That's the thing, that's the branding. The left (with Tucker Carlson's help) managed to get everyone to think of a man tanning his balls with any mention of men's rights. This is a major coup for leftist feminists, and a major loss for human rights.
Men's rights are human rights. They are father's rights. They are worker rights. It means equal protection under the law, protection from rape and violence, protection from discrimination and threats. These are basic human rights that should be afforded to everyone. This should not be a zero-sum game: to give one group rights you should not take them away from another group! There are plenty of rights to go around and they won't run out.
Fully agreed here, I'm just doubting that the resistance against that really comes from the left - my impression is that it more comes from the right (or maybe press outlets who have rebranded to look "woke" on the surface but still promote mostly traditional views).
E.g., I haven't yet seen a feminist sub on reddit excuse a female rapist or deny that a male rape victim is a victim. Though I have read articles that have done exactly that.
Some examples of feminist discussion of men's issues from Reddit:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/AskFeminists/comments/z083j5/the_gu... While the OP is dismissive, the discussion itself is far more nuanced.
- https://www.reddit.com/r/WitchesVsPatriarchy/comments/zz535i...
- https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/z7rsv1/mens_...
Also, I like subreddits like r/menslib which try to provide "non-tate/peterson" communities for men's issues - often arguing exactly like you did.
They don't have to, society already does this for them all the time.
Pay attention to how media frames the crime when a female teacher sleeps with an underage male student versus when a male teacher rapes an underaged female student.
My word choices are deliberate here. In a vast majority of headlines and articles I've seen, if the perpetrator of a sexual crime is female, the language is much softer about the action.
And courts tend to be much softer on them as well than on the men doing the same crime.
This makes me think this kind of narrative stems more from "woke captialist" media or from people pushing the "men are always happy about sexual attention" narrative. That narrative is considered part of "toxic maskulinity" - exactly the mindset that feminists want to get rid of.
Also note that (in the US) the legal definition of rape was changed to include men no earlier than 2012 [1] (i.e. under Obama). Under the previous definition, it was fundamentally impossible to consider a man a rape victim. That previous definition was from 1927.
So the assumption that only women could be raped was the older one. The modern progressive movement was who got men included in that definition.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/blog/updated-definition...
[0]: https://www.met.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/rsa/...
The left, however, has a compassion problem with men. It seems like very few people actually want to engage in a healthy way in left oriented spaces whereas the right actually talks to young men and offers them advice over a range of topics that a lot of boys feel most insecure about. I think that is something that needs to be addressed otherwise grifters such as Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate will continue to infiltrate spaces of 12 year old boys, with innocuous seeming lifestyle advice.
The advice I see given most frequently to boys and young men by lefties seem irrelevant to their actual interests at best or patronizing at worst (e.g. "Don't rape/make the world a better place"). I rarely see advice on how to engage with their own masculinity in a way that isn't harmful. It feels like the gut reaction of a lot of people is to conveniently label boys as assigned evil at birth rather than to guide them and unpack how interactions with peers, girls, or society work.
This isn't feminists ruining young men, it is society failing to have adequate role models and show compassion to young me.
A related impression I had is that a lot of innovation in understanding and talking about sexuality has happened in queer/LGBT spaces, but relatively little of that has swept over to hetero sexuality. There are tons of highly nuances discussions about queer and feminine sexuality and relationships. This is happening far less for hetero relationships, because traditional role models and traditional ideas of a relationship still exert a strong pressure.
It happens even less for hetero men than for hetero women in my impression. Yes, men have metric gigatons of porn available, and society is still mostly wired to male definitions of attractivity. But at the same time, the the act of actually being sexually attracted is portrayed in the media as shameful and creepy for hetero men. That sort of hypocrisy can be difficult to navigate, especially as a teenager.
In contrast, many spaces that are branded as "men's rights" today seem to go for an entire different vision of society, which often looks like a cartoon version of the 50s (if consistent at all). If lots of men find themselves lonely, unfulfilled and unable to find a girlfriend, I think that is a serious issue, but the solution of the "men's rights" groups - that it's the women who have cut back their own goals and ambitions, just so some men they don't even know have a chance to have sex - seems pretty insane to me.
Also note, not all women are feminists either. There are plenty of women who have issues with men taking on traditionally feminine roles because they it violates their own conservative worldview. I believe that's where the "Karen" slur originated from.