If you spent any time in Manhattan during the 1980s, particularly on the Upper West Side, you are likely to recall a recurrent vignette of dissent — the presence of a thin, wiry woman with hair that made emphatic her seriousness, who colonized the sidewalks in what appeared to be a full-time avocation as a crusader against pornography and other forms of sexual degradation. To make her point, she would often have with her a blowup of a notorious Hustler cover that featured an image of a woman who had been plunged headfirst into a meat grinder. Her approach was hardly solicitous; she demanded of those who passed by, “Sign the petition!”

Even then, among my circle of largely earnest college friends in Morningside Heights during the high point of women’s studies, the phrase “sign the petition” became its own circulating laugh line. By the ’80s, and certainly culminating in the ’90s, many young feminists had abandoned the idea that what we really needed to worry about was the violent enmity that men harbored to one degree or another toward women. Misogyny as a conceptual framework through which to view the world was distinctly out of vogue.

Today, simply using the word seems benighted, as our most dominant feminist debates are conducted at the level of rarefied conflict between satisfying maternal desire and satisfying the ambition to run global assets management at JPMorgan. But if the case of Gilberto Valle, the New York City police officer who inhabited an Internet subculture populated by men who think about raping and torturing women, roasting them on spits and eating them, doesn’t serve as a summons to broaden our gender discussions and think about what it means when a society can easily and actively nourish its most heinous notions about women, it’s uncertain what could.

Officer Valle’s trial, on charges of conspiracy to kidnap and accessing a government database without authorization, began in a Manhattan court last week. Prosecutors have argued that he was involved in more than deviant role play and unorthodox fantasy, that, in fact, he was plotting actual crimes that would begin with abduction and result in the cannibalization of female victims. In her testimony on Monday, Mr. Valle’s wife, Kathleen Mangan-Valle, recounted how she had delved into her husband’s electronic chat history on a laptop one day, only to discover that he had been talking about killing various women, including her.