In recent years, in October, publications appear on the Internet in which men are congratulated on an unusual holiday. We checked whether it actually exists.

In 2021, we told our readers about the International Day for the Protection of the Male Nervous System from Violent Actions by Women "Moskovsky Komsomolets", "Interfax - Ukraine", "RIA Novosti - Crimea", Ukrainian information portal UNIAN and several other media outlets, and the social network Odnoklassniki even congratulated its users on the “holiday.” In previous years, materials devoted to this topic also appeared on websites "Komsomolskaya Pravda", "Public Television of Russia» and publicist Alexandra Nevzorova. Numerous video on YouTube, as well as very popular posts on Facebook, "VKontakte", Twitter, "Yandex.Zene" and other social networks. International Day for the Protection of the Male Nervous System from Violence by Women mentioned on Wikipedia.

Despite the ascribed international status, almost nothing is known outside the Russian-language Internet about the Day of Protection of the Male Nervous System from Violent Actions by Women, celebrated on October 22. The only mention we could find was a post on Reddit, published in 2018 in the MensRights community. At the beginning it says that the text was borrowed from Taya Naidenko, author notes about this holiday on the website Spletnik.ru. The Day to Protect the Male Nervous System from Violent Actions by Women is not mentioned in calendar similar special dates established or recognized by the UN.

We found the earliest mention of the holiday in 2014. October 22 of that year about him wrote user of the website drive2.ru, which unites car enthusiasts from different countries. The publication is a poem that begins with the words: “We are weak, we need to be protected, // From inevitable nervous shocks.”

Apparently, the memorable date gained real popularity a year later. Posts with identical text and pictures on October 22, 2015 appeared in many large publics on VKontakte, whose audience now numbers millions of users, on Pikabu and in Twitter. At the same time, publications dedicated to the holiday appeared on the website "Gaming addiction", forums residents Nizhny Novgorod and car enthusiasts from Rostov-on-Don.

Although we could not unambiguously determine the founder of this unusual holiday, we can say with confidence that it was invented in the Russian-language segment of the Internet in the mid-2010s (some claim, that the idea was launched as a joke). It does not have any official status and is not recognized by major international organizations, and its internationality is in question - practically nothing is known about the existence of this memorable date outside of Russia and post-Soviet countries. Over the course of several years, the holiday, invented on the RuNet, became so entrenched on the Internet that even fairly large media outlets began to mention it.