Men today aren't the problem, they're a symptom of the problem. They're a symptom of the abused to abuser pipeline playing out on a mass cultural scale, and they're not the only ones.
For generations now, parents have undertrained their sons through neglect and low expectations. Those sons become incompetent men who frustrate and burden their partners, if not continually their parents. Burdened by the same conditions, the women in their lives take over everything, rubbing the salt of infantilization into the wound of incompetence. The next generation of boys becomes even more undertrained, as their fathers have even less to offer in the way of practical wisdom. This positive feedback loop has repeated itself enough times that this is where we now find ourselves.
None of us sees ourselves as the abuser. Parents think they're being understanding, that they're simply following the research telling them who their sons naturally are. Women think they're compensating for a necessary male inadequacy. Men think they're victims of unfair standards, which from birth they've been treated as though they would never be able to meet. Everyone (yes, even that person) is responding to real harm they've experienced with prescriptions that have only worsened material conditions.
At this scale, the abuse isn't malicious; it's structural. Each person is genuinely wounded and genuinely wounding others. Because we're all enveloped within this system, it's nearly invisible to us.
In a media saturated culture of mass victimhood, everyone's grievances are both real and unnecessarily amplified. The economic displacement, the institutional failures, the relational dysfunction, the bad actors eager to capitalize, all of it produces legitimate harm.
But here's what happens when victim status becomes central to identity: it blinds us to our roles in perpetuating the cycle. Our wounding becomes the entire story. Our support networks reinforce it. Our complicity becomes a feature not a bug.
Fourth-wave feminism frames women as victims while missing how they perpetuate lowered expectations for sons. Men's rights rhetoric frames men as victims while missing how incompetence, both practical and emotional, burdens the women around them. Parents see themselves as victims of confusing and shifting cultural norms while missing how they created inadequate sons and entitled daughters.
The victim framing, while not inaccurate, is incomplete. In this culture of universal victimhood, our particular wounding needs proper measurement. Not dismissal or minimization, but measurement. How much space is it occupying in our identity? How much is it preventing us from seeing our own hand in the system?
When victim status is properly weighted, graded along a curve with everyone else's suffering, it occupies the space it actually deserves rather than consuming our entire self-conception. Perspective is then widened, creating paradigmal space to hold the whole cycle. Our wounding and our complicity, what was done to us and what we're doing to others. Are we able to get the proportions right, to break the pattern instead of merely playing the roles the profiteers want us to?
If this were easy, we would have already done it. The machine wants us stuck in our victim identities. It's monetizable. It generates engagement. It keeps us scrolling, buying, reacting.
It is my belief that the people who'll actually change things, the thought leaders of our new dawn, are capable of holding both at once: genuinely wounded, genuinely wounding. Hurt by the system, perpetuating the system. Slave and oppressor. It's also my belief that this is the only position from which we can actually interrupt the cycle instead of simply passing it forward with a different justification.
The abused to abuser pipeline is operating at cultural scale because we're all playing our part while insisting we're merely responding to harm. The way out requires seeing ourselves inside the mechanism, not just suffering from it. The machine cannot function without our consent, and we are capable of withdrawing what it requires.