UC Berkeley computer science professor Jonathan Shewchuk ignited a nationwide controversy after advising a student to “get out of the Bay Area” if he wanted to find a girlfriend.
Last week, UC Berkeley computer science professor Jonathan Shewchuk ignited a nationwide controversy with comments he made on an official university online discussion 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 stark differences in behavior of women in places where women are plentiful versus their 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 spokesperson put it in a statement to the press, “threatening.”
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Shewchuk, who later apologized for his comments, didn’t go into detail about what 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 prominent set of values that dehumanizes women. His statements echo a dangerous, fringe ideology of male supremacy, centered on backlash against the recent social gains 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 harassment campaigns and social media that brought this ideology to life in the 2010s. 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 Valizadeh, a wildly popular pick-up artist and writer during this time, attracted followers 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 arrested the development of vulnerable men searching for some outside factor they can blame 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 like the Bay Area are too picky, too feminist or too full of themselves for regular 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 the source of actually legitimate issues of loneliness, wealth inequality and social disconnection, “manosphere” websites and peddlers like Andrew Tate and “Why Women Deserve Less” author Myron Gaines take advantage of men’s desperation to rake in huge profits in online “self-help” courses and, strangely, cryptocurrency.
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 apparently difficult dating scene in the Bay Area. Yes, it is true that the tech industry, a dominant force in the Bay Area, heavily favors young, male workers, who hold 65% of tech jobs in the U.S. It’s a structural problem that stretches back to schools like the one Shewchuk teaches in: Though women generally outnumber men in American secondary institutions, only 21.9% of computer science majors were women in 2021. (23% in Shewchuk’s department in 2022.)
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Given this data, holding resentment toward women for their perceived “advantages” or undesirable “behaviors” because you can’t get a date is clearly unhinged. Though profitable for some, resentment doesn’t get at the root of social disconnection and loneliness.
Men’s reticence to seek mental health treatment is well-documented, with multiple studies connecting low treatment rates to persistent, ableist stigmas that portray men seeking help as being “weak, inadequate and unmanly.” “Losers love 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 embarking on a search for meaning and validation on social media — much like the student seeking advice on the UC Berkeley message board — and are becoming radicalized 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 violent 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, including Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Burbank, urged the CEOs of Google and YouTube to take action to reduce the reach of extremist sites and videos aimed at “incels,” or “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 about the Montreal massacre. In 1989, an armed assailant killed 14 women, starting 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 spree to strike a blow against feminists, “who have always ruined (his) life.” The case shocked Canada, prompting a flurry of legislation aimed at reducing violence against women and increasing gun control measures.
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A year after the Montreal attack, Shewchuk graduated from a Vancouver university with a computer science degree. Surely, he remembers this incident. The fact that he didn’t come away from it with a commitment to treat women as equals damns him, and damns the society that allows toxic beliefs about women to thrive.
Reach Soleil Ho (they/them): soleil@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @hooleil
Why the entire country is still talking about a UC Berkeley professor’s toxic dating advice
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28.03.2024
UC Berkeley computer science professor Jonathan Shewchuk ignited a nationwide controversy after advising a student to “get out of the Bay Area” if he wanted to find a girlfriend.
Last week, UC Berkeley computer science professor Jonathan Shewchuk ignited a nationwide controversy with comments he made on an official university online discussion 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 stark differences in behavior of women in places where women are plentiful versus their 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 spokesperson put it in a statement to the press, “threatening.”
Advertisement
Article continues below this ad
Shewchuk, who later apologized for his comments, didn’t go into detail about what 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 prominent set of values that dehumanizes women. His statements echo a dangerous, fringe ideology of male supremacy, centered on backlash against the recent social gains 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 harassment campaigns and social media that brought this ideology to life in the 2010s. In 2014, an influential online movement called “Gamergate”........
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