Why does it seem so funny to so many that a small group have decided to boycott Mad Max: Fury Road in fear of its “feminist agenda”? Why does it seem like such a perfect encapsulation of our cultural moment? Anti-feminism so often looks like raw misogyny through a thin sheet of gauze, but perhaps this tiny event was really capturing the reactionary nature of the online man-o-sphere, where distrust of feminism forms the basis of a small community of men. With startling numbers of women murdered by husbands or partners, the visibility of anti-feminist, hard-right reactionary groups seems like a sick joke – but it is neither new, nor isolated. Reactionary masculinity has multiple outlets, from the overt “Men Going Their Own Way” nihilists, all the way across to pop culture fans who resist feminist activism in comic books and video games.

A blistering survey of the connections between online hate groups, cultural reactionaries and more politically minded neo-reactionaries was written for Boing Boing by Jay Allen, in which people like software developer Curtis “Mencius Moldbug” Yarvin and cultural critic Nick Land are revealed as the aesthete monastic caste of this emerging and diverse anti-liberalism. The piece made clear that these communities were often connected as much as they were not, but they were all fed by the isolation and masculine induction of anonymous and quasi-anonymous online spaces. For Moldbug and Land, at the intellectual end of the scale, it’s all about “biological realism” and questioning the entire democratic project. At the more vulgar, anonymous teenagers attack feminists for suggesting that popular culture clean up its act.

This new breed of cultural reactionaries now cast long shadows across videogame culture, comic culture and science-fiction awards – just to name three of their most visible battlefields. Their staging ground is social media, haunting article comments and Twitter hashtags to snipe and harass anybody who doesn’t toe their particular line. Encampments are anonymous message boards, forums and chat channels, which allow users enough privacy to avoid consequences but enough permanence to gain a reputation. Importantly, more formal right-wing networks and parties co-opt the movement and lend legitimacy, trumpeting anti-feminism as their victory. These forces are disconnected from each other in key ways, but also lack the organisational tissue traditionally associated with older right-wing and reactionary movements.

The dominant, unifying narrative of masculinity under fire depicts a creeping censorial advance, where political correctness, SJWs (social justice warriors) and a compliant, corrupt media all work together at great risk to artistic freedom. This view of the world is one seen through a kaleidoscope, where reactionary anger imitates the forms of behaviour it chooses to see in its would-be censors. All this is fed in no small part by a 24-hour news industry that adores the shaming, conflict and dramatics of social media.

In this way, a single murky anecdote about an academic conference deciding to switch from clapping to “jazz hands” to please an attendee becomes a global benchmark for the over-reach of liberal feminism. A badly handled campus complaint about a “safe space” becomes a touchstone for amorphous concerns about hypersensitive students. Arguments that play out on websites are pre-existing and come to blows in the comment section long before anyone actually reads the article.

Harassment has a special place in this toxic mix of news culture, social media and reactionary animus. If you can cast doubt on someone’s harassment then their opinion is suddenly worth less than nothing: they’re biased, they’re a liar, they have an agenda.

The reactionary worldview has always been based on justifying a return to previous cultural standards on rational grounds. This rationality gives adherents permission to see feminism and anti-racism as sudden, new, fabricated and false. The drumbeat issued from these corners is familiar enough: the media has a “left-wing bias”; “political correctness has run amok”; creators are “afraid to offend feminists”; the “pendulum has swung too far”. These tropes are pinings for the return of a magical, pre-feminist state.

Tactical anti-feminism has a very long history, rearing its head whenever advances toward equal rights are made. It is often blurred with that other bête noire, so-called “cultural Marxism”. Jason Wilson, writing on the latter in the Guardian, says:

It allows those smarting from a loss of privilege to be offered the shroud of victimhood, by pointing to a shadowy, omnipresent, quasi-foreign elite who are attempting to destroy all that is good in the world.

This is the mirror-image method of the reactionary world; where patriarchy exists, invent the opposite. This makes recruitment for contemporary anti-feminism open, easy and even honest. Confusion and frustration with social media outrage culture, even if we consider it secondary to a more inclusive world, still has nowhere to go. Finally, the mechanics of gender-oriented hatred are simple, effective and chilling: eldritch right-wing organisations and their voluntary ambassadors harvest this confusion and anger with military precision.

The stakes feel high because all players feel that there is an assault on some essential, unqualified sense of what civilisation itself is. Seen through this lens, feminism has gained a new virality and power within social media itself. The nuances and disagreements within feminism about representation, culture and power – important fractures that constitute its greatest achievements, for both men and women – aren’t important because the opponents of feminism view it as a prevalent, powerful, unquestionable social consensus. Once you believe that, then rebellion away from anything that looks like this singular, monolithic “liberal feminism” can seem like the next logical step.