Exactly. I think there's a pretty simple answer to this question:
> What explains this asymmetry?
What explains it is an asymmetrical history: millennia of oppression of women, often violently enforced. E.g., if you read the Iliad, it's basically a who-stole-my-woman story inside a who-stole-my-woman story; at the time, women were pretty close to property with opinions. An easy way to see the through-line to today is the history of "marital rape", where society did not see married women as being able to choose whether or not to have sex with their husbands. That was always the case under English common law, and was not fully outlawed in the US until 1992: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_rape#Legal_aspect
We may have removed most of the gross legal infrastructure of patriarchy, but the cultural aspects are still only slowly dissolving. We have generations more work to do there. The reasonableness you mention is exactly what amazes me. Think of all the men who haven't been murdered as the slept.
And I think this history also explains why the Men's Rights movement is so bonkers. A shift toward fairness is a loss for the people who used to benefit from the unfairness. This has left a lot of men upset that they aren't getting what they feel they are due. Some handle that well, but the ones who don't are going to fight to turn the clock back. And as Corey Robin points, out, reactionaries like that often cloak their efforts in the progressive language of the day. So we end up with "men's rights" as a bizzaro-world mirror of women's rights. And one of their heroes, one with 4 million Twitter followers, getting arrested as an abusive sex trafficker and international pimp.
> What explains this asymmetry?
What explains it is an asymmetrical history: millennia of oppression of women, often violently enforced. E.g., if you read the Iliad, it's basically a who-stole-my-woman story inside a who-stole-my-woman story; at the time, women were pretty close to property with opinions. An easy way to see the through-line to today is the history of "marital rape", where society did not see married women as being able to choose whether or not to have sex with their husbands. That was always the case under English common law, and was not fully outlawed in the US until 1992: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_rape#Legal_aspect
We may have removed most of the gross legal infrastructure of patriarchy, but the cultural aspects are still only slowly dissolving. We have generations more work to do there. The reasonableness you mention is exactly what amazes me. Think of all the men who haven't been murdered as the slept.
And I think this history also explains why the Men's Rights movement is so bonkers. A shift toward fairness is a loss for the people who used to benefit from the unfairness. This has left a lot of men upset that they aren't getting what they feel they are due. Some handle that well, but the ones who don't are going to fight to turn the clock back. And as Corey Robin points, out, reactionaries like that often cloak their efforts in the progressive language of the day. So we end up with "men's rights" as a bizzaro-world mirror of women's rights. And one of their heroes, one with 4 million Twitter followers, getting arrested as an abusive sex trafficker and international pimp.