White Men as the New Victims: Reverse Discrimination Cases and the Men's Rights Movement

Roy Den Hollander doesn’t exactly look like a revolutionary. He’s a reasonably good-looking guy—nattily dressed, sort of preppy-corporate, IvyLeague educated, former New York corporate lawyer. He should be comfortable in his late middle age, approaching retirement at the top end of the Top One Percent. And yet Den Hollander is “incensed,” furious at the ways that men like him—upper-class white men—are the victims of a massive amount of discrimination . . . as white men. In this self-styled revolutionary, the legions of oppressed men have found their champion. Men’s oppression is not an accident, Den Hollander says. It’s the result of a concerted campaign against men by furious feminists and their allies, a sort of crazed feminist version of “Girls Gone Wild”—more like “Feminazis Gone Furious.” And they’re winning. Roy Den Hollander casts himself as one of the few who is standing up to them, or at least trying to. He suffers, he says, from PMS: “persecuted male syndrome.” As he told a reporter, “the Feminazis have infiltrated institutions, and there’s been a transfer of rights from guys to girls.” A corporate attorney by training, Den Hollander has refashioned himself a civil rights champion, fighting in court for the rights of men that are being trampled by the feminist juggernaut. (And this rebranding has brought him lots of fame—he’s been profiled in heaps of media, including a very funny and selfmocking takedown on the Colbert Report—even if he’s had no legal success at all.) Over the past decade, Den Hollander has filed three different lawsuits, each of which has had multiple iterations as appeals. Taken together, they form a trinity of issues raised by the angry middle-class white guys who march under the banner for Men’s Rights. In his own words,