I'm not left wing, but I find this subreddit to have a lot of interesting discussion about men's issues and I've been concerned that this subreddit has been going down an increasingly MensLib-like route.

There have been a spate of posts here recently (most of them from a very specific user I won't bother to name) urging us not to bother criticising feminism, and that men's issues stem from traditionalist gender roles and men themselves being unwilling to help other men. And while I would agree with some of these points, I feel as the posts here have recently placed an undue share of the accountability on men and have shown a disturbing willingness to exempt women and feminism from responsibility for their hand in maintaining and intensifying plenty of men's issues.

The problem that we're facing is a multi-pronged one, and they cannot all be attributed to any one specific group or cause. As girlwriteswhat has already noted:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/fcvqzv/feminist_propaganda_has_successfully_created/fk1d91j/?context=3

  1. it's easy to believe women are being unjustly victimized, even when they're not, and easy to believe men are not being unjustly victimized, even when they are. This is a function of evolution and as such isn't going to go away. And it makes people susceptible to memes that reinforce the narrative.
  2. the feminist narrative pits team man against team woman. They've had a 50+ year head start entrenching that narrative in academia, media, the law and politics. This essentially codified point 1 (women are victimized and men are not) into a collective ink and paper bias, rather than just individuals acting on their own cognitive bias.
  3. there is an empathy gap between men and women. This gap manifests in both men and women (and in children, I'd suggest). It is an evolved bias augmented by phenotypical differences between men and women (the neoteny gap), which means we're stuck with it. This means our responses to men and women who are struggling or suffering are going to be different.
  4. over the course of 50 years of women's studies in academia, the main programs studying gender relations have been filtered through the feminist lens. That lens exacerbates, legitimates and reinforces points 1-3. It's been one enormous positive feedback loop essentially compounding the problems it purports to oppose.
  5. this leaves us with a situation where the memes we are most susceptible to (the feminist ones) are everywhere and have been for 50 years, while things like #NotAllMen can be readily twisted into a framework where men who say not all men (rape, beat their wives, catcall, harass, objectify women, etc) can be cast as minimizing the problem and re-victimizing female victims just by saying it. Where the primary concern of the mainstream with false rape accusations is NOT the effect such an accusation has on the male victim (even though it can result in the suicide, beating, wrongful imprisonment or murder of that victim), but the potential impact on society's willingness to believe women who say they were raped.

Some of this, such as our susceptibility to viewing men and women in particular ways and our greater empathy for women, is evolutionarily ingrained in us and existed long before feminism. We could never, at any time through history, have kept women and children safe by sacrificing the lives of men (10 million of them in WWI) if we cared as much about men as we do about women.

These biases exist in both men and women, and they cannot only be attributed to men lacking compassion for other men. Everyone, both men and women, lacks compassion for men compared to women, and putting responsibility on only men for men's issues is basically male hyperagency and female hypoagency all over again.

It would also be a mistake to exempt feminism from responsibility for the role they've played in worsening the situation. While men's issues are definitely not all solely caused by feminism, feminist activism and theory steers society's collective empathy more strongly in the direction it naturally wants to go - toward women and away from men. It takes our natural tendency to view men as inappropriate objects of our empathy, and exploits it in order to enact laws and policies that help women but actively harm men.

I have no problem with posts that urge men to be more compassionate with other men, but at the same time we have to be careful to not place all of the responsibility or accountability for fixing these problems on men. It's a lot more complex than that, and feminism is a huge culprit for causing and exacerbating a lot of men's issues.

Just my two cents.