Junior government and politics major
When 22-year-old Elliot Rodger went on a brutal killing spree on the outskirts of the University of California, Santa Barbara campus in May, he left a dark digital trail in his wake. To explain his killings, which targeted sorority sisters at the university, among others, and left six students dead, Rodger posted a manifesto to YouTube beforehand, lashing out against women who participated in the “crime” of not having sex with him. At the end of the video — a long diatribe brimming with self-righteous rage and sexist slurs — he declared that his planned massacre would cement his place as a “true alpha male.”
Unsurprisingly, subsequent investigations revealed Rodger had subscribed to multiple Internet channels linked to the men’s rights movement.
Often understood as a network of misfit misogynists who feed off one another’s sexual frustration and entitled attitudes, the movement is also a laboratory for political projects ostensibly aimed at alleviating institutional discrimination against men.
Some of men’s rights activists’ causes, such as their criticism of marital rape laws, square with Rodger’s view that women owe sex to men — or at least to “gentlemen” like him. A harder look, however, suggests that the media’s recent coverage has obscured the ideological diversity of the movement and, ironically enough, its overlap with feminist goals and principles.
Outside of dark corners of the Internet occupied by men like Rodger and his sympathizers, self-styled men’s rights activists have leveled a number of thoughtful criticisms against institutional arrangements harming men. Activists have attacked male-only conscription during drafts, lack of attention to domestic abuse and rape of men and entrenched biases against boys and men within the criminal justice system. Like feminists, the movement has served up constant critiques of gendered norms and policies and their pernicious consequences.
Indeed, the conscription case is particularly telling. In the 1981 Supreme Court battle, Rostker v. Goldberg, MRAs’ fight against discriminatory drafts intersected so clearly with feminists’ aspirations for gender equality in the military that the National Organization for Women joined with a group called Male Rights Inc. to oppose the male-only draft system.
What the two groups understood then, and what feminists pushing for women’s admission into ground combat units understand now, is that gender is not a zero-sum game in which alleviating discrimination against one group necessarily harms another. At the same time that male-only conscription sent young men to fight and die based on their sex, it also perpetuated a vision of women as weak and in need of protection. As the case of the draft makes clear, challenging gendered norms and policies can and will pay dividends to both sexes.
Today’s MRAs are a diverse bunch; while some are straightforwardly sexist trolls, others are legitimately interested in working toward gender equality. It seems as though the movement’s only unifying feature is its mistrust — sometimes hatred — of feminists. Indeed, the movement’s position on feminism is best summed up by the title of a recent Onion article: I Don’t Support Feminism If It Means Murdering All Men.
Clearly, MRAs’ reticence to support a movement with many of the same goals as theirs is a partial byproduct of the battering of the feminist brand. The reluctance of celebrities such as Taylor Swift and Katy Perry to identify with feminism, even as they express support for something resembling gender equality, reflects a popular caricature of feminists as angry, sexless women with an abiding hatred for men.
Feminism is commonly described as a movement for the social, political and economic equality of women. MRAs— as well as the public at large — should ask themselves: equality with whom? The answer is, of course, men. By recognizing feminism as a struggle against all the faces of gender inequality, no matter the gender they harm, thoughtful MRAs can reconcile themselves with a movement that’s entirely consistent with many of their aims.
Charlie Bulman is a junior government and politics and history major. He can be reached at cbulmandbk@gmail.com.
