"am I the only one who thinks boys can get a rough deal?"
No of course you aren't. Of course boys can get a rough deal, but they don't get a rough deal purely because they are boys. They get a rough deal because of their class, or their parent's lack of parenting skills, or their colour, or their social circumstances etc. etc. - all the things girls get a rough deal about in addition to the rough deal they get for being a girl.
Although thinking about it, you could argue that the one thing that really oppresses boys because they are boys, is the policing of masculinity and the pressure to fit into the brutal masculinity that men have invented to big themselves up versus women. Masculinity is the opposite of femininity in this model and so anything remotely associated with the feminine - kindness, empathy, fear, sadness - all are banished and if little boys express them, they are chivvied out of it or bullied out of it. That is not women's fault: that is men's fault - they're the ones who set up the patriarchy which decreed that women are lesser beings and that men are greater beings and that men and women have to act in pre-determined ways - tough shit if their little boys don't fit the model, we'll all brutalise boys to fit in that box come what may. Deal with the construction of masculinity and you deal with a whole mass of emotional and psychological problems for boys and men.
"I get the impression, not just from here, but reading generally, that men have this great life, and I don't think it's true." Then tbh Daddelion, I suspect that you're not really understanding what you read. The discussion really is going over your head and I'm sorry for that. All I can suggest is that you do a lot more basic reading first.
I don't disagree that working class white boys are actually approaching a crisis in terms of their place in society, just as has happened in Mathaanxiety's example in NI and that it will cause them a lot of problems in the future: but it will cause white working class women and black working-class people more problems, because what men do when they're angry and dispossessed, is take their anger and despair out on even more dispossessed groups than themselves: women, children, BME groups, muslims etc. White working class men have historically been higher up the food chain than these other groups and the crisis in their identity, is being caused by the loss of that privilege of being higher up. That doesn't mean that them being higher up, was the fine and dandy thing to be, it was bloody unfair that they got special treatment because of their sex and their colour and now they don't.
The problem is when groups of people who have an unfair advantage lose their unfair advantage, they feel it as an attack on their basic human rights to have that unfair advantage. All would be well if only women would stop demanding to be treated as equal human beings and black people weren't demanding to be treated as if they have the same right to be treated as full citizens as white men. Well guess what, re-instating an unfair advantage, is not the solution to the problem of white working class masculinity. Re-constructing masculinity and race is, but that would take acknowledgement of the fact that you've had an unfair advantage and a willingness to give it up. That ain't gonna happen soon because let's face it, no-one wants to voluntarily give up their unfair advantage, do they?