Men aren't wrong to feel alienated by feminism. But they're wrong about why.
Capitalism is our true enemy.
One of my jobs as a teenager was cutting metal in a factory that produced picture frames. I hated the lack of air conditioning, long hours, and low pay. But I loved hanging with the other workers on our lunch break. We’d laugh and drink sodas and complain about the boss.
It reminded me of being around my dad and his friends who worked with him at FedEx. They might’ve made sexist and racist jokes here and there, even the women and those who weren’t white. But they seemed more real than many of the students at my college. Less worried about seeming cool or respectable. More like the average person.
I felt most connected with my coworkers after the multinational conglomerate that owned the factory sent analysts to make us more efficient. Three men in suits slinked around all day whispering to each other and taking notes.
The next morning our boss announced changes to how we worked. Things like using the other hand for certain movements and stacking things differently. The guy who glued the wooden frames together was pissed. They made him dry his frames vertically instead of horizontally, causing them to warp. It made no sense, except that it allowed the company to produce more frames, warped or not.
I’m reminiscing about this because I’ve been debating with a few folks on Reddit about silicosis, a lung disease that kills thousands of people a year. Many of those people are workers manufacturing quartz kitchen countertops in factories similar to the one I worked in. Almost all of them are men.
It’s horrific what’s happening to these workers. Their lungs get scarred from inhaling silica dust, causing them to drown in their own fluids in hospital beds. Sometimes it all happens within months of exposure.
The folks on Reddit, most if not all of them men, see this as an example of misandry, or prejudice against men. The media isn’t covering it. The medical system hasn’t developed a treatment or cure. Doctors want workers to be protected, but government regulators aren’t listening.
But it’s clearly a labor rights issue caused by capitalism. The companies want to make as much profit as possible. They don’t care if workers are using safe cutting techniques and wearing protective equipment, unless they’re forced to by either the government or union contracts.
Yes, it should be a bigger story in the news. But that’s because corporate media woefully underreports issues affecting the working class. Millions of female workers are exposed to toxic chemicals and harassment in sweatshops in the Global South, but we rarely if ever hear about it.
Yes, governments should care. But they only will if they aren’t rigged by the rich and powerful. Last year, Trump paused a rule that would’ve forced companies to protect workers from getting silicosis and gutted the federal agency responsible for workplace safety.
Sexism plays a structural role in capitalism, but it’s misogyny (like white supremacy) that benefits the ruling class. During the Industrial Revolution, factory owners employed large numbers of women because they had less political influence than men and were forced to accept lower wages and more dangerous working conditions. This super cheap labor was the main driver of profits for the new capitalist class that would soon rule the world. Today, on average, women continue to make less money and do more unpaid work at home than men, because of capitalism’s hyperexploitation of reproductive labor.
In my factory, women and men who weren’t white generally were given the more menial jobs. Packing orders. Carrying materials around. Cleaning work areas. Most of the technical jobs were given to white men, including myself. This could have been a coincidence, but it fits with experiences I’ve heard from workers and labor organizers in other industries.
Why am I rehashing a debate from a tiny corner of the internet? Because it helped me understand why more and more men are blaming feminism as the source of their oppression.
I’ve increasingly seen this perspective showing up in comments on my newsletter and social media posts. Men point to evidence like women mocking men online, the disparate impact on men in the criminal justice system, and the lack of media coverage about male victims of domestic violence. Many don’t dispute that misogyny exists. But some say misandry is just as much a problem, while others say it’s even more so.
My first reaction was to chalk it up to these guys being “incels” and “men’s rights activists (MRAs).” It’s easy to write them off as right-wingers filled with hate for women. To be sure, there are many men whose misogynistic views should be condemned. But I’m beginning to think that many are well-intentioned and have truly experienced feminism as an alienating and even hateful force in their personal lives.
I feel a twinge of shame when I see a viral post saying that men are trash. But I’m lucky enough to have learned from some badass women writers and organizers that the reactionary neoliberal feminism that’s gone mainstream in recent years isn’t the only kind of feminism. That it’s a “trickle-down theory” that doesn’t actually help the majority of women. That it “views the world and the economy as a zero-sum game … so by definition, helping women to advance is going to push men out.” That it’s “fundamentally hostile to the interests of the majority of women, indeed of all people throughout the world.” That of course it’s alienating to men. That there are more inclusive forms of feminism that include working-class men like the men dying of silicosis out of solidarity.
But the answer isn’t to blame feminism back. Our true oppressors are the rich and powerful hoarding more and more wealth and rigging the political system in their favor.
The billionaires and their fascist friends running the government are the ones keeping the status quo of laws and policies that oppress women. They’re also oppressing all people who work for a living, including men, by destroying unions, keeping wages stagnant, defunding public services, and controlling the media and social media.
The enemy is capitalism, not feminism. Even if certain popular forms of feminism don’t challenge capitalism and alienate men in the process.
Try this:
I’m trying a new thing, giving you one practical step to take at the end of every newsletter. Watch this short video on “feminism for the 99 percent.”
I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments (or email me: jeremy@mohler.coach)!
With warmth & solidarity,
Jeremy
At the risk of some blowback... I feel as though you came oh so close to the root of the issue and failed to dig all the way down.
You made your point that the issue is not feminism but capitalism and that men's rage is misplaced. That it should be placed on the exploitative capitalist class and not on the feminist movement although it is understandably frustrating to be blamed.
I would argue the last level is the feminist movement blaming men in the first place as opposed to the exploitative capitalists. The capitalists exploited women in those factories paying them less and providing horrible working conditions. The capitalists also exploited men in the steel industry. An unbelievable rate of death and mutilation at those jobs for decades not to mention the sickness and cancer rates. The capitalists exploited blacks in slavery, Asians on the west coast and now undocumented immigrants regardless of sex.
When an auto mechanic hears a feminist say that it is his fault he's going to get pissed because she is flat wrong. He works his ass off covered in grease with callouses on all of his fingers and a sore back to earn a hard won wage to support his family. Then he hears that he is the problem from an article or TV snippet that he is the problem with society holding women down when he loves his mother, wife and daughter and he is understandably dismissive and pissed. He doesn't have the education to say "She's not mad at me, she's mad at the capitalist system that is holding her back and keeping her down. She's just misdirected in her anger and I will have compassion for the rage she's throwing my way." That is asking a lot of your average person of any kind.
Now I know there are many that will say "The exploitative capitalists are men!" therefore men are the problem. This is again disingenuous as you differentiate between the radical man hating feminists (reactionary neoliberal I believe you reference) and more thoughtful, nuanced feminism that specifically does not blame all men for the sins of a few. There are many exploitative capitalists that are women. Alice Walton, Julia Koch, Jacqueline Mars, Miriam Adelson, Diane Hendricks have all done their fair share of exploiting to prove their psychopathy is just as strong as any mans.
The implication of your article is that women can blame men (or at least be understanding of their rage) because men are the exploitative class and that men also need to blame men instead of women. BOTH have misplaced their anger as the exploitative class gets to watch a gender war when they don't give a shit about your sex, color, religion or anything else about you as long as they can exploit what they want.
Feminists also need to aim their anger at the rich. Not at men. The language MATTERS when you say I hate billionaires instead of I hate men. Then the auto mechanic says "Yes! I'm on your side sister! Fuck those guys!" Now we're aligned in hating the right men (and a few deserving women).
I think you discount how many systems are biased against men that have nothing to do with billionaires.
The custody courts are one of them, for example. Stare decisis does not apply in family law, where instead a ‘best interest of the child’ standard is applied. Which sounds nice on the surface— but is a subjective standard that allows judges and other officers of the court to come to motivated reasoning that conforms to their own personal biases.
As a Feminist, I know the standard response to this assertion: that at least in Massachusetts (basically, the only state we have data on) the data shows men who actually go to trial usually wins their cases. This ignores why most men are forced to settle.
Most states have what is called a Guardian ad Litem system, and mandatory moderation. The Guardian ad Litem is basically a lawyer who is supposed to represent your child’s best interest in court, rather than having children testify or relying on children to actually know what is best for them (e.g. cases where the child might be coached against a parent, or may not understand consequences at an adult level, or many other such scenarios). But the GAL also makes a recommendation to the judge; and most judges only rarely (if ever) make decisions in opposition to the GAL.
GALs have biases, and cannot be cross examined in the court, their recommendation to the judge is sealed and cannot be challenged in court. If your GAL is biased in a way that the evidence does not support you can sue them for violation of your due process rights , but this is an independent case from your custody case. Even if you win, it will not change the outcome of the custody case, and cannot be used to reopen the custody finding.
So if you dig into the system in most states (I am most familiar with the Wisconsin system) you find out why most men settle: the GAL usually discloses their finding during the mandatory mediation process in most states, in an effort with the mediator to get the party the GAL finds against to settle.
So if the GAL finds against you, this is like a more than 9/10 probability that the judge will side with the GALs. To even try to dispute the GALs recommendation you basically have to pay for an independent custody study; the custody study then becomes evidence in court that can be discussed and challenged through cross examination of presenting evidence for your case.
Except that also, as your child’s lawyer, the GAL also gets a say in which ‘expert’ conducts the study. They basically get to choose who gets a say in reviewing their work. They will dispute the selection of which expert gets assigned by the court to do the custody study, usually with the support of the parent they found in favor of. Surprise surprise— judges rarely allow the experts the GAL disputes to be selected for these studies. So again— these studies often come to decisions that support the GAL’s position, because the GAL is assumed to be an objective third party, they have been allowed to handpick who will do the study, and are allowed to consult on the study throughout the whole process. This is like a dirty cop getting to chose which internal affairs officer does the investigation, and having full access to the investigation and the investigator through the process.
So if the study comes in against you, then not only has the GAL found against you, but now this new party. If judges almost never disagree with GALs, they find against GALs even less when both the GAL and the custody study (done by someone the GAL and opposing counsel handpicked) aligns with the GAL.
But bias in this system is real; there are GALs who have been successfully sued for bias. But also if you talk to men who have been through the process, you will hear about this. In my own case, the GAL, an older white woman, decided I was an angry brown man, on basically no evidence. Like I cannot tell you how evident this was a case of racism this was, but she was a lawyer and didn’t make any obvious evidence I could sue her with. Other men of color I’ve known had similar experiences; because they disputed or argued with the GAL, the GAL labeled them as having ‘anger issues’ and used that to justify finding against them. Not to mention— GALs are overwhelmingly white women by profession.
So really— that the greater majority of men settle out of court in custody hearings is really more evidence of how busted the system is. If a GAL has bias against you— then you’re fucked. The only men going to court are those who have the support of the GAL— and they usually win. And hence the data we see.
So no, this isn’t this way because capitalism. This is this way because patriarchy— because our society still sees raising children as a woman’s role, and so it has found a way for our legal system to favor women overwhelmingly in the custody system.
But fathers who come away having to interact with this system and encountering the bias in some of the most important legal decisions of their lives? Have direct and painful experiences with this busted system.
I’m a feminist who believes women should have equal rights, but it is so evident that fair outcomes do not come out of the custody or divorce system.
If you want men to believe they have equal rights, then you would expect women to be about equally unhappy with these processes; there is no gender-equal reason to believe that mothers are better parents than fathers. That is not the world we live in; defending the divorce courts and the custody system has been a project of feminism for the past 50 years. Suggesting that reform is needed is not illiberal or antifeminist, but that also is not how this conversation usually goes.