For readers who may not regularly follow Curiata.com or The Modern Urban Gentleman: The following post is an entry in a weekly men’s lifestyle column. As such, it is written from a male perspective with a male audience in mind. For a female point of view on issues of gender, sexuality, and culture at large, check out the work of my talented and loving wife in her weekly column, A Feminist Sensibility.

Last week’s killings in Isla Vista, California, have become a watershed moment for me. I have had my own preconceptions and past behaviors projected through a new, uncomfortable lens. I hope readers will accept the challenge of gentlemanly self-analysis to reflect honestly on their own attitudes and conduct, and then refine them where they must.

If you are still unfamiliar with the crime, a sexually frustrated 22-year-old man, enacting “vengeance” against all women for his virginity, stabbed three roommates and opened fire outside a sorority house at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In the course of the attacks, six were murdered, 13 more injured, and the killer dead by his own hand.

The impact of the killings has, for me, been as much a response to the multitude of reactions to the attacks as to the motives of the man behind them. I have come to have a new appreciation for how hard-wired men are for casual misogyny, and how critically precarious that wiring is — how easily a spark can grow to a fire that devours innocent lives.

When I first heard of this latest in a long string of mass murders here in the United States late Friday, I callously and regrettably filed the headline in that portion of the brain reserved for routine, disposable pieces of information. Unfortunately, this has become the only practical reaction given the frequency of these large-scale tragedies. The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012 proved the futility of getting worked up over enacting sensible weapons laws, so I swallowed the instinct for outrage and went about my weekend.

As I checked in on social media over the course of the holiday, another low-level signal registered in my consciousness: Something called the #YesAllWomen movement was trending on Twitter, and it was eliciting the predictable trolling, including a #NotAllMen backlash. I had no idea what the fuss was about, never connected #YesAllWomen to Isla Vista, and I didn’t sit down to fill in the details until the discussion had reached an unavoidable critical mass — and, embarrassingly, until it fit my schedule.

Wading into #YesAllWomen is littered with landmines for a white, cisgender, straight male. But Phil Plait, one of my favorite writers, who brings logic and order to astronomy, science, and critical thinking at large, has done that heavy-lifting for me. In his article, Plait expertly summarizes the importance of women voicing the worrisome, creepy, unfair, threatening experiences they routinely endure while he dismantles the #NotAllMen trope that only serves to embolden those like the Isla Vista murderer.

It didn’t take long to find that murderer’s video in which he lays out, as in some sort of poorly produced WWE heel promo, his plans for mass murder because of his own pitiful shortcomings. The most troubling part about the Isla Vista murderer is how recognizable he is. I have heard and read his perspectives before. I have known men like him. I have even, at times, been him.

Let me say that I know this man had been receiving therapy and he may have been dealing with autism spectrum disorder. I am sympathetic to those factors, emphatic that mental health must be more properly dealt with to mitigate the possibility of this type of behavior — yet utterly disdainful of the pathetic egomaniac that felt he had the right to play god because the world did not mold to his expectations.

This murderer found solace and support in a community of self-appointed martyrs, bearing the cross in the fight against the destruction of some false conception of manhood, calling themselves the “men’s rights movement.” In this twisted worldview of victim-hood, the feminist agenda has emasculated society and every woman is a soldier in the war to destroy male-kind.

The MRM spins into action anytime a woman publishes, tweets, or speaks any perspective that may be out of line with millennia-old gender roles. The vitriol spewed by these keyboard warriors is disgusting and, frankly, criminal, including their threats of rape and dismemberment of a woman who dares to speak her mind. This phenomenon has become so predictable, so par-for-the-course, that it has had the ironic effect of strengthening the case for the feminism it rails against. (Lewis’ law has been coined to describe “that the comments on any article about feminism justify feminism.”)

This dangerous mode of thinking propagates among self-absorbed, isolationist circles: online forums, Twitter, gaming platforms, tea parties, Ayn Rand book clubs, and the gutters of Reddit. (Look, I know extreme, fabricated victim-hood exists within enclaves of the left, as well. But the utter disconnect with reality exhibited by the MRM and the dangerous lengths to which these folks have gone puts them in an entirely different category of alarming.)

It is, of course, true that #NotAllMen are intentionally anti-female, abusive, or predatory. But there exists a deep-seated masculine entitlement that the MRM actively denies and the more well-adjusted man unintentionally ignores. We are so integrated into our patriarchal system that we can’t see the forest for the trees — and I count myself among this group even now, though this conversation has at least made me aware of my ignorance.

I found an iota of my own complacency, as well as the clarity I didn’t know I was seeking, in a somewhat unlikely place. Recent Jeopardy! champion Arthur Chu, who had been one of the voices on Twitter pinging my brain with the murderer’s motives and #YesAllWomen catharsis throughout the weekend, penned a deconstruction of the male mind for The Daily Beast that struck a nerve in me. The editorial, “Your Princess Is in Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds,” laid bare the myth I had lived for my entire life as a single man without ever realizing the fiction of it all.

As Chu illustrates, the male entitlement culture pervades even in what would seem to be the safest zone: the expressly anti-masculine strongholds of nerddom. This is the haven of “nice guys” who only want to win the affections of the women they admire through their kind words and reassuring shoulders. Raise your hand if that’s a strategy you’re familiar with.

I, for one, spent all of middle and high school employing these tactics, finally “earning” a long-term girlfriend after years of rejection. Needless to say, that relationship didn’t work out. But I and many other of my “nice guy” ilk have had no other frame of reference for male-female relationships than the guy-wins-girl narrative so ingrained in our culture.

The danger lies in that when only one outcome is imaginable, it becomes an entitlement. And when an entitlement is repeatedly denied, a resentment builds. And when a resentment grows to a point where it can no longer be borne, tragedy strikes.

Chu’s perspective struck a nerve in more people than just me. I posted his article to Facebook and it has been re-shared an incredible 102 times in 24 hours (far exceeding any of my countless efforts to push our Curiata.com posts to that level of virality).

Chu also linked to another crucial illustration of male misconception. An unattributed reader of Andrew Sullivan’s blog The Dish shared a story that Sullivan reprinted in 2012 in which a high school freshman, “disgusted” by homosexuality because a man once made an unwanted pass at him, was stopped in his tracks when his teacher pointed out that it was the first and only time in the student’s life he had endured something that women deal with nonstop from the onset of puberty.

All of these attitudes, whether willful or ignorant, serve to enable a casual misogyny that every man who has ever taken a breath has perpetuated.

Gentlemen, we all share in the responsibility to eliminate this poison. Respect for women is never a negotiable item. Nonetheless, the everyday implications of living to a new standard will undoubtedly prove difficult for gentlemen like us. The wandering eye will ever ogle, and the cat-and-mouse of flirtation will endure.

But always keep in mind the perspectives of Katherine Cooper, Veronika Weiss, and other sisters and daughters, mothers and cousins, who have been gunned down or harassed when a woman’s will didn’t bend to a man’s.

More than any other topic we’ve addressed in this space, that will make you a true gentleman.