What can I, a female, do to advocate and fight for men's rights?

It sounds like you already do great work. Other people beat me to the punch, but since I already typed this out, I figured I'd post it as well:

I'm not sure what you have in mind in terms of scale (e.g. are you trying to find ways to reach out to a lot of people to have a wider impact in that sense?), so I think it would be best to frame the work to be done first:

Many of the issues men face on the basis of their gender are a result of unhealthy expectations regarding and expressions of their gender identity. What academics call "hegemonic masculinity" creates a normative idea of what it means to be a man, and men are socialized to perform hegemonic masculinity. For some traditional examples of hegemonic masculinity and how they create problems for men:

  • In family roles, to perform hegemonic masculinity, men are supposed to be breadwinners, not caretakers. This leads to the difficulties men can have in obtaining custody after a divorce, as mothers are traditionally seen as the better full-time caretaker for children.

  • In terms of emotion, to perform hegemonic masculinity, men are supposed to be stoic and unfeeling. Not only does this lead to mental health difficulties (as it is unhealthy to try to shut down emotions), but more to the point, this prevents men from seeking mental healthcare, as to acknowledge the need for mental healthcare would be to acknowledge feeling emotions they shouldn't be feeling in the first place.

  • In terms of sex, to perform hegemonic masculinity, men are supposed to be virile and aggressive towards women. This creates the idea that men must always want sex from women, which results in difficulty for men who are sexually assaulted or raped to be recognized as victims.

  • In terms of friendship, to perform hegemonic masculinity, again remember that men are supposed to be stoic and unfeeling, as well as independent and self-sufficient. This creates barriers to forming emotional bonds and results in a lot of men feeling tremendous loneliness in later life as it becomes harder to maintain friendships without a meaningful emotional connection.

(These are just a few examples, of course. It sounds like you already basically know this anyway)

To fix these issues, we need to address them at their source, which is hegemonic masculinity. That's why the framework I and others use is to promote healthy, alternative expressions of masculinity. That's essentially what you're doing when you tell the kid you nanny for that his shoes are fine: it establishes for him that he can express his identity as a boy by wearing whatever shoes he wants.

If you want to work on a larger scale, however, it behooves us to go further and look to the source of hegemonic masculinity itself. The sociologist RW Connell, who coined the term, stated that hegemonic masculinity is a direct result of a patriarchal society. If you dismantle patriarchy, you eliminate the source of hegemonic masculinity, in turn liberating men from the normative, unhealthy expressions of masculinity it dictates and solving the men's issues we discuss.

This is why men's lib and feminism are two sides of the same coin: as both seek to dismantle patriarchy, both are working towards the same goal.

So that's a long way of saying: you can do a lot of "large-scale" work towards solving men's issues by incorporating them into any feminist organizations you may be a part of. This is very difficult, and I would echo what Dewey_Darl said: try to avoid derailing conversations about women's issues to be about men, avoid making it a zero-sum game, etc. In my experience, however, most feminist groups are very receptive to this.

That would be my advice. To give you an example, I volunteer as an advocate for victims of domestic violence. For many victims, finding an advocate that works best for them is like finding a doctor: some people won't care about the gender of their doctor or advocate, but on the other hand, some women will prefer a female doctor/advocate, some men will prefer a male doctor/advocate, etc. Male victims will sometimes request to work with me for that reason, as the vast majority of DV advocates are women. If you were involved in a similar organization, you could recruit male advocates for the organization to give male victims that option.

So to summarize: if you are involved in any feminist organizations, try to make sure the ways the specific issues the organization addresses affect men are on the radar there (again, without hijacking the organization to be about men's issues). The goal is solidarity: through solidarity in addressing gender issues, we can effectively work to solve them.

/r/MensLib Thread