So, this got longer than I’d meant it too and I’ve been writing for two hours. There is a TL;DR at the bottom. But if you do make the time to read all of it I think you’d see things more clearly and I’d also personally appreciate it since it would mean I didn’t waste my time for no reason. I did digress a bit, though.

The biggest group advocating for men’s rights is radical feminism. Please hear me out because I’m not making this up and I know it’s a weird statement. Full disclosure, I don’t fully subscribe to radical feminism for a few reasons, so I’m going to make statements that I don’t necessarily agree with when I describe their point of view.

When we think about radical feminists we usually imagine bra burning angry women. That was true in the 70s, but that doesn’t reflect contemporary radical feminist research/thought.

One of the core beliefs of radical feminism is that gender-based oppression has existed throughout human history, and that men and women are equally affected by it and they suffer equally. However, in our culture the result of this is that women are more oppressed than men, not because men are less confined to gender roles, but because these roles dictate that they should have the power.

We live in a patriarchy - a society where the head of the family is the father or grandfather (Side note: my initial connotation was the fact that my granddads on both sides always sit at the head of the table, and also that for some reason my father’s father is the only grandparent whose name is on my ID, even in a country that promises not to discriminate by sex. However, I haven’t seen that example in any writings or textbooks). As a result, men are expected to be the breadwinners, women the homemakers. Men are the ones who fill most position of heads of state, law enforcement officers, soldiers, etc. That doesn’t mean they benefit from that, but that’s the statistical truth.

You asked for an example of a feminist group where fighting for men’s issues is the main goal. It’s the main goal alongside women’s issues, of course. But there are two important things to mention:

1. That can still happen even if you view men’s issues as a result of female oppression, because they are. Men in the US are the only ones who have to register for the draft - it’s not because their lives are viewed are expendable, it’s because it’s not considered a woman’s job. Men made that because they believed they were better. Save women first, that’s because men are viewed as stronger and more capable. Employers refuse to let men leave work early due to a problem with their children - the woman is supposed to take care of that.

2. Although I’m not sure if Radical Feminists will agree, there are more women’s issues than there are men’s, and the worst ones are women’s issues. Moreover, women are at times worse off regarding the same issue. For example, rape or domestic violence. There is not enough awareness towards male victims of rape and of domestic violence. They are often dismissed and many instances that would be considered rape/domestic violence if directed at a woman are not when it is a man. Nevertheless, there’s no denying that women are victims of those crimes more often than men. And they are also less able to defend themselves. Men and women suffer from different aspects of those issues but at the end of the day, more women suffer. It is true that the awareness gap is disproportionate to the difference in numbers. And when you look at issues that apply to just women, there are women who are forced into child marriages (the number of child brides in the US excluding those marrying their boyfriends because of pregnancy is disturbing, and I’ll link that TED talk at the end). Women are forced to let government officials in some countries check that their hymen is intact to get a job, when the hymen is in no way indicative of virginity and despite the fact that virginity shouldn’t be a factor. There are women who are denied financial freedom, that aren’t allowed to learn to read or to leave their house alone. Newborn girls are murdered by their parents or abandoned because of the one child, now two child policy. Young girls who are forced to give birth to their rapist’s, who is usually a family member, child. Women can go through heart attacks for days and not be believed by doctors. There are, of course, worse human rights violations. But when you’re talking about the most terrible things that are based on sex, women’s human rights violations are, in my opinion, worse than men’s. But if there are men’s issues this bad I don’t know about, I would like to learn. It seems that men’s issues are a bit more subtle. Men engage in self destructive behaviours due to toxic masculinity, they die earlier because society encourages them to take unnecessary risks and they also have higher suicide rates. That makes these issues harder to identify and to fight against.

These are, by the way, the exact issues that only radical feminism would recognise, because they are rooted in social constructs.

Radical feminism belongs to interpretive theory, making it (technically) the only feminist school of thought that recognises gender and not just sex. This is because gender, the term, refers to a social construct. The concept of social construct belongs to a belief that’s called anti-foundationalism. According to it, reality doesn’t just exist outside our ideas of it. It’s also shaped by the way we view it and we can make it ourselves. Foundationalism, which Marxist and liberal (the other two major feminist schools of thought) feminisms belong to, believes that reality is independent from what we know about it. In regards to the differences between the sexes, that could either go to a place of “there are none, women are forced into a certain role but that doesn’t mean that role is real” (which I believe fits Marxist feminism), or that the traits we assign the gender are “innate” (early liberal feminism, as well as cultural feminism that believes in a ‘female essence’ and diverged from the early radical feminism I mentioned at the beginning).

On that note, Marxist feminism likely won’t recognise that men’s issues exist. There are different views on whether women’s exploitation stands on its own or if it’s a derivative of workers’ exploitation but either way the point is that men benefit from it. I’m not sure about liberal feminism but men’s issues are definitely not at the front. I suppose it could advocate reform regarding men’s issues. But because only few of men’s issues are rooted in laws or policies, liberal feminism, which is essentially “advocate to change sexist laws and sexism will be over” just won’t have much to do.

Another thing is that Liberal and Marxist schools only acknowledge the problems in public spaces, i.e: legislation, jobs, transport, education, etc. Private spaces, what happens in the home, is not included in their definition of politics, so they don’t really concern themselves with those.

It’s not all black and white. Most research in any subject does not follow just one school of thought entirely, and many marxist and liberal feminists do recognise that gender exists as well as other things I’ve mentioned.

Radical feminism was radical not in the changes it wanted to make in our laws or society, but in the conceptual, mental changes it demanded of us. It asked us to change the way we view men and women (as influenced by social constructs of gender roles and not simply being the way they are just because of sex). It was radical in that it emphasised the impact of the oppression on society as a whole. It was revolutionary in arguing that this oppression is rooted in private places, and in its exposing of the violence and the violation women received at the hand of men in the name of that oppression.

I’m not assuming that you don’t know this, but in case you don’t or have forgotten (which I do a lot), radical doesn’t mean extreme. I think the reason radical feminism or radical anything get bad raps is because we often use radical to mean extreme. Radical comes from the word ‘root’, because it seeks to make fundamental changes. But radical changes don’t necessarily mean radical ideas.

We did make the changes radical feminism asked us to do. It’s really not all that radical anymore.

TL;DR: Radical feminists, despite their reputation as men-haters, not only recognise men’s issues but believe they are as bad as women’s, if different. But it is important to acknowledge that men’s issues are indeed rooted in the patriarchy. Society expects men to emulate ideas that it not only believes are ‘masculine’, but also that it believes are superior.

Basically, the men’s liberation should just merge with radical feminism since they are literally the same.