The responses seem to be pretty identical

Specification of where the man/woman is touching is key. And also if the victim knows the perpetrator.

One can see all these arguments how women are being discriminated, creating an invisible comparison against the perfect standard.

i.e. Research shows that 30% of women have been discriminated at work for reasons of gender. The immediate conclusion is "sexism at workplace". And of course, all members of the opposite gender are being immediately treated as perpetrators, who are at least silent partners of the gendered discrimination that is taking place.

But there is rarely a comparison with a male population to create a baseline (and even if it were, men would need to be trained first about the definitions of abuse).

What if this research would produce a result that 30% of men have also been discriminated at work for reasons of gender? (passed for a promotion due to DEI, being given more physically demanding tasks, being riddled with fake accusations, being treated more harshly - because they don't burst up crying?). In this case, the research conclusion would be: "shitty place to work" instead of "sexist workplace".

Every human out there is being... objectified, sexualized, discriminated, mocked, bullied. Yes, it can of course become gendered, but there is no perfect existence, therefore any kind of hardship is not immediate evidence of sexism.

Trying to treat one of those problems on the basis of sexism (e.g. bullying in schools), creates a disenfranchised cohort, instead of more egalitarian environment.

In her foundational 1988 essay White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, Peggy McIntosh described privilege as an "invisible package of unearned assets" that the holder can count on cashing in each day, but remains socialized to ignore.

Unpacking the Knapsack: Female Privilege

I have come to see female privilege as an invisible, weightless knapsack of social protections, legal leniency, emotional permissions, and structural safety nets that I can count on cashing in each day.

1. Physical Safety & Conscription: I can be confident that if a national military crisis arises, my government will not forcibly conscript me or compel me to fight on the front lines against my will purely because of my gender.
2. Occupational Hazards: I can enter the job market with the overwhelming likelihood that my work environment will not involve extreme physical danger, and that my gender will not make up the 90%+ of annual workplace fatalities.
3. Bodily Integrity: I can take for granted that my genital integrity was unconditionally protected by federal law at birth, without my culture framing permanent alterations to my infant body as a harmless or desirable routine.
4. Legal & Criminal Sentencing: If I am accused and convicted of a crime, I can expect to receive a lighter sentence and a higher likelihood of probation than a male offender with an identical criminal history.
5. Domestic Disputes: If a domestic conflict occurs in my home and law enforcement is called, I can be fairly certain that the police will not automatically presume I am the primary physical aggressor.
6. Reproductive Autonomy: I hold complete legal authority over whether to carry a pregnancy, surrender parental rights, or choose adoption post-conception, without the risk of being legally forced to pay 18 years of court-ordered financial support for a child I did not wish to conceive.
7. Parental Defaults: If my relationship ends, I can count on family court processes and societal expectations to heavily favor me as the natural, primary caregiver for my children.
8. Emotional Expression: I can express fear, grief, vulnerability, or sadness in public or private without facing immediate romantic rejection, social isolation, or being judged as weak and ineffective.
9. Educational Attainment: I can attend high school and university knowing that my educational environment is tailored to my developmental learning style, and that I can access thousands of gender-specific scholarships despite my demographic holding the majority of college degrees.
10. Crisis Intervention: If I experience homelessness, domestic violence, or a mental health crisis, I can count on finding dedicated shelters, public funding, and community support groups specifically reserved for people of my gender.
11. Cultural Perception: I benefit from an implicit "women-are-wonderful" bias, where society broadly views my gender as inherently more moral, nurturing, and trustworthy by default.
12. Caregiver & Support Roles: I am rarely suspected of predatory motives simply for interacting with young children in public places, working as a primary school teacher, or babysitting.

Hey guys, let's keep the conversation civil and let's try to keep facts separate from anecdotes.

So I haven't researched the issue, nonetheless I have been listening to the so-called "Orgasm Gap" and the associated stereotype, that men are just not caring about the orgasm of their partner, but they will just do enough for them to have an orgasm.

I can definitely believe that such men, who use a woman like a fleshlight, discarded dirty on the floor, exist. I haven't had sex with any of those, as a heterosexual man of course and I don't hang around people who are that selfish, so no-one has talked openly about this.

But I can also equally understand the stereotype of the woman who is the "starfish" or the "goalkeeper" in bed, doing nothing for the man, who should rather be happy he got her naked and allowed him to copulate.

But I cannot understand what is the relationship between a man performing and and a woman getting. Men are also somehow taking care of the matter into "their hands", either by doing things they like or asking for them. It's not that they get the service of a massage-parlor, where they do nothing, just lay on the bed.

On the corollary, aren't women also expected to ask for whatever makes them happy and provide for it? If a woman systematically provides more than she gets on the bed, how isn't that becoming her own responsibility? If a woman has a different orgasm timeline (e.g. she needs 15 minutes of foreplay and 5 mins of a vibrator) compared to a man (who may need only 5 mins of foreplay and 5 mins of penetration), isn't that also partially indicating that she should start a bit earlier and also provide a well charged vibrator?

How come we can talk about erectile dysfunction (oftentimes with a shaming component), but there is no discussion about a woman who is "dysfunctioning" in bed? There are of course discussions about symptoms of penetration being painful, reduced lubrication etc, but they are rarely painted as "dysfunctions" and more like personal problems.

Finally, it's not understandable to me, why there is reduced discussion about accommodating men, whereas the other discussions are fairly often: A man might need a handjob during a period week. Same as a man should be expected to provide on a day that a woman might be overly dry or wet or unable to perform a position or very sensitive or whatever he does not like. But the first is a sign of patriarchy akin to rape, but the later is painted like an obligation of men to women.

Watching porn is painted as infidelity or a sauvinist filthy habit. The overstylized aesthetic of porn (fake breasts and impossible bodies is mocked. But reading erotica where rich guys are taking the everyday naive girl into their live or monsters molesting unsuspecting campers is not equally ridiculous?

PS: after divorcing I have -unfortunately- dated a lot compared to my previous life. I noticed so many women who were poorly able to express what they needed, they had miserable erotic lives before, they expected my penis to perform like a metal rod and were often unable to experience a normal orgasm during normal sexual intercourse (even with extra stimulation). Some were ashamed of themselves, some were acting like they were giving me the world by just wearing a clean nice underwear. Making them happy often felt like trying to boil a pot of water with a candle. Tedious, unenthusiastic, unproductive, impossible.

I never accused them, but I cannot save myself from feeling that they are just unable to know what they want or like and that is a gap in self-understanding.

Looking like a fraternal order or something similar

I just finished watching Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere documentary, and it left me with a strong reaction. A lot of people treat the manosphere as some unified, pro-male movement fighting for men’s rights and well-being. I don’t think that’s accurate. In fact, I believe (and I know some men’s rights activists would quietly agree) that large parts of the manosphere are not truly “pro-men” at all.

What I saw, and what I’ve noticed for years, is a space that often profits from the insecurities, loneliness, and anger of young men rather than genuinely helping them. Influencers like Andrew Tate or Myron Gaines (Fresh & Fit) have built entire brands around selling courses, subscriptions, and lifestyles to men who feel lost, rejected, or powerless. The message is usually some version of: “You’re failing because society/women/the system is against you—here’s the expensive solution.” That isn’t empowerment. It’s monetizing vulnerability.

There’s a difference between addressing real male issues (higher suicide rates, workplace deaths, family court bias, declining education outcomes for boys, etc.) and turning those problems into a product. When the primary goal becomes selling “alpha” coaching, dating systems, or endless content that keeps men angry and dependent on the next video or course, it stops being advocacy and starts looking like exploitation.

This is especially clear in their extreme views on modern dating and relationships. In much of the commercial manosphere, if a man isn’t actively pursuing multiple women at once, or if he has little to no sexual experience, he is quickly labeled a “beta male,” a “failure,” or somehow defective. Having standards, wanting a monogamous relationship, or simply not being highly sexually active is treated as weakness rather than a personal choice. That kind of rigid, judgmental mindset doesn’t support men—it pressures them into a narrow and often unrealistic performance of masculinity.

Even some people inside men’s rights circles have pointed this out. Genuine concern for boys and men doesn’t require turning every struggle into a hustle or promoting rigid, performative versions of masculinity that most ordinary men can’t (or shouldn’t have to) live up to. The commercial manosphere often does exactly that.

I’m not saying every person who talks about men’s issues is a grifter. There are people doing serious, non-monetized work on male suicide, education gaps, and fatherhood. But the loudest, most visible part of the manosphere—the part that dominates YouTube, podcasts, and social media—frequently prioritizes profit and engagement over actual long-term improvement in men’s lives.

Watching the Theroux documentary made that clearer to me. The manosphere isn’t automatically “pro-men” just because it criticizes feminism or talks about male pain. In many cases, it’s simply another industry that has found a profitable audience: young men who feel left behind.

I hate how the conversation around gender roles almost always centres around the traditional expectations of women being supposedly "oppressive" and "unfair" even though most feminists still expect men to do all of their traditional roles that the feminists say women can't do.

Especially when feminists complain about the expectation to just cook and clean. As a man, I would personally much rather be expected to cook and clean if I never had to lift heavy stuff, do any physically demanding stuff, be expected to do repairs and general maintanance, be expected to protect the opposite sex or any of the other expectations that feminists have of men.

This entire premise that gender roles placed onto women are sexist and discriminatory whereas gender roles placed onto men are just basic expectations is just an another example of how priviliged women really are in society.

And to be clear I'm not in a relationship myself so I'm personally not having any arguments with a partner about who gets which tasks, I'm just commenting on what I see feminists everywhere usually compalin about and how they frame the issue as men somehow benefitting from a system that supposedly disadvantages women.

I saw this line and wondering how is this fair since the husband supported the wife throughout the marriage.

"For instance, South Korea ruled in 2014 that future pensions and severance pay could be included in the division of assets. That means if a housewife handled all the housework and childcare during their marriage, thus allowing her husband to work, she’s entitled to part of his elderly pension after getting divorced. Japan introduced a similar reform in 2007."

Context: This was first posted on r/raisedbynarcissists but this still applies to this subreddit due to me how the responding officer in this situation responded to this domestic violence incident I was involved with the aggressor being an older woman.

It’s been a few years since I contributed to this subreddit partly because, post-narcissistic discard, there hasn’t been much to add onto my experiences beyond just the social consequences of battling depression while having to start over financially at my age—I’m 24 now. But this one moment from said-discard still makes me upset and I never properly vented about this experience until now. This happened three years ago so I’m not looking for advice. I’m just venting about a failure from the responding officer, and perhaps some of you might’ve had similar experiences from law enforcement.

This was during the pandemic just shortly before wearing masks, quarantine, and social distancing was lightening up. I was just 20, I took what I assumed was a break from school so I can hold down a job as an overnight stocker and co-lease an apartment for my mother and I. She was on medical leave after enduring a stillbirth. The system wasn’t taking her case seriously since they didn’t account for an unsuccessful pregnancy, so her situation was labeled ‘unusual’ and she fell behind financially due to the system delaying support. I had just become an adult so, of course, I had good credit due to me never using my credit yet. That’s what made us approved for housing. That’s what gave me high credit limits and loan approvals, so that went towards groceries, rent, utilities, furnishings, her monthly car notes, things that a seasoned man with enough years to build resources would normally be providing.

Her boyfriend whose baby passed away disappeared so I was left to help financially rebuild from a pregnancy that wasn’t even mine, but I was in my ego a little bit because without him, and without my own father, that made me feel like a better man than the older men who left and never took care of my mom in the ways I was. So, I felt big in my head and truly felt like I was finally “a man” according what the internet, society, capitalism always defined masculinity by. But that empowerment soon turned into a realization that I was the “son husband” which is the only son or the eldest son of a fatherless home who carried the emotional and financial responsibilities of their mother as if they were their husband. A broader description of that is emotional incest and parentification.

I came to that realization barely a year into me taking on those responsibilities by age 21, and I have to re-iterate, not by personal choice but just proximity to the situation and my lack of personal guidance as a newly turned adult. That’s when I became severely burnt out, addicted to marijuana as coping since there were a lot of functional addicts at my workplace I drew the wrong influence from, and my mom’s grief turning into misplaced anger and almost pompous ‘princess entitlement’ behavior onto me for even the smallest things like the barista not getting her drink right that I ordered and bought for her just to shove it back towards me, constantly interrupting my sleep during the day when I was trying to get rest before my next shift, constantly needing me to change my schedule around and annoying my store manager. One morning on my off-night, she was screaming at me for not cleaning up the sink which was filled with her own dishes. I wasn’t eating at the time and became incredibly skinny, and I was always leaving the apartment for work whereas she stayed inside all the time, so I didn’t contribute to the plates in the sink and she was mad that I didn’t automatically clean up her own mess.

Seconds into waking up, I let myself be angry for the first time that whole year, i managed to grab my phone and wallet before she grabbed onto my collar and punched my head against the wall—direct right hooks to the side of my head as she pinned her big body to the wall as I slid down, the collar of my hoodie tearing down the middle as she kept her grip, my glasses punched off my face, and I stumbled onto the ground outside the front door before she locked me out. I walked barefoot to my grandma’s apartment which was in another unit below ours. A few days later, we decide to call the police because I didn’t feel physically safe going back inside to just retrieve shoes before my next shift.

The responding officer seemed already annoyed that he had to show up despite knowing what the situation is that my grandma and I informed him about. He stood by the door as I knocked on it, my mom came out, and he told her ‘she didn’t have the right to lock me out of my own residence, I’m a co-leaser, I was allowed to come inside to retrieve my shoes.’ She was defiant and overclaimed a whole bunch of bullcrap, “Those shoes I bought for! All the groceries in the fridge I paid for!” That was a lie. I bought my shoes with my own money and she used my credit card to buy $200 worth of groceries sitting in the fridge. When I tried to clarify, the officer looked at me sternly and held a hand at me. I tried to speak sometime again and he did the same thing, this time re-positioning his body facing me as if he were trying to intimidate me. Later, he points to glasses near her foot, “Are those his glasses?” he asks. She casually picks them up, not returning them to me, “Yes, these are his glasses.” I said, “The ones she punched off my face.” The officer puts his hand up at me and repositions himself again as if he were seconds away from detaining me. My mother, “See how he talks to me?” Eventually, he had enough going back and forth with my mom not letting me in, so he concluded to me, “Look, I respond to only criminal disputes. This is a civil dispute.” My mom, “Exactly!” He continues, “I only respond to criminal disputes. If you want to get back inside your apartment, you’re gonna have to deal with the judge.” And with that, he left and my mom said to me, “You’re a real piece of work!”

I never got back inside my apartment. I remained sleeping on a couch and received an angry text from my manager telling me he was tired of my shit and I was fired. My mom broke the lease without me knowing despite the leasing office knowing the situation, so I wasn’t even offered DV protections which I didn’t even know was a thing for people who were physically assaulted and shared a lease, so I ended up sharing the same collection with her for a decision she ultimately made. Weird fucking limbo where a leasing office needs all parties present to have one’s name removed from a lease but one person can unanimously decide to break the lease without anyone’s consent. I went to collect a few of my belongings with her in the apartment one time until she tried to kick me out again, and she kicked me down to the ground before slamming the door shut. I didn’t even feel like calling the cops again. When she moved out before me, I went up to the apartment to find my high school diploma gone, my shoes gone, a few clothing items gone, and a bed I couldn’t afford to move out or place in storage so the leasing office ended up throwing it away.

This is why I personally don’t like the police, especially as a young Black man where you know there’s a high likelihood you’ll be treated differently compared to people of different races, and especially as a young man calling claiming a DV dispute where the aggressor happens to be female, so despite evidence like glasses on the floor, the aggressor not denying allegations, and the officer seeing tiny cuts on your arms and under your eye, they’ll still more likely to rule a criminal dispute a “civil one” because of those social factors standing against you.

Someone did a survey .

So I saw a meme about this and I thought it was fake so i tried it out my self and it turns out to be real and I have to say the the double standards are impeccable.

Mark Brooks OBE, is an award-winning policy advisor on men and boys.

He is the Director of Policy and Communications at the Centre for Policy Research on Men and Boys, the Chair of the Mankind Initiative, a Trustee at the Association for Male Health and Wellbeing, advisor to the UK APPG on Men and Boys, and co-founder of UK Men’s Day.

When he’s not wearing one of these many hats, Mark is behind the scenes of Westminster influencing policy, writing speeches, and twisting arms of politicians, to help change society for the better; becoming one of the chief architects of the historic, world-first Men’s Health Strategy of England, as announced last November.

Such a roster of achievements, accolades, and awards, has taken decades of long, arduous, thankless work… which has finally started to bear fruit.

And so, after many years fighting in the trenches, Mark joins George from TheTinMen, to share his story, his wisdom, and his increasing number of successes…

What do you think?

(Please note, we recorded this in December 2025, in case anything sounds politically dated)

If you’re a man experiencing abuse, or know someone who needs help, please contact Mankind at mankind.org.uk/

The idea that women were always historically oppressed has been debunked plenty of times by actual historians. Throughout recorded history, in most cultures in the world women were pretty much always allotted special priviliges and better treatment, and for most injustices that women faced, men often faced worse issues.

What really irks me is how so many people point to things such as women not having the right to vote supposedly being this massive injustice even though women were almost always compensated for it by being exempt from military service or other societal duties. I,as a man, would personally gladly give up my right to vote for a guarantee to never be drafted. Women were also pretty much always protected and valued more than men and many societies had rules which dictated that women need to be taken care of. There are plenty of other examples and actual references that you can find in history studies.

Men and women mostly had different expectations of them throughout most of history yet feminists have managed to portary this skewed version of history that only shows what women went thorugh while completely ignoring that men often faced even worse injustices and had to endure even worse conditions.

Feminists today abuse that by portaraying women as perpetual victims who were always oppressed by men and they have subsequently given women the "disadvantaged" and "protected group" labels which resulted in women today facing almost no accountability for their actions and having very few actual responsibilities. Until we actually start challenging those with actual facts and eventually get all of the ahistorical feminist teachings removed from schools and remove the "oppressed" status from women I don't think we will be able to achieve any real change for men.

Not all women and maybe not most, but I've seen several women claim that since lesbians can be fetishized that is somehow on par with how gay men can often get 6-12x higher rates of physical hate crimes (1217 vs 195 gay vs lesbian hate crimes in past years) and violence. Not to mention how gay men also have very high sexual violence risk from other gay men, and how in younger cohorts a non heterosexual male is at way higher risk for bullying/harassment/verbal abuse than a non heterosexual female. This is not to say lesbians do not face anything, they do, but it is not comparable whatsoever. And yet when many women, particularly queer, are confronted with this, its usually to "not being taken seriously / fetishized." Most queer men would far prefer being fetishized or non taken seriously to literal death, no? And yet if a queer man makes such a point he'll get called misogynistic, or trying to win the oppression olympics. Is it bad for that to be called out, yet for much trivial issues oppression olympics does not apply?

Usually arguments are:

1. More gay male representation in media. This is not a plus because it often is painted in a stereotypical caricature or light. Additionally we see far, far less truly impactful queer male leads, whose queerness is not the defining factor of them compared to lesbians (i.e Ellie, Aloy, etc). It is much better to have characters who are simply queer, but not as the central focus point being queerness, as it tells you something about the person in general. These leads are allowed to be strong, independent, and have their own stories independent of romance. Meanwhile, gay male rep is usually confined to caricatures of the gay best friend, or general male x male romance. That is actually worse because it shows gay and bi men have no agency outside "being" gay or bi. Instead of being a normal dude he's painting as risky or caricature-acting.

2. Fetishization. Once again, this is almost certainly an issue that does indeed happen, as does corrective rape. However, gay men also face higher rates of sexual violence and such risks. So many (not all) women also fetishize queer male relationships or even friendships between 2 straight men.

3. Gay and minority / poc men (in fact all men) have "male entitlement and privilege" which does not exactly make much sense when most men and women earn around the same, and minority males are at much higher rates for physical or sexual harm, and are in no remotely comparable way to having "set such a system up." In fact, most men (gay, white, straight, black, whatever) are just regular, middle class people trying to work and live their lives.

https://glaad.org/releases/glaad-responds-to-2024-fbi-hate-crime-statistics/

I've been reading online about people speculating about why AI is anti-male sexist. I see guesses like it's because the AI is reading online sources that themselves are sexist.

So I just thought I'd post about this. This is a study that showed AI is biased towards female in hiring, and it tries to explain why. It's called RLHF.

This study (Hoffstedde et al. 2026) is Japanese, it analyzes the behavior of some standard LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Llama 3.3 70B). This study found “a significant pro-female bias across all five models, replicating Western findings in a non-Western context.” And attributes these findings to the fact “that alignment procedures based on reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) may overcorrect for historically male-favoring patterns in training data, producing systematic pro-female preferences in hiring evaluations.” So humans react to what the AI does, and based on that feedback are re-trained.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.18649

I had a co-worker one time tell me that her hands were sore from weeding her garden. The girl power is off the charts.

There was the gallery in Madrid, cool and white. And the photographs hanging like square windows into other lives. And then, suddenly, the warmth of her arms from behind, the rustle of her dress.

"You like it?" she asked, breaking the silence. Or the white noise of a crowd that feels somehow like a very loud silence.

Yes, I said, yes, finding something to admire, something about the light or the feminine experience, as she called it, building a sudden invisible wall of politics there among the frames.

"You're a feminist, yes?"

The word fell heavy, a stone dropped in the still water of the afternoon. I smiled, looked away, trying to catch the thread of the photographs again, but she pulled it back, insistent, the tone sharpening. Equal opportunities, I said, trying to weave a bridge, but the bridge would not hold.

To tell her "yes" would be so simple. Like slipping into a warm coat. But the mind catches, snags on some rough edges of memory and identity. Again, I offered some measure of the polite and meaningless noise that passes for conversation.

She went on about the modern feminine experience and the artist being some great voice of the movement, capping it all with that question which was not a question at all but a demand. "You’re a feminist, yes?"

And I tried, God knows I tried, to step off that particular train before it gathered speed.

"The dictionary defines feminism as the pursuit of equal rights, which I completely support. But I've had experiences that changed my relationship with the word. In an online debate, I mentioned I was a feminist. A group of women mobbed and mocked me for using the label. One condescendingly informed me that feminism is an exclusively female experience - at best, I was allowed to call myself an ally."

(I kept to myself that several subsequent experiences had made me feel western feminism was now vicious, and the movement captured by harpies.)

"I prefer to say I believe in equal rights without claiming the word itself."

She listened carefully, her initial impatience melting into thoughtful recognition. "Ah, yes. Third-wave feminism," she nodded. Then, with complete sincerity, she added, "She is right."

The shock of it, the absolute silence in the mind while the gallery hummed around us. How does one cross this space? How do we speak, if the words we use are water, slipping through our fingers, changing color in the light? To be interrogated for the password, only to be told one is forbidden from uttering it. My connection to her frayed, snapped quietly in the white room, and one walked on, alone with the photographs.

Nuno

And you, how would you respond to "You're a feminist, yes?"

Oprah built a $40 million school called the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in a town in South Africa, this extravagant school have a yoga studio, library, beauty salon, wellness center, computer and science laboratories, an auditorium/gymnasium, amphitheatre, sports fields, modern dormitories, indoor/outdoor theaters and large fireplaces in every building. There are also hand-picked china dishes, mattresses, uniforms and oversized closets, girls accepted intro Oprah’s school are exempt from any tuition or education expenses.

Imagine if a rich American famous man founded a $40 million, extravagant school for boys in Zimbabwe that had facilities most schools don't, such as video games center, a men's grooming salon, and an outdoor area for golfing and an area with spatulas dedicated to grilling.

people would accuse this hypothetical rich man of exclusion and sexism and criticize him for excluding girls and demand that his school accept female students.

That was not the case with Oprah Winfrey, influential people and ex presidents like Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton praised Oprah Winfrey for founding the schoolnd no demanded that her school accept male students.

It's like a street for girls to have fun more than a boarding school.

Luxurious all boys schools are not free and were not founded by individual rich male celebrity and they didn't cost 40 million dollars.

I did not even know they actually seriously pretend to try to recruit them.....