What is Men’s Rights?

Men’s rights have become an increasingly relevant subject in the past few years as men as a group have become worse off, and The Journal of Men’s Rights was created to be the place to discuss these issues.

Over the past century or so the Women’s Rights or Feminist movement has made great progress in women’s rights and political and social inclusion. This movement, as well as a number of other factors including changes in the structure of the economy in the West, have, however, caused men and boys to be noticeably worse off to the extent that the state of men today has been called a “crisis.”¹ These problems include performing increasingly worse in education, having fewer friends, declining economic and job prospects, and higher suicide rates, both compared to women today and to men only a few decades ago. The problems are clear and tangible, but the solutions are barely existent. Men’s issues have been neglected by governments and other social institutions, which continue to prioritize women’s issues even in areas where men are statistically worse off. And the desire to address men’s issues is frequently met with hostility and demonization.

The reason for continued hostility towards men varies. But I have a suspicion that it is due to a fact of our perception of gender that has long benefitted men and now is hurting them. The fact is that women are treated as a group, whereas men are treated as individuals.² Be it in personal traits, abilities, or struggles, women are seen as almost a monolithic group that gets addressed as a whole whereas men are seen as individual agents. If there are few women in STEM fields, it is seen as a women as a group being discriminated against. Too few men in humanities fields, however, is just men not being so interested in the humanities. Similarly, women struggling with poor medical care is the medical system not understanding women. Men who have health problems are seen as not liking going to the doctor or not feeling the need to. This is a problem because it obscures how men as a group are struggling today due to factors that uniquely impact men as a group.

The key realization and narrative change that is necessary is that just as problems that women face may be gender-based, so are problems that men face. Men as a group are discriminated against in K-12 education,³ men as a group are disinclined to come to enjoy reading books because there are a lack of recent male authors,⁴ men as a group have declining economic and quality of life prospects because of anti-male bias in upstream economic outcome determiners like school,⁵ and men as a group die of suicide at nearly four times higher rates because men as a group struggle from uniquely male issues.⁶

This tendency towards seeing women as a group whereas men are seen as individuals to the detriment of men can be seen in how gender-based violence is deemed something targeting women, whereas regular violence is just gender neutral. However, regular violence cannot be gender neutral when 80% of people arrested for violent crimes are men.⁷ Similarly, men falling behind in education cannot be their own individual fault when men are disadvantaged from the moment they enter the educational system while women’s scholarships and mentor organizations abound.⁸

The fact of the matter is that men are affected by group dynamics as much as women. And men are discriminated against when not given group-level support that women are. If you assume every boy or man’s actions is his own individual determination, you blind yourself to the systemic factors that undermine men’s success today, just as it is systemic factors, not individual choices, that in many cases have undermined women.

Importantly, however, men are different from women. Men have different problems and need different ways of addressing their problems. This is why men’s rights needs to be a field of its own and why men’s problems need direct attention. We cannot solve issues uniquely affecting men if we do not see men as the ones who are being uniquely affected in unique ways.

Men’s issues have in recent years given rise to the online Manosphere. As hateful as the Manosphere can be, it is wrong to demonize it as harmful to society. The Manosphere has arisen from a place of resentment and legitimate hardship faced by men and is one of the most effective forces today in speaking to young men about the problems they face.⁹ Meanwhile, many politicians, celebrities, and social media accounts explicitly call men problematic and just bad. Whether you think the Manosphere to be effective in a positive way or a negative way, the facts stand that the Manosphere has arisen to address men’s issues, and ignoring the Manosphere or exclusively focusing on how it can be a perpetuate misogyny is yet another way that men’s problems and feelings are undermined and ignored by society. This is certainly not to say that the Manosphere is good. But ignoring something that legitimately arises from people experiencing hatred and hardship is certainly bad and perpetuates that which is ignored.

A common rebuttal to men’s issues is that “the System was made by and for men” so it is ridiculous to put up a fuss now that women can play fairly and men are struggling. This is a common sentiment, but it is false. The “System” was, in many cases, made by and for the wealthy and powerful. And, indeed, today boys from upper socio-economic statuses have equivalent academic and social outcomes to girls or surpass girls.¹⁰ It is boys and men who are from lower socio-economic statuses, for whom the system was certainly not designed, who struggle the most. Meanwhile, women’s rights movements have redesigned the system and removed barriers for women of all socio-economic statuses. These barriers still exist for lower socio-economic status men. So it is unfair to say that women are outperforming men in the System that was designed for men. The real problem is that women have managed to redesign the system away from being so heavily wealth-based for themselves, yet men are still beholden to that system. For example, 95% of gender-based college scholarships are for women,¹¹ even though women are the majority of college students and have been since the 1990s. Granted, women are more likely than men to be in poverty, but they also have more opportunities to escape poverty than men.¹²

It may seem odd to call this new field men’s rights when men have full legal rights and usually are presumed to be the default gender that any enumerated legal rights are to be enjoyed by. But enumerated rights and experienced rights are two different categories of things, and in fact both categories of rights are currently under attack for men by the current Western social system. This holds true for generic broad rights like the right to “Life, Liberty and Happiness” that are undermined by men being more likely to be involved in violent crime and less likely to get specialized help for it, that men are four times more likely than women to commit suicide, that men are less likely to have close friends, having seen a much more dramatic drop-off in close relationships over the past two decades then women, or that men are frequent rape victimes yet completely lack resources targetted at them and help. This also holds true for more narrow rights, like the right to food or shelter, as 70% of unsheltered homeless people are men yet shelter resources are disproportionately targeted at women and children.¹³

Men and boys as a group need help and are not getting it. And men are not going to get it unless something is done. No large social changes have been made in a day. Women’s rights has been an issue for over a century. But it takes people making known the problems for people to care to or be compelled to implement the solutions. This is the goal of men’s rights, and The Journal of Men’s Rights is dedicated to publishing research, opinion pieces, stories, and more on the problems that men face and the solutions.