Men's Rights Activism

The ideas that feminists are the enemy have led to more groups of Men’s Rights Activism (MRA). While many of these groups voice their concerns about issues affecting men, a large portion of these MRA groups are more focused on belittling feminists groups. Like most political movements, extremists fight their way to the center of the discussion; similar to radical feminists for the feminist movement, the term Men’s Rights Activists (MRA or Meninist are other terms common online) have branched out into several different factions of the movement, with some extremist groups gaining a negative reputation among more moderate activists and certainly among feminists. For the sake of this analysis, I will refer to meninists and the acronym MRA as the

Important discussions are now being held in support of men breaking out of the masculine gender roles; cross-sex typed men, whether heterosexual, homosexual, or otherwise, have found communities of other men who are open and supportive of their feminine qualities. Men’s rights activists have created support groups for men escaping from their abusive partner, and have been spreading awareness of the prevalence of men suffering from domestic abuse, as well as of hotlines made for men to call when they are in need of help. Many men’s rights activists also cite the lack of shelters designed solely for male victims and have made efforts to create them. While this is a great step to be taking in order to provide protection from men escaping abusive relationships, many MRAs, with their extensive hatred of feminists have again made this an issue of feminists vs. meninists. Instead of making any sort of effort to create safe areas for men to go when escaping from domestic abuse, or attempting to get any state funding for these projects, they have attempted to defund shelters for women escaping abusive partners, claiming that these shelters are a financial scam because “false accusations of . . . domestic abuse are rampant” (Blake, 2015). In 2000, eighteen individual meninists sued the “State of Minnesota’s commissioners of Corrections, Human Services, Public Safety, and Children, Families and Learning” to halt the funding of women’s shelters through state money. Their reasoning? Cited in Equality with a Vengeance: Men's Rights Groups, Battered Women, and Anti-Feminist Backlash (2011): “[These shelters] publish fanatical, irrational, hysterical, sexist literature which maliciously and falsely defames and seeks to generate social and political hatred against men in general, portraying them as the basic cause of all domestic