“20/20″ keeps delaying the episode of their show dealing with the extensive, grassroots campaign to harass women, particularly feminists, online until they quit in terror and frustration. (Well, I assume that’s the imagined goal, though most anti-feminist harassers are men who get a lot of pleasure out of the direct act of berating and scaring women, so their campaign is really self-rewarding.) Luckily for us, Jaclyn Friedman decided to go ahead and publish a piece on so-called “men’s rights activists”—we really need to come up with a more accurate name, as they are neither concerned with men’s rights* nor with activism—at the American Prospect anyway. Read the whole thing. It kicks ass.

She made me consider a point in this that I had never really thought much about before. As anyone who has dealt with MRAs knows, the short list of “men’s issues” they have cobbled together to justify their existence is mostly shit they don’t give two fucks about. Men’s higher death rate in wars and from crime, men’s higher death rate on the job, sexual violence against men, and men’s higher suicide rate are all issues that are important, but represent to MRAs one thing and one thing only: A chance to deflect and derail discussions about feminist issues. They don’t do shit to actually address these issues. They often distort them deliberately, hiding some of the relevant contextual factors that would make it clear that what they call “men’s issues” are often labor issues, results of racial discrimination, and yes, feminist issues—particularly sexual violence, which affects both men and women but is nonetheless enacted primarily by men as an expression of masculine power.

Anyway, Jaclyn makes the point that because MRAs co-opt these very real issues but don’t actually care very much about them, they “are happy to abandon men and boys to real danger when it suits their hate campaign against women”. Because of this, the noise they make blaming all these issues on women means that it is now harder for people who actually give a fuck to find resources.


Every man who visits a men’s rights site concerned about male victims of rape is a man who’ll be told that women are the problem and will be offered no practical solutions, a man who won’t be connected with direct services for survivors if he needs them, a man who still doesn’t know about Just Detention International, which works to end prison rape, or Service Women’s Action Network, which is taking the lead to end sexual violence in the U.S. military for both men and women. Every man who comes to them concerned about the high rates of on-the-job fatalities for men is a man taught to blame women but who is never encouraged to support or join unions. Every man who comes to them concerned about the male suicide rate is a man who won’t be encouraged to help out with the life-saving work The Samaritans do every day.