Russian Sledges

Electron microscope image of the virus responsible for measles (paramyxoviridae). Photo: Alain Grillet/Sanofi Pasteur

Probably not, at least according to a growing army of pissed-off activists who are convinced that the male species is profoundly endangered by our feminized society. They say it's a woman's world now—that women have the upper hand in sex, in universities, in custody battles. And don't even get them started on all those bogus rape cases. It's enough to make a certain kind of man join a revolution. Jeff Sharlet reports from the movement's first national gathering and meets the true believers who want you to fight for your right to patriarchy

Albert Calabrese believes the age of consent should be 12 years old.

"What is 'the manosphere'?" I ask Paul Elam around three one morning. This is not a factual question. It's an existential one.

I already know that "the manosphere" refers to an online network, nascent but vast and like the universe constantly expanding, each twinkling star in its firmament dedicated—obviously—to men. Men and their problems. Usually with women. Some galaxies of the manosphere are composed of self-declared "pickup artists" (PUAs) who want to help ordinary guys trick women into bed; other solar systems deal earnestly with child custody and the Adderallization of rambunctious boys. There are constellations of MGTOWs, "men going their own way," separatists and onanists and recluses. There are hundreds of websites and blogs, many openly hostile—SlutHate, Angry Harry, The Spearhead, NiceGuy's American Women Suck Page—and many more that are brutally lewd. For instance: Return of Kings, published by the author of a series of popular country guides such as Bang Ukraine: How to Sleep with Ukrainian Women in Ukraine.

As the flagship political site of the movement (it had just shy of 9 million site visits last year), Elam's A Voice for Men functions as the closest thing there is to a center, an intelligence, a superego to the bloggy manosphere id of lust and fury. Just how big the whole thing is, nobody can say. More than fringe, less than mainstream, but at 3 A.M., sitting with Elam in his hotel room, I'm not looking for numbers. Size doesn't matter. What I'm really asking is, What does it all mean?

Elam has just wrapped up a conference. "An eye popper," he says, the first time he's brought A Voice for Men off the Internet and into the flesh. He likes to say, "You can't fight titty hall," but that's exactly what he's doing. He's fucking shit up. That's his slogan: "Fuck their shit up." "They" being feminists. Six eight, 290 pounds, with the beard of John Brown and the rumbling voice of James Earl Jones, Elam, whose name happens to be "male" backward, wants to be a provocateur. Responding to a feminist critic, he once wrote, "The idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection." But that kind of talk is just for show, he says. He points out he used to be a counselor. What he's doing, really, is a kind of therapy. He wants me to understand. So he draws a map of the manosphere, alluding to its origins as he sketches: its roots in the men's liberation movement of the 1970s and '80s—auxiliary to the much larger women's movement—and the New Agey men's movement of the '90s, its coming of age online, when Elam first started posting under the name Lester Burnham, Kevin Spacey's midlife-crisis character in American Beauty, its explosive growth since he founded A Voice for Men in 2008. Refuge, reaction, and fantasyland, practical advice and political calculation, identity and secret identity, cold fact and hot ambition. It's so complex not even Elam can map it neatly:

He holds up his rendering. The semblance is clear. "A dick and balls," I say.

"Yes," he says, chuckling, "I guess it is."

If you've heard of the manosphere, it may have been in the context of Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old self-described "supreme gentleman" who on May 23, 2014, in Isla Vista, California, murdered six people. In a YouTube video he posted the day he stabbed to death three men in his apartment and opened fire on a sorority house at UC Santa Barbara, he declared the slaughter a "Day of Retribution," revenge for the world's failure to provide him "the beautiful girlfriend I know I deserve." Rodger was a student of several manosphere philosophies, but his most active connection was through a forum called PUAhate. Most of its members embrace MGTOWdom after trying and failing to adopt the ways of the pickup artists—hence the "hate"—at which point their bitterness brings the angriest of them to the politics of Elam. Some of A Voice for Men's biggest web traffic days followed Rodger's murder spree. The media attention surrounding the Isla Vista shootings was a twofold gift for the group, driving new recruits to the movement and allowing A Voice for Men to present itself as the moderate middle. Some men tried to distance themselves from Rodger with a hashtag, #notallmen. Many more women—a million within days—responded with #yesallwomen, as in, yes, all women have experienced variations of the misogyny that led Rodger to his crimes. The manosphere did not like this. "Men are your benefactors, your protectors, and your providers," a writer at A Voice for Men explained. "So the next time you trend a hashtag about us, maybe you say 'thank you' instead."

A Voice for Men's first International Conference on Men's Issues convened a month after the killing. The issues were as varied as the manosphere: fathers' rights, suicide, and circumcision (a.k.a. male genital mutilation), and also false accusations of rape, male victims of rape, and unfaithful wives "cuckoo for cocoa penis puffs," as one speaker would put it, plus "mangina" journalists who "cherry-pick" quotes such as "cuckoo for cocoa penis puffs" out of context. ^1. It was supposed to be at the Detroit DoubleTree, a swank downtown hotel, but the feminists protested, and since the elite hospitality industry is pretty much in the thrall of feminism, or because the feminists floated death threats, or because a member of the men's movement floated death threats so people would understand that the feminists are floating death threats even if they did not, in this instance, float any death threats—for one of these disturbing reasons, A Voice for Men was told by the DoubleTree to "go elsewhere."

Elsewhere is a town called St. Clair Shores, and in it a VFW, Post 1146, known as "the Bruce." As in the sign out front that declares, cruising at the bruce / every friday night / 5–9 P.M. (By "cruising" they mean muscle cars, a fact I mention because A Voice for Men is surprisingly pro-gay, or at least anti-anti-gay.) There's artillery on the lawn and a faded sign on a fence around a parking lot: warning, of what, to whom, it is not clear. The blacktop beyond, where conference attendees line up to go through "security," is broken with weeds, but the men don't notice the decline in the conference's circumstances. They're too excited about "security." They keep saying, "No feminist better try coming here!" Local police have dispatched four officers, and the conference attendees have deputized even more security from their own ranks. "Security" wears black polo shirts, and there are a lot of black polo shirts, but since the line is slow, security decides to sweep us all in with a request to return for a "check." Nobody does. Only one feminist later attempts entry, an activist who goes by the handle "Dark Horse Swore." The black shirts eighty-six her. She sets up at a nearby bar, orders pizza, opens a tab, and invites any conference attendee who cares to talk. No takers. Feminist pizza? Not a chance. These men, they're hip to feminine wiles. They've taken the red pill, they like to say.

The red-pill moment, explains one men's rights activist (MRA), "is the day you decide nothing looks the same." It's what the movement calls the born-again experience of opening your eyes to women's Matrix-like control of the modern world. For a young MRA named Max von Holtzendorff, the red-pill moment was being accused of sexual harrassment by a co-worker to whom he proposed sex, "being blunt and forthright, because that seemed the best way to ensure consent." For Dan Perrins, one of the security black shirts, it was the day he ended up in jail, after he says he lodged a complaint against his ex, the beginning of a legal battle that led him to a hunger strike. "I should have killed the bitch five years ago," he tells me. "I'd be out by now." For Gunther Schadow, an M.D.-Ph.D., it was a "meta-study" on domestic violence that inspired him to seed a foundation with about half a million dollars, with which he now hopes to overturn the Violence Against Women Act. For Dan Moore, whose MRA name is Factory, the red pill was a revelation in stages. First, he says, his wife cheated on him. Then she wanted him to know it. "She'd laugh at me." His low point: lying on the floor in a fetal curl while she stood over him mocking him. He says she had a butcher knife in her hand. (She denies this. All of it.)

"Women gone insane with the power of the pussy pass" is how Elam describes the movement's raison d'être in an essay called "When Is It OK to Punch Your Wife?" Another one of his provocations. Elam's white, but he identifies with Malcolm X; he believes he needs to shock society to be heard. He says his talk of "the business end of a right hook" and women who are "freaking begging" to be raped is simply his version of Malcolm's "by any means necessary." To wit: Elam's proposal to make October "Bash a Violent Bitch Month," in which men should take the women who abuse them "by the hair and smack their face against the wall till the smugness of beating on someone because you know they won't fight back drains from their nose with a few million red corpuscles."

Paul Elam, a former counselor, launched his anti-feminist group to "fuck their shit up."

Elam describes such language as satire. Then again, one evening in a bar, he tells me that he stands by every word he says. A group of us have gathered with pitchers of beer at a place near the VFW—"You could get into a fistfight here," Elam says cheerfully—and the classic rock is rocking, but Elam's deep voice has gone soft and thoughtful. "It's a David-and-Goliath kind of deal," he says. He's David, personally confronting the Goliath of Womanhood, his "provocations" his sling. And just as in the biblical story, it's not so much about killing Goliath as giving hope to his people. This, to Elam, is how his provocations work: "satire" that's really rage that's really a beacon, a Bat Signal—calling all broken men. "Men who've decided to check out because they can't take it anymore, guys going to live in their cars because they have nowhere to go," he says. "I get e-mails from people who say, 'I was suicidal until I found your website and realized I wasn't alone.' "

1. Context: a conference presentation by Terrence Popp, introduced as "infantry soldier, former professional fighter, college graduate, author, poet, warrior, comedian," etc., a decorated combat veteran whom the conference introducer notes is "top" or "expert" with the following weapons: MK19, M16, M203 grenade launcher, pistol, M60, SAW. "I'm not the guy you want pissed off," says Popp, who while speaking on veterans and suicide suggests the audience "imagine coming back from war to find out your wifeI'm trying to think of a good way to say this, but, uh, you know, went cuckoo for cocoa penis puffs." I think Popp, who is white, means the wife in question had sex with a black man. "Crazy for some Rice Krispies treats," he continues, "and a couple Polish sausages thrown in there."