Yesterday The Atlantic published a largely incoherent article blaming the manosphere for mass shootings.
To Learn About the Far Right, Start With the ‘Manosphere’
The sexist world has become a recruiting ground for potential mass shooters.
The article doesn’t even try to tie mass shooters to any manosphere sites. Instead, it equates antifeminism in general with mass murderers. Ironically it simultaniously claims that:
- By definition being antifeminist is a heretical radical fringe position. All right minded people today enthusiastically support feminism, and only dangerous and insane people would dare to oppose feminism.
- Feminism is not a powerful force in our society. If you believe it is a powerful force in our society you are peddling an insane conspiracy theory because as feminism teaches us, women are powerless in our patriarchal society.
Finally, anti-feminist ideology has the capacity to become a 360-degree conspiracy theory, similar to the kind of anti-Semitic ideas that flourish online. Feminists are presumed to influence all government decisions, even though women are still underrepresented at every level of elected office. Across the fractured, diverse outposts of the manosphere, “one of the few things they will agree on is a conspiratorial view of feminism,” Murdoch says. “They don’t consider that it was ever a movement for gender equality. They think it was a guise to assert control over men.”
