Men’s rights activists (MRAs) have been around since the start of the feminist movement, in one form or another.
While some MRAs have some of the same features of your run-of-the-mill misogynist — an addiction to self-pity, a distinctive hate-musk that’s hard to get out of clothing and an excessive share of impotent rage — they distinguish themselves from your average he-man woman-hater by participating in a sort of counter-revolution to feminism.
The difference between a MRA and a misogynist is a pretty important one. Misogyny is easily found pretty much anywhere you go looking for it. (Scroll through USC's Yik Yak if you want some on-the-fly proof.)
The point is this: it’s easy to be a misogynist. You can be a misogynist and hide it. You can be a misogynist and not be conscious of it.
Being an MRA, however, means that you have to take a conscious effort to knowingly erode the decades-long advances of feminism.
This particular variety of sad-sack can take a few different forms. Some older male activists pine for the patriarchy as it was up until the 20th century and (hopelessly) try to help it re-emerge in the most effective possible way — by calling women disgusting names on the Internet.
A prime example of this is Paul Elam, the leader of the men’s rights group "A Voice for Men." To give you some idea about how this guy and similar-minded folk thinks, here’s a few choice facts; “When is it OK to Punch Your Wife?” is the name of one of his more popular essays. He wants to make October “Bash a Violent B---- Month,” suggesting that men should lash out violently if they’re being physically abused by a woman. (He escapes the legal consequences of these ideas by giving them the name “satire.”)
The second type of MRA might more or less genuinely believe in equality between the sexes.
Their problem is that they are so removed from reality that they think that feminism has completed its secret goal: to reverse the patriarchal power structure and create a society where women socially dominate men.
They’ll be the first to point out unequal prison incarceration rates between men and women, custody statistics that supposedly favor the mother and the “unfair” exclusion of women from the draft. The fact that feminist groups like the Service Women’s Action Network have spearheaded the inclusion of women in the draft seems not to register.
This second type of MRA is, I believe, the single best definition of a “meninist.” While the term originated in early 2001 from feminism.com to mean, essentially, “male feminist,” it came back en force late last year as an identity movement.
The interesting part? MRAs have more or less adopted the exact same narrative that feminism has. Through the imposition of social constructs, they believe that a formidable group has grown in power and uses that power to subjugate others. They have adopted the tone of feminist response to social situations with complaints like: “Why can’t men ever get in the club free?” or “Why can’t she open the door for me?”
Even the rhetoric toward the “other side” is mirrored; in response to the proud feminist epithet for agents of the patriarchy “chauvinist pig,” meninists have embraced their own term to label agents of the feminist power structure: “feminazi.”
I went to USC’s Feminist Collective — colloquially known as FemCo — to figure out how organized feminists saw MRAs as a whole and meninists in particular.
Elyssa Dougherty, a fourth-year Spanish student and FemCo member, said that a lot of the movement stems from two factors: ignorance and the Internet.
“I think there are issues that men’s rights deal with. That said, a lot of what they do is blame feminism for things when they really should be in line with us,” she said. “Some of them have had bad experiences over the Internet and may not know that most feminists are not men-haters.”
In a small group talk about MRAs that formed after the main meeting was over, much of the discussion centered on how feminists have helped move forward real progress for men.
It was feminism, some members of the group pointed out, that was the driving force behind issues like recognizing male rape victims on an institutional level. When FBI director Robert Mueller approved expanding the definition of rape to include men, he was fulfilling one of the goals of feminist organizations everywhere.
“Every issue is a feminist issue,” said second-year biology student and president of FemCo Clarie Randall “If people say ‘this isn’t feminist-related,’ they don’t know what they’re talking about. Everything you could talk about has a feminist point to it.”
Meninists, it seems, don’t know a friend when they see one.
In short, the crucial difference between meninists and feminists is that the premises of feminism are true, while those of meninism are not.
Every single piece of evidence points to the continued existence of patriarchy. National Public Radio, reporting on information gathered from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showed that women make 80.9% of what men make on average. (While some of this disparity is due to "job choices" between women and men, the report makes sure to say that any such reasoning doesn't square that difference.) According to a paper published in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology, both women and men are more likely to interrupt women than men in conversation. We have never had a female president.
The patriarchy is real, and the more meninism tries to cloud or deny that idea, the more they prove the intrinsic truth of it.
Meninists have adopted a feminist rhetoric and thought process, building a similar argumentative structure against feminism on faulty, ignorant premises. Even when they stumble upon important issues, they’re too absorbed in self-pity to recognize that the current incarnation of feminism is fighting for men also.
If imitation is the highest form of flattery, then this new incarnation of the men’s rights movement is basically one long, confused love letter to their most hated enemy.
Editor's note: Clarie Randall is a photographer for The Daily Gamecock.