I am in agreement with the view that conflicts over women's rights and freedoms are intensifying. The problem doesn't seem to be limited to the US, although that is where most of us here are inclined to focus our attention. Other countries regularly produce horror stories of rape and murder. There are several words and phrases that have been used to capture a sense of what is happening: war on women, rape culture and misogyny. I find that all of them reflect some truth and reality. The question that I want to address here is whether this is something that is getting worse or has it been around all long and is just getting more attention.
I think that what is happening is that we are in the midst of a cultural change and various reactionary attacks against it. Cultures always change. They never stay the same, no matter how much some people want them to. If you look back to what is known as the Victorian era, middle class women generally led a sheltered existence. Fathers and husbands were responsible for protecting them from the slightest suggestion of what we would now call sexual harassment. In return they were as a matter of law consigned to a status of being the property of those men without what we would call civil rights. There was a broad homage paid to the responsibility of all gentlemen to treat ladies with respect.
Things weren't quite that well structured for working class women. Their husbands and fathers weren't in much position to provide protection if a man with status chose to make advances. Never the less there was a general cultural ethos about gender relations. My view is that part of the present problem is that we are still dealing with residual influence form that ethos.
Toward the end of the Victorian era women began to break out of the gilded cage. The right to vote was the first major controversy along the road. All sorts of other social changes have created opportunities for women to have greater independence and they have been taking advantage of those for about 100 years now. They pretty much achieved basic legal equality by about the 1980s in terms of things like property rights and reproductive rights. Changing laws is a necessary step, but it by no means removes all the barriers.
What we are seeing now is a counter reaction that is attempting to reverse the social change and roll back the freedoms. It is easiest to see in the area of reproductive rights where there is an active movement of some men and a minority of conservative women to pass laws and impose restrictions that limit these rights. The barriers to protection from sexual violence are perhaps less clearly visible, but no less present. They can be seen in a comparison of the statistics on the frequency of incidents of rape and the great difficulty in getting thorough investigations and prosecutions. Suggestions that we need to reset this imbalance will always cries of outrage that some innocent young man might be falsely accused.
The problem with trying to make a quantitative assessment of whether the problems are getting worse or not is that what is publicly visible is only the tip of an iceberg. We know in the case of rape that only a minority of incidents get reported. We do see instances of organized groups under the heading of men's right groups. These are likely small in number. However, I think that there is a broader reaction of resistance that seems to be intensifying.
The traditional liberal assumption is that with education progress is inevitable. There are times when interests and objectives collide and it is not just a matter of everybody playing nicely together. There certainly are a lot of men, perhaps a majority, who are comfortably able to adjust to women's changing roles and to even see new opportunities for more flexible roles for themselves in the process. However, the climate in which people have to live is not determined by a majority vote. It only takes a few people to create a climate of hostility and threat.
The issues of gender do not exist in isolation. There is also social change going on in terms of issues of race and LGBT rights. They all impact the people who are trying to hold onto a traditional culture that confers more privilege on some than on others. The actual numbers of people trying to hold back the tide of change may not be growing, but I think that the intensity of their efforts is. That likely has something to do with why some of us fell that things might be actually getting worse.