"I think what’s going on is that for the past 10-20 years,
"men and boys have been marginalized,"
I haven't been marginalized. Nor have I witnessed it over my longish life.
I have witnessed easily offended guys complain how the deck is stacked against them, while they reap the benefits of playing life at the lowest difficulty level.
"Marginalization" is a systemic issue; its reality isn't dependent on anecdotes or your particular happiness with your lot in life. You've got to look at differential statistics between men and women to see if either (or both!) are marginalized. College attendance, suicide rates, life span, discrimination by the healthcare system, happiness with work, number of hours worked, affliction by drugs and alcohol, callbacks for jobs, algorithmic discrimination...
> "Marginalization" is a systemic issue; its reality isn't dependent on anecdotes or your particular happiness with your lot in life.
Sure but observations conducted over decades isn't an anecdote. It isn't even just one person's conclusions because it includes the observations and analysis done by other personally-known people. And their conclusions are augmented with my direct observations of their lives.
> You've got to look at differential statistics between men and women to see if either (or both!) are marginalized.
Stats give you direct measurements and from those we can make reasonable inferences. Stats are valuable; they tell us that women make less and are under-promoted. From that we can make inferences about women's work environments. We can confirm the inferences by listening to women.
Women fully know they struggle for equal pay and opportunity. Marginalization is indicated and confirmed all around.
Objective, reasonable women know they're marginalized.
Women attend university at significantly higher rates than men (3:2 ratio).
Men's suicide rate is around 3x that of women's.
The ratio of the unhoused is even worse, more like 4:1.
Men work tens of thousands more hours during their lifetime than women. They enter the workforce earlier, and leave it later, than women. They work longer hours when employed, and suffer far more occupational injuries and stress. Even their commutes are longer on average.
Despite all that work, men report lower job satisfaction than women.
And despite that late retirement, men's life expectancies are years below women, and the gap continues to grow.
Does that make it easier for them to get jobs? No. Using synthetic resumes with randomized gender, female-coded applicants to software engineering roles receive 41% higher callback rates (https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/marley_finley...).
Part of this is due to algorithmic discrimination: when LLMs are used to evaluate job applicants, they show a strong bias for women (https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10922).
Men died at a rate roughly 2x that of women from Covid: this is comparable to the difference between white people and marginalized racial groups. Despite that, they were excluded from accelerated access to the Covid vaccine by the CDC. So you might have a 20 year old woman having access to the vaccine faster than a 60 year old man, even though the CDC's own framework required that groups at greater risk from it get faster access to it.
If these statistics applied to any other group, they'd be top line news stories.
Now, I'm sure you object to all of these as examples of men being marginalized, with the logic going something like "men are privileged, so if social structures harm them, it doesn't count as a social harm, and we know men are privileged because they don't suffer from social harms." That's entirely your prerogative. I'm empathetic: that itself is a result of you being socially harmed, because society has so thoroughly enforced the male gender role into your brain that it becomes part of your identity that you're strong and manly and need nothing from the world and heroically protect women. Take some time to unpack that internalized misandry.
Women screech about how dangerous and hard the world is for them, but they're also the most risk-averse demographic. Depending on context men die at 2-8x the rate women do, with the latter multiplier being our homicide rate. But women have it worse...
This nonsense about women having it harder is just female supremacist sophistry blindly repeated because it's concise and sounds plausible. Feminism achieved its gains through collective whining about unfairness-- and we took them seriously enough to play along without simply removing them by force. The "battle for women's rights" certainly yielded few corpses.
Hell, not that long ago they had the luxury of being parents instead of disposable salarymen like us.
Now we're told we have a fertility crisis. The only people not experiencing one did not buy into the cruel lie that work would set them free. So even this particular female struggle is self-imposed.
This has real "I bought a house in 1970 working a blue collar job, I don't know why people are complaining about a housing crisis" energy to it. Should these boys just stop eating avocado toast to afford to go on a date as well?
Aren't dating expectations always contradictory for both genders, by definition? If they were not, human race was to become very homogenous with almost no variety (because everyone will start having kids with "just evidently the best" partners), and that's a path to extinction. Most complex species instinctively self-protect against that.
> Aren't dating expectations always contradictory for both genders, by definition?
Are they? All people tend to want the same things. We want to be seen, understood, appreciated, affirmed, trusted. We want to feel safe, be valued, connect to others and be happy.
What I want in a date is to help the other person achieve some of those things. What better thing is there?
https://archive.is/BjxrL
Only way to win this game, is not to play.
One response to the original article:
I haven't been marginalized. Nor have I witnessed it over my longish life.I have witnessed easily offended guys complain how the deck is stacked against them, while they reap the benefits of playing life at the lowest difficulty level.
source: man. former boy. raised 5 sons.
"Marginalization" is a systemic issue; its reality isn't dependent on anecdotes or your particular happiness with your lot in life. You've got to look at differential statistics between men and women to see if either (or both!) are marginalized. College attendance, suicide rates, life span, discrimination by the healthcare system, happiness with work, number of hours worked, affliction by drugs and alcohol, callbacks for jobs, algorithmic discrimination...
> "Marginalization" is a systemic issue; its reality isn't dependent on anecdotes or your particular happiness with your lot in life.
Sure but observations conducted over decades isn't an anecdote. It isn't even just one person's conclusions because it includes the observations and analysis done by other personally-known people. And their conclusions are augmented with my direct observations of their lives.
> You've got to look at differential statistics between men and women to see if either (or both!) are marginalized.
Stats give you direct measurements and from those we can make reasonable inferences. Stats are valuable; they tell us that women make less and are under-promoted. From that we can make inferences about women's work environments. We can confirm the inferences by listening to women.
Women fully know they struggle for equal pay and opportunity. Marginalization is indicated and confirmed all around.
Objective, reasonable women know they're marginalized.
Objective, reasonable men know we're not.
Women attend university at significantly higher rates than men (3:2 ratio).
Men's suicide rate is around 3x that of women's.
The ratio of the unhoused is even worse, more like 4:1.
Men work tens of thousands more hours during their lifetime than women. They enter the workforce earlier, and leave it later, than women. They work longer hours when employed, and suffer far more occupational injuries and stress. Even their commutes are longer on average.
Despite all that work, men report lower job satisfaction than women.
And despite that late retirement, men's life expectancies are years below women, and the gap continues to grow.
Does that make it easier for them to get jobs? No. Using synthetic resumes with randomized gender, female-coded applicants to software engineering roles receive 41% higher callback rates (https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/marley_finley...).
Part of this is due to algorithmic discrimination: when LLMs are used to evaluate job applicants, they show a strong bias for women (https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10922).
Men died at a rate roughly 2x that of women from Covid: this is comparable to the difference between white people and marginalized racial groups. Despite that, they were excluded from accelerated access to the Covid vaccine by the CDC. So you might have a 20 year old woman having access to the vaccine faster than a 60 year old man, even though the CDC's own framework required that groups at greater risk from it get faster access to it.
If these statistics applied to any other group, they'd be top line news stories.
Now, I'm sure you object to all of these as examples of men being marginalized, with the logic going something like "men are privileged, so if social structures harm them, it doesn't count as a social harm, and we know men are privileged because they don't suffer from social harms." That's entirely your prerogative. I'm empathetic: that itself is a result of you being socially harmed, because society has so thoroughly enforced the male gender role into your brain that it becomes part of your identity that you're strong and manly and need nothing from the world and heroically protect women. Take some time to unpack that internalized misandry.
Women screech about how dangerous and hard the world is for them, but they're also the most risk-averse demographic. Depending on context men die at 2-8x the rate women do, with the latter multiplier being our homicide rate. But women have it worse...
This nonsense about women having it harder is just female supremacist sophistry blindly repeated because it's concise and sounds plausible. Feminism achieved its gains through collective whining about unfairness-- and we took them seriously enough to play along without simply removing them by force. The "battle for women's rights" certainly yielded few corpses.
Hell, not that long ago they had the luxury of being parents instead of disposable salarymen like us.
Now we're told we have a fertility crisis. The only people not experiencing one did not buy into the cruel lie that work would set them free. So even this particular female struggle is self-imposed.
This has real "I bought a house in 1970 working a blue collar job, I don't know why people are complaining about a housing crisis" energy to it. Should these boys just stop eating avocado toast to afford to go on a date as well?
Aren't dating expectations always contradictory for both genders, by definition? If they were not, human race was to become very homogenous with almost no variety (because everyone will start having kids with "just evidently the best" partners), and that's a path to extinction. Most complex species instinctively self-protect against that.
> Aren't dating expectations always contradictory for both genders, by definition?
Are they? All people tend to want the same things. We want to be seen, understood, appreciated, affirmed, trusted. We want to feel safe, be valued, connect to others and be happy.
What I want in a date is to help the other person achieve some of those things. What better thing is there?