The men’s rights movement advocates on family law and custody, domestic violence policy as it affects male victims, educational attainment, and workplace fatality rates. Its organized history predates the internet: fathers’ rights organizations focused on divorce and custody reform date from the 1970s and worked through lobbying, legal aid and local groups.
Position within the online network
Ribeiro and colleagues’ study of the wider online network places men’s rights communities among its older and comparatively milder parts, and finds that their active users have migrated substantially towards incel and MGTOW communities over the period studied. That finding is about where people went, and it is one of the few things about this movement’s online life that has been measured rather than asserted.
How it is characterized in the literature
Blais and Dupuis-Déri analyse the movement as an antifeminist countermovement — a movement defined by what it opposes. That is their framing and is attributed to them; it is contested by participants, who describe the movement in terms of the specific policy areas listed above. This page records both descriptions rather than choosing between them.
What was removed
The previous version of this page carried specific claims with no source behind any of them: that
a particular men’s rights media site launched in 2008, that the r/MensRights subreddit was created
in 2008 and passed 200,000 subscribers, and that the first International Conference on Men’s
Issues was held in 2014. The founded field, set to 2008, rested on the same unsourced account and
has been removed; the movement’s organizing predates that by roughly thirty years, which is the
substantive problem with the date.
It also asserted a list of political impacts — that the movement contributed to custody reform legislation, prompted expansion of domestic violence services to male victims, and influenced government commissions on men’s health in several countries. Those are causal claims about policy, none of them sourced, and they have been removed rather than annotated.
Sources
- 01.
Blais, M. & Dupuis-Déri, F. (2012). Masculinism and the Antifeminist Countermovement. Social Movement Studies, 11(1), 21-39. Peer-reviewed analysis treating the movement as a countermovement defined in relation to feminism. This is the authors' framing, attributed to them here and not asserted by this page. Publisher site (tandfonline.com) returns HTTP 403 to automated clients; metadata confirmed against the Crossref record for the DOI.
- 02.
Hart Publishing. Fathers' Rights Activism and Law Reform in Comparative Perspective. (2006). Edited volume including a chapter on the origins of the fathers' rights movement in the United States. Cited for the movement's pre-internet history in family law reform. The Crossref record lists no editors or authors, so none are given here; year and publisher are taken from that record.
- 03.
Ribeiro, M. H., Blackburn, J., Bradlyn, B., Cristofaro, E. D., Stringhini, G., Long, S., Greenberg, S., & Zannettou, S. (2021). The Evolution of the Manosphere across the Web. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 15, 196-207. Source for men's rights communities being among the older and comparatively milder parts of the online network, and for the finding that their active users have migrated substantially towards incel and MGTOW communities.