The Unseen Faces of the Men’s Rights Movement

Peter is a gay, British writer who supports the Labour Party and grew up in a stable, middle-class household — and he’s an active member of the men’s rights movement.

Now in his late twenties, Peter began sympathizing with the movement as an adolescent after experiencing what he sees as the education system’s disparate treatment of boys and girls.

“In school I saw a lot of double standards in the ways men and boys were treated socially,” Peter told National Review. He found that boys were often disciplined unfairly while administrators and teachers turned a blind eye to the misbehavior of girls.

Like many of his fellows in the movement, Peter saw his own experiences in school as an outgrowth of a wider societal ill: Academics, feminist organizations, and politicians often diagnose masculinity itself as a problem in need of a solution. In 2019, the American Psychological Association issued guidelines arguing that “traditional masculinity . . . is, on the whole, harmful.” The following year, researchers popularized the term “Manosphere,” casting anyone associated with the men’s rights movement as traffickers in misogyny.

The experience inspired Peter to approach “equality groups to try and raise these issues.”

“I was, of course, screamed at, called names, lied to, and banned,” he said.

Struggling to find a place to hold conversations about masculinity, Peter started an online forum, “Men’s Human Rights,” where he began to discuss topics that are often ignored, crudely stereotyped, or just straight-up demonized by the mainstream media. Peter invited National Review to observe the channel and speak with nearly a dozen participants, most of whom agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity and are referred to using fictitious first names.

“I created the Discord because there was a massive need for men to get support that wasn’t being met, and for people on the men’s rights activist subreddit to talk and organize in real-time. We have had several men come to us on the verge of suicide — most of them disillusioned with the regular channels,” Peter explained.

Peter and the members of his channel aren’t under the impression that women and girls don’t face unique challenges, they just believe men and boys have particular struggles that modern feminists are unwilling to acknowledge.

“I think every men’s rights activist has a moment like this, and it’s why so many of us don’t like feminists,” Peter said. “We were told they support equality, then we get screamed at and told we’re gaslighting people because we say anti-male hate is real. Meanwhile, men’s rights activists happily acknowledge the existence of both male and female victims and treat them as equally valid.”

Not all men’s rights activists — a broad label used to describe members of an amorphous movement — are as thoughtful as Peter. There are noxious online chatrooms that are genuinely harmful. In August 2021, Reddit banned the forum “Men Going Their Own Way” (MGTOW) which boasted white-nationalist users. Incels (involuntary celibates), another offshoot of the so-called Manosphere, have been responsible for terrorist attacks in America and Canada.

The supposed connection between solutions-oriented men’s rights activists and the violent lunatics who commit mass shootings is “nonexistent,” Peter said.

“Incels don’t have any real crossover with men’s rights activists, and we have a ban-on-sight policy for the far Right. Academic papers on the ‘Manosphere’ are an education in how thoroughly the activists have embedded themselves in sociology and gender studies,” he said.

Indeed, to simply gain admission to the forum, members must assent to basic rules including hate-speech policies and anti-bullying measures. The chatroom hosts support channels for LGBT members and those dealing with divorce and mental-health issues.

The influence of outside forces, particularly academia and feminist organizations, in shaping the prevailing opinion of the men’s rights movement is a common point of frustration among members of the chat. Because the movement is diffuse and leaderless, it’s highly susceptible to being co-opted by toxic forces or misrepresented by outsiders, members of the chat argue.

Not only do they ban women-hating incels, the chat itself includes several women.

Kay, a 21-year-old American college junior, is concerned with issues of diversity and inclusion and has even been labeled “woke” by some who know her. She had an upbringing similar to Peter’s and, like him, became interested in the men’s rights movement after seeing how boys were treated differently by teachers.

“I started noticing a lot of inconsistencies and unfairness towards both genders,” she said.

“I think the most damaging misconception is that men’s rights activists are incels or hate women,” said Mason, a 17-year-old British college student. “I mean so far everyone I’ve met in the community are positive and so welcoming.”

Mason had been in an abusive relationship in high school. When he asked for support from his friends, Mason was told to “man up” and get over it. The self-help community became his “gateway” to the movement. Jordan Peterson became a source of new confidence, and he eventually ditched his “firm” atheism in favor of Christianity. The Discord channel became a portal for Mason to a world of “like-minded people.”

“I’ve felt a lot more comfortable with people who get me rather than people who I spoke to before who hated me and my ideas,” he said.

Mason and his peers said they turned to each other because they don’t see their concerns reflected in mainstream politics and culture. Tellingly, when President Biden issued an executive order in March 2021 creating a “Gender Policy Council,” there was not a single reference to boys or men.

In light of the headwinds facing boys and men, the glaring absence of any conversation about positive masculinity seems like negligence to members of the movement.

Men and boys are facing stagnating educational scores, plummeting labor-force participation rates, and considerably higher rates of suicide and substance abuse than women. Members of the men’s rights movement also argue that endemic sexism plagues the court system, with men receiving harsher sentences for identical crimes.

Sonja Starr, a law and criminology professor at the University of Chicago, has written extensively about the sentencing gap between men and women in America. Starr has found that men receive 63 percent longer sentences in federal cases, on average, than women, with women being twice as likely to avoid incarceration for identical crimes.

Domestically, there is virtually no serious American politician who has spoken openly about the issue. Warren Farrell, whom many of the interviewees consider the “founding father” of the movement, found that Andrew Yang was the only Democratic presidential contender in Iowa in 2019 willing to discuss the issue.

According to members of the movement, there are two central underlying reasons for their lack of visibility: The increasingly popular belief among young feminists that society is a zero-sum game between the sexes, and the media’s depiction of men’s rights activists as “angry white men,” a phrase popularized by one of academia’s leading masculinity experts, Michael Kimmel.

“When you focus on only one sex winning, both sexes lose,” Farrell told National Review. “We have to reposition the gender issue to recognize that we’re all in this together, and then we have to remember that.”

Many of the activists National Review spoke with want to pursue a different vision of gender equality, one championed by chat member Tim Goldich, a self-described “gender equalist” who writes books and gives lectures making the case that society needs to recognize the unique struggles of men and women, rather than trying to elevate one gender’s grievances above the other’s. In Goldich’s view, the conversation around gender politics has become stuck and requires an alternative to help people reconceptualize gender relations by calling a “draw” in the competition for victimhood status and refocusing efforts on true equality.

But when members of the movement seek to present these ideas to the public, they’re often met with mockery and derision. Thomas Carney, a former small-time Hollywood actor better known in men’s rights circles by his handle “blueorange22,” found that out firsthand when he called into The Majority Report with Sam Seder last year. During the show, a feminist guest rolled her eyes and jeered at Carney as he described how he often hears from “scared” teenage boys looking for guidance.

One of Goldich’s intellectual partners advocating “gender equalism” is David Shackleton, who became involved with the men’s rights movement after the common experience of divorce, which left him reeling and searching for answers. “I just saw for the first time that the whole story in society about men and women was about male violence and female victimization. That didn’t ring true for me,” Shackleton said in a phone interview.

Shackleton reserves some blame for the men’s rights movement itself for often behaving in a way that plays into the “angry white man” perception.

“I think it not easy to fully empathize with men — few do,” Shackleton said. “It goes against the cultural grain. But I believe that we must shift some empathy toward men. If men tend to express themselves in an unhealthy way, it’s at least in part because men aren’t granted any healthy avenues for speaking and being heard.”

Farrell, the activist who sought meetings with the 2020 Democratic presidential contenders, has publicly called on the White House to create a designated council for boys and men but has had little success so far. He remains hopeful, however, that once the culture moves on from its zero-sum approach to gender relations, and politics starts to catch up, real solutions to the problems facing men will be found.