I just had a long conversation with a young woman discussing societal biases, rape and rape accusations/allegations, and the power imbalances surrounding them and how they affect both men and women.

I argued that even though through society as a whole, men have more power due to the established gender norms and other factors, there are situations where men have less or very little power. My main examples were custody battles and rape accusations. I stated that statistically, all else being equal, a man is less likely to recieve custody of his children than the woman is, by a large margin. I also stated that due to society's propensity to believe the woman alleging being a victim of rape, there is an power imbalance in the favor of the woman in the event of a false accusation, and that it can and has ruined multiple mens lives and put innocent men in prison.

Her rebuttal to those two statements were that the custody scenario was still an example of womens oppression and patriarchy because of society seeing women as birth givers and caretakers. She also stated that given the fact that society as an average favors the man, having situations where men are not in a position of power is acceptable. I argued that equality and lack of gender bias was necessary and that having bias in a judging body toward one group based on physical differences should not exist, but she saw it as necessary to believe the woman accusing over the man because of the statistical likelyhood of the accusation being true. I brought up the fact that multiple men have gone to prison on rape charges that later proved to be incorrect. She tried to get me to choose between having all the guilty rapists who went unpunished be caught and having the innocents falsely convicted. I argued that the two were not related because having a more unbiased and accurate jury to establish guilt would improve both figures.

Her overall justification was that because patriarchy exists, then it is ok to have an inherent bias towards a woman to help balance it out, and ignoring the situations where men are the ones with no power.

As a man who has been a victim of sexual assault by a woman, it was jarring to me to hear these arguments coming from someone on a personal level. I guess I just needed to type this out and clear my head a little bit, I ended up having to leave the conversation because some of the arguments she was making were hitting pretty close to home and I was getting angry and didnt want to let that color my language or destroy any validity my arguments have because of personal emotion.

Please give me feedback, I'm kinda reeling right now and I'm not sure why I even posted this but idk