-928 · 2025-02-03T00:40:56+00:00

Yes, I have a couple brothers and a sister. Having an autistic boyfriend was also very enlightening. I was torn a part when I realised how disgustingly short sighted I was in my femcel era, I feel immense guilt almost daily and that probably fuels my 'pick me' activities on here.

The average woman wouldn't last one month as an average man, they can't even comprehend just how crushingly intensive it is mentally and physically, and they ESPECIALLY can't grasp how lonely it is romantically.

My boyfriend and my brothers are way above my level physically and mentally, like they're objectively all tall good looking guys with jobs, but they don't have a smidge of the options I had. I don't even work yet I had the option to just embrace my femininity and find a man that can provide for me, men simply don't have this option.

Inb4 "umm having a partner does not = quality of life sweaty!" Yea good luck living alone comfortably in 2025 where everything is priced with two people in mind, unless you want to live with your parents your entire life.

OkSun6251 · 2025-02-02T04:25:52+00:00

I think I have empathy for men, or at least my bros because I have brothers. However, not everyone has the same struggles and so far none have had the main struggles people complain about here. Some are young though, so time will tell. Love them so much thougu and pray they have happy good lives. Maybe because I’m the oldest, but I’d take all the pain in the world to ensure their happiness.

grasso86 · 2025-02-02T14:49:18+00:00

Lol listened to my older brother lecture me on how if I wanted to be christian marital rape was inevitable and christians don't believe in divorce. So thats a big fat NO. Most of my brothers (I have 4) were assholes and bullies just because they could. I have no empathy for the struggles they create for themselves. One of my half brothers is a kind and decent person. I have empathy for his struggles but they still seem pretty mild. He was given the world on a silver platter, but he has good character and integrity so he doesn't mistreat others or use his advantages over them. He is a good brother and a good person. I wish the best for him.

AngeAware · 2025-02-02T03:42:32+00:00

Funnily enough my SO is the one who gave me insight into men who struggle with dating, not my brother. My brother is a very calm, charismatic, and sociable person so he never had any of the troubles I've seen men on the internet complain about. Recently I was reading about "black guy on the admissions brochure" vibes and that is exactly him in a nutshell.

He curbed the captain of his high school's dance team (made up of some of the prettiest girls from our local private schools) because she led an unofficial fan club for him in middle school and he couldn't get past the cringe of remembering that.

Slipthe · 2025-02-02T03:58:03+00:00

No, talking to my dad has given me immense sympathy and awareness of dead bedrooms though.

My brothers never struggling romantically. They royally fucked their own lives up and now just can't live up to their potential.

FishermanWorking7236 · 2025-02-02T15:52:17+00:00

My brother hasn't really had issues dating, when he was younger he had a gf that was kind of terrible, but that's typical teen dating. He's had the same girlfriend a few years now and is happy with her. In terms of shit he has mentioned it's mostly things like him being defaulted to when it comes to lifting things at work sometimes (which is a valid annoyance since it interrupts him) and having to organise meet ups with his guy friends.

bluepvtstorm · 2025-02-02T13:43:33+00:00

No. I hate my brother as a person. I would have less empathy for men if I had to use him as a gauge. He’s kind of a garbage human and I feel bad that the earth is subjected to a person like him. His only real contribution is when they hopefully burn him and the carbon he produces helps another life form.

missmireya · 2025-02-02T04:04:29+00:00

Ehhh...I try to be. But I'll be honest- I'm not that empathetic because my brother changes his mind and beliefs every 5 years it seems.

He went from being atheist, hating women (yes, he admitted to this) and never wanting to get married nor have kids. Because "marriage and kids are for suckers".

Then all of the sudden when my brother turned 35, he changed his mind and now has gone in the polar opposite direction.

He is almost 40, is now god-fearing and religious, says he wants a much younger wife and a big family with "no less than 5 kids".

At this point I'm just fucking annoyed. Not because of his beliefs, but because he can't stick with anything he says. Tbh I think it's a mid-life crisis.

My father had a much worse mid-life crisis and ended up leaving us. He ran off with a 17 year old girl and made an entirely new family with her. As far as I know, they are still married to this day.

Needless to say, I have serious problems with being sympathetic towards men.

learn2earn89 · 2025-02-02T04:23:11+00:00

Yes and no. Both my bros are short and have been successful with women. They admitted that other men were the ones who gave them shit for being short.

I will say one of them is married to a psycho bitch but the other one is with a sweetheart woman.

They do require more persuasion and reasoning to coax them into doing things for their own good cause it seems they have attentional deficits, could be the testosterone? They don’t seem to think as long term as myself.

Men and women alike have bad people. I think that should be understood by everyone.

SwimmingTheme3736 · 2025-02-02T07:11:59+00:00

I have a brother and sons. Of course I have empathy to the difficulties men face, but the men I know in real like are nothing like the men here

Tylikcat · 2025-02-02T20:47:39+00:00

Ahaha, gods, yeah, that isn't going to help much. I empathize with men because I have a lot of close male friends. (And colleagues. And students - I just spent an hour on zoom with one of my students who wanted some more help on linked lists.) But my brothers?

So, one of them (half brother) ran his motorcycle into a telephone pole at 80 miles an hour with his girlfriend on the back. He had a history of doing stupid and dangerous things, that and having his girlfriend on the back is mostly why this was thought to be accident rather than suicide attempt (AFAIK, there wasn't any sign that he was suicidal, though considering our family, who knows?). He was eighteen. I was two. So, he didn't have a lot of direct influence on me.

The other was nine years years younger. (I'm one of seven between my father's two marriages, the eldest of the second marriage.) When he was little, I was pretty involved in the raising of him - or, at least, I tried to protect him from the awfulness that was our family, especially during our parents' divorce, which was pretty brutal. And he had a legitimately terrible childhood in many respects, if also in many ways a fairly privileged one. I moved out on my own when I was fifteen, not in the least because our dad kept coming over to threaten and try to lay hands on me and my mom refused to change the locks... so there was a lot I missed. (And because I was one of the few people he respected, my brother was vastly less of an asshole with me than most people, so I tended to see the best side of him.)

When the sister between us in age was fourteen, the situation with dad became dangerous enough for her that I helped her escape (literally she packed a bag an climbed out her window at midnight - she'd been locked in her room.) I offered to help my brother escape, and he refused. This offer was repeated at various times.

In his late teens, he developed bipolar 1. Which was treated, and he went off to a private university in new york, fully funded by our father. (For contrast, our father cut off child support and his share of tuition for me at our very high quality state university for me when I moved out on my own when I was fifteen, and I had to take him to court to have it reinstated. My sister had a kid when she was nineteen, and our parents agreed between them that this meant they weren't paying for her college - I paid for her professional education, later.)

And then he moved to san fransisco, and spent most of his twenties being support by our dad while he mostly partied and sometimes played at being a musician. (He was a pretty good DJ, but he never really studied music or practiced? But he was convinced it was his destiny to be a rock star.) Oh, and did a lot of drugs, which led to him being in rehab for opiate abuse. During this whole period, my sister and I tried hard to keep in touch with him, though we often traded off because he could be pretty fucking obnoxious. (How many rants can you hear about how everyone is jealous because he's smarter than them? Though I got less of that than our sister, because he had decided I was smarter than him.)

Around the time he turned thirty, or soon after, I think he started realizing that he was never going to be a rock star. (Dude, you could have studied music? Practiced? Learned to sing? Something?) And he started spending more and more time on online, and getting more involved in first anti-feminist, then general anti-diversity, and men's rights stuff, and eventually white supremacy. I was on the other side of the country working on my doctorate, so I missed the first bit of this (he didn't bring it up when I stopped in SF to take him out to dinner). I first found out when several of my friends in the Seattle arts scene contacted me because he was threatening to kill a well known writer (who he had been in classes with in middle school - he got weirdly obsessed with her. Um - I don't think I've mentioned that he was gay? But it was a stalkery hate obsession.) Which meant I got to go lurking through a lot of the darker and weirder parts of alt right shit on the net.

Realistic-Ad-1023 · 2025-02-02T05:51:27+00:00

My brothers are absolute losers, as are two of my sisters and honestly I feel zero empathy for them. It’s a long story but they’re the trash that you use as an example not to feel sorry for men/women/poor people/whatever intersections they claim. They’re the worst. They never grew up and blame their childhood for everything. And not in a “this is the reason I do things but I do x, y and z to combat that.” No no. “Wahhh mommy had a boyfriend and that’s why I’m lazy and have no ambition and use people and smoke pot all day and had a bajillion kids I can’t afford!”

I have empathy for men and support men’s rights because I’m an intersectional feminist who believes that the patriarchy has hurt men, and they also need support. In different ways depending on their intersection of oppression. I’m an advocate for lots of intersections I don’t claim, because I understand the nuance of those intersections affecting your life, much like my own. That and I know not all people are my siblings. They’re the minority of humans. Most humans don’t live like that, don’t want to live like that and aren’t scum bags.

fiftypoundpuppy · 2025-02-02T06:16:53+00:00

My brother has struggles, but women have never been one of them

And he's a 5'7" gaming addict 🤷🏿

Honestly he is part of the reason I think social skills are more of the reason behind the "struggles of men" than OLD or "hypergamy" or feminism, and that is also supported by the comments and excuses made all up and down the "male loneliness epidemic" posts

He may be why I'm less sympathetic to the "struggles" of men here, cause even though he games too much he's always had friends and known how to talk to people

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attendquoi · 2025-02-03T14:01:43+00:00

I have a younger half-brother, but we never lived together so we aren't particularly close. He went through a manosphere phase and I basically stopped talking to him during that time. We don't talk to now for different reasons lol

Outside_Memory5703 · 2025-02-13T04:24:52+00:00

I don’t need to have a brother to understand that men are hornier than women, and will thus be much more desperate and unsatisfied.

Because women don’t want to fuck them as much as they want to fuck women

CatallaxyRanch · 2025-02-02T04:53:51+00:00

I have two brothers. They're significantly older than me and neither of them were ever losers so I'm not sure it gave me much insight into that.

Quinfie · 2025-02-02T09:38:17+00:00

If you mean in regards to dating, then neither of my brothers have any issues with that.

ThatBitchA · 2025-02-02T05:26:37+00:00

My brothers never struggled. 🤷

Having 4 brothers taught me that men don't have many struggles.

False-Purple3882 · 2025-02-02T23:54:02+00:00

What struggles of men? And why are women expected to give out energy that isn’t reciprocated?

Title	Do women with brothers understand the struggles of men better
Author	burneraccountguydude
Upvotes	26
Comments	138
Date	February 2, 2025 12:34 AM UTC (1 year ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/PurplePillDebate
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/PurplePillDebate/comments/1ifkvcw/do_women_with_brothers_understand_the_struggles/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/PurplePillDebate/do-women-with-brothers-understand-the-struggles-of.1542735 https://theredarchive.com/post/1542735

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