Nope, that's not what it means at all. It means that the way men pervasively treat women in a patriarchy as a function of mainstream masculine norms have resulted in a society where speaking up about that is speaking the truth and isn't some sort of baseless attack.
Women being treated as devious, too emotional, shallow, etc. is also a function of patriarchy and how it treats women in this culture. Starting to notice a pattern here?
Mainstream norms of how men are "supposed" to behave and how they are pressured and policed to behave and behave towards women (even if not all of them do it, or do it to the full extent) is still the root cause of nearly all violence and sexual predation in our culture - against other men as well.
Of course there are disadvantages that men face - once again primarily the fault of - you guessed it - patriarchal norms.
“Though men benefit from patriarchy, they are also impinged upon by patriarchy,” says Ronald F. Levant, EdD, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Akron and co-editor of the APA volume “The Psychology of Men and Masculinities.” Levant was APA president in 2005 when the guideline-drafting process began and was instrumental in securing funding and support to get the process started.
The main thrust of the subsequent research is that traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression—is, on the whole, harmful. Men socialized in this way are less likely to engage in healthy behaviors. For example, a 2011 study led by Kristen Springer, PhD, of Rutgers University, found that men with the strongest beliefs about masculinity were only half as likely as men with more moderate masculine beliefs to get preventive health care ( Journal of Health and Social Behavior , Vol. 52, No. 2 ). And in 2007, researchers led by James Mahalik, PhD, of Boston College, found that the more men conformed to masculine norms, the more likely they were to consider as normal risky health behaviors such as heavy drinking, using tobacco and avoiding vegetables, and to engage in these risky behaviors themselves ( Social Science and Medicine , Vol. 64, No. 11 ).
“Because of the way many men have been brought up—to be self-sufficient and able to take care of themselves—any sense that things aren’t OK needs to be kept secret,” Rabinowitz says. “Part of what happens is men who keep things to themselves look outward and see that no one else is sharing any of the conflicts that they feel inside. That makes them feel isolated. They think they’re alone. They think they’re weak. They think they’re not OK. They don’t realize that other men are also harboring private thoughts and private emotions and private conflicts.”
These private conflicts can have tragic ramifications. Though men report less depression than women, they complete suicide at far higher rates than women, and the numbers are moving in the wrong direction."
You guessed it - the problem with all of these issues is patriarchal dominance hierarchy values that try to force men into a small Man Box of what is acceptable.
Women have to support men in remaking a lot of Western masculinity to be less violent, stoic, controlling, and harmful to men - and everyone else - but it's really up to men to take the lead here.
Men, after all, are the primary perpetrators of rape, battering, sexual abuse, and sexual harassment, at least according to those radical feminists over at the FBI. So we can dispense with the idea that it is anti-male to say what everyone already knows to be true. There is an awful lot of violence against women in our society, and men commit the vast majority of it.
Katz, Jackson. The Macho Paradox (pp. 29–30). Sourcebooks. Kindle Edition.
These men are not so much bad apples behaving in aberrant ways as they are regular guys acting out scripts of traditional masculine socialization — both as relates to sexual violence, but also to battering and physical abuse.
As the batterer-intervention counselor Lundy Bancroft observes in his deeply insightful book Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men, many men who batter have internalized cultural beliefs about manhood that legitimize — in their own minds — their controlling and abusive behaviors. These beliefs did not appear out of thin air. These men are not from some other planet.
Katz, Jackson. The Macho Paradox (p. 33). Sourcebooks. Kindle Edition.
I completely agree with you — we need to do better. All of us, but guys need to take the lead in shifting masculine norms that harm everyone.
