Recently, a young guy went on a rampage in America, shooting three young women dead, and stabbing three of his dorm mates.

Because of the anti-hero-loving world we live in, a video emerged online immediately showing the guy – Elliot Rodger – addressing the camera and promising a day of retribution.

This retribution was deserved simply because no girl had ever loved him. The video seems at face value like a caricature of villainy, as though Rodger had watched far too many reruns of Austin Powers and was dedicating his life to the memory of Dr Evil.

At first, it was almost funny, until you remembered that this same guy had just killed six innocent people.

It has since emerged that Rodger penned a large manifesto in which he talked of creating a concentration camp for women which would see us “die out”, except for a few who would be kept alive in labs and artificially inseminated to propagate the human race. He despised women, concluding that we manipulate and (emotionally) torture men.

The reason for this hatred seems to have been the simple fact that he’d never been able to forge an intimate relationship with a woman. He felt that if he couldn’t have them – “them” (being women in general) – then nobody else should have them either. It’s a worrying turn of phrase in itself, implying as it does that women are simply there to be had.

The fallout from his killing spree – rather than inducing a desire among the American people to ban guns, which would seem the most obvious thing to do – has been a bizarre Twitter war between men and women.

Women are using the hashtag #YESALLWOMEN to show that although Rodger’s extreme views are the ramblings of a violent and disturbed individual, the sentiments behind these views are merely part of the continuum of hatred toward women, part of the same line of thought reducing us to the state of objects that can be had.

Some men have trolled the hashtag, agreeing with Rodger’s sentiments that women psychologically and emotionally manipulate and torment men and push them to physical violence.

Well, no man in my life has ever been “pushed” to physical violence. And I like to think it’s mainly because they’re made of stronger, better stuff than that.