Some thoughts on men's issues.

Sorry for the rambling (and generally despairing) nature of this post in advance.

I think that people in general are unable to see men and boys as equally deserving of help as we see women to be. In our history, women were saddled with pregnancy for months on end and having an infant depend on them for sustenance for years after that didn't really make women very good at providing for themselves in nature (keep in mind that there was no access to abortion, birth control, healthcare, social security, or maternity leave in nature). Instead of doing things herself when she was pregnant or when the infant was dependent on her to provide milk, which would have put her and her offspring in danger, it would have been a lot easier for her to find a man who could and was willing to provide her and her children with the food, clothing, shelter, and protection she and they needed.

So women selected for men who were predisposed to do this, which caused men with these traits to be more successful in attracting mates. And these men who were willing to sacrifice their health, their wellbeing, or even their life in order to produce excess productivity over and above what they themselves needed to satisfy the needs of women and children would have had offspring that were more likely to survive. So that trait spread in men. These women who were willing to let men sacrifice their health, their wellbeing, or even their life for them could stay safe at home and they would have had offspring that were more likely to survive. So that trait spread in women.

And when societies were in danger, those societies who protected their women and threw their men in the face of conflict maintained their reproductive ability better than those that did not. If you have a group with, say, 200 women and 20 men, all 200 women in the group can get pregnant and produce a new generation. If you have a group with 20 women and 200 men, your society can only impregnate 20 women and will have a future that's far more uncertain. So societies that were more willing to sacrifice men and protect women overtime grew and became more successful, whereas the societies that did not do this were taken over by other more successful societies or simply died out. These are the basic drivers of what made humans as gynocentric as we are.

As a result, we have a biological predisposition to constantly make sure that women are safe and protected, and throughout history we have attempted to eliminate anything that could potentially put women in danger, usually throwing men in the way of the threat instead, because in the past doing so resulted in the best outcomes for our reproduction and the survival of our societies. Meanwhile, we don't care if men are victimised because for our species that's just "business as usual". Men throughout our history were selected to die in war or through the taking of dangerous jobs in order to provide for women and as a result it makes it innately very difficult for us to care about them the way we do about women.

So when you bring male victims up and say that their victimisation matters as well it triggers this knee-jerk response in us to dismiss them and refocus the discussion on female victims because we evolved to ensure the protection of women. I've found that this subreddit is pretty much the only place where people can discuss male victims without being overwhelmingly shouted down about how these problems are not important and that we need to focus on women. And yet we still get slapped with the label of “misogynists”, “women-haters”, “incels”, etc.

And I think it may just be completely impossible to generate equal compassion for men. Even in warzones, where the vast majority of deaths are men, we will focus on the minority of female deaths. When the terrorist group Boko Haram kidnapped girls, it was enough for the international community to start offering assistance and aid in dealing with Boko Haram, but nobody offered any help before when boys were being kidnapped and killed in far greater numbers. And we so readily malign the cultures in third world societies such as Pakistan and Afghanistan for placing such severe restrictions on women and girls, and yes, this is a legitimate issue, but we ignore the other side of the coin: most notably how the men and boys are forced, yes, forced, to work to support their female relatives, in some cases with underage boys even selling themselves into prostitution in order to satisfy their obligation to do so.

Closer to home, we throw men under the bus with domestic violence laws and policies that actively marginalise male victims as long as it means that there is more help for women, we happily screw men over in family courts and at the same time uphold their obligation to pay child support and alimony for children which they have no right to see, and we erode men’s due process rights as well as create a “listen and believe”-type cultural environment where a man’s entire life and reputation can be ruined by a woman who makes a false allegation. At the same time as all this is happening we scream about just how privileged men are.

And a lot of people still think that men have “relatively little to complain about” and hold the idea that male victims of domestic violence or rape are so rare that providing services to them would be a waste of resources, despite the fact that the evidence contradicts this viewpoint in a big way. Most men still don’t seem to care about men’s issues until they themselves get unfairly screwed over in some way and are forced to see the problem for what it is.

And we will all act confused when we see the huge amount of men that are committing suicide, or whenever some men snap and take their anger out on someone else other than themselves, and we ascribe it to “toxic masculinity” or a sense of “male entitlement” rather than a reaction towards a society that will completely gloss over men in distress, a society that has said that men should feel comfortable expressing their emotions and talking about their issues but has repeatedly showed them over and over that they will get no amount of help or sympathy or consideration when they do. We still don’t, or are unwilling to, see this as the warning sign that it is.

What we are doing to our men and boys is a fucking disgrace. Looking at what’s happening it’s honestly hard not to find it completely depressing, especially given the biological origin of our complete and utter apathy for the condition of men. I don't know how we are going to make significant progress unless our instincts themselves change.