The White House Triumph of the #BanMen Movement

The year just ended was a banner year for misogyny—review the scandals of GamerGate, the revelations of sexual violence from the National Football to the Ivy Leagues, and Elliot Rodger’s California killing spree intended to enact “revenge” against “all you girls who rejected me and looked down on me, treated me like scum while you gave yourselves to other men.” These days, we ingest our news in memes, streams, and social exchange tapped out in the shorthand of public e-space. Pith is sovereign. And so as misogyny swelled, Twitter—that many-ringed circus where outrage emerges, then cycles and sloughs—took a look and found the mirror image: misandry. All year long, one hashtag reigned on my Twitter feed, snarky, flippant, and less than delicate or helpfully nuanced: #BanMen. Here’s what 140 characters will do to the mind.

On the diffuse, difficult-to-legislate, and anonymity-permitting world of the Internet, trolls are king. Police forces and tech companies, both overwhelmingly male, are often unsure how to intervene. So female denizens, noticing the easy ubiquity of misogyny, imagined a different regime: would there even be violence against women without men? Would there be catcalls, school shootings, wars, or anything bad at all? Ban 'em, expel 'em, and why not exterminate 'em while we’re at it? For perhaps the first time since the mid-1970s, the dream of a penis-free world—a lot funnier this time—became a bonafide fashion, extending past the confines of Twitter’s letter limits. Misandrist book clubs and makeup tutorials debuted. Men published articles with headlines like “33 Reasons Why Men Should Be Banned.” ‘Male Tears’ mugs made bank. In the spring, as part of its ad campaign for the fourth season of “Game of Thrones,” finger-on-the-pulse HBO posted signs all around the subway reading, sinister and seriffed, “ALL MEN MUST DIE.”