IT was loud and the lighting disorientating. Nightclubs are like that, set up to create false intimacy; one must lean in to hear one’s conversational partner, touch arms for attention, breathe in the space of another’s breath. There are few other places strangers sweat together in proximity in the dark.

It was loud and the lighting dim yet I was sure this man had just asked me why I was not at home with my children. 

I wish I could remember the song that was playing. I’d like to cast my mind’s eye back over this scene and relive it with a soundtrack but my mind was working exclusively to prevent his mind playing tricks on me.

So, we were in a nightclub and my friend was talking to his friend. It seemed silly to stand to one side like twin gooseberries so I said hello, made some bland gambit.

I feel the need to emphasise that I was not flirting. I had no interest whatsoever in your man but this man was not the type to make chitchat with a woman. 

He drew my attention to the low quality of female in the nightclub and expressed sadness and frustration that so many young women were overweight. I suggested that the shape of unknown women might not be any of his business and that it is considered impolite to comment.

He told me that I was "heavy". "You need to look after yourself better," he said. "There's no excuse for young women not to look after themselves and for young women to be overweight." 

A light dawned. In certain circles, this is a tactic called "negging" and this hard nonsense is not unusual. The idea is that the man insults his intended in order to tap in to her presumed self-esteem issues and make her work for his attention. It's a classic tactic of the so-called "pickup artist" movement, a misogynist subculture with a set of rules for picking up women or, as they style it - "game". There are gradients of how odious this is but the lighter elements - such as negging - are fairly mainstream.

I wouldn't be drawn. I laughed, told him I was perfectly happy as I am. 

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He was a relatively short man and not unattractive, obviously took care of his appearance and had a confidence bordering on bullish. 

"Why are you here?" he asked me. "Wouldn't you be happier at home in your kitchen with your children?" He wasn't trying to be a cheeky chappy. He wasn't trying to be a contrarian. He was, quite seriously, asking me the question.

Two things kept me on the spot: an ingrained politeness and a desire to confound his beliefs by confronting him with a women who has neither children nor a kitchen anyone would want to pass much time in.

"I don't have children and I also don't want children," I told him. He seemed genuinely curious. Why not? 

"Well," I said, "Why would you assume I would?" 

He had the obvious answer: "Women are only ever truly happy when they are at home with their children." Ah, there. The penny dropped. This guy was a pickup artist of the men's rights activism type.

Men's rights activists espouse misogyny as ideology. They believe feminism has oppressed and disadvantaged men, they see no fundamental unfairness of society’s treatment of women. They have hijacked feminist terminology and narrative for their own purposes and use the perceived evils of feminism to explain marital breakdown, romantic inadequacy and workplace failure. 

I'd read so much about these fellows yet one never really believes one will cross paths in real life with the truly odious corners of the internet. 

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Women should be at home in the kitchen with their children, not abroad at night in clubs. Yet who would he hunt if we were safely at home? His stance was classic men's rights activism. It is a set of kaleidoscopically contradictory beliefs: that women should be sexually available to any man at any time; that women should be despised as sluts; that women should keep themselves exclusively for their husbands. 

Sorry chaps, as women have been told repeatedly, you can’t have it all. 

I wanted to stick around and see what else he had to say. He had much else to say. 

He point blank refused to entertain the notion that I might be happy being single.

This was impossible. Women, he told me, are delusional about being single. 
"The only reason you think you're happy being single," he said, and I've had to edit this to take out certain suggestions for how he believed a man might benefit me, "Is because you've never met a man who knows you, who is your intellectual equal, your emotional equal, who dominates you and who you can submit to."

Women, he believes, look after themselves better - by which I imagine he means 'make themselves aesthetically pleasing for men' - when they are in a relationship.

Single women let themselves go.

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"That's why we have so many young women who are overweight. The rise of the single woman is causing obesity. Women are in their best shape when they are with the right man."

Briefly, I mulled this over. I have put weight on while being single, that's right. But not due to unhappiness, due to contentment. No longer wanting to conform to a standard ideal of what my younger self believed men wanted was a great release.

Besides the bald fact of this man being a dick, he was also a dick who had everything backward. 

He told me how he'd been furious to receive a flyer through his door from a famous weight loss club and had gone as far as to phone up to complain about how the diet method the club uses messes with a woman's hormones, forcing her into a weight loss/weight gain cycle. Imagine that anger, that need for control. 

He carried on to tell me how damaged society has become by women who think they can raise children on their own as single mothers. "People think the blurring of the gender roles is acceptable, it's wrong. Men and women's roles should be separate but they need to work together - men providing and women at home." 

And so, you might think, this sounds not unlike being trapped next to an elderly and cantankerous uncle at an event organised by the side of the family you'd usually ignore. 

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But this is a relatively young man and these are his firmly held beliefs. The controlled hatred rolling from him was palpable. 

Receiving this information in a blunt and unemotional way was not easy. This has always been my tactic in a chat up situation. Present as disinterested. Do the rejecting before they reject you, save face at all costs. But this time it wasn't a tactic,

I was quite determined to emphasise that I had no interest in him and this was not a chat up situation.

Of course, I needn't have worried. How silly to have ever thought so. I was far too old for him. Despite him telling me he was mid 40s, there was no way this man would look at any woman upwards of 30. 

He told me about women's "biological shelf life" and how I was inching past it. "A man," he said, "Can father limitless children but a woman only ovulates 13 times a year and so she has a biological shelf life - that's a fact. It can't be disputed."

I wonder how many women are aware of how many times a year they ovulate. This chap had clearly done his reading. I was reaching my limit now. I thought knowing his tricks and his trade I would be relatively immune but this bile was starting to have an impact as I thought of the other, younger women he might have tried it on and my other, younger self who might just have been susceptible. 

I know myself now, I know what I want and what I believe. But my late teens and my 20s were a quagmire of uncertainty, my self-esteem an unreliable flibbertigibbet. I would have tried to impress this man. I would have seen his views as a challenge, tried to win him round.

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And that's what pickup artists rely on, the vulnerability women in a non-feminist society develop by being constantly told they don't and can't fit an ideal of beauty, career success and motherhood. 

I was trying to tune back into the music, he was hearing the clattering din of misandry. 

He switched his phaser to our education system, a "failed disgrace". "It is sucking the creativity out of our children," he said, as a gaggle of joyous young women squeezed past on their way to the bar, "And teaching them conformity. 

"It's teaching them homosexuality is ok, feminism is ok. The only reason we have feminists and lesbians is that the alpha man is dying out.

"There is no such thing as a lesbian - only a woman who hasn't found an alpha male to submit to."

That was my limit. There was only so much talk of submission before I admitted defeat and just... walked away. I didn't chide him, I didn't shout at him. I just walked wearily away wondering how many very young women he's manipulated, how much emotional damage he's caused. His anger had left a weight on me no amount of dancing could lift and I carried that weight all the way home. 

How many others like him are there with this deep rage towards women? This rage, it breeds in the corners of the internet but it is carried into real life by these men with beliefs more common than you might think.

I hope any women he encounters does the same: walks away and leaves him in the dark all alone.