Let me set one thing straight before I start. Men don't have awful, pain-filled lives. Men are not downtrodden and oppressed. A few men are. Many, many men don't like their lives, and it's not because they're expecting to run everything; it's because they've had bad luck, or been screwed over. Many of these men were screwed over by women. However, "many, many" isn't "all." Some men have excellent lives, and many men are happy.
By the same token, women aren't downtrodden and oppressed, either. In fact, I doubt that they ever were, as a group. Many women were. A few still are. However, I think that all of the hand-wringing and chest-beating over "oppression" was nothing more than propaganda designed to make women feel self-righteously angry and men feel guilty. By and large, I think it worked.
The upshot of making women feel self-righteously angry and men feel guilty is that men's lives have gotten crappier, even as women have adopted a smug attitude of superiority and so have little sympathy for men's problems.
I'm not going to write much here about happy men with lots of money and power who lord it over their wives and children. Neither am I going to write about dark, tortured men who beat their wives and rape their children. First of all because that's not my situation and never has been and second of all because there's lots of that stuff about... far more than is justified, so who needs more? What's here is mostly about the dark side of being male. The pain and frustration of being a man in a feminist society.
I think that overall women are happier with their lives than are men. Of course, I would think that, being closer to men's problems than to women's. However, as I've said elsewhere, if you want to see pages full of discussion of how unhappy and dissatisfied women are, there is plenty of that elsewhere.
