This is really frustrating

I am a huge proponent of the often neglected male aspect of gender equality. There are numerous ways that men are uniquely hurt in our society. Specifically, a machismo-filled culture discriminates against men who don’t look like Ashton Kutcher (read: me) in the same way that women are made to hate themselves if they don’t look like Salma Hayek. However, while our culture reaches out to women by encouraging them to express their emotions and confront eating disorders and other problems, men are told to bottle up their issues because an emotional man is often considered effeminate (which is, for some reason, bad), which usually makes these dilemmas worse.

The same confinement of emotions is also one of the causes of rape laws that exclude men—in five states, men cannot be legally raped. While the number of reported sexual assaults is always much lower than the actual number, men have an additional motivation to not come forward when assaulted—admitting your attack means admitting that you were physically dominated, which makes you less of a man according to many destructive social stereotypes. So, the rates of reported male sexual assaults are often lower than the female counterparts. Rape is always terrible, but feeling like you can't do anything about it because of social pressures is even worse. In fact, these rapes against men are even made fun of in popular culture and in our daily lives—dropping the soap in the shower jokes are just one example of how male sexual assault has become so common that it is socially acceptable to laugh at rape.

My point is that there are lots of ways that men are very seriously hurt in our society that demand our immediate attention. Movements like this shift the focus away from the areas where it is really needed and demean very legitimate social concerns. I am very ashamed to be a man today.