The Debate About Whether Men Have Been Left Behind Is Decades Old

Donald Trump’s success with men—especially Latino men and young white men—has caused handwringing among Democrats. Some have charged that the party has abandoned male interests, or even taken to treating men derisively, with disastrous consequences. According to John Della Volpe, director of polling at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, these men are not radicals or incels. “They are your sons, or they’re your neighbor’s sons,” he told the BBC in late October. “Many support equality for women, but they also feel their own concerns go unheard.”

This critique is a continuation of a narrative that developed during the campaign. Commentators asserted that men’s loneliness, disillusionment, declining educational outcomes, under- and unemployment, and feelings of abandonment by Democrats were driving them toward Trump, the GOP, and an almost caricatured vision of masculinity embodied by pro-wrestler Hulk Hogan and UFC’s Dana White.

Yet, while there is evidence to support some of these claims, it’s necessary to trace the discussion about marginalized men back to its roots: the men’s rights movement. For over 60 years, its activists have argued that men have drawn the short end of the stick, thanks in large part to what they characterize as feminist movements that purport to fight for gender equality but instead actually prioritize women over men.

Understanding the links between the men’s rights movement and the current fixation on disillusioned young men is critical because men’s rights activists have used many of these claims to advance a political agenda that attempts to hold girls and women back. 

The men’s rights movement began spreading across the country in the early 1960s in response to what activists saw as a “divorce racket” that fleeced men and coddled women. Their complaints ignored the reality of divorce at the time: the restrictive fault-based system limited access to divorce, and structural inequalities like unequal pay and pink-collar professions made it impossible for women to support themselves (and their children) after their marriages ended. Nonetheless, men’s rights activists bemoaned how family courts awarded women alimony at the expense of their ex-husbands, as well as usually granting them custody of children (and with it, child support payments) thanks to a decades-old presumption that mothers were the more nurturing parents, particularly for younger children. 

This anger spawned men’s rights groups like the pertinently named Divorce Racket Busters, founded in 1960 in Sacramento, and the American $ociety of Divorced Men—pointedly using the dollar sign in its name to emphasize men’s perceived financial exploitation.

These organizations convened to fight against divorce laws and provide emotional support for men, as well as connecting them with sympathetic attorneys willing to fight for the “male interest” in court. Much like the practice of consciousness-raising occurring in feminist circles during the same years, early men’s rights organizations offered social connection and a sense of political purpose to their members. 

Through these gatherings a broader argument began cohering: men faced systematic and fundamental discrimination in a changing world. This belief enabled aggrieved men to see themselves as a class and a constituency for the first time.

While some of them yearned to turn back the clock, most men’s rights activists wanted to advance a new gender order—one that borrowed selectively from the burgeoning second-wave women’s liberation movement. If women wanted true equality, these men believed, including the right to leave their marriages, work in male-dominated industries, and earn equal pay, then they should also stand on their own two feet at the end of marriages.

Some in the men’s rights movement claimed that just as women suffered from caricatured ideas about femininity and sexuality, so too did people mistreat and objectify men because of outdated conceptions of masculinity. For every female “sex object” diminished because of stereotypes, there was a male “success object” expected to excel at work, stifle his emotions, and financially support his wife and children. Feminist reforms that prioritized girls and women, such activists argued, ignored the plight of modern men.

Figures like Farrell did admit that a power imbalance existed between men and women, and that misogyny had enduring and deleterious effects. Yet they claimed that women discriminated against men just as much as men oppressed women—and worse, that this “misandrist” mistreatment was normalized by family courts and the wider culture. 

Perhaps surprisingly, during the 1970s, these activists become enthusiastic promoters of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which prohibited denying “Equality of rights under the law…on account of sex.” Second-wave feminists fought hard for the ERA, viewing it as a legal shortcut for achieving women’s equality. Men’s rights activists had similar ideas—except they wanted to level the playing field for what they saw as marginalized men. In their view, the ERA would abolish alimony and men’s disproportionate child support payments. 

Perhaps most importantly, men’s rights activists believed something primarily promoted by ERA opponents like Phyllis Schlafly: that the amendment would force women to serve in the military, a hypothetical and alarmist position given that the draft had ended in 1973. Unlike Schlafly, however, men’s rights activists cheered this possibility. They argued that the all-male draft had been an unfair outrage perpetuated on men—one so grievous that men’s rights leader Fred Hayward equated it with rape in 1981. 

As the feminist movement made gains, men’s rights activists began asserting that the political spotlight on violence against women was leading to false accusations of workplace sexual harassment, sexual assault, and domestic violence—something they hoped the ERA would correct. They argued that these claims ruined the lives of individual men and vilified masculinity as violent and predatory. They imagined that the ERA’s passage would lead to equal punishments for male and female “wrongdoers” in the workplace. Such wrongdoing, they believed, should not only account for male sexual harassment and assault, but also punish women for displaying “sexuality through application of makeup, mode of dress, and exposure of sexually alluring body parts.” 

Even after the ERA ratification deadline expired in 1982, some men’s rights activists kept hope alive, attempting to resuscitate it—paralleling the efforts among some feminists.

Most men’s rights activists, however, turned their attention to laws at the state and local level during the 1980s and 1990s, along with academic understandings of gender violence. Increasingly, they falsely claimed that men, not women, were the primary victims of domestic violence. With the support of sociologists Murray Straus and Richard Gelles, activists inaccurately proclaimed that politicizing “battered wives” distracted from the problem of “family violence” that included a high proportion of male victims.

More broadly, men’s rights activists began pointing to a long list of poor outcomes affecting boys and men as proof that men were the ones being discriminated against. The claims spanned from lower rates of attainment in higher education and white-collar professions to higher proportions of mental health struggles and “deaths of despair,” including suicides and drug overdoses. 

Most of these efforts received scant attention and men’s rights activists achieved relatively little well into the 21st century. Yet, the era of social media and podcasts has expanded their reach in ways their forbears could only have dreamed of. They’ve also latched onto Trump as a defender of men’s rights, while cheering the misogynistic mockery of his two female opponents: Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Kamala Harris in 2024.

The result is that the central premise of the men’s rights movement—that boys and men are being left behind—has gone mainstream.

The movement’s longer history has largely escaped notice, but it provides crucial context for the burgeoning debate about whether poor outcomes and private struggles are changing the politics of young men. Men’s rights activists have long made many similar claims—and they’ve used them to push dangerous and radical “solutions,” which would harm girls and women in the name of fairness to men.

For example, men’s rights activists have argued for abolishing the Violence Against Women Act, which they claim discriminates against male victims. They’ve gone so far as to sue state services to help female victims in Minnesota, California, Maine, and West Virginia, efforts that drain already-overburdened agencies of their limited time and resources. Some men’s rights activists have even pushed for men having an equal say in cases of abortion and adoption, which would give them control over women’s bodies. Some longtime men’s rights fantasies about overturning no-fault divorce—without reinstating men’s historic alimony obligations—have even made their way into conservative reform efforts in red states like Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma.

Understanding this history is the key to enabling Democrats and the media to address the alienation of young men and their drift rightward without unwittingly empowering this movement—one that wants to restore “men’s rights” to unearned legal privileges, unfair economic and educational advantages, and, quite literally, to women’s bodies.