I just watched an excellent BBC nature documentary called The Hunt. One sequence features chimps hunting monkeys. The "alpha" chimps get first dibs on the meat, then all the females are fed, and the lower ranking males get jack squat. It occurred to me while watching that our current society is quite similar.

Our alpha males love acting chivalrous toward females and ignoring/attacking the men at the bottom. Indeed the entire history of feminism is a gigantic exercise in chivalry. It has never been an equality movement. The socialist Earnest Belfort Bax accurately described feminism during the first wave:

“Chivalry, as understood by Modern Sentimental Feminism, means unlimited licence for women in their relations with men, and unlimited coercion for men in their relations with women. To men all duties and no rights, to women all rights and no duties, is the basic principle underlying Modern Feminism, Suffragism, and the bastard chivalry it is so fond of invoking. The most insistent female shrieker for equality between the sexes among Political Feminists, it is interesting to observe, will, in most cases, on occasion be found an equally insistent advocate of the claims of Sentimental Feminism, based on modern metamorphosed notions of chivalry. It never seems to strike anyone that the muscular weakness of woman has been forged by Modern Feminists into an abominable weapon of tyranny."

[It's really interesting that Bax insists on using the phrase modern feminists. Remember this was written in the late 19th century. So evidently even then there were anti-feminists saying "yeah, modern feminism is awful, but first wave feminists back in 300 BC had some really good ideas, and fought for REAL gender equality]

Lest anyone think the MRA project is doomed because our society currently resembles that of chimps, hunter-gatherers provide an alternate model.

When people think of hunter-gatherers they often think of "chiefs", however chiefdoms were a fairly recent development; they emerged when a tribe became stationary/domesticated and there was food surplus. For 95 percent of our history we lived as nomadic foragers. Not only was there no "chief", but attempts by an individual man to monopolize resources/sexual access were regarded as the greatest form of social deviance. The P2P foundation explains:

"What accounts for the difference between primate bands and hunter-gatherer egalitarians? The absence of a disposition for dominance? Not likely. In Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, anthropologist Christopher Boehm argues that we share with chimpanzees and bonobos a tendency toward despotism. Yet nomadic hunter-gatherers have nevertheless been uniformly egalitarian, seemingly for thousands if not millions of years. Boehm explains this seeming contradiction with the claim that hunter-gatherers have “reverse dominance hierarchies”: the adult males in the society form a general coalition to prevent any one of their number, alone or with a few allies, from dominating the others. Male egalitarianism is not necessarily extended to females—the degree to which females are subject to male despotism varies, even among hunter-gatherers. But the reverse dominance hierarchy prevents the monopolization of females by dominant males. This makes possible the heterosexual nuclear family as we know it, based on (relatively) stable cross-gender pair bonding and mutual nurturance of children by parents, precisely what is missing in our closest primate relatives."

Intriguingly, anthropologists Guillaume Calmettes and James N. Weiss argue in The Emergence of Egalitarianism that males in these societies constitute a collective alpha:

"Language, specifically gossip, allows resentment against being dominated to promote the formation of antidominance coalitions which destabilize the alpha position for individuals, leading to a phase transition in which a coalition of the full population suddenly becomes dominant. Thus, egalitarianism emerges suddenly as the optimal power-sharing arrangement in a population of selfish individuals without any inherently altruistic qualities. We speculate that egalitarianism driven by punishment for exhibiting alpha-like behavior may then set the stage for genuinely altruistic traits to propagate as predicted by game theory models. Based on model simulations, we also predict that egalitarianism is a pre-condition for adaptation of tools as weapons....Male hunters [serve] as the collective alpha."

I have no idea whether egalitarianism is reproducible in a large scale technologically advanced society, and some may not consider egalitarianism desirable in the first place, but hunter-gatherers do provide us with a model in terms of male cooperation in defense of male interests. We are indeed capable of solidarity as a sex.