A growing number of people on Deviantart fancy themselves part of an "anti social justice" movement. In their eyes, white, straight men are being unfairly bullied and oppressed by women, minorities and the LGBT community. To them, requests for equal treatment somehow go too far, and backlash against the prejudiced is somehow a greater evil than prejudice was to begin with. Eventually I'll be writing something like this for racial issues, but for now, we're going to focus on the increasingly hostile, extremist "anti-feminist" subculture and the faultiest talking points of their agenda.

Argument: "You're the real misogynist by painting women as victims"

This common "point" is a surefire way to make yourself look like a remorseless villain. The idea behind this sad tactic is to make the "feminist" feel like they're insulting women by insinuating that discrimination affects women at all, the idea being that only "weak" women would ever have a problem with misogynistic behavior to begin with. It's a distraction maneuver, dismissing any actual points raised in favor of an elaborately yet still thinly veiled "NO, U!"

Argument: "Men only become feminists because they'll get more sex"

This one is barely worthy of acknowledgment, but it's still bafflingly common, hurled even by people who otherwise make a strong effort to dress up their opinion with so-called "logic." Ironically, doesn't this claim only demonstrate internalized sexism against men? Doesn't it imply that men are only motivated by sex? It also makes the bizarre presumption that women are so impressed by feminist attitudes that it can be the only deciding factor in having sex with a man, despite there having never been any shortage of men who support feminist ideals. A feminist man isn't special, but a basic norm of society.

Argument: "If feminists cared about equality they would just be called humanists"

This common one is based on the idea that both men and women face equal forms of oppression, and therefore, feminism is "no longer needed" and represents only an attempt to elevate women above men.

Unfortunately, discrimination against women exists virtually everywhere in the world. Wherever you go, certain things are much more difficult for women than for men, and always have been. It was only centuries ago that even mainstream "scientific" and "medical" literature asserted that women were naturally weaker, more hysterical, and less intelligent than men. These attitudes were rooted in our culture recently enough for almost every modern institution, from the judicial system to corporate practices, to have originally been built in the same environment.

Women are treated unequally. Feminism is the effort to amend that. When both men and women face exactly the same levels and same types of discrimination, we can begin to talk about just a "humanist" movement.

Argument: "False rape accusations are an understated issue"

Now we're getting to the factual claims, rather than just the logical fallacies, that we can actually debunk with objective studies. There's a claim perpetuated by the anti-feminism crowd that false rape accusations are an epidemic problem, are not taken seriously enough, and that this somehow, in some way, can be pinned on feminists.

All false crime reports are serious, but do false accusations of rape really fly back and forth like Christmas cards, and is it really "feminism" that perpetuates it?

 According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, false accusations occur at a rate of 2-8%, the same as other categories of crime. This is not, it should be pointed out, solely cases of women accusing men. This statistic includes all false allegations of sexual assault, including, for instance, parents who accuse others of molesting their children, men accusing other men of intimidating them into sex, and rapists who frame other people for their own crimes. Here are some papers on the statistics and on the FBI's methodology for reporting and categorizing sex crime:

www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/…

www.icdv.idaho.gov/conference/…

So, while false reports happen and are severe, they are not a special, unique problem faced by men or particularly downplayed by feminists. False allegations of murder, physical abuse, drug abuse and theft are all common as well.

It should also be pointed out that actual rape victims are highly likely to withdraw accusations when faced with ridicule and mistrust, fearing a life of abuse and stigma. Our culture tends to treat victims as "stained" or "broken" at best and as deserving "sluts" at worst. Thus, many so-called "false" reports would simply be the accuser intimidated into falsely backing down. Such is likely the case for the MRA's beloved "41%" statistic, which came from only a single small study of 109 rape reports in the same city, 20 years ago, and went by police records. The veracity of police data is something I'll be going over heavily when we get to talking about racism and hate crime in an upcoming journal.

Argument: "Rape of women is OVERstated"

Hand-in-hand with the above, anti-feminists believe that women do not suffer as much rape as "the media" or "feminist propaganda" would have you believe, or suffer the same exact rate that men do. They commonly cite a claim that one in five women may be sexually assaulted in their lifetime as an example of a "feminist" lie...but where does that statistic originally come from?

Once again, we can cite an exhaustive government study.

This particular study looked at over 16,000 people. Nearly one in five women admitted to being victims of sexual violence, while only one in 71 men did the same, though one in seven men reported suffering physically violent abuse at the hands of a partner, again not as many as women, but certainly a large number overlooked by mainstream media.

"Feminists ignore male genital mutilation"

This is one of anti-feminism's favorite topics, one of the two or three things "Men's Rights Advocates" will bring up in almost every single argument. Unfortunately, it only serves as a shining example of how their broken reasoning functions.

Feminism is about tackling things that disproportionately affect women. Ways in which society treats women worse than men.
That is precisely what we see in the issue of genital mutilation.

"Male genital mutilation," or circumcision, is a practice conducted on nearly 90% of white males. The practice began for hygenic purposes and there remains evidence that circumcision can reduce the risk of infection by HIV. Later, it came back into fashion under the incorrect notion that it could prevent masturbation, but circumcision does not reduce the sensitivity of the penis or ability to have sex, and complications are rare. Circumcision may not be necessary and it should probably be discouraged since it is done without the consent of the patient, but it does not have a negative impact on a man's ability to live his life.

Conversely, female genital mutilation, also conducted on up to 90% of women in some countries, involves slicing off the clitoris, the equivalent of removing the end of a penis, and may also include slicing off the labia and sewing shut the vagina. This altogether eliminates the woman's ability to feel pleasure from sex, and in fact, usually makes sex painful. The reasons for this procedure are purely cultural, with no known health benefits, are technically outlawed in most countries even where it continues to be performed on almost all newborn girls.

Please read up on how these procedures are performed courtesy the World Health Organization.

Genital mutilation is unequivocally a women's issue. There is no comparison between the removal of a man's foreskin and the grotesque, torturous and sadistic procedures performed on millions of young girls to control their lives. Men normally report no discomfort from having been circumcised and no difficulty leading a normal sex life, whereas the victims of female genital mutilation suffer life-long pain and the capacity for a sex life taken away from them completely.
Like it or not, it will continue to be a women's issue until female genital mutilation is ONLY as serious as circumcision. Both are better eliminated altogether, but the removal of foreskins is nowhere near an equivalent or comparable horror.

Argument: "Women just don't want certain jobs."

Bring up the issue of hiring biases or institutionalized sexism in career fields, and the anti-feminist will invariably claim that fewer women hold those jobs because women are naturally less interested in them.

This, of course, needs only common sense to dismiss. There is no reason women would "by nature" be less interested in science or technical jobs, or heavy labor. There would be only cultural explanations for such a trend, the active discouragement girls face from a young age to pursue what are traditionally seen as "masculine" career roles.

Beyond this basic, self-evident truth is the statistical fact that just as many women do pursue the same jobs as men in college, they simply aren't being hired as often. It really is that simple. When a man and a woman apply for the same job with the same qualifications, the man is more likely to get a call back.
This is particularly true of science and technological jobs. The industries themselves conducted the studies demonstrating this fact:

"New Research Proves Gender Bias Extraordinarily Prevalent in Stem Careers"

Scientific American: "Study Shows Gender Bias in Science"

Even the response to this scientific data shows significant hostility towards women.

Further, studies find that the gender bias is perpetuated by men as well as women, i.e, women in the position to hire someone are still more likely to hire a man. Nobody is saying that only men are misogynistic; there is a deeply rooted attitude among the population as a whole that women are less capable of the same tasks.

Bear in mind, it was only decades ago that the rift was even greater. There are people alive today who remember a time when women were flat-out barred from certain jobs under the notion that they were weaker and frailer. Some of the same people who were openly denying women jobs in the 50's and 60's are still corporate CEO's and politicians today. That these biased all could have abruptly gone away in our lifetimes is an absurd notion, and scientifically disproven again and again.

Argument: "Child custody favors women"

This is another favorite complaint of the Men's Rights crowd - that apparently, courts are prone to favoring the mother when child custody is brought up.
There are, of course, cultural reasons why this sounds true. It makes a sort of sense that perhaps people are inclined to favor the parent whose body actually incubated the child in question, regardless of their suitability as a parent otherwise.

However, the fact of the matter is that men simply aren't as likely as women to pursue child custody, and when they do, half them win it anyway.

A bias towards mothers was, at one time, the norm. It became the norm during an era when women were still almost universally the at-home caregivers and men were expected to work jobs. It was known as the "tender years doctrine," and it was abolished in 1994 throughout most of America, in light of the vastly higher rates of women in the work force compared to when it was first written.

In other words, this is simply no longer an issue. It started for arguably legitimate reasons and has gone the way of the Dodo long ago.

Argument: "Male Rape Isn't Taken as Seriously"

This claim is actually true. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, people continue to chalk it up to the influence of "feminism" when nothing could be farther from the truth.

The notion that men cannot be raped is a relic of the same notion that women are inherently "weaker" than men. Men are not taken seriously as victims because a large part of our culture still sees men as powerful controllers over women by default. Our culture shames and ridicules men who show "feminine" qualities, and those "feminine" qualities are generally defined as forms of sensitivity, love, emotion and vulnerability. The systematic denial of male victims is a symptom of misogyny, not misandry. It's a by-product of hyper-masculine attitudes dating back to the dark ages and beyond.

As it happens, the majority of male rape does not occur in prisons, as we're trained to believe, but in the military:

www.gq.com/long-form/male-mili…

 In fact, rape by peers or superior officers is a more common cause of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in military personnel than combat situations, and they find themselves helpless to press charges. An actual military doctor is quoted in this article claiming that men do not get raped. A male doctor. Just like the male superiors who commit the rape, and their own male higher-ups who excuse, deny, and cover it up. At no point is a "feminist" involved in any of this process.

Argument: "Men are just as objectified."

There can be no denying that our culture puts enormous pressure on women to be attractive. You need only take a glance at America's celebrities to see what we value; men can get by looking wildly diverse and are even considered handsomer as they age, but women rely on plastic surgery and radical dieting to retain the same homogeneous look well into their 50's and 60's. They need to look as young as possible, they need prominent breasts and they need to be thin. Any who stray from this even slightly can become the targets of relentless ridicule; whole magazines boast "shocking" photo collections of celebrity women showing wrinkles, cellulite, a slight belly or the lack of a thigh gap.

For women, it's be sexy or be the butt of a joke.

...But what about men?

Men's Rights tools would have you believe that it's just as difficult for guys, that there's some kind of pressure on them to have rock-hard abs, full heads of hair and big penises, even though virtually all polls repeatedly show that women have no such preferences.

In fact, the vast majority of women find an unnaturally muscular man to be a turn-off. Hilariously, a website called "spotmebro" expressed a lot of confusion and anger when a casual survey found 75% of women preferred slightly chubby men:

spotmebro.com/women-prefer-fat…

Studies also find that about 85% of women are perfectly happy with a male partner's penis size, despite the prevalence of men feeling inadequate in that department:

www.livescience.com/4489-penis…

The pressure men claim to feel to be attractive, you see, is not actually coming from women. It's coming from other men. Men own the magazines that claim women need to be thin and men need to be ripped. Objectification does affect both men and women, but it affects women far more often and more harshly. It is also a product of the cult of masculinity.

Bottom line:

Hostility towards feminism exists because of misinformation, viral "us vs. them" attitudes and a subculture of bitter entitlement dominated by socially inept men who find it easiest to blame "feminists" for things they dislike about the world, regardless of whether those things are even real. They will latch onto anything they can, any one-off example, even so much as some angry tumblr blog, to try and support their paranoid belief that feminism is nothing but an anti-male hate group.

In reality, feminism encompasses millions of people around the world with thousands of beliefs, some of them even internally conflicting, radical and non-radical. What unifies the feminist movement, however, is that it seeks to mitigate the prevalence of discriminatory attitudes towards women, the effects of which are statistically demonstrable. While problems exist that affect men alone, they are generally not systematic, institutionalized efforts to control or suppress the freedom of men on a grand scale as we see against women, nor is there any systematic discrimination against men that has been perpetuated by feminism.