What first got you interested in Mens Rights issues? Did it happen gradually or did you have an epiphany moment when you realized men are treated as second class?

griii2 · 2026-04-15T17:45:19+00:00

Grew up identifying as feminist. Got attacked by feminists online for being male.

Old_Wall_6159 · 2026-04-15T17:28:44+00:00

I never thought about it until I went through a divorce/custody battle.

brainhack3r · 2026-04-15T18:19:43+00:00

It seemed reasonable that women should be treated with respect. That part always made sense to me - still does.

The turning part was when my ex attempted a false sexual assault extortion against me to try to get money.

My lawyer said to settle for $75k because it would cost more in court cases just to defend myself because he said "when a woman cries in front of a jury, they tend to believe her and not the man."

Then I looked back at my life and I realized that a lot of shitty things that have happened to me were because of women. Not because of men.

I think it's FAR worse now than most men imagine, including those in the MensRights forums.

HALFWAYAMISH · 2026-04-15T17:30:53+00:00

Becoming a professor.
Publishing a book.

RyuujinPl · 2026-04-15T19:18:35+00:00

It was gradual for me.

I grew up with two older sisters, and the message everywhere — at home, at school, and on TV — was that girls were being discriminated against. At around 8 years old, I never doubted it. It felt as obvious and unquestionable as the sky being blue. I even distinctly remember thinking how lucky I was to be a boy, because life would be easier for me.

Over time, though, I started noticing that boys didn’t get any easy pass. If anything, it was girls who consistently received preferential treatment — both at home and at school. At home, it was always excused by the fact that my sisters were older. At school, I assumed the teachers just didn’t like me personally and that’s why I was treated more harshly. But some incidents were so blatant they were hard to rationalize. For example, the time the entire class of boys was collectively punished severely for some misbehavior I hadn’t even witnessed.

Still, as a kid I fully absorbed the constant message that “boys are bad, violent, and stupid. Girls are smart and caring.”. That was the worst part of all that messaging because between ages 11 and 15yo — I genuinely felt ashamed of being a boy and believed that the most I can achieve is to be "less bad".

It was only later that I gradually accepted the world worked very differently from what people loudly claimed. I began revisiting old memories and seeing them in a new light. Many of the experiences that had stayed with me (like being consistently beaten and punished by my father for crying at age 7) had happened specifically because I was a boy. My cries for help to adults due to abuse at home were ignored for the same reason. As an adult, I can now see that much of the treatment I received from teachers was immature, unjust, and clearly driven by prejudice.

Nowadays, I see far more nuance in life. Double standards exist everywhere, and being a man is definitely not easy. I’m very careful not to claim that women have it easy — I’ve never lived as a woman, so I won’t pretend to know. But I’ve also become very allergic to women who confidently declare the exact opposite while dismissing men’s struggles.

men-too · 2026-04-15T18:54:38+00:00

A brutal and devastating divorce after years of doing “everything right” as a committed/dedicated nice guy.

(Typical red pill that allowed me to see the sheer darkness of the feminist agenda.)

GracefulRobot-HW66 · 2026-04-16T00:09:12+00:00

I got tired of hearing constantly from the media that women are always the victims of everything, when in fact I was doing most of the heavy lifting in my relationship. Women here, women there. It was always about women. Constant pounding from the media pushing this victimhood narration in everyone's heads. Men? Never. Men don't have issues. Men have all the power. Men are always the problem, always trying to undermine the growth of women. I remember hearing this nonsense from the news while I was moping the floor. While the media took constant delight in insulting our gender, day by day I used to prepare meals for my wife, clean the house while she was away, fix broken stuff, take care of taxes, be her emotional support throughout 15 years of endless self-pity. I was everything feminists said they wanted from a man. Sensitive, dedicated, romantic, forgiving. I struggled to make her feel happy because her happiness mattered to me, only to be rewarded with a growing lack of attention towards our relationship and a lackluster sexual life. I felt taken for granted and underappreciated. When I started researching men's issues to understand if I was being abused, my reward were accusations of being anti-women that eventually spiraled into divorce. A divorce I requested, though with great sorrow, only because my relationship had become hurtful to me and I genuinely needed to protect myself from emotional harm. One of the things that hurt me the most was her mother saying to me "I have to defend my daughter, even if she were a serial killer". So much for the intellectual honesty of self-righteous feminists. Now my life is ruined and I've been left alone by the person I showed the most care for, only for demanding more attention. And people say we're rotten. Uhu. Well at least I ain't your bitch anymore.

SidewaysGiraffe · 2026-04-15T18:13:59+00:00

Becoming a Cub Scout (the pre-Boy Scout arm of the BSA, for the unaware). As a toddler, I'd gone along with my mother when she'd lead my sister's Girl Scout meetings, and I'd seen what they got up to; we got to do WAY more cool stuff, and that didn't seem fair to me. When I asked my mother about it, she said "girls like different things than boys do", which seemed reasonable, but when I asked my sister, she said "that sounds like WAY more fun".

When you see something that's not right, point it out, and get told "no, that's right" by people who can't explain the discrepancy but refuse to renounce it, you start looking for more examples, and the rest follows on from that.

dsakc12 · 2026-04-15T18:50:11+00:00

Nearly getting divorced due to my wife’s actions as I learned that my nice guy tendencies were not working at all. Then seeing discrepancies between the oppressor narratives against men and all the female favoritism I saw in the workplace. Beating guys over the head with anti-male narratives while praising women and keeping them above criticism sealed it. The more looked, the more I found and I can’t unsee it now

Pretend-Storm4566 · 2026-04-16T02:44:22+00:00

I was always aware. But what got me into the online movement was watching some Karen Straughan videos. Not at all uncommon, she is known as the gate way to the non-wokeness.

Alert_Term_8144 · 2026-04-15T19:25:06+00:00

25-30 years ago, I noticed there were tons of "girls empowerment" programs, and not so much for the boys. Then online, I keep seeing women accuse men in general of repressing women for thousands of years, as if the people alive today are 5,000 years old and had anything to do with that. I see them bitch about the wage gap (which is false, for the same job) when men die in workplace fatalities 10x more than women. Women are allowed to make money- they are celebrities, CEOs, politicians... they have power and whine that they don't, that the guy who works as a custodian is repressing them. When a man speaks, he's told by women he doesn't have a right to since he didn't have that experience, yet it's "believe all women" as if women can't lie (they do). Everyone acting like only women have problems, even though men die by suicide almost 4x more. It feels like opposite world "don't belive your lying eyes." It's 1,000 microaggressions every day. I hate unfairness and hypocrisy which is why I'm interested in Men's rights even though I'm a woman.

bulimic_squid · 2026-04-15T23:55:15+00:00

Was writing a fictional dystopian story about a female led future, and needed to research feminist groups and subs to try and ground it in some kind of reality with gender essentialism in the current era. I went undercover in a bunch of groups.

Discovered that feminism is a really fucked up cult. That led me to question a lot of things, and to resolve a lot of the abuse I'd suffered at the hands of females as a child.

And here I am.

Working_Parsley_2364 · 2026-04-15T18:48:00+00:00

I mean, it was pretty obvious to me ever since I was a little kid and started gaining the basic societal awareness. Even when I was very little I could see things such as only girls being allowed to wear skirts and dresses, being allowed to grow their hair long, and the toys that I wanted to play with being "only for girls" which I realised later in life was because men are the class that is primarily meant to do the heavy lifting and things such as caring roles are usually reserved for women, Then growing up it was me being hit by both boys and girls without them suffering from any consequences from it, being taught to always put women and girls' wellbeing first and me bring taught to do all the typicall male tasks around the house, also growing up in a country that still had millitary conscription I had to think about how I would most likely have to serve whereas women didn't (it got at least temporarily cancelled when I reached adulthood but it was still something that I had to worry about back then) then I learned about circumcision (I wasn't cirrcumcised but just the fact that my parents could have taken me at any time they wanted when I was a baby, a kid or a teenager and have it done against my will was extremely scary) to being an adult and surviving things that feminists claim can't happen to men such as Sexual Harrasment, SA and being violently attacked when just sitting out in public after refusing adavnces from a woman.

And then the fact that I would get silenced by the feminists for talking about it and demanding justice and an end to female supremacy got me completely away from feminism.

And I understand that people from different countries and walks of life may ahve differing experiences, my issue is that we get silenced for demanding justice whereas there are thousands of international organisations that support women and advocate for them.

emo-ctrl · 2026-04-15T18:50:44+00:00

When I found out that civil rights and due process do not pertain to men, ‘Silver Bullet’ spousal legal abuse woke me up, and no family members warned me about it.

Comprehensive_Baby53 · 2026-04-15T19:08:58+00:00

My brother actually introduced me to the double standard of hiring practices in the US. He was working in journalism and making headway in his career when the whole "we need more women in positions of power" movement really ramped up around 2015. He had been writing articles for several travel magazines and he realized that a lot of people in his industry were being fired and replaced by women, who would fire the men under them and hire women. There were other issues too but that was the first time I realized there was a systematic effort to take jobs away from men and give them to women for no reason. Eventually the axe came down on my brother when the magazines replaced him with female writers. In my opinion that is discrimination and bad business practice to hire & fire people just based on sex. If it happened to women there would be a lawsuit but no one cares about men losing their jobs.

roharareddit · 2026-04-15T20:07:02+00:00

I spent three years working in higher ed administration. It didn't take long to realize that there is a war being waged against men and boys in all levels of education.

Billmacia · 2026-04-15T20:20:47+00:00

I grew up like most average white western men : In a liberal system that preach feminism and say that they are for "equality".

But I realised, that when you start asking questions about the narative of feminism and this "equality", you get ostracize. The dating market really open my eyes about women, because I tought I was broken. But deep down the rabbit hole, you finaly see it. Feminism is a supremacist movement and women will never care about men.

FrontOperation7154 · 2026-04-16T06:05:34+00:00

Bunch of women-privileged Victorian era chivalric garbage laws that are relics of colonialism, unfortunately our pathetic politicians didn't care to remove them (I'm froma India btw)

Sonarconnoisseur · 2026-04-15T23:18:55+00:00

It was the constant misandrist headlines in the early 2010s. The woman quotas that came up everywhere. Constantly being faulted for everything wrong in the world

House-of-Raven · 2026-04-15T19:10:07+00:00

Always been a proponent of equal rights. I’ve argued for both men’s and women’s rights. But it seems like men are just so much further behind these days

A_Vinegar_Taster · 2026-04-15T19:28:51+00:00

I've always believed in equal treatment for everyone. Sure, there are differences and the sexes have different strengths, but I had internalized the first wave feminism of being cool and not thinking either sex was superior to the other. As time went on, the world kept changing, and I started seeing more and more people hating men openly, and treating us like we were the problem. As you all probably know it kept getting worse and worse.

The real breaking point was with an ex of mine who was super-woke. I just tried to avoid the topics where she would talk about how all of the problems in the world can be tracked back to men. Not my finest moment. When I finally ended things with her, I went full MGTOW, just wanting to stay away from women and all of the hate that seemed to flow out of so many of them.

Oddly, this was when I met the love of my life. She's almost more anti-feminist than I am. She's wonderful and she treats me like an equal. But, this isn't what you were asking us....

I first got interested in Men's Rights in secret when I dated a shrill woke woman. When I dumped her, I went full MGTOW. Then I found my unicorn.

AlternativeOption313 · 2026-04-15T20:43:07+00:00

I think what really sparked it was looking into the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard case and similar cases of women abusing men back in I wanna say April 2022.

Along with that, there's also personal experiences like my mother and grandmother being abusive pieces of shit and being sexually assaulted by a girl in my class in March of 2022, so it was gonna happen inevitably anyway.

nathanv70 · 2026-04-15T21:12:50+00:00

I watched my dad get divorced, my brother get divorced, my brother in law get divorced, more than a few friends get divorced and THEN, I did some research and holy bananas.

Single mother stats vs single father stats Divorce statistics in general and then by group Child support laws

I could go on but wow

datyams · 2026-04-17T04:35:48+00:00

When I was in highschool and got my back up about the fact that breast cancer care/treatment/research is funded at a rate 2.5x that of prostate cancer and was promptly lit up by the teacher, other chick's and their Simps.

4captainclaw · 2026-04-17T10:11:31+00:00

I had pretty positive views on feminism when I heard about gender neutral languages, equal housework and the like. Many feminist yt creators framed it as something that benefits everyone. Eventually, I realised that these concerns about gender neutral language or equal responsibility were only talked about when it benefitted women. The media considering men as less valuable in wars or disasters (or in similar situations)and feminism's refusal to even acknowledge it as devaluing men is my main criticism of feminism.It was around the time I installed reddit and realised what real feminists believe. I started seeing "progressive", feminist commercials, movies and songs portraying violence against men as humour, and feminism turned a blind eye to or even justifying the same(like Sabrina Carpenter).

thisismymgtowaccount · 2026-04-15T20:02:21+00:00

It was probably around the time that the MGT0W subreddit was banned, yet actual hate subs, like inc3lt3ars and f3mal3datingstrat3gy still exist. I had found a community here, that had helped me to better understand male-female relationships, through pattern recognition. Seeing family, friends, and colleagues going through messy divorces, and identifying the common issues, along with the failings of the court system, made me realize that we are not actually equal. That, and being a broke, late 20s kid, who was regularly being told I had white male privilege, and that my opinion was invalid because of my immutable characteristics all really put things into focus.

ReferendumAutonomic · 2026-04-15T22:30:26+00:00

In high school I had girlfriends for a total of 1.5 years. But most of the time we didn't see each other. So for college I tried to do better.

Circumcision ruined it and an attempt to reverse it failed. For 7 years no woman helped my painful malpractice injuries until they believed I was about to succeed in tech. Unsolicited proposals (and 1 woman flat out asking for money) were the final provocation causing me to join the protests.

Royal-Feedback5814 · 2026-04-16T01:01:25+00:00

Simple, I'm not interested in what people say the world is like ("Everybody is equal!"). Instead, I choose to look at what the world is actually like underneath all the bullshit and wishful thinking. I already knew that men were disadvantaged when compared to women in social settings when I was around thirteen years old (I'm twenty nine currently). I already felt worthless and incapable of being loved partially due to my gender and the propaganda people were spouting online at that age.

avtarius · 2026-04-16T08:30:05+00:00

Mine was male self improvement until I stumbled onto MGTOW.

Not_Just_Any_Lurker · 2026-04-16T17:13:49+00:00

I always believed and still believe in equality. But even from a young age I knew it wasn’t always equal and nor will it ever be. My mom always taught me “you should never hit a woman” which of course not. But I never heard her tell me sister she should never hit a man. If I asked what about defending myself, she scoffed and said women could never hurt me like I could potentially do to them. Like that made it okay to hit me.

I still don’t think it’s okay to touch them or anyone without asking. But the wage gap? How dumb would it be to be able to pay women less and NOT entirely fill your employee roster entirely with women that you could hire at 4/5ths the cost? Clearly it’s a myth. Then you look into it and you see that it’s mainly just a general [all male income]-[all female income] without any further look into what kind of jobs each other go for. Then you see that women could rape men and still sue them for child support. I’m all for women having the ability to vote yet no requirement for selective service? Say in matters of the state and no responsibility to fight for it?

And every inch you give for mile demanded, comes another mile of demands. There is no “equality they can gain and be content with. I learned long ago you can’t make women happy. I’m MRA because men don’t ask for much, and what we do want is actually achievable. I do it for our sons and brothers and fathers we lose along the way.

Other-Poet2397 · 2026-04-18T01:22:46+00:00

I was abused as a 9 year old child by my uncle who was manipulated by his wife(yes,a woman) to do so because she enjoyed watching others become sad. The abuse was so bad that I developed severe coping mechanisms still following me to college. And it wasn't just one woman behind the abuse,turns out that it was four or five other women behind her too who even discuss on how much me and my parents suffered. I just wanted someone to hold my hand or just..tell me I mattered. Did a s**cide attempt at the age of 11 but failed,it's a miracle I'm still here. Sorry, this became a bit of a rant but this is part of how I became slowly interested in men's rights

Rare-Discipline3774 · 2026-04-18T04:57:40+00:00

Watching the fascist way feminist organizations behave.

Watching what happens to anyone who questions the feminist bourgeoisie vs proletariat narrative.

Watching men get treated like monster by an institution which claimed to be for Equality.

That's what turned me against modern feminism.

Listening and reading Christina Hoff Sommers is what made me realize feminism is an institution like religion, and that it's not all bad but absolutely needs criticism. Listening and reading Christina Hoff Sommers is what introduced to the men's rights.

Careful_Pen_5740 · 2026-04-18T05:38:18+00:00

Years ago, I got fed up with the fact that in my home country (Spain), laws were being passed that treat men like second-class citizens and walking wallets.

I emigrated to Mexico, and I’m starting to see that it’s heading down the same dangerous path.

LateDream · 2026-04-18T23:00:13+00:00

I was raised being told about equality and mutual respect. Now, the far left have gone even farther, demand respect while not giving it, and accuse the right/religious of doing what they want to do.

Just_an_user_160 · 2026-04-16T02:51:35+00:00

Used to swallow all the feminist propaganda until i was like 14 years old, that was when i started noticing things, things that didn't seem quite right, but i still couldn't point what exactly was, it was until highschool, that i came to understand these things, why i saw that when a girl cries there where a lot of people to comfort her, when i was visibly distressed and not feeling good, no one came to ask if i'm well, why girls always seemed to talk about going out together, while no one invited me for anything, some girls literally calling the men they led on' "cattle", etc.

2muchtequila · 2026-04-15T21:27:44+00:00

A guy I know who was the victim of domestic abuse was taken to jail despite his partner admitting to the cops that she was the aggressor. She demanded they take her instead but he department practice the Duluth model so the guy gets the ride every time. The cops eventually go so sick of her they told her to shut up or she'd go with him.

I also had an experience where a woman purposely got me black out drunk after I turned her down and raped me. I said no, but I was in and out of consciousness and when I tried to push her off me my arms felt like jello. I remember curling up into a ball so she couldn't go down on me because she was trying to get me hard so she could get on top.

Not a single woman cared. I was told I slept around a lot so they didn't see what the big deal was. One of them even saw her at a store and said "That's who you're complaining about? She's cute!"

I still respect people regardless of gender, but society seems to have decided that men's issues are unimportant and any complaint by a person with the "privilege" of being a man can be dismissed as entitled whining.

kootenayboy501st · 2026-04-18T03:23:26+00:00

seeing the current state of affairs on Reddit and social media. I do feel kinda foolish as my son brought it up years ago I argued with him defending women as that is how I was raised lived my life even stabbed defending a woman outside a bar being assaulted. despite being treated bad by women often losing everything at on point. 20 years never spoke Ill of my son's mother not because I didn't feel It but because I did what was right. for that life these women attack me trash me online it changed my whole outlook and what I now teach my son how fracked up is that

Strict_Primary3161 · 2026-04-21T07:25:12+00:00

I first started learning about MGTOW then they were mentioning Mens Right communities more and more. And seeing how unfair the world is to my brothers, I decided to join this subreddit here.

What first got you interested in Mens Rights issues? Did it happen gradually or did you have an epiphany moment when you realized men are treated as second class?

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