To dismiss the MRM as merely misogynist and extreme would be to ignore the fact that their beliefs are shared by a troublingly large percentage of the American population. And while the MRM’s rhetoric is ugly and often sophistic, they have identified a number of issues—consent, victim-blaming, and legal standards of proof—that have too often been presented in black and white terms, when the reality is much more complicated.

Take the issue of false rape accusations, which gets endless play on MRM websites and YouTube channels. Women falsely accuse men of rape for “lots of reasons,” Karen Straughan, a 43-year old Canadian mother-of-three who has become a major figure in the MRM, told me when we spoke on the phone. Straughan mentions the case of Praise Martin-Oguike, a Temple University football player falsely accused of rape last year by a woman who was apparently angry that he wouldn’t have a relationship with her. There is also the Hofstra University student who falsely accused five men of rape in 2009, allegedly to keep her boyfriend from finding out she’d cheated on him. (The Hofstra case has become a touchstone in the MRM community, viewed as proof that a woman will ruin five men’s lives to cover her tracks if she needs to.)

The most reliable statistics available place the number of false rape reports at between 2 and 8 percent of all rape reports. Yet most people, both in and out of the MRM community, believe these numbers to be much higher. One survey found that both male and female college students believe that about 50 percent of rape allegations are false. So while the substance of the MRM’s claims are false (false reports of rape take place much less frequently than they claim), they have identified a flashpoint issue that progressives disregard at their peril. False reporting of rape can be a life-destroying crime. It may not be especially common, but it is serious.

The way rape is dealt with on college campuses is another bugaboo of the MRM. “We have a problem with feminists hyper-inflating rape statistics, creating a kind of hysteria on campus over a problem that needs due attention from law enforcement,” says Paul Elam, the founder of A Voice for Men, widely considered the flagship website of the MRM. The site, which features essays pontificating on society’s supposed anti-male bias, gets about 10,000 to 12,000 hits per day, says Elam, 57, proudly declaring that this is more than “every significant feminist website I can think of” except for Jezebel. (Elam’s estimates are probably off. While Slate doesn’t release precise breakdowns, their overall traffic for January was 24 million; Double X made up a good portion of that traffic.) The way Elam sees it, college campuses are hotbeds of feminist bias where all male students are shamed as potential rapists in endless anti-rape orientations and workshops. He and other activists devote much time and energy to disproving the popular “one-in-four college women will be sexually assaulted before graduation” statistic that floats around campus sexual assault awareness seminars and rape support webpages. He especially scorns the way many universities use their own on-campus justice systems to deal with accused rapists, sometimes coming to conclusions different than the court system.