Travis, I totally agree with you. Men get the short stick when it comes to so many things, like divorce cases -- in about 80% of divorce disputes women get the kids and men pay alimony or "child support" even if they don't get to see the kids -- men commit suicide more frequently and suffer more frequently from severe, more long term depression, men get conscripted to war and men die more frequently in workplace accidents and road traffic accidents. Although Eastern societies are heavily biased against women, Western ones are heavily biased in favour of them.

I read a story a few weeks ago about a 28 year old female teacher who "slept with" a 15 year old boy in her class. She got off with a 6 month suspended sentence and lost her teaching license. A few days later a story came out in the same newspaper about a male teacher around the same age who "groomed" and "abused the trust of" a 15 year old girl and was sent to prison for statutory rape.

Apparently when adult men have sex with people who are underage it's "malicious" and "abusive", but when women do it it's "a mistake" or "a lapse of judgement". It happens in same-age relationships too. Girl get's drunk, guy gets drunk, girl and guy have sex, and guy get's hit with all the responsibility. Apparently it's customary in women's studies classes for feminist teachers to teach girls that drinking alcohol, having consensual sex, then regretting it the next morning is grounds to claim rape. Add to this the cultural stereotpye of men as potential rapists, violent abusers, bad fathers, poor husbands, plus the societal responsibility on men to be "strong", to show little "negative emotion", and to prop up society and economy when women are rearing children and you have a drastically unfair paradigm that seems to give whatever benefit of doubt exists solely to the female party.

Women in the West harp on about wage gaps, but they're a myth. In the UK and most of Europe it's illegal for an employer to pay a women an unequal wage to a man, if they're both under the same job title and doing the same job. Not only that, but about 70% of women in the West at some point have kids, so it makes sense that overall, men would contribute to more of the GDP of a country than women: men fundamentally spend more of their lives working.

Western society in a lot of ways, particularly when it come to judicial practices, social education and economic policy fundamentally pose massive risks to men in regards to physical, mental and financial health. Pregnant women of any age over 16 in the UK can get onto something called "the housing register" and be given an affordable home within no time at all. It is supposed to be a social programme to help everyone, but single adult men, in practice, cannot benefit from it at all. They cannot receive the financial windfall that a person receives for being on that register, or the opportunity to rent an affordable home, because it works on a points system which puts pregnant women at the top, but does not provide a single adult male with enough points, even if he is homeless.

A taxi driver a few days ago told me that he has heard more than a few women talking about how they got pregnant so they wouldn't have to work. Obviously this isn't representative of all women (I know many who are hard working, and lots who don't eevn want kids), and of course I do fundamentally agree with a social programme to house and support single pregnant women -- I would never want to take that away from them. My problem isn't with the institution of state benefits and child support laws and divorce proceedings themselves, it is with the unfairness with which they are enforced or carried out.

Why should a man who earns less than his wife be forced to pay child support for kids his ex wife doesn't allow him to see? Why should a man be forced to have his reputation and confidence destroyed because he happened to have consensual, mutually drunk sex that the woman, under the pangs of a hangover, regrets? Why should an adult male who sleeps with an underage girl be treated more harshly under the law than an adult woman who does likewise?

I am actually a staunch equal rights advocate, but I'm not a feminist for reasons above. Even the word "feminism" contains some sort of implication that the feminine is fundamentally a more fair and worthy heading for equal rights advocacy than the masculine. It implies that women are somehow the shining example of the unbiased approach, the arbiters or true social justice. That's nonsense, really. Modern feminism in Western countries is by-and-large about demonizing men and making women into victims who aren't culpable or responsible for anything. Human rights advocacy and equal rights advocacy deserve a better name, imo.