The scholar Carol Anderson coined the term white rage to describe the predictable backlash every time black Americans inch closer toward equality with white Americans.

The way the Jim Crow South rose up to trample reconstruction,

the rise of hate crimes after the election of Barack Obama,

and calls to take back the country in the wake of Black Lives Matter.

And maybe the phenomenon is not limited to gains in racial equality.

In response to the hard-won gains of feminism, there is masculinism.

From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I'm Chris Boyd. We can see this trend in the misogynist

ideas promoted by the Manosphere, that women ought to leave the workforce to concentrate on

pleasing husbands and raising children. As my guest has learned,

there are even some influencers trying to make the case that the 19th Amendment was a mistake.

Helen Lewis is a staff writer at The Atlantic, and she's a host of podcasts at the BBC. Her book

is called The Genius Myth. Her article for the Atlantic that we're talking about today is called

The Men Who Want Women to Be Quiet. Helen, welcome back to think. Thank you very much for

having me. You call masculineism both serious and silly. What do you mean by that? Right. Well,

there is a kind of trolling performative quality to a lot of the things that some of these guys will say. You know, they will kind of raise the possibility of, as you say, repealing the 19th Amendment. Now, you know, that would require two-thirds of the states to sign up on a constitutional amendment. It's a really tough uphill climb thing to do. But it's kind of done to sort of say, this is the destination, right? This is the

direction of travel. So it's at the same time a kind of serious thing that lots of these people

do believe would be a better way of governing America. But it's also designed to kind of entrap

liberals and feminists into arguing with something and looking like their, you know, their chicken

little running around warning that the sky is going to fall in. So it's a way basically of humiliating liberals and feminists by getting

them upset. Yeah, and also to be an edge lord, which is so much of a strain through that

MAGA online right, you know, the idea that you just deliberately say things that are

rude or uncivil or would have previously been ruled out of bounds for racism or sexism or

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