The men’s rights movement has used forums, blogs, and social media to invest individuals in a deeply misogynist agenda, organizing around the belief that feminism has systematically privileged women and disadvantaged men. In this article, I analyze data from two online men’s rights forums to examine how men’s rights activists construct this belief and identify what appeals to them about it. Posters co-construct a highly personalizable and appealing personal action frame through which they share personal experiences that they consider proof of women’s privilege, men’s disadvantage, and feminist wrongs. In contrast to previous work on personal action frames, I find that this template for account sharing is a powerful tool for building solidarity and constructing collective identity. Men’s rights activists’ use of a personal action frame allows them to build a fictional yet credible narrative of men’s oppression, with important repercussions for gender inequality and movement dynamics.
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March 2022
