The Men Are Not Alright

Between the last decade of demographic shifts, horrible manosphere influencers, and progressive orthodoxy, the democrats have lost a subset of men, particuarly young men. I think we can be honest about this constituency's issues without engaging in zero-sum race-to-the-bottom bullshit. And we should.

Excerpts from the article:

Imagine a world in which, for centuries, young women were conscripted into the military and forced into combat. The vast majority of murder victims were female. Countries existed in which girls could be judicially caned, but boys were exempt. In liberal democracies, healthy genital tissue was routinely cut from baby girls without anesthesia, while the same procedure performed on boys was a federal crime. Girls dropped out of school at higher rates than boys. Women made up 93% of the prison population. Women died by suicide at four times the rate of men. And when a cargo ship sank or a mine collapsed, everyone understood, without needing to be told, that the dead would almost all be female.

What would feminists say about such a world?

They would say it was a monstrous world. They would say it was an emergency. And they would be correct.

The South African philosopher David Benatar opens his book The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys with exactly this reversal. Every condition in that paragraph is real. Every statistic is accurate. The only thing I changed was the sex. Benatar’s provocation is not that men have it worse than women overall (he’s careful to deny that framing). It’s a more unsettling claim: that we have developed a collective inability to perceive certain forms of sex-based unfairness when the victims are male. Not because the evidence is hidden, but because something in our moral psychology makes it almost impossible to see men as a class that can be discriminated against.

Here is how some feminist theorists define sexism: wrongful discrimination against a person on the basis of sex, within a system in which the discriminating group holds systemic power over the discriminated group. Under this definition, sexism against men is logically impossible in any society where men collectively hold more institutional power. Male disadvantages become “costs of patriarchy” or “the price of dominance,” never discrimination.

Benatar rejects this definition, and I think that’s right. His alternative is clean and symmetrical: sexism is wrongful discrimination on the basis of sex. Period. No clause about who holds the systemic leverage.

Why does this matter? Because the “power clause” does an enormous amount of covert work. It takes a teacher who grades a boy’s essay more harshly because he’s a boy and says: that’s not sexism, because boys benefit from a patriarchal system. It takes a judge who gives a man a longer prison sentence for the identical crime committed by a woman and says: that’s paternalism toward women, not discrimination against men. It takes a state that forces only men to register for a potential draft and says: that’s a legacy of patriarchal warrior culture, not sex-based coercion.

Think of it this way. If a powerful nation discriminated against a minority ethnic group within its borders, we would call that racism, even if members of that ethnic group held positions of power in other countries. Nobody would say, “Well, that ethnic group is dominant globally, so what’s happening to these particular people in this particular country doesn’t count as racism.” We evaluate discrimination by looking at the treatment, the basis for the treatment, and whether the treatment is justified. We don’t first check whether the victim’s demographic group is winning some cosmic power tally.

The United States Selective Service System requires all male citizens and immigrants aged 18 to 25 to register for a potential military draft. Women are exempt. The FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act, signed in December 2025, mandated that this registration will become automatic starting December 2026. Women remain exempt.

No complex causal untangling required here. This is an explicit, state-imposed sex classification. The government sorts its citizens by sex and assigns a coercive obligation to one group. If you fail to register, you can be denied federal student aid, federal job training, and government employment. The penalty for willful non-registration is up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Apply Benatar’s reversal test: if only women were required to register for potential conscription, and failure meant losing access to college financial aid, would anyone hesitate to call that sexist? The question answers itself.

And this isn’t a relic. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine has banned men aged 18 to 60 from leaving the country under martial law, while women of any age can leave freely. In August 2025, the government eased restrictions for men aged 18 to 22, but men 23 to 60 remain trapped (with limited exceptions). Any small-d democrat who thinks about this for thirty seconds will recognize the profound liberty violation involved: you cannot leave your country because of your sex. Yet the discourse around Ukraine’s mobilization policy has been overwhelmingly framed as military necessity rather than sex-based coercion, in a way that would be totally unthinkable if the genders were reversed.

Meanwhile, Norway introduced gender-neutral conscription in 2015, and Sweden followed in 2017. These countries demonstrate that “men-only” is a policy choice, not a law of nature.

In 2012, University of Michigan law professor Sonja Starr published a landmark analysis of gender disparities in federal criminal cases. Her finding: men receive sentences that are, on average, 63% longer than women for similar crimes, after controlling for arrest offense, criminal history, and other pre-charge characteristics. Women were also significantly more likely to avoid charges and convictions entirely, and twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission’s own 2023 demographic report confirmed the pattern: after controlling for relevant case factors, female defendants received sentences approximately 29.2% shorter than comparable male defendants. The USSC found the gap was driven heavily by the earlier decision of whether someone is incarcerated at all (probation versus prison), not just by sentence length once prison is on the table. Women were also 39.6% more likely to receive probation-only sentences.

Now, there are possible explanations beyond discrimination. Women are more likely to be primary caregivers. Women may have lower recidivism risk. Some portion of the gap may reflect unmeasured case characteristics. The USSC explicitly attempts to control for all of these factors, and a large, stubborn gap remains.

In 2023, the male suicide rate in the United States was 22.8 per 100,000, compared to 5.9 for women (CDC/NIMH). Men die by suicide at nearly four times the rate of women.

That gap has been roughly stable for decades.

I find it revealing that we have government offices devoted to women’s health, federally funded campaigns on breast cancer awareness, and a whole month dedicated to violence against women (and we should!). We do not treat the male suicide rate as a comparable public health emergency, despite the fact that it kills more American men each year than homicide does. The gap between how we respond to this number and how we respond to female-skewed health crises of comparable magnitude is itself a data point about the empathy asymmetry Benatar describes.

If the evidence is this visible, why does it take a philosopher writing a book to force people to look at it? The answer, I think, lies not in politics but in cognitive psychology.

In 2009, Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner published a study on what they called “moral typecasting”: our tendency to sort people into two roles, moral agents (people who do things) and moral patients (people who have things done to them). Once someone is cast as an agent, it becomes psychologically difficult to also see them as a patient. Perpetrators can’t be victims. Doers can’t be sufferers.

In 2020, Tania Reynolds and colleagues took this framework and applied it to gender. Across six experiments with over 3,000 participants, they found a systematic bias: people automatically typecast women as victims and men as perpetrators, even when presented with identical harm scenarios. Men were perceived as suffering less pain from the same event. Participants prescribed harsher punishment for male wrongdoers than female ones committing identical acts.

The weakest version of the “second sexism” argument is the one that keeps score: men have it better, women have it worse, let’s compare spreadsheets. That kind of “who’s more oppressed” competition is as intellectually sterile as it is politically toxic.

The strongest version is Benatar’s forcing question: if the sexes were reversed, would we tolerate this?

You know what happens when you reverse the sexes. You knew before I told you. The test works. The only question is whether you’re willing to let it change what you do now.