I arrive at the gathering at 4 p.m. on December 17 to a group of about ten men, casually dressed, imbibing tea and coffee and chatting around a long wooden table. My entrance is met with restrained courtesy—and a perceptible cloud of suspicion. Why, they must wonder, would I, a lesbian feminist, want to break bread at their masculinist table? As cautiously as I tread their terrain and as much as I disagree with most of their politics, I believe that some of their views are in the interest of feminism.

As Mel introduces his troops, who feel their movement has failed, the reason they eye me with self-protective skepticism becomes clear. Some of the men claim they have lost jobs and relationships over their men's rights activism; hence, a few request that I use a pseudonym when referring to them, like "Charles," the loquacious intellectual to my right, who believes that men today are paralyzed with confusion as to how to behave toward the opposite sex. "A man is guilty if he opens the door for a woman," he says, "but he's also guilty if he doesn't, so he's always wrong." The way Charles sees it "men have all the disadvantages of the old and new systems and women have all the advantages."

To my left sits Tony Nazarro, a former deputy director of NCM, who produces a cable access show called Mens Net. The arch conservative compares the men's movement to Vietnam, calling it a "no-win situation." He calls for "gender sanity," which he believes means: "As a female, don't push to change a law that will make you a cop walking a beat in Bedford Stuyvesant. You don't have the physicality to do that." He bristles at the New York City Police Department for "lowering its height standard to accommodate women."

At the other end of the table, a tall, robust man named Roy also reflects back on Vietnam and bemoans all the jobs vets lost to women upon returning to a thankless country. "A lot of us at this table," the fiery activist insists, "are victims of affirmative action. We suffer in silence. Nobody gives a fuck about us. It's reverse discrimination gone amok."

Next to Roy is a tall, handsome father's rights advocate named Stephen Metzger. Metzger believes that courts are still partial to mothers, usually awarding them primary custody. Progress for him would be "a universal shared parenting law from the federal level—a presumption of joint physical custody."

The leader of this weary clan, Mel, who's miraculously kept the NCM and himself financially afloat the last 25 years as a paid men's rights pundit and counselor, sits next to me, opposite Roy, at the other end of the table. Unlike most MRAs, Mel's a liberal democrat who supports a woman's right to choose and equal rights for LGBT people.

He came into his masculinist consciousness sometime in 1959 when he was eight years old. "I became aware of the sexism of the draft in conversation with my father," the long-haired, bespeckled 62-year-old remembers. "The realization that society can draft and kill only men, do anything it wants to men," he emphasizes, "and not be required to atone for that sex discrimination has remained at the center of my activism all these years."