followed the dawn of management consultancy into a white-collar job and the Midwest suburbs. Before Max was born, his father was a unionized carpenter in Newark, New Jersey, part of a long line of the same until the 1980s came around and Max Sr. Kind of a hippie.") His parents are alive and married. (He has a brother, younger: "He goes to school in Seattle. But Max is remarkably unassuming in appearance, handsome enough and normally tall equally imaginable in board shorts and a snapback as he is in the sort of graduation suit one wears to a first post-collegiate interview downtown. In the popular imagination, men's rights activists are "neckbeards": morbidly obese basement dwellers with a suspect affection for My Little Pony. I wanted to know what these men were like, not on Reddit or on Twitter, but in ordinary life It was only good luck that he lived in my city and was willing to talk. I found Max on Reddit, on a forum largely devoted to making fun of teenage leftists on Tumblr. River North is - at 70 percent white in a city where the white population is 32 percent and declining - one of the few places one can live in the Chicago where it is still possible to avoid even a vague awareness of the city's racial and cultural dynamics. When I met him, Max lived in the River North neighborhood of Chicago. When they vary, it is in extremity, with some merely decrying the "anti-male" attitude of feminism and others seeking, for example, to reverse the criminalization of marital rape. Beyond these overt disadvantages, they claim more subtle systemic disrespect from a culture increasingly focused on what they take to be feminine values, from emotional expressiveness to total sexual and reproductive liberation. Men are expected to work dangerous and difficult jobs in construction and agriculture. Men typically lose their children in otherwise equal custody disputes. Men are required to enter the selective service women are immune. The movement has neither a central platform nor any acclimated leaders, but the central themes are consistent: It is men, not women, who are oppressed. Men's rights activism has been in the undercurrent of American culture since at least the 1970s and has been largely explicit in its role as a backlash against feminism.
"If both of us stood up on this table right now and started yelling what we think about feminism, somebody might tell you to shut the fuck up. "I'll make you a bet, hundred dollars," Max tells me the first night we hang out. I found him because I wanted to know what these men were like, not on Reddit or on Twitter or on any other forum where they are actively engaged in their cause, but in ordinary life - relaxed, after having a few, and without a keyboard to take it out on. He doesn't think much of feminism in general, or at least of what he says feminism became once the voting and the jobs and the abortion rights were sorted and the word became a dog whistle for "self-pity and sexism toward men." His name is Max - although it isn't, of course - and he is a men's rights activist. He's just a man who takes a dim view of Sarkeesian, he says, and hasn't been afraid to tweet her about it. "Like, if I'm 'privileged,' I'm privileged to have had parents who encouraged me to think for myself"Īs it happens I'd spent several nights in August with one of her antagonists. He claims he's not the kind to send explicit threats, and he wasn't involved in Gamergate. Yet she was harassed as if she'd proposed revolutionary insurrection, and so during the last week of August, Sarkeesian, an ordinary woman with a message so innocuous that a sane world might deem it obvious, was forced to flee from her home. Is any of this truly in doubt? Is any of it more radical than a new voice reciting an old liturgy?
She points out that the video game industry caters to men women, when included, are typically set dressing, as victims of violence or sexual reward. To view Sarkeesian's Feminist Frequency videos after reading accounts of her harassment is to be surprised chiefly by how uncontroversial her analysis feels. Very few of the women who have found themselves violently threatened on the internet are. T he most public victims of last year's Gamergate rage - women like Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn, and Brianna Wu - were not radicals. Organized intimidation is now fair game for anybody audible to the mob, and everyone is audible online. For all the sense that we are in a generation finding a new voice, it may be more accurate to say that we are in a generation where an old voice has finally found volume. Women - some women, at least - have always known. It only took the internet to make it obvious.