The main response of feminists on the internet to any criticism of the movement is deflection, dodging, and denial. To understand this, you only have to look back at internet feminists' responses to information presented to them about their movement, and about internet feminists' actions during the last few years.
One example of the deflection response is to dismiss men's issues by combining blame for them on a conspiratorial concept they've labeled "Patriarchy" with the treatment of all men everywhere as a single unit instead of individuals with individual experiences and effects on the world. The gist of this argument is "men's problems are caused by men having power and control in society. One man's power is all men's power. Therefore, your issues are your fault, while women's issues are also your fault. That makes women's issues more important, and means that men aren't qualified to seek and apply solutions to men's issues. You should back off and let feminists have control. Our efforts to empower women will solve all of the issues related to discrimination in the world, and if they don't, you probably deserve to be discriminated against, anyway."
However, an accurate look at the history of the issues and the feminist response to them often reveals that feminist activism and feminist ideological assertions have been either causative or exacerbating factors leading or contributing to discriminatory conditions faced by men.
One example which stands out is the unequal legal handling of child custody and division of property following divorce. It was feminist activism which led to the widespread adoption of the belief that mothers should be primarily awarded child custody. Prior to their involvement, it was standard procedure that custody of children in divorce would remain with fathers, who did not receive any financial support from their ex-wives. Following the change, women given custody of their children were awarded support on the basis of their lower earning capacity. However, as women's earning capacity has increased, the expectation that an ex-husband will continue to fund his ex-wife's custody of their children following their divorce has not decreased in proportion to it.
When estranged fathers denied contact with their children and kept in poverty by exorbitant and often arbitrarily imposed support obligations (and therefore unable to fight the willful alienation imposed by their exes) began lobbying for equal custodial rights, feminist organizations opposed that effort by demonizing all fathers as abusers and deadbeats, and denying the behavior of mothers whose denial of parental contact and abuse of the system led to the effort. Further, feminist groups have not only supported the continuation of the use of outdated reasoning for the imposition of support obligation on divorcing husbands and fathers, they've fought to impose stricter legal handling of that obligation. This, knowing that the group primarily assigned custody is women, and the group primarily assigned child support obligation is men.
Another is the unequal treatment of victims of intimate partner and sexual violence depending on the sex of the victim and the sex of the perpetrator. This is another area in which feminists blame "patriarchy," but a look at their own activism shows that with respect to modern treatment of victims, their hands are as dirty as they can get, in both the area of sexual violence, and intimate partner violence. And they're still doing it. Feminist rape apologia is so blatant that they're willing to admit they have no basis for defining the same forced or coerced sex act differently depending on who is the victim and who is the perpetrator.
The internet feminist answer to being confronted with feminist involvement in causing or exacerbating discriminatory conditions faced by men is to actually claim that despite their own actions, it's still "patriarchy," not feminism, which is the primary and current cause of these issues because
1) NAFALT (explained below), and
2) Lawmakers are mostly men, and they don't have to listen to feminist advocates.
In other words, no matter the lobbying/information on which their decisions are based, all discrimination is male lawmakers' fault (female lawmakers who support feminist efforts don't count) and no responsibility can be placed on feminist groups exercising influence on the process. Or to put it another way, the all-powerful male lawmakers should have known that feminist groups were talking out of their asses, ignored all of the information presented to them, and decided purely based on the innate knowledge that comes from male omnipotence.
NAFALT is a combination of deflection, dodging, and denial that takes expert mental gymnastics to pull off. Address a concept upon which the feminist pro-discrimination lobby is based, using it exactly as feminists have described it, and your approach will be dismissed with "that's not what that concept is." Give references for your usage of the concept, and they'll be dismissed with some version of the "Not All Feminists Are Like That" argument, which boils down to the claim that no matter what the mainstream, heavily funded, established and world-effecting segment of feminism has laid down as feminist ideology on which to base their organized activism, if there's anyone anywhere who calls themselves "feminist" and believes or says differently, that feminist constitutes the new "mainstream," and all other feminism with which she disagrees (at the moment) due to her discomfort at hearing organized feminist pro-discrimination activism criticized is "radical." This argument is used in attempts to deflect responsibility for the effects of organized, established feminist activism to the subjective concept "radicalism." It's used to dodge one's responsibility to counter or accept the assertion that discriminatory conditions men currently face cannot be dismissed, or men's activism co-opted by attributing that discrimination to the ill-defined feminist concept "Patriarchy." It's used to deny the movement's role in the political process by proclaiming anything damaging which organized feminism has done "not feminism."
The NAFALT argument is the lazy feminist's answer to any criticism of any damaging thing ever done by feminist activists. It doesn't actually counter any of those criticisms, but it makes the feminist offering it more comfortable with them.
Recently, feminists have begun responding to rejection of the NAFALT argument with lame attempts at projection. This method entails equating "prominence within a group" with "political/government establishment" and demanding that men's rights activists "take responsibility" for men's issues discussion to which feminists take personal or ideological offense, by censoring said "offensive" speech. "If feminism is responsible for feminist-advocated and feminist-lobbied anti-male discriminatory conditions, then you're oppressing me by not condemning other MRAs for saying things I don't like!"
To employ this method, feminists treat speech they dislike as if their dislike defines it as malevolent, and elevates its impact and that imposed malevolence to the same level as the active feminist lobby for discrimination against men in law, policy, and social response. In other words, the argument is "If you don't accept the claim that feminism is not responsible for the real, demonstrable damage feminist activism has done, then we expect you to let us tell you what you can and can't say on the basis that you're responsible for our emotional response to it. Having in existence statements we don't want to hear is as damaging to us as being falsely imprisoned, having one's victimization by intimate partner or sexual violence condoned by society and the law, being artificially pushed into poverty by the law, and being denied contact with one's children. We just can't tell the difference between an affront to our own fragile and twisted sensibilities, and real, demonstrable oppression."
Pointing out the double standard in that approach varies in effect depending on which feminists are involved in the discussion. Those purporting to be reasonable will often simply abandon the discussion at this point. Vehement opponents of the men's human rights movement, such as the trolls from reddit.com's /r/againsmensrights (certainly not a name that contains bias, right?) subreddit, on the other hand, have actually tried to justify their molehill=mountain and mountain=molehill mentality in two ways.
The first is by assuming for themselves the right to not be offended and treating that presumed "human right" as if it is as valid and vital as the very real human rights which are violated when one is wrongfully imprisoned, stripped of personal property, separated from one's loved ones, or subjected to tolerance of violent crimes against oneself specifically on the basis of one's sex. In this way, internet feminists exercise a complete abandonment of all sense of proportion and authenticity in order to feel justified in attempting to use criticism of feminism as leveraging support for their effort to cut off nonfeminist or antifeminist speech about men's issues.
The second is the "lower ground" argument, which employs the social justice concept of "privilege." The "privilege" dialogue uses treatment of perceived disadvantage as an excuse to infer guilt upon anyone not experiencing that disadvantage, and a baseline level of innocence for the disadvantaged. The term is used as a cattle prod in gender and other human issues discussion, allowing Social Justice ideologues to claim it's justified to treat existing conditions differently based on the "averaging" factor of privilege. Injustices against privileged people become justified; Injustices against the non-privileged are amplified. This allows the feminist to ignore real, life-effecting conditions in favor of an ideological interpretation of them. "Oh, you're in jail? Well, you're male, so you have Magic Patriarchy Powers™ that cancel out all adversity. Women have it worse just trying to live in public because women are oppressed."
The double standard approach to justifying feminist deflection of responsibility for their own movement's damage to society can also be seen in internet feminists' responses to the last few years' events. In this case, the double standard is in their application of standards of evidence.
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