About ten years ago I spent quite a bit time surfing some of the nastiest male supremacy sites, and became very troubled by the trends I saw taking shape:
These sites were (and are) bubbles of reinforcement for misogynist beliefs as the correct beliefs.*
The next step, advocating violence against women, seemed then quite predictable. It, too, got and gets reinforcement on those sites.
But when I brought up the danger I saw developing, like a dark cloud moving swiftly in from a distance, I was (in many different venues) viewed as a bit deranged myself. Mostly I was told that the men who hate women on those sites are a tiny and deranged minority and better ignored lest they get more prominence**.
That is the angle from which I read today's Washington Post article on Scott Paul Beierle, a man who shot at six women, killing two, on November 2, 2018 at a Tallahassee yoga studio. The headline of the piece is "He Always Hated Women."
It's not only Beierle's own history as a hater of women the article covers. It cites several other mass murders where the search for an explanation led pretty directly to the worst types of misogyny sites, and it highlights the way the misogyny and male supremacy sites are one of the channels into all the other beliefs of Alt Right***.
Sigh. I hate being Cassandra.
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* Beliefs such as
a) that women are genetically inferior, meant to be treated as such or as property or as domestic animals, and to be excluded from all public life,
b) that women, all billions of them, are inherently and biologically nothing but scheming whores and gold-digger,
and
c) that any man is entitled to have sex with any woman he desires who is not already the property of another man, which makes it unacceptable that women have any boundaries or any right of refusal.
These beliefs are reinforced on those sites, because anyone trying to introduce a bit more balanced ideas will be banned immediately.
As an aside, there is at least one male in academia who thinks of women as pecan pies or something similar in this context.
** I was also concerned over the fact that these sites are similar to those anorexia sites which encouraged starving and offered applause when someone had managed to go from 110 pounds to 90 pounds. In other words, the actual pain of the men commenting on those sites did not get the professional help it requires.
*** From the WaPo article:
“Incels are full of rage, and it is trivial to turn these guys into kike haters,” explained one of Anglin’s sidekicks, Andrew Auernheimer, known online as Weev, in a Daily Stormer post. “Few people have ever personally had their life harmed by a Jew (in a direct, personally observable sense), but every single breathing man has had it f----- up by multiple selfish, scheming hookers (likely starting with their own mothers).”The ugly rhetoric can lead to violence. The 19-year-old nursing student alleged to have opened fire in a San Diego-area synagogue in April cited, among a litany of anti-Semitic conspiracies, the role of Jews in promoting feminism.Incel adherents in particular — who dream of destroying the women they long for, derisively nicknamed “Stacys,” and the attractive men, “Chads,” who have better luck — have emerged as killers.