Note: Originally this was a comment in another thread directed at claims made by a non-regular who suggested that women have it worse off, and that they are under attack because there is an effort to restrict abortions. Since his post was heavily downvoted and then deleted, my reply is hidden by default, but I think it is substantive enough to deserve a large viewing/discussion. If mods disagree, they are obviously free to delete this post.
I’m honestly not sure if this is a reactionary/progressive sub;
It is neither. It is egalitarian advocacy based on the realization that there are substantial legal and social issues facing men as a function of being men from a society that prioritizes women.
but surely you’d concede that men have it much better than women, no?
None of the regular posters here would, nor should they, particularly if we're discussing the Western world. Female genital mutilation is illegal, yet male genital mutilation is common. Women who commit the same crimes as men face lesser legal penalties. The outright majority of college and post-graduate degrees are awarded to women, yet there are still affirmative action programs and single sex scholarships to boost female enrollment. Due process rights of men accused on college campuses of sexual assault and/or rape are being denied routinely. The overwhelming majority of workplace deaths are men. The significant majority of homeless individuals are men. The majority of suicides are men. Divorce and family law is wildly lopsided, such that the vast majority of people paying alimony and child support are men. Custody laws are wildly uneven, and attempts to remedy that are actively fought by groups like the National Organization for Women. Women have multiple post-coital options for avoiding the burden of parenthood, whereas men have zero. There are multiple cases where male statutory rape victims have been made to pay child support. In the US, only men are legally obliged to register for the selective services and face the threat of a draft. And even in countries where women are conscripted like Israel, their required period of service is much shorter (33%) and they have additional exemption from service options (like marriage; see: Bar Rafaeli). And despite domestic violence being roughly equal across genders, with a slight majority actually perpetrated by women, you can count on one hand the number of men's shelters in the US and Canada with fingers to spare, though they are abundant for women.
That, by the way, just scratches the surface as to the legal issues in the west. There are certainly others that could be discussed, to say nothing of issues relating to social norms. And even the supposedly terrible for women developing world countries like India have a whole host of anti-male laws and social norms that we ignore that mean men there have it as bad or worse than women.
Now, are there perhaps a few true outlier countries where women have it worse than men? Sure. Afghanistan probably fits that bill, as might a few other Islamic nations, though not the majority of them. And even in those cases, it seems worth pointing out that the male experience is still extremely bloody miserable. But if you live in the US or Germany or Sweden or Israel or any other developed Western nation, you are far better off as a woman than a man.
but women have much more toxic gender roles imposed on them, especially nowadays when Roe V Wade is under threat, for example.
Abortion "rights" have nothing to do with gender roles, but about a fundamental disagreement over when life begins. If you believe life begins at conception, the first heartbeat, viability, or some other relatively early point in the pregnancy, then you'd be a complete savage to support virtually unrestricted abortion, since the procedure is tantamount to murder. And if you believe life begins at delivery or some point close to it, then there'd be no morally defensible reason to restrict abortion. As it turns out, women are just as pro-life as men, and the vast majority of Americans support significant restrictions on pregnancy after the first trimester. Most Americans seem unaware of the fact that Roe, already limited in scope by Casey, doesn't protect abortion rights beyond the first trimester as a general rule.
There are two other points in re abortion that need to be mentioned. First, the "bodily autonomy" argument doesn't carry much weight. In part that is because the people making this argument seem unwilling to make the same argument when it comes to the right to smoke crack or to engage in prostitution or to sell one's kidney on the open market. And in part because even if a woman were forced to carry a pregnancy to term, there would be no legal compulsion that she raise it thereafter (see: safe abandonment), nor that she behave responsibly while pregnant. She could, if she so chose, drink like a sailor throughout the pregnancy and produce a child with fetal alcohol syndrome with zero legal consequences.
Second, if women ceased to have post-coital control over pregnancy, that would merely level the playing field with men. No reasonable man believes they should be able to force a woman to abort, but surely men shouldn't have to finance the unilateral decisions of women to reproduce? Except of course that we do. We have no say, and even if we used and condom and were clear that we didn't want kids, we are still on the hook for child support. So for men, the law treats consent to sex as consent to paternity, but it doesn't do that to women. Unless we plan to create parity for men (see: paper abortion), it's hard to be especially sympathetic to women who claim their rights are being infringed over their inability to carry out what many people reasonably see as a murder motivated by convenience.
there doesn't seem to be anything here