Welcome to the “Countermovement”!

On January 20, 2026, I published an essay titled, “Backlash Against the Backlash: Feminists Reveal Their 2026 Playbook.” In the essay, I commented on two items written by feminist authors. The first item was an article published in Foreign Affairs, titled, “How to Save the Fight for Women’s Rights: The Backlash Against Democracy Calls for New Strategies.” The second item was a report published by UN Women and the UN Research Institute for Social Development titled, “Understanding Backlash Against Gender Equality: Evidence, Trends and Policy Responses.”

The aims of the UN’s report and the article in Foreign Affairs were to communicate with activist readers the feminist playbook for 2026. The components of that playbook were listed in my previous essay, and they included platitudes like “strengthen[ing] democratic institutions” and “strengthen[ing] broad-based coalitions.” But they also include things like investing in initiatives that include boys and men, and recommendations to use words like “family,” “life,” and “care” in new lights. Overall, the aim of the 2026 feminist playbook is to pushback against the growing “backlash” against feminism and “gender equality” activism.

On April 25, 2026, the Journal of Gender Studies published an article titled, “The limits of ‘backlash’ masculinity: on the value of reframing gendered resistance as ‘countermovement’.” The article was written by Steven Roberts and Stephanie Westcott—both feminists, working at universities in the city of Melbourne in Victoria, Australia.

The aim of Roberts and Wescott’s paper was to encourage feminists to start using the concept and word “countermovement” rather “backlash” when describing individuals and organizations who are both pushing back against the excesses of feminism and advocating for the well-being of boys and men. Roberts and Wescott identified these individuals and organizations as those who coordinate “masculinist restoration” and seek “not just to oppose feminism, but to re-legitimize patriarchal authority…reshape public discourse, and institutionalize normative masculinity through appeals to common sense, victimhood, or moral order.”

Roberts and Wescott did not provide names of individuals or organizations who they had in mind when writing their paper. Instead, they referred only to “men’s rights groups,” “anti-gender organizations,” “manosphere influencers,” and “state-aligned political actors.” The lack of these details is important because it is unclear if persons or organizations who are genuinely concerned about boys’ and men’s well-being, and who are engaged in legitimate discourse about sex differences and related academic theories, are part of these categories.

According to Roberts and Wescott, countermovements are “strategically organized actors who mobilize in opposition to progressive gains,” and they reflect a “reaction to disruption, i.e. a patterned, protective response to the destabilization of normative orders.”

Roberts and Wescott then expanded on their conceptualization of “countermovement” and how it differs from that of “backlash””:

“we propose countermovement as a tool that may help gender scholars move beyond backlash as a language of grievance or regression, towards a more coordinated and politically attuned understanding of masculinity as an active site of power. This reframing also foregrounds masculinity as a formalized political field, rather than an abstractive concept or identity: one in which legitimacy is contested, power is reorganized, and new strategies for reasserting or recalibrating patriarchal dominance are actively trialled. Put simply, backlash and countermovement operate at different analytic registers. Backlash, we contend, is most effective in capturing how gendered resistance is experienced, expressed, and circulated at the level of affect and discourse. Countermovement, by contrast, provides a framework for analysing how such resistance is organized, coordinated, and mobilized as a political proj