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

by Laura Bates

“Awaken to your power as a man, and enjoy the success with women that is your birthright,” blares one well-known pickup training website.

But to achieve this, you’ll have to overcome her “bitch shield” (attempts to fend you off) and potential use of the UFEA (universal female excuse archive).

Men in the PUA community are repeatedly programmed to think of women as objects for pleasure, problems to be solved, children to be wrestled into obedience, or dogs to be trained.

But because PUAs are one link up the chain from incels, because they are seen as charming or funny or harmless, they tend to receive a much more prominent hearing in the media.

He also suggests ignoring a woman’s rejection of your approaches, again framing this as a magnanimous gesture for her own good: “I believe that not caving in to a woman’s first ‘knee-jerk’ response is a good thing. I’m creating a space for her to have a new choice, to respond with more freedom and act differently.” What a gent.

So we see how incel ideas, like the belief that women secretly want to be raped, begin to worm their way through the different communities of the manosphere and pop out into real people’s lives.

The emphasis on reporting back to the community, playing to the crowd, only promotes the escalation of such violence as members jostle and vie for each other’s attention and respect.

Not one of these men seems to have considered that they could have achieved the same effect by simply not sexually harassing or assaulting any women.

MRAs are about as focused on men’s rights as defense contractors are invested in maintaining peace.

Clearly, the central idea that fighting to give women rights must mean taking something away from men is hardly new.

In 1973, sociologist Steven Goldberg wrote The Inevitability of Patriarchy, in which he argued, much like today’s MRAs, that biology and human nature meant that the project of feminism was flawed and misguided, that male domination was natural, and that women’s liberation would lead to dangerous cultural instability.

The National Coalition for Men (motto: “Freeing men from discrimination”) was founded in 1977 and still boasts chapters or liaisons in Australia, Canada, Kenya, Israel, Sweden, and the Democratic Republic of Georgia. The organization has repeatedly entered lawsuits against women-only spaces—alleging discrimination on the part of sports teams, networking events, and groups seeking to increase women’s participation in business and technology—and has often settled with the organizers for large sums of money. It has also filed court cases seeking to force the defunding of women’s domestic violence shelters unless they admit men.

In interviews, Farrell drew a direct comparison between male unemployment and the rape of women, suggesting that both lead to humiliation and the lowering of “self-concept,” because, “when a man has unemployment forced upon him, he is humiliated…he feels violated, he feels imposed upon.”5

He famously suggested that October, which is domestic violence awareness month, should be renamed “Bash a violent bitch month” and advised men “to beat the living shit” out of women who are supposedly physically abusive—“and then make them clean up the mess.”

In the context of a discussion about MRAs’ cherry-picking tactics, the case of Lorena Bobbitt is significant. In 1993, Lorena Bobbitt, who had suffered violent sexual and psychological abuse at the hands of her husband, John, cut off his penis with a knife after she said he had returned home in the evening and raped her. Despite the fact that she was found not guilty at trial (due to temporary insanity after years of rape, abuse, and terror and because both prosecution and defense attorneys agreed that Bobbitt had demonstrated a history of abuse), MRAs seized upon the case and continue to use it as evidence of the vindictive violence of women to this day. This is typical of the way in which the movement highlights individual, emotive, and often highly unusual cases and distorts them to try to imply a much wider pattern, or a gender-neutral problem, when there is overwhelming statistical evidence to the contrary.

The penetration of the online hatred into everyday society is also facilitated by political activity.

I stumbled across a video advertising an upcoming men’s rights conference: Messages For Men 2018. The video caught my eye, primarily because it featured images of me. It seemed to the organizers that the best way to advertise this conference about “conveying positive messages for men” was to use a video of images of high-profile feminists, most of them crudely Photoshopped to include devilish red eyes or horns. Naturally. It seemed only fair to attend, given the lengths to which they had gone to make me feel included, so I purchased a ticket online. The event sounded right up Alex’s street, so I booked my ticket in his name, in case mine rang any alarm bells, and immediately received several messages about the top-secret location for the conference, which could only be revealed after midnight the day before the event due to concerns about the potential disruption that might otherwise be caused by angry feminist protesters…

The Kavanaugh hearings (after which Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice in spite of claims he had committed sexual assault) were cast as the downfall of the #MeToo movement, much to the appreciation of the crowd. But the biggest cheer by far was reserved for the announcement that both Donald Trump and his wife, Melania, had made statements in support of “men and justice” following Kavanaugh’s confirmation. This struck me as the most significant moment I witnessed. Men all around me were cheering and clapping approvingly, nodding encouragingly at one another. It was the first tangible proof I had seen that the words and actions of Trump have had a direct evangelizing impact on the movements I was investigating. His statements are seized upon and held up as direct approval and encouragement for the manosphere and its ideology.

If anything, support for the MRM only seems to be growing, galvanized by the powerful backlash to the #MeToo movement and the social acceptability engendered by Trump’s vocal public assertion (in the wake of sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh and others) that “it’s a very scary time for young men in America.”

One of his most recent cases, challenging the male-only military draft, had come before Judge Esther Salas, whom Den Hollander had baselessly accused of delaying the case. In July 2020, Den Hollander arrived at the New Jersey home of Judge Salas, dressed as a FedEx delivery driver. When the door opened, Den Hollander opened fire. Judge Salas was in the basement at the time and was not injured, but her son was killed and her husband seriously injured.

In January 2019, for example, the American Psychological Association (APA) took the unprecedented step of acknowledging publicly that “traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful and that socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage.”

Their objection? That the guidelines acknowledged men as beneficiaries of privilege within a patriarchal society and suggested that certain forms of masculinity were harmful.

“How people continue to believe so fervently in values and norms according to which they can only be failures is an awe-inspiring phenomenon.”

“I hope u get bashed, or get cancer, you filthy man hating cunt” ANONYMOUS EMAIL, RECEIVED SUNDAY, AUGUST 4, 2019, 3:42 P.M. “Shut the fuck up bitch.” Just ignore it. “Fucking women should know their place, fucking skanks.” Don’t make a fuss. “The only reason you have been put on this planet is so we can fuck you. Please die.” Don’t take it so seriously. “KILL YOUR SELF.” Turn off your computer if you can’t handle it. “Laura Bates will be raped tomorrow at 9pm… I am serious.” It’s not personal.

It’s easy to tell people not to make a fuss when you’re not the one on the receiving end.

Troll. It’s such a silly little word. It makes it sound like a silly little problem. A ridiculous, pot-bellied, bright-haired ’90s toy. Or a lumbering, stupid, green oaf, crouching slimily beneath a bridge. Neither one comes close to capturing the truth. But these two stereotypes are illuminating, because they accurately portray the most common ways in which our society perceives trolls. They are either seen as harmless, comical figures of fun or as nasty, mean, but ultimately dim-witted bottom-feeders, cringing away from sunlight, too stupid to do much real damage beyond giving people the occasional scare. The very word troll, much like manosphere, is a hopelessly benign euphemism for a much darker reality.

In classic internet terminology, the term trolling emerged in the late ’80s or early ’90s and was probably coined in reference to the fishing practice of trolling (or trawling)—slowly towing a baited hook to catch unsuspecting prey. In its earliest iteration, the term referred to the practice whereby seasoned and regular users of a particular forum or Usenet group would deliberately ask a very simple question, pretending to be extremely stupid or confused. Their inquiry would often be about a topic already discussed exhaustively on the forum, which would have the immediate effect of drawing out newcomers to the group, who would be the only ones to respond sincerely to the conversation and might then be mocked. As the internet expanded, the term spread. It started to include any activity that involved deliberately baiting other internet users into increasingly emotional, angry, or defensive responses. This was usually achieved by posting off-topic or inflammatory messages in a specific forum. The more sincere and earnest the targets, the better. The more passionate and indignant their responses, the more successful the troll.

The practice of trolling is widespread and established enough to have variants in many different countries and languages. My favorite example is the Portuguese expression pombos enxadristas (literally translated as “chess-player pigeons”), which refers to a Portuguese adage that describes a futile argument as akin to playing chess with a pigeon: “It poops on the table, drops the pieces, and simply flies off, claiming victory.”

While our current terminology euphemizes and dismisses the work of online trolls, the terms online abusers or harassers might be more accurate, given the ways in which trolling has developed and mutated.

It is impossible to understand trolls in their most modern form, which involves tactical harassment, mass participation, and a serious sense of competition, without understanding Gamergate. It was through this mass harassment campaign that many of the modern tactics and techniques deployed by large mobs of trolls with great precision and impact were honed and developed.

The rhetorical trick of presenting a campaign as nobly battling exactly the interests it itself personifies would go on to become central to future campaigns of the alt-right and the manosphere. Gamergate’s proponents harassed, abused, and deliberately obfuscated their real aims, all the while claiming to be acting in the name of ethics, transparency, and purity. In the same way, the manosphere calls for gender equality while indulging in extreme misogyny, demands transparency of statistics while spreading false facts, and portrays itself as the champion of downtrodden victims while espousing the creation of greater gains and protections for the group already most privileged in our society. Similarly, the alt-right claims to have the noble cause of opening people’s eyes to injustice and inequality, all the while attempting to revive some of the most deeply damaging hate campaigns of recent history.

Again, it’s easy to think of these men as tiny minorities: a few sad and deluded individuals, clinging to obscure internet fringe groups as a way to feel a sense of belonging. But the reality, as with all the manosphere groups I have investigated, is that these are massive communities and internet spaces, populated by hundreds of thousands of people.

So when we tell women to simply switch off, spend less time online, or stop visiting certain websites, what we are really saying is that they, not their harassers, should suffer the negative consequences of trolling.

Perhaps the problem is that many in the manosphere, and further afield, seem to confuse freedom of speech with the right to be heard, to have an audience, never to face disagreement, and not to be called a violent, misogynistic, racist bigot?

Looking back at the first brigading attack I ever experienced, hundreds of messages pouring in within the space of hours, I now understand the oblique references to 4chan and 9gag “turf”—the allusions to troll armies and point scoring. I realize that my experience, my terror, was the game board between two warring groups of online abusers, each loyal to a different forum, glorying in the escalating fantasies of destroying my body, which represented the playing pieces of their game, with the ultimate goal being my destruction by withdrawal from the internet and from my job, victory sought at all costs, for honor and for lulz.

The U.S. Congress defines a mass shooting as a single incident in which three or more people are murdered.

What’s most terrifying of all is what this means for a community in which winning is everything and there is only one way to win: escalation.

Men hurt women. It is a fact. It is an epidemic. It is a public health catastrophe. It is normal.

We cannot discuss violent misogynistic extremism and male supremacy without contextualizing it in a world in which violence against women is at stratospheric levels. The manosphere is both a symptom of that inequality and a furious backlash against attempts to reduce it.

It is a striking fact—long unacknowledged but finally and belatedly starting to be discussed in the mainstream—that a significant percentage of terrorist attackers and mass murderers have a previous history of domestic violence or abuse.

A 2011 U.S. media study revealed “a thematic pattern of terrorism coverage in which fear of international terrorism is dominant, particularly as Muslims/Arabs/Islam working together in organized terrorist cells against a ‘Christian America,’ while domestic terrorism is cast as a minor threat that occurs in isolated incidents by troubled individuals.”

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.

But in order for them to successfully smuggle their cargo of division, fear, and hatemongering, a delicate balancing act is necessary. The men who help to usher trends from the fringes of internet extremism onto our airwaves and into our living rooms must at once continue to appeal to the denizens of online communities, hitting the ideological keynotes that will chime with trolls and members of the manosphere, yet simultaneously package their message behind a veneer of “reasonable” debate and respectable (if unpopular) opinion for public consumption. In short, dog-whistle rhetoric, coded language, and sometimes outright self-contradiction are required. Some of these men are cashing in on trends driven by manosphere communities, perhaps without even realizing who they are appealing to. For others, the decision to appeal to certain groups seems to be more deliberate.

For political figures like Donald Trump and his advisers, such as former chief strategist Steve Bannon, there are gains to be made by issuing dog whistles to the alt-right and manosphere communities. Such rhetoric, like Trump’s derisive advice to four Democratic congresswomen of color and American citizens to “go back” to the countries they originally came from, is greeted with wild applause across the masses frequenting extremist websites.1 But a buffer of plausible deniability is also important in order to avoid alienating a more mainstream base: a feat achieved by publicly disavowing racism and white supremacy, even while his own statements seem to send a very different message.2 For many of the other figureheads idolized, quoted, and supported by the foot soldiers of the manosphere, it is also richly profitable to maintain the sympathy and loyalty of these communities while actually holding them (either genuinely or performatively) in contempt.

By encouraging more and more men in the ultimately doomed attempt to live up to toxic ideals of performative masculinity, men’s rights idols are driving forward the vicious circle, ushering another wave of disaffected, broken, ashamed men straight into nets of misogyny, blame, and bitterness.

We don’t have to speculate about this deliberate use of “irony” to obfuscate a hate-filled message. It has been clearly explained by misogynistic, white supremacist Andrew Anglin himself, who has openly described his approach as “non-ironic Nazism masquerading as ironic Nazism.”

The techniques described include the direct instruction to mix hate speech with humor in an attempt to woo new readers just beginning to dip their toes in the bile (“It should always be considered that the target audience is people who are just becoming aware of this type of thinking,” states the guide). A list of suggested racist, misogynistic, and homophobic slurs is offered, with the precaution that when using such slurs, “it should come across as half-joking—like a racist joke that everyone laughs at because it’s true… It should not come across as genuine raging vitriol. That is a turnoff to the overwhelming majority of people.”

The calculated self-awareness is chilling. Anglin knows exactly what he is doing, and he is damn good at it. It is a naked admission that recruitment of young people is the aim and “irony” and humor the vehicle. “The reader is at first drawn in by curiosity or the naughty humor, and is slowly awakened to reality by repeatedly reading the same points… The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not.”

Beyond the leaders and evangelists of the male online masses, there is another group often celebrated by members of the manosphere and the alt-right. A group that has shifted manosphere views further into the mainstream than its inhabitants could ever have hoped. Politicians.

The first and most obvious politician whose success has emboldened the manosphere and alt-right alike is Trump.