I was thinking about this question a lot recently & I found it very difficult to describe any particular, gender based, hardships without reducing it to a mere comparison with some abstraction of male & female. And also reducing it to my own heuristics, although that's going to be unavoidable in a question that, to some extent, appeals to anecdotal experience like this one does.
For example I could point out male specific diseases and conditions, but that can't really exist on an indeterminate spectrum of it being hard to be a man since women have their own gender specific conditions and diseases. Perhaps it's a numbers game? Who has/had more of them throughout history up to the modern era & how many died or had miserable lives because of them. But that becomes a question of infinite complexity with regards to human individual variation.
So I ruled that out as a useful example pretty much straight away.
Another angle is socially, which is generally what these threads are aiming towards, but that is a bit of complicated mess as well & also tends to fall into a historical examination of who had it worse. For example men being almost exclusively the ones conscripted to war & women exclusively the ones suffering through pregnancy based problems and death (although this one also comes under the heading of conditions and diseases as well).
It's become a very sisyphean task, where every time I thought I had something I realised it was too arbitrary to be applied as an exclusive.
And so I realised I could only talk with any degree of authority and insight from a very specific position of personal experiences. "Well duh" chimes the invisible strawman crowd, but the question does deal in individual experiences as part of a collective identity, so it was difficult for me to come up with examples in my own life that I could conclusively say were in the domain of 'being a man'.
Ok so...waffle out of the way.
The caveat here is that what I'm about to describe as examples, are just things that have happened to me personally & I don't generally assume that they are rules that apply at all times, or are to be assumed as true without question. Nevertheless, they did happen and I think it is important to remember that.
I'll start with being around 4-5 years of age at infant school where Rhianna Hall and her friend were going around pulling down the trousers of the boys and when they did so to mine I went and told one of the teachers who was governing the playground at the time. They followed me once they saw what I was attempting to do and told her that I was also doing it to them with their skirts, which was patently not true. The consequence was that they were told off, whereas I was hauled off the ground and made to sit out my play time and then strongly lectured. I'm not that old so this would have been around the early to mid 90's.
That was just one of many such incidences involving what can only be described as a false accusation, followed by an unjust punishment. But while women certainly aren't the only ones who make things up to get another in trouble, they did seem to be disproportionately believed, or at least so it seemed from my very individual experience. So I'd say it's hard when you are assumed to be the villain of a situation, seemingly because of your own gender.
In my small, run down mining town, people don't have much to do. So what they tend towards are fleeting distractions to pass the time, most notably casual sex and drinking. The culture where I grew up was that if you hadn't had sex by around 13-14 there was something wrong with you. Now this is an extremely unusual localised assumption (which I didn't realise at the time) and so being a sensitive and nervous person with a proclivity to overreact, I wasn't exactly a prize catch and I became very isolated.
Any time I started to become intimate or close with a girl around this age, eventually she would elicit (and it only happened a few times, though it still hurts) the information of my virginity and then use that as a weapon of ridicule, with the only motivation I could perceive was that this was just for kicks. Now it's fair to say that without context and coming from only myself that this is a biased sample, nevertheless I can only insist on it's veracity and whether or not I was a gullible fool might depend on your view of the average boy going through puberty from the ages of 13 - 16.
Without going into lurid detail, I experienced it as cruel and it wasn't just verbal abuse. Interestingly enough, the other boys my age weren't so bothered.
When I was older and working, a girl I worked with invited me out for a coffee after work. As we were walking on our way to the shop she said she needed to pop into a chemist's we were passing to get some cash, which I thought was odd. After a while she came out with an intense looking guy who didn't say a word to me (even when I said hello) and who immediately started walking with us, staring at me all the while in this very unsettling manner. We get to the shop and, while in the queue, I receive a text off my brother. By this point I had figured out what was going on and made an excuse to leave.
And what I had figured out was that this was her boyfriend, even though she had bare-faced lied to me when asked if she already had a boyfriend. And I believe she was using me to make him jealous and potentially manipulate us into conflict.
In any case, that doesn't really say much about the hardships of being 'a man'. But surprisingly it also didn't colour my perceptions of women as I took all these as incidents of individuals more than anything.
For a more...nebulous description I suppose it would probably be some of the stuff I've seen in day to day life, particularly certain expectations of character and behaviour (although I am against a lot of social deconstructionist reasoning) the judgements of character based on poorly defined traits, which are something which affects everyone, were quite harsh at times.
At work the more physical and tiring tasks tend to fall to the men over the women, with only a small productive minority of the women willing (and capable) of keeping up. This means that in my current job in a small retail outlet that has a large amount of female staff compared with male staff, that the work is often unequally shared between us, so that I might spend 4 hours on a till and 4 hours doing delivery, whereas some of my female co-workers might spend 4 hours on a till and 4 hours barely touching delivery while gossiping in the back. I notice this by observing how often a cage of delivery is actually brought out, how many there were on delivery when it first came in to how many are still there when I start working them (and the reverse if I am working them first) & the fact that there are cameras in the warehouse and you can rewind them to see. Although I generally don't go out of my way to rewind them for that purpose, usually I'm looking to see if a suspicious person has been shoplifting and then I notice them drinking coffee and standing around for 40 odd minute intervals.
Once again I recognise that this is a biased sample & I don't think this is necessarily normal, although the lack of physical ability is an issue I've run into many times in different jobs....they (female staff) usually attempt to make up for it (successfully or not).
What I found most difficult is that as a man it seems more difficult to take advantage of what is implicit in nature. At times the concept of actions speaking louder than words seems not to matter so much in the court of public appeal & especially so in the minutiae of the day to day. The women I am working with are currently able to say one thing, do something completely different and yet have what they said they did be accepted as what actually happened.
In all of these frustrations I cannot tell if this can be construed as the hardships of being a man, and I don't really see it as the fault of women as a collective. My most difficult trials are actually outside these current work-based ills and more so to do with being an emotionally sensitive person, who resents that sensitivity as it only keeps blocking him from moving forward.
After all, the best mantra I discovered for coping with the situations I find myself in is that "In all things one should only expect a thankless task, or else wither from yearning for an impossible praise". People usually meet you for a brief window of interaction and neither you nor they have much information on the other and so, with the average person lacking the imagination necessary to conceive of another's position, the standard position is one of casual cruelty.
And that's how I view both men and women, or rather humans in general: as agents of casual cruelty.
To me, that's a hardship & life appears to carry a lot pain with it. To expect otherwise seems dangerously naive.