This comment section: "Actually I'm pretty sure the bike fell over for reasons unrelated to the stick"
Idk, I don’t feel like young women are really offered any kind of safety net or support system that isn’t being offered to boys.
I mean, there are special scholarships and programs only for women, and explicit preferential hiring for women in some fields. There is nothing like that for men, even in fields men are grossly underrepresented in (which also tend to be fields where men are mistreated or have their duties restricted for more or less explicitly sexist reasons - like child care).
This is the thing, I constantly hear how awful young men are being treated. I don’t ever really hear any specific reasoning that can’t be explained by other means other than sexism against men.
Here's the trick - when you hear how say women or black folks are mistreated, you don't require "any specific reasoning that can’t be explained by other means other than" discrimination against them.
I like using criminal justice as an example of this:
If I asked you to prove that the criminal justice system was racist, you could throw a whole pile of statistics at me. A whole panoply of stats demonstrating how black people are treated worse by the criminal justice system. But if you take those same measures and break them down by sex instead of race, they more or less all have a sex gap, that sex gap favors women over men, and for most of them it's a similar or larger gap than the racial one. The core difference is that you will treat the racial gaps as proof of racism in and of themselves, while requiring the sex gaps to prove that there is absolutely no other hypothetically possible cause other than sexism.
When a gap lies in one direction, blaming discrimination is the default move and when it lies in the other then every other possible explanation has to be provably false before it can even be considered.
Imo this is one of the first generations of young men, especially young white men, that weren’t born on third base. The men’s right movement is a reactionary movement that’s just upset about being placed on an equal footing, and then falling to achieve the same results of previous generations of young white men.
So long as you define "being on an equal footing" as others having explicit institutional benefits you don't.
For example, girls outperform boys in education K-12 (and there are studies that suggest this is at least in part a result of bias in grading favoring girls), girls both enter higher education and graduate from higher education at higher rates than boys, etc, etc, etc.
My favorite is people being angry when men apply anti-discrimination laws to things like differential pricing that favors women, differential benefits that favor women, literally any application of Title IX that benefits a boy, that sort of thing.
You aren’t being treated worse than everyone else, it’s just that equality feels like prosecution to those who have traditionally lived charmed lives.
Ironically, the oldest known expression of this notion comes from a proto-MRA on USENET in the late 90s, except he was talking about women.