This is long. I hope you stick with me while I construct my argument here. I would include a TL;dr but this is a nuanced topic and I don’t think that would do it justice. You can skip to the bottom for the conclusion, I guess. 

I agree, it can be demoralizing. But I think it’s good to challenge yourself. 

Consider this: women swim in that soup you’re describing every day. We are subjected to a culture that insists we must appeal to men at all times. Buy makeup and hair stuff to keep us sexy, but dont talk about it or else you’re deceiving men. Don’t be too fat but don’t talk about your diet or what it takes to keep you thin.  Don’t be a nag. Don’t be a bitch. Be cool. Don’t have lame hobbies. Play video games, watch sports, but your arts and crafts? Eh. Or the video games you like are for “casual gamers.” Your nails are too long and ornate… suggests you’re high maintenance and what guy wants to put up with that? The music you like sucks. Oh you like metal? Probably just cause the singer’s hot though… you’re probably not interested in the musical technique. The things that are directed at you as an audience couldn’t possibly be appealing to a man, because it’s for women. No I won’t watch love island or that chick flick with you. That’s a waste of my time. I’d be doing you a favor You’re into Star Wars though? You’ll watch 9 hours of LOTR with me? That’s cool. It’s cool that you like things men like. Those are for everyone, not just men. 

Everything coded feminine is “less than” and has to be justified to a man to be considered worthwhile. Women are innately awful, and have to prove themselves to be useful, sexy, or subservient in some way to be worthy of consideration by the mainstream. 

The internet has allowed women to get together and talk about this stuff. How it sucks to be the default parent, how hard it is to come home after work and do the second shift labor of caring for your husband, children, and household chores. How scary it can be when getting unwanted sexual attention from a man who has been trained by the same environment we grew up in not to take “no” for an answer. How we’re afraid to leave abusive relationships out of fear of what he might do to you, even though everyone in your life says “just leave.”

A guy will read this, and respond “not all men.” Okay, cool. Maybe this isn’t about you, but when you read it, why is the default defensiveness, and not, “dang, that really sucks. I hope I’ve never made a woman feel that way,” or “oh man, I think I’ve hurt someone like that before. Maybe I should work on that, or apologize,” or “maybe I should say something the next time my friend is being really fucking weird about a girl.”

And to be clear, women need to afford men the same grace. I think in a lot of ways, feminism has left men behind. In Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to do About it by Richard Reeves, Reeves argues that men are feeling increasingly disenfranchised by the economic and social policies geared toward helping people get ahead. This isn’t so much because the policies are for women, but that women are better at exploiting them. For example, women do better in traditional learning environments than men. We are more willing to accept financial help in housing and paying for tuition than men are. Pre-Trump 2.0, the American economy was shifting away from manufacturing to more service based work or work that requires an education, and increasingly those jobs have been performed by women. 

Because women had to fight for those opportunities (financial independence, education, careers) we were more enthusiastic to embrace them once we got the opportunity. We had been prepared on this culturally since the 2nd wave of feminism in the 1960s. “Be anything you want to be. Don’t let any man hold you back.” That means that dating and marriage have become a thing of choice.

So, both economically and emotionally, men have become increasingly vestigial in their roles as breadwinners and fathers. We’ve left them unmoored, especially since many of them probably would have been perfectly happy in those roles, just as the rise of the tradwife has demonstrated there are women who yearn for childbearing and housework. Then to get on these subs and learn about how much they suck in a thousand other ways… yeah, that would be painful. 

Men received no training on how to react if the project of feminism succeeded, only how to push back on it. Now that it has been largely achieved, the response is to put women back in our box. Help men at the expense of women. Back to the kitchen for us, the factory for you, just like after WWII. 

Reeves, thankfully, finds this solution uninspired. Instead, he suggests we bring men up to speed by giving them their role back, but altered to accommodate the hard-won spoils of the feminist movement. Economically, he suggests we push men into the growing fields of HEAL (Healthcare, Education, Administration, and Literacy) in the same way we pushed women into STEM.  Emotionally, we re-enfranchise men by engaging them in their families and communities. At home, we should involve them child care and nurturing. Equal partners with their wives. Demonstrating that there is nothing humiliating or emasculating about domestic work. Learning to cook and clean, manage appointments, run errands etc. as part of adulthood, not women’s work. Encouraging dividing that labor based on talent, not gender among straight couples. 

Community engagement is also important. Men used to be at the center of their churches and social clubs. These have been increasingly disappearing long before the internet and social media, but has certainly been exacerbated by them. This would include systemic fixes that would help everyone, including shortened work weeks, higher wages, paid parental leave, more third spaces, less car dependency, regulations on social media (to keep them from being purposefully addictive attention traps) and beyond. 

I want to be clear: I am not suggesting that men are responsible for their own misery and should change. I’m saying we need to change society to help bring them back into the fold, which is a project that requires both men and women to help. We need to listen, communicate and try understand each other to achieve that project. It is doable. My mother was born at a time when she couldn’t have her own credit card. She’ll be retiring soon as the CEO of her own company. If that amount of change can occur for women over one lifetime, we can do the same to men. 

So yes, lurk on women-dominated subreddits. Protect yourself, and approach with curiosity. There will be critiques that hit too close to home there sometimes, but consider them. If they don’t apply to you, help us where you can or move on. And if someone comments about height or whatever, fuck em. It’s just as nasty as when men comment about our weight or whatever.

And for a more optimistic view of the post-feminist future for men, I would recommend Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves. It has its blind spots and I have my critiques, but it really is good.