No Stupid Questions

I don't follow the media and the debate where you live, but over here left leaning politicians and media tends to frame it as: women, minorites etc have a problem. Men are the problem.

You're basically pushing any undecided man over to the right.

Simple. What do young men care about? Getting laid and getting paid. Promise them that, and you'll get their votes.

You'll need to use coded language, of course. But using coded language is politicians' whole job.

Education. You will never be able to explain taxes in a way that can counter propaganda if the person is an idiot. You just won't. And until then it's an uphill battle.

1. Stop dismissing that men have problems which require addressing

A lot of people say things like "men have it the best, they don't need help!" That's nonsense. Everyone who is dealing with problems and is suffering needs help. Helping men doesn't mean you stop helping women, we should help everyone who needs help.

2. Stop purity tests and infighting

Progressives today are truly awful when it comes to this. I'm not talking about including nazis, I'm talking about attacking people who agree with you on 90% of topics. Like if someone thinks trans people should be totally treated as the gender they express in every facet of society, except they shouldn't be allowed to compete in women's physical sports competitions.

3. Messaging needs HUGE improvement

This is another one that progressives have a terrible problem with. They do a terrible job of letting people know how they're being helped, and they also use language that gives the impression that they're against you. For example "the patriarchy" is a terrible term that makes men feel attacked, even though that's not what it's about at all. What most people actually mean to refer to is "gender norms", meaning concepts like 'men should fuck a lot of women and not express their emotions'. "Gender norms" is a much more accurate term and it doesn't make men feel like they're being attacked.

This is all from the perspective of a non-american from a country where thankfully we are still liberal at heart and only entertain some progressive ideas, instead of buying it wholesale, meaning the right has yet to completely cannibalise the government over the mistakes of the left.

1. Move away from equity and return to equality of opportunity as the main goal. Equity demands lack of competition, and men love competition.

You can want everyone to receive equal opportunity and dignity, but people are not equal and will not end in the same place once the race is over. You can't demand equality of outcome and onboard the most competitive demographic, there is a reason if the stereotype of leftist men is passive wimps. This is completely compatible with prgressive ideas, but it's incompatible with progressive brains, apparently.

2. Actually understand what intersectionality looks like, stop treating it like a hierarchy of oppression.

The core idea of intersectionality is that each demographic has its own issues and they manifest differently if more demographics overlap in the same individual (e.g. sexism against white women vs sexism against black women exhibit different tropes and connotations).

This does not mean whoever has the least minoritary traits is the most acceptable target, that is some marxist "oppressor vs oppressed" horseshit and, while it was probably the intended idea, it is massively counterproductive and doesn't have to be the actual application of the issue.

Men have issues that women don't have, women have issues that men don't have. As soon as your movement decides to prioritise one they have lost the other.

The reason this does not happen with race is that no movement in the US can realistically exist politically without white people simply by virtue of how huge the white slice of the demo pie is, and because this whole thing was started by highly educated, economically mobile, overwhelingly white, college grads who live in very specific coastal bubbles, hence the endemic hatred of farmers and factory workers, the actual working class of the US, as hicks and racists, and the lionisation of serving staff like baristas and waiters (the only working class most large city dwellers ever interact with).

3. Move away from "patriarchy".

It's just a fucking L on its face isn't it? "Yes come join the party that thinks men being in power is the problem" fat fucking chance lol.

And when they do join, the parodies write themselves.

I don't care if you think it's "just a name" (especially in light of what progs consistently do over "just a name" and "just a statue" and so on) it's a massive optics L that shows all of the horseshit about microaggressions and non-confrontational language and whatnot are entirely performative.

You have the most obvious othering language in the core ideas of the movement and then complain about microaggressions? And you wonder why people don't take you seriously?

And while we're on that:

4. Politeness is baseline, respect is earned. Confrontation is necessary and men are more likely to thrive in confrontational spaces.

You can't have a political movement that does not tolerate dissent and confrontation, or only tolerates it in one direction. See the implosion of the "Unfuck america tour" as a good example of this.

The whole point of politics is to create a critical mass of people who align on some goal to push for it, you don't have to agree with them on every point, if you had enough people who agree with you, you would be already in the majority and would not need to participate in politics.

Easy example from the last decade: TERFs.

Now, I don't like TERFs, on account of them being radfems and thus automatically hostile to me due to the circumstances of my birth (i.e. penis), but you know what? I reckon they probably want women to have better salaries and fewer barriers to entry into professional fields.

Let them force themselves into political irrelevance if they refuse to play ball, don't make a big fucking show of kicking them out of the movement, because then you end up on the back foot of having to explain "trans women are women" to the mass population and the TERFs simply need to say "look at these brainwashed biology deniers, they think males and females have no differences" and you end up eating your own ass in public, when the point is that trans women ought to be treated as women for their own good and a more welcoming society.

(side note: if you are in that brainless chunk of progs who do believe there is no difference between the sexes, I highly encourage you to look at the world records in any discipline with easily measured metrics such as 100m dash and freestyle swimming. Not a single male record is under the women's record, in some cases every historical male record eclipses the current female one. Males and females are different, this should be acknowledged, and it should not be a barrier to equal dignity in treatment.)

A movement that can't include anyone but the most in-line and pure of the ideological adepts is doomed to be irrelevant, and on that the progressives have an almost complete lock.

The same as it always has been. Punk Rock. Conservative shit is so goddamn cringe it's really hard to imagine how it has convinced anyone that it is any kind of counterculture.

Easy

Every time there is a conversation regarding men issues, dismiss them as talking about something that clearly DOESN'T EXISTS, demean them, if they are emotionally intelligent enough to defend themselves from the TOTALLY NOT aggressive rhetoric, compare them to something else, preferably, something weaker and less smart than them, bonus points if you attack their sexuality in the same phrase, that always gets them riled up to support you!

Even more so if you treat them like complete imbeciles with a memory span of seconds and assume they forgot about all the years you have been doing this exact same thing!

And whatever you do, don't forget to bring up how women have and keep having BIGGER issues

That'll work wonders

The reality of this all is rather complex but I think the greatest issue is fundamentally the empathy gap. Men's issues are not recognized as issues, they're just dismissed out of hand. I'm talking about the easy things like the sentencing and education gaps.

We need to start the discourse that these are very real problems that are worth addressing.

Another problem I personally run into is how it's acceptable to discriminate against men, "kill all men" is acceptable but "kill all race" isn't. Neither should be and we don't recognize it as a problem, instead defaulting to arguments that are considered horrendous in another context.

The elimination of ghost jobs, for a start. If you have to jump through hoops for a job that doesn't exist, that instills a strong distrust in society. People need money to make headway in their life, and shit like ghost jobs corrode the feeling of hope.

Once you cannot feel love for living anymore, that is a great deal of space in one's heart to be filled with hatred.

Punching nazis can be nice and masculine if you like.

Start by no longer telling men who have done nothing wrong they are responsible for the misdeeds of others. It breeds resentment and closes people to anything else you have to say.

Be nice and respectful to them and masculinity. Like "It's masculine to protect the oppressed"

Don't belittle anyone for that matter, such as based on race, gender or religions, even if you're upset at that grouping.

Reframe spending as stimulating the economy.

Create jobs through a green new deal that allows for upeard mobility for the motivated. Small business grants.

Create tax incentives for, endorse and give loam grants to businesses that provide workers with a share of a company. Whether co-op type thing or convoluted stock share program.

Young men want to matter, and they want to see the results of their effort.

Do what you say you're going to do when you get elected. Quit finding just enough no votes and making excuses. You promise, we vote, you don't deliver. Then you ask "why does no one want to vote for us? We promised to be marginally less terrible than our opponents!"

Legit I think it's to shift the focus away from helping other people for the sake of being nice and onto uniting together to fight a common enemy - the bosses, corporations, etc. Dale the machinist from Alabama isn't going to go to the protest to protect trans latinx PoC out of the kidness of his own heart but he might if he realizes it's part of a larger project to go out to take back his rights from the people fucking him over, and fuck over his boss. Young men are drawn to masculinity and militaristic language right now, and left wing politics can be easily framed in those terms. Yes, being good to other people should be good in its own right but a lot of people don't see it that way and we need to get them on our side too.