A recent rabbit hole I had went like this
Wikipedia page for mens studies mentions it came from a 1970s Mens Rights Movement.
Mens Studies today works alongside and often uses feminist theory so this is surprising regarding the current MRA hate groups today.
Looks into the 1970s Mens Rights or Mens Liberation movement
Find a detailed article thats open source
The mens liberation movement basically saw patriarchy as harmful to men and women and pushed to both help feminism (even working with NOW) and push against the enforcement mens gender roles.
It went well with the liberal feminist movement but when the 1980s came around and radical feminism gained traction, it did not. Radical feminism was focused on the actions of men as oppressors than it did on overall societal pressure and forces, so the mens liberation movement was seen as men trying to avoid accountability.
While the movement had a lot of flaws that contributed to its downfall (unorganized, losing a solid goal, not being that big of a group, not intersectional and mostly filled with highly educated White men), the article points out/speculates that the group split in response to radical feminism.
One group that formed out of it is the current MRA movement/hate group. It was formed by the men that saw feminists as abandoning them and leaned more with the mens issues side of the mens liberation movement.
The other joined the radical feminists and doesn't really exist in common knowledge today. The article mentions that NOMAS claims the original mens liberation conference.
I find myself at the NOMAS website and feel like I'm in a time capsule. The group is still active but has not moved on from radical feminism. Like, it pretends to be intersectional but isn't in the slightest. Its like "we recognize that race, class, and immigration status impact the power balance in DV" before only focusing on men using societal power to abuse women.
It has an entire position statement on sex work that is pure SWERF shit. It dismisses sex positive feminism, including feminists such as Emi Koyama (a transfeminist whos written a few works I love), in favor of people such as Janice fucking Raymond (who wrote The Transsexual Empire).
And honestly they stick to the source material way better than today's TERFs. Like, I don't hate read terf shit much if at all these days but the shit I do see definitely isn't actual radfem theory.
I'm not trying to call the group evil either, shit has nuance. In 2015 they helped make a toolkit around reproductive coercion and they seem to have played a role in Mens Studies, the thing that lead me to this rabbit hole.
But because of my history with getting bothered by TERFs and as a man who has went through DV, something that the group sees as a main issue, and as someone that makes porn for fun, I'm not a fan.
Even with reproductive coercion the language isn't gender neutral when discussing birth control and such nor does it discuss the coercion many women face to not reproduce (eugenics with women of color and disabled people, trans people with trans women often left out of the conversation of reproductive rights). Its going to be helpful for people but you can't keep insisting you're intersectional while... not being that.
But hey at least this rabbit hole didn't take ten different articles like it usually does.