Transcript | Men’s Rights Activists 101

[00:00:00] DR. EMILY CARIAN: Therapy can't solve misogyny. Misogyny is built into our culture and our social structures, and we have to root it out in those places, not just kind of in our personal psychologies.

[UNLADYLIKE THEME SONG]

[00:00:23] CRISTEN: This is Unladylike. I'm Cristen. We are turning the tables this episode and focusing on men. Finally!

I mean, here we are, 160 some-odd Unladylike episodes in, maybe 170, and not a single cisgender man has been invited on this show. I even turned down my own brother who asked to come on, and I am not joking. Uh, neither was he, which told me that he hadn't listened to enough episodes of Unladylike, and therefore was doubly disqualified.

And look, I mean, are we talking about men today? Yeah. And have I at long last, invited one on to discuss. God, no.

And if you don't get my sarcasm, you might be a men's rights activist, in which case please do not rate and review this podcast, you know, and save, save yourself some time. Go to Jordan Peterson's podcast. I'm sure he’s got one. Go listen to the Rogan Hour, y’know?

Now, men's rights is distinct from everyday sexism and misogyny in that its central belief is that cisgender men are society's real victims. They are the ones being oppressed. Women are the ones wielding the privilege. And feminism is the stiletto on their necks.

So, things they'll usually cite are child custody laws, alimony, circumcision is big. Domestic violence against men is a huge theme. And uh, you know, Johnny Depp is most definitely their 2022 Man of the Year. Man, that just took the wind outta my sails just to think about him, and that wasn't even a Jack Sparrow joke.

Men's rights also very much overlaps with incels, mass shooters and your Andrew Tate fanboys. But as I discovered from today's guest, men's rights anti-feminists have some key commonalities with feminist men!

Dr. Emily Carian is a sociologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a co-founder of the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism. She is also an editor of Male Supremacism in the United States: From Patriarchal Traditionalism to Misogynist Incels and the Alt-Right.

Emily and I chatted earlier this year for a bonus episode on the Unladylike Patreon–patreon.com/unladylikemedia–and our conversation has only gotten timelier since then.

So with that, engineer Ali, would you be so kind as to roll that tape?

[AUDIO STING]

CRISTEN: You look at the question of why gender inequality is so persistent and focus on masculinity and male supremacism and kind of the cultural beliefs around gender, and I am so curious what sparked your academic interest in these areas?

[00:03:54] DR. EMILY CARIAN: I came to grad school thinking I was going to study something totally different.

So I was interested in education and inequality in education. I had been a teacher before I went to grad school, so I was interested in that. And then I had kind of stumbled upon the men's rights movement online, I think as a lot of people first discovered them, on Reddit or other internet sites, and I was just really surprised by it and interested.

I had identified as a feminist for a while before that and after reading some of the claims they were making, like, you know, the gender wage gap doesn't exist, things like that, I was just really interested in how people came to see the world that way and to believe those things. And so it kind of piqued my interest.

And then in my first year of grad school, I took a theory class with Professor Corey Fields, and the way he had set up the class, we had to write three essays all on the same research topic, but using different theorists. So like one on marks, one on vapor. and I just decided I would write about the men's rights movement just to kind of think about the topic after becoming interested in it.

And after that, it just became my main research topic and I've been studying them since.

[00:05:24] CRISTEN: What are the kinds of things that you have learned, um, about, you know, kind of who is drawn into this and how?

[00:05:33] DR. EMILY CARIAN: I've looked at posts on online forums and then I've also done interviews with men's rights activists. I've learned a couple lessons about who is interested in this movement, who becomes mobilized in the movement and what appeals to them about it.

I think one of the big lessons from my research, you know, a lot of the folks who end up identifying as part of the movement, they don't necessarily have these really traumatic experiences that the men's rights movement talks about. So you know, things like losing custody of your kids or going through a really contentious divorce or being the victim of domestic violence, right? A lot of folks don't have personal experience with that, but they do have these kind of mundane, everyday personal experiences like with romantic rejection that they can kind of interpret through the claims of the men's rights movement.

So the movement, I would say, makes three kind of overarching claims, which are: Women are privileged. Men are oppressed. And feminism is to blame. And so, you know, when newcomers stumble upon the movement online, usually they're kind of greeted with this huge corpus of data, of people's personal experiences where they're interpreting those experiences through that worldview, right? That men are oppressed. And when they see all of that, it's very easy to apply that lens to their own personal experience.

Something like romantic rejection is very universal, right? I, I think everyone, no matter their gender, has probably experienced romantic rejection or will some day in their life. That's a very common experience that they can then interpret to mean that men are oppressed, and this woman was privileged or controlling in the relationship.

So I think that's one big lesson, that it's really about these more mundane, personal experiences that they're viewing through an anti-feminist and misogynist lens that, you know, it's not what someone like myself, a sociologist, would consider scientific evidence that men are oppressed. But nevertheless, it, it really appeals to them, right? They see personal experience as convincing evidence.

I think the other big lesson from my research is that masculinity and whiteness and straightness are all really tied up together when it comes to people's trajectories into the movement. And so one thing I find is that the folks I interviewed who are part of the movement, the majority of them were straight white men.

And again, they don't talk about going through like a nasty divorce or losing custody of their kids. Instead, what they talk about as, you know, propelling them into the movement is coming into contact with, um, these cultural narratives and cultural beliefs that have become more common, right? So feminist cultural beliefs, anti-racist cultural beliefs, anything that really points out their privilege. And so they might, you know, read online that men are privileged or they might hear that in a sexual harassment training, right? Or they might read about the Black Lives Matter movement, and so they're getting these messages that because of their identities, that they hold a privileged position in society, and that's really uncomfortable for them.

Typically, straightness, whiteness, masculinity–those identities can stay invisible, right? They're kind of built into the structure of our organizations and our institutions, and so they're very much considered the norm, so they're invisible most of the time. But with these kind of counter-cultural narratives, they're being made visible and they're being called privileged, and so that's really uncomfortable.

And it creates these negative feelings, right? They don't wanna see themselves as benefiting from systems of oppression or kind of having what they have for some unfair reason. And the men's right movement gives them a way to feel better about that by claiming that men are the true victims of inequality, that men are truly oppressed.

They kind of are able to flip that script, right? They're able to say, no, I'm not privileged. I'm actually oppressed. And that gives them kind of the moral upper hand. And then also identifying as men's rights activists, they're able to say, you know, I'm the true defender of equality.

And so all of that is a way kind of to resolve those feelings and make them feel, you know, better about their identities and, and feel like morally good men.

[AD BREAK]

[00:10:43] CRISTEN: I was, I was gonna ask about the issue of race and that element of kind of intrinsic white supremacy. Did it come up for any men of color who also identified with the movement? Was that something that they had to kind of reconcile?

[00:11:01] DR. EMILY CARIAN: Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I'll just preface it by saying, you know, the men's rights movement, although it isn’t explicitly for straight white men, I think from other research, we know that that's kind of who it caters to. The issues they take up are very much issues that straight white men face.

For example, I think a major blind spot in the movement is talking about, you know, the disproportionate incarceration of men of color, right? Some men's rights groups and sites will talk about that, but for the most part, it's really missing from their agenda. So in that way, you know, it definitely caters to straight white men as a movement. It's also especially helpful to men as they try to negotiate their feelings around straightness and whiteness and masculinity.

In terms of my own research, so like I said, most of the folks I interviewed were straight white men. I did interview some men's rights activists who were not straight and who are not white. For the most part, for those, it was really about masculinity, right? Still this idea that because they were men, they felt like they were being victimized, right? That because of that, they were privileged and so, you know, they felt bad about that and needed a way to, really, a strategy to navigate those feelings and navigate their identity.

It did not come up with any of the men of color I spoke with, this feeling that maybe there was tension for them about being part of the men's rights movement as a man of color, that didn't come up. I will say, you know, the movement is pretty diverse in terms of people's political affiliations, and so that came up sometimes that, you know, people who would identify as more like politically progressive had problems with or had tension with kind of allying themselves with people who are more conservative. But race for the most part eas kind of invisible unless they were talking about whiteness.

[00:13:26] CRISTEN: As a non-researcher, the idea of interviewing a number of them as you do for your research, uh, sounds very daunting to me. How do you approach these kinds of qualitative interviews, and is there, is there ever any hesitancy about engaging with them?

[00:13:50] DR. EMILY CARIAN: So in terms of the way I was trained for qualitative research, for qualitative interviews, you know, the approach I take is very much–like it's not a normal conversation, right? I ask a question and I kind of just sit there and listen. You know, I might be nodding or I might be making, you know, sounds of a sense that I'm still listening. But I'm not, it's not a conversation in the sense of like, I'm gonna say, oh yeah, that really reminds me of, you know, something that happened to me.

We're trying to really let them express their feelings, their beliefs. I'm trying to allow them to guide the research as much as possible. So I might ask a follow up question. Maybe what they say takes us in a new direction, and I'm asking questions about that. But it's very one-way in a sense, and in some ways that creates kind of ethical concerns when you're interviewing folks that you disagree with politically. because I think for some people you could, an interviewee could end an interview thinking that the interviewer totally agreed with them only because they didn't contradict them. Right? Cause I'm not saying something like, actually, I think this, or actually, we have this research that shows xyz. Right? I'm just listening. And that was uncomfortable, I think, for me as an interview.

You know, I remember one men's rights activists I interviewed told me at the end of the interview– because I was also going to interview feminist men as part of this project–he told me at the end of the interview, oh, you're gonna have a really hard time getting feminist men to talk to you cuz they're not gonna wanna talk to you. Thinking that I was sympathetic to, you know, the men's rights movement. And that was very uncomfortable.

And so I think it does kind of raise ethical concerns, right? There's this like disconnect between what you should do as a good interviewer and maybe being totally forthright with how you feel about what interviewees are saying.

And then I think, you know, obviously the other issue with interviewing folks like men's rights activists is it opens you up to harassment and, you know, other problems I think. Not necessarily at the stage where you're doing interviews, but um, definitely at the stage where I'm publishing research, you know. There's, there's not a ton of research about the men's rights movement, and so men's rights activists are really interested in anything that does come out about the movement.

And so, you know, some interviewees asked me to send my papers once they were published and you know, I was happy to do that. And then other folks email me once things are published, and I have to kind of face the consequences of publishing on these topics.

[00:17:01] CRISTEN: Yeah, I, I was going to ask whether there were kinds of, um, occupational hazards and whether you, and like your colleagues at the Institute kind of have to also be maybe better versed in online privacy and kind of just, protecting yourself in that way.

[00:17:20] DR. EMILY CARIAN: Yeah, absolutely. This kind of research is very emotionally draining in lots of different ways, right? Doing the actual interview, analyzing the data, reading posts online, like all of that. It can be very emotionally draining.

You know, I am a woman and so a lot of what I read was very misogynist. That's pretty upsetting to me personally. Reading some pretty racist things can be very upsetting. So I think doing the research itself is very challenging emotionally. But then you do kind of think about preventing harassment and things like that as you do this research.

So one of the things we do at the Institute is we offer our research fellows data and security training, and then also we subscribe to, you know, a service that removes your information from the internet just as kind of a protective measure. Because all of us, too, at the Institute were very, you know, committed to doing public facing work. So doing interviews, you know, serving as experts for media outlets. And of course that also really opens you up to harassment if, you know, you're quoted in a newspaper article. Uh, so we have to think a lot about that.

And I think one of the great things about the Institute is, you know, bringing us all together. We now have a group of people to kind of commiserate with and to support us emotionally through that work.

[AD BREAK]

[00:19:00] CRISTEN: “If being Unadylike is also being a misandrist, then y'all aren't pushing for equality.” End quote. That, unladies, is a one-star Apple Podcast review that gets five stars in my book for throwing out misandrist! It's not every day one gets accused of being a man hater.

But you know what would get all the stars? You rating Unladylike on Apple Podcasts and/or Spotify.

You don't even have to write a review. Spotify doesn't even allow reviews. They're just like, hey, come on, smash that five stars. And in fact, on Apple Podcasts, you can rate the show every single time you listen. Technically, like 170 times cuz that's how many episodes there are!

Okay. Back to my chat with Emily.

CRISTEN: You are also working on a book that I'm honestly very excited to get my hands on once it comes out. It's called Heroes and Villains: Feminism, Men's Rights, and the Pitfalls of Men's Gender Activism. And could you just tell me a little bit about the parallels that you've observed? And that might not be the, the right wording for it, but kind of a tiny bit of a Venn diagram, uh, between men's rights activists and feminist men?

[00:20:29] DR. EMILY CARIAN: Yeah, so I interviewed, as I was doing these interviews with men who are men's rights activists, I was interviewing men who identify as feminists. And you know, both sets of interviews, I was asking them really about their trajectory into their social movement. Like, how did you end up identifying with this movement?

And I was really surprised to learn that, you know, their trajectories are pretty similar. And so just like men's rights activists, feminist men kind of felt like they were privileged and they were learning about that at school, online, at home, that because of their gender identities, their racial identities, their sexual identities, that they were privileged. And again, that made them really uncomfortable.

But unlike men's rights activists who turned to this very misogynist movement to kind of reconcile those feelings, they turn to feminism. Through feminism, feminist men can kind of position themselves as an exception to the rule that men are bad and men are immoral and privileged. That they're one of the good guys who are, you know, working to reduce inequality or working to dismantle their privilege.

So I was really surprised to see that their trajectories are actually very similar, even though they end up in two very different movements with really different goals.

But I think one of the things that those similarities illustrate is that we really need feminist men to do more. Nearly all of the feminist men I interviewed, their feminism was really about proving that they were a good guy. It was not kind of a more deeply held commitment to equality. A lot of the work they did was not activism. It was what we would call identity work, building their identity as a feminist, as a good guy, working through their feelings around their identities. And, you know, although I think it's really promising that more men in the United States are identifying as feminists, it's not enough to get the job done. If their commitment to feminism stops with creating their identities as a good person, it's not enough to reach gender equality.

[00:23:04] CRISTEN: Are there any kind of public misperceptions or myths, um, about the men's rights movement or even just gender inequality that you tend to kind of encounter and maybe wish that you could dispel?

[00:23:25] DR. EMILY CARIAN: Yeah, absolutely. I think in terms of misconceptions about the men's rights movement, and I would also say this is a misconception about other male supremacist groups, like incels, I think the misconception is that they're, they've just been romantically rejected, and so they're just kind of sad and they're like maybe working through those feelings.

I think the problem with that understanding of these groups is it ignores that not everyone who has had these experiences end up in this like very deeply misogynous movement. I think we have to keep reminding ourselves that these groups are centrally about misogyny and anti feminism. It's not just about, you know, being romantically rejected and finding community and that, that these groups–especially incels–you know, have been responsible for mass violence, uh, and violence against women.

And kind of along with that, the solution is not therapy. I think it would be really nice if the solution were therapy, but the solution has to be more expansive and creative than that because therapy can't solve misogyny.

Misogyny is built into our culture and our social structures, and we have to root it out in those places, not just kind of in our personal psychologies. I think in terms of misconceptions about gender inequality, I think one that I encounter a lot and I think is a belief held by a lot of men's rights activists and other folks in male supremacist movements are these biologically essentialist beliefs about where gender inequality comes from.

So, like, you know, believing that men and women are fundamentally and naturally different and that maybe that's the result of sex-specific evolution, or their genes, or their hormones, or what have you, right? I think as a sociologist, I think about gender as socially constructed and kind of created by our interactions and the social institutions we’re part of.

And I think understanding gender and gender inequality that way is really helpful to being able to see gender inequality, it's not biological or natural. It's actually made. And if gender inequality is made, it can also be unmade. And I think the danger of some of these biologically essentialist beliefs is, you know, if gender inequality is natural, then who are we to do anything about it?

Or, you know, could we even do anything about it? Uh, so I think those beliefs are in addition to being objectively incorrect, are dangerous for equality.

[00:26:34] CRISTEN: You mentioned earlier that this can be very emotionally draining work, so what makes that aspect of it worth it?

[00:26:45] DR. EMILY CARIAN: That’s a good question.

Well, I do think I'm still kind of driven by what first interested me in the movement, really just trying to understand how people come to this movement, what it achieves for them and why they find it appealing. I still think it's really interesting to, you know, investigate the movement and kind of unpeel layers of that with different types of research.

I think the other thing that's really important about the research is that these are extremely misogynist, male supremacist, white supremacist, heteronormative groups, and I think we have to understand them if we want to challenge them. Obviously, understanding them is not enough to undo them, but I think it's an important step in trying to challenge these groups.

[AUDIO STINGER]

[00:27:42] CRISTEN: Thank you to Dr. Emily Carian for both her time and also her research. I mean, it is not for the faint of heart and it is so critical for catching up to these communities and beliefs that are unfortunately just, you know, they just keep on trending.

You can check out the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism at malesupremacism.org.

I would also love to hear what y'all think about men's rights in the culture. Do you know any men who have gone down or seem to be headed on this pathway into male supremacism?

There are also so many layers to this conversation that Emily and I didn't even have a chance to get to. So if there's something we missed and you wanna share, share away. Always share. You can send voice memos and emails to hello@unladylike.co or DM them on Instagram, @unladylikemedia.

You can also follow Unladylike on TikTok and Twitter @unladylikemedia. It's all @unladylikemedia. Easy to remember, right? @unladylikemedia. It could be easier. I should not have added the -media, but @unladylike was already taken. Anyway!

Okay, for full-length guest interviews and weekly bonus episodes, including the most recent two-parter on celebrity fake pregnancy conspiracy theories with a focus on the Duchess of Sussex herself, my colleague in podcasting, Megan Markle, you can head over to the Unladylike Patreon. For $5 a month, you get all that. It's at patreon.com/unladylikemedia.

Your support goes directly to me, and it means the world. This is what I do. Wow. I'm really, I'm really getting in the holiday asking spirit.

Unladylike is a Starburns Audio production, written and executive produced by me, Cristen Conger. Tara Brockwell is our senior producer, Katherine Calligori is our associate producer. Engineering and post production is by Ali Nikou. Our music is by Flamingo Shadow, Amit May Cohen and Sarah Tudzen.

And I'm gonna close this out with something Dr. Carian said that I would like sewn on a thousand pillows.

[00:31:07] DR. EMILY CARIAN: We really need feminist men to do more.