Fathers' Rights Movement: Misogyny, Anti-Feminism, and Violence

Like all the worst things one can import from abroad, it is now clear that the "masculinist" industry has also arrived in Greece: the influencers, the men's rights movements, the countless unspeakable characters who — for a fee — are ready to hand out advice to protect men from the hardships brought on by the innovations of our time, chiefly through feminism, which has, they claim, put their precious masculinity in the crosshairs.

Their algorithm keeps throwing them in front of us. They run seminars on seducing women, teach the "truly masculine" approach to life's different facets, offer advice on financial success (always for the sake of status), or reveal, drop by drop, the hidden secrets of fitness.

One day, it turns out that the reel in which someone asks them to share the distillation of their years of wisdom actually comes from an "interview" that never took place; another day, the great masters of martial arts are shown sparring with their eyes closed, unable to see where they're striking. And of course, we can never actually examine what results the advice given by these "experts" produces in the realm of romance.

One might consider these to be quaint parodies of masculinity, a bad circus that, after enough accumulated incidents of deception, will inevitably fizzle out under the weight of its own absurdity.

But the picture becomes more complex and more threatening once we take into account that this is a symptom of a broader problem. When we see how silently distrust of the "woke agenda" has spread (about which one apt joke asks whether it is currently in the room with us), how many institutional positions the misogyny of the fathers' movements has reached, how invoking "both genders" has become established as a skillful political opportunism, and much more.

This is the reality that took shape in Greece around and in favor of the passage of the Tsiaras law on mandatory joint custody in 2021. Fathers' organizations that pushed for its enactment continue to this day to press for its further expansion, even as complaints pile up about the law's impact on abused women and children.

In fact, domestic "masculinists" resemble their international counterparts in almost every respect: both in the industry of threats and in the use of tools such as "parental alienation," the notorious pseudoscientific theory deployed in courts to discredit mothers' and children's allegations of abuse by former spouses and fathers, on the argument that they are false and aim at "alienating" the child from the father.

Unfortunately, looking to the other side of the Atlantic, we have seen that these "masculinists" (masculinistes, as the counterpart to féministes) can even rise to positions of power.

Recently, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the warmongering TV host who proclaimed himself "Secretary of War," tried to smooth over the — to put it politely — limited performance of the American military in the war with Iran, with a campaign to restore masculinity to the armed forces, measuring soldiers' testosterone levels and offering "treatment" to raise them.

The same man had, a few months earlier, threatened to cut funding to the Boy Scouts because they did not sufficiently promote "masculine values." All of this was mockingly labeled by the American outlet The Intercept as "Pete Hegseth's crisis of masculinity."

The real question, however, is what market all these figures operate in, when, why, and on the basis of what concerns this El Dorado of opportunities for "fixing" masculinity emerged. Reading the remarkably lucid book by Francis Dupuis-Déri, The Crisis of Masculinity: Autopsy of a Persistent Myth, recently published in Greek by Stasei Ekpiptontes, the answer would be: in Ancient Rome.

The First "Crises" of Masculinity

Indeed, as far back as 195 BCE, the Canadian author traces Cato the Elder's concerns about the effects on men — and thus on the state — of women's simple demand for the right to wear colorful clothing and drive carriages!

Similar concerns have since emerged across a host of different historical periods, from the Renaissance to Elizabethan England and the French Revolution, with more or less common patterns: the demonization of women and, even more so, a perceived danger to the social body or the state from "feminization" and the undermining of the gains of male dominance.

Dupuis-Déri observes these common patterns across different eras, without necessarily claiming that there has been an unbroken continuity in the rhetoric of "crisis of masculinity" over the past twenty-two centuries. Indeed, to arrive at today's reality of anti-feminist discourse hiding behind the crisis of masculinity, we could, following the author's account, choose different starting points.

One such historical cycle that extends to the present opens in the 19th century, when the alienating effects of industrialization took on gendered characteristics. The use of machines was at times presented as a factor feminizing the workforce, and at other times as heavy labor suited only to real men. Other changes of the era were inscribed in similar patterns, from the abolition of slavery in the US to the demand of suffragettes everywhere for women's right to vote.

As Dupuis-Déri shows, the white men threatened by the changes of modernity are not an arbitrary construct, but a figure that produces politics in the field. It organizes into clubs, associations, unions, parishes, and other bodies explicitly devoted to anti-feminist activity, while in many cases it influences or even shapes political, and sometimes military, decisions. It is a phenomenon that, at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, appeared with some variation in America, England, France, Germany, and elsewhere.

In many of these cases, the crisis of masculinity is treated as a pathology of the nation's condition, a cause undermining its combat readiness, and a degenerative disease threatening its well-being. That is why in every manifestation of this rhetoric, we find its proponents putting it in the service not only of sexism, but also of nationalism, warmongering, racism, and the suppression of workers' demands, often through a "masculinization" of working-class identity that renders it willingly obedient to employers.

At the same time, this line of thinking seems to run into the same problem again and again. It sounds the alarm against the demands of women and other oppressed groups, without ever measuring the extent of male dominance. In every phase examined by the author in which a claim about the crisis of masculinity was made, it turns out that whoever made the claim had forgotten to look at who actually controls economic and political power, the military, the media, the arts, and so on.

Needless to say, the line from interwar anti-feminism to today's runs unbroken. It is not only the current testosterone campaign of the MAGA administration in America — we can also go back to the distant year 1994, when, in a feature titled "The Phallus of the Nation," the investigative journalism team of Ios at Eleftherotypia compiled the cries of deficient manhood coming from the Greek far right.

Masculinism Becomes a "Movement"

A second cycle opens with the second wave of feminism in the 1960s. Dupuis-Déri traces the evolution of men's groups that were initially formed with the intention of supporting the feminist movement, before their internal dynamics veered toward misogyny.

At the same time, a masculinist "movementism" explicitly targeting feminism began spreading over the following decades across the planet and gradually created the universe we know today: fathers' groups, men's rights groups, pick-up artists, and religious and quasi-religious organizations that declare war on feminism.

Specifically regarding fathers' groups, which have their own dedicated — and highly illuminating — chapter in the book, Dupuis-Déri sees the most "influential and militant" tendency within the men's movement.

The history of these groups shows striking similarities, regardless of the country or the moment in which they emerge. The violence they carry out has escalated to the murder of women, children, and even family court judges. The relevant organizations do not openly endorse these practices, but very often we find them adopting a rhetoric around such incidents that whitewashes these acts as moves of desperation by unhappy fathers.

At the same time, they launch mass campaigns of harassment and intimidation, primarily but not exclusively against their former spouses, while systematically accusing them of making false allegations of abuse against them and their children.

It should be noted that the author systematically studies the public discourse of the representatives and leaders of these groups, finding everything from common patterns of attempts to avoid paying alimony, to much darker aspects, such as veiled defenses of pedophilia as a method of proper fatherly upbringing.

But fathers' movements are not the only expression of masculinist discourse today. There are the so-called "incels," there is red-pill culture that tries to argue that men are the truly oppressed group today, and there are various hybrids and mutations that have multiplied in the era of global Trumpist influence.

What all these transformations share is that they rest on myths of men's victimization which, as it turns out, cannot withstand close scrutiny. Dupuis-Déri devotes the final part of the book to a very careful, well-documented, rigorous, and therefore valuable deconstruction of all the claims put forward by the various spokespeople of masculinist movements, from the reasons behind men's suicides to the pseudo-theory of "parental alienation."

In light of the current situation, Dupuis-Déri's book is a valuable contribution to understanding both the roots and the flimsy nature of the claims put forward by masculinists, who are increasingly rallying around various forms of the Western far right.

However dark the history the author narrates may be, the effort of masculinity over the years to assert itself in opposition to the perceived threat of femininity remains deeply comical: from the recommendations issued to women to welcome the man who has taken out the trash as though he were a warrior returning from battle, to the otherwise centrist and moderate Francis Fukuyama, who began the 1990s celebrating the arrival of Pax Americana and ended it voicing concerns that America had become too feminized to sustain that global order.