Vice has an article on the Men’s Rights movement titled What I Heard at This Weekend’s Men’s Rights Conference in London. Unsurprisingly, it’s a hit piece. While author Robert Jackman may have heard, his open bias shows he did not attend the conference to listen.

This weekend, the global men’s rights movement came to London for the 2018 International Conference on Men’s Issues (ICMI) – an annual summit bringing together MRAs and their sympathisers from the US, Canada, Australia, India and Europe. As someone who’s been following men’s rights for a while, I wanted to go along, partly to find out what actually happens at these events, but also to see whether the attendees really all were the women-hating wackos they are believed to be.

Right out of the gate, Jackman claims that MRAs are believed to be women-hating wackos. Pathetic excuse for journalism, but then again, this is Vice.

So, who are the MRAs? What you realise at events like ICMI is that, to the extent that a “men’s movement” exists, it’s really a bunch of smaller groups rallying around related issues. Of these, there are four main camps: child custody, domestic violence, false accusations (rape and sexual assaults) and circumcision (still a huge hang up for the movement). Add a handful of “red pillers” and alt-right types, and that’s everyone covered.

These so-called “camps” are merely some of the major issues that the movement cares about. Circumcision is a hangup in the same way that female genital mutilation is a hangup; how are the two any different? Jackman skips a few major issues, like anti-male bias in prison sentencing and the vastly higher rates of male suicide. Of course he has to add the tiresome smear of anyone so-called “progressives” don’t like as “alt-right”. Dumbasses, if everyone is alt-right, that means no one is alt-right.

What brings all these groups and individuals together is an underlying belief that the system is rigged against men, to one extent or another. Some ICMI delegates attribute this to a general naivety among those in power to assume the best of women; others see feminism as a malign conspiracy to shatter the nuclear family and usher in an era of weak men and socialist state control.

Those in power are biased in favor of women. Feminists are against traditional families and the ideology is rooted in communism. See How #MeToo Revealed the Marxist Roots of Feminism.

At the start of 2018, The Southern Poverty Law Center officially classed two men’s rights organisations as hate groups, identifying them as “male supremacist”. Overwhelmingly, groups or websites advocating men’s rights present their arguments with a misogynistic slant, whether it’s coded or undisguised. MRAs commonly have a victim mentality – viewing themselves as being systemically persecuted, with women getting a better deal – and many are loudly anti-feminist.

The SPLC is a left-wing smear factory. They were recently forced to pay a huge settlement to Islamic reformer Majid Nawaz after wrongfully calling him an anti-Muslim extremist. It’s funny that the author complains about MRAs having a victim mentality and being anti-feminist, when feminists, who have vastly more political influence, claim to be victims and are anti-MRA. Pot, meet kettle.

So: is there misogyny within the movement, to the point you could say it’s one of its defining characteristics? Absolutely. As the SPLC has pointed out, while some men’s rights advocates “voice legitimate and sometimes disturbing complaints about the treatment of men, what is most remarkable is the misogynistic tone that pervades so many”.

Is there misandry in the feminist movement, to the point you could say it’s one of its defining characteristics? Absolutely. If the MRAs have legitimate points, who gives a shit about their tone?

However: was the ICMI solely about women-hating? No. Some of the speakers I saw managed to get their points across – the need to support male victims of sexual violence, for example – without resorting to misogynistic rhetoric, or painting men as society’s great victims. Even then, though, it wouldn’t take long for audience members to make the connection to feminism as the ultimate evil. You’d think, too, that speakers would feel at least a little uneasy about speaking in front of banners proclaiming the latest “Lying Feminist of the Month” – but apparently not.

Why would they? Feminists have been notorious liars, most blatantly in their nearly universal claim that they believe in equal opportunity for everyone.

As a rule of thumb, the more overtly political the speaker, the closer they came to outright misogyny. At one low point, an Austrian political activist presented his “red pill” political platform, calling for compulsory paternity testing at birth (in general, the men’s rights movement is obsessed with cuckolding) and acknowledging common ground with white nationalists. Most attendees watching on shook their heads as he spoke.

How is this any different from radical communist feminists on the edge of their movement?

Maybe it’s this intense emotional involvement which allows newcomers to swallow the wider dictum around men being the oppressed sex, something which flies in the face of popular evidence. Take domestic violence: it would be silly to deny that men experience DV at all (including from male perpetrators, of course) – but to claim that men are somehow the biggest victims (either in numbers alone, or by getting a rougher ride from the system) requires a real warping of reality.

Bullshit. While there may be more women who suffer domestic abuse (though there is evidence the the balance may be fairly even), men who are abused are treated vastly worse in most cases. At the extreme, there are places where if a man reports domestic abuse, he is automatically treated by the authorities as the abuser. Denying this is a real warping of reality.

Whether that warping comes from an overpowering emotional response (i.e. the inability to see beyond your own traumatic experience), an internalised distrust of women (i.e. misogyny) or a mixture of both – well, that’s the difficult thing to say.

Distrust of women (especially those who aren’t worthy of trust) is not misogyny. If women and the media want to be trusted, they need to earn trust. Smearing men as misogynists will earn the exact opposite.

If men’s rights has a strategic weakness, beyond the outright misogyny espoused by so many of the movement’s members, it’s the inability to empathise with women who might be in a similar situation – or even build bridges with women’s campaigns. This oversight means that even when the movement hits upon real issues – male sexual abuse, for example – its tactics usually fall short of what the issue deserves.

There is no way to build a bridge to feminist campaigns. Third wave feminists see men as the enemy. The real weakness of the men’s rights movement is male gynocentrism.

Often, though, the discussion has a habit of falling to the lowest common denominator. The language can be dehumanising, whether deliberate or accidental (men, in general, are “men”, whereas women are usually “females”), and you’re never too far away from a cringeworthy or problematic interjection.

Perhaps you are cringing because your biases are being challenged.

Towards the end of the weekend, for example, one sympathiser of the Men Going Their Own Way movement – which advocates men avoiding relationships with women – questioned whether a speaker was too quick to attribute a particular woman’s behaviour to feminism, rather than the nature of women themselves.

How is it invalid to question whether a behavior is innate rather than driven by ideology? This question is of paramount importance. Ideological beliefs are subject to change with rational arguments. Instinctual behaviors, like male gynocentrism, must be continuously recognized and wrestled with at a conscious level.

It’s attitudes likes this which make the movement (not to mention the misogyny and its caricature of feminists as angry misandrists) hard to take seriously – and which will ultimately harm those it wants to protect.

Male gynocentrism gives you license to claim that those who support men’s rights are misogynist. Many feminists are angry misandrists.

As an individualist, I support the right of those who speak out for men’s rights and issues to do so. Those who mindlessly criticize them from a position of progressive orthodoxy believe they are superior, but they are living in their own (admittedly larger) ideological bubble. The men’s rights movement are doing nothing to infringe on my rights, whereas the progressives are attacking me financially by constantly advocating for higher taxation, and are attempting to suppress my right to free speech. More power to the MRAs.