There's been a different tone to the complaints from white men about "political correctness" and "social justice warriors" lately. Their whines are getting shriller, more histrionic. They're conflating political correctness with Ebola, for Christ's sake. It's not like the 1990s, when a man could grumble about political correctness and find an entire room's worth of people nodding silently in agreement. This latest resurgence of complaints feels more tense, less stable than before. Part of this sea change comes because minorities and women are better-represented in culture now than they've ever been, thanks to the internet. More people have platforms allowing them to argue against those who want to write off non-white voices as silly, non-essential things.

Last night, as ThinkProgress reports, Men's Health posted a story about how to talk to women about sports. It suggested that women would be confused by all the statistics, so you should instead share the personal stories of the athletes, because that's what women care about. The backlash began almost immediately and Men's Health quickly retracted the story. It's easy for people to belittle "hashtag activism," but think of this: If that story were published in a men's magazine in the 1980s, the publication would likely receive a handful of angry letters in response. If the editors even deigned to respond to those letters, they would likely run a brief, bullet-pointed correction three or four months later in a two-sentence paragraph at the bottom of a letter column. At most. Now, they'll think twice before they publish something so stupid and condescending again.

Perhaps even more impressive is the news of Jennifer Lawrence's interview with Vanity Fair, where Lawrence calls the theft and subsequent distribution of her private nude photos a "sex crime" and a "sexual violation," saying that people who viewed the photos should feel "shame." She's right, and I can't imagine one of the biggest actors in the world responding like this to a theft of nude photos in even the early 2000s. Sure, some people—almost all men—responded to the theft and distribution of the nude photos with blithe, offhand comments about how you shouldn't have nude photos of yourself if you don't want to see those photos distributed. But rather than bowing to victim-blaming, Lawrence (and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, too) responded by placing the blame where it belongs—on the people who stole (not "leaked") private information, and on the people who gawked at the photos when they exploded on the internet. They refuse to take the blame for simply being human beings, and that's exactly the correct response. Even satirical sites like The Womansplainer, where a woman reasserts the value of her time and energy against men who play dumb and demand to have every aspect of feminism explained to them, feels refreshing and new.

I also greatly enjoyed Lindy West's nuanced piece on Gone Girl that was published today over in her new home at GQ. Lindy predicts the way so-called men's rights activists will use Gone Girl to amplify their arguments and preempts those arguments in clear, intelligent language. By jumping ahead of the inevitable co-opting of the film by a tiny-but-loud handful of internet monsters, she dismisses their argument and restarts the conversation exactly where it needs to be: Why can't a story about a woman who behaves badly just be a story? Why does it have to bear the weight of all women? Aren't we at the point where we can stop using the action of a lone (fictional!) woman to flog contemporary womankind?

I don't know if we're there yet. Time will tell. But it's heartening that these remarkable women are speaking for themselves, leading the conversation, and refusing to be labeled in by men who want to diminish them. We might be moving way too slowly as a culture when it comes to misogyny, but we're getting closer to where we need to be.