The Men's rights movement

I would like to begin my speech by saying, the men’s rights movement is not made to oppose the rights of women. The mens rights movement is more of a counterpart to feminism, it is led by people who believe that in our modern day society there are some benefits that women receive purely for being a woman and that it leads to men being treated unfairly. Such as in the court of law.

An example of this is sentencing disparity. For example, in the United States men are most adversely affected by sentencing disparity being twice as likely to be sentenced to jail after conviction for the same crime than women and receiving on average 63% longer jail sentences. This is one thing that people who are followers of the mens rights movement believe needs to be changed, it is unfair on men to receive longer sentences than women just because of their gender.

However, just like with radical feminism there are men's rights activists with radical views which leads to those who don’t know much about it demonising it. These people are not true advocates for the movement but are instead those looking for an excuse for disliking women. Every movement has people who take things too far. The people like this within the mens rights movement will often be misogynistic men who believe the way they speak and act are acceptable things to do. However they are not truly the people to judge the movement by, just like feminism isn’t cancelled for having radicals who believe misandry is the way to gain rights for women.

However the mens rights movement doesn’t only fight for the legal rights of men, it also fights for the safety of men. Since the mid 1990’s the male suicide rate has been three times that of women. The mens rights movement exists to try and change this statistic. Men often commit suicide because of depression as men have been taught from a young age that it is not manly to cry or even discuss emotions at all. Because of this lots of men decide to keep their feelings inside and many won’t even report signs of depression in a medical setting. And although women are nearly two times more likely to be diagnosed with depression a survey in 2013 found that a higher percentage of men than women met the criteria for depression diagnosis.

In 2021 in England women filed for divorce almost double the amount of times that men did. One observation was that in divorce cases the majority of divorces were because of ‘unreasonable behaviour’ with women twice as likely to divorce their husband for this reason than their male counterparts. One reason believed to be why men are less likely to divorce their partner is because they believe that they will lose more in a divorce than their wife. In general this is true as evidence suggests that men are more likely to suffer financially with the standard of living shown to drop between 10-40% for men after divorce. They are also likely to suffer emotionally due to the fact that they often lose out on child custody to their partner and are more often placed on custody schedules, quite often only being allowed to see their child at the weekend and even in these cases sympathy is often shown towards the mother. Figures show that over 80% of children of separated parents, do live with their mother.

In conclusion some may believe that the mens rights movement is unnecessary due to the fact that men already have plenty of rights, or that they should focus on helping feminists instead. However, although men may have had more rights than women in the past, today in western society women have lots of, if not all the rights that men have. I’m not saying that feminism is unnecessary but instead that the two movements are equally as important. While feminism fights for gaining rights for women such as the right to an abortion or equal pay, the mens rights movement focuses on lowering the male suicide rate and gaining more support for mens mental health. As I have previously stated the mens rights movement does not aim to hinder the progression of the feminist movement.