"Performative Male Feminism": Rotten Little Men With Pink Pussy Hats
"When one of these guys says men are trash, he doesn't mean himself," writes Kat Rosenfeld at Tablet.

She starts out with a description of the Cool Girl -- from "Gone Girl" -- a "desperate pretender trying to land a man."

Cool Guy is Cool Girl's male counterpart -- the male feminist pandering like mad to get in with women:

Cool Guy doesn't knit, but he definitely owns a pink pussy hat (ordered from a female artist on Etsy, as he'll conspicuously let you know). When he's not tweeting about toxic masculinity, he's hanging out in the replies on feminist threads, apologizing on behalf of all men everywhere for being such trash. Cool Guy writes a several-thousand-word New York Times op-ed flagellating himself for having ogled the butts of his teenage classmates once upon a time, in a quest to ignite a public movement of male confession with himself at its center (suggested hashtag: #IAmSexist)--or just fantasizes about a world where women have all the power and men simply cease to exist. And of course, Cool Guy believes women, so when he's outed for sexual misconduct himself, he makes sure to let everyone know how happy he is to be the bigger person and throw himself under the bus for the movement.

...Whether he's disavowing masculinity entirely or only distancing himself from it--the Cool Guy's performance inches him incrementally closer to the new nexus of cultural power. And yes, it sometimes puts him in contact with women who find his posturing attractive, but here the analogy frays: Cool Guys are not, above all, hot, nor is that their primary intention. Where Amy Dunne imagines grabbing an enraptured man by the lapels and telling him what's what--"Nobody likes chili dogs that much!"--many women, and particularly the longtime feminists from whom the Cool Guy borrows his talking points, find him insincere and obnoxious. Even the women who date these men describe being attracted not to the behavior itself, but to the appearance of allyship, a guy they won't have to explain male privilege to because he already gets it. It's not that this self-flagellating male feminism is sexy, but it does seem safe. Surely, that guy won't mistreat a woman the way a less-enlightened man might.

Except, of course, that they do. Scratch the surface of the Cool Guy's self-conscious cheerleading, and there's often something ugly underneath. You need only look at the way these men, who claim to respect and revere women, react when challenged by one--or at how they treat their girlfriends. The exposure of prominent male feminists as hypocritical jerks in their private lives happens so often that it's not just a familiar narrative, but an SNL punchline.

These guys are hostile and resentful in a way I just don't find guys who are straight up in pursuing women are.

I've written about this before -- via the late anthropologist John Maynard Smith's "Sneaky Fuckers Strategy." Basically, Beta males who can't compete well with other men get in through sneaky methods -- waiting till the alphas are off defending the tribe or herd and then crawling into the cave or whatever to fuck their women.

I find the "male feminist" announcement by a man a big "keep away!" sign.

NOTE: I've been having some problems with the website and lost an earlier version of this entry because of it. Upgrading the software is $300 that I don't have, so we're trying to figure something out so I don't get the repeated Gateway Errors in posting.