I'm not sure how this will be received over here but I figured I'd put it on people's radar. One of the earliest men's rights activists was also a socialist, which proves that men's activism doesn't have to be strongly tied to one political ideology or another.

And even if you ignore his political leanings, he's still a good resource on the history of gender norms. Many of the things that he wrote about are still going on today and mirror some of the discussions that you see around here.

It also shows that the men's rights movement predated the "mens liberation" movement from the 1970s. His earliest writings on the men's movement date back to 1886, which was before the advent of feminism in England, and not long after the wider women's movement had started.

He wrote more than 20 books about philosophy, socialism, history, men's rights, the women's movement, and various other social issues from his time period. His work was featured in several prominent left-wing magazines and periodicals, including the Social Democrat.

According to him, women living in England were already privileged, and it was men who needed special consideration when it came to gender equality. He discussed in depth some of the gendered laws and social standards surrounding marriage. As well as the treatment of men and women in civil court, criminal court, and family court. He even claimed that there was a media bias against men in the newspapers, especially with regards to domestic violence. Women were believed by default (without evidence), and men who were the victims of female violence were laughed at and ridiculed.

For example, in The Legal Subjection of Men, he writes:

In the first place a woman has only to complain against a man, and the tribunal is already convinced of the justice of her claim. The tribunal is only impartial if the complaint is by one woman against another. In the next place, no adequate repression of crime or other injury by a woman against a men is even attempted.

This tendency of the tribunals is confirmed and rendered irresistibly by the actions of the press and public opinion. All injuries to a woman are chronicled with flaring headlines. Injuries by women to men are laughed at, or worse still, passed over in silence.

He also believed that the only way men could be equal to women is if we adopted socialist principles in society. According to him, women were using capitalism to exploit men and male labor. A socialist economic system would force women to work just as much as men because under socialism, everyone is treated the same, regardless of race or gender.

From the same book (original emphasis):

Certain Socialist writers are fond of describing the Social-Democratic State of the future as implying the "emancipation of the proletarian and the women". As regards to the latter point, however, if emancipation is taken to include domination, we have not to wait so long. The highest development of modern capitalism, as exemplified in the English-speaking countries, has placed man to all intents and purposes, legally under the heels of women. So far as the relations of the sexes are concerned, it would be the task of Socialism to emancipate man from this position, if sex-equality be the goal aimed at. The first step on the road towards such equality would necessarily consist in the abolition of modern female privilege.

It's been 124 years since he wrote that and the fabled "Social-Democratic State of the future" still isn't here. But then again, men are still being treated unfairly. And according to him, this was likely true even before his time, and throughout most of Europe's history. He postulated that the pro-female biases present among the public and in the media had always existed. And that those biases were being made worse by women's activists.

So despite what the modern feminist mythology wants us to believe, there was likely never an era in history where men were treated fairly.

The origin of this bias is a subject of deep interest, but not one capable of being discussed within brief limits. It is, of course, to be found in the history of England for some centuries past -- practically since the Reformation -- in so far as differences in the intensity of the sentiment differentiates England from other European peoples. It is to be found in the history of Europe and the race for many centuries before the period of the great European upheaval of the 16th century. It is enough for the present to note that the pro-feminist prejudice exists and is transmuted into positive rules of law, and legal administration by the action of public opinion and the press, Parliament, judges and juries, and crystallized into statutory enactment by an active pro-feminist propaganda of sex-conscious women's righters.

If you're interested, Wikipedia has a list of his books, which are available to read online for free:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Belfort_Bax

The Legal Subjection of Men (1896) and The Fraud of Feminism (1913) are two that I would recommend the most.