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

by Laura Bates

Imagine a world in which millions of women are raped, beaten, mutilated, abused, or murdered every year because of the simple fact that they are women. Imagine a world in which the hatred of women is actively encouraged, with sprawling, purpose-built communities of men dedicated to fueling and inflaming the cause. Imagine a world in which such hatred blends seamlessly with racist rage: “whores” blamed for contaminating superior bloodlines; invading “savages,” conjured from hate-fueled imaginations, framed as plunderers of the dehumanized commodity of fragile, white women. Imagine a world in which thousands of men band together, united by a common code of vitriolic rage, demonizing and railing against evil, soulless, greedy women, graphically plotting their rape and destruction in a glorious, bigoted uprising. Imagine a world in which some men actually enact such fantasies, killing women in mass murders, leaving behind manifestos explaining the ideology that drove them to commit these acts of terrorism. Imagine a world in which vulnerable men, lost boys, and confused, scared teenagers are swept up and preyed upon by such communities, which feed on their fears and push them toward hatred, violence, and self-destruction. You don’t have to imagine that world. You already live in it. But perhaps you didn’t know, because we don’t like to talk about it.

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. These men are complex, heroic, individual. Their decisions and choices are seen to spring from a set of distinct and unique circumstances, because we see them as distinct and unique people. 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 do not, as a rule, talk about male perpetrators of violence against women. 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 warn women to take precautions to protect themselves and, implicitly or explicitly, blame those victims who do not. Because a rape is a shadowy, dark thing waiting to befall women who walk in alleyways wearing short skirts, not a deliberate, criminal choice made by real men. When we are forced to confront these men because high-profile cases hit the headlines, we describe them as “beasts” and “monsters” in order to separate them clearly from those other, ordinary, decent men among whom we walk every day. We do not count them, quantify them, or study them in any meaningful sense. In fact, we rarely think about them at all.

If we talk about masculinity, patriarchy, or male privilege, the conversations are immediately derailed by accusations of generalization and prejudice. “Not all men,” rises the ubiquitous cry. It is too simplistic, too offensive, too broad. Yet we raise few such objections when the crimes of a man with brown or black skin are immediately assumed to be related to his race or religion. To speak ill of masculinity—to describe it, in its current societal iteration, as something problematic—is seen as an ...

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. While 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.

Those who do know describe it as the “manosphere.” Like man cave, man flu, and man bag, we use man as a prefix to denote a sense of gentle ridicule, suggesting something slightly pathetic, a deviation from traditional masculinity. The manosphere is seen as a joke and therefore harmless. But it isn’t.

Because don’t all men, really, have a God-given right to sex?

Men themselves were the real victims, they’d tell me, in a society in which political correctness has gone mad, white men are persecuted, and so many women lie about rape.

Around the same time, I heard snippets of the rhetoric—the same phrases used in the online, woman-hating labyrinth I had occasionally encountered as a feminist activist—being repeated verbatim by respected politicians and mainstream news pundits.

The incel community is the most violent corner of the so-called manosphere. It is a community devoted to violent hatred of women. A community that actively recruits members who might have very real problems and vulnerabilities and tells them that women are the cause of all their woes.

Alex was twenty-four and had never had a girlfriend. He didn’t have a lot of money, and he felt frustrated and lonely. It didn’t seem fair that people were complaining about women’s needs when his lot in life, as a supposedly “privileged” white guy, didn’t seem so splendid. Alex didn’t feel privileged at all, so it annoyed him when people said he was.

Over twenty years later, the little project Alana called “invcels” (a portmanteau of “involuntarily celibate”) has morphed into something completely unrecognizable.

Almost cultish in its development of a vehemently misogynistic ideology, this hydra-like incel subculture has spawned a detailed, often delusional, and violently antifeminist worldview.

But however you find the incel community, your first initiation—in common with many other manosphere communities—is taking the “red pill.”

Borrowed from cult film The Matrix, this refers to the scene in which the protagonist, Neo, is offered a choice between taking a blue pill, which will enable him to continue seeing the world around him the way he always has, or a red pill, which will suddenly shift his perspective, enabling him to see the Matrix and, in so doing, realize that nothing in his world is as he had thought.

It’s ironic that I feel a little bit like I have taken a red pill after writing this book. Once you know that there are hundreds of thousands of people out there despising women to the point that many of them belie...

Incels use the metaphor of the red pill to describe the moment a man’s blinkers fall away and he suddenly realizes he has been lied to his whole life. The world he has been forced to believe works in his favor is actually hopelessly stacked against him. Everything, from ou...

The myth of male privilege, so the story goes, is perpetuated by a massive feminist conspiracy. Incels refer to this man-hating world as a “gynocracy,” a clever system designed to keep men (the true victims of oppress...

The red pill metaphor is a powerful and dramatic way of conveying an ideology, and it is immediately attractive to those with any kind of grudge or grievance. Lost your job? What could be more appealing than a whole new worldview in which it isn’t your fault: you’ve just been the victim of a power grab by women and minorities. Dumped or divorced? That lying bitch is part of a much bigger attack on you and other men ...

The manosphere goes one step further: it subverts the narrative of the privileged and the victim altogether. It tells men they are suffering, and it blames women.

What they do seem to have in common is a craving to belong, and this need is met in spades by a community that excels at conveying a tribal sense of cohesion. What better way to suck in new recruits and repel criticism than to borrow an origin story that immediately positions all acolytes as heroic, doomed visionaries and all critics or disbelievers as either pitifully ignorant or part of the oppressive system itself?

(The fact that the Matrix trilogy was created by two transgender women or that its kick-ass female characters would revolt against the misogynistic ideology of any manosphere community is an irony apparently lost on incels.)

The foundational tenet of taking the red pill is at the root of almost all the major manosphere groups we will look at in this book, including pickup artists, so-called Men’s Rights Activists, and Men Going Their Own Way. But it is a departure point from which different communities take dramatically different routes. In the case of incels, their prime focus is a feverish obsession with sex and anger at being “denied” it. Yes, this is a community of tens of thousands of men who...

Indeed, the majority of the community seems mainly to consist of straight, white, educated, middle-class men.

Dr. Sugiura’s mention of the close links between the manosphere and the so-called alt-right is vital in understanding both groups. A vaguely defined term, the alt-right refers to a network of loosely connected movements, leaders, online communities, and groups that are generally considered to represent far-right, white nationalist, or white supremacist views. Many groups associated with the term have been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center (a leading U.S. nonprofit legal advocacy group) as hate groups.

And just like the manosphere, the alt-right takes a privileged group (white people) and sells them the comforting idea that they are really the ones facing discrimination at the hands of the group actually facing prejudice (people of color and immigrants), who are portrayed as the true oppressors. Much has been written about the alt-right, and particularly its links to the rise of Donald Trump.

I started to realize that incels have to create their own language, because there simply aren’t existing words to express the extremity of many of the concepts they use on a daily basis.

These groups resort to railing violently against the unfairness of non-incel society (people they call “normies”), the selfishness of the most attractive men (“Chads”), the superficiality of beautiful women (“Stacys”), and the promiscuity of less attractive women who are still able to attract sexual partners (“Beckys”).

Incel logic seems to reveal a hopeless contradiction: women are simultaneously reviled for sleeping with men and for refusing to do so.

At its simplest, the argument goes like this: if women’s sexual autonomy has given them wicked and tyrannical control over men’s lives, then women’s liberation is at the root of all male suffering. Therefore, the obvious remedy is to remove women’s freedom and independence and to use specifically sexual means (like rape and sexual slavery) to do so. In other words, the problem is not women having sex but women having the choice of whom to have sex with.

First, there is the notion that women are dehumanized objects: subhumans who are either too evil or too stupid to deserve to make decisions about their own lives and bodies.

Second, this idea of women as empty sexual vessels without the right to sexual autonomy leads naturally to a feverish obsession with sexual violence, which ranges from assault fantasies and open advocacy of rape to lengthy, chillingly casual arguments about whether rape should be legalized.

He highlighted the dangers of a culture that “promotes saying more and more extreme things just for the ‘lols’ [an incel and internet expression for humor]” and “abhors expressions of emotional vulnerability,” adding that [this culture] emphasizes mockery and the externalization of blame as the means by which one should cope with negative emotions. Posters can always claim that the things they’re saying are ironic or jokes or meant just to provoke a reaction, but, with enough posts and posters, it becomes impossible to differentiate between those who mean it and those who don’t.

Except that Leucosticte was later exposed as Nathan Larson, a thirty-seven-year-old accountant and congressional candidate from Virginia.

When he was asked about how potential constituents might respond to his views, Larson seemed encouraged by the success of Donald Trump, saying, “A lot of people who disagreed with someone like Trump…might vote for them anyway, just because the establishment doesn’t like them.”

“On incel forums, they pride themselves on their tech contributions; they joke that the world would collapse without them to maintain network infrastructures, and that their companies would fail without them.”6

“Hi, Elliot Rodger here,” he began before declaring, “Tomorrow is the day of retribution, the day I will have my revenge.” He went on to lay out his grievances against women and described his plans to punish them for rejecting him sexually. “I’ve been forced to endure an existence of loneliness, rejection, and unfulfilled desires, all because girls have never been attracted to me. Girls gave their affection and sex and love to other men, never to me.” Rodger’s tone oscillated between plaintive and angry—“I’m still a virgin. It has been very torturous… I’ve had to rot in loneliness, it’s not fair”—but it became darker when he addressed women directly. He failed to ever turn the focus on himself or the role his own behavior might have played in his situation—a classic hallmark of incel ideology:

I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it. It’s an injustice, a crime, because I don’t know what you don’t see in me, I’m the perfect guy, and yet you throw yourselves at all these obnoxious men instead of me, the supreme gentleman.

The ultimate evil behind sexuality is the human female. They are the main instigators of sex. They control which men get it and which men don’t. Women are flawed creatures, and my mistreatment at their hands has made me realize this sad truth. There is something very twisted and wrong with the way their brains are wired. They think like beasts, and in truth they are beasts. Rodger’s online radicalization into extremist incel ideology led directly to his offline act of mass misogynistic violence.

Shockingly, this is the only known example of an incel attack being treated by authorities as a terrorist offense.

Most pertinent of all, it has produced a significant number of mass murderers who have committed what ought rightly to be described as terrorist acts in its name. That so few people have ever even heard of it is, frankly, outrageous.

But this is far from the only reason that the majority of people don’t take incels seriously or even know about their existence. We are, after all, quick to recognize and take action against the threat of other forms of online radicalization, like that used by Islamic extremists to lure young converts into acts of violence in the name of a twisted and prejudiced set of beliefs. Part of the problem is that this is about women. And we don’t even take violence against women seriously offline, let alone on the internet, where it is so easily written off as banter, jokes, and satire. When online radicalization results in a Muslim attacker driving into white pedestrians, media reports and political commentators immediately alert us to the connection, the word terrorism quickly filling the front pages and the ideology and online footprint of the killer highlighted for all to see. The same is not the case when men kill in the explicit name of misogyny.

In the aftermath of Rodger’s massacre, media coverage was mixed.

Several media channels explicitly questioned or rejected the idea that there was anything gendered about the murders,

The writer, like so many others, tried to focus the piece on mental health, describing mass killers in general as “angry, resentful, mentally ill individuals.” Muslim terrorists, in stark comparison, are rarely referred to as “mentally ill.”

So it is disturbing that the Isla Vista police report summary also makes very little reference to misogyny—quite extraordinary, given the extensive expression of misogynistic intent set out in the report itself, which quoted from Rodger’s journal entries and his manifesto: I will be a god, punishing women and all of humanity for their depravity… I cannot kill every single female on earth, but I can deliver a devastating blow that will shake all of them to the core of their wicked hearts. I will attack the very girls who represent everything I hate in the female gender.

To “go ER” is a common term used to denote carrying out an incel massacre, while the initials are frequently included in other words with the same inference. In many posts, forum members are exhorted to become “hERoes.”

They are, for all intents and purposes, a cult, rather than a community.

“Have you just farted? Because you blew me away.” Of course, I ripped off his clothes and we were married a week later. When you hear the term pickup, it is this kind of silly example most people automatically think of. The buffoonish guy hiding his shyness behind a cheesy joke, or the slightly sleazy womanizer whose confident one-liners are supposed to render him charmingly irresistible. (Think Joey in Friends.)

The community’s veneer of public acceptability enables it to operate much more brazenly in plain sight than incels, protected by those “cheeky womanizer” pop-culture stereotypes. And as incels despair of ever having sex, PUAs pursue it relentlessly. Yet the two groups have more in common than immediately meets the eye. Both groups depend on the separation of men and women into narrow, highly stereotypical categories. Both cast heterosexual sex as the pinnacle of male achievement and portray women as little more than objects whose sole purpose is to provide sexual pleasure to men, like some kind of pornographic slot machines.