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

by Laura Bates

We don’t like to risk offending men. We find it hard to think of straight, white men as a homogeneous group, though it comes so easily when we think of other types of people, because we are used to affording such men the privilege of discrete identities.

We don’t mind talking about women as a group and about violence against women as a phenomenon, but we do so as though it is something that just happens.

We describe a woman as having been raped; we discuss the rates of women sexually assaulted or beaten. We do not speak in terms of men committing rape or being sexual assaulters and violent abusers. That is what makes it so easy to focus on women’s dress, behavior, and choices when we consider sexual violence.

To speak ill of masculinity—to describe it, in its current societal iteration, as something problematic—is seen as an attack on men themselves. To question why some men behave in certain ways is viewed as an assault on all men and thus unacceptable.

Yet the opposite is true. Those who speak of “toxic masculinity” are not criticizing men but rather defending them: describing an ideology and a system that pressures the boys and men in our societies, in our families, to conform to unrealistic, unhealthy, and unsustainable ideals.

problem. But we don’t like to offend men. So we don’t mention it. We do not use the word terrorism when describing a crime of mass murder committed by a white man with the explicit intention of creating terror and spreading hatred against a specific demographic group—even though that

the definition of terrorism—if the demographic in question is women. The man is just “disturbed,” “deranged,” a “lone wolf.” We use language that designates him an outlier, an aberration. We do not call his online journey a “radicalization” or use the word extremism to label the online communities in which he has immersed himself, though we would reach for those words in an instant when describing other, similar types of crimes, committed by other, different types of men. We do not examine what led him to commit those acts or how he became so full of hate.

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.

pretending that what threatens these boys is women or immigrants or nonwhite men, the real threat comes from the very forms of rigid “manhood” their so-called saviors are desperate to preserve and promote. Yet we’d rather stay ignorant of this misogynistic hate movement, actively grooming and radicalizing our boys, than be forced to confront it. Maybe this

At the root of manosphere communities and white supremacy is a shared belief that the core, sacred purpose of man is to have sex, to procreate, and to dominate.