The men's movement is a social movement consisting of groups and organizations of men and their allies who focus on gender issues and whose activities range from self-help and support to lobbying and activism. Despite the term "men's movement" implying a single, unified movement, the men's movement is actually several movements that have differing and often antithetical goals. Major movements within the men's movement include the men's liberation movement, profeminist men's movement, mythopoetic men's movement, men's rights movement, and the Christian men's movement, most notably represented by the Promise Keepers. The movement is predominantly Western and emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.
The men's movement consisted of "networks of men self-consciously involved in activities relating to men and gender. It emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s in Western Culture, alonsgide and often in response to the women's movement and feminism." Whilst bearing many of the hallmarks of therapeutic, self-help groups, men's movement groupings have increasingly come to view personal growth and better relations with other men as "useless without an accompanying shift in the social relations and ideologies that support or marginalise different ways of being men." Men's movement activists who are sympathetic to feminist standpoints have been greatly concerned with deconstructing male identity and masculinity. Taking a cue from early feminists who criticized the traditional female gender role, members of the men's liberation movement used the language of sex role theory to argue that the male gender role was similarly restrictive and damaging to men. Some men's liberationists decontextualized gender relations and argued that since sex roles were equally harmful to both sexes women and men were equally oppressed.
By the mid- to late 1970s, the men's liberation movement had split into two separate strands with opposing views: The profeminist men's movement and the antifeminist men's rights movement. After that the men's liberation virtually disappeared.