Last week, UC Berkeley computer science professor Jonathan Shewchuk ignited a na
tionwide controversy with comments he made on an official university online disc
ussion forum advising a student to “get out of the Bay Area” if he wanted to
 find a girlfriend. 
“I’m not kidding at all,” he continued. “You’ll be shocked by the star
k differences in behavior of women in places where women are plentiful versus th
eir behavior within artillery distance of San Jose and San Francisco.”
On the surface, the remarks might seem tacky, but maybe not, as a UC Berkeley sp
okesperson put it in a statement to the press, “threatening.”
Shewchuk, who later apologized for his comments, didn’t go into detail about w
hat those “differences” might be. But you need to read between the lines to 
see the statements for what they are: coded language for an increasingly promine
nt set of values that dehumanizes women. His statements echo a dangerous, fringe
 ideology of male supremacy, centered on backlash against the recent social gain
s of feminism and LGBT civil rights activism. We allow it to proliferate at our 
peril.
It was a rancid primordial stew of pick-up artist culture, right-wing online har
assment campaigns and social media that brought this ideology to life in the 201
0s. In 2014, an influential online movement called “Gamergate” mobilized to 
wage a culture war in the world of video games, slinging rape and death threats 
to perceived intruders in that historically white and male space. Daryush Valiza
deh, a wildly popular pick-up artist and writer during this time, attracted foll
owers with his concept of “neomasculinity,” defined as the pro-male antidote
 to gender equality and “Western degeneracy.”
This rise of misogynistic “manosphere” ideology in online spaces has arreste
d the development of vulnerable men searching for some outside factor they can b
lame for feeling rejected or sexually outcast. Maybe it’s because women don’
t recognize the virtues of “nice guys” like them. Or maybe women in places l
ike the Bay Area are too picky, too feminist or too full of themselves for regul
ar guys. It’s incredibly human to crave an explanation, some sign of order in 
a chaotic universe. By diagnosing feminism, and therefore female autonomy, as th
e source of actually legitimate issues of loneliness, wealth inequality and soci
al disconnection, “manosphere” websites and peddlers like Andrew Tate and �
�Why Women Deserve Less” author Myron Gaines take advantage of men’s despera
tion to rake in huge profits in online “self-help” courses and, strangely, c
ryptocurrency.
I’ve encountered variations of this line multiple times, especially in online 
places like the tech industry forum Blind, where lonely young men bemoan the app
arently difficult dating scene in the Bay Area. Yes, it is true that the tech in
dustry, a dominant force in the Bay Area, heavily favors young, male workers, wh
o hold 65% of tech jobs in the U.S. It’s a structural problem that stretches b
ack to schools like the one Shewchuk teaches in: Though women generally outnumbe
r men in American secondary institutions, only 21.9% of computer science majors 
were women in 2021. (23% in Shewchuk’s department in 2022.) 
Given this data, holding resentment toward women for their perceived “advantag
es” or undesirable “behaviors” because you can’t get a date is clearly u
nhinged. Though profitable for some, resentment doesn’t get at the root of soc
ial disconnection and loneliness.
Men’s reticence to seek mental health treatment is well-documented, with multi
ple studies connecting low treatment rates to persistent, ableist stigmas that p
ortray men seeking help as being “weak, inadequate and unmanly.” “Losers l
ove to talk about feelings,” Tate wrote to his 9 million Twitter followers. An
 accompanying video says, “Leave the feelings to the girls.” 
Instead of working out issues with shame and self-confidence in therapy or with 
honest discussions with peers in real life, lonely, frustrated guys are embarkin
g on a search for meaning and validation on social media — much like the stude
nt seeking advice on the UC Berkeley message board — and are becoming radicali
zed in the many online echo chambers that make up the world of the manosphere. 
The ideology’s ties to white supremacist figures, conspiracy theories and viol
ent incidents around the world, including the 2014 mass murder by a wannabe pick
-up artist in Isla Vista (Santa Barbara County) and the 2021 Atlanta-area Korean
 spa shootings, have prompted authorities like the National Security Council to 
consider it a serious terroristic threat. In 2022, a group of legislators, inclu
ding Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Burbank, urged the CEOs of Google and YouTube to take a
ction to reduce the reach of extremist sites and videos aimed at “incels,” o
r “involuntary celibates,” citing “an increase in the scale and extremism 
of incel content, and the corresponding threat of incel proponents to the safety
 and security of Americans, particularly women and girls.”
When I first heard about the Shewchuk controversy, I couldn’t help but think a
bout the Montreal massacre. In 1989, an armed assailant killed 14 women, startin
g with six students in a mechanical engineering class at a public university in 
Montreal. In his suicide letter, the killer claimed to have embarked on this spr
ee to strike a blow against feminists, “who have always ruined (his) life.” 
The case shocked Canada, prompting a flurry of legislation aimed at reducing vio
lence against women and increasing gun control measures. 
A year after the Montreal attack, Shewchuk graduated from a Vancouver university
 with a computer science degree. Surely, he remembers this incident. The fact th
at he didn’t come away from it with a commitment to treat women as equals damn
s him, and damns the society that allows toxic beliefs about women to thrive.