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”........

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