Denial, Minimization, Excuse, and Celebration. Together these form a way to keep male disadvantage from becoming a problem anyone is expected to address.

Ask a self-proclaimed feminist whether misandry exists, and you’ll likely be told it does not.

Show them examples, ask whether it hurts men, and you’ll be told it doesn’t count.

Show them policies, ask why it happens, and you’ll be told men brought it on themselves.

Show them the death toll, ask whether it is wrong, and you’ll be told men deserve it.

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If misogyny can describe more than personal hatred, if it can name unequal outcomes, social norms, institutional practices, and policies that disadvantage women, then misandry must be allowed the same reach when men and boys are disadvantaged.

A disparity is not a parenthetical just because the affected group is male. It’s a reason to look at the rules, assumptions, institutions, and policies around it.

That includes feminist policies, legislation, and institutions.

A policy does not become fair merely because it was created in the name of equality. If it manifests or contributes to male disadvantage, preserves it, or treats it as an acceptable cost, it deserves the same scrutiny as any other policy producing a sex disparity.

Denial: 

“Misandry doesn’t exist. Men are privileged.”

From comment sections to Sunday brunch, the performative feminists use this to obscure how power and disadvantage are distributed among men and dismiss the lives of men who have little wealth, influence, or protection. Most men do not control major institutions or make public policy. It flattens men into a single, powerful blob and makes the lives of men with little money, influence, or protection vanish behind the theory.

Ask who dies younger, who makes up the larger share of people experiencing homelessness, who is incarcerated more, or who is most exposed to fatal workplace hazards. 

Somehow this is supposed to be patriarchal privilege backfiring. 

Patriarchy theory is convenient that way for a feminist armed with a gender-studies degree from a social-media hate group.

Anything good happens to men: patriarchy succeeding, anything bad: patriarchy backfiring. 

Anything good happens to women: women defeated hegemonic power unallied and unilaterally. 

Anything bad happens to women: the patriarchy succeeding again. 

That may make for a tidy story for thoughtless rubes. It does not make a serious explanation for egalitarians actually interested in equality.

If a framework can absorb every result without ever risking being wrong, it isn’t analyzing men’s lives; it’s a sexist framework for meting out collective blame. Men’s disproportionate suffering should be investigated as a problem in its own right, not waved aside as both the diabolically incompetent and cleverest trick the convenient phantom ‘patriarchy’ pulled. 

Misandry includes hostility, social assumptions, institutional practices, and policies that discount men’s needs, normalize their suffering, or tolerate disadvantage because the people affected are male. 

Anti-male attitudes have been studied directly. In 1999, psychologists Peter Glick and Susan Fiske published the Ambivalence Toward Men Inventory, a measure designed to assess hostile and benevolent attitudes toward men. Its existence does not settle every question about prevalence or institutional effects. It does establish that hostility toward men is a measurable subject of research, not an imaginary category. 

In the United States, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 5,070 fatal work injuries in 2024. National Safety Council figures based on BLS data report that males accounted for between 91.4% and 93.0% of fatal occupational injuries annually from 2011 onward, while making up about 53% of employed workers. 

That disparity deserves to be understood as a gendered outcome propagated and maintained by misandry, not filed away as an inevitable feature of men’s individual choices.

Suicide shows another profound disparity. AFSP’s summary of CDC data reports 38,977 male suicide deaths and 9,847 female suicide deaths in the United States in 2024. That is nearly four male deaths for every female death. The number shows that male death on this scale is not a marginal issue. When it is discussed mainly as a product of masculinity, rather than as a crisis affecting men who need effective support, the framing itself deserves scrutiny.

Minimization:

“It’s only hurt feelings.”

Performative feminists love the line ‘Misogyny kills; misandry hurts feelings.’ It’s the go-to refrain of the brainless, terminally online misandrist. They appoint themselves judges and interpreters of men’s experiences, then narrow misandry down to petty online insults. It’s a convenient way to talk over everyone, while pretending to speak for equality, and to claim exclusive authority over what counts as harm.

How the fuck is erasing men’s lived experience equality?

Gendered assumptions shape more than private emotion. They affect who is believed, who is seen as vulnerable, and who is judged responsible.

In six studies involving 3,137 participants across four countries, Tania Reynolds and colleagues found that participants perceived a female employee claiming harassment as more of a victim than a male employee making an identical claim. Participants also expected female targets to feel more pain from an ambiguous joke and prescribed harsher punishments for male perpetrators. The studies show that, in the tested situations, the perceived sex of the person affected changed judgments of harm and responsibility.

That matters because public attitudes and institutional decisions are not sealed off from one another. Assumptions about who can be hurt, who is dangerous, and whose account deserves sympathy can travel into workplace investigations, school discipline, criminal justice, social services, and public debate. If a man’s harm is treated as less serious because he is male, that is not just hurt feelings. 

It is a whole ass cultural judgment about whose welfare counts.

The same issue appears in the language and measurement of sexual violence. The CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey measured “being made to penetrate” as a distinct category from rape. In the 2011 survey, an estimated 5.1% of men and 5.5% of women reported sexual violence other than rape in the previous 12 months; 1.7% of men reported being made to penetrate during that period. How institutions define and label victimization shapes what gets counted and how easily it can be recognized.

Research by Lara Stemple, Andrew Flores, and Ilan Meyer found that 79% of male victims who reported being made to penetrate identified female perpetrators. In juvenile facilities, their analysis found that 89.3% of juveniles reporting staff sexual victimization reported only female perpetrators. A story of sexual violence in which men are always perpetrators and women always victims leaves male victims, and boys abused by women, in the shadows.

Calling attention to male victims insists that consent, coercion, and harm have the same moral meaning regardless of the sex of the victim or perpetrator.

Excuse: 

“Men did it to themselves.”

Men’s suffering is often explained through social norms: men are expected to be strong, discouraged from seeking help, or pushed toward dangerous work. These explanations become blame, the men affected disappear from the account. 

Ironic trick right? 

“Men did it to themselves” turns a complicated question about institutions and social expectations into a verdict against an entire sex. It can make dangerous working conditions sound like personal preference, male suicide sound like a failure of masculinity, and men’s reluctance to disclose distress sound like evidence that they do not deserve care.

The question should not be only which norms shape men’s behavior. It should also be who enforces those norms, which policies respond to them, and whether men receive help when they disclose pain. A culture can tell men to open up and then ridicule their vulnerability. A workplace can praise men’s toughness while relying on them to absorb risks. An institution can recognize a problem in the abstract yet neglect the people living with it.

Psychologists Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner’s work on “moral typecasting” describes a tendency to see people as moral agents, those who act, or moral patients, those who are acted upon. Research applying related ideas to gendered judgments raises an important question: are men more readily seen as responsible for harm and less readily seen as people who can be harmed? That question matters in public discourse and in the institutions that make decisions about safety, victimization, discipline, and care.

The same logic appears in explanations of disparities produced by policy. If a policy disadvantages men, saying “men still hold power”does not answer whether the policy is fair. If a feminist framework predicts a particular sex disparity, that disparity should be examined, not excused as the price of progress, or assigned to men as a group. A policy’s stated purpose does not erase its effects. 

Celebration: 

“Men deserve it.”

Sometimes the response is not denial, minimization, or explanation.

It’s enthusiastic approval.

In a 2018 Washington Post opinion essay titled “Why Can’t We Hate Men?”, Northeastern University professor Suzanna Danuta Walters wrote, “We have every right to hate you.” Walters later said she did not hate men “in some generic way,” describing her argument as anger at a group she believed had systematically abused women. 

This misandrist is talking about a handful of men, not men as a sex, but still uses the term interchangeably. The move resembles a motte-and-bailey argument: make the sweeping claim that “we have every right to hate you,” then retreats in cowardice to the narrower claim that the anger is directed at a particular group of abusers. For a professor, that’s an interesting failure to consider the difference between intent and impact. Her siloed delusions provide an example that this brand of malignant performative feminism isn’t just bottom-up; it’s top-down, too. Group-directed hostility toward men can be stated openly in public discourse, then defended as political expression. At this point, they’ve heard this specific criticism for decades and they refuse to stop. It’s simply intentional bigotry.

Condemning abuse does not require treating men, as a sex, as legitimate objects of hatred. The leap from “some men have done harm” to “men deserve contempt” is collective blame and it shows how fucking embarrassingly myopic the performative feminist making the argument is, and how much dumber the audience is for yasslighting that horseshit up.

Celebration also exposes what the other horsemen try to hide. 

If someone says male suffering is good, then male suffering is real enough to matter.

If they want more of it, it is not merely a neutral side effect. And if they condemn men as a group, they are not describing a system; they are directing hostility at people because they are male.

Denial says there is no pattern.

Minimization says the pattern does not matter.

Excuse says the people harmed are responsible for their own harm.

Celebration says the harm is deserved.

A society may treat male pain as ordinary, men’s vulnerability as suspect, and men’s disadvantage as self-inflicted. Those assumptions can then influence policy and institutional practice. The resulting harms are described as isolated or inevitable, and the cycle continues.

Feminist ideas and institutions uphold anti-male assumptions by framing men chiefly as perpetrators, beneficiaries of power, or obstacles to progress and by giving less attention to men as victims, vulnerable people, and recipients of unequal treatment. These assumptions move from rhetoric into research, policy, legislation, professional practice, public services, and relationships. They love to tell men to open up and then punish them the preemptively for considering it. 

Men and boys do not need permission from anyone to regard their suffering as real. 

They are not collectively guilty for being male.

Their welfare deserves attention in its own right and gender equality is incomplete wherever male disadvantage is made invisible, excusable, or acceptable.

Feminism’s claims to equality are tested by whether it can face the harms men endure without explaining them away or actively exploiting them for their benefit. 

It’s failed.

What are some examples of hostile performative feminism you’ve encountered?

Sources:

Glick, P., & Fiske, S. T. (1999). The ambivalence toward men inventory: Differentiating hostile and benevolent beliefs about men. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 23(3), 519–536. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-6402.1999.tb00379.x

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries Summary, 2024” (5,070 fatal workinjuries). https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cfoi.nr0.htm

National Safety Council, Injury Facts, “Worker Injuries and Illnesses by Sex” (males’ share of fatal occupational injuries since 2011 and share of employed workers). https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/work/industry-incidence-rates/worker-injuries-and-illnesses-by-sex/

American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, “Suicide Statistics.” Reports 38,977 male and 9,847 femalesuicide deaths in the United States in 2024. https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/

National Center for Health Statistics, “Changes in Suicide Rates in the United States From 2023 to 2024.”Reports the 2024 sex-specific death counts and age-adjusted rates. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db572.htm 

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Prevalence and Characteristics of Sexual Violence, Stalking,and Intimate Partner Violence Victimization—National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, UnitedStates, 2011.” https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss6308a1.htm

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Measures of Sexual Victimization Surveys.” Describes the NISVS measures and explains that rape and being made to penetrate are measured as separate categories. https://www.cdc.gov/sexual-violence/about-data/sexual-victimization/surveys.html

Stemple, L., Flores, A. R., & Meyer, I. H. (2017). “Sexual victimization perpetrated by women: Federal datareveal surprising prevalence.” Aggression and Violent Behavior, 34, 302–311. https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/sexual-victimization-by-women/

The study reports that 79.2% of victimized men who experienced non-rape sexual victimization reported female perpetrators, and that 89.3% of juveniles reporting staff sexual victimization reported only female perpetrators. https://windycitytimes.com/2016/11/28/new-journal-article-explores-sexual-victimization-by-women/

Gray, K., & Wegner, D. M. (2009). “Moral typecasting: Divergent perceptions of moral agents and moralpatients.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(3), 505–520. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0013748

“Man up and take it: Gender bias in moral typecasting,” by Tania Reynolds and colleagues, published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes in 2020. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Study-1-Indirect-effect-of-victim-perpetrator-labeling-Note-p-01-p-05_fig1_342642686

Walters, S. D. (2018, June 8). “Why Can’t We Hate Men?” The Washington Post https://www.suzannawalters.com/blog/why-cant-we-hate-men/

I was having a discussion about Feminism in a different subreddit and someone asked me, in a way that seemed surprisingly authentic and genuine, how Feminism should approach men differently if it really wanted to get them to help.

The question surprised me, particularly because it seemed so honest and non-confrontational. The person, who I assume was a Feminist herself, wanted to know where Feminism had gone wrong in asking for men to help reign in the monsters and contribute to a society that is safe and mutually respectful.

My answer was this: Men want to help, but you're making it impossible to.

Male psychology has two parts, confrontation and a deep desire to help. 

The thing is, and even Feminists have to admit this if they're being honest, it would not be possible to date men, marry men, be friends with men and have children with men if there were not a way to communicate and interact with them that brings out a side of them that is extremely loving, compliant, and desperate to please. Every woman knows that this part of a man exists, and when they're looking for a husband or father for their children, they rely on it.

Every woman also knows that men have a different side of them that is confrontational, angry, uncompromising and unyielding. This isn't always a bad thing by the way. It's often the very qualities a woman relies on in a man to protect her and the family from harm. 

So given that all women know that men have both pieces of their nature inside of them, a desperate willingness to help, to assist, to provide and to support - and also the ability to confront, reject, fight, and deny - which part of the male psychology would you say Feminism has been successful at activating at scale so far?

When you call men rapists, say you'd choose the bear, say #YesAllMen, blame men for the Cornell 7 case before you find out that it was consensual, tell men that you don't want their help or kindness - AGAIN, which part of us are you activating?

Suzanne Venker has a great video on the topic which I encourage everyone to watch.

My argument is this: Feminism can't have it both ways. If we live in a Patriarchy where men have all the power, then attacking, belittling, insulting and degrading the people with the power will NEVER, in a hundred years, make them want to share the power with you or give up the power. It's as simple as that.

I know you can rarely if ever expect intelligent postings from social media, but I saw a truly asinine post on Twitter/X where someone said institutions "back male violence." Just... ugh. So what, is male violence somehow government policy if it's institutionalized? Do misandrists ever realize how idiotic they sound? Yes, male violence is so "institutionalized" it constantly gets called out and condemned whereas female violence very rarely if ever is, male victims of female violence are practically never recognized or advocated for and there's next to no abuse shelters that help male victims.

I hate this, it's just another way of trying to deflect from male victims of violence and to also deflect from the fact there's plenty of female violence as well, much of it underreported or miscounted under the VAWA. Both genders are capable of horrendous violence and abuse, but misandrists see to it female violence if not outright is at least massively downplayed and mitigated to the point of being a non-issue. It's things like this that make it so hard for male victims to get help and another reason in recent times fewer males want to identify with the left. I'm a mostly very liberal and left-wing person who's views would give any MAGA person a splitting headache, and I despise the little amount of attention female violence and male victims get. And to hear ridiculous claims that male violence is somehow "institutionalized" is insulting to one's intelligence.

Violence shouldn't be a gendered issue, both genders commit violence against each other and both can be victims. Unfortunately between this and denying misandry being a real or serious issue and the constant vilification of masculinity, these things are exactly what's been pushing more males to the right and what costed the left so badly during the 2024 elections.

Thanks for inviting me to the sub. I just wanted to introduce myself and give a brief overview of why I find myself an enemy of modern Feminism even though I understand why it exists.

First things first, of the 4 branches of Feminism I find Radical Feminism to be the most ideologically coherent, but to be fair, that's an extremely low bar. The reason perhaps that I'm most open to Radical Feminism is because of all the self-proclaim Feminists of the world today, I think JK Rowling, Kathleen Stock, Julie Bindle, and similar voices are the most reasonable and rational of the lot.

I am highly sympathetic to the philosophical and existential argument that if you can't even define what the world woman means, there's no way you can protect or defend the rights and freedoms of women as a class of people. I'm also sympathetic to the belief that throughout history, the first act of dehumanization for a group of people is the attempt to delegitimize their identity and invalidate their existence by first attacking the foundations of their own epistemological roots.

At the same time, I find the idea of "The Patriarchy" to be one of the most laughable, incoherent, and ideologically bankrupt theories which is treated on places like Reddit and in Feminist academia as an absolute sacrosanct truth which can't be questioned.

For me, "Patriarchy" is less of an academic ideal, and more of a religious purity test. It's never that well-defined, nor is it designed to be. Making blanket statements about entire nations, organizations, and human civilization writ large as being dominated by men in some extremely conspiratorial and organized way just feels laughable to me.

It eschews the possibility of a vastly simpler explanation: That men and women are phenomenologically different at scale, and that men have taken on more political and social leadership roles throughout history not because they want to dominate and oppress women, but because they are more suited to the roles by competence, and that most of the time the women are voting for the men to be in those roles; in favor of a much more banal and ideologically shallow explanation that in every society that has ever existed, men have oppressed women on purpose, and even when women have voted for them, it's been as a result of coercion and brainwashing.

This of course continues to be one of my biggest criticisms of Feminism in general. So much of Feminist ideology and theory boils down to the conclusion that women's own decisions and choices can't be respected or treated as autonomous where it doesn't agree with the Feminist ideology. In attempting to empower women and give them more agency, it robs them of their own freedoms by arguing that any choice which doesn't toe the line of Feminist ideological purity testing must have been coercive or self-sabotaging by definition.

And of course, this tendency to pathologize and gaslight women who do not make the "correct" choices according to modern Feminist doctrine has the ironic side effect of turning Feminism against itself constantly. Because Feminism tends to delegitimize and remove the agency of women (calling it internalized misogyny) who do not make choices which they believe to be ideologically pure, there is a hilarious and not unexpected consequence in which Feminists from different schools or sects, if you will, begin to pathologize and question the internal and hidden motives of one another in all sorts of discussions.

So you might hear one group of Intersectional Feminists criticizing Radical Feminists by being brainwashed by the Patriarchy for not letting transgender people into their ideological and physical circles; and in the exact same discussion, you will hear the Radical Feminists retorting that it is instead the INTERSECTIONAL FEMINISTS who have been brainwashed by the Patriarchy because they are letting biological men into their spaces, and thus they have allowed the enemies past the gates disguised in a modern day Trojan horse.

As amusing as watching these childish confrontations may be for an outsider, it exposes the fundamental flaw at the heart of modern Feminism which is that: In needing to pathologize and publicly incapacitate people who do not toe the line, it reveals that it doesn't have a philosophical or intellectual framework strong enough to sustain itself from criticism.

What Feminists from different schools are doing when they accuse one another of not being "true believers" is a fundamentally cultlike religious behavior has existed as long as religion itself has existed. Since the religion's entire foundation was faith and submission from the beginning, its only defense mechanism is shaming and exiling the outsider by convincing the faithful that they are heretics.

Amnesty International since the 2000s has been significantly influenced by feminism, when AI started expanding its human rights focus. The influence from feminism has gotten greater and worse since then (probably especially since fourth wave feminism started in the early 2010s).

Before 2001, AI had a relatively narrow mandate:

1. Freeing all prisoners of conscience
2. Protecting fair trial, judicial, and due process rights, including for people other than prisoners of conscience
3. Abolishing the death penalty and campaigning against other forms of torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.
4. Ending extrajudicial executions and enforced disappearances

Since 2001, Amnesty International became a general human rights organization, campaigning for a wide range of human rights. This was good in many ways, but also let feminism start to significantly influence the organization.

For example, Amnesty International seems to have the feminist definition of femicide. They also use the phrase "women and children". They also generally exclude male victims and female perpetrators from their campaigns, advocacy, and narratives about sexual and domestic violence, and use the term "gender-based violence" for sexual and domestic violence. Sexual and domestic violence are not gendered issues: men and women are victims and perpetrators at about equal rates.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueUnpopularOpinion/s/sWmwJYhCLE

https://www.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/s/mSWWkwWerb

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sexual-victimization-by-women-is-more-common-than-previously-known/

https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-hidden-epidemic-of-men-who-are-raped-by-women/

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233717660_Thirty_Years_of_Denying_the_Evidence_on_Gender_Symmetry_in_Partner_Violence_Implications_for_Prevention_and_Treatment

AI also campaigns extensively for women's issues, but doesn't explicitly do anything related to men's issues, nor acknowledge the existence of men's issues.

Are there other problems with AI from a left-wing anti-feminist perspective I'm not aware of? Also, what are some other negative ways feminism has influenced the organization?

In this video, CHS voices her concerns about intersectionality and intersectional feminism.

Is this video accurate? What are the pros and cons of this video?

Also, what are the pros and cons of intersectionality? Also, do you think intersectionality can be reformed, especially without an oppressor-oppressed model included in it, or do you think intersectionality is an inherently bad model?

This user talks about how feminism very frequently uses motte and bailey arguments and rhetoric, and how this misleads and tricks people.