Francis Dupuis-Deri (Montreal, Quebec), 1966. He is a professor of political science at the Francophone University of Montreal (UQAM). He is a member of the Institute for Feminist Studies and Research (IREF). Anti-feminism and masculinism are its main fields of research. He has written several books on these fields, including Antiféminismes et masculinismes d’hier à aujourd’hui (Antifeminisms and masculinisms, from yesterday to today). He has also published books on issues such as democracy, social movements or anarchism, among others.

There are also those who say that masculinity is in crisis.

I don't know how it's going in Euskal Herria, but whether it's Quebec, France, England, the United States or something, we have a speech that's heard in many countries about the crisis of masculinity. This is the speech that says that men suffer because they are men. They do not suffer because they are unemployed, because they lack papers or others. No, the reason for suffering is in the emancipation of women or in the attempt to emancipate them.

It has taken time to determine what a speech is.

Judith A That is what historian Allen says and I agree with his vision. He has analyzed two or three books that say there was a crisis of masculinity in the United States at the end of the 19th century and the conclusion is quite clear: historically, it is absurd to say that, knowing that then women had almost no right. The crisis of masculinity is a discourse, not a reality. In this sense, A advises us to match objective data with this discourse. Allen. It stresses the need to look at what is happening in institutions, the importance of seeing in what hands is power and money, who controls resources, who kills or who assaults. The discourse on the masculinity crisis does not coincide with social reality.

This speech is not new.

I'm not a historian, but I've looked at history and I've found that in the West there are over 500 years of men who have that speech. For example, the kings of England or France of the 16th century, the priesthood and the authors of plays or poetry… Regardless of the political, economic, cultural or legal regime, this discourse of domination of women has appeared for a long time and anywhere. I identify this trend as a preventative anti-feminism, as a preventative attack on feminism. If women move away from the role that they should play in terms of patriarchy, then instability in intersex immediately emerges. In the end, despite inequality, there has always been an anti-feminism that serves to confirm the superiority of men and the difference between the sexes.

Also on the part of some who have
fought against power. Anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, among others.

Proudhau has written hundreds of texts against women in a very violent tone. At the same time, if I looked at her personal writings, I could clearly say that she wanted a woman, that she was her service, that she cared for her, that she played the role of her mother. This Proudhon wanted freedom and equality for men at the root, but that was allowed by patriarchy with advantages. Somewhere it is not inconsistent, because this system of oppression is advantageous to those who are not. Many anarchists, socialists or Republicans thought the same thing, that the house is the space of women. Proudhon was truly anarchist, but a supporter of anarchism for men, keeping women as subjects, so that they could follow the advantages that men had. Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, all the great philosophers of Western modernity were in that line.

Does that mean that anti-feminism is not just a matter for the right?

I think anti-feminism is faster trend on the right side or on the right end than on the left. But at the same time, anti-feminism, like anti-racism, is not always consistent with the spectrum of left and right. On the far left there are also sexists and aggressors.

Today, what is the dictionary that masculinists use?

Somewhere they turn feminist analysis upside down: patriarchy becomes matriarchy, men’s oppression is women’s oppression, rather than women’s rights talk about men’s rights, etc. They say that the problem lies in the feminization of society. They don't realize that the fundamental problem is usually conventional masculinity. All his arguments are deconstructive and refutable. Feminists have been robbed of another element: the importance of the word of the individual. Parents' groups, let's say, will count on a catastrophic divorce case, because it's quite effective for them to achieve empathy and to delve deeper into social reality. The Unintentional Single Movement INCEL also works like this.

They tend to pile up for men.

That's it. They want to focus their attention on them, they are presented as victims to be helped, questioning the political and civil authorities. Crisis discourses always identify a fundamental problem. In what they call masculinity crisis, the problem is women, the feminists. They therefore have an absolutely political, reactionary and anti-feminist discourse.

Although the context is different, it is the same arguments that make up the discourse.

There are different currents in anti-feminism. One of them is masculinity. The same ideas have been repeated since 2000. If we compare men with women who have a higher suicide rate, they take this claim as proof of their suffering. They also highlight the difficulties that boys have in school, making sense of the feminization of education and the scarcity of male models in schools. The difficulties heterosexual men have in seducing themselves are also very frequent. The INCEL movement is in it. They have also denounced that judges are supporters of women and feminists in regretting that they are not entrusted with care and maintenance pensions. Regarding intra-family violence, they defend the symmetry of violence between women and men in heterosexual relations.

Arguments that you can look at reality and undo one by one.

It is obvious. Let's consider the issue of suicide. More men commit suicide, among other things, by using more violent and, therefore, more effective ways (pistol or hanger) that are associated with masculinity. But if we look at other data, the assertion is soon to be belied. For example, the number of suicide attempts is similar between men and women. There are other indicators of discomfort, such as anorexia, which almost exclusively affects women. Therefore, limiting itself to the suicide rate, the reality of evil is not considered in its entirety. In addition, if we look at the issue from an epistemological point of view, the thesis of the masculinists falls. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at the beginning of the data collection on suicide, the number of suicides among men was much higher than today. However, at that time the feminist movement hardly existed. Even in today’s non-feminized societies, such as Mexico or Russia, the suicide rate of men is much higher than that of women.

Are they organized or are they personally published speeches?

Most chroniclers, intellectuals, often psychologists, talk to us about the crisis of masculinity. In France, we have a good example, the controversial Eric Zemmour. Magazines dedicated to women also tend to make special numbers with headlines such as “Where have our men disappeared?”. Then there are some groups that are recovering these speeches to justify their mobilization. In particular, separated or divorced parent groups working as a lobby to lobby the media and parliamentary committees. Some groups perform encounters in the center of the jungle with the objective of “finding the warrior inside”, that is, to re-indicate his masculinity.

Do you identify antifeminists?

No, they retain this character, they don't even reveal their status as a masculinist. They are often defined as humanists, egalitarians, advocates of real equality between the sexes. They have recovered the rhetoric of rights, in defence of the rights of children and parents.

In the end, behind the discourse is the desire to maintain the superiority of men.

Regretting the crisis of masculinity, of course, women are criticized, but they are also reaffirmed in the way of defining a “real” man and a “real” woman. Following clichés and stereotypes, man is action, violence, dynamism, movement and women, passivity, sweetness, care, with all the functions that this entails in society. Masculinism is the means to confirm these differences defined as natural.

Masculinism is part of anti-feminism. What are the other movements within anti-feminism?

There are many. On the one hand, the nuns are obsessed in the West with the control of the body and the sexuality of women, especially with the issue of motherhood and abortion. They are also nationalists, far-right and anti-capitalist. Each branch has its own references, priorities, areas of struggle and propaganda, but always with the same general idea: to criticize feminists and to reaffirm the preponderance of males.

Surprisingly, the struggle between patriarchy and sexism was sought at the beginning of the various masculinist groups today.

In the 1960s, a feminism linked to the extreme left flourished in American universities and soon in France, Belgium and other countries. There was a clearly communist or anarchist movement that opposed imperialism, the Vietnam War. Dissatisfied by the sexism and misogyny that they were there, women soon created their own groups. From Radical Lesbian to The Furies. Of course, they also had children among their relatives, be they siblings, couples, members of the militancy or even members of heterosexual or bisexual relations. With solidarity, some of them would meet to help the women’s movement, to reflect critically on patriarchy and sexism. They began to organize conferences and congresses, soon adding up to hundreds of men. The men at the base had deviated a little bit with their early goals.

How is that possible?

After an inclination of introspection, they began to question their state. The problem is that when privileged people come together, there is a risk of starting to talk about their problems early, forgetting the problems of subjects. In a very heterosexual context and view, gays soon left the group to create their own groups. Gradually, heterosexual men began to talk about their partner or former partner, standing as victims. Garai’s far-left activists also acknowledge that they have completely lost control of these groups. A lot of new people came and gradually the area lost its anti-sexist character until it became the meeting point of men who talked about the challenges of men.

Can we say that when feminism is fast, antifeminism is also more present?

There are debates on this. Some say yes, others say no, that when the feminist movement did not also exist anti-feminism. That is the case. There are many factors at stake. In Québec feminism is fast and antifeminism is also present. I have just read a study of the peoples that were in the Soviet bloc, of paternal movements that have a violent anti-feminist discourse. However, the feminist movement is not necessarily strong in these peoples. Anyway, as researcher Melissa Blais says, you have to be careful about the idea that being a feminist is easy. It's never easy to be a feminist, even when the movement is fast, there's a risk of aggression.

Anti-feminism
is violent and can also overcome verbal violence, turning it into physical aggression. At this time when fascism is booming, a radical and violent anti-feminism is emerging, without any kind of complex. What do you think of this violence?

Antifeminism advances through misogynistic insults and lesbophobes, staining the bodies and sexualities of feminists and making references to physical violence. Feminist friends get death threats. Feminist bloggers have been victims of brutal aggressions. There have also been anti-feminist terrorist attacks. For example, the 1989 massacre at the Montreal Polytechnic School, in which fourteen women were killed by an anti-feminist. There were also attacks on abortion clinics in the United States or bomb attacks on family judges in Australia in the 1990s. Some neo-Nazi terrorists are also revealing very violent anti-feminist and misogynistic testimonies.

We hear more and more the insult to Feminazi in the Basque Country...

I had never heard of it, and I must say that it is one of the most ridiculous insults in human history! Nazism has been a policy of genocide, a military conquest, which has caused millions of deaths. Of course, feminism isn't that. What's more, fundamentally and surprisingly, feminism is a movement linked to nonviolence. From the point of view of scientific policy, it is absurd to see how it is not more violent. In France, a woman is murdered every two days by her partner or former partner. And is there no rebellion? I do not understand. But back to the insult, it's clearly anti-feminist.

What are the clues to reducing the anti-feminism line of work?

There are three different positions among feminists: to ignore, to bring the struggle of the moment and to make this struggle a priority. Seeing that it is my field of research, that I am in the fight against anti-feminism and that the closest are also concerned about the problem, I will give a personal opinion. Knowing, of course, that feminist women will do whatever they want. I think it is important that some take it as a priority line of struggle, to have at hand tools to fight against anti-feminism. On social media, anti-feminism is very violent, and many feminists are attacked. An individualistic paradigm is the family, which says that the being on social networks is what it entails and that, besides being fast, one must learn to collect the blows. The trend is very individualizing. It is necessary to develop solidarity strategies, activate solidarity and support strategies when a feminist is attacked on the net.