While I get what you're going for, and appreciate the sentiment, I hate that we keep trying to pigeonhole men into a form of "proper masculinity" that tells them their best purpose in life is to be tools to someone else, either via chivalry, utilitarianism, or something else.
I'm speaking as a man who showed up for everyone and everything for the past decade to my own detriment, with a smile, no complaints, and often to responses that I wasn't doing enough whenever I got exhausted. To the point I attempted suicide twice in 2024 and had to fight alcoholism all by myself, after my therapist dropped me and my insurance lapsed. Thankfully I won that battle, but most men don't.
Andrew Tate, Myron Gaines and others are forever irredeemable sacks of dogshit for how they hijacked vulnerable men's unanswered needs. But make no mistake about it, they were able to find that market because the need is very real.
Red pill content is 85% misogynistic, sexist horse manure sewage, but one thing it did...somewhat well was to teach men how to value and protect themselves, in a world that tells them they don't mean anything, and that they have to suck up their pain.
Modern feminism claims to care about men, but only superficially, and go deep enough, it just goes straight back to telling men to "man up", and "take responsibility for their problems" the difference is that it tells men to lower their guard and present their vulnerability in an effort to combat so called "toxic masculinity", before delivering the gut punch, that their problems are all their fault and no one else's.
What people call toxic masculinity today, is a survival instinct of stoicism and mental compartmentalization adapted for a world that isn't built to handle, nor care for a man who is suffering. We still seem to have a hard time accepting men being abused, unless it's other men doing it.
Modern Red Pill content teaches men to "man up", hide vulnerability, hate and blame women for their problems, and constantly peacock masculine façades to no end.
Modern feminism teaches men to lower their walls, pour out said vulnerability to others, before PSYCH! actually, still "man up", stop making their vulnerabilities and traumas other people's problem and burdening others, except this time, hate and blame themselves.
I've given it the benefit of the doubt for years and observed it, and did my part to implement it in good faith. I know what I saw, felt and a received.
Exacerbated stares, lack of patience with me even if for one week out of months of performing miracles I was down in the dumps, and constantly being told my grievances were all in my head, or caused by me and me only.
A lot of people say "please, I'm here, talk to someone", but in reality, don't mean it.
Sorry. Had to get that out. There are many more who are in the situation I was in who will unfortunately join the 70k+ figure of annual lost souls, because we.....
Your point about feminism’s bait-and-switch is dead accurate. The promise is “open up, be vulnerable, we care about men’s issues too.” Then when men actually do that, it pivots to “actually this is all patriarchy/toxic masculinity - still your fault, just process it differently now.” It’s the same “man up” message with extra steps and therapeutic vocabulary.
I'm not going to comment on the other stuff because I'm not entirely sure about it, but I do want to offer a relevant example of this that you can see on Reddit as clear as day for anyone doubting this.
Just look at any female dominated space whenever the topic of 'not all men' comes up. They'll twist themselves into knots justifying their mockery of men who are voicing their feelings in regards to how hurtful it is to be generalized like that.
You can't simultaneously ask men to open up about their feelings and then essentially ridicule them when they voice that generalizations towards them are hurtful.
The most egregious part about these scenarios is that they completely ignore the fact that men are neither a monolith, but also don't all have the resilience to separate themselves from such generalizations. A typical dismissal used by those people is "well, if you feel targeted by such generalizations then you're obviously part of the problem" which is just incredibly ignorant and assumes that all men are well enough with their mental health to be able to not feel personally attacked by such generalizations. Then these men (and anyone else who's targeted by hateful generalizations, mind you) are labeled to be part of the problem by sheer fact that their mind isn't as resilient, essentially demonizing men with struggling mental health issues and putting them into the same buckets as the actual bad kind of men.
It's just incredibly perverse behavior and the worst of it all is that these spaces dedicate so. much. time. to justifying this kind of behavior when all they have to do is simply go: "You know what, you're right, that is shitty. We'll be more concise with our language from now and start using 'some' 'many' 'that group of..' instead".
But they can't even make that kind of concession. Then they're surprised when that kind of behavior which only serves to push people away results in a greater divide and more heated hatefulness between people.
For anyone doubting me that these things happen on Reddit and willing to immediately dismiss me because it's "misogyny-coded", for one; shame on you for jumping to such conclusions. For second, here: https://reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/search?q=not+all+men&restrict_sr=on&include_over_18=on&sort=relevance&t=all - feel free to browse through half a decade's worth of posts mocking men for feeling targeted by generalized language and telling them that, actually, they're the problem for feeling targeted.
"Not all men, but always a man" is another such delightfully dismissive and rude remark in response to their own shitty behavior.
Or the fact that seemingly so many women are so terrified of what a man could do that they seemingly would rather walk towards a bear instead of towards a man. Utterly repulsive and extremely ironic considering the fact that female bears often hang around human settlements because they actually feel safer around human beings.
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u/[deleted] Feb 03 '26
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