‘Is this a “witch hunt”?’
John Humphrys on #MeToo, Today, BBC Radio 4
Men today are terrified. They’re living in a world in which they are persecuted and threatened within an inch of their lives. Any one of them, regardless of his past actions or relationships, is at risk of seeing his happiness destroyed, his career decimated without a moment’s notice.
Angry, deceitful, manipulative women are on the warpath and no man is safe. No scalp is off limits, no history so unblemished to be safe from deliberate warping and destruction.
There are hysterical overreactions that paint perfectly innocent interactions as sordid acts of abuse. There are gold-digging professional victims who’ll conveniently ‘remember’ a brush of the hand three decades later in a shameless bid for attention, compensation and ‘five minutes of fame’.
And that’s before you even start on the morally bankrupt women out there who’ll invent a story out of thin air, torpedoing an innocent man’s entire reputation and livelihood, just because they can.
‘What about “innocent until proven guilty”?’ I hear you cry. Oh no. Not in today’s world of feminazi Twitchfork mobs and PC snowflake hysteria gone mad. Not in this environment in which #MeToo has become so powerful that companies are jettisoning their most senior employees left, right and centre, with no due process, based on little more than the whisper of a rumour circulated online.
This is a witch hunt, make no mistake. And any man might be next…
This is a not-inaccurate summary of the recent backlash following the #MeToo movement, a campaign started by Tarana Burke in 2006 and popularised on social media in 2017, following accusations of sexual abuse against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. The campaign led to millions of women around the world sharing their stories of sexual harassment and assault, initially in the workplace, but also further afield.
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
‘Sorry ladies, but a clumsy pass over dinner is NOT a sex assault’ – Daily Mail
‘What will women gain from all this squawking about sex pests? A niqab’ – Mail on Sunday
Then consider the following comments, made online by men who are members of the manosphere community:
‘I think it’s scary for men. It’s the story of the fear of it all. Where you get punished for something that you didn’t do.’ – Erik von Markovik (‘Mystery’), commenting on #MeToo to BuzzFeed1
‘Every woman on this planet, regardless of her education or background, is a bitch, a cunt, a slut, a golddigger, a flake, a cheater, a backstabber, a narcissist, and an attention whore that is dying to get out… this, I’m afraid, is the true nature of women. This is the true nature that will come forth if society doesn’t put constraints or limitations on a woman’s behavior and choice.’ – Daryush Valizadeh (‘Roosh V’), in a blog post titled ‘The True Nature of Women’
‘Ever since #MeToo came out and all these allegations of harassment and rape and what not, I’m afraid to even approach a woman… the harassment claims scare the shit out of me. Also, the idea of a woman playing hard to get vs No Means No… this has been all very confusing, as I wasn’t great with the girls to begin with.’ – Manosphere forum user, in a thread titled ‘Is MeToo making [men] weak?’
Notice the similarities?
The hysteria and panic whipped up in the furthest corners of the manosphere has spread online like wildfire, reaching its tendrils so quickly and effectively through the forums, blogs, websites and platforms that it has extended far beyond the individual domains of incels, MRAs and PUAs. It has spread so comprehensively, in fact, that it has emerged into the mainstream consciousness, almost becoming ‘common knowledge’. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary: in spite of the fact that you would be hard-pressed to name high-profile men who have experienced a sudden downfall based on an unfounded accusation without due process; in spite of the fact that a relatively small number of high-profile men have faced consequences at all, compared to the millions of women who have recounted their experiences of abuse without ever having seen justice; in spite of the fact that many high-profile men accused of sexual violence by dozens of women continue to walk free… 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 quasi-respectable 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 pseudo-science 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.
Let’s be clear from the beginning that this misogynistic narrative is not rooted in truth.
Take, for example, the numbers surrounding the #MeToo movement, portrayed repeatedly as a witch hunt. According to a New York Times analysis, it is estimated that around 200 ‘prominent’ men in the US lost jobs, roles, professional ties or projects after public allegations of sexual harassment, with just ‘a few’ facing criminal charges.2 Compare this to the fact that over 12 million tweets were sent using the #MeToo hashtag within its first four months alone, not including the millions of women who took to other social media platforms to share their stories. Even if we assume that a significant portion of those using the hashtag were critiquing or commenting on the movement, rather than sharing personal stories, and that some of the hashtag usage took place outside of the US, it is still clear that the disparity between women who have reported sexual harassment or assault and men who have been seen to face justice remains stark, and is certainly not weighted against men.
The idea that ‘the tables have turned’, as has been dramatically claimed, with the movement ‘going too far’ and tipping the balance of gender power in the opposite direction, is absolute nonsense. We have barely seen a blip. Then there is the notion that a single woman’s spurious accusation is enough to torpedo an innocent man’s livelihood. The reality, again, is very different. What we have seen over and over again, as the trajectories of high-profile men like Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh clearly demonstrate, is that even multiple accusers or dozens of correlating accusations are often not enough to derail powerful men’s careers.3
In fact, the New York Times investigation revealed that at least 920 people had come forward with sexual misconduct allegations relating to the 200 men in their investigation, suggesting an average ratio of 4.5 accusers per single case. It further pointed out that ‘more than 10 percent of the ousted men have tried to make a comeback, or voiced a desire to, and many never lost financial power’. So, even among the tiny number of men who actually faced any kind of repercussions, many salvaged their careers and finances regardless.
Finally, though dramatic media reports about men’s ‘execution without trial’ have attempted to portray the loss of reputation or individual roles as equivalent to imprisonment or even death, the reality is that many of these men will go on to be quietly rehabilitated away from the public eye. They are often able to continue their careers in new positions, as the swift return to work of one of the most high-profile perpetrators, comedian Louis CK, demonstrated. Similarly, Uber general manager Eyal Gutentag left his job after reportedly being witnessed sexually assaulting a female colleague, yet he quickly went on to become chief operations officer at another ride-hailing service, and then chief marketing officer at a billion-dollar company. And his is not an unusual case: it has been reported that, in the technology industry particularly, ‘a number of men who have been accused of, and admitted to, sexual misconduct have reemerged on the scene – sometimes within months of allegations surfacing in the public. Many have returned with new startups or venture funds backed by investors well aware of their past behavior.’4
When it comes to criminal charges, the justice gap yawns even wider. Some men are facing short-term professional consequences. The vast majority have faced no long-term sentences or criminal justice. The explanation for this is a complex cocktail of statutes of limitations, victim shaming and the failings of our justice systems. But, for many women who have been victims of sexual violence, it is not an exaggeration to say that the impact – psychological, physical or professional – really is a life sentence.
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.
During the rise of the #MeToo movement, I was inundated with requests to speak about the issue on the radio and television. A few of the invitations seemed to be made in good faith, with the desire to highlight women’s experiences and explore the issue of sexual harassment and assault. But in only one interview, out of all the press requests I accepted during that period, did journalists steer completely clear of casting doubt on women’s testimonies, asking about false accusations or generally suggesting that the whole issue was a balanced ‘debate’ between men and women.
How does this happen? How do the anti-feminist conspiracy theories of the myriad manosphere forums find their way into our national narrative about sexual assault? The truth is it happens in a number of ways. Manosphere ideas leak out of the forums onto popular social media sites like Twitter, often in a deliberately orchestrated push by trolls, causing hashtags like #HimToo to trend worldwide. This gives journalists the excuse to seize upon a Twitter trend and describe it as a hard news story, sprinkling their copy with quoted tweets as ‘proof’. They write articles portraying the issue as a ‘raging online debate’, rather than a legitimate movement being hounded by a few hundred fake sock-puppet accounts, controlled by a group of extremists. Once in the national press, the story becomes fair game for discussion on mainstream radio and television programmes, with the concept of ‘balance’ often misinterpreted to portray urgent issues like climate change (or, in this case, sexual assault) as one side of a genuine debate.
Many commentators catch on to the rewards of playing to the manosphere crowd, finding that this ‘extremely online’ audience will come out in great numbers to share and comment on pieces that repeat their rhetoric and worldview. So we see deliberately extreme and obfuscating articles in our national newspapers that present a barely sanitised version of the commentary found in MRA or MGTOW forums.
The Times published a piece by columnist Giles Coren under the headline ‘A couple of xx’s could end my glorious career’, suggesting that putting an innocent kiss on the end of a text message could, in the current climate, be enough to destroy a man’s livelihood. Giving high-profile, platformed voice to the murmurings and fears of the online masses, Coren wrote (without corroboration or examples):
Over the last few years, man after man in the public eye has met his downfall when a woman came forward and made claims against him of sexual aggression of one sort or another… And then without any cross-examination of the stories, the man is finished. No trials or second chances… Time to stop being ‘charming’ to waitresses. Time to stop trying to make women laugh… One misfired flirt and I could be out of a job, publicly shunned, end up in prison. The women are out there who could make it happen. The historical crimes, real or imagined, are waiting to tumble upon one wrong move.5
It is, of course, possible that Coren would seek to defend this column as ironic. But, given how closely he echoes the concerns and attitudes of a great swathe of men who have responded to the #MeToo movement with similar sentiments both on- and offline, it is likely nonetheless that his comments might be taken by many readers at face value, despite being nonsense in reality. The idea that completely innocent men are being laid off willy-nilly, by employers making absolutely no attempt to verify allegations of workplace misconduct, is simply false. What we do know – thanks to hard, statistical evidence – is that thousands of women experience workplace sexual harassment and assault, that their employers regularly fail to take any action over it, and that the vast majority (far from the spectre of conniving, manipulative accusers conjured up by the media) never report what has happened at all. Most are too scared, terrified that they won’t be believed, that they’ll be blacklisted or seen as a ‘troublemaker’, or that their careers may suffer as a result.
These fears are well founded. A 2016 UK poll of over 1,500 women, conducted by YouGov for the TUC and the Everyday Sexism Project, found that over half of all women, and almost two-thirds of young women, have experienced workplace sexual harassment, and that 80 per cent did not feel able to report it to their employer. Of those who did report it, nearly three-quarters said that there was no change, and 16 per cent said that they were treated worse as a result.
That Coren’s argument utilised the manosphere tactic of reversing the positions of victim and perpetrator doesn’t mean he is a secret member of an incel or MRA group. It doesn’t even mean he is necessarily aware of such communities.
But it does reveal how closely aligned manosphere logic has become with mainstream rhetoric around sexual harassment and violence. It reveals a symbiotic relationship, whereby such rhetoric in the mainstream media risks emboldening and encouraging online extremists, and extremist communities’ enthusiastic responses reward editors with clicks and shares.
Invited to discuss the outpouring of allegations of sexual violence in 2017 on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Moral Maze, I found myself, on a highly respected national media platform, faced with arguments explicitly attempting to blame and undermine the victims who had come forward with their stories of abuse – in this case, the women who had accused Weinstein of sexual assault, for which he has now been convicted. The questions I was asked included:
‘In the case of Hollywood, isn’t it reasonable to assume there were some actresses involved in this who saw an opportunity to advance their careers?’
‘Don’t you think that, probably, young actors played along with this? It’s understood, even by people at the bottom who have come to Hollywood… that they’re entering a situation that they understand.’
‘Do you think, having arrived in Tinseltown, they’d be surprised by this?’
It is my belief that we will look back on these narratives and be shocked and appalled that this was our national response to the stories of women who gave chilling evidence at trial that they were raped by a sexual predator.6 And, when we do, we will ask ourselves a question: where did these attitudes come from? Men (particularly those influenced by the manosphere or its ideology) are not only afraid of women who make sexual assault allegations. They are terrified of women’s advancement in the workplace as well. Specifically, they have been led to believe that women’s gains can only come at their own expense. In 2017, Google engineer James Damore famously wrote a memo, which he shared on an internal mailing list, before it appeared in the media. In the memo, Damore criticised Google’s diversity and inclusion programme as ‘arbitrary social engineering of tech just to make it appealing to equal portions of both men and women’. Damore’s ten-page memo focused on ‘biological’ differences between women and men (and their brains), which he claimed made men simply more naturally predisposed to be interested in tech roles like software engineering. He described the existence of mentoring or programmes for women and ethnic minorities at the company as ‘discriminatory practices’, suggesting that the bar was lowered at hiring for ‘diversity candidates’, and accusing the company of promoting ‘veiled left ideology’ that could cause irreparable ‘harm’.7
There were several telling factors that seemed to link Damore’s memo to the manosphere. It included rambling references to communism and ‘Marxist… class warfare’, railing against a conspiracy to portray the ‘white, straight, cis-gendered patriarchy’ as ‘the oppressor’. After he was eventually fired, Damore went on to speak widely about his ideas and the belief that Google had discriminated against him as a white man. The interviews he gave were to Reddit and to the YouTube channels or platforms of men who would later be identified by one report as part of a powerful and influential net of high-profile figures, promoting reactionary, often misogynistic, anti-left or alt-right views.
Within days of his firing, Damore had posed for a photoshoot outside the company’s HQ, dressed in a T-shirt that read ‘Goolag’ in the font and colours of the Google logo, a play on the word ‘gulag’ (a twentieth-century Soviet forced-labour camp). The photographer was Peter Duke, a man dubbed the ‘Annie Leibovitz of the Alt-Right’ by the New York Times, famous for photographing men like Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich. In a suggestion that Damore may have had support from people acquainted with trolling, fake anti-Google adverts suddenly popped up around Google’s LA offices, also featuring the ‘Goolag’ pun.
Whether Damore was deliberately promoting manosphere ideology or had himself been influenced by the general terror it has whipped up beyond its own realm became largely irrelevant in the feeding frenzy that followed. The media latched on to the case with a vengeance, using it as an opportunity to debate the persecution of white men in the workplace. Such segments implied a legitimate correlation between the anecdotal experiences of individual men and the systemic, proven discrimination and disadvantages faced by other groups, such as women and people of colour. It was another ideal opportunity for manosphere ideas to leak into the mainstream.
Damore’s firing was portrayed as a politically correct punishment for his brave choice to speak truth to power. (Rather than the fact that his sweeping, sexist statements about women being less good at their jobs than men clearly contravened his employer’s workplace policies.) And the overall result of the media maelstrom, which once again took Damore’s outdated pseudo-science and misogyny at face value and debated it in good faith, was to create the impression that women everywhere were storming into workplaces, supported by PC-mad bosses, and stealing better-qualified men’s jobs.
This is an ongoing pattern. We saw it in 2012, when two young men were convicted of the rape of a minor in the Steubenville case.8 The media directed public outrage to focus not on the devastated life of the victim, whose ordeal was filmed and spread virally on social media, but on the ‘blighted’ lives of the perpetrators, described by a CNN correspondent as ‘star football players, very good students’. We were told live on air how the attackers were forced to watch as ‘their lives fell apart… when that sentence came down’.9
We saw it in 2014, when Washington Post columnist George Will responded to a major Obama administration report into campus sexual assault by attempting to downplay the data and casting it as an attack on innocent young men. In a C-SPAN interview, Will said: ‘You’re going to have young men disciplined, their lives often permanently and seriously blighted by this – they won’t get into medical school, they won’t get into law school, and all of this.’ Yet Will’s own attempt to ‘reinterpret’ the data, suggesting it was exaggerated and inaccurate, was itself shown to rely on a dubious analysis from a right-wing group with a long history of trying to undermine the public perception of the campus rape problem.10
We saw it in 2016, when a single, small BBC internship for BAME candidates led to outraged headlines like ‘BBC bans white people from job’, neatly portraying a corporation recently revealed to be struggling with a significant gender and racial pay gap as deeply discriminatory against white men instead. Or when Jeremy Clarkson’s comment that ‘men now just don’t get jobs [at the BBC] at all’ was widely reported in the news.11 The most modest efforts towards equality are repositioned by angry white men as a potential threat to their own livelihoods. Thus, other men are encouraged to fear, rather than celebrate, progress.
We see it again and again in the media’s willingness to whip up controversy and court the ire of online mobs by highlighting rare instances of false rape allegations, and in the tendency to compare punishment of false accusers with sentences for sexual abusers, in an attempt to suggest that the two problems are directly equivalent, creating the misconception that the crimes have similar prevalence rates. This false equivalency was breathtakingly widely touted in July 2019, when DJ Paul Gambaccini and musician Sir Cliff Richard launched a petition calling for anonymity for sexual offence suspects. Speaking to the Today programme, Gambaccini said: ‘This is not a competition, who has been hurt the most. There are actually two crises – one is a sex abuse crisis and the other is a false allegation crisis.’12 Anonymity for those making accusations of sexual violence, he said, ‘does, unfortunately, encourage everyone from liars to lunatics to make some false accusations and get in on the action’. It was a deeply damaging claim that completely belied reality. A man in the UK is 230 times more likely to be raped himself than be falsely accused of rape, so low is the number of false allegations.13 In the meantime, 85,000 women each year in the UK experience rape or attempted rape.14 And, far from being hopelessly biased in favour of accusers, we have a justice system that sees a shamefully low 1.5 per cent of all rape cases that are reported to police lead to a charge or summons.15 But did the media provide a robust examination of Gambaccini’s claims? No. Outlets seized on the opportunity for more juicy ‘debates’. And headline after headline suggested to the casual observer that there was, indeed, an epidemic of lying women feigning victimhood, including: ‘Paul Gambaccini warns of “false allegation crisis” ’.
In the year 2012–13 alone, the Daily Mail used the phrase ‘cried rape’ in fifty-four separate headlines – a dramatic, manospheresque misrepresentation of the scale of the problem.16 A Crown Prosecution Service review, undertaken over seventeen months between 2011 and 2013, found that just thirty-five prosecutions were brought for making false allegations of rape during that period.17 In other words, the Daily Mail’s reporting on false rape allegations outstripped the actual rate of such events occurring by almost double. ‘Wicked women who cried rape trapped by three-in-bed photos’ is a standard example, which gives an idea of the titillating and vilifying tone of such reports.
Once again, all these are manosphere tropes and tactics.
Taking large-scale, representative statistics, demonstrating a systemic problem, and attempting to suggest that the problem doesn’t really exist, because women are ‘asking for it’, then reversing the narrative by casting the perpetrators as the real victims of societal bias and oppression: classic incel ideology.
Using individual, rare miscarriages of justice to suggest that the whole system is unfairly stacked against men, and that manipulation and lies by women are widespread: a tactic beloved by MRAs.
Suggesting that the climate is now so hostile towards men that even those simply enjoying their lives in the company of women risk seeing their careers and prospects decimated: MGTOW philosophy.
Focusing obsessively on false rape allegations and deliberately spreading fake statistics to whip up a climate of fear and undermine victims: a common stomping ground of PUAs like Valizadeh.
At the time of writing, Valizadeh’s website contains over 100 articles about false rape allegations. They include pieces titled ‘All public rape allegations are false’, and blogs advising men that the rate of false rape allegations may be as high as 90 per cent, before moving seamlessly into promotion of the PUA community, with the argument: ‘Game can protect you from false rape accusations.’
‘PUAs do not hate women,’ Neil Strauss wrote in The Game. ‘They fear them.’
Is it any wonder that men everywhere are so scared?
Sometimes the mainstream media picks up manosphere ideas through a less circuitous route, taking arguments that have originated in incel communities and helping to normalise them by debating them directly as valid propositions on national platforms. One recent example of this was the extended and high-profile discussion about so-called sex redistribution, a concept that originated in the manosphere as a supposed measure to prevent incels from engaging in mass violence.
The thrust of the argument, which has long been repeated across manosphere websites and blogs, and is endlessly debated in incel forums, is largely summarised in a piece by Valizadeh on his website. The article – ‘How to Stop Incels From Killing People’ – was written in direct response to criticism of incels, following the Toronto van attack. Valizadeh completely absolves incel killers like Alek Minassian of responsibility, rationalising acts of mass murder as a simple bid for attention by men ‘utterly forsaken’ by society, writing that ‘incels are killing solely because they are failing to bond romantically or sexually with women… they resort to getting attention in the only way they know how: killing’.
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 programme like this isn’t implemented, and public attitudes don’t shift to sympathise more with incels, he casually threatens, ‘there will be many more incel shooting sprees in the future’.
This is clearly ridiculous and misogynistic. The very idea of redistributing sex, as it emerged within the manosphere, rests on a number of deeply sexist and harmful premises, each of which should have given mainstream media platforms pause before amplifying the concept or implying its validity. Yet the argument was picked up and widely discussed across major international outlets, exposing it to a far wider audience than the manosphere, and communicating it to that wider audience with all the respectability and implied validity that these platforms confer. In the New York Times, opinion columnist Ross Douthat echoed incel forums, writing: ‘The sexual revolution created new winners and losers, new hierarchies to replace the old ones, privileging the beautiful and rich and socially adept in new ways and relegating others to new forms of loneliness and frustration.’18
Douthat acknowledges the distinction between men who turn to incel communities through vulnerability and distress and those with violent intent, but then suggests that they should all be treated the same. This strengthens the idea that sexual deprivation is the true motive of murderers like Minassian, and implies that violence against women is inconsequential. ‘I expect the logic of commerce and technology will be consciously harnessed, as already in pornography, to address the unhappiness of incels, be they angry and dangerous or simply depressed and despairing.’
‘At a certain point,’ Douthat suggests, we will all simply succumb to this sensible incel plan. ‘Without anyone formally debating the idea of a right to sex, right-thinking people will simply come to agree that some such right exists, and that it makes sense to look to some combination of changed laws, new technologies and evolved mores to fulfill it.’
In a post on his blog, Robin Hanson, a conservative blogger and professor at George Mason University, wrote:
One might plausibly argue that those with much less access to sex suffer to a similar degree as those with low income, and might similarly hope to gain from organizing around this identity, to lobby for redistribution along this axis and to at least implicitly threaten violence if their demands are not met.19
He went on to muse about possible practical implementation, adding: ‘Sex could be directly redistributed, or cash might be redistributed in compensation.’ Thus, women, as in incel culture, are equated seamlessly with inanimate commodities for possession and trade.
The Spectator ran an article by Toby Young, under the headline ‘Here’s what every incel needs: a sex robot’, in which he demanded: ‘Why is there so little compassion for the “have nots” when it comes to the unequal distribution of sex? It must be because the “victims” of this type of discrimination are nearly all male and, as such, classed as the oppressors not the oppressed.’20
These mainstream media outlets and high-profile commentators, intentionally or unintentionally, amplified incel ideology by taking it at face value, and encouraging their millions of readers to do the same. The effect may have been inadvertent, but that makes it no less pernicious. Instead of examining the real misogyny and power dynamics at the root of incels’ hatred of women, the deeply flawed premise of the manosphere’s own arguments is adopted and debated.
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 of 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, humouring 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.
This is not just a vague comparison. Minassian, Elliot Rodger and other incel killers like them weren’t ‘akin’ to terrorists. They were terrorists. And so it can be argued that the mainstream media, in picking up the ‘debate’ about sex redistribution, is engaging with the sympathisers and apologists for terrorist murderers. And, just like the original media portrayal of these killings, which failed to identify them as acts of terror, these responses have a deep and lasting impact on our societal perception of the problem.
In light of this, it is mind-boggling that Douthat’s column was published, especially given its opening words. ‘One lesson to be drawn from recent western history might be this: sometimes the extremists and radicals and weirdos see the world more clearly than the respectable and moderate and sane.’ Imagine this (or the headline of a similar National Post article: ‘What should we do about dangerous “incels”? Maybe help them’) repurposed in the context of any other terrorist incident.
What matters here is that the narrative becomes so persuasive, and is eventually repeated by such reliable sources, that it becomes extraordinarily convincing. And so it begins to convince good men. 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 realised 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?
These are men who have not committed sexual violence, yet still have a nagging sense of discomfort about the #MeToo conversation. They’re the kind of decent, normal people who crop up again and again in press reports saying: ‘It just seems like you can’t say what you think about anything any more without a witch hunt.’ Or: ‘This has all just gone a bit too far.’ The kind of men who might be looking back over their past relationships and sexual encounters and wondering with a nasty lurch of the stomach if they have ever acted inappropriately. And some of them may well have done. But, rather than reflect on that in a useful and uncomfortable way, they are urged, whether ironically or not, by Coren and his ilk to see themselves as persecuted potential victims instead. By far the most revealing line of Coren’s article was this: ‘The historical crimes, real or imagined, are waiting to tumble upon one wrong move.’ (Emphasis mine.)
Men who are afraid of women are actually afraid of other men. They are afraid of the myths that other men have created, which they have bought into without examination. They are afraid of an idea, rather than a reality. They are afraid of the very cleverly fabricated, carefully disseminated notion that there is a shadowy danger floating somewhere out there, waiting to ensnare them. That their position, their rights and even their very identity are under threat in mysterious and powerful ways. That a movement of women seeking justice for transgressions puts all ‘innocent’ men at risk. That somehow, without realising, the tables of privilege have turned and men have become a persecuted minority, unable to defend themselves without being accused of increasingly worse crimes against progressive values. But this is not what women have asked for. 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.
This was perhaps most clearly summed up when one American woman tweeted about her terror that her good, innocent son might have his life ruined by a false accusation coming out of nowhere, and she consequently encouraged him to videotape every encounter, and invest in technology and software to monitor and record online interactions. This, another Twitter user responded, seemed like an awful lot of effort and expense, especially when the mother could achieve the same result by simply teaching her son not to assault women.
This is the same hysteria we saw whipped up by the media when the idea of recording misogyny as a hate crime was introduced. Innocent men would be locked up in jail for having the temerity to pay a woman a compliment, the papers suggested. Wolf-whistles would suddenly become criminalised. The world had gone mad. Except, in reality, the exact opposite was true. If we know one thing for absolute certain, it is that women are not falling over themselves to report ‘minor’ issues to the police. Every single available statistic we have proves the contrary: women shy away from reporting even the most major and devastating crimes. They are desperately unlikely to report being raped. What on earth makes us fear that they will suddenly be queuing up in droves to complain about wolf-whistles?
The interesting thing about this whole situation is that it is built on a tissue of lies so delicate that the faintest scrutiny brings it all down in shreds. The main thrust of the argument rests, after all, on the idea that innocent men are approaching, touching or otherwise interacting with women in ways that are not really sexual or inappropriate, but just perceived to be so by the feminist mob. But this argument goes up in a puff of smoke when you point out the curious fact that these men, who claim to have no idea these behaviours are sexual or inappropriate, are nonetheless not acting in this manner towards other men.
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.
Except… those two parallel claims – ‘not all men’ and ‘it’s all accidental’ – are directly contradictory. Either it’s ‘not all men’ – in which case, we must infer that it is only a small, specific group of men, deliberately committing acts of harassment and assault (a conclusion with which I broadly agree) – or this is all about poor, blundering men, making innocent missteps in a world in which behaving perfectly respectably risks being misinterpreted beyond one’s control – in which case, presumably, we are talking about all men, since the specific implication is that it could happen to anyone – so, once again, the logic falls apart.
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 defence 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.
When men are encouraged to be afraid of women, the outcome is often most devastating to those women who are most vulnerable. In framing the problem as one of individuals, vulnerable to false accusations or losing prominent roles, the systemic nature of the issue is largely sidestepped, erasing from the narrative the importance of solutions and reforms that would have a much broader impact on women’s workplace rights and safety.
The sensationalist focus on prominent cases renders invisible the women who actually make up the vast majority of workplace sexual-harassment victims: those in public-facing, low-paid, service roles. The victimisation of women in unstable jobs with no human resources department to complain to. Those on zero-hours contracts, who stood out in the TUC research as ‘a group which seems more likely to experience certain types of harassment and are less likely to report it’.21
When the media narrative is wrested so firmly out of the hands of the women who are trying to discuss a serious and complex problem, we are reduced to firefighting: spending precious column inches or screen time defending the very premise that sexual harassment exists in the workplace at all, or refuting the allegation that the majority of claims are false. Thus, the truly important aspects of the problem are edged out of the picture entirely. We never get around to discussing, for example, the migrant and refugee women who face shockingly high levels of sexual harassment in the workplace and are effectively barred from reporting it, because of a failure to protect them from repercussions if they come forward to authorities.
The conversation becomes centred, 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. Fear of women, fear of feminism, fear of #MeToo, fear of progress, fear of change. For those who oppose advancing equality, it is far more effective to make others terrified of it than it is to oppose it openly using logic or argument. People are motivated by fear. And it is fear of being under attack, of being vulnerable to a threat they hadn’t even realised existed, that makes them most likely to succumb to hate and anger against others. It prevents them from sympathising with those ‘others’, whether they are refugees or women in the workplace, because such support suddenly becomes positioned in direct opposition to their own best interests.
So men – even good, moderate men – become less likely to believe women and more likely to suspect them of malicious motives. In 2017, 47 per cent 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 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 per cent. And the number of Republican men who agree that sexism is a problem in our society went down.22
We become scared and preoccupied with problems that, in reality, are enormously unlikely ever to affect us. Consider the following, for example, in light of our societal obsession with false rape allegations. In October 2018, Channel 4 conducted a detailed investigation, using robust national statistics, and revealed that the average adult man in England and Wales has a 0.0002 per cent chance of being falsely accused of rape in a year.23 Most people, when I discuss it with them, find this statistic absolutely shocking. They believe the true figure to be far higher. This clearly demonstrates how insidiously assumptions about lying women and witch hunts have infiltrated our collective consciousness.
So the men who gradually become afraid of women are not just incels or hate-fuelled online extremists, not mainstream commentators making a living out of provocative sexism that teeters just on the right side of socially acceptable. They are the nice, decent, ordinary men, just going about their daily lives, trying to make their way in the world, suffused with a thousand little hints subtly telling them that women are looking to take something away from them and they’d better watch out. These are men who would be devastated to be accused of being ‘misogynists’, who would quickly describe themselves in full favour of gender equality, who honestly want the best for their wives and daughters. They are not men who would commit sexual assault or shout at women on the street. But not being a ‘misogynist’ doesn’t mean that you can’t sometimes behave in sexist ways. We all do it. When we make unspoken, unthinking assumptions about somebody’s appropriateness for a particular role. When we praise our daughters for their looks and our sons for their strength. When we automatically reach for the word ‘bitch’ to describe a woman who has acted in a way we don’t like. This is not extreme misogyny, but it is there nonetheless, and it has an impact. Fifty per cent of men are not extremist misogynists. But a recent survey found that almost half of all American men believe the gender pay gap is ‘made up to serve a political purpose’.24 That is what extremely successful fear-mongering looks like.
And so you find yourself sitting on a panel at a literary festival, faced with a male audience member, who seems very nice and well-meaning, asking you, half-apologetically, how men are supposed to support movements like #MeToo when there is ‘evidence’ that thousands of innocent men have lost their jobs for no reason. And you want to ask him: ‘What evidence? Where did you get that idea? Where did it come from? How do you know?’ But it is just something he knows. It is an idea borne out of hate, slowly, slowly passed along a chain of communities and websites and interlocutors and commentators, until it morphs into a shadowy fear that isn’t easy to grasp or refute, but suffuses our public consciousness. And you already know where it came from, even if he does not.