Men’s rights groups seized the moment, chivalrously denouncing the attack and simultaneously suggesting—big surprise—d’Entremont was making it all up. Various men’s rights groups, including one in Australia and the women-led Honey Badger Brigade, collectively ponied up $4,500 to reward anyone with information that could lead to an arrest. Attila Vinczer, leader of Men’s Rights Canada, put up reward posters on campus. Yet even as they denounced the attack, they sowed doubt. The reward money they collected proved that no men’s rights activist could possibly have attacked d’Entremont, or so they argued. Considering the already heated and threatening environment on campus, such a claim stretched credulity. Yet the obfuscation was effective. Wasn’t this just another case of a woman being deceitful to get what she wanted? As another men’s rights leader wrote on the organization’s website: “My money is on the idea, and I don’t think I am alone here, that it [feminism] is the kind of movement filled with people who may not really want this case to be solved; with people who think she is lying.”
Lest we make the mistake of dismissing how dangerous and widespread these narratives have become in the short years since, let’s briefly return to what Donald Trump said in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election after multiple women accused him of sexual assault: “Every woman lied.” Hell, he didn’t even know them. Trump claimed the women fibbed because they wanted to hurt his campaign. Was he mocked for this? Yes, of course. But he also won the election. Enough people (a lot of them, apparently, and many of them women) were eager to believe him. Because, as one Queen’s activist told me multiple times during our interview, the sentiment that feminists are liars, that they’re out to harm and undermine men, is everywhere. No wonder women are reluctant to call themselves feminists. The deeper questions are How did this happen and Why are women cheering it?
I was invited to Queen’s in fall 2016 to do a talk on the importance of independent media. While there, I visited with Brea Hutchinson at Grey House. I wanted to know what the campus was like two years after Fiamengo’s talk. Was men’s rights activism thriving? Was feminism? We sat down on mismatched furniture in one of the space’s casual meeting rooms. Outside, gray and white paint peeled from the wood, but a cheery, multicolored “Come in! Everyone welcome!” sign that hung from the porch extinguished any spookiness. Grey House was both shabby and cozy, certainly not the rich HQ of women’s privilege. Hutchinson told me that, so far, the 2016–17 academic year had been relatively quiet. The MIAS and feminists hadn’t clashed since the Fiamengo talk; in fact, she hadn’t heard a peep from MIAS at all that year. (And indeed, as of this writing, the group’s Facebook page seems to have vanished.) But, the Levana volunteer would agree in our later interview, that didn’t mean nothing had happened. Thinking had shifted, and while the MRA-feminist controversy might in many ways resemble a young sibling rivalry—that’s my toy! I want whatever she has! It’s not fair!—there were no “take-backsies” here.
Just that morning, I’d grabbed the satirical student paper Golden Words, in which one of the male editors had written a column called “Has Science Gone Too Far? Girls Now Have the Technology to Tell Me to Fuck Off.” It was supposed to be funny, I guess. But I mean, come on, dude: “What ground-breaking research was developed to allow women to come to terms with their agency and confidence to say this? Even ten years ago, they would have giggled uncomfortably and told me, ‘No thanks, maybe another time!’” Around the same time, Queen’s hosted its first Worth Week, a social justice initiative that was founded as Women’s Worth Week (emphasis mine). It had rebranded, organizers said, “to be more inclusive.” A few years before the rebranding, the campus paper had described the event as “a celebration of women.” That was wrong, said organizers. “Our event aims to celebrate all individuals, regardless of gender, by drawing attention to the importance of gender equality.” Remember, as the young college feminist told the Washington Post: “Feminism isn’t a political movement.”
This is the same campus where, in 2016, a twentysomething—presumably out to be the next, somehow cruder, Girls Gone Wild millionaire—made the video “Drunk Times with College Girls: Queen’s Homecoming” (“girls” was later changed to “students”), asking them if he could touch their “boobs.” The creator of the video, which had been watched sixteen thousand times in less than three months, pinned his own comment at the top: “Don’t take it out of context. If you can’t handle it—go watch cat videos!” But what context, exactly? Queen’s is also the same campus where school security has, in recent years, reported a distressing rise in prank calls through its blue light system, which is designed to prevent sexual assault on campus. They blamed the rise on engineering students who compete to get a “blue bar” for their school jackets, a process that involves going to blue light locations on campus, drinking a Blue Light beer, taping it to the pole, hitting the button, and then bolting. Apparently, you can also get a “true blue bar” if you damage the alarm. As Pam Cross, chair of Sexual Assault Centre Kingston, wrote at the end of 2012, the behavior is chillingly like the campus climate in 1989 “when some male students in residence responded to the No Means No anti-rape campaign by placing offensive signs in their residence windows. Those signs contained such slogans as ‘No Means Harder,’ ‘No Means More Beer,’ and ‘No Means Down on your Knees, Bitch.’”
I don’t want to pick on Queen’s. Universities across Canada and the US are grappling with the same potent culture. At the University of Toronto, backlash against the feminists who protested Fiamengo’s talk was both swift and violent. Men’s rights groups put the women’s photos online and encouraged surveillance. The first woman they targeted wrote about her experiences in the zine Pineapples Against the Patriarchy, produced by Queen’s feminists to discuss men’s rights action on their campus. “I was called Hitler’s Barbie, Feminazi Bitch, Princess Cupcake,” she wrote. “Walking around on campus and in the city became a difficult thing to do with what felt like an X marked on the back of my head.” And then, the next year, someone with the screen name “KillFeminists” threatened to do exactly that. “Walk into a classroom and fire a bullet in the feminist professor’s head,” read the anonymous threat, “and proceed to spray bullets all over the classroom.” The rest of the threat is even more gruesome and helpfully offers the location and price of where to get a gun in downtown Toronto. Police later deemed the threat “not credible,” but students were understandably scared. Some called for the cancellation of classes, and for six months after the threat police wandered the hallways where women’s studies classes were held.
Bonnie Burstow, an associate professor at the university’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, did not cancel her classes, though she did tell students she’d support them if they didn’t feel safe coming to class. She also told them this: “If feminists started canceling classes, they win. Whoever is sending around those threats wins.” Burstow was not impressed with how the university handled the anonymous online encouragement to shoot her, her colleagues, and her students. At first, she told me, administration didn’t even reveal the threats were against women. Instead, they used the term “members of the university community.” Campus feminists confronted administrators and forced them to be transparent. But, shockingly, added Burstow, administrators never consulted any of the faculty’s numerous experts on violence against women. “You might say they didn’t want to alarm women. Well, that’s also patriarchal. If our lives are being threatened we need to hear about it, and we need to figure out how we want to organize. Then they need to find a way to support us,” she said. “I don’t think anyone took seriously that this combines with other anti-feminist things we’re seeing at the university. It was treated as an isolated case, and it wasn’t isolated in the sense we’re seeing more and more action of men’s rights groups. These are people who are misogynists on a profound level. And you never know where that’s going to go.”
Men’s rights groups have sprouted across Canada and the US. Women, people of color,
and transgender folk are involved with many of them, in some cases acting as founders or co-founders, presidents and vice-presidents—belying stereotypes of the usual suspects. In a few short years, at least fifteen groups formed on Canadian campuses from coast to coast, and plenty of them faced their own battles with women on campus. Toronto’s Ryerson University drew the attention of men’s rights activists worldwide after its student union repeatedly denied the campus MIAS official club status, blocking it from funding or resources available to other student groups, like the Women’s and Trans Collective. In response, the MIAS sued the student union in April 2016. The lawsuit, led by the group’s president, a male fourth-year politics and governance student, and its social media executive, a female fourth-year journalism student, demanded the student union respect “freedom of expression” and give the MIAS club status. “[The denial] was contrary to the principles of natural justice and procedural fairness,” reads the suit, “[and] was tainted by a closed mind and bias.” The tense climate has led to a resurgent push—presumably resurrected from the horse-and-buggy era—for men-only universities. “Why not give men the chance to learn in male-positive spaces and be taught by teachers practicing male-positive pedagogy?” Fiamengo wrote in a September 2016 op-ed in the Toronto Sun. “I wouldn’t want to be a young man attending a co-ed university today.”
What a mess.
Elisabeth Eigerman is a curly-haired high school senior in Weston, Massachusetts. I spoke to her, along with dozens of other young women, throughout my three years researching this book because I wanted to know what drew—and repelled—young women when it came to feminism today, what issues they saw facing them and the movement itself. Her mom, she told me, with a laugh that dimpled her cheeks, was a women’s studies major who had wanted to raise her daughter without gender. She was terribly dismayed to find her young daughter shouting, “Need man! Need man!” at a Barbie catalogue. Nonetheless, Eigerman grew into feminism and has gone on to write for feminist publications, including the Jewish Women’s Archive website as its 2015–16 Rising Voices Fellow. When I asked Eigerman whom she’d like to see more involved in the feminist movement going forward, her response was immediate and ebullient: “Men, please!” It’s an answer I heard from many young women, who usually cited a variation of fifteen-year-old Michigan teen Enya Spaulding’s argument. “It will encourage larger change by eradicating the idea that only women can be feminists,” Spaulding told me, “which would open more minds to the idea of feminism.”
I don’t disagree. And neither, likely, would Eigerman. Like many feminists I spoke to, young and old, the eighteen-year-old argued that women’s rights had done a terrible job of discussing how the patriarchy affects men. “When we’re tackling social norms,” she told me, pausing in between sips from a mug of tea, “we should really tackle social norms that affect boys.” In a March 2016 blog post on the Jewish Women’s Archive, she expanded on her views, explaining what drives teen boys away from feminism, hitting the proverbial nail on its proverbial head. “These boys grow up being told they’re inherently sexist,” she wrote, “and watch as feminism tackles minor issues.” Modern feminist discourse, she criticized, treats all issues as equally problematic, expressing equal outrage over domestic violence (a reaction that she contends is justified) as it does over, say, super-air-conditioned workspaces (not so much). Boys see this and assume feminists are nitpickers with no real problems, she added. She stressed to me that she doesn’t think the men’s rights movement is the answer to tackling this disconnect, largely because it sacrifices focus on serious issues that affect men in favor of making fun of feminism.
Again, I don’t really disagree. Feminism has done a not-hot job of advocating for men and boys; we were too busy fighting for women. But men do face gender restrictions and damning expectations under the patriarchy, of course. Namely, they’re not supposed to do anything that seems remotely feminine. There are also places where race and class intersect. Though they do not uniquely affect men, they cause real trauma that can thread through generations. Indigenous and Black men, for example, face disturbing and disproportionately high rates of incarceration and poverty. These and many other issues demand more attention. They’re also ones that have complex underlying, contributing factors—none of which, however, can reasonably be blamed on feminism.
I wonder, though, if women, particularly those “fence-sitters” who operate outside of politics, realize the unintended consequences of adding their voices to the “But, men!” choir. You’ll get no arguments from me that society would be more equitable if we broke down gender should-bes, as in “women should be polite” and “men should be prodigious and hearty grunters.” But is that what we are, in fact, doing? I have my doubts. Statistics on male suicide, for instance, are commonly trotted out whenever an argument for men’s rights is put forward, highlighting the fact that men die by suicide at a rate four times higher than women. What is often not mentioned in this context is that women are three to four times more likely to attempt suicide and are hospitalized for attempts at one-and-a-half times more than men. Suicide is an important social issue, but it is not a zero-sum gender game. It’s both misleading and dangerous to paint it as such, especially when it’s used to put forth the idea that men lose while women gain at their expense (laughing diabolically while we do it).
Yet if the diverse rise in men’s and boys’ conferences (and not just those led by men’s rights groups) is anything to judge by, the idea that men need special attention has certainly caught on. The results are mixed, and in some cases very strange. Across the US are, for example, a plethora of Christian-based men-only conferences with names like “No Regrets,” “As For Me and My House,” “Courageous,” “Stronger,” “Master’s Men,” and, arguably the most popular, “Act Like Men,” an extension of the book of the same name, which preaches that men need forty days to achieve what’s called “biblical manhood.” The author of Act Like Men, James MacDonald, gruffly acknowledges that some people break gender stereotypes, but he clearly doesn’t like it: “We also know the woman who swears like a sailor and changes the oil in her own car—but if she’s your wife, that says more about you than it does about her.” Mostly, his advice is that acting like a man means not acting like a woman. I’m not being unfair here; that’s one of his primary rules, verbatim. Similar messaging is found in other Christian men’s conferences. The slogan of Master’s Men, held in Fresno, California, is “Iron Sharpening Iron.”
Then there are men’s health conferences—all great causes with somewhat constrained definitions of masculinity, mostly based on facial hair. Take the Southern Illinois Men’s Expo, which featured talks from a urologist and an infectious diseases doctor, as well as a beard and mustache contest and Dr. Dan the Pancake Man, who promised to immortalize attendees’ faces in batter (until they eat it, I suppose). The expo’s logo featured the trifecta of modern masculinity: beards, bowties, and bacon. The 2017 Epic Men’s Expo in Pennsylvania scrapped the health focus but did have a former Pittsburg Steelers linebacker as a guest and, of course, its own epic beard contest. Even the Movember Foundation, which does amazing work for men’s health issues, started after its founders decided to see if they could bring the mustache back, launching the campaign with an email that said: “Are you man enough to be my man?” Somewhere one of these campaigns has, I’m sure, included an axe-throwing contest. If it hasn’t already happened, I’d bet my beloved and extremely obese twelve-year-old tabby cat that it will soon.
Toronto’s inaugural three-day Gentleman’s Expo in 2016 (not to be confused with the Gentleman’s Club Expo, which bills itself as “the ONLY national convention and awards show for the multi-billion-dollar adult nightclub industry”) encouraged men to #BeBetter. Sponsored by Best Buy, Lincoln, American Express, and Clinique, the expo included a fashion show, beers, burgers, and guest talks from UFC fighter Georges St-Pierre, as well as former Toronto Maple Leafs heroes Wendel Clark and Doug Gilmour. It told men not to send unsolicited dick pics o
nline and used busty “booth babes” to sell its products. The Concierge Club, an event-planning company in Toronto that supplies models to host your party, featured prominently. Talk about mixed messages: similar to their Christian counterparts, these conferences preach a rigid and even traditionalist-infused masculinity, albeit more Dos Equis or Don Draper than Jesus. Don’t even get me started on the rise of International Men’s Day, which, since 2010, has gained steam in both Canada and the US (the opening of Global TV’s 2016 piece honoring the auspicious day: “Ladies, get ready to give your man some extra attention this November 19”).
It’s not all discouraging. My home city, Toronto, has, for the past few years, hosted the What Makes a Man conference. It’s the flag-ship annual event for the White Ribbon Campaign, a worldwide movement of men and boys who are, as its mission statement says, “working to end violence against women and girls, promote gender equity, healthy relationships and a new vision of masculinity.” The 2016 conference day featured prominent feminist activists on its panels, which included topics such as: “Men and Masculinity On and Off the Field,” which tackled sports culture and its presentation of ideal masculinity; “Military Culture and Evolving Masculinity,” an exploration of how that male-dominated culture has narrowed masculinity in harmful ways; and a panel on Canada’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis, a women-led conversation on how men can be better allies in pushing for much-needed answers and action. Interspersed among the afternoon’s talks were video presentations of men sharing their experiences with masculinity while building on the idea of safe spaces for men, free from forced and constricting expectations of what, ahem, makes a man. So good! This is, no doubt, the type of action Eigerman and other feminists are talking about when they ask feminism to expand into men’s issues territory.
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