“I just thought, Wait a minute, if I'm going to start writing again, I have to go to the quiet place, and this is the least quiet place I've ever been in my life ,” Whedon told BuzzFeed News.

Ahn Young-joon / AP Joss Whedon at an event for Avengers: Age Of Ultron in Seoul, South Korea, on April 17, 2015.

When filmmaker Joss Whedon decided to delete his Twitter account on Monday, the day after his movie Avengers: Age of Ultron scored the second-highest domestic opening weekend ever, it prompted a flurry of speculation about what, or who, might have driven him away. Whedon found one theory — that he left Twitter due to militant feminists angered over the film's depiction of Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) — particularly galling, so much so that he decided to break his silence. "That is horseshit," he told BuzzFeed News by phone on Tuesday. "Believe me, I have been attacked by militant feminists since I got on Twitter. That's something I'm used to. Every breed of feminism is attacking every other breed, and every subsection of liberalism is always busy attacking another subsection of liberalism, because god forbid they should all band together and actually fight for the cause. "I saw a lot of people say, 'Well, the social justice warriors destroyed one of their own!' It's like, Nope. That didn't happen," he continued. "I saw someone tweet it's because Feminist Frequency pissed on Avengers 2, which for all I know they may have. But literally the second person to write me to ask if I was OK when I dropped out was [Feminist Frequency founder] Anita [Sarkeesian]." What did happen, Whedon said, is that he chose to embrace his long-standing desire post–Age of Ultron to reclaim his personal life and creative spark — and that meant saying good-bye to Twitter. "I just thought, Wait a minute, if I'm going to start writing again, I have to go to the quiet place," he said. "And this is the least quiet place I've ever been in my life. … It's like taking the bar exam at Coachella. It's like, Um, I really need to concentrate on this! Guys! Can you all just… I have to… It's super important for my law!"

Jay Maidment / Marvel Scarlett Johansson and Whedon on the set of Avengers: Age of Ultron.

While Whedon is adamant that feminist criticisms were not the catalyst for his decision, it is clear that some of the distracting uproar that was crowding his notifications and squeezing his creativity came from at least a nominally feminist point of view. "I've said before, when you declare yourself politically, you destroy yourself artistically," he said. "Because suddenly that's the litmus test for everything you do — for example, in my case, feminism. If you don't live up to the litmus test of feminism in this one instance, then you're a misogynist. It circles directly back upon you." One example: Before Age of Ultron opened, Whedon tweeted that he was frustrated that a clip from the upcoming film Jurassic World was "'70s era sexist" — something he later regretted, telling Variety it was "bad form." At the same time, Whedon was clearly exasperated by some of the negative commentary about his tweet. "There was a point during the whole Jurassic World thing where someone wrote the phrase 'championing women marginalizes them,' and I was like, OK! We're done! The snake hath et its tail," he told BuzzFeed News. "There's no way to find any coherence when everything has to be parsed and decried." As far as Whedon is concerned, however, anyone blaming feminists for driving him away from social media is not only wrong, but missing the point about the relationship between internet trolls and feminists on Twitter. "For someone like Anita Sarkeesian to stay on Twitter and fight back the trolls is a huge statement," he said. "It's a statement of strength and empowerment and perseverance, and it's to be lauded. For somebody like me to argue with a bunch of people who wanted Clint and Natasha to get together [in the second Avengers film], not so much. For someone like me even to argue about feminism — it's not a huge win. Because ultimately I'm just a rich, straight, white guy. You don't really change people's minds through a tweet. You change it through your actions. The action of Anita being there and going through that and getting through that and women like her — that says a lot." So while some of the hate directed at Whedon did take the form of death threats, Whedon said he never saw anything on Twitter that escalated to the level of what feminists like Sarkeesian have had to face just about every day. "Nothing that made me go, 'Wait, they're calling from my house,'" he said. "It was like, OK, these guys don't understand about hyperbole."

"For someone like me even to argue about feminism — it's not a huge win. Because ultimately I'm just a rich, straight, white guy." —Joss Whedon