> I am continually baffled by people that feel threatened by feminism
I was just having a conversation last night about this exact topic with my best friend. We are both very progressive, and other topics we talked about were the mounting need for UBI, higher education reform, The problems with our current welfare model and a need for a massive pay down on Infrastructure. All the same I feel the need for a fresh account to say this, and that shows a problem with the movement right away. So, in the spirit of open discourse, let me try to enlighten you as to why people feel this way, at least in my experience. I have no citations as I’m mostly reiterating the sentiments I’ve gathered from others.

I would say that the fear of feminism makes way more sense if you slide down the income ladder. If you are a straight male who works a job near the poverty line, feminism seems like it’s already handed out a big advantage to your female peers. If you are a poor women, you have substantially more viable options to increase your lot in life and generally a lot more support. The big winners of our current “patriarchy” are only rich men, and it seems like feminism only enhances the advantages they have. Women get a lot of benefits from being on the receiving end of the courtship game, and yet feminism somehow frames that reality as a negative(I get “harassed” by men wolf-whistling at me in the street).

Examples of unspoken advantages of women/grievances of men at this income bracket:

women seem to be able to find work much more easily than men, and they generally seem to be given more leeway in general. This seems a second order effect of men being demonized by many groups and because feminism’s fight for sexual liberation of women has resulted in many less women being reserved with who they sleep with. The result is that ethics be damned, male bosses want to hire females more. But because of the sexual dynamic of women seeking a provider and the social demonization of men/tribalization of women, women bosses have either no preference or prefer women also.

it’s no secret that more women are graduating from college than men and that primary/secondary education is better suited for females, and yet it feels like things are just continuing to favor women more and more.

Women just get a lot more attention in general, and as a result tend to have better self esteem. People frequently tend to stick up for women and trample men. As a result, females’ egos on average seem to be much more inflated, making dating very difficult for low income men who generally receive little to no encouragement and most attention they get is negative. Meanwhile men suffer in the shadows with high rates of suicide and depression, and US society would rather focus on taking away guns than making people not want to kill themselves or others.

The biggest irony is that sex and having an SO are pretty well known to be a fairly common part of living a happy, fulfilling life. And yet when men complain about their inability to successfully court women, they are typically lambasted and called names. Hell “nice guy” is basically a pejorative now. This further drives home the feeling that society really doesn’t care about men. The incel community didn’t used to be anywhere as toxic as it is now, and it seems it was largely driven there by bullying.

While we are talking about bullying, men are almost always expected to be able to deal with bullies alone(unlike women who are typically given attention and empathy about bullies), and there is a pretty strong dynamic of females wanting the attention/courting of bullies. Feminism has fought hard for men to realign their expectations about women, yet there seems to be nothing done at all to change women’s expectations of men.If anything Hollywood and pop culture is full of roided up men with objectively unnatural physiques who live unattainable lifestyles and ridiculously wealthy bad boys who seem to make a sport of unethical behavior.

Women are, generally speaking, the ones who call the shots in a relationship if you are poor. Wealth as a proxy for ability to give care/attention drives this. If you are a low earning male, you are seemingly much more likely relative to a women of the same income to be subject to a lot of unsavory behavior from females, partially because women who are emotionally stable are typically shooting for someone who brings home the bacon, and partially because women perceive the weakness of your position and use it against you. the latter happens to both men and women, but generally speaking there are no social brakes on women abusers like their are on men, who are truly demonized for perceived abuse. I think this problem is hidden to a lot of more wealthy feminists because of the perception that wealthy men(or the people they are courting) are portrayed to be shitty, see pop culture.

Women can essentially decide unilaterally to have kids, and then they get support from the government. They get a chance to raise someone to take care of them, and all of the psychological benefits of Child-care. Meanwhile, if you are subject to abuse as a male you have virtually no support network and will find even getting people to side with you difficult.

Feminism targets the social problems observed fairly high up the income/privilege ladder, and seems to be against making any kind of concessions.

I think good places to start trying to tackle these problems would be for feminists to spend much more effort demonizing the portrayal of unnatural, anti-social men in the media. I think a $1000/month UBI would make the biggest immediate impact, as men almost certainly wouldn’t feel like they were getting shafted by society so badly, and women might not be so preoccupied with finding a provider. Probably most controversial and unrealistic, I think that to pair with Planned Parenthood we should have public gyms that also facilitate the supervised use
of steroids. Having sex constantly without pregnancy is no more natural than benching 600+ pounds, both are, outside of rare cases, the result of exogenous sex hormones, yet we hand out estrogen to women to fulfill the sexual fantasies of men, but make it illegal (unless you have a bunch of money) for men to get their sexhormones to match women’s sexual expectations.