There’s a certain copypasta that gets posted in men’s issues spaces online. I think it might have originally been said by Karen Staughan. You may know the one I’m talking about. If you have it handy, please post it in the comments. I want to go ahead and reiterate it because it’s a very important point about online gender discussions. It bears repeating here as we start off on a new platform:

“I’m a real feminist. I support equality for men, too. Only fake feminists oppose recognizing abuse and laws against men.”

Have you ever posted a comment like this before? Well, I’m glad to know that you support men and boys. We need all the allies we can get. Too many people deny that we even face any gender-based disadvantages, or if we do it’s our all fault, anyway, so it’s on us to address them. It’s hard for guys to find sympathy from either side of the culture war, but especially from the progressive-leftist side. There’s just one problem.

What you say doesn’t matter.

I mean no disrespect, but you are an anonymous commenter on the internet. I have no reason to assume you have actually done anything to confront the anti-male policies or stereotypes that rule our lives. Unless you have “leveraged your privilege to call out” those who stand in the way of progress, your egalitarian ideals mean nothing to me.

First of all, I need you to understand who the “fake feminists” who oppose gender equality are. Quite simply, it’s all of the major feminist organizations. There’s a convenient list of those who proudly stood behind husband-beater Amber Heard: https://amberopenletter.com/ . Despite numerous recordings of Heard admitting to violence against Depp, they backed her. This isn’t the first time feminist organizations have stood behind violent women. Donna Hylton, who participated in the torture and murder of a man and spent 26 years in jail for it, has reinvented herself as a feminist activist and was even a featured speaker at the 2017 Women’s March in Washington, DC.

Not only do feminist organizations support female abusers, they have created and fight to maintain policies which exclude men and boys from being recognized as victims. Many countries and territories around the world legally define rape in such a way that men cannot be victims. When efforts to reform the laws to being gender-neutral started in India, feminists worked to shut them down (https://timesofindia.com/india/Activists-join-chorus-against-gender-neutral-rape-laws/articleshow/18840879.cms)

Aside from laws, feminists have also engineered the standard operating procedure of law enforcement to be biased against men. A framework for understanding interpersonal violence known as the “Duluth Model” was created by feminist Ellen Pence in the 1970’s. It assumes that men are more violent than women, based on stereotypes rather than scientific evidence. The Duluth Model informs the way police in many countries respond to domestic violence calls. This usually involves assuming that in a heterosexual relationship, the man is the aggressor, even in cases where he makes the call to the police to report violence against him.

This bias against men cuts across gender lines. Male feminists like Lundy Bancroft and Chuck Derry have made their careers on perpetuating the view that men are always the aggressors and women are always the victim. Bancroft even goes so far as to say that men who claim to be victims are actually doing it to hide their abuse, and that all men are potential abusers (https://www.acsh.org/news/2019/10/31/lundy-bancroft-anti-vaxxer-who-thinks-all-men-are-abusers-14370)

Feminists fighting to maintain legal inequality is bad enough, but they don’t stop there. Any time an advocate for men and boys makes a speech or starts a new organization, feminists are there to harass and undermine them. Erin Pizzey founded the first domestic violence refuge shelter in 1971. When she turned her attention to creating services for battered men, her feminist colleagues went so far to as threatening to bomb her house. Despite moving away from the UK she is still regularly harassed for her promotion of a gender neutral approach in her services and writings. The experiences of self-described feminist filmmaker Cassie Jaye had a similar experience. She directed an unbiased documentary about the men’s rights movement, and was subsequently shunned by the feminist movement.

Prominent feminist individuals and organizations have demonstrated time and again they oppose equal treatment for men. So that begs the question, who are the “fake feminists”? Does NOW, an organization which platforms abusers and opposes 50/50 child custody laws (https://floridapolitics.com/archives/206474-womens-rights-groups-host-statewide-media-conference-sb-668/), not count as real feminists? Is Hillary Clinton who once called women the primary victims of war, despite them not facing conscription anywhere in the world, not a real feminist? Are the various gender officers in universities around the world setting up kangaroo courts for accused men not real feminists?

It’s time for an uncomfortable realization. When it comes to equality, feminists’ actions speak louder than their words. If you still think the term “feminism” is worth reclaiming at this point, it’s up to you to stand up against the feminist institutions which have created and uphold the treatment of men and boys as second class citizens.