Gender Roles for Thee: 5 Times Feminists Demanded Liberation for Women but Not Men

Feminism: liberation for women. And, supposedly, men don’t need a men’s rights movement because feminism already has them covered. Feminism fights for liberation from the male gender role too. Or does it?

What is the male gender role? Traditionally, men have had to be protectors and providers. They have had to support and subsidize women who usually cannot produce enough to support themselves, much less their children, due to physical limitations. Namely, women face health complications from menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth. Additionally, they have lower upper-body strength on average, weaker bone density and more sensitive skin.

Yet despite supposedly opposing gender roles, feminists by and large support policies and programs that institutionalize the male gender role and force men to be providers and protectors. As I always say, this allows them to reap the benefits of the female gender roles with none of the responsibilities so that men are left with the responsibilities of the male gender role but none of the benefits. In this article, I have decided to provide elaborate descriptions of these such policies and programs to illustrate this concept.

Menstruation Leave

Perhaps the most blatant example is the feminist movement for menstruation leave. This can take on two forms: either the government providing it through social security or merely mandating that employers or health-insurance providers pay for it. Regardless, the result is the same: men have to subsidize women when they can’t produce due to their periods. So far, Spain is the only Western country with this policy, but it’s on the table in Italy and regularly promoted in the United States.

For example, let’s say that a man and a woman both work 20 days a month in a factory. It’s not physically demanding, so they both have the same marginal productivity of $100 per day or $4,000 between the two of them. However, if the woman takes two days off due to menstruation, then their combined productivity is only $3,800. The man could simply receive $2,000 and the woman $1,800, but if period leave is required of the firm, then they’ll have to pay each $1,900. Alternatively, the government can just take $100 from the man and give it to the woman via social security, surely with a nice little administration fee.

In other words, men have to provide for women. How is this equality?

Equal Health Insurance Premiums

In the United States, it has long been required by law that men and women pay the same insurance premiums. However, for a myriad of reasons, women are far more likely than men to utilize healthcare services, and the average woman is 76 percent more likely to have visited a medical professional in the past year than a man.

Naturally, insurance companies would charge more to women then if they could while offering men lower rates, just as they do in other markets that aren’t regulated. Since they can’t, men must make up the difference in premiums, subsidizing women’s health care. This is the case in a public system as well where women use more services but pay less into the system.

Ironically, this also creates a reinforcing cycle. Because women’s health care is discounted, they have an incentive to use it more and above market equilibrium while men, who face artificially expensive health care, tend to forgo it. As women use health care even more, feminists demand even more subsidization for them, and the cycle continues. Meanwhile, men continue to suffer shorter lifespans and more chronic illness.

Women-First Disaster Response

A famous study from the London School of Economics based on research by the World Health Organization disturbingly manipulated statistics in attempt to claim that natural disasters affected women more than men. While I plan to provide a more in-depth exposé in the future, the methodology was this. The data showed that adult males died at the highest rates. They were followed by juvenile males and females, ie children, who died at equal rates. Finally, adult females died at the lowest rates. As a result, the average age for female mortality was lower than that for male mortality since it was primarily concentrated on children. This allowed the LSE to claim that natural disasters affected “female life expectancy” more dramatically.

This study, among other things, has provided a basis for demands that disaster relief programs focus on women. For example, UN Women, an openly feminist organization, advocates that disaster relief “foreground the needs of women and girls.”

Once again, we see that feminists don’t want to free men from their gender roles at all. Instead, we must continute to sacrifice ourselves for women just as we have since the days of chivalry and “women and children first.” In fact, it seems that based on the WHO data, women take precedence over children.

New Masculinity and “Men’s Lib”

Op-eds abound about “redefining” masculinity and creating the modern man. It’s more than words, though, governments like Australia’s have earmarked millions of dollars to fight “toxic masculinity” and use the school system to teach boys how to behave correctly as men.

Wait, so female child caregivers will be socializing children to act a certain way based on their gender? Isn’t that… what a gender role is? Not only that, but it’s acting a certain way to benefit society and, more specifically, women.

Imagine if the government spent millions so that male officials could teach little girls how to act for the benefit of men, or even just a better “society”? Classes teaching girls how to be better mothers—which given how many boys have their genitals mutilated each day, seems like a bigger necessity—would receive unprecedented rage.

Do not buy into these ideas of “toxic masculinity” and the “healthy masculinity” pushed on us by feminists. In the end, this is just re-inventing the wheel of gender roles, but you know that the same feminists do not want the same for women.

Violence Against Women Campaigns

Billions of dollars have been devoted worlwide to programs designed to end violence against women, specifying the gender to be protected. Since the population is roughly 50/50 men and women, this is obviously discrimination from the get-go.

However, what makes it worse is that women are disproportionately unaffected by violence. The vast majority of violent crime affects men, including four out of five homicides and two-thirds of robberies. And this isn’t even considering the disproportionate amount of violence men and boys suffer during wars, despite Hillary Clinton’s claim that women are the “primary victims.” Men account for over 98 percent of combat casualities for the US military, and men are more often civilian casualities as well due to rules of engagement regarding “fighting-age males” and other practices that single out men and boys by gender. For example, during the Kosovo War, the victims of mass killings were 90 percent male.

Yet feminists don’t demand that NATO change their rules of engagement to include females, and they don’t campaign to end mass killings against boys. Instead, they demand money be spent specifically on protecting women, those who arguably need the least protection. They thereby reinforce male disposability and the idea that men can be sacrificed if it means saving women.

But… What If I Like Those Policies?

Maybe you’re thinking: Wait a minute, I want to prevent violence against women. I don’t mind sacrificing myself for the women I love or supporting them while they’re pregant or menstruating. Of course, you’re a good man, and you were raised to put women and children first.

Here’s the thing, though. It is disingenuous for feminists to claim they also fight for men’s liberation when really they fight for men to keep providing women all the benefits of being women… without giving anything in return. If you think that the above examples of institutionalized gender roles are valid, then you must logically demand that women provided a socially defined gender role in return. Traditionally, this has revolved around women’s strengths, such as caring for children and the home, and the things they have to offer men, like sex and offspring that men can be sure are theirs. Of course that doesn’t forgo a “modern woman” like feminists demand a “modern man.” Leave your ideas for this new gender role in the comments.

However, if you don’t think women should be confined by a gender role at all, well, then you have to give men the same privilege, and that means endings the programs and policies listed above as well as the many others I didn’t even mention.