I asked on Twitter and facebook for some examples of what MRAs and anti-feminists have done to help men
Here’s ten things I learned from the experience:
1. There are a lot of very angry men out there who claim to only want equality, but will get super abusive when you ask what they’re doing to actually help other men. I’ve been on twitter for four years and I blocked three times as many people in four hours as I have in that entire time.
2. Some men who don’t actually associate with the MRM or anti-feminism are doing some cool things like opening shelters for male victims of DV and giving talks about depression and suicide prevention. A lot of MRAs want to pretend that was their doing, even though they had nothing to do with it. They will tell you it’s because of their years of campaigning for awareness, but struggle to point to any actual campaigns for awareness that can be linked to the MRM.
3. Although MRAs and anti-feminists share a lot of the same ideology (and a lot of the same memes and rape jokes), they are not the same thing. Anti-Feminists get quite upset when you label them as MRAs.
4. Anti-feminists like to accuse feminists of not having any real issues, and then at the same time like to joke about how ‘weird’ it is that feminists are always going on about rape and domestic violence. Apparently those things aren’t real issues, but it’s also totally weird how advocates for the rights of marginalized people would go on and on about issues which disproportionately affect marginalized people.
5. The MRM is as varied as feminism. This was actually really good to learn. There are men out there who just genuinely care about helping other men, and they are genuinely sad that the movement has been hijacked by assholes. They want nothing to do with PUAs and men like Paul Elam, they’re just trying to help men who need it in the same ways feminism helps women. When I asked them why they didn’t join the feminists who were already helping men, they said they a) didn’t believe in the patriarchy or b) felt like feminism was for women, and they wanted their own thing.
6. A lot people apparently think feminists made up the word ‘patriarchy’ and that there’s nothing at all which signifies Western culture as patriarchal. It’s a shame the word has lost so much of its meaning. I feel like it used to be a useful tool for explaining power structures, and now it’s just a word that makes people roll their eyes and shut off.
7. Earl Silverman was pretty vile, but he did do some good stuff. He opened a shelter for male victims of DV, and gave talks about depression and suicide. Unfortunately the MRM did absolutely nothing to support him in this, and after he died they blamed feminism for his shelter being underfunded.
8. No one could provide me with any evidence of the MRM helping gay men, trans men, and Men of Color, disabled men, and no one in the MRM seems especially concerned about the rights of male sex workers. It seems the movement is fairly focused on the issues of people in the majority, and from what I can tell there is very little motivation to embrace intersectionality in the way third/fourth-wave feminism is attempting to do.
9. I tried to calmly discuss statistics with a bunch of different dudes, and I was told every time that I was just spreading man-hating propaganda. Apparently the UN and RAINN have an agenda to bring down men. Who knew?
10. For the most part, people are people. Most of the anti-feminists I came across were pretty young and sheltered. I think a lot of them actually knew very little about feminism, beyond what they had heard about from other anti-feminists on reddit. They would say things like, “There’s no evidence we live in a patriarchal society” which, even if you don’t believe in the feminist interpretation of patriarchy, is pretty ignorant of the actual meaning of patriarchy. Their comments about rape culture made it pretty clear they didn’t really understand what rape culture means. Similarly, a lot of the MRAs I spoke to seemed kind of confused about their ideology, and when I really got into it with them a lot of them agreed that men’s rights and feminism shouldn’t be at odds with each other. Even the gamergate-sad-facial-hair dudebro I spent ages going back and forth with didn’t seem especially full of rage, he just seemed terribly misinformed.
Bonus fact: MRAs will always mention how they’re campaigning for men’s reproductive rights, but then get super vague and cagey when you want them to explain what that would actually look like, and the ways that their apparent lack of reproductive rights is affecting their health and bodily autonomy.
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