FWIW, there are contexts in which I've seen this criticized.

Usually, the context is that someone has started a discussion about some situation in which men or boys have caused suffering or otherwise behaved badly, and someone else has responded by expressing empathy towards the men or boys in question, and the person who started the discussion has criticized the attempt to switch the conversation focus from empathy towards the objects of the behavior, to empathy for the agents of it. (The jargon term for this is "derailing" in many contexts.)

Of course, this is only a subset of the general category of expressing empathy towards men and boys, but it's one that gets a lot of attention.