although MRAs have highlighted suicide as a major health issue for men, they do not support research and interventions examining the impact of gender, even though it is widely acknowledged that masculinity is a key factor in men’s suicidal behaviour

MRAs have attacked women’s health in the name of men’s health, such as advocating for reduced funding to women’s health. This does little to benefit men’s health. As Flood

(2004, pp. 276-277)

argues,

“Attacking services primarily for women is no way to gain services for men. Men’s rights advocates have attacked women’s refuges and women’s health centres, simultaneously while calling for either parallel services for men […] or services for both men and women.

“There are at least four problems with such strategies. They focus on the wrong target, they antagonise potential supporters, they taint as backlash the need to address such men’s issues, and they are based on a simplistic “You’ve got it, we want it too” logic which may not provide the most appropriate services for men.

“For example, when it comes to the poor state of men’s health, the problem is not women or the feminist health movement and the organisations it worked to establish. Instead, we should be tackling destructive notions of manhood, an economic system which values profit and productivity over workers’ health, and the ignorance of service providers. Women have been central to advocacy for and the promotion of men’s health. To try to build men’s health by taking away from women’s health is to shoot oneself in the prostate, and is a betrayal of the principles on which a concern for health should be based in the first place.”