REALITY: If freeing women from gender roles automatically frees men, why have pants been common clothing for women in most Western cultures for probably longer than most people reading this have been alive, but a man still can’t walk down the street in a dress? When is that going to kick in? In fact, where are the examples of advocacy for women helping men, and why not just advocate for men directly, like it does with women?

The logic is equivalent to saying reducing discrimination against Black people in America will also reduce racism against the Chinese, or saying you can fight Holocaust Deniers with Affirmative action. It’s an entirely gynocentric and sexist view of gender roles, and is often accompanied by ill-considered rationales about how men’s issues are really about female traits being devalued. None have explained why said traits are valued in women, or how things like, oh, circumcision are about “femmephobia”. Or, for that matter, why men being conscripted to fight in wars is really about hatred of women, and not men’s lives being considered disposable.

That aside, the idea that feminism helps men without actually doing anything different from what they do to help women is absurd on its face, especially since people - and not just MRAs - are often derided as misogynist fedora-wearing Neanderthals complaining about “privileges” men have lost just for saying that men are oppressed at all. Talking about men’s rights in a non-Party-approved manner is supposedly inherently oppressive to women, yet actively fighting for women’s rights automatically means that men’s rights are going to improve?