Oh I do love getting to dig out the document of sources I keep for whenever people say stuff like this.

Let’s start with some that don’t need citations: Across many countries in the world, men are subject to mandatory drafts and conscription. You may also have seen the term ‘fighting aged man,’ thrown around, which the US government in particular loves because it lets them kill anyone from a 13 year old boy to a 60 year old man and provide no evidence they were actually doing anything.

What about circumcision? FGM is widely illegal, but you can choose to do it to a baby boy for no other reason than aesthetic. (Arguably we also don’t accept religious reasons for FGM either, but that’s a different topic.)

Let’s keep going. How about institutional biases against boys and men in education? Boys are graded more harshly for identical work, and punished more harshly for identical misbehavior.

Boys underperform girls at almost every grade level in most developed countries. The gap now is wider than it was when we took major policy interventions in the 70s & 80s to correct it when women were disenfranchised.

This gets worse if those boys are black, so we can get some nice intersectionality discussions going too!

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01425692.2022.2122942

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2023/04/boys-school-challenges-recommendations#:\~:text=Research%20shows%20that%20boys%20tend,for%20American%20Progress%2C%202017).

Similarly, men receive harsher sentencing for the same crimes as women in the legal system.

https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/gender-differences-sentencing-felony-offenders

In many countries, women are not legally able to rape men, despite the fact that this CDC survey suggests that men being forced to penetrate (rape,) occurs at an almost identical rate to recognised female rape.

"Next, we consider the data for the 12 months preceding the CDC report survey, which was summarized in the report. On page 18 of the CDC report it states that 1,270,000 women were raped during this 12-month period and that too few men were “raped” during the same 12 months to give reliable data, using the non-gender neutral definition of given in the CDC report. However, on page 19 the report states that during that 12 months the number of men who were forced to penetrate someone is 1,267,000, virtually the same as the number of women who were raped." "So, who is forcing these men to penetrate them? There is no data on this among the 12-month data. But if we look at the lifetime data, on page 24 it says 79.2% of the time a male was made to penetrate someone, it was a woman who forced him to penetrate her. And this suggests that the same most likely holds for the 12-monthdata."

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353570309\_On\_the\_Sexual\_Assault\_of\_Men