HOW MANY PEOPLE EVEN KNOW THE "MEN'S RIGHTS" MOVEMENT EXISTS?

We don't know the motive for the van attack in Toronto that killed nine people yesterday, but we're being told this about the man charged in the attack:

Speculation surfaced Monday night around a Facebook post associated with the same name and the same photo as the one that appears on [Alek] Minassian's LinkedIn profile....

The post referred to the "Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger." Rodger was the 22-year-old California man responsible for a deadly rampage in Isla Vista, Calif., that left six people dead and a dozen more injured.

In a video posted ahead of that 2014 attack, Rodger raged about a number of women turning down his advances, rendering men like him "incels," a term used by some groups to mean "involuntarily celibate."

Nikolas Cruz, the shooter in Parkland, Florida, posted praise for Rodger in a YouTube comments section ("Elliot rodger will not be forgotten"). Other mass killers and would-be killers have praised Rodger or connected their rage directly to their sexual frustrations.

But awareness of the "men's rights" movement has never broken through. Stories and op-eds about the phenomenon are rare in the mainstream media. There's a useful blog, We Hunted the Mammoth, that's devoted to these guys, and there's discussion of them at feminist sites. We heard about the movement after the Rodger incident and during Gamergate. But none of this seems to have penetrated.

This is an ideology like jihadism or white separatism, but we're not having a national debate about whether it's the fault of late capitalism or the removal of prayer from the schools or what-have-you. We're not talking about it at all, even though it's a subculture with bizarre beliefs and secret code words that would lend itself very well to journalistic explainers. I'd say the lack of discussion is because the subculture participants are mostly white men, but that's true of the neo-Nazis, and we seem able to talk about them. Maybe the problem is that many of these guys are socioeconomically similar to the white men who run newsrooms. In any case, we need to talk about them more. I bet many people you know don't even realize that this subculture exists.