You know what I love? Curfews for men. Because I’m a feminist.

You know what I love? I love chocolate and cheese and yodeling and neutrality! I also love hanging out with people who feel that gender is a zero-sum game in which gains by women mean losses for men. So I am super sad to have missed last weekend’s anti-feminist conference in Switzerland.

Details about the event that billed itself as the world’s first men’s rights conference were kept under wrap – once organizers got word that feminists were planning to rally in protest outside, they suddenly didn’t want anyone to know where it was happening.  Only those who signed up and paid to attend, and journalists who wanted to cover the event, were told where it would be held.

Which is a shame, because I think everyone deserves to know just what these guys think of women and of feminists:

In a written statement prepared for Saturday’s meeting, [member of the Swiss-based antifeminist interest group IGAF] Andersson has drawn up five key beliefs of antifeminists: “opposing the feminist hatred of men, valuing the nuclear family, believing in the child’s rights to both its parents after a divorce or a separation, looking at the individual and not judging people by their gender, and accepting that men and women are different and counting that as assets”.

Andersson founded the Swedish father’s rights group PappaRättsGruppen after being prevented from seeing his daughter for six years after getting divorced from his wife. With support from a father’s rights group his situation has since changed and he is now able to see his 11-year-old occasionally.

But he blames “feminist” social workers for his plight. In his eyes, “feminists have hijacked the word equality” and today, “feminist stands for pure evil”. He cites radical feminist organisations who call for men to be grounded at home after 9pm or bear placards calling for “male slaughter, female supremacy”, as an example.

So he thinks feminists are pure evil, but he doesn’t want his cause to be misunderstood. Anti-feminists, while they think is evil, don’t hate women, and they don’t know why so many people seem to think that . “They believe that an antifeminist is a woman-hater. Not at all. An antifeminist is a kind of peacekeeper who wants to return things to normal. As an antifeminist I believe in true equality between a man and a woman.” (Emphasis mine).

Back to normal! You know, back to women not having rights. Back to true equality! Where a woman knew her separate, different, socially proscribed and legally enforced but totally equal place.

New York, NY

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia. She joined the Feministing team in 2009. Her writing about politics and popular culture has been published in The Atlantic, The Guardian, New York magazine, Reuters, The LA Times and many other outlets in the US, Australia, UK, and France. She makes regular appearances on radio and television in the US and Australia. She has an AB in Sociology from Princeton University and a PhD in Arts and Media from the University of New South Wales. Her academic work focuses on Hollywood romantic comedies; her doctoral thesis was about how the genre depicts gender, sex, and power, and grew out of a series she wrote for Feministing, the Feministing Rom Com Review. Chloe is a Senior Facilitator at The OpEd Project and a Senior Advisor to The Harry Potter Alliance. You can read more of her writing at chloesangyal.com

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia.

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