ABSTRACT
A Voice for Men (AVfM) is a large anti-feminist Internet site that contains numerous articles. Men’s rights activist (MRA) sites repeatedly mention AVfM and mainstream news sources identify it as central to contemporary MRA and anti-feminist beliefs. In 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate watch list associated AVfM with male supremacy. Members of AVfM assert that they are resistant to feminism but actively cover feminism and feminist issues. AVfM includes a “Feminism” archive category and subsections that associate feminists with “Bigotry” and “Violence.” Through such structures, the AVfM site and its members construct a “straw feminist” version of straw man arguments, misrepresent adversaries, and contest the distortions. AVfM members also enact more personal dismissals of women by figuring former wives and women partners as “crazy.” This chapter references the literature on masculinity-in-crisis, containment, straw man fallacies, and straw feminists. It shows how AVfM participants employ feminism as a way of purporting that masculinity, men, and their MRA project are threatened. The chapter concludes that despite dismissals, AVfM members participate in the cultural production of feminism and become a kind of feminist, although AVfM’s versions of feminism and feminists are less developed than mainstream feminist projects.
