From the 1980s onward, the American incarceration rate soared, and those most damaged by this astronomical rise were males. Although there were socially and politically structural attacks on wartime masculinity beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, those attacks shifted after the Vietnam War and veered from focusing on men as killers to men as deadbeat dads. Furthermore, the rise of anti-masculinity could be seen in the cruel intersection of massive imprisonment of men and dropping off of political activity by men. Indeed, hyper-incarceration stripped millions of men of their voting rights. As a consequence, the voting bloc of men in America declined.

To ignore the negative political effect that incarceration has had on millions of men is to express a cavalier misandry. And this attitude has only intensified with feminists demonizing men in general as pedophiles and rapists. Such sexist claims have had dire effects on criminalizing men in our democracy. Clearly this can be seen in the run-up to our current period of male hatred – the federal prison population increased by about 790% since 1980, dwarfing all other prison populations in the world, and the combined state and federal prison population increased by about 600% since 1980.

These are not just numbers. These are men’s lives. And equally important, these are male voters. The last three decades saw an alarming political disenfranchisement of men, paralleled by the mass incarceration of men. We often hear about how many black men have been incarcerated – a fact well documented by Ohio State University professor Michelle Alexander who correctly claims that more African American men are in prison today than were in slavery in 1850. In her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Alexander shows that 40% of men incarcerated in American jails and prisons today are black. And while racism is a major factor, so is gender with almost 95% of all prisoners male. And as the male prison population rocketed since the 1980s, a voting gap formed between men and women, so that by 2012 there were 10 million more registered female voters than male voters. Unfortunately, to regain one’s voting rights has been made extremely difficult for ex-convicts – contributing to the increasing number of eligible but unregistered male voters.

It is not my place here to predict what difference these male voters would make in all of our elections since the 1980s – but my guess is that we would not have many of the male issues in critical mass today. For there is no doubt that the diminishment of men in the American political process has only aided feminist political causes that turn out to be even more destructive to men overall.