I suspect a lot of people who self-identify as nonfeminist, or antifeminst, agree with my basic egalitarian premises above. The misogyny I'm talking about occurs along a spectrum. Most subtly (and probably most controversially for purposes of this discussion), I always noticed an undercurrent of animus among many of the MRA-type posters on mainstream websites like reddit. They seemed more interested in harming (or at least venting about) women than concretely improving things for men. But this was a mild, recurring source of exasperation -- not a big misogynist blackpill.

I also spent significant time on chans, mostly /b/, /pol/, and /r9k/ in the 2000s and early 2010s. If you're familiar with those sites, you know what they are like. I don't mind the irreverent, chaotic old internet -- I enjoyed it. I made edgy jokes too. So if it had just been a mix of rape jokes and porn and other random content it wouldn't have bothered me. But over time it became very clear that a lot of these guys viewed women as (i) meatholes only good for fucking and degrading, and/or (ii) uppity bitches who must be brought down and harmed. This was especially true on r9k where more serious discussions prevailed and you could see proto incel ideology emerging.

I posted on another forum I can't name because it's private, but it contains a lot of men in my professional sphere. I work in a mostly male industry. At work, everyone is polite and I have no real complaints. I have been promoted fairly based on what I believe are my merits, and if men think I'm a shrill harpy or a ballcutting shrew, they don't say so. But online, my professional peers would rate pics of women they knew (including, once, me), conjure grotesque and absurd "cock carousel" fantasies about how we must secretly have conducted ourselves before marriage, and opine that our legal rights should be taken away. Again, this occurred on a spectrum with edgy jokes on one end, and genuine mentally ill rage on the other. At least one man from the forum was arrested IRL for a sex crime.

When I got into what eventually became the alt right, the view that women were generally NPCs who ought to be treated as second class citizens became the prevailing one. There were benevolent versions of this (women don't belong outside the home, keep them pregnant, feminists are evil for burdening them with the option of economic independence; we should protect them by treating them as what they are, children) and malicious versions (like a blog which I won't link, but is discussed here.) The latter blogger -- the sadistic pedophile -- was an influential and ubiquitous presence in several NRx sites. He had smart and interesting things to say on topics including cryptocurrency, but his view of women is deeply demented and if I personally believe he has violently raped young girls. Less grave, but still blackpilling, were my interactions with dozens of men who parroted Roissy posts uncritically, as if this was some shining secret knowledge that explained the world instead of a sleazy, reductive polemic against women.

In the meantime, IRL, incidents like Rotherham and Cologne were getting swept under the rug.

I don't want to portray myself as traumatized by the Internet. I'm not -- in fact, I like the Internet. But I credit it for opening my eyes to misogyny as a real force that shapes cognitions and behavior. This, in turn, made me more interested in feminism, and I've come around to the view that 1980s-90s feminists made some valid points, especially about pornography. I used to view it as a coincidence that the young men I met online who hated and objectified women had also spent years immersed in online porn. After all, I'd been exposed to the same porn on the same sites and it didn't affect me. Sitting here today, I don't think the "coincidence" is so easily dismissed.

*fixed link