Your conversation with ER took a weird turn, Jody, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't have posted. You've discovered a small but powerfully virulent dark corner of the Net.

Google terms like "pick up artist" or "PUA", or "social justice warrior", and "beta males". Apropos that last, there's an ugly thread on one of the hate sites right now about how the Umqua shootings signal the start of a "beta rebellion".

Like you noted, context is everything, and the posts and comments, and the lop-sided vote in the opinion poll, identify those people as members of this one ugly Internet tribe. These are simply losers who can't get laid, and resent the fact that women have the power to say "no". They're suckers for those books about how to pick up women, and trade tips on how to trick women into bed. If they succeed, they become those men who control and abuse their wives and girlfriends, basically out of fear of what could happen if the women wise up.

So far there's no political dimension to those losers. But recently there's been a new term coined that's worth checking out: "cuckservative". It means "cuckolded conservative", somebody insufficiently "hard" at conservatism, and it's a direct allusion to the meme of cuckolded beta male watching with shameful arousal as a big black "buck" has sex with his woman. Only the "cuckservative" is watching it being done to his country. That's a powerful demagogic brew, mixing sex and patriotism.

Except in the literal sense, men can only emasculate themselves. The quickest way to do that is to think there's some kind of competition between men and women, and that one sex loses if the other wins. Women have ways of teaching a lesson to that kind of man.