Men’s Issues: What Are They?

I can’t remember what triggered this issue, so I’m just going to get into it.

I watched a documentary called The Red Pill. The documentary was not good. It was propaganda, which is why I don’t like documentaries. They only give one side of the issue–the one the producer wants to promote. A filmmaker can manipulate a film so much to give you what they want you to see and feel (e.g. Super Size Me, White Wilderness, Tiger King, Dinesh D’Souza stuff, Bill Maher stuff, Michael Moore stuff, anything involving haunted places). They’re entirely biased and often lie. And if they’re not lying, they’re omitting or misrepresenting. They ignore questions that might poke holes in the thesis or counterclaims. So I don’t watch them unless they’re something personal or isn’t controversial (Dear Zachary, Will & Harper, American Movie, Super/Man).

The Red Pill is not one of them. The documentarian has “little girl voice” which makes me worry she’s already endured abuse by men. The movie never addresses the misogynist articles or rape threats on the sites (e.g. “When’s the best time of year to beat your wife?”). It never deals with its ties to the alt-right or white nationalism. But I see kernels of good ideas here.

I will be the first to say I am a straight white cis male age 30-50 with a B.A.. My house is not on fire. Give that water to the houses that are, I’m quite fine. Nonetheless, after watching the documentary, I wanted to parse my feelings about all this because they’ve built up over the years. (Continuing my tradition of writing things that won’t make me any friends.)

OVERVIEW

Just as there are “women’s issues” and “race issues” and “LGBTQ issues”, it must be granted there exists “men’s issues”. One might say men don’t need to have a platform for their “issues” because they have all the power and control. And they’d be right. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have problems. We all have problems. Even the richest, handsomest, strongest man out there has problems. They are not important problems, but they are problems.

The problem is this movie and the men’s rights movement raises them abhorrent presentation, with no regard or thought to how they exist in the grand scheme of things. This leads to people misunderstanding what their desired end goal is. If they put their manifesto in a picture, the frame would look like one of those tacky things your kindergartener makes you for Mother’s Day. Except this one’s covered with MAGA hats, red pills, a big Q, purple and green fingerpaint, Chad, a Proud Boys flag, the Punisher symbol, a Twitter egg, the 4chan clover, a wolf, ambiguous Nazi salutes, and of course lots of American flags.

This could have been a productive movement, but they were immediately swallowed up by conservatives, alt-righters, sexists, and trolls all shouting louder than the ones who wanted sincere change. I don’t know how things get appropriated like that, but no one said “no” to them, probably because it meant more numbers. Just using the term “red pill” immediately makes me think of Trumpophiles, profiteers, and quasi-cult leaders like Andrew Tate and Alex Jones carrying the flag for Andrew Dice Clay. The movie does not help with this–it shows feminists exactly as stereotypes portray them–pink hair, cats-eye glasses, college age, and yelling, yelling, yelling. It would have been fine if the message was “men have some problems too”, but it was “I’m now anti-feminist.”

Here’s the thing: men asking for some increased rights does not stop women from retaining or gaining more rights. But the today’s style of debate and advocation is with unhinged one-liners and yelling as loud as you can to shut the other person down instead of joining forces. Men get domestically abused? Women get domestically abused too. We should get together and fight for abuse victim’s rights. Men don’t want to be falsely accused of rape? Women don’t want to be accused of making up rape! We should take measures to stop people from making up false claims. All our interests seem to align, so why do the camps have to be divided? We are always making it “you vs. me”. We should be thinking of it as “you and me vs. the problem.”

When I was in college, in my second semester Computer Science class–introduction to coding, I was struggling. We were all struggling. We were the largest CS class the college had ever had, but I don’t think a lot of us had ever attempted making a computer do something, rather than just executing programs someone else had written (i.e. games). And after a particularly disastrous quiz, my professor, Dr. Wick, told us something I will never forget. “Help each other out. This class isn’t graded on a curve so there’s no reason you couldn’t all get A’s. I mean, don’t cheat, but… you can all win.”

I don’t know why that lives rent-free in my brain. Maybe because I don’t like competition. I don’t like having to adopt a Darwinian philosophy that only the fittest survive. That you’ve got to cheat, lie, steal, or hurt others to be successful. But we are all one-winged angels. We must hold on to one another to fly.

What the Movie Says that I Believe to Be True and What I Believe to Be Not True

Paternity rights for fathers are very backwards: True

I follow the thedadvocateig on Instagram. I like her because she makes me feel not so guilty about being a man. She spotlights partner-shaming TikTokkers and influencers who jump on trends like “test your boyfriend” their boyfriend or “how to have an affair”. She also campaigns for fairer rulings in custody cases, in which decisions overwhelmingly favor women. The movie concludes that this is solely because of biology–women have been carry and raising the babies since neandertal days.

I think the scales of justice are weighted toward them because there are SO many bad fathers out there–deadbeats who don’t pay, skip town, forget pick-ups and drop-offs. So many that we don’t have the resources to hunt them all down. It’s not fair that they can get away scott free, with minimal or no responsibility to their children. So the system of law leans toward the patrons stuck with the bill. But there are good fathers out there. There are fathers better than the mothers. And I’m not talking about “too close to call”, I mean by leagues. You can see it without glasses.

The movie provides some examples–one is the Serpico scenario. Serpico sounds like a great name for a G.I. Joe villain, but sadly, it is a 1974 Al Pacino based-on-a-true-story movie about police corruption. But after those events, the real Frank Serpico became involved with a woman who lied about taking contraception. She had his child then sued him to get a hefty child support payment. Now, certainly, this is not a crime that only women are capable of. Men can poke holes in a condom or simply not put one on. Why they’d want to do this, I don’t know, but lying is lying no matter who you are. (See previous comment about “this is a problem for both sides”.)

Then of course, you have your Casey Anthonys, your Susan Smiths, your Andrea Yateses, your Joan Crawfords, your Lori Vallows, your whoever-Honey-Boo-Boo’s-Mom is. In 2025, there is no biological or societal reason that a man can’t be as good a provider and parent as a woman. I don’t like it when men are judged by the behaviors of others, of the deadbeats who came before them. That’s not fair. That’s not justice when a woman says she’s on birth control and is not, just the same as if a woman has sex with a masked man thinking it’s one person but it’s another. That’s called “rape by deception”.

One might argue that the cases where men deserve custody over women are few and far between. That these are minor exceptions, drops in a bucket. And you’d be right… statistically. But these decisions aren’t being handled en masse. They are decided on a case-by-case basis (literally). But the judges aren’t looking at these cases closely, they’re looking at previously established laws and precedents. But just because it’s a law doesn’t mean it’s right. Slavery used to be legal. Feeding parking meters that aren’t your own is illegal. Times change. Ideals need to be updated. But these judges would rather rely on laws from the 1950s, back when women couldn’t even have a credit card, to make decisions for them.

Another might argue that men do not have to undergo the process of gestating the child, therefore should have fewer rights. Doctors visits, blood tests, constipation, morning sickness, swollen feet, complications like preeclampsia, diabetes, anemia, false labor, not to mention the fact that your body will be changed forever inevitably. It’s a whole body horror scenario, especially when you consider that, without modern medicine, you had a one out of five chance of just up and dying from it. Pregnancy is a burden that the woman may not have asked for, so the justice system tries to compensate by giving women more choices and control about what they can do with the baby.

The movie showed one case where the woman lied about who the father of the baby was and he was still forced to pay child support. To a child he had no biological or emotional relation to. Surely anyone can see the breach of good judgement in that. Why should you have to pay for someone else’s kid? What did he do? What criminal or wrongful act did he perform?

And it doesn’t help that all the states have different laws. So a woman can drive from one state to another, have the child in a place where the father has fewer claims, then come back. Of course, this can work the other way too, if this is a case where the woman is trying to keep the father out of the child’s life because he’s a bad guy.

And I’ve seen this happen in personal experience too. I had a friend whose boyfriend had married, produced two kids, then got divorced. Then his ex-wife decided/realized she was gay, then got into a relationship with another woman. The other woman made enough money to pay for both of them (she was something like a neurosurgeon or something) but they never got married. Because if they did, he wouldn’t need to keep paying alimony. So both the lack of same-sex marriage and paternity rights were responsible for providing unfair treatment due to sex.

The movie attempts to examine this objectively with a flowchart demonstrating what powers the man has over the child vs. what the woman has. Green means a positive scenario for the role, red means a negative scenario for the role.

The conclusion the documentarian makes is that anything a father wants to do is contingent on what the woman wants to do. Assuming both parties were equally negligent when it came to preventative measures, this seems like an upset in equality. But maybe there isn’t a way around it, given biology. Also, it’s important to note that there is no good option when a pregnancy is unwanted, just the best of a lot of bad choices.

Men Are Being Oppressed: False

Hit a stick at anyone in a leadership position and you’ll hit a man, dollars-to-donuts. They are 90% of the politicians, CEOs, judges, doctors, military officers, and chefs. But you must also recognize that many more men are in non-leadership positions (e.g. soldiers, cubicle jockeys, line cooks, etc.). Imagine there’s one leader and a hundred peons. Odds of that one being a man? 99%. And that one is making decisions for all those ninety-nine peons. Their gender? 50/50. Women get the short end of the stick, but all men do not get the long end of the stick.

You can’t look at someone like Donald Trump–a criminal, a misogynist, a rapist, twice-divorced–get elected and think it’s a fair world (even if he wasn’t running against a female candidate both times). But remember: A) lots of men don’t like him either B) lots of women see everything he’s ever done to women–said about the #MeToo movement that men need to “deny, deny, deny”, overturned Roe vs. Wade, “grab ’em by the pussy”–and still voted for him (for some ungodly reason).

Hey, I’d like to tear the patriarchy down too. I can’t imagine the Israel-Gaza thing would be going on if all the leaders in this scenario were women. America’s biggest religion specifically denotes women as sinful and deceptive. Any woman you didn’t like, call them a witch and you can have them killed.

But certainly no one is stopping me from getting what I want. Not because I’m a man at least.

Paul Elam is a rape apologist/misogynist: Unknown

The movie starts by explaining the public perception of MRAs with front page articles like “When Is It Okay to Punch Your Wife?” and “October is Bash a Violent Bitch Month” and “I’ll Decide If You Were Raped, Not You”. I did no homework for this post (can you tell?) so I do not know who’s responsible for these articles or how they were allowed to get on the site, if one expected MRAs to be acting in good faith. All the clips of Paul Elam in the movie make him seem sincere, but editing film footage to make reality look like something else is easy.

When you lead a movement, everyone who speaks on behalf of your movement speaks for you, even the assholes. You are who you associate with. Just like the saying: “If there are 29 Nazis at a table, and you sit down with them and don’t say anything, there are 30 Nazis at a table.” The extremists have to be curtailed or they will derail your intentions. You can’t just say “Ooh, there are a few bad apples.” You’ve got to get that bad apple out of the basket or the bag will spoil.

MRAs want to eliminate feminism: False

I can’t remember if this is in the movie or not, but some people think MRAs are only acting up because “they want stuff too”. They see feminists getting all these new rights and they’re saying “hey, what about me?” Like it’s a birthday and the spoiled little brother has to get presents too or he’ll throw a tantrum. Some feminists frame the movement as “I want power over women” not as “I want power.” I don’t see anything that MRAs are interested in that preclude a women’s ability to choose. Just like I don’t think women want to take away pornography.

Now remember, we are still not that far removed from the “How to Be a Good Housewife” days. Women who were taught those kind of lessons sincerely are still alive. They have every right to be defensive when we’re barely out of that stone age. We certainly don’t want to lose the momentum or go backwards.

There was backlash to the #MeToo movement in the form of #NotAllMen, which got its own backlash with #YesAllWomen. The point was not to say that all men are harassers. They’re not. But all woman have been harassed. The two ideas can exist in the same space. But no one seemed to realize that–they’d rather think in extremes. It’s everyone or no one. But there’s a difference between dismissing a movement and actively trying to silence or close down others.

There’s a scene near the beginning where a bunch of college students are protesting Paul Elam speaking at their school. One of the woman perpetually harasses someone trying to get in. He says “I just want to listen.” and she keeps calling him scum, telling him he’s giving money to a rape apologist, and not leaving him alone. My motivations for attending such a talk might be my own–maybe I sincerely don’t know both sides of the argument, maybe I’m on your side and I’m attending to “know thy enemy”. Maybe this is research for a paper. But screaming in my face, calling me names, and not even listening when I try to say something? Acting like an asshole will never endear me to your side of things. Remember, the world is watching and judging.

It reminds me of Gabriel Iglesias’s story about promoting Chick-Fil-A, not knowing about its anti-LGBTQ contributions. Short version is he’s a supporter and ally, but sincerely did not know about Chick-Fil-A’s activities. He was just using his celebrity to try to get free food. The point is that some activists only attack. They don’t try to educate or inform. They simply blitz on social media. No forgiveness, no tolerance, no mercy.

And I get it. Hell, I do the same thing. It’s frustrating to work so hard to get your race/gender/etc. a seat at the table, then see something directly antithetical gaining traction. I’d wig out too. I’d drop all pretenses. You tried to be nice, and it didn’t work. I feel the same way that Trump got elected a second time. After all four years of watching him break the law, wield power like a dictator, hamper the wheels of justice for his own selfish reasons, put children in cages, etc. the American people said “let’s do it again!” If I owned a shop and someone came in with a red MAGA hat, before 2024 I would have begrudgingly served them. But now, I would tell them to get out. I’m not serving “his kind”. At a certain point, you see that being nice isn’t working. So now it’s time to rage. (Also see: Paradox of Tolerance)

But some people simply don’t know. It’s not in their scope. And they’re wise enough not to jump into a fight without knowing what each side is fighting for. So don’t condemn them for trying to find answers beneath all the shouting and marches and signs. They want to form an opinion their own way.

A long time ago, on 20/20, I saw John Stossel doing a report on environmentalism, that despite the continuing outcry, things were improving, like that there were more trees today than twenty-five years ago. But when he went to a college campus to talk with students about it, they just shouted at him. They refused to listen. That clip stays in my mind–people who are supposed to be on the side of understanding and sympathy stonewalling anyone who might have counter-arguments or new information. Is that any different than racist grandfather talking about “those coloreds moving in”?

And I can see why they wouldn’t want to take the time/energy to educate someone–because that easily leads to feeding the trolls and sea lions. All things being equal, you probably only have a 20% chance of getting someone receptive than a fratboy manosphere chump. Influencers in the manosphere always hide behind “I’m just asking questions,” but they never ask good questions or attempt to get answers. They just want to sow doubt. “What if the Earth is flat? I’m just asking questions.” No, we know. We know.

But then just don’t engage. You don’t have to scream and insult and degrade. Sometimes people need to fall to know how to pick themselves back up.

One of their yelled slogans was “Women hold up half the sky!” That’s fine, but who holds up the other half? I think there’s only one choice left.

The Statistics Are Correct: True

But the thing is, I trust statistics less and less as I get older. You can use the English around them to get whatever reaction you want. You say “dihydrogen monoxide” has killed more people than any other substance on Earth, you’ll get idiots who want to ban it. (Dihydrogen monoxide = H2O)

In the movie, they frequently feature a board in the MRA HQ that lists all the ways men get screwed over. This isn’t that exact board, but I think it contains all the same information.

In plain and condensed language, it says “more men suffer X than women” where X equals…

• Workplace deaths and injuries
• Suicide
• Sexual abuse and assault*
• Being a victim of homicide
• Increased prison time
• Children being taken away/lack of custody
• Death while in the armed services due to war
• Falling behind in schools

*not more than women, but more than you think. Definitely more woman-on-man violence and sexual assault than you think.

If you’re an 80s kid like me, you might remember Square One and “Dirk Niblick of the Math Brigade” (he’ll look you right in the eye). Basically, his thing was exposing scames and solving problems by pointing out mistakes in the math. In one of them, a shady character misrepresents what certain numbers mean with fast talk and false labels. In defense, he keeps saying “figures don’t lie”. But when he’s caught, Dirk Niblick comes back with “But liars do figure!”

First of all, just gathering the statistics can lead to all sorts of problems and misrepresentations. Second, you don’t have to be a genius to see why these numbers are the way they are.

More workplace deaths and injuries? Of course, because more men are in blue collar jobs that are riskier. Construction, roofing, garbage collection, steel work, logging work, firefighting, etc. Women aren’t breaking down the doors to get jobs at coal plants and radio towers, the same way I don’t see men racing to be nannies and nurses. But this is why workmen’s comp exists. Also no one’s making men do this. They aren’t being forced against their will to take these jobs. It’s not a mens’ issue, it’s a work issue.

More men are homicide victims? They’re also the homicide perpetrators. Increased prison time? Men are the ones committing the crimes. It’s not like women are getting away with it or being ignored by police.

More men dying in war? That’s because it’s mostly men in the military–especially in combat positions. And who are those men? Are they rich? Are they the sons of CEOs and politicians? No, they’re the ones looking for a way out of poverty. This isn’t a gender issue, it’s a socioeconomic issue. It’s the same as before about the one man at the top and a hundred below. Is the message “stop sending men to war?” No, it should be “stop sending anyone to war.”

More men are homeless? That’s because homeless women become prostitutes. Not by choice, I mean. A woman can’t sit out on the street for a day without being scooped up by a pimp.

These stats ignore the demographics of these situations. It’s as ridiculous as saying 100% of the people who died in childbirth were women. This is misleading and overreaching.

As far as boys falling behind in school, sure. But it’s because they’re not trying. I don’t know what’s causing it–hopelessness, neglect, ego, biology. I talk more about it in the post, but I think it’s something that needs to be studied. Nothing has a 100% chance of causing the downfall of this country like lack of education and critical thinking.

Suicide? Sure, men are depressed. But because men’s culture is different than women’s, we don’t reach out to people, won’t show vulnerability, won’t express ourselves. Good or bad, it’s not considered masculine. For example,

And then there’s this quote from Jason K. Pargin.

Is this a problem that needs to be fixed? Absolutely. Does it get in the way of feminism? It does not. Would the situation be improved by smashing the patriarchy? I think so.

Men and women are different from each other: True

All these stats prove is that men and women don’t have equivalent experiences and have trouble relating to each other, but I already believed that. Because men and women are different.

The movie makes this point poorly. A man will lose a job. A woman will lose a child. A woman will make 30% less than what a man makes. A man will die nine or so years earlier than a woman. Women get periods. Men get erectile dysfunction. Women deal with ageism. Men deal with strengthism. Men are still praised for having lots of sex while women are condemned. In men’s fantasies, men are powerful and successful and the women are sexy (example re: Batman). In women’s fantasies, women are high-powered leaders, men are lean, responsible, and caring (again, example re: Batman). These aren’t even apples and oranges. These are “my problem is blue.” “But my problem is rock.”

Men can’t know the female experience and women can’t know the male experience. Let’s just get that out of the way. But just because we can’t understand doesn’t mean action can’t be taken. Men do not understand why women like to get flowers. I certainly don’t. But that doesn’t mean that I should never buy flowers for women.

Women don’t report rapes. Men don’t report being physically abused. Both for the same reason–not wanting to revisit trauma/shame. Unfortunately, no one can do anything about it unless you say something. People aren’t telepathic. (The police might not do anything about it–that’s a separate problem–but they definitely won’t do anything about it if they don’t know about it.)

Both men and women can have stalkers and obsessives, but don’t have them in the same way or same threat level. Women have more to worry about when it comes to dating and relationships. There’s some tweet that says “When it comes to rejection, men have to worry about feeling embarrassed. Women have to worry about getting killed.” Even if the relationship starts as successful, it can turn sour. The man’s not ready for it to end, he becomes a stalker, kidnaps her and locks her in the basement. I don’t think that’s ever happened to a man.

Men are presented as bumbling oafs as sitcoms. There are Anna Nicole Smith-like golddiggers and sugar babies. There are women teaching other women how to get away with affairs. Men are manipulated by women for TikToks like “kiss your crush” or “ask your man to peel you an orange”. The number of female politicians known for being bad psycho (e.g. Kristi Noem, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Sarah Palin, Joni Ernst) is becoming greater than the good ones.

There are more male authors/directors/chefs/main characters. Women are blocked by getting those kinds of jobs by a glass ceiling or societal expectations (see the 1 vs. 100 argument again). And when they do get them, they have to deal with sexual harassment or rape. Inevitably. It’s like if you apply for these jobs you have to expect that your vagina will be penetrated unwillingly.

Men have had it so good for so long. We are still only a hundred years from women not being able to vote and blacks being enslaved. There are still issues in the system constructed by people who valued those rules. There is no way to measure who has it worse, who has the worse quality of life. Every person has different burdens than another. Everyone’s going to have a different quality of life.

MRAs are a radical hate group/is a gendered version of White Nationalism: False

It’s incorrect to say all mens’ issues advocates hate women and deserve to be made fun of like in Parks and Recreation. But it’s a very short hop to that way of thinking. It’s certainly adjacent, especially when you use “red pill”/”woke” symbolism. It implies that people are “asleep”. If you’re not with us, you’re against us. I mean, that’s literally in the movie that the red pill thing comes from.

But that’s spec fic, which often uses extremes of good vs. evil in its stories. It’s not meant to be used in the context of real life politics. That’s how you get extremism. And it’s easy to Jedi Mind Trick people into that way of thinking. For example:

More men commit suicide than women. WHY? Men don’t have close-knit emotional support networks like women. WHY? Patriarchy and toxic masculinity trains men to only expect emotional fulfillment from a sexual partner and never show vulnerability in front of another man. CONCLUSION? We should fight patriarchy.

But the Andrew Tates of the world prey on victims by using emotion rather than rational thinking. That’s why they yell and scream so much. They just want your money and cultivating a tangible enemy is a good way to do that (see WWII propaganda). They provide this type of thinking:

More men commit suicide than women. WHY? Men don’t have close-knit emotional support networks like women. WHY? Women are heartless bitches!!! WHY? Women are bad. CONCLUSION? Feminism is bad.

You gotta watch for the pinch point. Watch for where they start $elling you a $olution. Men are looking for happiness and community, not radicalism. These people are sad/fearful/despairing and the solution being sold to them is to be upset/angry/stressed. And they buy it because, hey, it’s not the old emotion.

The community is decentralized. That means no consequences to the figureheads and influencers because there’s no trackback. (See “January 6 U.S. Insurrection“) It also means the movement has no control or direction (See “Failure of the January 6 U.S. Insurrection“). I don’t know how these people are able to motivate others to get off their ass and do an action, but they can. This is how you get GamerGate. This is how you get Occupy Wall Street. No clear goals. Nothing that says “I’ll be satisfied when _______________.” Or they ask for something that can’t happen or isn’t realistic.

That’s why they say “facts don’t care about your feelings” so they can use that as justification for their hate. The community gives them the “feelings”, thus logic/rationality isn’t going to get anyone out. But at the same time, it gives a promise that can’t be kept–that your life will be better by joining this group. And it’s something I can see in my own life.

I have been trying to be a published author for more than fifteen years. It’s easy to get angry when you see that all the names in the “Best Short Stories of the Year” have foreign names. And all the best sellers are the same book, written by authors like Colleen Hoover and Ali Hazelwood. Or agents who only want “diverse voices” (authors that are POC, LGBTQ, disabled, etc.)

It feels like looking through a window while they get published. Given that, it would be an easy hop to blame it on DEI. But that doesn’t solve a problem. Plus it’s a self-interested feeling. It’s the not the disabled or LGBTQ I should be mad at. It’s not the publishers or agents I should be mad at. What I should be mad at is their notion that they’re too afraid to take risks. Movies do the same thing. “Well, according to charts, these books and movies earned the most money. Therefore… we should make the same books and movies!” They do this instead of taking a risk on a different kind of story.

It doesn’t mean anyone here is subhuman. No one person is more valuable than another because of an uncontrollable trait. But it can feel like the world is catering to marginalized groups because they get all the attention. They’re the ones people talk about and help. The prisoners, the immigrants, the women, the non-white races, the non-cis genders, the tuberculosis sufferers. Even child pornography traffickers and providers think they’re being oppressed because of their uncontrollable traits. But you have to remind yourself–that’s because their house is on fire.

Given all these traits of an alt-right group, I don’t think the MRAs qualify. But a lot of their members sure act like they do. Maybe they were already in alt-right groups and got into this as a new way to hurt women.

CONCLUSION

Again, I want to reiterate: None of these issues I’ve mentioned are as important as other social issues like equal rights, healthcare, racism, economic inequality, and so on. I just made this to point out everyone has problems. Like Cherry says in The Outsiders “things are tough all over.” You can say “that problem is not a priority right now”, and that’s fine. But when you say “That’s not a problem,” that makes me feel like I don’t matter.

Also, we must be brave enough to call people on their bullshit. There’s not enough of that going around. I get so frustrated when the president says he’s got a great economic plan and no one asks “what is it?” He’s going to build a wall and get Mexico to pay for it. “How? How are you going to execute that?” Tariffs are going to end the trade war. “Why would raising the price on our goods make others lower the price on theirs?”

The only two big takeaways I want people to get from this is that men deserve better regard for custodial rights to children and that men aren’t unemotional, invulnerable tanks like in the stories (e.g. Batman, Edward, Heathcliff).

Who we really should be angry at is the polticians and judges and leaders making poor decisions based on the past. Our rules are being decided by malignant narcissists and psychopaths. They paint people with a wide brush, which we all know is wrong. Whenever you see someone saying “all X are this way,” you know that’s a false statement. All Mexicans with tattoos are gang members. All immigrants are eating the dogs and cats. We need to see people as individuals, not as stereotyped groups with resolute traits.

It’s not the fact that men are in power, it’s the fact only a few men are in power. And those men are rich and white and sociopathic, so of course they’re choosing and creating rules that are in their best interests. To stay powerful.

The problem is women are doing all the fighting. They have all the skin in the game. So it’s natural they get defensive when confronted with yet another opposing faction. They’ve invested decades into fighting against assholes like Andrew Dice Clay, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Rush Limbaugh, Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, Chris Brown, Woody Allen, Louis C.K., R. Kelly, Jordan Peterson, etc. And all they’ve gotten is a rep for being hateful, myopic man-haters who rage like ravenous harpies at every tiny offense. (See Black Christmas (2019)).

The funny thing is that gender equality means that women can be assholes like men can. A man is bad at something, he’s just bad at it. A woman is bad at something, she represents all of women being bad at it. It works the other way too. When a headline says “X’s wife wins new world record in swimming” isn’t just “Y wins new world record in swimming”. Or “I’m a boss bitch, but hold the door for me.”

Be careful you aren’t one of those people who want only the benefits of a right and not the consequential negatives, like “no, not like that.”

• “Women should be able to serve in the military.” “Okay, now you have to sign up for the draft.” “No, not like that.”
• “Fast food workers should be paid a livable wage.” “Okay, we’ll raise our prices to pay for their benefits.” “No, not like that.”
• “Immigrants are ruining the country.” “Okay, we got rid of them all. Now there aren’t enough people for restaurants, construction companies, produce harvesting, office or hospital cleaning, or oil refining.” “No, not like that.”
• “Let’s bring manufacturing jobs back to America.” “Okay, China wants to build one in your quiet rural town which will increase air/water/ground pollution, bring in new and different people & businesses, and expand the town.” “No, not like that.”

So in conclusion, patriarchy hurts everyone. Men have a long way to go to tear down the reputation of being bastards. And the Men’s Rights movement is not going to get us there. Best to drop that whole thing and start fresh.