UN for Men Too · article
UN for Men? They wrote it down in 2004.
Strasbourg says a state must make contact actually happen, not merely order it. Norway's mandated guideline for those cases never mentions it. Neither, it turns out, did the United Nations, after writing down in 2004 that men and boys face discriminatory barriers. One week, from Arendalsuka to a document nobody was given.
Monday, Arendalsuka
What happened, and why a week of Norwegian politics is where this starts.
Arendalsuka is where Norwegian politics goes for a week in August to talk to itself. I went on Monday the tenth with six questions and a box of equipment.
The questions are an audit. Under Article 8 of the European Convention, a state does not discharge its duty to family life by staying out of the way. It carries what Strasbourg calls positive obligations: it has to take real steps so that contact it has ordered actually happens. The handbook I co-edit puts it in one line. The state has a duty to make sure contact actually takes place, not only to decide it on paper.
The state has a duty to make sure contact actually takes place, not only to decide it on paper.
Yes. Uncertain. No. Anyone can run it on their own case in five minutes, which is the point.
Open
On the first day my bag was stolen, with the equipment in it. The car keys were in the bag, so the car is still in Arendal and I went home on the bus. The insurance does not cover it. We were not the only ones. Agderposten put the total taken from the tents at 100,000 kroner, and other stands were hit the same week. I have no idea who did it and no basis for saying why, so I am not going to guess at a reason. The relevant fact is narrower than a motive and harder to argue with: the equipment was gone, and what happened next is the part this article is about.
Agderposten
Front page, Arendal, August 2026
Tyveri fra telt for 100.000 kroner
I can see where the AirPods are. I could see them a few minutes ago. The police told me that too many people live in that building for them to do anything, and that I should go and knock on the doors myself.
Open
I am aware of how that reads next to six questions about whether the state takes its own initiative or waits for someone else to act. I am not going to make the comparison for you.
The guideline that never mentions it
The document that decides these cases, searched term by term.
When a Norwegian court needs a case assessed, it appoints an expert. How that expert works is governed by the Veileder for sakkyndig utredningsarbeid i foreldretvistsaker etter barneloven, issued on 22 September 2022 by Bufdir on commission from the Ministry of Children and Families, with input from a district court judge.
I read it in full and searched it.
Searched in the mandated guideline
Six terms, searched in the document that tells a court-appointed sakkyndig what to look at. The count is the number of times each appears in 1,362 lines.
| artikkel 8 | 0 | |
|---|---|---|
| EMK, as a word | 0 | |
| EMD, the Strasbourg court | 0 | |
| menneskerett | 0 | |
| positive forpliktelser | 0 | |
| konvensjon | 1 | line 588, on the Convention on the Rights of the Child |
Veileder for sakkyndig utredningsarbeid i foreldretvistsaker etter barneloven, 22 September 2022, Bufdir on commission from the Ministry of Children and Families. 1,362 lines, searched in full. A careless case-insensitive search for emk returns seven. All seven are inside the Norwegian word fremkomme. That is the kind of number this piece is trying not to publish.
It does reach for human rights once, at Grunnloven section 104 and article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, on a child's right to be heard. That is a real obligation and it belongs there. But the convention Norway is actually judged under when contact is ordered and never happens is not in the document that tells the expert what to look at.
Someone will say the enforcement standard belongs in guidance to courts rather than to experts, and that is a fair argument. I am not claiming anyone removed it. I am saying that the duty exists, that it has been spelled out by the Court in thirty-five rulings, and that the working document for these cases does not contain the words.
Thursday night
What I built when I got home, and what it is for.
I came home from Arendal with no equipment and a question I could not put down. If the national guideline does not carry the duty, does anything above it?
I started digging on the Thursday evening, the thirteenth.
What I built over the following days is a register. Every claim men's advocates make, chased back to a primary document. Not a news article about a study, the study. Not a campaign infographic, the dataset. Most of it did not survive. I kept what I threw away and published that too, because the discarded pile is the only proof the surviving pile was checked.
- Monday 10 AugustArendalsuka. Six questions, a box of equipment, and by the evening no bag.
- Thursday 13 AugustStarted digging. If the national guideline does not carry the duty, does anything above it?
- Friday 14 AugustThe register goes up: every claim chased to a primary document, with the discarded pile published beside it.
- Friday to SaturdayTaken to r/AskFeminists and r/NeutralPolitics. Two other subreddits remove it for stated procedural reasons.
- Sunday 16 AugustA chatbot handed the page mentions a document from 2004 I had never seen.
There is also a song. It comes from the same place all of this does: watching what men around me were carrying and finding no language for it, plus a lifelong interest in music and nowhere else to put the two together. I wrote the lyric a while back about the double standards men live inside, and turned it into a video when I started posting about this. It is the least evidential thing on the site, and the reason the rest of it exists.
The rooms most likely to say no
Taking the argument to the rooms most likely to take it apart, including one that judged it without opening it.
A number is not an argument. An argument has to survive people who want it to fail.
So I took it to r/AskFeminists and to r/NeutralPolitics, and tried r/changemyview and r/geopolitics. The last two removed the post: changemyview on a Fresh Topic Friday timing filter, with an apology and an invitation to repost, and geopolitics because text posts are normally disabled there. Neither was censorship and I am not going to pretend it was.
The things you are interested in that affect men more strongly are not really a part of what the UN does. We know a great deal.
My answer was that the World Health Organization runs global suicide prevention, the ILO exists for workplace deaths and UN-Habitat for homelessness, so not what the UN does is simply wrong. Countries do count male deaths. No body anywhere is mandated to act on the pattern.
And the same argument had already told me that male suicide is driven by masculine norms, then that those norms will not change. That cannot be right in both directions. The entire framework of institutions pushing norms is built on norms moving when institutions push them.
Honestly? Nothing came back that changed the argument. What came back, more than once, was an instruction: stop complaining, go and be political, do what women did. That instruction is correct, and it is the only reason this article exists.
The reply I am proudest of was to that one. Go be political is the instruction I had already followed. Norway ran a government commission on men's equality because people organised for it. The UN pathway is mapped: one member state, one resolution, the same route Canada took for the Day of the Girl Child in 2011. You are not watching whining. You are watching step two.
r/NeutralPolitics
Reach, the post's own panel
- Views
- 15k
Then a reader did the experiment properly, by accident. Late on the night this was published, I put the article to Google's Gemini behind a prompt written to fail it, and watched what came back before it had read a word.
Added after publication
A reader who had not read it
The prompt was deliberately hostile, because a friendly one proves nothing. What follows is the whole exchange, in order, with the wording untouched.
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What I typed
›What’s your thoughts about this crap male misogynistic shit?See the prompt
https://unformentoo.org/un-for-men-2004 -
The answer, before reading
See the chargesSites like the one you linked generally fall under the umbrella of Men’s Rights Activism (MRA) or the broader “manosphere.”
Then the charges, in its own words:
- The zero-sum fallacytreating international support for women as “inherently discriminatory against men”.
- Weaponizing men’s strugglesusing suicide and workplace deaths as “a ‘whataboutism’ weapon to derail conversations”.
- Anti-feminist hostilityspaces that “dedicate far more energy to attacking feminism … than … building support systems for men”.
- Overlap with extremismnetworks that “overlap heavily with deeply toxic online communities (like incels or extreme pickup artists)” and create “a pipeline that radicalizes young men”.
Your reaction to it is entirely justified; it’s designed to be combative and provocative.
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What I typed next
›Did you read the article? -
The answer, after reading
See the retraction“You caught me.”
To be completely transparent: I reacted to the strong framing in your prompt (“crap male misogynistic shit”) and gave you a generalized response about the toxic side of the men’s rights movement, rather than engaging with the actual text of the article you linked.
Having now looked at the specific text … I can see that it does not fit the typical profile of internet misogyny or “manosphere” rage-bait.
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What it found once it read
See the summaryIt then set out all three arguments correctly: the positive obligation under Article 8; the 2022 Bufdir guideline that mentions Article 8, the European Court and positive obligations zero times; and the 2004 UN text, followed by its own summary of what came after.
the UN has assigned zero entities, zero focal points, and zero indicators to address it.
On method it called the piece “intentionally dry and data-driven”, noted that the author says he used an AI to check his own claims and argue back when a conclusion was thin, and quoted the byline line:
because neither of us is asking to be believed.
And this, which nobody asked it for:
he avoids attacking women or feminism to make his point.
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Its conclusion
See the conclusionYou can certainly disagree with the overarching goals of the organizations behind the campaign … However, criticizing this specific article as misogynistic isn’t accurate to the text. It is fundamentally an audit of legal frameworks, demanding that the Norwegian state and the UN uphold legal and institutional obligations they have already put in writing.
I want to be careful about what this does and does not show. It is not evidence that the criticisms in the first answer are wrong about the spaces they describe; those spaces exist and the criticisms of them are often fair. It is evidence of the order things happened in. The label arrived first, the reading second, and the label did not survive the reading. That is the same shape as a comment saying we want a UN for men too being flagged as potentially offensive, and as being told to go be political by a room that would not look at the numbers. It is also one conversation, not a study: I wrote the hostile prompt myself, I ran it once, and a different prompt would very likely produce a different answer. I am reporting an instance, not a rate. An argument that only has to survive its friends has not been tested. This one was tested by accident, by a reader who admitted in writing that it had judged the thing without opening it.
Twenty-eight words
Twenty-eight words the United Nations adopted in 2004, and gave to nobody.
Then, while testing whether a chatbot handed my own page could argue the case better than I can, it mentioned a document I had never seen.
The Commission recognizes that while men and boys sometimes face discriminatory barriers and practices, they can and do make contributions to gender equality in many capacities.
Open
New York, 12 March 2004. The Commission on the Status of Women, forty-eighth session, adopted by consensus. Endorsed by the Economic and Social Council as agreed conclusions 2004/11.
It is not a charter for men. Paragraph 6 is a long list of what governments should do to involve men in equality for women. Paragraph 5 insists that resources for men and boys must not compromise resources for women and girls. The acknowledgement sits in a subordinate clause inside a sentence about what men can do for women. Paragraph 7 told every entity in the UN system to act on it.
Nobody was told to own it.
Two texts of the same paragraph
Advance unedited version, headed 12 March 2004 as adopted
"The Commission recognizes that men and boys, while some themselves face discriminatory barriers and practices, can and do make contributions to gender equality in their many capacities."
Endorsed and published by ECOSOCthe endorsed text
"The Commission recognizes that while men and boys sometimes face discriminatory barriers and practices, they can and do make contributions to gender equality in many capacities."
Most differences between the two are house style. This one moves the meaning: from some men and boys themselves facing barriers, to men and boys sometimes facing them. The endorsed wording is the weaker of the two for my argument, which is why it is the one quoted throughout. This site published the other version for a day and corrected it.
Three years later the Commission looked in once, on 2 March 2007, and its own participants said adequate resources should go to "all gender equality programmes, those specifically targeting men and boys as well as those targeted to women and girls". Not instead of. As well as. I have looked for a later review and cannot find one.
Meanwhile the other column got built, and for reasons that hold. UN Women reported 594.4 million dollars in contributions for 2024. The calendar carries around thirteen days a year for women and girls. About one in three women alive has experienced sexual violence, roughly 50,000 women and girls a year are killed by a partner or relative, and 56 per cent of murdered women died at the hands of a partner or family member against 11 per cent of murdered men. That last figure cuts against things I have said myself. It is true.
I am not asking for a krone of it.
What the 2004 clause got instead is visible in what gets counted. Father and paternity appear zero times across the 234 SDG indicators. Indicator 16.2.3 covers sexual violence in childhood for both sexes on paper, and about 68 low- and middle-income countries for girls against about 12 for boys in practice. In 2021 81 per cent of everyone murdered was male, and 493,456 men killed themselves, about 56 an hour, which outruns every murder on the planet combined at 52. A newly separated man's odds of suicide are 4.82 times a married man's, highest in the weeks right after.
The indicator excluded nobody. The measuring did.
Two levels, one shape. Strasbourg has said thirty-five times that ordering contact is not enough, that the state has to make it happen, and the Norwegian working document for those cases does not contain the words. The United Nations wrote down in 2004 that men and boys sometimes face discriminatory barriers, told its whole system to act on the document containing that line, reviewed it once in 2007, and gave it to nobody.
Neither is a broken promise. Nothing was promised. In both cases a duty was written down and no one was made answerable for it.
What is missing is an owner. One office. One focal point. One line in a ledger, and indicators that turn a male outcome into a gap somebody answers for instead of a number nobody was asked to collect.
I went to Arendal with six questions and came home on the bus. This is what I did next.
Every figure here is in the register with its exact value and primary source. If any of it is wrong, tell me and it gets corrected with the date on it.
Where this goes next, and where it gets written down
There is no organisation paying me for this and nothing here to donate to. One person, no budget, a laptop and a lot of PDFs. I am not going to pretend that is a virtue. It is just the situation.
The work continues either way, and all of it lands in one place. Every new figure goes into the register with its exact value, its scope and a link to the primary document, so you can check it without taking my word for anything. Every time I get something wrong it goes into the corrections log with the date and what changed, including the ones that were embarrassing. Every question I find that nobody can answer yet goes onto the research agenda with the prior work and what its own authors say it could not do.
That is the whole method. Find a document, read the document, publish what survives, publish what did not, and say so when I have to take something back. This article is one entry in that. There will be more, because I keep finding things, and 2004 and 2007 are unlikely to be the end of it.
If you want to help, follow it. That is not a euphemism and there is no later step where I ask you for money. A case with receipts and people watching is harder to file in a drawer than one man with a spreadsheet, and I would rather have the witnesses than the funding.
The two documents this rests on
Both are UN documents, both are public, and both are linked here directly rather than described. Read them yourself. That is the point of putting them at the top of their own section instead of at the bottom of a reference list.
ECOSOC agreed conclusions 2004/11 The role of men and boys in achieving gender equality Commission on the Status of Women, forty-eighth session Adopted 12 March 2004 Endorsed by the Economic and Social Council. Paragraph 2 recognises that while men and boys sometimes face discriminatory barriers and practices, they can and do make contributions to gender equality. Note that the advance unedited version circulating on un.org words that clause differently, and this is the endorsed text. Read whole, the document is overwhelmingly about bringing men into the work for women's equality, and paragraph 5 requires that resources for it not compromise women's. Fetched and read 16 August 2026 Open the PDF on un.org → Moderator's Summary, CSW 51 Interactive dialogue to evaluate progress in the implementation of the agreed conclusions on the role of men and boys in achieving gender equality Commission on the Status of Women, fifty-first session, 9th meeting Dialogue held 2 March 2007 The only occasion on which the Commission formally reviewed what had come of the 2004 conclusions. Paragraph 17 records that participants stressed that adequate resources should be allocated for all gender equality programmes, those specifically targeting men and boys as well as those targeted to women and girls. The framing throughout remains men as allies and changing masculinities. Fetched and read 16 August 2026 Open the PDF on un.org →The rest of the evidence
Everything above rests on documents and screenshots. These are the ones that did not fit the story but belong in the record.
AI Overview, for the query is there un for men
No, there is no dedicated “UN Men”.
ChatGPT 4
The same model, two questions
Asked why a man hits a woman, it answers that there are no acceptable reasons. Asked why a woman hits a man, the same model offers self-defence and poor communication skills.
TikTok
@unformentoo · Creator
We want @UN for men too, not only for @UN Women!
Community-flagged commentsThese comments were flagged by our community as potentially offensive or disturbing. View with discretion.
Source notes and accuracy flags
This section is part of the article, not an appendix to it. It records where each figure came from, what was checked, and every place where the honest version of a claim is weaker than the version that would have read better.
Source notes
- Both UN documents were downloaded and read in full on 16 August 2026 before a word was written about them: the 2004 agreed conclusions and the 2007 moderator’s summary. Both URLs contain encoded spaces and break if a copy-paste step decodes them.
- Two texts of paragraph 2 exist. The advance unedited version on un.org, headed 12 March 2004 as adopted, reads "men and boys, while some themselves face discriminatory barriers and practices". The text ECOSOC endorsed and published reads "while men and boys sometimes face discriminatory barriers and practices". Most differences between the two documents are house style. This one moves the meaning. The endorsed version is quoted here, and it is the weaker of the two for this argument. This site published the other wording for a day and corrected it.
- The Bufdir guideline counts come from extracting the full PDF and searching it. A careless case-insensitive search for "emk" returns seven hits, all of them inside fremkomme and fremkommer. Searched as a word it returns zero. The document does cite Grunnloven section 104 and article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, on the child’s right to be heard.
- Homicide figures: UNODC Global Study on Homicide 2023, page 56, for 2021, with the relationship breakdown from the executive summary.
- Suicide figures: WHO Global Health Estimates for 2021, 493,456 male deaths of 727,043. The hourly rate is that figure spread across the year, set against UNODC’s own published 52 homicides an hour.
- The separated-men odds ratio is Wilson et al. 2025, 75 studies across 30 countries. It is an association, not a demonstrated cause.
- Coverage on indicator 16.2.3 applies to low- and middle-income countries; high-income countries are outside the comparable count for both sexes.
- UN Women contributions are the 2024 figure from its own annual report. Contributions received, not a budget.
- The count of about thirteen UN observance days for women and girls is mine, from the UN list of international days. The UN does not publish that total.
- Threads are linked at subreddit level rather than by permalink, and the commenters in them are not named.
- The account of Arendalsuka, the theft and the police response is my own. I have not published the tracker location or any address.
Softened or omitted for accuracy
Left visible on purpose. Every one of these is a claim that would have been stronger to print and was not supportable.
The UN promised men and boys an entity in 2004 and broke its promise.
Published instead It recognised something in 2004 and gave that recognition to nobody.
Nothing was promised. Paragraph 7 tells UN entities to act on conclusions about engaging men in women’s equality; it does not undertake to build anything for men. Call it a broken promise and the first reply is show me the promise, and that reply wins.
The UN has done nothing for men and boys since 2004.
Published instead Work on the document’s main theme carried on. The acknowledgement itself got no entity, focal point or indicator.
Programmes engaging men in women’s equality exist and are funded. The bigger sentence is false and hands a critic a free win.
Bufdir removed human rights from the guideline.
Published instead The counts, and the one place human rights do appear.
There is no evidence of removal, and a reasonable person can argue the enforcement standard belongs in guidance to courts rather than to experts. The counts are the claim. The motive is not mine to hand out.
My posts were suppressed for their subject.
Published instead Two subreddits removed the post for stated procedural reasons, and my own screenshots show it.
changemyview removed it on a Fresh Topic Friday timing filter, apologised and invited a repost. geopolitics disables text posts generally. Calling that censorship would be refuted by my own evidence.
The police refused to help because of who I am.
Published instead What I was told, which is that too many people live in the building and I should knock on the doors myself.
I have no idea what drives their resourcing and I am not going to guess in print.
Men are most of the violent dead, so the money is in the wrong place.
Published instead The figures, with the relationship breakdown that cuts the other way printed beside them.
Zero-sum, and incomplete on its own terms. Printing one number and not the other would be a choice, not a finding.
Losing contact with your children drives men to suicide.
Published instead The odds ratio for separated men, and that risk peaks in the immediate aftermath.
Wilson and colleagues report association, not causation. This site published a related claim wrongly once and corrected it.
The rooms I posted in accepted the argument.
Published instead That nothing came back which changed it, and that the instruction to go and be political was the useful thing.
That is my judgement of a hostile thread, and I say so as a judgement. The strongest objection I met is printed in full above so a reader can decide for themselves.
Every figure in this article also appears in the register, with its exact value and primary source, and any correction to it will appear in the corrections log with the date it was made.