Are You Man Enough for the Men's Rights Movement?

"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 dedicatedobviouslyto 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 hostileSlutHate, Angry Harry, The Spearhead, NiceGuy’s American Women Suck Pageand 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 ’80sauxiliary to the much larger women’s movementand 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 artistshence 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 womena million within daysresponded 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 threatsfor 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 / 59 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’tre 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."

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 cheerfullyand 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 Signalcalling 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.’ "

Factory raises his beer to Elam. "This guy saved my life," he says. It was two years ago; Factory had taken the red pill by then, but marriage, kids, and family court still proved too much for him. He decided to do himself in. He sent off one last e-mail, to Elam. "Just seemed the guy I knew who’d sorta understand." Elam did; he called the police, who were able to intervene in time.

To Elam it’s clear how satire and solace, threat and solidarity, bleed into one another. It’s the world that’s confused, addled by feminism. He refers me to the man who provided him his own red pill, in the form of a book, 1993’s The Myth of Male Power. "We have long acknowledged the slavery of blacks," writes author Warren Farrell, Ph.D., whom Elam sees as speaking the gentler truth of his same message, a white MLK to Elam’s white Malcolm. "We have yet to acknowledge the slavery of males."(2.)

They have evidence. Men, particularly poor and working-class men, are cannon fodder abroad and expendable labor at home, trapped beneath a glass floor in jobs nobody really wantsfarm workers, roofers, garbagemenand injured at far higher rates than women. Imprisoned at far higher rates, too, and more often the victims of violent crime. Men get hit by women nearly as often as the other way around (even if the damage done is decidedly one-sided). And there is almost no refuge for battered men, unless you count homeless shelters. Men, meanwhile, by far make up the largest contingent of homeless people.(.3)

The irony of the men’s rights movement is that its critique, its focus on the constraints of gender, is essentially a feminist one. No less an arch-feminist than the late Andrea Dworkina "300-plus-pound basilisk of man-hate" who just "wanted to be raped," according to Elamcritiqued the idea of men as "disposable" in her 1983 book Right-Wing Women, ten years before The Myth of Male Power. "Feminism," wrote Dworkin, "proposes one absolute standard of human dignity, indivisible by sex."

"Nope," says the manosphere. Or rather, "I can’t hear you!" A number of men at the conference tell me that women’s-studies programs teach The SCUM Manifesto, a 1967 screed advocating the elimination of men. That’s true, I sayit’s taught as an artifact. I know, because my wife has taught it in a women’s-studies program. And she’s not trying to eliminate me.

Several men look at me sadly. "If only you knew," one says. Another hugs me. "This is a safe space," he says.

On the second floor of the Bruce there’s a mostly empty meeting hall, robin’s-egg blue walls beneath a low paneled ceiling, three brass seagulls next to an unused bar, and at the back of the room, selling swag, the women of the men’s rights movement. Not girlfriends and wives. They are the Honey Badgers, their name taken from a viral YouTube video of the actual creature shrugging off first a swarm of bees, then the bite of a cobra in the pursuit of its prey. "Honey badger don’t give a shit," says the voice-over. Such is the slogan of the Honey Badgers, who do not give a shit for the opinions of other women and their mangina friends.

The leader of this pack is a woman named Alison Tieman, a.k.a. Typhon Blue, a nom de guerre borrowed from a mythical Greek monster with a hundred dragon heads. She is small and sour and wise, 37 years old, married to a man who she says was once the victim of an attempted gang rape by a mob of 16-year-old girls. He was 22, and cute, and they tried to stop him from leaving a party. "He actually had to escape," she says. "They drew blood."

There’s also Jess Kenney, a doe-eyed young mom who says her red-pill moment was giving birth to a boy. That was when she started to worry. "Can someone take advantage of him?" she asks. "You know, make accusations against him, for things he hasn’t done?"

Or he could be raped, offers Typhon Blue. "And have no recourse."

"It’s largely invisible," a Badger named Rachel Edwards says, blinking rapidly as she thinks of all the false accusations against the men who are most vulnerable to predatory females. "It’ll often happen in colleges. A guy will wake up and be like, ’You weren’t there before, what are you doing here?’ And then they don’t know who to talk to about what’s happened."

I want to say that I think I read that story in Penthouse Forum when I was 13. Typhon Blue reads my mind. She wants me to know this isn’t funny. She says, "If a woman puts a gun to a man’s head and says, ’I’m not even on the pill. And I have gonorrhea. I’m fucking you now.’ That’s not rape? ’I want a child-support payment,’ gun to his head. That’s not rape?"

It is, I say. That would be rape. If it happened. And it does, they tell me. It’s happening right now. Why haven’t I heard about it? Because the feminists don’t want me to. The Badgers summon up numbers and stories and facts. Kristal Garcia, a former sex worker and founder of a group first called Cock Consciousness and then Loving & Celebrating Men, tells me that "in Africa" there are "female gang-rapers" who abduct men and use "friction" to produce involuntary erections; in Nigeria, says Kenney, a man was raped to death by six wives; "And wait," says Edwards, "do we wanna mention there’s that woman who has AIDS in Africa and she’s just having sex with a bunch of men? Giving them AIDS?" Typhon Blue talks about the Congo, about men whose throats are slit, about machetes and ditches and the bodies of the disappeared.

They say they will send me studies. Science. A whole bottle of red pills. I write down my e-mail with a shaky hand. "We are giving off a lot of information," Edwards says. "It can be overwhelming."

I take a break on the balcony of the VFW, a blistering hot slab of concrete speckled in bird shit. In the near distance, a parking lot; beyond, Lake St. Clair. There’s a plume of smoke on the other side; something is burning. My phone buzzes with a text message from my friend Blair, who’s downstairs. Blair lives in Wisconsin, and when I told her I’d be in a Detroit suburb for the conference, she and her boyfriend, Quince, decided to tag along. They both write about gender; they thought it would be interesting. She’s 26, blue-eyed and rosy-cheeked, and one of the very few women here; an irony of the conference is that there are several men only willing to talk to me because I’ve been vouched for by a woman. "T-shirt guy is REALLY excited to talk to you," she texts. I know the shirt she means: hand-drawn in red fabric paint, the kind kids use, a thin white tee with the legend inscribed across the narrow back of the wearer"Free Robert Maynard."

He who would free one Robert Maynard is named Albert Calabrese. He finds me with the Honey Badgers, but he keeps his distance. He knows who Typhon Blue is, has watched the videos she’s posted online in which she discusses the sexual abuse of boys by women. Calabrese does not exactly share her concern. His issue is girls. His friend Robert Maynard, he says, is in prison because of one. She was 14. "He received a naked picture of her," Calabrese says, his vowels rounded and clipped, his indignation over the verb receivedmaking his eyes wide.

Like Calabrese, Maynard was a graduate student in physics at the University of Arkansas. Together they studied black holes. They talked about men’s issues. But Calabrese didn’t know his friend was in trouble until Maynard announced he was leaving school. For prison. Ten years. He didn’t even touch the girl, Calabrese says.

Not that he may not want to do more, believes Calabrese. He says Maynard might argue that 14 is sexually mature, that he thinks the age of consent should be the average age of menarche: 12.3. "He likes women," Calabrese says. "He does not unlike women just because they’re young." Calabrese does not unlike preteen girls, either.

But this is not a conversation to have with Typhon Blue around, so we wait until after lunch, when I catch his eye across the VFW lobby. Or maybe he catches mine. He’s good at this kind of communication. A barely perceptible nod, not a wink but a flicker, and it’s like we’ve agreed. We both leave the hall and make for the shore. Dead fish slap against the crumbling concrete lining the lake’s edge. Gusting wind does nothing to dissipate the heat or the smell.

There is a point on which he disagrees with Maynard, Calabrese says. Calabrese thinks 12.3 as an age of consent is too old. He’d go with 12. "I would rather err on the side of 12-year-olds having sex than on the side of ruining men’s lives."

He doesn’t deny that there are cases of real abuse. But he suspects that adult men are better lovers for young girls than boys their own age. "The teenage boy is, I would suspect, more interested in sex." Whereas the adult would be interested in "substance," he says. "Or even a mentor-protge relationship." Teenage boys, he says, brag.

"Maynard didn’t brag?" I ask.

Calabrese laughs. "No!" Then, under his breath, "That would be silly."

Calabrese does not brag. Not really. "I’m easily Googleable," he says. He is: Albert J. Calabrese Jr., a former substitute teacher in Akron, Ohio, arrested for felony sexual misconduct with a minor. "My chick wasn’t a student," he claims. "She asked me out." He thought it would help his case if he told the police she was more experienced than he was. "I was remarkably naive," he says. He didn’t know he had a right to remain silent. He’s never watched cop shows. Such programs, he says, "are emotionally frustrating to me." He says you shouldn’t take pleasure in others’ suffering.

He wishes he didn’t feel what he feels. Not because he believes these feelings are wrong, but because the world does. He would like to be part of the world. Right now, he’s not. A sex offender. Unemployable. He can’t live where he wants. He can’t say what he really thinks. He can’t, he believes, be fully human.

He stands on the concrete shore, cocks his black-jeaned hips, and spreads his arms wide, embracing the water, his back to the world. Letting us read: "Free Robert Maynard." Calabrese drove fourteen and a half hours to be here, he took uppers, and he’s still taking them; he’s pale and dappled with cold sweat under the hot gray sun.

Inside, Blair is at the bar, buying a drinkyour choice of Coke or water, one dollar per cupwhen Sage Gerard, collegiate-activism director of A Voice for Men, wearing the all-black outfit of the conference security force, decides it’s time to talk with her. Sage is not a pickup artist. He’s the nice guy. Tall, square-jawed, blue-eyed. He asks what Blair finds exciting about men’s rights activism. What does she want to learn about? She says she’s surprised that she hasn’t heard more about rape.

Sage saysaccording to the notes Blair says she asked Sage if she could take: "You wanted to hear more about rape? Ooh, you’re freaky."

Blair: "What do you mean?"

Sage: "What do you want it to mean?"

Blair says she wants to hear more about false accusations, because a friend of hers, Bryan,(*) has recently been accused, and for the first time she thinks the accusation may be false. She doesn’t know. That, according to her notes, is what she wants to understand.

Sage wants to help. He’d like her to come with him. They need someplace private. He has an idea, he tells her. He wants her to write a poem. A poem for her friend, a poem for men falsely accused. It would be best, he says, if she writes it now.

He wants to sit in a stairwell. A quiet place. But Badgers keep stepping between them. Come with me, he says. He takes her to the balcony, the hot concrete, and she sits down, and he pulls his chair close.

Blair tells him she’s not sure what to write about her friend Bryan. "You do want to make an emotional impact," Sage says. He touches her hand. He wants her to empathize with Bryan. He will teach her how. He suggests that they write an opening together. He closes his eyes, licks his lips, waiting for Blair to begin.

"Bryan," she says, "I hope you’re not lyin’."

Sage opens his eyes. Women. "Blair, poetry doesn’t have to rhyme." He’ll show her. This could be a good line: "You owe her nothing but a view of your back." Sage, notes Blair, pets her thigh. "I’m not angry at women," he explains, "but I’m angry at what they can do. You could put down your book right now and yell ’Rape!’ and I would be led away in handcuffs." They think about this. Sage says, "I hope it’s okay if I hug you."

Before she can respond, he pulls her in, pulls her up out of her chair, pulls her against his chest, and holds her there. He rubs her back. An embrace Blair will later describe as "the most unconsensual hug I have ever known."

Blair: "I still don’t know what to do about the poem."

Sage loosens his grip. "I apologize for dragging you away," he says. "I wasn’t going to feel okay until I talked to you." He warns her not to send mixed messages. For instance, she shouldn’t put her hand on a man’s knee if she doesn’t want to have sex with him. Sage puts his hand on Blair’s knee. This is not a mixed message, he wants her to understand. She’s here, in the VFW. She’s taken the red pill. She needs another hug. He needs to give it to her.

On the last night of the conference, Sage and Typhon Blue dance in a bar to "Blurred Lines." "This is our song!" cries one MRA. Blair receives several marriage proposals. There’s karaoke, AC/DC’s "Big Balls" performed twice. And around midnight Blair’s boyfriend, Quince, and I join Elam for a private afterparty in his suite. Once it’s determined that girls are allowed, Blair joins, too. Factory is there with his girlfriend, Lori, and there’s Tara Palmatier, Psy.D., the "Shrink 4 Men," and a skinny old hippie with a thin gray ponytail and a belt buckle that says "Jazz," whom I will call Jazz. We all drink mudslides.

Elam is pleased by the entrance of another female. Sitting next to him with her hands folded in her lap, Blair seems like a student, ready to learn.

"Tell me why you’re here," Elam says, his voice soft. He fixes her with a gaze that says, "I really want to listen to you."

"I’m interested in hard conversations," she says.

She walked into that one. Factory guffaws. "This is as hard as it gets," he says.

"I’m curious," Elam says. "What did your friends think when you told them you were coming here?"

"To be honest?" Blair asks. Elam nods. She says, "I had friends who said I’d get raped."

Blink. You can almost see the struggle in Elam’s bones: Play the nice guy? Or the perv? No question. "All right!" he booms, swinging his arms together. "Let’s get started!"

Jazz winces.

"Get the video camera!" Factory yells at his girlfriend, who giggles weakly.

I should be very clear here: At no point does it seem like Elam or Factory is actually going to rape Blair. We know they’re joking. Just a couple of middle-aged guys joking around about rape with a young woman they’ve never met before in a hotel room at one in the morning.

"What surprised me," Blair says, "was how warm people were."

She’s found Elam’s hinge: He launches into reminiscing about the days just past, about the camaraderie, the brotherly love. "I’m seriously choked up about it," he says.

"I am, too," says Factory. Factory appreciates Blair’s generous observation. She’s a "labia traitor." That’s a good thing.

The night winds on, with discussion of rape and the smothering of penises, the sorrows of false accusations and the narcissism of young girls. A sore point for Factory, who has two daughters, who, like young women everywhere, he says, compete for the most exaggerated rape claim. It is, he says, a status thing. When one of his daughters came home one night and said she’d been raped, he said, "Are you fucking kidding me?" Sitting with us, he hikes his voice up to a falsetto in imitation: " ’Oh, I just got raped.’ " He laughs. There’s a moment of silence. A bridge too far? "I told her if she pressed charges, I’d disown her."

Elam, whose attention has drifted, grins through his beard. "That’s good fathering," he says.

Factory loves his children. He would have reacted differently if it had been what he in theory considers a legitimate claim, but"if you don’t have videotape or forensic, a whole lot of bruises, I don’t give a fuck."

We move on to the topics of weak-willed men and the mothers who make them such, of cowards and pickup artistspathetic, thinks Elam, who says game comes naturally to a man who knows he’s a man. It’s getting late. We’ve run out of Kahla. Jazz is growing a little trippy about feminism and "the end of the human race." Elam and Factory slip out onto the balcony for a smoke. I follow. We look into the darkness of St. Clair Shores and the lake beyond, three men smoking in the damp air before dawn.

When we return to the room, Elam and Factory are giddy, horsing around, teasing Blair. "Your last line," Elam tells me, "should be, ’Then we got the munchies, and Paul said, "Bitch, go get me a sandwich."’ " He’s joking, more satire, because right now his brotherly love extends to ladies with a sense of humor. He would never ask a bitch to make him a sandwich. But seriously, he says. Seriously.

And that’s when Elam draws me my diagram. The Dick & Balls. He doesn’t mean to draw the Dick & Balls, but he does. It is a sign. "Yes," says Elam, "I guess it is." He smiles. Everyone smiles. We are high in the manosphere now, the great phallic oversoul, the red pills are working, the rape jokes no longer land like bombshells, they’re like the weather, ordinary as rain. We’ve made it: the dream world of Elam, where men are men, no matter how broken.

JEFF SHARLET is the author or editor of six books, most recently Radiant Truths.

* Name has been changed.

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 wife-I’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."

2. Farrell really is a gentle character. In the daylong pre-conference workshop he leads, we make massage circles, we close our eyes and think of our fathers, we role-play explaining men’s rights to the one woman taking part in the session. One cover of Farrell’s book depicts the title, The Myth of Male Power, in big red letters over a shadowy photograph of a naked woman, the "Power" said to belong to men breaking into pieces across her ass. Men are slaves to "female beauty," he says, and thus enslaved in every sphere of life. Freedom, to Farrell, begins with men having a say over their own sexual destinies by finding a way to "enter the woman," as he explains to me later, with masculine dignity intact.

3. Of course, these are largely economic conditions, but conference speaker Helen Smith, Ph.D., in her book Men on Strikea door prize throughout the weekenddescribes the problem as "female privilege": schools drugging the boyishness out of boys and workplaces promoting underqualified women, leaving men dumb, doped, and too broke to afford what one of Smith’s sourcesechoing Elliot Rodgerdescribes as "an expensive bitch." To men "on strike," those who refuse to marry or to work to avoid alimony"going Galt," in the movement’s Ayn Randian parlancewomen are the economic condition, singular.