Slate says the fappening is an anomaly:

It has been widely discussed in recent weeks that the Internet is not a safe place for women. More A-list celebrities are having their privacy violated by hackers and users on 4chan have targeted Emma Watson to shame her for speaking out in favor of feminism at the United Nations. (The latter was apparently a hoax, but many 4chan users took it seriously and delighted in attacking the actress for being an outspoken woman.) At the same time, feminist gamers have been experiencing death threats from men who oppose their critiques of video game sexism. In the latter case, known as GamerGate, video game developer Zoe Quinn and feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian experienced an onslaught of virtual attacks and were forced to go into hiding after their addresses, phone numbers, and other personal details were revealed—or doxed—by online hackers. As in the case of the leaked photographs, young men gained status among their peers by using the most violent, sexually explicit, and demeaning language possible to abuse these women.

“There is no question that these are vile, exploitative, misogynistic behaviors that reduce women to fetishized, digitized objects,” said Whitney Phillips, lecturer in communications at Humboldt State University. Her forthcoming book from MIT Press, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, investigates the culture of power and cyberbullying among people who have come to be known as trolls, Internet users who intentionally provoke or even assault others online. This is a culture that follows what is called “the logic of lulz,” a digital remixing ofschadenfreude in which the misfortune of others is publicly exploited for maximum amusement and personal prestige. In this way, lulz (the phonetic plural form of LOL, or laugh out loud) are a kind of cultural currency that these trolls use as their stock in trade. Their targets are women, people of color, so-called white knights who criticize their behavior, and virtually anyone that does not belong to the trolls’ cultural in-group.

men will need to find a way to wise up and quickly.  there'll be no going back now to primeval ways.

wasn't this part of the article interesting?

In the early 1980s, a group of olive baboons known as “Forest Troop” underwent a unique natural experiment. The territory of their neighbors, “Garbage Dump Troop,” overlapped with that of a tourist lodge. The Garbage Dump Troop had access to the leftover meat that had been discarded into the lodge’s dump. The most aggressive males from Forest Troop began invading their neighbors’ territory to access the meat for themselves. Soon afterward, tuberculosis ravaged the baboons from both troops who had been feeding at the garbage dump. Because it was only the most aggressive males of Forest Troop that died out, the results were twofold: Less aggressive males were more common in the population, and the female-to-male ratio had now doubled.

The social consequences were startling. According to Stanford University primatologist Robert Sapolsky, who documented the event and followed the troop for the next 20 years, the brutal hierarchy that was common among male baboons disappeared, and the amount of affiliative behaviors—such as males and females grooming one another—increased markedly. What was most surprising was what followed over the intervening years. Males always migrate to other troops at puberty, and new immigrant males to the Forest Troop adopted the local culture that they encountered. Even though none of the original population is alive today, this highly cooperative baboon society remains intact. As Sapolsky wrote in Foreign Affairs, “Forest Troop’s low aggression/high affiliation society constitutes nothing less than a multigenerational benign culture.”

That WAS fascinating.

It seems to indicate that when aggressive males die off, culture becomes collaborative enough that aggression does not return in future generations. 

I hope this is true for humans too!

and what if tuberculosis took care of it for us?

That would make me think everything happens for a reason. 

i'm starting to wonder if those researchers poisoned that meat with tuberculosis...

That would make me think EVERYTHING happens for a reason. Everything. 

wow.  that's deep.  really.

I think so, too.