MRAs generally suck, but I honestly feel like the Manosphere is, to some extent, held up by people who don't want to engage with their misandry to justify unreasonable and prejudiced positions. It's a whole lot easier to say misandry doesn't exist or that it's not institutional and claim that's the nuanced view when you're debating the "men are the real oppressed gender" club who couch that claim behind the idea that feminists and women invented misandry and that they're the ones who are primarily responsible for it.
This definition of misandry as "something women and feminists do to oppress men" is clearly not true for a variety of reasons, so it's easier to shut down. But that's not the only possible way to define the term or the only conversation that can be had. Yet repeatedly when I've tried to engage with the topic it's the only one people are willing to engage with.
The reality is that discrimination against men for being men *is* institutionalized. The draft, circumcision, the disdain for male victims of violence and sexual violence (which extends beyond just the ones with female abusers).
It *is* ingrained in the culture and we *are* taught it from a young age. Boys face physical violence more often than girls. Boys are more often physically abused by their parents than girls. Boys are told "big boys don't cry" as some kind of aspirational shit when they're like four. And as much as "boys will be boys" negatively affects women, it also negatively affects boys because it *also* posits that violence is somehow good, healthy, or not harmful for men to experience and that parents should not only encourage it, but also refuse to protect their male children from it (boys being harmed is also trivialized and dismissed this way). And this is all just the stuff around children! I can go on about how puberty is this traumatizing experience where the little affection and support men get drops off severely as people (especially women) stop seeing you as a child and start seeing you as a dangerous man. For instance, I have repeatedly encountered women who casted doubt on the idea of female teachers raping their male students because they were more concerned about those children raping the adult women!
And lastly, yeah it has to be unlearned. The difference here is that while progressives and feminists acknowledge this about misogyny they simply refuse to do so with misandry.
The thing is, the nature of a normalized prejudice is that it is *normalized*. It seems normal, logical, and rational, even when it isn't, because there's this entire framework built around getting you to believe that. The cycle that keeps it this way is getting people to assume things are a certain way without examining them too closely, and people do this with men *constantly.*
As much as I don't want to make this about feminism, there really is no better example than modern gender studies. Feminists have a tendency to just assume that an issue doesn't affect men, not include them in their studies or theories, and then point at that lack of due diligence to "prove" their own assumptions. Most infamously, they did and many still do this with rape and domestic violence, claiming that men make up some tiny proportion of victims and women some tiny proportion of perpetrators, pointing to outdated crime statistics that they themselves will turn around and contest when applied to women, but which apparently counts as divine revelation when it comes to men.
As much as this is defended as "centering women", there's really no difference between leaving men out of your study on the link between structural sexism and neurodegenerative disorders, and leaving women out of your study on the symptoms of a heart attack. Except that the medical industry had the decency not to suggest women didn't experience heart attacks.
Centering women is "Women are victims of X and that's important, let's discuss." It's not "Men are not victims of X and even if they were they aren't as harmed by it." The thing is, many people will mix both claims and then defend it with "you're decentering women" when you point it out.
But of course, feminists are not the only ones who are misandric, and they hardly invented the concept. They are misandric because society is misandric. Because they were taught to be misandric as children at the same time they were taught to be misogynistic. They just spent multiple generations challenging the former while engaging with the latter only superficially, often basing their entire understanding of men's issues off the vibe that there's some handful of feminist thinkers they've never actually read who did that work, so therefore feminism so therefore they care about men now could they please get back to women please.
That doesn't make feminists any more misandric than the rest of society, it just makes them no less. As evidenced by the fact that so many struggle so hard to see it around them.
The primary culprit here is patriarchy. It's always been patriarchy. Women who rape men are primarily responsible for the rape of men, but police, policy makers, religious leaders, and even friends and family are primarily the ones who enforce rape culture for men. Feminists are probably on the list simply because feminism is now an industry worth tens of billions and has yet to reckon with the grifter influencers spreading rape myths, but they certainly aren't at the top of that list. All the groups of people at the top of that list are mostly made up by men.
Men could refuse to circumcise their sons. Men could insist on being more involved with their children's lives and insist they be taught better beliefs about men. Men could stand up for their sons against violence. Men could teach their sons that consent goes both ways. Men could be better friends. Etc.
The Manosphere itself is *extremely* misandric, way more than feminists. They will actively look you in the eye and claim some of the most horrifically prejudiced things about men imaginable. Which is why they are so useful to progressives who want to cast themselves as *not* misandric. It's like thinking you aren't racist because your uncle routine drops hard R's and rants about welfare queens. It's not that simple.
The fact that people keep trying to make it that simple is just because, well, that would mean accepting that they have an obligation to do uncomfortable introspection for the good of dirty stinky men that they believe all this fucked up shit about. "How dare you say women should have sympathy for our oppressors" kind of stuff.
This is a more complex issue than people want to give it credit for because simple allows them to place misandry in a neat little box on a shelf they can comfortably forget about. In fact, I would say for most, the most important part is attacking the idea that they should have to critically examine their own beliefs. Because that's where change begins: admitting you have a problem.
