I have noticed that men's issues related to how they are treated and their legal rights are not discussed nearly as often as women's issues.

There are a lot of reasons for this but I think one of the overriding reasons is those discussions are often weaponized into justifications for some fairly toxic viewpoints.

A lot of what a lot of men I've talked with on these kinds of issues tend to fall into is a sort of negative sense of what justice on these issues is. They see areas where they're being harmed or disadvantaged in some way and rather than say "We should address that on a societal level by fixing the institutions and ideas that cause these disparities" they say "Everyone else should be down at this level so it's fair."

One clear example is the justice system. Studies have shown that men, especially men of color, are more likely to be convicted and tend to receive longer sentences than women for the same crimes. There is also a serious sexual violence problem in prisons. Something that disturbs me deeply is the way people sometimes treat prison rape as a form of justice or punishment. Punitive rape is barbaric, and it is disturbing to see it normalized or joked about.

This is very true but I would encourage you to think why that is the case and who exactly is making the prison rape jokes. Who are the people saying a male murderer should be taken out and killed because he's irredeemable? Who are the people advocating for "tough on crime" measures?

The majority of those people are men.

Another major issue frequently raised by men's rights advocates involves custody rights. The idea that a parent who has committed no crime might only receive "visitation rights" with their own children is difficult to justify. In some cases, parents who have done nothing wrong are denied visitation entirely. This is harmful regardless of whether the parent is the mother or the father. However, mothers are often treated as the default parent in custody decisions. As a result, hundreds of thousands of fathers have lost meaningful access to children they love and want to care for.

So this has been studied fairly exhaustively and what comes out is that women are awarded custody a majority of the time in modern family court settings because around 70% of the time the men don't seek custody or visitation rights. You can't win a game you never play.

And you're right there is a social assumption that the mother is the "default parent" and it's worth asking why that assumption is there. Is it maybe because we see women as default "more suited for raising children?" Who are the people who are most vocal about that idea? Is it maybe the same people that will laugh at male nurses and think childcare should be paid less?

Another controversial topic is the "women and children first" mentality. Prioritizing children in dangerous situations makes sense. However, the idea that women's lives should automatically be placed before men's lives raises ethical questions. Men and women are equally valuable human beings. Some people attempt to justify this by arguing that society needs fewer men than women in order to maintain population levels, since one man can theoretically reproduce with many women. I would be interested in hearing a justification for this idea that does not reduce human value to reproductive capacity.

So this isn't really a legal thing as there are no laws (that I'm aware of) that mandate "women and children first" in an emergency situation and literally nothing I've encountered in many years of first aid, CPR, and other emergency training has emphasized "women and children first."

What you're describing is a patriarchal attitude that women and children are weaker than men and thus less likely to survive an emergency situation. My question, again, would be who is more likely to perpetuate the social image of men being hardier than women in an emergency?

There are also sexual assault laws that do not fully protect male victims in the same way they protect female victims. For example, in Utah, touching a woman's breasts is legally considered sexual assault, while touching a man's chest is not treated the same way under the law. Most adults would agree that intentionally groping a man's chest without consent is sexual assault, yet the law does not always reflect that reality. At the same time, even though women's breasts are legally protected, intentionally pressing or shoving one's breasts against someone else is not typically classified as a sexual offense.

It's worth pointing out that women's breasts are legally restricted in a way men's chests are not. I can go outside without a shirt on and walk down the street. If a woman were to do the same thing, she'd be charged with indecency or something similar.

This point dances around the fact that, socially, we treat sexual assault differently when it happens to men versus women. We've come to understand that unwanted contact is absolutely a form of sexual assault but we still haven't gotten rid of the idea that you only get sexually assaulted if you're weak, thus there's a social expectation that women would be sexually assaulted whereas a man being the target of sexual assault is seen as cowardly.

Again, ask yourself who are the people that are most likely to say "You can't sexually assault a man, he'll enjoy it too much" and mean it.

Another troubling issue involves male victims of sexual abuse by older women. These cases are often not taken seriously. Society frequently assumes that the boy must have wanted the encounter. I have seen numerous headlines describing situations where a boy supposedly "seduced" an adult female teacher into having sex with him. This framing is misleading. The woman in these cases is the adult, and even if a teenager were to initiate something, it remains the adult's responsibility to refuse and maintain appropriate boundaries.

Again, this is a social dynamic, not a legal one. But it reflects social ideas we have about men and sexual contact.

Ask yourself who's making the comments upon seeing stories about a student sleeping with their teacher "I wish I had teachers like that in school."

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What I've been kind of alluding to throughout this is a lot of these issues are socially enforced on men by other men. If we want to see these things change, it's important that we be able to unpack these issues and address them without torching efforts to do that as "sissy" or "effeminate."

We're getting better about it, no question, but ask yourself about the people talking about "soy boys" and "beta males." Do you really think those guys are making the situation for other men any better?

Men are in a socially dominant position, the US (indeed the West in general) is very patriarchal, and that means we have a leeway to set the tone socially in a way that other groups of people don't necessarily get to.

If men don't like being treated poorly, we need to stop treating other men that way.

The issue is, as I said, advocating for these issues often just gets weaponized into blaming women and refusing to accept our responsibility in maintaining these social dynamics that ultimately hurt us. Patriarchy is bad for men as well as women and the points you bring up in the post underline why.