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

by Laura Bates

Valizadeh’s thoughts were echoed across incel forums, in which a typical post at the time, referring to groping, rubbing up against women, and forced kissing, read, “If Trump can do these things without getting arrested, there is no reason an incel male should not be able to either.” Another said, “America has spoken wenches, Trump is the president. Nobody cares about your cunt whine anymore. And it is now time to show them this truth.”

These were not just far-right policies. They were justifications rooted in the alt-right and the manosphere.

So someone like Trump may not directly endorse incels and white supremacists, though he can borrow their arguments, but he is able to communicate his apparent support by interacting with the middle men like Bannon, who are more explicit in their support of communities like the alt-right, thus enabling Trump to imply a direct connection to such communities through intermediaries without actually getting his own hands dirty.

After being appointed to lead the U.S. Department of Education, Betsy DeVos arranged meetings to discuss campus sexual assault with men’s rights groups well known for their misogynistic views and attacks on sexual violence survivors.31 One of the groups DeVos invited to a consultation, Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE), has been singled out by the Southern Poverty Law Center for promoting misogyny and “lobbying to roll back services for victims of domestic abuse and penalties for their tormentors.” The SAVE website states as a “key fact” that “female initiation of partner violence is the leading reason for the woman becoming a victim of subsequent violence.”32 DeVos also reached out to the National Coalition for Men.

The following year, DeVos proposed a major overhaul of college and university sexual misconduct procedures, including narrowing the definition of sexual harassment and increasing protections for students accused of misconduct.

There are clues, too, that politicians may be aware of the enormous support they stand to receive from extremist communities when they tap into their ideology. One of the clearest such indicators is the way in which the politicians may subsequently refuse to apologize for their rhetoric or double down with messaging that will appeal to the same communities, even when challenged.

His use of the term window is not a coincidence—manosphere and white supremacist forums alike are obsessed with the concept of the “Overton window,” a term describing the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse. When figures like Morgan use rhetoric that might previously have been considered radical or unacceptable, or politicians like Trump express ideas that might have seemed unthinkable for a former president to utter, alt-right and incel forums cheer at their perception that the Overton window has shifted, opening a wider gap for their even more extreme ideas to nudge their way into the mainstream.

“Is this a ‘witch hunt’?” JOHN HUMPHRYS ON #METOO, TODAY, BBC RADIO 4

Men today are terrified.

This is a witch hunt, make no mistake. And any man might be next…

If the above representation sounds like an exaggeration, consider the following headlines and quotes about the #MeToo movement, taken from some of the most prominent and highly respected media platforms in the world: “#MeToo Run Amok” —The Week “When #MeToo Goes Too Far” —New York Times “Is This a ‘Witch Hunt’?” —Today “Millennial Women Are Too Quick to Shame Men” —The Times “A Clumsy Pass Over Dinner is NOT a Sex Harassment” —Daily Mail “What Will Women Gain from All This Squawking about Sex Pests? A Niqab” —Mail on Sunday

Still this idea of it being fake news has become an accepted and acceptable narrative. And it is no longer a fringe or extreme narrative. It is the norm.

These are the ideas of the manosphere. Of the woman-hating fringes that thrive beneath the radar, undiscussed, unstudied, and unchecked. When their ideas are repackaged and brushed up for a mass audience—threaded carefully into mainstream dialogue through quasirespectable figures who act as human conduits, through social media algorithms that give their content undue prominence and make it appear more widely accepted, through media outlets seeking controversy and clickbait and the appearance of “balance”—they don’t emerge looking exactly the same. What starts out as hatred is subverted into something else: fear. Men who hate women make other men afraid of women.

The tactics and hallmarks of manosphere logic and argument, however, remain clearly visible. There is the use of “whataboutery” to distract from valid argument. The undermining of real statistics using pseudoscience or just outright lies to suggest a different reality. The focus on individual, emotive cases to try to create false equivalence or imply a wider trend. And the portrayal of those who are the most privileged and the most likely to commit acts of abuse as the greatest victims of all.

So even among the tiny number of men who actually faced any kind of repercussions, many salvaged their careers and finances regardless.

The explanation for this is a complex cocktail of statutes of limitations, victim shaming, and the failings of our justice systems.

Yet in spite of all this hard evidence, the narrative surrounding #MeToo in the mainstream media leaned far closer to manosphere hysteria than to actual facts.

How does this happen? How do the antifeminist conspiracy theories of the myriad manosphere forums find their way into our national narrative about sexual assault?

In the year ending April 1, 2013, alone, the Daily Mail used the phrase cried rape in fifty-four separate headlines—a dramatic, manospheresque misrepresentation of the scale of the problem.

In other words, the Daily Mail’s reporting on false rape allegations outstripped the actual rate of such events occurring by almost double.

Valizadeh and other manosphere community members extended this case by arguing that the state should provide sex workers to “service” incels. (“The whores that are a part of this program would be given special training to make the incels feel special by calling them ‘handsome,’ ‘powerful’ and ‘confident.’”) Single women, it is argued, should be forced to pay for this scheme through a tax on birth-control products. If a program like this isn’t implemented and public attitudes don’t shift to sympathize more with incels, he casually threatens, “there will be many more incel shooting sprees in the future.”

This is clearly ridiculous and misogynistic.

What incel beliefs and the sex redistribution argument are actually about is terrorism. Manosphere figures such as Valizadeh, and many others like him, are effectively holding women hostage, claiming that more will die if the sexual demands of incels are not met. But somehow, seemingly, when it is “just” women at stake, all our societal norms about not negotiating with terrorists fly out the window. Suddenly, we seem quite willing to entertain the possibility that throwing a few women (particularly if they are “just sex workers”) under the bus seems like a pretty good trade-off. Even entering into the debate, humoring it as a thought experiment, giving it the oxygen of publicity, sends the message that these terrorists are worthy of negotiation, whether their ideas are rebutted in the op-eds and blogs or not.

Kind, reasonable men who have never heard of manosphere communities and who genuinely believe in equality begin to become infected with a niggling worry. Men who really deplore sexual violence and want women to have equal chances in the workplace start to face the shadowy fear that the pendulum might be swinging a bit too far in the opposite direction. A seed of doubt is sown, and it whispers that perhaps they are paying a higher price than they realized for women’s advancement. Hang on a minute, they might start to think. I am all for equality, but is that really what’s going on here?

Men who are afraid of women are actually afraid of other men.

We are asking for dignity, for justice, for an end to impunity. In short, many people have bought into the fear of a threat that does not really exist.

Take another example: the cries of “not all men” and the repeated arguments, from the same crowd, that this moment of snowflake hysteria has created a PC minefield for modern men, who are unable to do so much as sneeze near a woman without triggering an accidental accusation of sexual harassment. That it isn’t a man’s fault if his colleague has a wildly different interpretation of a harmless “compliment” than his. That men are left desperately navigating a world in which one woman’s “sexual assault” is another’s friendly pat on the knee.

That is because these arguments are not being made in good faith. They are simply attempts to dismiss and undermine the validity of women’s complaints. The irony, of course, is that it is precisely these kinds of responses that risk tarring more than just a few men with the same brush. Yes, it might only be a small group of men who are deliberately committing the crimes of sexual harassment or assault in the workplace and beyond, but if the response of many men to hearing about this is to leap immediately to the defense of their gender and try to cast doubt on the validity of victims’ testimonies, that doesn’t exactly further the argument that not all men are implicated in the problem. No, of course, not all men are committing these acts. But those men who choose to respond to this moment of accountability by trying to discredit survivors remain complicit in the wider system that works, and always has worked, to silence victims and preserve the privileged status quo.

The conversation becomes centered, again, on men’s needs, fears, and rights. When all this comes together, we see the perfect storm, with the internet, social media, mainstream media, commentators, and politicians all, wittingly or unwittingly, playing a part in a symphony that swells and amplifies basic tenets of manosphere ideology, resulting in the same aim: spreading fear.

In 2017, 47 percent of Republican men agreed that “most women interpret innocent remarks or acts as being sexist.” A year later, after Professor Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations against Brett Kavanaugh had been derided in the manosphere, painted across the media as a manipulative partisan conspiracy to topple an innocent man, and mocked by the president himself, the number jumped to 68 percent. Meanwhile, the number of Republican men who believe sexism is a problem in our society dropped.

Boys who reacted in a resistant way at the beginning of a session usually did so because they were embarrassed, they thought the whole thing was a bit of a joke, or they worried that the word sexism meant they were going to be told off. We’d discuss the many ways in which gender stereotypes affect men and boys and talk about mental health and male role models, and as the boys came to realize that this was not an attack on them, they’d participate more and more fully in the conversation. This phenomenon was most clearly illustrated when I visited an all-girls school where pupils from the neighboring boys’ school joined us for the talk. The two schools often participated in shared activities, so the students knew each other fairly well. On the morning I was due to arrive, the girls started to notice belligerent comments cropping up on the boys’ social media accounts. They demanded to know why they should be forced to sit through a stupid lecture about sexism and began planning to be as disruptive as possible, promising to jeer and snigger their way through the event.

Instead of reporting the messages, the girls asked their teachers if they could leave their last lesson of the morning a few minutes early, giving them time to reach the assembly hall before the boys arrived. Fanning out, they sat in every other seat throughout the auditorium. When the boys arrived, they were stymied. Each of them stuck sitting between two girls and so stripped of the bravado of a disruptive bloc, they were forced to actually listen to the conversation the girls wanted to have.

He was wearing a red hat emblazoned with words in white: Make America Great Again.

I frequently hear young people say that “rape is a compliment really” or “crying is part of foreplay.”

At one school I visited, the girls had been banned from starting a feminist society because the headmaster had deemed it divisive, unnecessary, and potentially sexist. The girls started meeting in secret anyway; it was only after the headmaster’s daughter joined as an act of protest that the society mysteriously gained official approval.

they are unwittingly becoming indoctrinated into the shared knowledge and groupthink of the misogynistic mob.

For those adults who think of YouTube as the home of grumpy cat videos and movie trailers, it is unnerving to learn that the platform is heavily colonized by extreme right-wing thinking, represented by a vast number of channels with white supremacist, misogynistic hosts, pumping out thousands of hours of content in support of their worldviews.

These algorithms might not seem especially important, until you learn that 70 percent of all YouTube videos watched are recommended by the platform’s algorithm.10 So people spend significantly more time watching the content served up to them than videos they’ve actually gone looking for.

While learning about Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in high school, some of her students complained, saying there ought to be “a Handmaid’s Tale for men.” (Atwood’s dystopian novel, set in an imagined totalitarian United States in which women are completely subjugated, is famously inspired by real-world oppression. Atwood has stated, “One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened.”)

“When I asked them about this,” the teacher told me, “they referred to a YouTube video, which said that men now have fewer rights than women and that women are always complaining, but now things are harder for men.”

On the day I visited the forum, the most recent post in that section featured six pages of abuse and attacks against U.S. politician Ilhan Omar, including Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and racism. Users suggested she go back to her “chit hole [sic]” country, while others discussed whether they would rape her. “Not gonna lie, I’d smash her, hijab and all.” Little coincidence that she is one of the congresswomen Trump tweeted about, telling her to “go back” to where she came from.

So we have a situation with all the hallmarks of grooming and online radicalization.

“Always include memes, funny gifs, Twitter embeds and YouTube videos in every post,” says the Daily Stormer style guide. “This is very important.” It adds, “Packing our message inside of existing cultural memes and humor can be viewed as a delivery method. Something like adding cherry flavor to children’s medicine.” The simile here, given the use of memes to radicalize actual children, is sickeningly accurate.

And yet in spite of all this, we don’t talk about misogynist extremism. We barely talk about radicalization in terms of white supremacy and neo-Nazis, let alone misogyny. When we think of terrorist groups that radicalize young men online, we really mean Islamic terrorism.

Think of the manosphere like the Guinea worm.

Its ideology, smuggled inside via other hosts, can infect you before you even realize it. Once inside, it spreads and grows, eventually causing great pain. In an attempt to ease that pain, hosts cause harm to others and accelerate wider infestation. And while only a small part of the problem is visible, a much greater portion lurks beneath the surface. It isn’t possible simply to pull the Guinea worm out of your leg. Though only the tip protrudes, the body of the worm might be up to a meter long, and it will not simply slide out with ease. Pulling too hard or too quickly risks breaking the worm, which can be disastrous, causing putrefaction. The only way to extract the worm is to wrap it around a small stick and to slowly turn the stick a little each day, pulling the worm out gradually over a period of weeks. The same is true of the manosphere. It won’t work to try to lop off just the visible tip. It isn’t enough to try to yank it out in one go or to focus only on one part of the problem. Quick fixes won’t do. The only method that will work must be slow and sustained, patient and thorough. We have to get the whole worm.

Unfortunately, evidence suggests that perhaps the weakest area of response to online misogyny and extremism, including the deliberate grooming of boys and men, comes from the very top. Looking at the major organizations and government groups tasked with tackling extremism, terrorism, and radicalization, it becomes clear that the threat posed by misogynistic communities is simply not taken seriously.

“The ECDB only includes violent and financial crimes committed by one or more suspects who adhered to a far-right, Al Qaeda-inspired, or extremist animal/environmental rights belief system.”

So there it is, in black and white. The extremist ideology referenced by Sodini, Rodger, and Harper-Mercer does not qualify them to be included in the national government database of extremist crimes. In spite of the fact that these three men alone, explicitly acting in the name of violent misogynistic extremism, killed eighteen people and injured thirty-one more. Meanwhile, animal rights and environmental extremist ideologies are considered serious enough to be included, despite no killings in the name of these belief systems being carried out during the same period.

We do not leap to tackle a terrorist threat to women, because the reality of women being terrorized, violated, and murdered by men is already part of the wallpaper.