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

by Laura Bates

The way the media frames these incidents is enormously important. There is repeated evidence to suggest that framing attacks as terrorism has an impact on public opinion, influencing individuals’ political stances on issues such as funding for antiterrorism activities and support for various government acts and policies.30 This swaying of public opinion can, in turn, influence politicians’ priorities and actions or affect the perception of particular groups. So the fact that news media underplay and soften their portrayals of white male terrorists, never define explicitly extremist misogynistic attacks as such, and never reference violent misogyny as a form of terrorism contributes to our societal normalization of such ideologies and such violence and reinforces the weakness of our government and policy response to the problem. What we are seeing when we witness the dramatically different reporting on incel mass murders in comparison to other similar crimes arises from the overlap of two major media blind spots. The first is its reluctance to classify white murderers as terrorists with anywhere near the same eagerness as Muslim or nonwhite perpetrators. The second is its tendency to downplay, excuse, and humanize men who commit violence against women in general, including (and particularly) in domestic settings.