Sometime in the middle of law school, when Know Your IX was gaining real national traction, I started finding photos of myself on Twitter. In each, my face was photoshopped into depictions of the Salem witch trials. Witch trials, of course, were persecutions of women, often because of the women’s defiance of male authority or their deviant sexualities. But in these doctored photos, I was the inquisitor; the persecuted witches were college boys. Sometimes my face was accompanied by those of other anti-rape organizers. Tracking the photos, I found screeds against Title IX, supposedly the instrument of contemporary witch hunters. Sometimes the screeds sent other Twitter accounts my way, to remind me that I was the enemy of due process, an idiot, a man-hater, a liar.
That was my personal introduction to so-called men’s rights activism, a reactionary anti-feminist movement that has long flourished on message boards in dark corners of the internet and is now making its way into the light.
Plenty of decent people hold bad ideas about sexual violence. We’re all raised on myths and biases; no wonder we end up believing some. With many critics, even when I deeply disagree with them, and even when I think their advocacy is rooted in some internalized sexism, I have no doubt they genuinely care about fairness and equality. They’re trying to do good, as best they can.
This isn’t true of everyone, however. With every action comes an equal and opposite reaction, and as women and other survivors have gained legal and social standing, the extremist men’s rights movement gains strength and numbers. Men’s rights activists, or MRAs, insist on a funhouse version of gender inequality: men, not women, they insist, are the subordinate sex in the contemporary United States.
MRAs identify some rigid stereotypes that certainly do hurt men and must be addressed as part of any campaign for gender justice. For example, assumptions about men and women’s proper roles within a family can pose challenges to men seeking custody of their children. Domestic violence programming is not always responsive to male victims’ needs. Men die by suicide at higher rates than women, perhaps because men are expected to be “strong,” and so get shamed for seeking mental health support. But MRAs do not draw the more obvious conclusion from these data points—that sexism hurts people of all genders, as feminists have long said. Instead, they wage war on what they see as overwhelming female dominance over poor, defenseless men. “We have watched our predictions of men being reduced to indentured servants to a malicious matriarchy come true, even as society continues to dismiss and humiliate us for speaking,” bemoans Paul Elam, the reliably histrionic founder of the leading MRA publication, A Voice for Men.
The common (unfounded) complaints: Structural misogyny is a myth. The gender pay gap is nonexistent, or entirely the result of women’s choices. Men do just as much domestic labor as their wives. Domestic violence is rare, and women are equal perpetrators. Post-Roe, women gained control over their reproduction, but men are still “slaves” because they are expected to pay child support for a baby their partner chooses not to abort. Open discussion of sexual violence demonizes men, who are never adequately celebrated for their accomplishments and contributions. Warren Farrell, known as the father of the men’s rights movement, was upset, for example, that journalists were more interested in covering Mike Tyson’s 1991 rape trial than the heroic deeds of male firefighters who put out a fire near the courthouse. “Two firefighters died, but men-as-saviors don’t make news,” he complained in his 1993 book The Myth of Male Power: Why Men Are the Disposable Sex. (The title alone tells you most of what you need to know about Farrell’s views.) Meanwhile, institutions from courts to campuses are systemically biased against men. “There is now a second sexism and it is anti-male,” says professor Miles Groth. Groth is a prominent advocate for “male studies,” a right-wing discipline that, echoing Farrell, denies “the continuing myth of male power.” He believes that, with proper investment, his field “would give serious attention for the first time to the unique experience and history of human beings who are male.”
It’s almost funny, except it’s deadly serious. Roy Den Hollander, an MRA lawyer, sued Columbia University over its women’s studies program, part of a yearslong and wildly unsuccessful anti-feminist litigation strategy. In 2020, he went to the home of Esther Salas, a federal judge who had presided over one of his cases, and opened fire, killing her son and wounding her husband. (As with many MRAs, Den Hollander’s misogyny was inextricably tied to his racism. In his writings, Den Hollander dismissed Salas as “a lazy and incompetent Latina,” while also noting his attraction to her.)
Thanks to women’s liberation, MRAs warn, women can now use accusations of sexual harassment and rape as a tool of feminine control. “Sexual harassment legislation is a male-only chastity belt,” Farrell writes. “With women holding the key.” Rape is rare, MRAs claim, and many accusations of it are false, sending thousands of innocent men to prison each year. The “false accusation industry,” Elam explains in A Voice for Men, perpetuates a vicious cycle: “Women lie about being raped, judicial politicians make careers off of putting away sexual offenders, and a brainwashed public cheers it all on. That so many of the men caught up in this are innocent doesn’t stop the grinding wheels of all this injustice for even a moment.” Never mind that false accusations are actually rare. Never mind that so little sexual abuse is reported, so few abusers convicted. Never mind that, of students found responsible for sexually assaulting a classmate, only a third were expelled. Never mind the facts: men, the MRAs are sure, are terribly vulnerable to women’s lies.
The solution, they say, is due process. In recent years, all the most visible lobbying efforts of the major MRA groups have focused on protections for students accused of sexual assault. Elam labeled the 2011 Dear Colleague Letter “hypocrisy [that] borders on treason,” and further evidence that “professors and legislators acquiesce to virtually any initiative that strips males of whatever it is they may still possess, including their self-respect and especially their freedoms.” Farrell later concurred, citing the preponderance standard—again, the standard of evidence used in almost all civil trials—as a violation of due process that requires correction. And MRAs do not limit their due process demands to schools: Elam claims that, when it comes to the criminal prosecution of rape (and, of course, rape alone), “the system is rigged” against men.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, though, MRAs’ commitment to due process extends only so far as it serves to protect men. They are less concerned about—and even openly disdainful of—actual rules that facilitate fair adjudications. Elam calls upon jurors in rape trials to vote to acquit “even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the charges are true.” “Your fellow jurors, who can be assumed to be living unconsciously in the misandric [anti-men] matrix, and prepared to condemn men on accusation alone, cannot be trusted,” he warns. “Voting not guilty on any charge of rape is the only way to remain faithful to the concept of presumed innocence.” To Elam, “presumed” apparently means “guaranteed and permanent.” Those who decried the Shitty Media Men list or the students at Brown for semi-publicly naming accused harassers might be surprised to learn that the National Coalition for Men (NCFM) posts the photographs and names of women, including young students, who are “false accusers”—that is, those who NCFM believes, seemingly without any actual investigation, have lied. Apparently, only accusations against men need to be vetted. (Another MRA blog once identified me as a “suspected false accuser,” before shifting to the shorter identifier “this cunt.” They did not identify any accusation I had made, or note why it was not credible.)
For MRAs, due process matters only as a defense against accountability for male violence. They are not looking to treat parties fairly; they seek impunity. For them, “due process” is first and foremost a dog whistle, as Professor Cantalupo puts it. Despite the mismatch between their actual commitments and the legal label they put on them, their rhetorical strategy is effective because it evokes our Constitution and national morality, sources of legitimacy. Frequently, the MRAs cite left-leaning advocates of due process, like the Harvard Law professors critical of the school’s Title IX efforts, as support. Look, even the experts agree. Ours are mainstream views.
But they aren’t. In their own writings, MRA leadership makes clear that their criticism of anti-violence efforts is always, first and foremost, driven by a belief that women deserve to be abused and men deserve to get away with it. Speaking of the football player Ray Rice’s videotaped assault on his then fiancée, NCFM president Harry Crouch explained to a reporter that “if she hadn’t aggravated him, she wouldn’t have been hit.” Daryush Valizadeh (also known as Roosh V), a notorious “pick up artist” and publisher of the MRA site Return of Kings, has proposed decriminalizing rape on private property. Paul Elam declared October—nationally recognized as Domestic Violence Awareness Month—“Bash a Violent Bitch Month.” Elam claimed satire as defense; the humor eludes me. “A lot of women … get pummeled and pumped because they are stupid (and often arrogant) enough to walk through life with the equivalent of a I’M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH—PLEASE RAPE ME neon sign glowing above their empty little narcissistic heads,” Elam wrote in 2010. “In my opinion their ‘plight’ from being raped should draw about as much sympathy as a man who loses a wallet full of cash after leaving it laying around a bus station unattended.”
IT’S EASY TO dismiss the men’s rights movement as an offensive but ultimately harmless campaign, too fringe and ineffective to be worthy of concern. But the movement has gained real traction in the halls of power, especially since Trump’s election. DeVos’s Title IX regulations were the result of a “deep collaboration” between MRAs and Trump’s Department of Education, a Nation exposé uncovered. The groups had unparalleled access to federal officials to shape the substance of the rules and, emails showed, MRAs and the department coordinated a joint public defense. Hans Bader, the senior department official who argued for DeVos’s policies in the New York Times, was the primary funder of one of the MRA groups. (The Nation also uncovered that Bader had previously given $680,000 to a group that pays drug users to be sterilized. Its logic, the group’s founder explained: “We campaign to neuter dogs and yet we allow women to have ten or twelve kids that they can’t take care of.”) Trump’s most loyal attorney general, Bill Barr, blurbed a book about the supposedly precarious position of young men in higher education. In the endorsement, Barr accused the Obama administration of “fanning the false narrative of a ‘rape culture’ on college campuses” and promoting “kangaroo justice.” Even John Hickenlooper, then a candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, met with Farrell to discuss Farrell’s proposal to devote more White House resources to men and boys.
President Trump himself echoed key MRA rhetoric about male vulnerability to false accusations, women’s resulting power over men, and the need for a particular flavor of “due process.” “Peoples [sic] lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation. Some are true and some are false. Some are old and some are new,” Trump tweeted in February 2018. “There is no recovery for someone falsely accused—life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?” Later that year, he warned: “It’s a very scary time for young men in America” because “somebody could accuse you of something and you’re automatically guilty.” When a journalist asked what message he had for girls, the president insisted that women “are doing great.” Trump’s language perfectly mirrored the MRA outlook: when it comes to sexual harassment, the vulnerable are the potentially accused—assumed to be men—not the potentially victimized, assumed to be women. Rightly, the MRAs recognized Trump as their own. Soon after his comments, Farrell published an article titled “Why This Is a Very Scary Time for Young Men,” in which he ran through standard MRA talking points.
MRA ideology is a good fit for the contemporary GOP, and not only because of the party’s hostility to women’s rights. The through line of contemporary conservative identity politics is that the powerful are oppressed by the historically powerless. Race is as much a part of that story as sex: after all, punishment for sexual harms, real or imagined, is new only to white men. And their resentment is so potent it delivered Trump to the White House. For a long time, these voters had felt they could get away with anything—sexual harassment, yes, but also more than that. They had known that American society was theirs for the taking. But that privilege is (very) slowly disintegrating. White people now have to work alongside immigrants and report to women of color. They can no longer use racial slurs or sling casual homophobia without the “PC police” reminding them we don’t do that anymore. They are, as Arlie Hochschild’s book by the same name puts it, “strangers in their own land.” They feel like victims even as they continue to dominate.
To be fair, the feminists and anti-racists and social justice activists have, in fact, taken something from them: small slivers of impunity. For those used to power, every inch toward equality feels like an injustice. The threat of accountability for white men’s sexual harassment—a truly novel idea—is a perfect focal point for all these anxieties.
And so the message spreads. By the year after the Weinstein allegations emerged, four in ten Americans surveyed by NPR agreed that Me Too had gone “too far.” Some cited procedural concerns, including a lack of respect for the presumption of innocence, as the heart of the problem. “We have females that make false allegations and jumping on the ‘me too’ bandwagon. And it’s ruined a lot of guys’ lives,” explained one respondent, Nate Jurewicz, who ran a popular anti-feminist Facebook page. When asked if proven allegations of sexual harassment should disqualify a political candidate, Jurewicz said no. “No one’s perfect,” he explained.
ATTITUDES LIKE JUREWICZ’S, still front and center in our national discourse about sexual harassment, boil down to a belief that men should not be accountable for sexual harassment. Plenty of people across the political spectrum—not only reactionary conservatives—share this goal. The lawyer Linda Hirshman cataloged a long history of left-wing apologists and enablers in her 2019 book Reckoning. At the height of Me Too, self-professed feminists lined up in the Atlantic and the New York Times to decry social opprobrium of serial harassers as over-punitive hysteria. Yet few outside MRA circles explicitly acknowledge that they seek to ensure male impunity. Even Trump doesn’t go so far. Instead, those who seek elite liberal legitimacy borrow a page from the MRA playbook: to combat accountability for sexual harassment, they use the sanitizing language of due process.
During the deluge of accusations that followed Weinstein’s downfall, bad-faith due process arguments were frequently deployed in defense of famous men. The actor Tony Denison insisted it would be unfair to credit the dozens of reports about Weinstein himself without seeing the abuse with one’s own eyes. “Until somebody shows me pictures and has me outside the door, and I open the door and that is what is going on, until [that happens], it is innuendo,” Denison insisted. “I can’t and won’t point fingers at people unless I have proof.” Weinstein was, of course, eventually criminally convicted, even though jurors did not personally witness him sexually abusing any women.
I think again of the performance night Weinstein attended in New York while awaiting trial, the one where comedians compared him to Freddy Krueger and confronted him about his abuses. Their comments were critical, angry. But no one deprived Weinstein of anything. He was fine. Yet their words were, a Weinstein rep decried, “an example of how due process today is being squashed by the public.” In a perfect irony, Weinstein was allowed to stay at the club while some of the critics were escorted out without any kind of process of their own. You may remember that one performer recalled, “This guy was leading me out the stairs, just repeating ‘due process, due process’ to me.” The term had no content. It was just a buzzword excuse for male impunity.
The return of Louis C.K. provides another prime example. In the fall of 2017, just weeks after the allegations against Weinstein went public, the New York Times published another story on sexual abuse in the entertainment industry. In it, five women performers said Louis C.K., the edgy and purportedly feminist comedian with an eponymous show, had masturbated in front of them or while talking to them on the phone. Only sometimes did he bother to ask for permission; only sometimes did women over whom he had power feel able to say no. Rumors to this effect on gossip sites had followed Louis for years, but, the women explained, they had feared reprisal if they came forward publicly. In response to the allegations in the Times, Louis did something rare: he confirmed the women’s accounts. “These stories are true,” he wrote in a widely published statement, which many press outlets mischaracterized as an apology. (He did express remorse. He did not apologize.) “I have spent my long and lucky career talking and saying anything I want,” he concluded. “I will now step back and take a long time to listen.”
“A long time,” apparently, meant a bit over nine months. The August after Louis stepped back, he emerged again with a surprise appearance at the Comedy Cellar, a fabled New York comedy club. His fifteen-minute set, according to reports, did not address the reason for his absence.
For many, Louis’s return was too little, too early. Comedy Cellar’s owner, Noam Dworman, expected a backlash for handing over the mic so soon. But he felt his decision was just. “Bottom line, I can’t compel testimony, I can’t punish perjury, I don’t have a forensics lab. If I’m judge and jury, I’m going to get it wrong,” he wrote in a statement. “We have a civil and criminal justice system to punish people. We all respect the notions of fairness that are contained in the rules of due process. The Comedy Cellar is just not the institution to be meting out such serious punishment. I think we’ll be better off as a society if we stop looking to the bottlenecks of distribution—Twitter, Netflix, Facebook, or Comedy Clubs, to filter the world for us. It will just end in one biased inconsistent mess.”
There are undoubtedly hard questions to ask about the terms by which famous harassers can return to public life. What is absolutely not hard to figure out is that club owners get to decide who comes on their stage, and they do not need a police investigation or court decision to justify that choice. Dworman’s position is especially absurd because here the accused admitted he did it. Let’s repeat that. Louis told the world he had nonconsensually masturbated in front of women, and Dworman’s response was: I don’t have a forensics lab, so who can really say? This disingenuous call for due process was, blatantly, no more than a call for impunity.
And yet, judging from the online response, Dworman’s statement passed the smell test for more people than it should have. I’d wager it succeeded because of exceptionalism. We’re so used to talking about sexual harassment allegations as a unique procedural challenge, one that requires uniquely criminal-trial-style safeguards. So we fail to catch the flaws of arguments that, if made to excuse any other misconduct, would be obviously ridiculous. Ubiquitous exceptionalism provides a first line of defense for abusers, allowing cultures of disbelief and dismissal to disguise themselves in plain sight.
Dworman and Denison are hardly the greatest political threats of our day. It is a little too easy to dismantle these entertainers’ self-interested legal reasoning. But just as Hollywood’s condemnation of abuse in the wake of the Weinstein revelations shaped public views about sexual violence, so can the defense of abuse, or the shrugging away of it, in the wake of others’ misconduct. And, what’s more concerning, the poorly executed excuses of entertainment hacks reflect the strategies of more powerful, coordinated misogynists.
It may be obvious that Weinstein’s supporters and men’s rights activists are not earnestly trying to work out a system of adjudicating sexual harassment that is fair to all involved. But as we’ll see in the next chapters, the project of discerning who’s acting in good faith and who isn’t becomes trickier as the players become more polished and more politically mainstream. Some readers may disagree with my assessment of some people’s motivations. That uncertainty, though, is part of the problem. Those of us trying to get it right need partners and interlocutors who come from different perspectives. But when we know that some in the debate are acting disingenuously, pretending to care about fairness when all they care about is reducing accountability, we don’t know who to trust. It’s tempting, then, to just stick to our own camps.
A few years ago, I spoke with a defense attorney who often represents students facing school disciplinary charges for sexual assault. He was upset: on a panel about Me Too, a lawyer he otherwise respected had drawn connections between MRAs and advocacy for accused student harassers in a way that, to him, felt dismissive. It’s certainly true that not all champions for accused students’ rights are MRAs. But, the defense attorney and I both agreed, it does make it tricky that plenty of them are.