The furore over Mad Max: Fury Road amongst “men’s rights activists” is, as many have pointed out, hilarious. It shouldn’t surprise anyone who has spent any time monitoring what passes for thought in the assemblage of pick-up artists and man-children who have collectively been christened the “redpill right”.

Mad Max: Fury Road review – extravagantly bizarre and noisy Read more

The latest kerfuffle started when Aaron Clarey, “the resident economist of the mano/androsphere” took to the pages of Return of Kings, “a blog for heterosexual, masculine men”, to proclaim that Mad Max: Fury Road was an affront. He hadn’t seen it, but nonetheless went on to say:

[The real issue is] whether men in America and around the world are going to be duped by explosions, fire tornadoes, and desert raiders into seeing what is guaranteed to be nothing more than feminist propaganda, while at the same time being insulted AND tricked into viewing a piece of American culture ruined and rewritten right in front of their very eyes.

It’s puzzling that such a strong believer in the innate superiority of the male sex, a man who thinks genetics guarantee a male victory over feminism, would think that anti-feminist men could so easily be duped and brainwashed.

But this kind of strident, off the cuff victimology is par for the course in those vast regions of the Internet where grown men gather to moan about how everyone is picking on them.

Return of Kings is a prominent part of the “man-o-sphere”, a pick up artist site where men are urged to exhibit confidence and strength by essentially tricking women into sleeping with them. PUAs, as they’re called, claim to instruct men in “game” so they can reliably get laid.

It’s an apt term, because it conceives of the path to sexual intimacy as a kind of video game walkthrough, where if you learn to press the right buttons in the right sequence you’re bound to “win”. Men come for the surefire sex tips, and leave with a heaping helping of reactionary ideology.

The real point of PUA and the related “men’s rights movement” is not really helping the plight of lonely nerds: it’s disputing the result of the sexual revolution. PUA “game” is premised on the idea that women are basically lab rats who will reliably respond to certain stimuli. Anyone who disputes this idea and any evidence to the contrary – like women’s increasing economic success, and sexual and social confidence – are anathema.

Independent women with choices stand as a factual refutation to the watery stew of evolutionary psychology, macho posturing, and LAN party horse sense that these groups subsist on. So on any given day on Return of Kings you’ll find an ocean of bile directed at individual feminists, women in general, and the “decline” that feminism’s successes represent.

To a lesser extent, men who accept and support the claims of feminism cop it too (they’re dismissed as “white knights” who are themselves really angling for sex too). What the badasses at Return of Kings love most, though, is working themselves up over a post about what a particular woman has said, and then piling onto her on Twitter.

So it’s not surprising that the Internet’s angry white men find Fury Road objectionable. A strong female lead in a Hollywood action movie would be enough on its own to draw their ire on its own – as Clarey wrote, “Nobody barks orders to Mad Max.” The involvement of women in its production, like Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler, is even worse. But the final straw is that the film shows a man and a woman standing together against the kind of world reactionaries fantasise about inhabiting.

Paleo isn't a fad diet, it's an ideology that selectively denies the modern world | Jason Wilson Read more

A postapocalyptic, hierarchical society that treats women as chattels, and gives free rein to cosplay machismo: that’s a pretty good picture of the redpill utopia. For a woman to take the lead in challenging it, and for a man to support her efforts, is far too depressing a reminder of the kind of progressive change they impotently rail against.

Clarey is proposing that the man-o-sphere boycott the film. Which is all the more reason to go, get a large popcorn, satisfied in the knowledge that it’s salted with reactionary tears.