What's bad about men's issues?

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What about Janet Yellen or Ruth Bader Ginsburg? Honestly if you're just thinking in terms of power they're head & shoulders above many heads of state.

When I was a child, there were Golda Meir of Israel and Indira Ghandi of India.

In more recent times we have Julia Gillard of Australia and Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan.

But, that is beside the point. We need to support each other across all genders; the perspectives are different, but the underlying issues of life are basically the same. I think Fnord has made some good points.

Oh come on, what about Mazlan Othman?! She's the UN ambassador to ALIEN WORLDS.

The 20s? These things are/were true in my lifetime. There still is no equal rights amendment.

Having no equal rights clauses applies unilaterally. That means guys are just as unequal too.

I've actually been refused a request for a shirt of my proper size, women's small, which should be obvious considering I'm 5' 2" and weigh 108 pounds. She said it was "cut wrong" and put me down for a men's size small. Of course it was too big. It was an event in which everyone had the same custom logo.

Not even a close approximation. We men ran the world while expecting women to just grow up to be our wives to tend to our homes and raise our children. In some ways it still is that way, but it's gradually changing.

Today men face psychological oppression (leading to earlier mortality rates), whereas women face more systemic.

Saying men were and are as oppressed as women in terms of institutional/system rights is like trying to say straight people are as oppressed as the lgbtq community - which is ridiculous. As a guy, I know I was born with the world at my fingertips.



Still not equal to presidential type power which occurs in countries beside the United States. We are behind. The only question is how much and to what degree.

All I'm saying is that not having equal rights for women completely undermines men having equal rights among each other too.

Yeah, that makes sense.

I wasn't talking about power in the political sense, though in a democracy it is the people who elect their representatives, according to the qualifications of prospective candidates rather than their sexual characteristics. I agree that the electorate does a woeful job of this, however.

Women still can't always keep their jobs if they become pregnant, nor should they be given any such guarantee. If one doesn't have the financial security to be able to look after a child, one shouldn't produce one.

Women have always in principle had access to credit, albeit that it may have been more difficult for them to access at certain times in the past.

Your third point is simply untrue (except for those jobs for which women were simply unqualified).

Women still don't have the "right" to be paid the same as men. Just as it is in a man's nature to be more reckless, on average, than a woman and, as a result, he is expected to pay higher car insurance premiums (for example), so it is in a woman's nature to become pregnant, making her more of a liability to an employer, which liability has to be offset by a correspondingly lower pay. This is a law of economics; the only alternative would be EVERYBODY receiving lower but equal pay. This said however, it is a fact that ON AVERAGE women STILL tend to earn more than men, have higher levels of education and so forth. This admittedly ceases to be true at the very highest end of the pay spectrum, however.

Women shouldn't be able to seek "damages" for sexual harassment which is merely verbal; it is not the law's responsibility to deal with a woman's inability to tell a man to get lost. Sexual assault is another matter, and always has been.

That marital rape was not a crime is a fallacy. It was never a SPECIFIC crime, but that doesn't mean a woman was unable to gain redress for crimes committed against her by her husband, including rape, where there was evidence. One thing a woman couldn't do however, was prosecute a man on the sole evidential basis of her CLAIM that a man raped her, as she can do today. Nor should she have been able to.

A woman shouldn't be able to serve on the front line of battle. It's a simple anatomical fact that a woman is, on average, weaker than a man. The law was in place for her own good.

I get the impression that there are certain things, certain sacrifices, that can chafe at a persons soul (whether that's just their pool of character/integrity, something metaphysical, not making a distinction here) and if it was a sizable enough part of their motivation for living - whether they knew it or not - they'll be in for years of trouble as a consequence. While it's not true for all women it's true for many that not having children is one of these crises.

I think its fair to say that we're increasingly living in an expensive enough world in the west where very few people can both have children and keep up with their societal credibility in terms of what their friends, family, etc. would demand that they have in order to keep up social appearances. Some people would make the case as well that those who don't share that sense of responsibility will have lots of kids, leave them in uncomfortable situations, and the balance of births will lean in the direction of the nation's overall education and intelligence dropping. If that's the case we really need a two-prong approach, ie. make damn sure that the underprivileged have access to the best K-12 education they can get (online or in classrooms) so that they have a fighting chance of developing themselves to the best of their ability and also making sure that middle class women aren't stuck having only one or two children tops when they could afford to do otherwise with a better negotiation of contract with society.

I think part of the problem right now with feminism is it's tried so hard to gird women for a run at the male power game that it's sacrificed what it maybe should have been doing once it got some degree of institutional power - ie. attempting to renegotiate economy, value, etc. in favor of what women need out of life, and I can't think of a better example than the need for maternity leave to be covered as well as the possibility where, if they do decide to take several years off, there could be some career-oriented institution to help them jump back in the fray once their kids are in school and pick back up where they left off. Technically I think men and women actually both need that, and I get the impressions that some countries like Germany are way ahead of the US with respect to vocational aid and matching talent to positions, if you can be permanently discarded because a break in your resume makes it smell funny that has a lot of negative consequences in other ways. As of right now I think one of the tragedies is that women's consumption patterns, by mass marketing, have been geared toward fripperies, competitive apparel, and these might help women if life were really supposed to be an eternal arms race between women but I try to imagine what would happen if feminists were pushing women to ask themselves what their absolute priorities are and try to use their power, as an economic block, to reshape the economy to their own needs - ie. promoting products that really enrich their lives, promoting contracts that are highly beneficial to them, and looking down more on the burn-and-turn type stuff that everyone wants them to spend all of their money on.

A large part of the reason why traditional roles were arranged as they were is precisely because of what you've stated above. The woman wasn't forced to forego pregnancy out of simple poverty, because she had a husband who could continue to bring in the necessary income.

I would agree that in the case of MARRIED or otherwise stable couples, the state should step in to ensure that the very poorest aren't forced to avoid having children.

I don't believe, however, that a woman who will reproduce with any male specimen she finds, at the expense of society and quite frankly, the genepool, should be extended such a privilege. She had no right to get pregnant in the first place.

This area is where the crude individualism of the postmodern world starts to become genuinely dangerous; reproduction is a sacred act which concerns not just the egos of those involved but every following generation (and every past). That such a situation is approached on the moral premises of individualism is the reason our civilization is collapsing and that of the Chinese, for all its very, very many faults, is taking its place as the world's cultural superpower.

p.s. here's some reproduction biology 101 - a woman isn't the sole one to get pregnant, a woman can't get pregnant without first we MEN impregnating them. Thus, acting like pregnancy is solely up to the woman and like we have no rule to play is a narrow and funny reproduction thesis.

Good luck finding a girlfriend or a wife, man, that's all I have to say. Women are fighting for and are starting to get equal say in this world - which may be intimidating for some and would damage their odds of finding someone (but, no remorse here - it's on the man to change rather than the woman to accept it). I, personally, say bring on the strong women. It's about time.

Your post is an excellent example of "what is so bad about men's issues". Men's issues are not the problem. The problem is when men, under the pretense of advocating for men's issues, instead of actually talking about men's issues, launch attacks against women and women's issues.

Instead of actually talking about men's issues, they go on tirades about feminism, create an arena of competition where women and women's issues are the adversary and act as if women having rights or having their issues addressed detract from men having the same. They complain about feminists not talking about men's issues, intrude upon forums and spaces for women's issues and try to destroy them and use them as stages for men's issues, derail, piggyback men's issues on the backs of women's issues and otherwise usurp arenas for women's issues.

I'm not sure if men are aware of it but it is actually very war like behavior.

Look how you started your post.



Your banner is "Feminism (and to some extent, women...you might not intend this but this is what it becomes) is the enemy and we must fight it", not something like "Men deserve equal rights in family court" or something that actually touches on men's issues.

You strategize to destroy the enemy.


Because you cannot have two speakers (people speaking) on the floor at the same time in the same room. Men's issues and women's issues should be given their own spaces when possible so they can be given the voice, and time and attention they each deserve and so there is no "fighting for the mic" or derailing.

You stage it in terms of us vs. them when it doesn't have to be.



We will overlook the subject of the actual validity and veracity of these two issues because addressing them in this post would deviate from the point I am trying to make, which is, the way a lot of men talk about men's issues is in a war like manner which seeks to destroy the subject of women's issues rather than actually address men's issues.

Let's take issue number 2.

If men's health issues are not getting enough funding, shouldn't they get more funding regardless of how much funding women's health issues are getting? Maybe some men's health issues need more funding than some women's health issues to properly address.

When you base it on how much funding women's health issues get, you might be doing men a disservice. When you bring women unnecessarily in to men's issues, you create a competition which will introduce obstacles that would have not otherwise have been there.

I'm happy to talk about men's issues and advocate and support advocacy for things such as equal treatment of men in family courts, and more funding for men's health issues and more resources for men who are victims of domestic violence...I am currently sheltering such a man.

I am more than happy to respect forums where men can freely talk about difficulties they face that are important to them such as losing their virginity and living in a society where they are still expected to be wage earners rather than home makers, or confident when they are shy, and so on.

But I am not going to join an anti feminist/woman rally that tries to suppress talks on and progress of women's issues any more than I join an anti men's rights/man rally that try to suppress talks in and progress of men's issues.

I don't see these issues as things that must be advanced under a banner of war against the opposite sex but as you have done, that is what many do and men seem particularly inclined towards this.

The article doesn't state anything different from what I stated myself; it was more difficult in the past for women to get credit cards for men. I acknowledge this to be true. Again, this was a simple result of the inevitable differences between the temperaments of the two sexes, and not an example of any government-mandated oppression of women, which has never been present in the western world in the lifetime of anybody registered on this forum.

Speaking of the distinction between East and West, however, it’s interesting that the campus-feminists seldom turn their attention to countries such as Saudi Arabia which genuinely do oppress women. This only proves my point that feminism is a tool of the establishment, in which gullible “rebellious” students are playing an unwitting part.



I think I misunderstood your point on this one. Certainly it has been illegal for some time to discriminate in job advertisements, though I don’t see this as a women’s rights issue, any more than a men’s rights one. In consequence of an unjust law like the one you’ve quoted, old women who want (rightly) to be nursed by other women will be forced to be nursed by men just as much as the converse.



I think you’re making an unwarranted assumption here; I don’t even own a car, and never have done. In other respects, too, I’d consider myself anything but reckless, regardless of whether it’s a masculine quality or not.




I don’t believe it’s anybody’s fault except the individual men concerned, and they must be dealt with as such. There is no justification for criminalisation of anything so subjective as mere verbal harassment, however, since this would be a criminalisation, in principle, of everything verbal qua verbal. Unfortunately this is the lunacy we are in, or at least headed towards.



Where there was physical evidence of rape, there’s not a court in the land that would have chosen not to prosecute. The prosecution may not have come under the heading of “rape”; it may have been assault, but the man would have been prosecuted. But I dare say that the extent of marital rape then was very slim indeed. The figures may tell us that it’s higher now, but that’s only because rape under the present legal system is, to all intents and purposes, anything a woman says it is. This, incidentally, is an insult to genuine victims of rape – an irony which attention-seeking campus-feminists seem oblivious to.



I don’t believe that because some women, given the legal ability to do so, will sign up for front-line military action, that I should support it. Some women in China will consent to work in sweat-shops; that doesn’t mean I should be in favour of sweatshops. It is absolutely the right of all men (and women) to state that other human beings shouldn’t be subject to indignity.



Pregnancy as a result of rape must form an exceptionally small proportion of overall pregnancy cases. And even in these cases, the law permits abortion.




I don’t want a girlfriend or wife who doesn’t share my values. I appreciate that this probably rules out an enormous proportion of the population, and I’m fine with that; I want a genuinely feminine woman rather than one whose emotional insecurity and childhood conditioning tell her she’s worthless unless she’s a copy of a man. If this means I die a bachelor, I accept it – I probably will. I have no real desire for the company of others anyway, precisely because of their lack of objective values.



Not intimidating, but disappointing, because “equal say” usually translates into their being conditioned to accept roles which are beneath their dignity – something which I, as someone who sees woman as an exalted creature, am hurt by. I used to read the novels of the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen and wondered how love could have transformed itself, in the space of a mere hundred and fifty years or so from a phenomenon of extreme beauty capable of inspiring the greatest art, the greatest virtue, the greatest passion - to a tedious, formulaic preamble to sex. I have since mostly given up any hope I had.

I know many minorities are since it's basically the same tactic that the non-minority always try to use - which makes it so easy to see through.