When an ex told me things are far harder for men than women in the world, I reeled off a litany of facts and figures that proved that this was wrong. I was used to comments such as these. This was not a man with one solitary chip on his shoulder, but a whole overflowing bag of them. I love chips, but not his metaphorical and therefore embittered and perennially victimised kind.
This notion that things are much harder for men is not a unique or isolated perspective. There is a growing army of men who are threatened by gender equality and want us to renege and backtrack on hard-won progress. However, it is neither constructive nor helpful to get caught up in debates centred around whether men or women have it worse. For me, a desire to engage in such discussions indicates a dogmatic, reductive, black-and-white worldview that lacks nuance. Given we live in a cruelly unequal world where the poorest 50 per cent of the population own only two per cent of the total net wealth, it is clear many people are suffering.
