It's been a triumph of moral progress that the female gender role has been so examined and largely deconstructed. Tragically, men have experienced no such liberation anywhere near that same extent. If anything, modern society has chosen to double-down on male gender roles. I've made amateur attempts at armchair sociology and anthropology to understand why the male gender role seems more resilient to change, and I'm curious whether others have considered this question.

Male advocacy may be fundamentally more at odds with men's gender role than female advocacy was with women's. I suspect feminism succeeded first partly because traditional gender roles—despite their serious problems—included a social attitude that women deserve protection and provision, and are a legitimate demographic for society to help. The double-edged nature of this, of course, is that alongside the empathy came infantilization and sexist beliefs about women's incapability. Nevertheless, the feminist movement may have leveraged aspects of the existing female gender role to its advantage.

Traditional male gender roles, by contrast, offer no built-in starting point for male advocacy. It's difficult to convince society to help the sex that, under rigid gender roles, is expected never to need help. If a man needs help, then according to cruel evolutionary logic, he's probably not fit enough to reproduce anyway and represents a liability to the species. It's uncomfortable to acknowledge that both the "gender empathy gap" and "women are wonderful" effect have likely roots in evolutionary psychology. To be absolutely clear: I'm not suggesting that something being "natural" makes it morally good. That would be a catastrophic error, and I'm firmly opposed to Social Darwinism (the ideology behind eugenics and other atrocities). But it's worth understanding the true nature of what we're up against. Male advocacy may require humanity to transcend a part of our caveman brain that we haven't yet overcome.

We've already transcended mountains of evolutionary baggage before, so it's not impossible. But still strikes me that men simply don't have the home-court advantage when it comes to asking for help. When men ask society for support, maybe some primal adverse gut reaction kicks in: "If the men need support, we're screwed. They're supposed to be protecting and providing for everyone else. If we allow them to become weak and dependent, we won't have anyone to defend us." Almost like a "you can't protect the protectors, that's their job" type logic.

It does make me wonder what, if anything, might already exist in the male gender role that would serve best as the most effective launch pad for male advocacy. The path for male liberation will likely have to leverage different social attitudes, especially if the empathy gap is too large to be overcome on the grounds of empathy itself. Regardless, our best bet is probably to continue building solidarity and healthy community with other male advocates, and keep tossing out objective stats and legal inequalities (which are harder to dismiss) while practicing peaceful protest and growing a movement.

Unfortunately with solidarity, here too men lack the home-court advantage. Women have about a 4.5x stronger in-group bias towards other women than men do to other men (citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women-are-wonderful_effect, in group bias section). Male advocacy is such a uphill battle, it feels like. I think the cultural winds are moving a bit more in our favor, and being a doomer gets you nowhere, but it's worth acknowledging what true gender equality is up against.