A study recently came out saying that over 60% of young men and 45% of young women agreed with the idea that “women’s rights have gone so far that men are now the ones being oppressed”. 

45% is a minority…but it is a very, very large minority, on the cusp of being a 50/50 split. And of course the majority of young men flat out agree. So the question is: why aren’t people speaking out? Statistically, you only need about 2.5% of the population to resist something to make a difference, and regardless of which gender you look at, men’s rights have been rapidly been seen by the general public as more and more under threat. So what gives?

I won’t pretend to have a holistic, all encompassing explanation for this discrepancy, but I will offer some possible reasons.

Firstly, as practically everyone here knows, the world of the elites, the super rich, is quite different to ours. And although in normal peoples’ lives, men in general are getting absolutely hammered by society (modern media is constantly treating them like crap, deliberately connecting their natures with the word “toxic”, men make up the minority in almost all university courses, with Computer Science being one of the very rare exceptions etc.), elite circles appear to lag quite significantly behind the rest of us. For instance, we’re all familiar with people like Harvey Weinstein, and I believe that only 2% of large scale investments are given to female-lead companies that are just starting out, which is statistically insignificant. So it looks like it’s the case that women in these hyper rich, elitist circles are projecting their own problems into the rest of society via the media and politics, in a twisted kind of vengeance that they’re taking out on the rest of society. 

So men’s issues don’t permeate the media because the people in control of the media are entirely out of touch with the reality for the rest of us. And of course, those who get all their opinions and ideas from the current media without questioning them, those intellectual munchkins, project this out into the rest of the world. I presume this is why the statistics aren’t even higher.

But there’s another reason people refuse to speak out: cowardice. People see what they think is the overwhelming zeitgeist, and they bend to it. For instance, I recently found out from a journalist there was an incident where the female writers at the company brought up concerns that they were getting a lot of hate mail. When their male colleagues and managers found out, they panicked. Without asking whether that’s what the women wanted, without even giving a damn about their feelings or whether they wanted their personal problems broadcast to the world, these men instantly made big, official statements about how they repudiated and commended this behaviour. This was nothing more than them trying to save their own asses. 

In addition, Richard Reeves has pointed out that many of these mainstream self-described feminists have serious private concerns about men’s issues, but they don’t want to speak out because they are afraid of the backlash from other feminists. 

So where did this cowardice come from? I believe that’s due to a hyper-fixation on the concept of “toxic masculinity”. What concept is closer to the heart of masculinity than courage? And if courage=masculine=toxic, suddenly, cowardice becomes a lot less shameful and a lot more desirable. 

Feminists, both male and female, have a very immature, superficial view of masculinity. They seem to think masculinity is all about “grr, let’s get aggressive and assertive and punch thinks and not talk about feelings!!!” But someone can be emotional, not assertive and not aggressive…yet if they’re willing to stand up for what they believe in, even if it means they’ll get push back, then that is often seen as the most masculine trait of all. So if these feminists really wanted to be more “masculine”, to educate us all on what “healthy masculinity” is, rather than encouraging “girl bosses” to be aggressive, assertive and angry, they’d stand up for men’s rights when they feel that they’re under threat. And, quite suddenly, they turn out not to be so masculine after all…