Will We Ever Notice Boys' Struggles?

Well, it's collective punishment, isn't it? As they exit the womb, little boys pick up responsibility for all the imagined oppression of women for the past 200,000 years. If you try to argue for the defense of boys and men, you are a selfish, exploiting, chauvinist, rape apologist, and the magic of shame will make you acquiesce in repression of your darling boy for another generation. Shame on you. Or not. It's a matter of what you choose.
http://canadiancrc.com/PDFs/The_Invisible_Boy_Report.pdf

There are more men getting educated than before. The situation is nit deteriorating in that sense.

School is about sitting down and learning. Men who don't like school can still find good paying jobs: plumber, electrician, etc. As a woman, choosing a profession that involves finding yourself alone in a stranger's home is something I would never do, no matter what the pay check. How can you fight back a man twice your size with your head under the sink?

For men, school isn't the only option, for women it's the best way to physical security. Women are more at risk, so they work more to protect themselves.

One of the first things taught to boys is to always act confident and never ask for help. In the last decade boys are also being taught misogyny. This doesn't set them up well for a demographic that is going to receive assistance. Nobody wants to help people who don't want help or appreciate help, or will spit on anyone that tries to help them.

Girls are taught social skills, and are encouraged to practice social skills. This is good training for today's economy. I can see why the are doing well.

If boys are going to get help that have to set themselves up to receive it gracefully, I don't see anyone working on this challenge. A few basic social skills will go a long way.

The genders are NOT equal. Boys learn in different ways than girls and public schools feed kids a one-size fits all that leaves the boys behind.

"there is no White House Council on Boys and Men to parallel the one established for women and girls very soon after President Obama took office"

The problem isn't that there is a Council on Boys and Men. The problem is that there is a Council for Girls and Women. The eagerness you have to politicize everything is the basic problem facing our country. The cultural problems you note are directly attributable to the politicization of what you call "gender" issues (they are sex issues).

I'm quite certain you find people like Donald Trump just appalling. Since that's the case, why are you so eager for him to have power to determine how little boys and girls should be taught? Why are you so against parents choosing for themselves to teach their own children as they want? In short, why do you have so much distrust for your fellow man, but so much trust for Donald Trump?

In short, YOU are the problem. Instead of leaving people be, you insist on imposing your values on everyone else using the coercive powers of the state. Your rejection of our basic American ideal of liberty is the problem.

Stop thinking of your fellow man as serfs upon which to be experimented by powerful politicians.

"I don’t have to read books to remind me of how women were treated years ago"

Translation: I prefer my fantasies to actual reality. If you are actually "obsessed with gender issues", then you'd know that men have always been treated worse than women. Men were more likely to die without having children, live in poverty, die violently, be imprisoned, etc. Instead of learning the actual historical record, you choose your flight of fancy, where men had it so good and women were oppressed.

That "sex discrimination" you bemoan was simply the obvious recognition that men and women are actually different.

"But let’s for the moment concentrate on one group only, absolutely the most important group of all:

Children."

Children are absolutely NOT the "most important group of all". There is a rather straight forward way to see this. Imagine if society were broken down into age groups 0-20, 21-60, 60+. If everyone in the the age group 0-20 all the sudden died tomorrow, society could still be rebuilt. The same is true for those in the 60+ group. Society would collapse, though, if everyone 21-60 died.

You make so many excuses, seemingly punctuate your valid points with digressions to ensure you don't run afoul of the current vernacular - what are you afraid of? Being right? Or not having the courage of your convictions?

You're old enough o remember the reeducation camps in China, Vietnam and Cambodia - tell me, what is the difference between the "off with their head" policies of those regimes and those "liberals" of whom you are seemingly wavering to self identify with?

You're a coward. You know you are a coward. Good luck explaining it to both your sons and grandsons.

Boys are defective girls. To be modified or destroyed.

If there is a problem with boys at school or in other areas, certainly address those problems. I just don;t see what it has to do with feminism. Equal rights and equality are a given. They're not up for debate. When women didn't have their rights, they fought hard for them. Men are free to do the same.

Boys struggle? Oh, so they aren't as strong and superior as they like to pretend, huh? That's right. The male sex is weak and has only been superior because they often have more muscle. But their minds and hearts? Weak. They have no place on the top of the modern civilization. And let's not forget all the suffering they've caused to women. They deserve any struggle they face and more.

I think we tend to focus on little details that we believe are indicators of "equality" and miss the big picture. We see the trees…not the forest. Men and women have very defined rolls that we all embrace and promote. We are driven by instincts that we pretend don't exist. Boys and men struggle because we cannot allow males to be victims. It starts with boys don't cry.…we tell boys it is not ok for them to feel and express physical or emotional pain and then it becomes " take it like a man" or "man up" or " grow a set"...etc. All ways of saying to males that your pain is irrelevant, your struggle is irrelevant because you are not allowed to be a victim. Which is why we don't talk about our feelings, or go to doctors. Our whole lives we are told to suppress concerns for ourselves as men.So as a society we do not recognize when males struggle because we are not comfortable seeing them as victims.

Liberals no longer advocate inclusion, but intolerance instead. Liberals no longer advocate equality, but supremacy instead. Liberals no longer advocate compassion, but hatred instead.

Forget liberals, they are the problem, not the solution.

Conservatives only care about money and profit. It is sad to say, they are now preferable to liberals.

Dear all,

Wow. So many comments here are proving the author's point: there is something very ingrained, intrinsic in us that keep us from seeing men as a group as (deserving) victims. The stats have spoken clearly even before the education gender gap was reversed, and contrary to popular belief, archetypically patriarchal Egypt and Saudi Arabia are no better.

What I find particularly befuddling is the narrative that says that women used to be oppressed, and maybe now the pendulum has swung too far. Only a few hundred years ago, life was short, rough, and ridden with disease and violence. Do you really think we could afford to or even survive treating women WORSE than men? Quite the contrary: we had to organise society so that women could do what was essential for the bare survival of the tribe: procreate. Which, by the way, was excruciating and life-threatening enough.

We remember the witch trials, sometimes as gendercide, because the majority of the victims were women. But scores of world war battles with many more victims with a much more one-sided gender distribution are fading fast. We ignored Boko Harom as they slaughtered THOUSANDS of men and boys, but saw world leaders rally around 200 kidnapped girls.

Nothing bad about that. In fact, defeating the witch trials and extirpating Boko Haram is good for their male victims as well. And I am not going to be as blue eyed as to think that we can change these gender roles completely. But to seriously think that we used to hate women just because of some gauche comments back in the days where professional women were still a novelty, is bad enough. The comments here: egregious.

What makes this all the worse: everything that happens to men and women affects the other gender too. This is not the case with race, which is why I have much more sympathy for Black Lives Matter, although of course I find their rhetoric widely exaggerated. As a white person, I can feel my privilege, and I can feel my own racism (I am trying to fight it, but a group of drunk black men at the end of the street is more likely to make me take a detour than white men - although the sexism is stronger: a group of women would have to be Thow Mamma Off the Train-type intimidating to have the same effect). I am also incredibly lucky to be born in a rich country, to have a family that loves me, and not to be ugly (can you imagine any discrimination worse than that faced by ugly people?). But because I am a man? How can this be serious?

You need to tell the whole truth. Women are advantaged by society nowdays way beyond men. You left out that around 60% of those graduating from college are women. Do you really believe that women face discrimination that is at all comparable to the discrimination men have been facing for the last 2 decades? They benefit from affirmative action, tons of scholarships, scores of programs to encourage them to go into STEM fields. Where are men's programs? They don't exist, or at least, barely exist compared to the massive amount that women have.

And to posit that your sons are privileged just for being born white is horrendous. It's just more identity politics that leads to discrimination. This is no different than when you assumed that men were clearly the privileged ones. Perhaps you're still stuck in the mentality of the 60s and have not caught up to how things work in the modern day, or perhaps you're so caught up in academia that you haven't managed to venture out into the real world ever and see how things are. We have a saying where I come from that goes something like "You have to be really well educated to be that stupid." Now I'm not calling you stupid, but I hope you get the point.

You should want the best for your son and grandson, and telling them that they're privileged is anything but that.

Boys' struggles are perpetuated by the toxic masculinity and expectations of the patriarchy. This is why feminism exists. Feminism is about obliterating the patriarchy, dismantling sexist stereotypes for ALL PEOPLE, and creating a society in which equality and acceptance exists for all.

I find these articles about "what about the boys" so infuriating. Just like white supremacists whine about not being able to celebrate their whiteness, this mentality assumes that boys and men have not been at the forefront of everything for most of humanity's existence.

Here's an example: medical testing is done almost exclusively on males. Why? Because menstruation is considered too difficult of a variable to manage. So the birth control pill, created to prevent pregnancy, to be taken by women, was tested exclusively on males, who cannot get pregnant and would not be taking the pills.

If our society truly wants to recognize and address the struggles of boys and men, it needs to embrace feminism. It will only be when boys and girls and men and women are fully accepted and treated as HUMAN BEINGS and not genitalia and sexist stereotypes (that include all sorts of sick and harmful expectations) will our society move forward and help everyone who needs it.

As an outspoken feminist, I agree. Gender roles are a double edged sword; whereas girls are taught they are inherently more delicate than men and therefore that crying etc. is only natural, boys are taught that to show emotion, to be shy/sensitive, or, god forbid, to cry in front of other boys, is a sign of weakness/femininity and makes them less valid in the eyes of other males. It is this attitude that creates a vicious cycle; the boy who is continually told to 'man up' grows up to be a man who cannot deal with or express his emotions and treats 'wimpy' men the same way he was treated. Then he tells his son/grandson/nephew/student to man up, and it starts again.
Also, you wouldn't believe how many people have seen me talk about the issues guys are faced with, and are shocked when I say I'm a feminist. Stop saying that standing up for men's rights is oppressive to women, and vica versa. It's supposed to be about equality.
P.S this comments section is really awful and completely missing the point. You're all acting like this post is a brave stand against the evil lies and oppression of those who believe in women's rights/empowerment. OP specifically said that there is nothing wrong with standing up for the rights of either sex.