The Witches are Coming

by Lindy West

The men’s rights movement (which fed directly into the alt-right) was in itself an elaborate troll, preying on disaffected young men’s resentments and insecurities to entice them to join what was framed as a social justice movement, then deploying them to make women’s lives hell both online and off. They did not fight for paid paternal leave, raise money to build domestic violence shelters for men, or encourage men to go to therapy and learn to be vulnerable and share their feelings instead of seeking cruel catharsis in degrading and abusing women. Instead, they spent their time doing things like flooding Occidental College’s online rape reporting tool with false rape reports. Or advocating for the legalization of rape on private property. Or declaring “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” in protest against women, supposedly, being allowed to beat their male partners with impunity. Or, mainly, just writing lots and lots of blog posts about how women are bad and harassing lots and lots of women on Twitter. It was a movement designed to make women angry, so that men could take that anger and hold it up and say, “See? See? They are hysterical. They are violent. They do hate men.”