this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2025
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It's not so much a misunderstanding of concepts, it's people using 2 different definitions.
You must know by now that misandry can both mean "systemic oppression of men" and "bigotry against men" - sorry, "unfairly being mean to men", just as misogyny or racism can mean different things in a systemic and personal context.
People are complaining about bigotry, or "being meanly treated" if you want to imply dismissiveness, and the word they use for that is misandry/racism/misogyny - that these words imply systemic oppression in an academic context doesn't matter, we are talking about the other context.
And if you think it should not have this other definition at all, because it makes it harder to talk about the more important systemic issue, or for another reason: don't be a pedantic prescriptivist on these definitions, language is fluid.
when have men ever been systematically oppressed? misandry doesn't mean that, because it doesn't happen.
and what words mean in an acedemic context does matter, because when the academia says one thing and people use it to mean another, it furthers the meabing from reality and science. especially when it's something like this, when what you're using as is just something not grounded in facts.
The academic definition does matter in an academic context, but outside of that, other definitions are used. Misandry does exist and is grounded in facts, because people can use misandry to mean bigotry against men. In fact, that is what people mean more often than not. Linguistic is a real science as well, you know?
Again, being a pedant about what it should mean isn't helping anyone, least of all you.
not to mentioned that:
these ideas and definitions are not the “academic definition,” whatever the fuck that means. this opinion isn’t a common one, even in academia. academics aren’t fucking stupid…
there… have been plenty of times in human history where men were an oppressed group. acting like those people didn’t suffer is getting up there into holocaust/holodomr denial core shit. that’s not an overreaction if you actually know your history unlike these fake pseudo leftists/feminists!
Please name one time in history where men were an oppressed group?
Well excuuuuuse me princess…
The assertions that "men have always been dominant," “men do not experience oppression in the way or scale women do historically,” or even “men have never been oppressed,” are all historically and anthropologically imprecise. Power throughout human history has been mediated primarily by class, lineage, and economic control, not by biological sex alone (Lerner, 1986). Most men in all known civilizations lacked authority, being peasants, laborers, soldiers, or slaves subordinated to elite hierarchies of both birth and office (Scott, 1990).
In ancient Egypt, women possessed independent legal and property rights; queens such as Hatshepsut (18th Dynasty) and Sobekneferu (12th Dynasty) ruled as Pharaohs with full titulary (Tyldesley, 1996). In matrilineal West African societies such as the Akan (Rattray, 1929) and among the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) (Morgan, 1851), women held decisive roles in lineage, inheritance, and the selection or removal of male chiefs.
Throughout European feudalism, the overwhelming majority of men were serfs, legally unfree laborers bound to the estates of noblemen or ecclesiastical landlords. The feudal order did not empower "men" as a sex class but rather privileged noble birth (Bloch, 1939). Similarly, in imperial China, millions of peasant men faced forced conscription and corvée labor under dynastic systems ruled by male bureaucratic elites (Fairbank and Goldman, 1998).
More strikingly, numerous historical systems imposed direct and gendered subordination upon men themselves. In imperial China, court eunuchs were castrated to ensure their political subservience, a literal removal of male autonomy in service to dynastic stability. The Ottoman devshirme system forcibly extracted Christian boys to be converted and militarized as Janissaries, a state-managed gendered slavery. Among the Aztecs, ritual warfare (xochiyaoyotl) overwhelmingly targeted captured men for sacrificial death, showing the expendability of the male body. In modern conscription regimes, from the Napoleonic levées to industrial-age mass mobilizations, millions of lower-class men were compelled to die for national elites, a pattern of sex-specific coercion persistent across state systems.
Thus, while elite men frequently monopolized formal authority, this cannot be conflated with "male dominance" as a universal structural relation. Historical patriarchy was a hierarchy within the male sex as well as between the sexes, a pyramidal rather than binary order. Men as a sex were not the rulers of history; rather, history has often ruled through men, using them as laborers, soldiers, and instruments of elite power.
To claim that "men have always been dominant" is therefore not merely an oversimplification but a categorical error. It substitutes an elite fraction of men for the entire sex and erases both the agency of women and the subjugation of the majority of men under class and state domination. Or, to borrow the ironic tone of a certain 1980s adventurer, well, pardon us, princess, history is more complicated than that.
I don’t think any of that matters to you though, you’re just going to continue on and argue that these instances of oppression are somehow categorically different because you’re most likely a bigot yourself. I’d say good day but I don’t like bigots.
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