“What About Us?”: Male Counter-Claims and the Erasure of Women’s Suffering
Society has become a boxing ring, with many men treating women’s demands for equality as a contest they must win. Whenever women raise gender inequality, the same response appears almost immediately: “What about men?”
The phrase appears in online debates, policy discussions, classrooms, and academic spaces. It is typically framed as a call for fairness—a demand for balance in conversations about gender. In practice, however, the “what about men?” response often operates less as a genuine invitation to dialogue and more as a rhetorical diversion. It shifts attention away from systemic violence against women and toward a defensive posture centered on male grievance. Philosopher Kate Manne describes this pattern as a feature of “himpathy,” a cultural tendency to redirect sympathy toward male discomfort when women raise allegations of harm (Manne, 2017).
From a feminist perspective, this reflex is not a neutral reaction but a deeply political move. It diverts attention from systems that disproportionately harm women and asserts a false equivalence even where the evidence of asymmetry is overwhelming. Feminist scholars identify this pattern as a mechanism for preserving gender hierarchies (Manne, 2017). By reframing women’s claims as exclusionary or exaggerated, it dilutes the urgency of addressing the real and well-documented inequalities women face worldwide.
To understand why this question is a move that is so pervasive and harmful, we have to confront the scale of violence and structural discrimination that women continue to face globally. This does not mean that men never suffer. Of course they do from war, poverty, mental ill health, violence at the hands of other men, and rigid masculine norms. Feminist work acknowledges and critiques these harms. Yet at some point, the focus is not on men.
When women speak about gender-based violence and discrimination, the immediate counter-question, “What about men?” rarely aims to deepen the analysis. Instead, it tends to interrupt, relativize, or delegitimize women’s testimony, implying that women’s experiences cannot be discussed on their own terms unless they are instantly balanced by male experiences, as if empathy for one group automatically threatens the other.
A Global Pattern of Violence Against Women
Across cultures, continents, and political systems, women’s bodies, autonomy, and rights have long been subject to control, violation, and restriction in distinctly gendered ways. These are not isolated incidents but part of a broader, systemic pattern.
This pattern is especially disturbing when compared with the scale and specificity of violence that women and girls face globally. Practices such as female genital mutilation (FGM), still inflicted on millions of girls and young women in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and beyond are deliberate, irreversible acts used to control sexuality, enforce purity norms, and mark girls as “marriageable” (UNICEF, 2023). Child marriage similarly targets girls: they are married off in adolescence, removed from school, and exposed to early pregnancy and marital rape. In Cameroon and other parts of Africa, girls’ breasts are flattened with hot objects, supposedly to “protect” them from male attention by damaging their bodies. These are not gender‑neutral harms; they are designed and justified precisely because the victims are female (UN Women, 2018).
Economic and social practices reinforce this gendered pattern. In some regions, girls and women are still used to pay off family debts, forced into marriages, or pushed into exploitative arrangements to “settle” obligations they did not incur. In many legal systems, women’s ability to own or inherit property is restricted, or they are pressured informally to relinquish their rights in favor of male relatives (UNFPA, 2019). Widows face extreme practices: in several communities, when a husband dies, his wife may have her head forcibly shaved, be publicly humiliated, or even forced to drink the water used to wash his corpse as “proof” of innocence or loyalty. These practices operate on a logic that treats women’s bodies and lives as extensions of male honor and family reputation.
Legal Inequality and the Control of Women’s Lives
Gender-based violence also manifests in both domestic and political spheres. In many jurisdictions, domestic violence remains inadequately criminalized, weakly sanctioned, or broadly tolerated, which in practice renders it quasi‑legal. Women are beaten and killed by their husbands and partners at rates that amount to a global epidemic. Yet media coverage and legal responses frequently present these crimes as isolated “family disputes,” rather than as predictable consequences of entrenched patriarchal power.
Consider a few examples. In recent years in Afghanistan, domestic violence has been effectively legalized, and women have been reduced to the property of their husbands, who control them as they see fit. Girls have been barred from secondary and higher education, women have been pushed out of many jobs, and their movement has been severely restricted. They have also been subjected to harsh dress and behavior codes, enforced with violence. In this context, gender is not merely one factor among others; it is the explicit basis for exclusion. (Human Rights Watch, 2023).
In war zones, rape functions not only as an individual act of brutality but as a strategic weapon used to terrorize communities, punish the enemy, and consolidate control over land and resources. Women and girls are targeted because their bodies are treated as symbolic carriers of community honor and lineage. In the aftermath, victim‑shaming adds a second layer of trauma: survivors are blamed for the assaults they endured, ostracized, or even forced to marry their attackers, while perpetrators often enjoy impunity. The pattern is clear: women’s bodies, sexuality, and reproductive capacity are systematically weaponized. Even then, some men attempt to create false equivalences and shift the narrative away from women’s experiences. (World Bank, 2023).
Everyday Inequality and Cultural Conditioning
Every day, cultural norms that devalue women’s lives both reflect and compound these realities. In many families, the birth of a boy is celebrated, while the birth of a girl is met with disappointment or pity. Girls are discouraged from pursuing higher education or professional ambitions and are instead told to prioritize marriage and motherhood. Women who marry “too late” or remain single are mocked and pathologized, while those who do not have children face suspicion and stigma. Even women who marry and have children remain at risk of being killed by their spouses, and their deaths are often dismissed as isolated misfortunes rather than recognized as part of a broader, gendered pattern of violence.
In this context, the reflexive male question “What about us?” does more than voice insecurity; It distorts the conversation, collapses structural, historically rooted, gender‑specific harms into a vague, supposedly symmetrical narrative of “everyone suffers.” In doing so, it equates the long history of women’s subordination—including their legal treatment as property, exclusion from citizenship, denial of education, and subjection to explicit, codified misogyny, with men’s genuine but differently structured vulnerabilities. From a feminist standpoint, this move is not only analytically flawed; it is ethically troubling.
When women speak about FGM, there is no male equivalent: no global, culturally sanctioned practice aimed to mutilate boys’ genitals primarily to control their sexuality and pleasure and justified through gendered notions of purity and marriageability. When women speak about being inherited as property, being used to pay debts, or being forced into widowhood rituals that strip them of dignity and health, there is no comparable scale of male experiences grounded in the idea that men are naturally inferior and must be controlled. When women highlight laws and customs that explicitly deny them inheritance, land, and bodily autonomy, the response cannot responsibly be to insist that “men also suffer,” as though the existence of male hardship cancels out the gendered architecture of these abuses.
Feminism and the Politics of Recognition
Feminist theory has long maintained that recognizing structural inequality is essential for meaningful change (Fraser, 2009; Butler, 2004). A feminist analysis insists that we hold complexity without erasing asymmetry. Men can be victims of violence, poverty, and restrictive gender norms, and we do need nuanced discussions of how patriarchy harms everyone. But in conversations specifically about women’s oppression, immediately re-centering men reflects a refusal to confront the depth of that oppression. It shifts the emotional labour back onto women, who must comfort male egos, moderate their anger, and dilute their pain just to be heard.
This dynamic exposes a deeper discomfort: acknowledging the scale of violence against women requires men to recognize themselves not just as individuals, but as a social group that has collectively benefited from systems built on women’s unpaid labor, restricted freedoms, and controlled bodies. The “what about us?” response often acts as a defense mechanism, effectively saying: We will only listen to your suffering if we can immediately cast ourselves as co‑victims, rather than as potential beneficiaries or perpetrators.
From a feminist perspective, a more honest and responsible response from men would sound different. It would begin with listening without interruption and accepting that the statistics and stories point to real, gendered patterns (Ahmed, 2017). Next, it would require acknowledging that many of the practices described: FGM, child marriage, widowhood rituals, denial of property, impunity for domestic violence, and bans on education, are enacted, enforced, or sustained primarily by male-dominated institutions and norms. Finally, it would require resisting the urge to compete in suffering and instead asking: What can we do to dismantle the systems that produce this harm?
Listening Instead of Deflecting
The goal is not to deny that men experience pain, but to refuse a rhetorical pattern that reduces women’s historic and ongoing subordination to just one “perspective” among many, instead of recognizing it as a central injustice that must be confronted on its own terms. Feminism asserts that when women speak about the specific violence they endure, their experiences should not be immediately diluted by demands for symmetry. It urges men and societies more broadly to acknowledge that the burden has not been equal, that women have been subjected to gendered and systemic forms and degrees of violence, and that this reality must be named without apology.
Solidarity can become truly meaningful only when this asymmetry is honestly acknowledged. Until that happens, “What about us?” will function less as a genuine question and more as a tactic one that forces women to keep explaining and justifying their pain instead of allowing them to transform it into power and change.
References:
Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press.
Butler, J. (2004). Undoing Gender. Routledge.
Fraser, N. (2009). Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World. Columbia University Press.
Human Rights Watch. (2023). Afghanistan: Taliban’s War on Women.
Manne, K. (2017). Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Oxford University Press.
UNICEF. (2022). Child Marriage Global Data.
UNICEF. (2023). Female Genital Mutilation: Global Prevalence.
UNFPA. (2019). Breast Ironing: A Harmful Practice.
UN Women. (2018). Conflict-Related Sexual Violence.
World Bank. (2023). Women, Business and the Law Report.
World Health Organization. (2021). Violence Against Women Prevalence Estimates.
About the author:
Chimeziri Chiazom is a professor, political analyst, feminist writer, consultant, and youth advocate whose work explores the intersection of gender, politics, economic power, and social transformation. She is committed to advancing women's rights, youth empowerment, the political and economic inclusion of women through research, advocacy, and public engagement.
