Getting Rich and Famous by Teaching Men to Hate Women

Dangerous indoctrination is taking place “for fun and profit” all across the ‘manosphere’

Paul Elam, who founded the men’s rights group, A Voice for Men, once wrote a blog post entitled, “An Open Response to Troubled Men.” In it, he addressed all the frustrated and upset men who were supposedly suffering at the hands of a purportedly anti-male society by telling them to essentially piss off unless they were willing to pay for his advice and expertise.

Elam’s response to these men, suffering from exactly the ills he claims to abhor, representing precisely the “victims” he professes to devote his life to helping? “Fuck you… tough shit… go fucking bother someone else with your problems.”

Bates, Laura. Men Who Hate Women (p. 232). Sourcebooks. Kindle Edition.

Many of the guys who find themselves on various “manosphere” websites come there with legitimate feelings of sadness or vulnerability hoping to find support and answers in order to make their lives better. What they most often find instead are shrewd tacticians who know how to manipulate them to their own ends, building up their own armies of devoted followers and taking money from their fans without actually helping them in any meaningful way. Rather than actually helping these men, they teach them to hate and dehumanize women as the source of all of their problems in a growing and increasingly worrisome movement.

There is no incentive for men like Elam to help their followers move on or solve their problems, because such figureheads are dependent on the slavish support of men who believe the systemic discrimination against them exists and is inescapable.

Instead, they double down on the very problem hurting their followers the most. They encourage men to hold ever more tightly to outdated tropes of masculinity, suggesting that adherence to these tired and rigid constructs is a life raft when it is actually the very current dragging many men beneath the surface.

Bates, Laura. Men Who Hate Women (p. 234). Sourcebooks. Kindle Edition.

But these tactics aren’t just confined to Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs), they are also employed by other manosphere types as well, from incels and Pick Up Artists (PUAs) to the likes of Andrew Tate and Jordon Peterson.

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. The process is as ingenious as it is self-serving. As an article in the New York Review of Books put it, Peterson is “a disturbing symptom of the malaise to which he promises a cure.”

Bates, Laura. Men Who Hate Women (p. 234). Sourcebooks. Kindle Edition.

Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist turned social critic is well-known for exhorting young men to “stand up straight” and “clean up your room” but that seems to be where his advice on self-responsibility ends. According to him, everything else that is wrong with the world is the fault of feminists, vegans, Social Justice Warriors, and the fact that it’s no longer the 1950s. Newsflash JP, personal responsibility begins with you. Where is the advice for young men about how their words and behaviors impact others around them? Where is the Jungian work on the shadow-self? Nope, it’s all about blaming other people when you get beyond the superficials.

The truth is, these men don’t actually want to solve their follower’s problems or heal their wounds and insecurities. They rely on maintaining them in order to keep the machine rolling and to continue filling their coffers and stoking their egos. They claim to want to help men, but they never seem to do anything positive or affirmative to that end in a really substantive way.

Some corners of the men’s rights movement focused on legitimate grievances — male homelessness and rates of suicide, male conscription, or lack of male shelters for domestic violence victims — to draw in followers. But the movement has never made meaningful steps to address these issues or seek solutions, instead directing their followers to blame women, aided by a large feminist conspiracy, for everything. (source)

It’s all about demonizing women, particularly feminists, as the source of all of their pain. Meanwhile, the main people who are actually addressing the things that men are suffering at the hands of stifling and restrictive social norms are the very people the manosphere rails against. The American Psychological Association issued new guidelines a few years back to help address the way that the small box of patriarchal masculinity harms boys and men, but the manosphere guys don’t care about any of that and these new guidelines made many of them apoplectic.

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

There is a community of men’s organizations focused on tackling issues like mental health, masculine stereotypes, and relationship violence. But this isn’t it. Instead, MRAs are concerned, to the point of obsession, with attacking women. And their particular target is feminism. Not only do MRAs do vanishingly little to tackle the many very real issues affecting men today, what’s worse is that their efforts actually impede progress for many male victims. The efforts of men’s rights groups to cling to outdated gender stereotypes and their crusade against the women trying to address those same stereotypes often mean that they themselves contribute to precisely the problems they claim to want to solve.

Bates, Laura. Men Who Hate Women (p. 136). Sourcebooks. Kindle Edition.

Despite the very intentional rhetoric to the contrary by the manosphere, mainstream feminism believes in equal opportunity, personal choice, and self-determination for everyone. It’s not about female supremacy or hating men — but that’s the rhetoric the manosphere keeps pushing in order to keep vulnerable men ensconced in what is essentially a cult — where facts are distorted and male victimhood is cultivated for the purposes of keeping the “thought leaders” rich and famous.

“Women should be terrorized by their men; it’s the only thing that makes them behave better than chimps.” – Matt Forney under the pseudonym Ferdinand Bardamu, “The Necessity of Domestic Violence,” In Mala Fide blog, 2012 (source)

Warren Farrell used to be a board member of the National Organization for Women (NOW), but after his divorce, he became an ardent Men’s Rights Advocate (MRA) who equated paying child support to “taxation without representation.” The Southern Poverty Law Center notes, “Often, these men’s rights advocacy groups, like the National Coalition for Men (NCFM) — founded in 1977, and on whose board of advisors Farrell sits — distort statistics to indicate female privilege, scapegoat women for their unfounded gripes or create false equivalencies between the oppression of men and of women. Groups like NCFM use litigation to challenge what they perceive as discrimination against men and try to influence policy on domestic violence, sexual assault, divorce and custody cases. Funneling extensive energy into grievances with legislation like the Violence Against Women Act, men’s rights groups offer little tangible support to their constituents.”

Everything we have seen so far from the rhetoric of incels, PUAs, and MRAs suggests that the primary goal of these reactionary groups, like much of the alt-right and other online supremacist groups, is to regress to an idealized state of white, heteronormative male control and power. They want to see women subjugated as vassals, objects to be used primarily for men’s sexual pleasure and reproduction: pliant, obedient, and servile. The end — achieving this extreme, patriarchal utopia — is considered infinitely more important than the means, which may include everything from trickery to harassment to assault to mass violence.

Bates, Laura. Men Who Hate Women (p. 210). Sourcebooks. Kindle Edition.

Often the mouthpieces of this movement are careful not to publicly say anything that could get them in too much trouble, while at the same time blowing dog whistles and speaking in coded rhetoric that their followers clearly understand. If they get a bit overzealous and step over the line, as Paul Elam of A Voice for Men did when he declared October to be “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” they pretend that it is satire or that it’s been taken out of context. The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that despite initially stepping back from BAVBM, Paul Elam still trots it out every October.

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.”

Bates, Laura. Men Who Hate Women (p. 235). Sourcebooks. Kindle Edition.

In 2017 The HuffPost got ahold of a 17-page “style guide” and alt-right playbook giving instruction on how to recruit and indoctrinate men into racism and misogyny on The Daily Stormer website — all the while never straying overtly into the territory of hate speech. This was often done by mixing hate in with “humor,” wholly unobjectionable mundane elements, or excerpts from mainstream news, so as to not turn off anyone new with something too vitriolic. The idea was to boil the frog slowly so that by the time the water was really hot, he’d been so inured to racism and misogyny that it only seemed reasonable. Other manosphere groups have used the very same techniques.

Laura Bates runs the Everyday Sexism Project website to document examples of sexism from around the world. She has studied the manosphere extensively and notes, “If we think of the various manosphere communities as a chain of interlinked but distinct groups, starting from the extreme of incels and inching toward more mainstream misogyny, we can see how rhetoric and ideas may be passed along the chain, gradually gaining a veil of normalization as they go. Each community can interact with the ones directly above or beneath it on the chain, thus maintaining the overall mobility of ideas but insulating the higher links from the public censure and criticism associated with those at the bottom.”

Taking a page from The Daily Stormer playbook keeps the men who prey on other men for status and profit on message without tanking their credibility and it allows violent misogynists like Andrew Anglin to keep getting their message out. While there may be a few corners of the manosphere where men are actually supporting each other in healthy ways, overwhelmingly it is the hub for straight white male anti-social radicalization — something that is spreading in disturbing ways into everyday life. I will go into that further in another essay.

© Copyright Elle Beau 2023