The Men Fight Back [After #MeToo]

Mother Jones | Archive.org

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One of the consequences of the revelations that many prominent men behaved poorly in private was a very public effort to grapple with the whole concept of masculinity. Boys have long been mired in a well-publicized and seemingly endless “crisis.” But MeToo raised another question: Who would speak to these men?

Over the last five years, the answer has become clear: influencers. These micro-celebrities have positioned themself as guidance givers to struggling boys. Often, they pose the problem as not men’s fault and instead blame the usual suspects, feminists. Many are part of, or adjacent to, what has become known as the “manosphere”—a loose-knit network of hyper-online masculinists who see the undermining of traditional gender norms as the reason for the decline of, well, everything.

Trump’s ascendency in some ways helped push this along. One of the early news-making moments of his 2016 campaign was during the first Republican primary debate when Megyn Kelly asked him about his past comments in which he referred to women as “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.” He answered, “Only Rosie O’Donnell.” (He would later say that Kelly asked the question because she was menstruating.) But to focus solely on him ignores the unique ways young men have found their way to right-wing politics through a backlash to MeToo, rather than the other way around.

“If you look at the history of antifeminist movements, they have always positioned themselves as responding to an overreach,” says Annie Kelly, a postdoctoral researcher at King’s College London, who studied the impact of digital culture on antifeminism and hosts the podcast Manclan. Recently “lots of antifeminist [rhetoric] used MeToo as the [current] moment when things went too far.”

Here is a guide to a few of the bold-face names in the manosphere influencer galaxy, who rose to fame, and power, telling men that women were asking for too much while offering a uniquely politicized brand of male self-help...