BRYAN CAPLAN: Advice for Shy Male Nerds.

Plus, a followup: Shy Male Nerds and the Bubble Strategy: Reply to Scott Alexander.

A couple of points: First, if feminists are mean to you, you can — as Caplan suggests — simply shun them. They are a minority (and not an especially big one) among women, and there’s no particular reason you should have to interact with them if you don’t want to — and why would you want to, if they’re mean to you? That’s less true in academic settings, of course, but even there the noisy mean ones are not a majority, as opposed to fellow-travelers who will mouth the right formulas but who don’t really care. And if they still attack you in your place of work or school, make a sex-discrimination complaint. There’s all sorts of actionable sexism out there in the academic and corporate worlds from activists who — unlike their colleagues on the right — have never learned to self-censor or guard their communications. It’s a target-rich environment. HR plaintiffs’ lawyers are figuring that out even as we speak.

Plus, from the comments to Caplan’s first post:

What must be understood here is that young female campus feminism is a social climbing strategy – it is a way for women who from middle-class backgrounds with low future income potential to pose as upper-middle class. Thus, attacking of the SMN is merely bullying to increase social status. Ask yourself, why is it the SMN that is attacked, and not black men, Texas ranchers, rich white men, etc who are attacked? The reason the SMN is attacked is because: 1: The SMN is S, and thus weak and socially isolated. 2: The SMN is M, and thus a socially-approved target 3: The SMN is N, and thus gravitates towards academia and blue states, and thus cannot escape. Further, just as in any case of bullying, every time the SMN shows weakness or acquiescence, the bullying is going to get worse.

And this is why university reinforcement of this kind of bullying is a Title IX violation, which the plaintiffs’ attorneys are, as I say, starting to figure out.