Spouting off about stuff you know nothing about is traditionally considered unwise. But as the Republican war on science intensifies, ignorance has started to become not only less of a handicap, but a point of pride. In the face of expertise and facts, being belligerently ignorant—and offended that anyone dare suggest ignorance is less desirable than knowledge—has become the go-to position for many conservative politicians and pundits. Sadly, it’s a strategy that’s working, making it harder every day for liberals to argue the value of evidence and reason over wishful thinking and unblinking prejudice.

The strategy of holding out ignorance to be the equivalent of expertise and simply daring your opponents to try to do anything about it was epitomized recently in the Ohio legislature. Republican state legislator John Becker introduced a bill that would ban all insurance plans in the state from covering abortion. It was a horribly misogynist and intrusive bill, but Becker didn’t stop at just trying to outlaw abortion coverage. He also insisted that IUDs, the most effective contraception available, be outlawed from insurance coverage. His reasoning was that he believes IUDs cause abortion, because he believes they work by killing fertilized eggs.

He is, of course, factually wrong in multiple ways.

An “abortion” is a procedure that stops a pregnancy, and if a fertilized egg fails to implant—and about half fail to implant, regardless of a woman’s choices—then you were never pregnant in the first place and therefore cannot get an abortion. But it’s also factually wrong that IUDs work by killing fertilized eggs. Like nearly all other forms of contraception, IUDs work by preventing sperm from meeting egg.

When confronted with the facts, Rep. Becker just blew them off. “This is just a personal view,” he said. “I’m not a medical doctor.”

Well then, sir, by all means. Let your random “view” pulled directly out of your hiney supersede the actual opinions of people who are considering the evidence before drawing conclusions.

The bottom line is this: Married women are notably safer than their unmarried peers, and girls raised in a home with their married father are markedly less likely to be abused or assaulted than children living without their own father.

The original headline of the piece placed the onus on women and mothers in domestic violence situations, calling for them to "stop taking lovers" and marry their "baby daddies":

The authors claim that marriage "tames" men, the implication being that because men are less likely to abuse their biological children, women should lock down that engagement ring. "Marriage seems to cause men to behave better," Wilcox and Fretwell Wilson write. "That’s because men tend to settle down after they marry, to be more attentive to the expectations of friends and kin, to be more faithful, and to be more committed to their partners -- factors that minimize the risk of violence." Apparently, the responsibility rests on women to marry men and prevent them from becoming violent.

The piece acknowledges that there are married men and biological fathers who do abuse their wives and children, but focuses on how unmarried women can -- and should -- take themselves out of danger by getting hitched. The authors do not investigate other factors that may make never-married women more likely to be victims of domestic violence, like poverty and fear of homelessness. Instead, they tie women's safety to marriage without mentioning other economic or social factors.

Men’s Rights activists see men as the victims of reverse discrimination in every political, economic, and social arena; feminism has been so successful that men are now the second sex; and men have to stand up for their rights. In doing so, they believe, they strike a blow against the wimpification of American manhood: they get their manhood back by fighting for the rights of men. Who says the personal isn’t also political?

So how did we get here?

The origins of MRA

It might come as a bit of a surprise to know that the initial seeds of the contemporary men’s rights movement were planted in the same soil from which feminism sprouted. The critique of what became known as the female sex role, the traditional ideology of femininity, resonated for some men, whom by the early 1970s, took the feminist call for women’s liberation as an opportunity to do some liberating of their own. “Men’s liberation” was born in a parallel critique of the male sex role. If women were imprisoned in the home, all housework and domestic drudgery, men were exiled from the home, turned into soulless robotic workers, in harness to a masculine mystique, so that their only capacity for nurturing was through their wallets.

But feminists moved from a critique of those sex roles – abstract ideological constructions – to a critique of the actual behaviors of actual men, corporeal beings who acted in the name of those antiquated roles. And once women began to make it personal, to critique men’s behaviors – by making rape, sexual harassment, domestic violence, part of the gender dynamics that were under scrutiny -- the men’s libbers departed. Instead, the Men’s Liberationists stuck with the analysis of roles, which, they argued, were equally oppressive to men; they shifted their focus to those institutional arenas in which men were, they argued, the victims of a new form of discrimination – gender discrimination against men.

The question was why men were so unhappy. What caused the male malaise? The way different groups of men resolved this question provided the origins of the various men’s “movements” currently on offer.

George Will on Friday became the latest conservative pundit to attempt to debunk sexual assault statistics, arguing that universities' efforts to address campus rape have made "victimhood a coveted status."

In a column for the Washington Post, Will argues that universities are basing their definition of sexual assault on a "Washington" education, which is leading to inflated statistics.

“They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous ('micro-aggressions,' often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate," he wrote.

Will offers an anecdote from a student at Swarthmore College, in which a woman reported a rape after a former sexual partner wouldn't take no for an answer. Will implies that because the incident occurred "with a guy with whom she’d been hooking up for three months," she wasn't sexually assaulted.

"I just kind of laid there and didn’t do anything — I had already said no. I was just tired and wanted to go to bed. I let him finish. I pulled my panties back on and went to sleep," the woman wrote about the encounter.

"Six weeks later, the woman reported that she had been raped," Will wrote about the Swarthmore student. "Now the Obama administration is riding to the rescue of 'sexual assault' victims. It vows to excavate equities from the ambiguities of the hookup culture, this cocktail of hormones, alcohol and the faux sophistication of today’s prolonged adolescence of especially privileged young adults."

The conservative columnist then disputed certain aspects of the definition of sexual assault.

"Combine this with capacious definitions of sexual assault that can include not only forcible sexual penetration but also nonconsensual touching. Then add the doctrine that the consent of a female who has been drinking might not protect a male from being found guilty of rape," he wrote. "Then comes costly litigation against institutions that have denied due process to males they accuse of what society considers serious felonies."

lliot Rodger, the Isla Vista shooter, was a member of the PUAHate forum. It was nominally a place for those who felt conned by the pick-up artist promise, and many of its members were rightfully suspicious of what they had come to see as snake oil. Yet PUAHate.com is now a dead link because many of its members reacted the other way—they blamed the women for not doing as they should, instead of the broken models of human interaction that they paid money for. They blamed women with a bile that gave Elliot Rodger a sense of belonging.

A "perfect gentleman," Rodger was driven by an immense sense of entitlement, and yet the surprising thing about his women-hating autobiographical manifesto is how little time he ever spends with any of them. Again and again he sets out to find a girlfriend by going to a local mall or park, sitting on a bench, and waiting. Apart from the female counselor his parents pay to spend an afternoon with him, he never has a full conversation with a woman; he goes to a party, and stands in the corner, waiting for someone to talk to him first. His expectation was such that he felt his designer clothes, his BMW, even his bone structure marked him out as "a descendent of British aristocracy," a person who women should be uncontrollably attracted to for his obvious social value. He was, as he described himself in his final video, "the superior one, the true alpha male," and every woman in the world was thus in violation of his natural rights for ignoring him.

This attitude might seem alien to pick-up artists—by now, a recognisable pop culture stereotype, the subject of reality TV shows and bestselling books—and to those inside the community it might seem unfair to link them to a mass shooter. Pick-up artists, after all, are all about structuring as many opportunities to meet and seduce women as possible, in every kind of possible social situation. Yet it's not a coincidence that PUAHate was the first and only place where Rodger felt as if he was among people capable of understanding him.

Pick-up artists sell an ideology about women, and an odd one at that—cod evolutionary psychology and pop anthropology mashed together into a kind of brute forced seduction, or a quantified romance that approaches women like mechanical devices that can be debugged and reprogrammed. It takes the phrase “press her buttons” too literally, and assumes there’s a de facto biological Konami code that any man can use on any woman. Not for nothing has Neil Strauss, author of The Game, called it “the revenge of the nerds.”

Rebecca Solnit is smarter than you, and she's not sorry about it. Photograph: David Levene
Rebecca Solnit is a prolific author (she's working now on her sixteenth and seventeenth books), historian, activist and a contributing editor to Harper's. Her most recent book, Men Explain Things to Me, is a collection of Solnit's essays, including the title piece that launched a million memes. Solnit, on the road in Seattle, took some time to explain "mansplaining", writing and how the post-Isla Vista misogyny conversation is a little like climate denialism.

JESSICA VALENTI: How do you feel about being considered the creator of the concept of "mansplaining"? Your now-famous essay – which really gave women language to talk about the condescending interactions they've had with men – certainly gave birth to the term, but you write in the book that you didn't actually make up the word.

REBECCA SOLNIT: A really smart young woman changed my mind about it. I used to be ambivalent, worrying primarily about typecasting men with the term. (I have spent most of my life tiptoeing around the delicate sensibilities of men, though of course the book Men Explain Things to Me is what happens when I set that exhausting, doomed project aside.) Then in March a PhD candidate said to me, No, you need to look at how much we needed this word, how this word let us describe an experience every woman has but we didn't have language for.

And that's something I'm really interested in: naming experience and how what has no name cannot be acknowledged or shared. Words are power. So if this word allowed us to talk about something that goes on all the time, then I'm really glad it exists and slightly amazed that not only have I contributed about a million published words to the conversation but maybe, indirectly, one new word.

Today's heart(and pants)warming story of sweet payback for someone who really had it coming is brought to you by The Muppet Movie, the internet, and one petite but brave Boston lady who likes to practice making scary monster voices in her spare time.

Reddit user ManichestBreastiny (+10) shared her story with TwoXChromosomes, the site's female-focused subforum. MB was leaving a movie theater in Boston and walking the short distance to the nearest T station when,

A man that looked to be at least fifteen years older than myself who was walking near me in the same direction took an extra step to catch up to me and put his arm around my shoulder and grabbed my breast, and said "Hey".
Oh, hell no. MB wasn't having any of it, and rather than just taking it, she fought back in an unconventional way. She explains,

I pushed him off me, and in my most threatening bellow yelled, "HOW DARE YOU TOUCH ME?"
Now, before you shrug and say who cares? I yell at street gropers and harassers all the time! there's something you should know about MB. MB likes to practice funny voices, like, as a hobby. One of those funny voices is a scary demon voice. And so when she yelled "HOW DARE YOU TOUCH ME!?" what her attacker heard was this:


http://jezebel.com/awesome-woman-scares-groper-so-badly-he-craps-his-pants-1586151686

To a certain extent, sure: the screaming women in K Camp’s music video are on mute. And when you hear this song, or “Loyal,” on the radio, it's not likely you'll hear a follow-up response from a female voice. In fact, you’re more likely to hear “Cut Her Off” follow “Loyal” than you are anything remotely like a rebuttal. And I appreciate Caramanica’s prominent response to a topic that not only usually gets glossed over in rap criticism, but that at this point even gets blandly name-checked. That is, acknowledging an awareness of misogyny in hip hop is often treated as just another mark in The Responsible Critic’s notebook, like referencing the “correct” musical influences, or acknowledging the right producer’s vinyl collection, as guided by the specific mentor so-and-so, who was raised in the school of—trails off into jerkoff motion. But rap, and most popular music across genres, has long adopted, and continues to take on, a misogynistic narrative. There is nothing “retrograde” or “rare” about this inclination, in hip hop or elsewhere.

This isn’t a critical failing, it simply underscores the importance of perspective: women who listen to hip hop are generally not surprised by the “disheartening” nature of songs like “Loyal” and “Cut Her Off,” by their willingness to “diminish women” with a “lack of imagination and ease.” Women who listen to hip hop are “disheartened” by the nature of hip hop’s narrative as a consistent, ongoing arc that diminishes us not only with ease, but also with a seemingly willful tendency toward callousness and a total lack of ingenuity.

But even with that fatigue, most women who listen to rap would concede that the music has long sustained and even nurtured a dialogic approach to its perceived moral failings. Think Yo-Yo combatting Ice Cube on “It’s A Man’s World,” Lil’ Kim flipping the R&B seduction standard on its head in “Dreams,” Trina taking Trick Daddy down a notch in “I Don’t Need U,” La Chat getting in her words on Project Pat’s “Chickenhead,” Nicki Minaj going on Hot 97 to engage with Peter Rosenberg’s criticism, and so on: this is a music constantly in conversation with itself, and always open to the other side’s dis. The critical feminist response to “Loyal,” for that matter, was sudden and emphatic—a fact that Caramanica doesn’t acknowledge.
So let’s review what women had to say about "Loyal" before a man went so far as to call it wrong. One of the first times I heard the “Loyal” beat, I remember, was from an idling car on a street corner in Brooklyn last winter. I recognized the voice as Keyshia Cole, and I noticed that the hook had a hell of a melody: “Just got rich,” she sang in the opening bars, “being broke was a bitch/ These niggas ain't loyal/ Fuck it, all the shit that he did!”