Three Hundred Ways It Can Hurt to Be a Man — Category 7.6
CATEGORY 7.6: Miscellaneous ways it can be hurtful to be a man. [71 items]
[This post is part of a longer series; see the Index for an overview.]
CATEGORY 7.6: Miscellaneous ways it can be hurtful to be a man. [71 items]
It is culturally much less accepted for men to be unemployed than it is for women to be unemployed.
It is culturally much less accepted for a man to make less money than his wife, than for a woman to make less money than her husband.
Given that the space for men’s physical power has dramatically decreased over time, whereas women’s space for social power has increased, men nowadays often have more to fear from women’s pain and its consequences than women have to fear from men’s pain and its consequences.
It is far more accepted and indeed appreciated by men for women to be nerdy, than it is by women for men to be nerdy. (Meanwhile, it is also not especially appreciated for men to have more feminine interests; after all, women do not en masse seem very captivated by e.g. men who do yoga, whereas ‘gamer girl’ is at this point a massively popular porn genre.)
Masculinity (meaning here: the quality of being seen and accepted as ‘properly male’, whatever that means) is something that’s easy for men to lose, something that men have to prove themselves as having, over and over. Femininity, meanwhile, is inherent to women; they don’t have to keep proving they have it, and it is less something they can really lose.
Women’s clothing options are far more diverse than men’s. (Technically speaking, if one looks at cultures around the world, men do have a nearly equivalent diversity of clothing options; but the vast majority of them are simply not tenable for the average man in modern WEIRD society.)
Men generally are perfectly OK with their partners being less intelligent than they are; women tend to find a lower relative intelligence quite unattractive. (This is a big problem for illiterate himbos like myself.)
In cultures where content warnings or trigger warnings are used, there may at times be warnings when misogynist content so much as gets mentioned, but I’ve practically never seen warnings for misandrist content, either when it’s mentioned or when it’s endorsed.
It is a much less culturally legible and accepted problem when feminine men do not feel represented by masculine men in media, than it is when masculine women do not feel represented by feminine women in media.
Of all groups, it is hardest for the group that is straight cis men, to find communities, particularly ones that at least superficially value intelligence, kindness, and decency, that are explicitly and firmly devoted to loving and supporting that group.
Men are the primary victims of physical violence in the world.
There are many initiatives to help women enter and stay in male-heavy job fields, but very few to help men enter and stay in female-heavy job fields.
Briefly assuming again the potentially wrong model of “women give sex to receive love, men give love to receive sex”: within modern relationships, sex is seen as something which either partner does not owe to the other, whereas love and emotional support are things which are viewed as necessary substrates for any relationship, with their absence thus being commonly accepted as being sufficient reason to break up. In this way, women are better positioned to feel entitled to what they need in a relationship, than men are.
The above is, of course, on top of the fact that for many men, sex is a form of emotional support; among all forms of emotional support available to men, it is in fact one of the strongest. But men’s desire for sex is culturally widely viewed as being simply selfish, something which only takes from women and which does not necessarily gain men much that is worthwhile. No matter how necessary and deeply valuable a component sex is for a man’s emotional health, a man who’d try to use that as an argument for why his partner should give him more sex, would be viewed as entitled and as caring little about consent. Meanwhile, a woman may well demand that her emotional needs be met by her partner in ways that work for her.
Women have greater cultural control in deciding what’s not cool.
It’s harder to be a ‘bad boy’ than it is to be a ‘good girl’, since it’s harder to resist one’s social environment than it is to acquiesce to it.
Many of the capabilities that men evolved to optimize for are physical in nature, whereas many of women’s are social. Women’s social skills are still very relevant today; men’s physical skills are almost entirely superfluous in contemporary society.
Similarly, we may say that women have more social needs whereas men have more physical needs (meaning here e.g. physical labour). Contemporary schools and jobs offer far more opportunities to fulfill social needs, than physical ones.
Women tend to get more attention, both positive and negative, whereas men are often much more invisible to society. When women receive positive attention for being women, this isn’t viewed as sexism against men, but when women receive negative attention for being women, this is (rightly) viewed as sexism against women.
Men face an implicit assumption that within male groups they feel more welcome than women do, even though for many men (especially e.g. feminine or neuroatypical men) this is often false. (The pain of e.g. queer men in heteronormative communities is an example of a similar situation that is more legible to society.)
Swear words referring to men or male body parts (e.g. dick, asshole, etc.) are much more accepted than swear words referring to women or female body parts (e.g. bitch, cunt, etc.); this communicates the message that only the male body can be bad, and makes it easier for men to get insulted relative to women. (Here, “asshole” is overwhelmingly gendered male in its practical usage, likely because men often use theirs for excretive purposes, giving the term its negative association, whereas women’s are mere vestigial structures.)
Among people who are rich, high-class, etc., it is the case that the men frequently have much power but also a lot of responsibilities, since they still are generally expected to keep earning money somehow, whereas their wives have about as much power (since the man’s income is shared) while having far fewer responsibilities.
It is much easier for women to ‘date up’, or through marriage become higher-class than they previously were, than it is for men.
Women are allowed to get angrier than men at double standards.
It’s viewed as acceptable and even necessary in culture to teach young men not to rape, implicitly communicating the assumption that they would if not taught otherwise; this despite the fact that amongst men, only a very small percentage of them are rapists. If any other group were taught not to do what the worst few of them are infamous for, this would be immediately recognized as a gross case of discrimination; but when men are the assumed perpetrators, and particularly when women are the assumed victims, it is viewed as necessary work.
There’s a kind of confused idea in modern culture where it looks at reality, parses “men do more evil than women,” and… concludes that men are thus advantaged? The notion that having power and using it in evil ways, is an enviable position, says a lot about the people holding such an opinion. The truth is of course that the kind of person for whom bad acts are necessary to have a good life, is leading a quite rotten life, and much better is the life lived by someone who feels less draw to do bad, who is instead more connected to the goodness of life and those around them. It is a very tall statement that men do more evil than women, but should it be true, then that would be a sure sign of men’s lives being worse.
Primarily male cultures are assumed to have been that way solely due to what must be a great and consistent exclusion of women (even when said exclusion solely takes the form merely of ‘doing things that women don’t like’, like being generally physically unclean); meanwhile, cultures that are primarily composed of members of any other group are said to have “a rich [minority group] history” and can get away with much more explicit exclusion of men.
Insofar as we take seriously the way men value looks in their female partners and women value personality in their male partners: it is not considered OK to view women who in the starting stages of a relationship make themselves seem more good-looking than they naturally are (through e.g. makeup), as doing ‘false advertising’, whereas it is considered very OK to view men who in the starting stages of a relationship make themselves seem more capable or more loving than they naturally are, as properly lying to and manipulating their dates. It is viewed as much more acceptable for women to fake female attractiveness, than it is for men to fake male attractiveness.
Gatekeeping is frequently viewed as bad when primarily-male communities do it; meanwhile, when primarily-female communities do it, it’s often instead interpreted positively, e.g. as “they can do this because it maximizes their space’s safety,” or “they can do this because even their specific niche deserves its own space,” or even “watch how other people are trying to crassly invade these women’s spaces.” Male communities are judged more harshly for any gatekeeping they do; female communities certainly can receive judgment for gatekeeping too, but in general they still enjoy far greater freedom in this.
Men’s formalwear is highly uniform, whereas women’s formalwear is much more varied in colour, form, tone, and style. Men’s formalwear enforces rigid conformity in men, as opposed to the great self-expression that women may enjoy through their formalwear.
Masculine gatekeeping selects out: men’s cultures are often open to begin with, but are rough enough that people who do not fit them, leave them. Feminine gatekeeping selects in: women’s cultures are often closed, with people being added and included manually once they have proven themselves trustworthy. Even though both types of cultures thus end up excluding many, many people, people whom masculine gatekeeping excludes are far more obvious as victims, since they will have felt personally harmed by the masculine cultures that they felt unwelcome in and which they thus ended up excluding themselves from; meanwhile, people whom feminine gatekeeping excludes, barely know what they’re missing out on, and may at best simply have some vague but powerful sense of never quite being accepted, never quite being good enough. Through this dynamic, masculine gatekeeping is judged far more harshly in the public eye than feminine gatekeeping is, even though the former is no less exclusive than the latter.
When men mention feeling attacked by negative messaging about men, they are often sardonically asked why they feel spoken to when the messaging isn’t about them. This response gaslights men about the validity of their defensiveness, since even negative messaging that is not true about you, can be used to stereotype and define you in other people’s eyes so long as they do not know (or you cannot prove) that the messaging does not hold true for you.1
Communities are far more harshly evaluated by the acts of their worst men, than by the acts of their worst women. For example, when some community contains a female abuser, it’s viewed as a mere technicality, often by the exact same circles who will view the existence of male abusers within a community as proof that said community is fatally flawed. As a result of this, primarily male communities are at higher risk of getting judged harshly, than primarily female communities are.
On a related note: if we assume a model where men are in many ways riskier and less balanced, both for worse and for better, then modern culture’s vastly increased tendency to judge people by their worst actions rather than by their averages, as well as to judge communities by their worst members’ actions, rather than by their average members’ actions, both disproportionately harm men.
Insofar as videogames are addictive and detract from consumers’ lives more than they add, it is to men’s disadvantage that most videogames are primarily designed for and advertised to men.
Insofar as porn is addictive and detracts from consumers’ lives more than it adds, it is to men’s disadvantage that most porn is primarily designed for and advertised to men.
Insofar as much popular media is culturally a net negative (teaching distance from oneself and from human nature, teaching disconnection from others, and so forth), it is to men’s disadvantage that most of it is primarily designed for and advertised to men.
The average (though perhaps not the median) men’s job is more physically taxing and more physically dangerous than the average women’s job.
Women are often assumed to have good intentions; men often have to prove themselves trustworthy first.
Despite men being overwhelmingly the justice system’s primary victims, movements that aim to improve the justice system for women seem bigger, more numerous, and much more popular, than ones that aim to improve it for men.
Women’s feelings are taken into account by others much more than men’s feelings are.
Men tend to get more help than women when they’re already doing well; women tend to get more help than men when they’re doing badly. Help is much more needed when one is doing badly; men are disadvantaged in this.
When women are wrong about something important, they tend to be merely ridiculed and viewed as dumb. When men are wrong about something important, they tend to get feared as seeming dangerous and hated for seeming hurtful. It is worse to be viewed as hurtful than as merely dumb.
Broadly speaking, most contemporary technical technology favours men, and most contemporary social technology (concepts, frameworks, ways of interpreting the world, etc.) favours women. There are many people who will be against technical technology because e.g. said technology has caused harm in the past, or people creating said technology have caused harm, or people currently doing bad things will benefit from said technology gaining more support. There is no such norm, meanwhile, around having to be against social technology because of any of these very same issues. Employees of a company doing something bad, is often viewed as sufficient reason to stop supporting that company, but spokespeople of a movement doing something bad, is often not viewed as sufficient reason to stop supporting that movement.
It feels like attractiveness standards for men have increased dramatically compared to what they were like a century ago. It used to be the case that a man simply being employed was enough to make him a worthwhile man; nowadays men are only viewed as a ‘catch’ when they’re far above average in intelligence, charm, strength, ambition, emotional self-insight, and, of course, salary. Meanwhile it is often still enough for a woman to be pretty, to be considered a worthwhile woman by men.
On the topic of “men’s role is to please the world, women’s role is to please their men”: it is moreover the case, very broadly speaking, that men change to please the world and women change to please their men. For example, even men that prefer archetypically feminine subjects may instead often choose to follow a STEM education instead, since those are the skills men are told the world needs; meanwhile, women feel more free to pursue subjects like psychology and art, which often allow more connection with and expression of oneself, even though the job market in these fields can often be so lacklustre that from a financial point of view (which is, of course, not the only legitimate lens) it is often barely worth the investment to study in these fields. Men change themselves, gear their skills, and dull their own spirits, so that they may better fit in as cogs in the machine; women change themselves so as to better compromise with, and bear living with, their husbands. From the relationship’s point of view, this reads as “woman does a lot for her husband, who does little for her in return.” That framing, however, misses all the ways men change themselves for their work and for the world at large.
On a related note: it is men’s role to impress women, and women’s role to accept or reject men. Women are viewed as inherently dateable; men very often aren’t, and have to put in work to become someone women say yes to. Thus much work that men put in to make themselves better people for their future partners, happens before they even enter a relationship. Meanwhile, much of the work that women put in to make themselves better people for their future partners, often happens primarily within the relationship with said partner. Here, too, from the relationship’s point of view it seems as though women are the ones who put in all the effort to please their men; but looking solely at the relationship itself is limiting here, and misses much of the work men put in for their partners’ benefit. (It also misses that men are often the older party in most heterosexual relationships, and have thus often have spent more time working to become the kind of person that they are.)
Men are often viewed as more dangerous than women, even though women (whose social power in many modern contexts exceeds men’s physical power) can often be every bit as dangerous as men. This distrust harms men.
With the exception of their nipples, women get to show much more skin in public than men do.
There’s a certain symmetry between ‘nice guys’ and ‘easy girls.’ Nice guys listened to culture, inaccurately learned that to get sex and intimacy from women they must be nice to women, and proceeded to make themselves extra nice to women, only to get upset when it turns out that being nice to women does not get you (physical) intimacy. Easy girls listened to culture, inaccurately learned that to get love and intimacy from men they must be sexually available to men, and proceeded to make themselves extra sexually available to men, only to get upset when it turns out that being sexually available to men does not get you (emotional) intimacy. Both categories are tragic; but in many communities, easy girls are sympathized with and supported, whereas nice guys are mocked just about everywhere.
“Toxic masculinity” gets thrown around all the time, and as a concept has garnered institutional respect; “toxic femininity”, though being just as real, is almost never taken seriously.
There is likely a natural sense in which men view women as a monolithic group and women view men as a monolithic group; “he’s literally just some dude” and “she’s literally just some chick” tend to be enlightening statements for many. Within this framework, it feels like many women, much moreso than men, like to abuse this framing of women as monolithic. For example, many women often frame certain opinions as belonging to ‘women’ as a group, such that if you disagree with these opinions, you’re disagreeing with ‘women’ as a group, instead of merely disagreeing with a number of women. (And of course: women who seek deniability are in many ways better allowed to get this by externalizing their decisionmaking and desires to ‘women’ as a group, even when their desires are not representative of women at large; see e.g. the desire for an explicit consent framework, which is often generalized as though belonging to all women even though there are many, many women who find explicit consent very unsexy.)
To add to the above: despite women’s relative greater posing as a monolith, there is more pushback against men who then go on to view women as a monolith; they are often disparagingly met with the sneer-like implication that to think women are so simple and undifferentiated so as to be all alike, is surely a little misogynist. Meanwhile, women who fear that men are all the same (e.g. that all men just want sex, that all men don’t care when they hurt women, or indeed that all men are sexist, and so forth) are not viewed as dumb, stupid, or misandrist, even though they, too, are absolutely wrong.
Stereotypically, the harmful parenting extreme for girls is that they get suffocated (controlled too much), and for boys is that they get abandoned (controlled too little). It seems easier to recover, later in life, from the former, than it is to recover from the latter.
There’s a certain culture nowadays that will be so careful with their words so as to differentiate between ‘women’ and ‘menstruators’, but these same people will happily continue to use ‘male gaze’ (vs. e.g. ‘gynephilic gaze’), ‘nice guys’ (vs. e.g. ‘entitled guys’), ‘mansplaining’ (vs. e.g. ‘condescendingly explaining’), and so forth. Imagine if ‘smart girls’ became a mean and generally accepted way to describe dumb women who think they’re intelligent; genuinely smart women everywhere would get very upset, and rightly so. In a culture that so strongly emphasizes the power of words and the risks and harms that come with using the wrong words, for them to lose all this carefulness when the risks and harms in question are primarily risks and harms to men, suggests an aversion towards empathy for men.
In another case of people who are usually very careful with their words, being not careful at all when men are the victims of their carelessness: “Toxic masculinity” very neatly ambiguates between “negative expressions of masculinity” and “masculinity, a thing that is bad.” Whenever challenged, the people using this concept will retreat to saying they mean the former; but the effect of hearing it all the time is absolutely that it implies the latter. For groups other than men, progressive communities are much more careful not to cause this kind of negative leak effect, but men are given no such quarter.
Fathers who are alone in public with their own children, especially when they’re physically loving towards their own children, are disproportionately viewed as child predators, compared to mothers.
Of all privileges, physical beauty is amongst the most impactful, but it is in contemporary society quite underdiscussed relative to other privileges. This disadvantages men, who are on average viewed as less physically beautiful than women.
‘Female’ is a much more heavily protected and gatekept category than ‘male’ is. For example, nearly all societal discussions around transgender people revolve around whether we accept transgender women as women, whereas culture barely gets outraged at all when transmen want to be accepted as men; there exist a thousand thinkpieces on what constitutes a ‘woman’, whereas society doesn’t really seem to care what constitutes a ‘man’. This discrepancy betrays the fact that being female is implicitly seen as high-status and special compared to being male.
It’s common for women to tell men that their having a more looks-based attraction style is bad and superficial, or makes the world a worse place by allotting more resources, attention, and love to ‘bad but hot’ women than these women supposedly deserve. Meanwhile, women’s more personality-based (or perhaps more accurate: energy-based) attraction style often leads them to be positively attracted to bad or hurtful qualities in men; in particular, power and ambition in men are often viewed as attractive even when the power is used for evil or the ambitions lack virtue. One has to wonder whether that’s really that much better than just really liking the way someone looks.
Women often complain that they are liked for what they didn’t ‘earn’ (such as their looks), whereas men are liked for what they did earn (such as their achievements). This misses that to many men, their achievements feel unearned nevertheless, since they are due to positive character traits they just happen to have. Many men do not identify with a framework of having ‘earned’ their own perseverence, or their own interest in certain topics, or their own natural talents; these things feel just as much bestowed upon them as one’s looks are.
When some club or group has only women, no one bats an eye, but when some club or group has only men, these men are viewed as being likely sexist in some sense.
There are more (and more powerful) cultural stories that men can be evil and greedy and selfish, thus negative messaging from men may be expected. There are much fewer cultural narratives that women can be evil and greedy and selfish; thus negative messaging from women hits harder, since within their cultural context, one is likely to take negative messaging from them more seriously.
Many things that can be understood as ‘statements’ (i.e. intellectual arguments, popular media, and so forth) is often viewed solely through the lens of how much or how little they harm women, with little to no attention paid as to the harm they might be doing to men.
The vast, vast majority of videogames teach a masculine worldview centered around the player’s agency, giving them a supreme ability to achieve total control over what’s external. Even difficult games that require great skill from the player, still ultimately promise an experience where players have great control over what happens to them; indeed, whenever something happens to the player that they cannot control, this is known as unfairness and widely (and indeed unfairly) viewed as bad. Thus the billion-dollar industry of videogames, which is primarily focused on men, teaches players to escape ever more firmly into agency fantasies, rather than opening them up to the experience of trusting in the world.2
Many popular media narratives (which often center men) emphasize protagonists standing out, being special, being different in a positive way, and so forth. This is, firstly, harmful for men who fail to stand out in positive ways, and secondly it is ultimately not a psychologically healthy and joyous state of being to stand out from one’s peers, as opposed to finding (or indeed co-creating) spaces where one fits in and where one belongs. Meanwhile, the values of fitting in, of belonging, of finding people one is well-liked by, and so forth, are taught more often to women than to men.
With many more men studying STEM and many more women studying sociology, psychology, gender, etc., the field of gender discussions (a field that would require equal input from both men and women, if there ever was one, since obviously women will miss and misunderstand what it’s like to be male in much the same way that these scholars assume men will miss and misunderstand what it’s like to be female) was always highly epistemologically fraught, but as far as I can tell, it is rare for women in this field to notice this flaw in the field and try to correct it by actively inviting and listening to male perspectives. Certainly one gets the impression that this has rarely made people any less confident in the conclusions they draw from gender studies scholars.
It is increasingly becoming not a bug but a feature of many progressive communities, that they make (straight, cis, white) men feel uncomfortable. It’s wholly expected that these men are privileged and blinded by their privilege, indeed that to the privileged, equality looks like oppression, and that thus you will know the truth by the way it makes men feel bad (and as a rarer but not uncommon implicit extension of this: whatever hurts men, must be true). When a space makes men feel unwelcome, it’s viewed as a sign that the space is doing something right, that it’s standing up for the truth, that it’s speaking truth to power. There’s an incredibly icky sense in which some such communities set their compass to men’s suffering. The biggest red flag here is that a man speaking up about feeling uncomfortable in some space, may often expect to be told to shut up and take it. In these spaces, male discomfort has ceased to be a marker that something is maybe wrong; and men feeling that their boundaries are getting crossed, has ceased to be a sign that people should stop. Underlying these awful norms is the deeply harmful and dehumanizing notion that men, and only men, and often indeed only cis straight white men, are fully responsible for their own reactions to things, and are therefore the ones who should change when they are made uncomfortable. This denies the very real ways in which men are genuinely sensitive to, may suffer from, and may be victims of, their environments.
Using the framework that men’s role is to probe boundaries and women’s role is to hold boundaries: when women fail to hold their own boundaries, the pain that can result from this is extremely legible to society. The pain resulting from men failing to probe other people’s boundaries, though, lies less in the presence of bad things and more in an extreme absence of good things, and is much less legible as a result, even when it is very harmful.
The irony of the following point does not escape me; let me nevertheless include it. Much of modern culture teaches people, including many men, to view the world through the lens of victimhood. We’re taught that the correct and righteous way of relating to the world is to notice where it unjustly makes us suffer. This framework often (though certainly not always) works wonders for women, since society loves to solve women’s problems, but it works very badly for men, as men’s suffering frequently does not inspire change in the world but rather isolates men from it.
A heartbreaking number of women are taught that men’s desires are wholly insensitive to their boundaries. They are taught that men want to do X with them, period, rather than that men want to do X with them if they want this too. It commonly happens that women who are bad at holding their own boundaries, don’t notice that in many cases, with many men, they needn’t; what’s actually required of them, is little more than to make it common knowledge that even though men could take X (and nothing else) if they tried, the thing they often really want (namely “X which the other person wants too”), is simply not an option to begin with. But women are taught that men do not care if they hurt even those whom they like and love. In leaving men to think they are getting what they want, while actually giving these men something they didn’t want at all and would reject if they could recognize it as such, these women are making men harm them when no such harm was ever necessary. When this behaviour comes from women whom men love, their resulting pain hurts these men too.
For a thorough examination of this phenomenon, see Scott Alexander’s Weak Men Are Superweapons. (Here, a ‘weak man’ is a form of argument, like ‘strawman’ or ‘steelman’.)
There is, to my extensive knowledge, only a single modern videogame that meaningfully asks the player to surrender to its world rather than subjugate it. For a detailed examination of that game, I highly recommend Leslie Brooks’ longread, Rain World — Reaching Enlightenment Through Unfairness.
Re footnote 2, Undertale seems like a notable candidate, though maybe your intended sense of "modern" excludes it?