“But, truly, if he were with us, wouldn’t this all have ended a long time ago?” she asks. “If he really were with us, wouldn’t he reckon that one good way to change structural violence and inequity would be to refuse the power that comes with it?” She concludes her opinion piece with an admonition to all of the men that are reading it, whom she appears to blame for producing ills going back thousands of years:

If you really are #WithUs and would like us to not hate you for all the millennia of woe you have produced and benefited from, start with this: Lean out so we can actually just stand up without being beaten down. Pledge to vote for feminist women only. Don’t run for office. Don’t be in charge of anything. Step away from the power. We got this. And please know that your crocodile tears won’t be wiped away by us anymore. We have every right to hate you. You have done us wrong. #BecausePatriarchy. It is long past time to play hard for Team Feminism. And win.

The argument is actually a perversion of “Team Feminism”—that is, the web is awash with feminists earnestly dismissing the notion that “Team Feminism” hates men, and the view is so unrepresentative of the various strands of “in real life” feminism that it is encountered more commonly among ideological enemies trying to parody or undermine feminism than among earnest advocates like Walters.

Still, the core question warrants a dispassionate, substantive answer.

“Is it really so illogical to hate men?”

Yes, it is.

It is always illogical to hate an entire group of people for behavior perpetrated by a subset of its members and actively opposed or renounced by literally millions of them. It is every bit as easy, and more just, to assign collective rhetorical blame to groups that deserve it, like “murderers” or “rapists” or “domestic abusers” or “sexists.”

Indulging in collective hate validates hatred itself and the flawed premise of group rather than individual responsibility. It puts all groups at greater risk of suffering hatred, for there are bad individuals in any group and folks ready to hate every group. What’s more, any hate tends to harm the individual who harbors it.

Finally, group hate tends to make those who harbor it less able to see clearly, less likely to acknowledge nuance, and less able to improve the world, even as their wrongheaded ideas risk leading others into destructive errors.

For example, some of Walters’s less thoughtful readers might draw the conclusion that bad behavior by men damages women exclusively, and erroneously conclude that half the population—maybe their own half—has no strictly selfish interest in tackling the sundry forms of violence that are mostly caused by men. But (for instance) men are wildly overrepresented among both homicide perpetrators and homicide victims—according to the UN, 78 percent of homicide victims are male. Even the most self-interested man has a stake in perceiving, studying, and trying to remedy most ills men disproportionately inflict.