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I realise this is a month-old post, but I haven't been super active on this forum for a while and have only come across it now.
This is one of the most exceptional examples of an ideological horseshoe in existence today, and I notice such opinions plaguing conservative forums (including this one) as much as I do progressive ones. Recently I watched a video by the conservative reviewer Critical Drinker about the American remake of the Danish-Dutch film "Speak No Evil". He correctly identifies it as missing the point of the original, but his interpretation on the original film diverges heavily from mine. The original film follows a family who are targeted by another couple with a history of serial-killing, it's effectively a satire of over-politeness in culture - the family lets the other couple victimise them due to the fact that they're too worried about stepping on toes despite the increasing amount of red flags showing up. Drinker's opinion, however, is that everything that happens in it is the father's fault. He failed to provide for his family properly due to his declining career, he failed to satisfy his wife's needs and made his poor wife have an affair with another man, he failed to be a Chad who would act as a bulwark for his own family against the offending couple, and so on. Here we see a brief outline of Drinker's expectations for men, and it's quite far-reaching - the entire burden of his family's wellbeing falls on him and him alone, and everything that happens is his responsibility. I've watched a number of his other videos as well, and if you're curious if he has a similar list of onerous roles he would expect women to fill, he does not. He effectively upholds the role of man as unquestioning protector and provider, but makes it such that they will receive nothing substantial in return from women for doing so.
It's quite clear that many mainstream conservatives seem to enjoy selectively invoking gender roles and sexual dimorphism only when it could justify further benefits for women. They'll selectively absolve the woman of all responsibility and place all fault on the man when these poor darlings are "pumped and dumped" and taken advantage of and supposedly manipulated into sex acts that get retroactively interpreted as predatory once the outcomes of the sex don't result in what they want. They will put out pieces of special pleading explaining how women's more delicate sensibilities justifies them being treated more lightly when dealing with them in multiple contexts, sexual, professional and so on. The same people who pull such shenanigans will generally not acknowledge that women's lack of agency and weak constitutions should ever affect how they get treated when they are in the running for leadership roles or positions which require one to take on a huge amount of responsibility. The acknowledgement that "men and women are not the same" only ever gets used to exclusively benefit women.
This kind of thing is everywhere and it's really hard not to notice it once you're aware of it. I distinctly remember seeing a comment under one of my posts here which basically said "Actually, male pedophilia is more damaging than female pedophilia", an assumption made with not a shred of support provided for it, and it is in contradiction with some quantitative and qualitative research showing the effects are actually very similar regardless of sex of perpetrator (you can find some studies I collected on this general topic here). There are so many more examples I can bring up, including but not limited to things like sex-differential treatment of infanticidal mothers and fathers "she was sympathetic and distraught and hormonal, she had no true free will or agency in the matter and Regretted It, he was a horrible abuser who deserves to be put in jail forever" (this despite the fact that men do experience postpartum depression, and despite the fact that even in its absence literally everyone is puppeteered by their hormones all the time yet it doesn't seem to nullify their agency in virtually every other situation when their biochemistry pushes them to commit crimes), etc.
I sincerely did not realise the sexes are only different in ways which justify special and preferential treatment for women. The sheer amount of Women-Are-Wonderful in virtually every political camp is quite ridiculous, and it's one of the many things that have made me skew further from the right as time goes on - over the years I've realised that mainstream conservatives and feminists exhibit many similarities on gender issues.
The usual male burden of performance on top of women's Wonderfulness.
If a married woman has an affair, her husband is the asshole for letting himself go, or otherwise falling short of expectations. Married men are not entitled to their wives' attraction, much less sex. He should had never stopped dating her and never should had stopped pulling out all the stops, taking her on cute dates and trips, reading her mind to buy her gifts.
If a married man has an affair, he's the asshole for being a lech and not recognizing his wife as the most beautiful woman in the world and the queen she is, and potentially being a pedophile and/or groomer if the other woman or women is/are materially younger. Everyone who's not an incel or misogynist knows women aren't attracted to men with wives or girlfriends, so he must had groomed or gaslighted the other woman or women.
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In drinker‘s defense, he‘s a film critic, not a political analyst, and sometimes you don‘t like a character. You can think that an irritating, sniveling, weak man is responsible for his wife‘s infidelity and his family‘s downfall without making it about all men.
I‘d go further: as a film critic, you have to go along with the world presented in the film, especially if it conforms to reality: and the husband would indeed be expected to be the protector of the family. It‘s not drinker‘s role to go MRA SJW and rant against the ways of the world.
Additionally, he notes that the assertiveness the husband lacks has been ‚bred out‘ of men – imo he is more highlighting the contradictory demands society places on men, than blaming them for their failure to fulfill them.
This is true, but his critiques have an unambiguously political angle to them, and he also makes it very clear here that his selective assignation of responsibility is not just because of the submissiveness of the man in question, it's also due to his evaluation of the man as responsible for the protection of the family - his gripe is that they are no longer taught to be masculine, and are as a result derelict on that front since they can no longer be a bulwark for their families and societies at large. Further, he often makes it quite clear within his analyses of films that the perceived erosion of the male gender role is a disaster, and upholding it is certainly an element of his own personal philosophy.
I do think Drinker's critique is meant primarily as a systemic one, and he certainly places a large portion of the blame on society's attempts to undermine these norms and not on the individual man. Still, the fact remains that this is a male gender role he's decided should be enforced. Hell, I do appreciate and agree with some of his points - such as the acknowledgement that traditional masculinity was in fact a social good, but I do hugely disagree with the seemingly unilateral upholding of these gender roles, wherein no role will be enforced upon women at all. I kind of understand why people don’t express these sentiments - the Overton window has shifted such that enforcing a complementary role on women would be political suicide - but it’s still cowardice.
In general, my view is that both mainstream conservatives and feminists are quite similar in this regard (men should protect and provide for women in various ways, without receiving many of the traditional benefits that made that role palatable to them). Conservatives are just moderately better because they enforce that role on men while allowing them to gain a modicum of token respect through it, feminists have only vilification to offer them with the utterly condescending title of "ally" as the carrot on the stick to make them comply.
From an extreme minority position like Men‘s rights, which I think you and I share, I am wary of declaring anyone an enemy who has not made his position crystal clear. For example, naive, ill-informed feminists who think feminism just means equality. It‘s only after they‘ve understood the tension, the tradeoff between academic feminism and fairness for men, that they can be separated into our opponents and our allies.
The defining feature of feminism is its inability to blame women for anything, even 1% of what they blame men for. It‘s 0%, always. Husband cheats: it‘s because he‘s an asshole. Wife cheats: it‘s because he‘s an asshole. Etc. Drinker does sometimes criticize female behaviour, female characters, like the admiral holdo video. So he at least avoids the worst in female hypoagency (hyper-hypoagency?).
I don‘t think there is enough evidence to say he supports the unilateral upholding of gender roles. Despite being critical of gender roles, especially the way they are performed now, I‘m quite fond of masculinity myself, and I sometimes criticize men for their lack of courage in gendered terms. But then I also criticize women. Frankly, much more.
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