Before I give my response to the debate, I hope you'll allow me to indulge my inner grammer nerd. When you said "quote on quote" I think you meant to say "quote unquote" - this is only really ever used in spoken language (it can be replaced with making the 'bunny ears' sign) and, as you put the quotes around the phrase anyway, wasn't really necessary. It's nothing to do with the topic, but I just wanted to point it out as it's a little quibble of mine!
A problem I see is that I've noticed it seems to be assumed that it is perfectly acceptable to portray women in a positive light, while putting men in the bad light. Such as the women I see around school and college who freely talk about how women are smarter, rule the household, how their men are dumb, stupid, stubborn, etc. How women really control everything. But I saw a man mention how men are better at thinking clearly, and everyone completely blew up on him. It is definitely all right to have pride in your gender, but this seems slightly excessive.
The trouble with trying to keep sexism against females out of this discussion (as much as I can appreciate your reasons for doing so) is that you get an incredibly skewed view of the problem when you refer to one gender and not the other. The only time I've ever experienced what you're talking about is when I'm joking with a male friend and I have a playful jibe at him, only to realise he didn't take it as a joke. Apologies very quickly follow if that happens, though.
Having lived with plenty of guys, however, I've seen a lot of the opposite. As much as I ignored it to get along with them, the fact that I had to endure the guys in my flat talking about the girls they'd met the night before in terms of a rating out of ten or what they liked physically about them really annoyed me. Maybe it's not a
direct way of pronouncing superiority (at least not as direct as, "you're a girl, so naturally I'd be better at maths than you," or something along those lines), it's still reducing a member of the opposite gender to an object or a number. That, to me, is still an effort to appear superior. Not too long ago in the UK there was also the debacle of two Sky Sports presenters, who were caught with their mics still on, commenting about a female linesperson for a football/soccer match. One of them commented that "someone better get down there and explain the offside rule to her," simply because she was a woman.
It may be banter and it may go on all the time between guys, which is fine; but if men expect women to put up with that as normal, they shouldn't then get offended if women make belittling comments about them as well. Granted, in your case the girl shouldn't be degrading him to his face or making him feel like dirt there and then, but if it wasn't a joke and was intentionally meant to hurt him then the girl's just being cruel.
It doesn't help how men are portrayed in television, especially sitcoms; it's always the dumb, deadbeat husband who has a crappy job. He makes the vast majority of the stupid decisions and messes everything up while the wife is the one who is right most of the time. A lot of these shows have entire episodes depicting how women are smarter; but at the same time, depicting men as superior is a problem.
Maybe it's just watching these shows from my own viewpoint, but I've always seen those shows as sexist towards women. Shows like that, for example 'King of Queens' - yes, they have the 'dumb, deadbeat husband' as you say, but he's always the main protagonist. What may be logically seen as dumb is often emphasised as being goofy and just part of who that character is. Maybe it's just my perception of it, but it's often played for laughs and even to make the audience sympathetic to him, whereas the wife (who is always good-looking) has to be the voice of reason, the 'straight guy', if you will, and yet never comes across as likeable as the man. Just to veer off gender issues slightly, if you replaced the woman in that situation with another guy and made them friends, you'd have pretty much a classic comedy double act. Why the woman is made to play the more serious role has never been clear to me, apart from the old perception that women are the homemakers and so it's their job to keep stability in the household.
In essence, I guess you can take different things from these shows if you look at them from different angles.
Yes, I understand the REASONING, since women fought hard for equal rights, and in such, any knock towards women can be perceived as sexism; but this topic is purely about what you think about the criminalization of men, and do you think it is an issue?
Yes. There are a lot of very valid points raised in the thread so far and there is a perceptible unfair advantage towards women in certain areas; however, I'll bring my argument back to my first point that you can't have a balanced discussion without bringing inequalities of both genders. You have the example of rape being okay when it's female on male, but at the same time there's the perception that sleeping around is okay for a man and it's just boys being boys, but if a girl sleeps around she's a wh
ore or a sl
ut. So is it an issue? Yes, but only inasmuch as female inequality is also an issue. Personally, I don't think they can be argued seperately.