Men Who Hate Women: From incels to pickup artists, the truth about extreme misogyny and how it affects us all

by Laura Bates

This is not just about women and girls. It is also a battle to protect the boys who are lost, who fall through the cracks of our society’s stereotypes and straight into the arms of the communities ready to recruit them, greedy to indoctrinate them with fears of threats to their manhood, their livelihood, their country.

What if our desensitization to low-level, ubiquitous misogyny is preventing us from recognizing a fully blown crisis?

I no longer believe depriving these groups of the oxygen of publicity is the best course of action, because we are kidding ourselves if we believe they aren’t superb propagandists, already spreading their message like wildfire. And the spread of that message benefits from our careful silence, our choice to look away. So I don’t think they should be ignored. Not because those who spread hatred and sow division deserve a “fair hearing”; not to legitimize the rhetoric of extreme prejudice by suggesting it is one side of a valid debate. But because we cannot confront the real threat these groups pose unless we are prepared to look it directly in the eye.

Because allowing the manosphere to remain shrouded in shadows lends a different kind of legitimacy—that of the scrappy, underdog outsider. It allows these groups to claim the mantle of righteous grievance, posing as alienated victims, when exposure to the bright light of day proves their ringleaders to be anything but.

In other words, the problem is not women having sex but women having the choice of whom to have sex with.

The most frustrating part of my experience of incel immersion, surfing these websites as Alex, was seeing posts from men who were vulnerable or in pain, many of them young boys going through the typical tumult of adolescent hormonal angst and looking for some guidance to help them through it, and then watching as these men and boys collided catastrophically with deeply twisted and misogynistic views, supported by pseudoscience and fake statistics, at precisely the moment when they may have been most impressionable.

The community is either characterized as darkly violent and misogynistic, dangerously promoting violence against women, or as a mischaracterized and disadvantaged group of lonely men, widely smeared by association with a tiny number of bad apples who could exist in any movement. The reality, which almost nobody seems to have confronted, is that both stories are true. That extended exposure to the violent rhetoric of the most extreme ideologues slowly desensitizes and draws in the other members too.

So-called Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) might more accurately be described as Women’s Wrongs Activists. The name suggests something noble and important: a focus on the many issues affecting men today. The reality is very different. MRAs are about as focused on men’s rights as defense contractors are invested in maintaining peace. There is a community of men’s organizations focused on tackling issues like mental health, masculine stereotypes, and relationship violence. But this isn’t it. Instead, MRAs are concerned, to the point of obsession, with attacking women. And their particular target is feminism.

Troll. It’s such a silly little word. It makes it sound like a silly little problem.

When we see rape and death threats bandied across social media in such extraordinarily high numbers, when we watch and take note as social media companies actively refuse to suspend the accounts of those who send the threats, we receive the message that this behavior, this discourse, is acceptable.

Misguided advocates quote the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis—“Sunlight is the best disinfectant”—to argue that open platforms will expose and show the wrongness of hate and terrorism. Instead, though, what we’ve learned from platforms, ranging from Reddit and Twitter to GoDaddy and Cloudflare, is that public exposure consistently normalizes, encourages, and amplifies these beliefs.