It's rather obvious to anyone that people seem to have an automatic reaction towards women in distress or danger that they don't have towards men. People are just more "bothered" by bad things happening to women than to men, the misfortune of women is just "special", for lack of better word, and seems worse to us.

I think an explanation for this phenomenon might lie in human evolution. Because women give birth, we are neurologically programmed to see an individual woman as more valuable than an individual man- the phenomenon we all know as male disposability. This is where the argument of "one man can impregnate 100 women" comes from, although this argument is flawed for 2 major reasons:

*In a modern society, the issue of emergency population numbers are pretty much obsolete. It has nothing to do with feeling more sympathetic to a 60 year old woman who can't afford healthcare than a 60 year old man, or ignoring the plight of boys education.

*It would be better to have 50 children from 50 men and 50 women. If 1 man has children with 99 women, every child of the third generation is product of incest. Plus, one man can't possibly do all the work for 100 people when 99 women are 8 months pregnant and can't do much physical labor.

The end-of-the-world doomsday scenario is absurd, there are no events that represent extinction potential.

But anyway, this hard-wiring is present in both men and women, and is what makes taking male issues seriously so difficult. People are just programmed not to care about homeless men, men dying of cancer, male DV victims, etc, as much, and men just aren't seen as the "same."

A great hypocrisy is feminists talking about toxic masculinity, and how it prevents men from crying or talking about how they feel...and yet that's exactly what they do with "but what about the men." By attacking MRAs and suppressing the things we feminists, feminists are enforcing the very toxic masculinity they claim feminism will help undo. Because of the subconscious tendency to favor women, feminists may very well are unaware of their bias behavior, and not even realize why the things they do are actually unfair and bigoted. It's just instinctual, as it is even in many men. This is a very hard thing to overcome, and might suggest that simply presenting facts and stats of male issues and discrimination may not be enough- we may need to change the entire basis of people's concept of equality and fairness.

This may actually represent a area where major progress in our dialogue with feminists has potential. Many of the feminists saying the awful things we post about may not in fact be "bad" people in the sense that we think- they may not realize, or they may simply lack the emotional response to realize- that what they are doing is wrong. They may simply lack the self-awareness to understand why their lack of empathy for men is not justifiable by claims of privilege or oppression, and if we can connect to them on that level, we may get them to better understand and empathize with where we are coming from.

Just a thought.