The Early History and Persistent Narratives of the Men’s Rights Movement

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Alexis de Coning, whose focus is on the men’s rights movement. Although a great deal more visible in recent years, it emerged to public visibility already in the 1960s and 1970s; but it is likely that early men’s rights ideas go back much further still. Alexis takes a very broad approach here to what defines the men’s rights movement – overall, it exists at the nexus of gender and labour rights and positions men as having greater social-economic and financial status that is exploited by parasitic women.

This is in response to a growing women’s rights movement, which is seen as taking rights away from men; by the 1920s, a first small men’s rights meeting was organised in Vienna, and was covered even in a variety of U.S. newspapers. By the 1970s, the rhetoric had been modernised to a claim that men were positioned by women as ‘success objects’ based on their socio-economic status, much like women were positioned as ‘sex’ objects based on their looks.

Such discourse has remained consistent, and continuously repeats claims that men are discriminated against while women receive handouts without reason; this also reveals some profound and persistent anxieties about life in late-stage capitalism that such men’s rights activists hold.