Hunting the Manosphere

In the final days of May, after police in Portland, Ore., reported that Jeremy Joseph Christian stabbed three men on a train, killing two of them, an unusual theory as to why the attack occurred emerged in certain parts of the internet. Mainstream commentators had already pointed to Christian’s alt-right flavored racism, which seemed obvious enough; the victims, after all, had been defending two Muslim women from his Islamophobic abuse, according to the police. Others raised the possibility that Christian was mentally unstable. But according to this new theory, the primary blame lay not with Christian at all and instead with an ideology internalized by the victims.

“Two good men killed by chivalry,” tweeted Paul Elam, a notorious figure in the field of “men’s rights activism.” “Let this be a lesson to your sons.” In follow-up tweets, Elam elaborated: If the victims had not been culturally conditioned to risk their lives on women’s behalf, they would still be alive. Therefore, while Christian was heading to trial, the real perpetrator was America’s anti-male status quo.

I don’t follow Elam on Twitter. I came across his theory only thanks to the blog We Hunted the Mammoth, run by a 51-year-old Chicagoan named David Futrelle. In a post called “Killed by Chivalry: Everything Wrong With the Men’s Right’s Movement in One Tweet,” Futrelle mockingly summarized Elam’s hypotheses and then went on to argue — making heavy reference to Elam’s writing over the years — that this “killer chivalry” argument epitomized a general disdain in the men’s rights movement not only for women but for the very notions of altruism and empathy.

Over the course of seven years spent running We Hunted the Mammoth, Futrelle has made himself an expert on the “manosphere”: the amorphous, fractious constellation of online men’s groups united in their belief that feminism is ruining the world. Most days, he trawls a constantly-updated list of sites he hates (including Elam’s “A Voice for Men”), seeking out arguments he finds repulsive, baffling and, he admits, fascinating to watch play out in real time. Clicking through his list, he reads post after post, charting the themes and preoccupations of the day, the latest catchphrases and memes, the shifting alliances and disputes.

“I plunge myself into this endlessly swirling caldron, and I see what’s new,” Futrelle told me recently. When he began the site in 2010, it was an after-work hobby. Since 2014, it has become a full-time enterprise, bankrolled by advertising revenue and PayPal donations from his readers. Most of those readers, Futrelle says, are women, for whom the site’s lively discussion threads offer a place they can talk (and laugh and cry and yell) about internet misogyny without being harassed on all sides by internet misogynists. The discussion under “Killed by Chivalry” quickly stretched to over 700 comments.

Futrelle’s journey toward his idiosyncratic career began in the late 2000s, when he kept finding himself in long, drawn-out Reddit arguments with self-described men’s rights activists (M.R.A.s, in manosphere shorthand). At first he was shocked to discover that M.R.A.s even existed — that there really was, in his words, “a group of guys who saw men as America’s most oppressed class.” Some of these men, he realized early on, were hardened misogynists or trolls: They argued that only men should be allowed to vote, or they gleefully condoned the use of violence to keep women in their proper place. But some of the less extreme posters reminded Futrelle uncomfortably of his younger self. Looking back on his high-school years, he saw himself as under the sway of some of the same flawed assumptions prevalent among the M.R.A.s.