From the original on Reddit. Reproduced here to ensure it still exists when Reddit goes down.

The idea that “men have it great” is often treated as self-evident or undeniable, but in reality the condition of men in our society is just not that simple. Men are doing better in some areas, but they’re doing worse in some very important areas too. For example, men:

Many men’s issues interact with issues for racial minorities. The result is that minority men are doing the worst of any race/gender combination in numerous areas (including homelessness, life expectancy, and incarceration).

Introduction

This document is intended to be a comprehensive and reliable resource detailing the major gender issues and negative attitudes facing men in the Western world. The goal is not to compare men’s and women’s issues and decide who has it worse, but to show that men’s issues are serious enough to warrant being more than an afterthought.

We’re also not interested in addressing questions of ideology or movements here (feminism, the men’s rights movement, MGTOW, the red pill, etc.). Those questions are important because they involve how to solve the problems facing men, but for now we’re only interested in establishing what the problems are.

This project was started in January 2015 by /u/dakru, with input and suggestions from many others since then. From August 2018 it was maintained and updated by /u/PM_ME_UR_PC_SPECS, until in August 2021 it was taken over by u/Oncefa2 and u/genkernels. Its home is on /r/rbomi, but it’s also shared with /r/mensrights. For more information on men’s issues beyond this page, consider the following books:

  1. The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys (by David Benatar: professor of philosophy and head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Cape Town in Cape Town, South Africa)

  2. The Myth of Male Power: Why Men are the Disposable Sex (by Warren Farrell: activist, men’s movement icon, former member of the board of directors of the National Organization for Women in New York City, and former professor)

  3. Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream - and Why It Matters (by Helen Smith: psychologist specializing in forensic issues and men’s issues)

  4. Media and Male Identity: The Making and Remaking of Men (by J.R. Macnamara, adjunct professor in public communication at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia)

  5. Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men (by Roy F. Baumeister: professor of psychology at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, USA)

  6. Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised as a Man (by Norah Vincent: writer who has had columns on Salon.com, The Advocate, the Los Angeles Times, and the Village Voice)

  7. Spreading Misandry, Legalizing Misandry, & Sanctifying Misandry (by Katherine Young and Paul Nathanson: both professors of religious studies at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada)

  8. Gendercide and Genocide (edited by Adam Jones: professor of political science at University of British Columbia Okanagan in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada)

Section 1: Male disposability

Overview: Male disposability is our society’s tendency to have a greater concern for the well-being of women than the well-being of men. Simply put, women’s suffering is considered more tragic and worthy of action than men’s suffering. It produces a stronger emotional response in us. Having greater compassion for women is so deeply-ingrained in our culture that it seems natural and unremarkable. Not only does male disposability cause many issues for men, it also leaves people less likely to care about men’s issues.

Male disposability has many parallels in the realms of class, race, and nationality (e.g. citizens of non-Western countries are often seen/treated as more disposable than Westerners).

Examples/evidence: There has been enormous public outcry over the issue of “missing and murdered Aboriginal women” in Canada [1]. Aboriginal people do get murdered and go missing at disproportionate rates, but it’s the men, not the women, who are victimized more. Aboriginal men are murdered more than twice as often in Canada [2], and 4-5 times more of them have gone missing in the Northwest Territories and the province of Ontario [3]. Despite this, it is the women who are the focus of the public outcry.

A second example is Western coverage of Boko Haram, the Nigerian Islamist group. It received widespread attention for its kidnapping of 200+ schoolgirls. The gender of the victims was a major focus of the coverage.

Images: http://i.imgur.com/W844OpX.jpg, http://i.imgur.com/EuQfiVS.jpg, http://i.imgur.com/ZA7o7Yd.jpg, http://i.imgur.com/f10K7m0.jpg

The numerous other incidents where the group spared the women/girls and targeted the men/boys for murder (often brutally, including burning alive) received less attention in general, and much less focus on the gender of the victims [4].

A third example comes from the research of Adam Jones, genocide researcher and political science professor at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. In Western coverage of the Kosovo War, he found that male victims are seen as “unworthy” and marginalized as victims in comparison to “worthy” victims like women, children, and the elderly [5].

A fourth example comes from Portland, Oregon. Although the homeless population there is 64% male [6], the mayor has expressed that one of his priorities is to “house all homeless women by the end of the year”. He commented that “when I see a homeless woman on the street, or in a doorway, my heart is touched, and I know Portlanders’ hearts are touched”. Another individual in the newscast asks “do we want any women sleeping on the street when the weather gets bad and it’s cold?” [7]. These quotes illustrate male disposability because although men are doing worse, women garner more sympathy.

One statement from former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is especially interesting in light of the concept of male disposability. According to her, “[w]omen have always been the primary victims of war” because they “lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat” and because they are “are often left with the responsibility, alone, of raising the children” [8]. The idea that men aren’t even the primary victims of their own deaths seems to be a particularly insensitive application of male disposability.

A phenomenon likely linked to male disposability (and a similar attitude to racial minorities) is missing white woman syndrome: “when a young white girl goes missing in America, it immediately becomes a national story” [9].

TVTropes identifies male disposability in the media with a trope called “Men Are the Expendable Gender”: “A female character can lose that some or even all of the audience’s sympathy if they are manipulative, somehow ‘immoral’, ugly, or just plain evil. Male characters on the other hand have to earn the audience’s sympathy by entertaining or interesting us with their their actions. If they don’t, we either don’t care what happens to them or want them to suffer for failing to entertain/interest us.” [10]

In his book The Second Sexism (chapter 3), David Benatar mentions the fact that men are overwhelmingly the ones sent to war as an example of male disposability. He quotes a politician in the U.S. House of Representatives who spoke in favour of exempting/excluding women from combat roles in the U.S. military: “We do not want our women killed”. This attitude, he says, “partly explains why societies have been prepared to send males to war but have been extremely reluctant to send females”.

Our society’s particular concern for the well-being of women can be seen in the common practice of news media and human rights groups mentioning the total number of victims of an event or tragedy and specifically singling out the number of women or girls. The BBC reported on successful efforts to save children who had been forcibly recruited for a militia in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: “[the United Nations Mission] said that since the beginning of the year, 163 children, including 22 girls, have been removed from the militia” [11]. The International Business Times reports on ISIS executions: “The Islamic State has executed 1,362 civilians, including 9 children and 19 women, since it declared a Caliphate last year in the regions under its control, a Syrian human rights monitor said on Tuesday.” [12] The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported on a 17-month period of airstrikes that killed (in its words) “7902 civilians, including 1121 women, and 1679 children”. The title of the the article was “More than 3500 children and women killed during 17 months of aerial bombardment” [13].

The fact that women’s suffering is seen as more tragic and worthy of action is also evident in the statistics showing that crimes with women as victims receive harsher sentences than crimes with men as victims (including a greater use of the death penalty), after controlling for legally relevant factors. More detail can be found in the section on the criminal justice system.

[1] Including from Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau http://bit.ly/Yy0oZO, NDP leader Thomas Mulcair http://bit.ly/1tWlLOz, and former Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney http://bit.ly/1uV3jpL.

[2] http://on.thestar.com/1nnaQ29 (Toronto Star article “Aboriginal men murdered at higher rate than aboriginal women”)

[3] https://archive.is/3CiRr (CBC article “Missing aboriginal men need more attention, too: N.W.T. mother”), http://www.opp.ca/media/mumip/files/report-mumip.pdf (“Missing and Unsolved Murdered Indigenous People” from the Ontario Provincial Police)

[4] http://bit.ly/1uISTeE (Mediaite article “Why Did Kidnapping Girls, but Not Burning Boys Alive, Wake Media Up to Boko Haram?”), http://bit.ly/1vnXK3H (Reddit post documenting incidents)

[5] http://bit.ly/1uvyonw (Adam Jones’ article “Effacing the Male: Gender, Misrepresentation, and Exclusion in the Kosovo War”)

[6] https://www.portlandoregon.gov/phb/article/532833 (“2015 Point-in-Time Count of Homelessness in Portland/Gresham/Multnomah County, Oregon”)

[7] https://archive.is/4DIXa (Huffington Post article “Portland, Oregon, Mayor Wants To House All Homeless Women By End Of Year”)

[8] https://archive.is/TB5RC (Hillary Clinton’s speech at the First Ladies’ Conference on Domestic Violence in El Salvador, 1998)

[9] https://archive.is/mRIJL (The Huffington Post article “How Trayvon Martin Became a Missing White Girl”)

[10] https://archive.is/O2ljL (“Men Are the Expendable Gender” on TV Tropes)

[11] http://bbc.in/1AqRhd5 (BBC article “DR Congo unrest: Children freed from militia, says UN”)

[12] https://archive.is/EaWCB (IBTimes article “Isis has Beheaded, Stoned and Shot 1,362 Civilians, including 9 Children: Report”)

[13] http://archive.is/jOMgd (Syrian Observatory for Human Rights page “More than 3500 children and women killed during 17 months of aerial bombardment”)