Extremism expert: Rising misogyny is fuelling political violence worldwide

Professor Cynthia Miller-Idriss is a globally recognised expert on violent extremism and prevention, based at American University in Washington, DC. She is the author of a new book, Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism, which explores how misogyny is driving a surge in extremist violence throughout the West.

Speaking with the Lowy Institute's Lydia Khalil, Professor Miller-Idriss explains the five tactics of misogyny in extremist movements, why Gen Z men are increasingly rejecting women's rights, and what a public health approach to prevention looks like in practice.

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Lydia Khalil: Hello and welcome to Lowy Institute Conversations, a podcast in which Lowy Institute researchers and some of the world's leading experts delve into the big issues in international affairs, coming to you from Gadigal land. My name is Lydia Khalil. Today I'm joined by Professor Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a US-based global expert on violent extremism and its prevention. Cynthia founded and heads the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL), an applied research lab at American University. We'll talk to her about her work preventing and addressing polarization and extremism in the United States and around the world. We're also going to talk to her about her new book, Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism, which is an exploratory look into how misogyny is driving a surge of extremist violence throughout the West. Cynthia, welcome. Great to have you on the podcast and in Sydney.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Thanks for having me, Lydia. It's great to be here.

Lydia: So Cynthia, your book argues that gender, misogyny and extremist violence are all inexorably linked, that this has always been the case across violent extremist movements and contexts. So if that's always been the case, why write this book now? What prompted you to write it?

Cynthia: Yeah, that's a great question, and it's one of the reasons why the subtitle of the book says "the new misogyny and the rise of violent extremism". So one of the things I really try to emphasise is that misogyny is, of course, age-old. I use it, by the way, not in its colloquial usage as the hatred of women, where it's often used in that way. I use it in a more expansive way, as the philosopher Kate Manne has defined it, as the law enforcement arm of the patriarchy – as a set of actions that are really gender policing to keep people in line with the norms and expectations that patriarchal societies expect. Which means that boys are subject to it as well as girls, men and women. Women can do it as well as men, and so it's just a more expansive understanding of what misogyny is.

And the reason why now is important to write the book is because misogyny is surging. That's what I mean by the new misogyny – these online forms of gender policing, online forms of abuse of women in particular, by both coordinated gender disinformation campaigns from global actors against elected officials and interference in campaigns like elections, but also from influencers online who have tremendous sway over young men and boys and teenage boys, with huge popularity rates. 33% of teenage boys, for example, admire Andrew Tate, who is a self-described misogynist influencer who has a subscription-based dating academy that teaches exploitation of women and control of women.

So thinking about that accessibility, how easy it is to reach boys, how much that's being used to recruit and radicalise boys toward other movements that also create hierarchies of superiority and inferiority, or that celebrate violence – it seemed like a good time to raise the alarm about these intersections and the way that rising misogyny might also be a kind of Trojan horse that carries other forms of hate along with it.

Lydia: And another new thing that you point to is that, particularly among younger generations, there is a much greater discrepancy among men and women in terms of their support of women's rights, particularly in Western contexts.

Cynthia: Yes, we have a declining level of support for women's rights and a declining level of support for feminism among Gen Z men compared to older generations of men in several different surveys. And because young women are the exact opposite thing is happening – they have an increasing level, compared to older generations of women, of support for women's rights and of identifying as feminists – you now have the biggest generational divide among young men and young women in Gen Z, which is the opposite of what people tend to think, that younger generations get more progressive on these issues. And that's actually the opposite of what's happened here. So we can see a real effect in both political conservatism emerging more among young men and women moving more toward the left. So political polarisation, but also polarisation on gender rights and equality.

Lydia: Let's delve a little bit deeper into the arguments of your book. Can you give us a very high-level breakdown of your book's arguments in terms of the way you see misogyny playing a role in violent extremism?

Cynthia: Yeah, I think there's several different ways. And I outline five tactics in the book, which I call containment, punishment, exploitation, erasure and enabling. The other four are tactics primarily enacted by men against women and against other men and boys who don't measure up to patriarchal norms and expectations. So a lot of homophobic bullying, for example, or gender policing that happens in the case of men and boys.

But containment is the most everyday and ordinary forms of misogynistic gender policing that tell women and girls in particular, get back in your place. We've seen a lot of this surge after the US election, for example, in online spaces where white supremacist Nick Fuentes said, in a gleeful video that went viral on election night, "your body, my choice" – that kind of expression of entitlement to women's bodies. That was all in the first week after the election. So this kind of containment, keeping people in their place and policing and deciding that women's bodies in particular are meant for reproduction or for more traditional roles – that can be an ideological component.

Punishment is more what we typically think of in the violent extremism space – male supremacist spaces like violent incels, men's rights groups that have been advocating against so-called false rape claims and a wide variety of other attacks that actually target women, which is not the case with a lot of the other things.

Exploitation – I talk about the use, unfortunately, of child sexual abuse materials to recruit and radicalise, but also as part of the foundational... there's a Vice News story that is titled simply, "Why are all the neo-Nazis getting arrested for child sexual abuse?" It's just a very common intersection. And then also sex trafficking, which is not talked about very often, but there are prostitution rings, for example. So the exploitation of women, which is widely recognised among Islamist groups as problematic, but not talked about on the domestic and Western side.

And then erasure of LGBTQ communities and their rights and curriculum and knowledge about them. That sweeping set of tactics is meant to encompass a wide range – there might be others that I didn't think of. I'm not saying these are the be-all, end-all, but they should each be areas where we could see more research, more data collection, more attention paid to the intersections in ways I hope that would lead to better interventions.

Lydia: So obviously a lot of correlation between the broader societal issue of misogyny and violent misogyny and violent extremism as an ideological and political act – lots of correlation there, but also some murky and less understood aspects of the phenomenon. So I'll talk about a particular incident that happened here in Australia. We had in 2024 the Bondi Junction shopping centre stabbing, where the perpetrator attacked six people, killed five people, five of them were women. It wasn't ruled a terrorist attack here in Australia because there was no clear political or ideological motive established, but there was a lot of public commentary arguing that it should be considered a terrorist or terroristic-type attack, and they honed in on the fact that so many women were the targets of this assailant. So it gets to this broader question about how we should understand public acts of violence against women.

Cynthia: Yeah, I think there are two or three different parts of it that you have to parse out. So one is, were women the targets deliberately, right? And in that case, we're actually pretty good – it's rare, but we're pretty good at identifying when there's a violent incel attack: the Toronto van attack, the sorority attack in Santa Barbara, or the yoga studio in Tallahassee, just to name three examples, plus a number of other violent incel attacks in Europe. There it's the one identifiable place that you'd sometimes see it.

But even there, I think there's some slipperiness, like this Bondi shopping mall attack. We don't really know. There's a disproportionate, maybe, number of victims who are women, but there might have been more women shopping anyway. It's hard to know without a manifesto.

We had the case of the Atlanta spa shootings that I often talk about, which never got identified as anything related to ideology, even though he killed nine people, six of whom he targeted because they were spa workers who he perceived created too much sexual temptation for him. And so I see that as a male supremacist attack. He saw himself as entitled to live in a world without the temptation these women supposedly created for him, and so they should be eliminated, right? He was going to eliminate that. And then there were three bystanders eliminated as well. That's male supremacist ideology, but we don't have a way of identifying that unless it's a violent incel attack. So he didn't hate the women, but he dehumanised them to such an extent that he didn't think they were worth... they couldn't live, as though he were entitled to live without that temptation. So I think there's a lot of that mixing up.

And then the other thing I'll say is it's not just the targets of the attacks that matter. It's some of the prior histories of perpetrators and the ways that they incubate sometimes very violent misogynistic fantasies, the consumption of tremendously violent porn and histories of domestic and intimate partner violence, which the majority of mass attackers in the US since 1949 have a documented history of. In a world in which less than half of domestic and intimate partner violence is reported to begin with. So I think in the case of the Charlottesville trial, the Unite the Right rally, for example, every single one of those perpetrators had a history of domestic partner violence.

And so it's just... you know, it's not to say that you only treat domestic partner violence as a warning sign for later problems. It should be dealt with in and of itself, but it means that these are violent actors who sometimes enact initial harm against someone they feel should be subservient to them and then later escalate to other targets.

Lydia: Your work is also focused on various aspects of online radicalisation, particularly on gaming platforms. So here in Australia, in about two weeks' time, we're going to have the world's first social media ban, as it's colloquially called, coming into effect. And this piece of legislation will prohibit children under 16 years of age from creating social media accounts. So this regulation has been featured by our prime minister in various international forums at the UN, and I was wondering if you could reflect on this regulatory approach, given that it doesn't include gaming platforms or gaming-adjacent messaging platforms, where we do know that a lot of radicalisation and even recruitment takes place. So it seems like we're still missing an important piece of the puzzle.

Cynthia: Absolutely. I've been hearing a lot about this, and of course it's a massive experiment that the rest of us will be watching very closely to see how it goes and how it works and what impact it has.

So in general, I am a fan of less screen time when you can do it, and I say that as someone who spends too much time on my own screens. So I fully admit that it's hard to do. But I think it's better to reduce the amount of violent content in particular, and harmful content, that kids see any way we can, including cellphone bans in schools, which have had very good data around mental health. And so in theory, it sounds like a great idea to reduce the likelihood that kids are going to encounter harmful content, and I think it probably will reduce that amount of content kids are seeing.

I think my caution would be, one, that it will probably drive some kids to more accessible spaces online that are not banned, including online gaming chats, where you already have a lot of incubation of misogyny and other forms of racism and hate, or encrypted chats or other kinds of rooms. They're also going to use VPNs and fake accounts. I mean, kids are pretty good at getting around bans and restrictions, and so I don't think we should see it as a be-all, end-all.

And I'll just say that what I hear... I spend a lot of time talking to teenagers in schools, middle schools and high schools and in universities, and I ask them a lot about what content they see that's harmful or that bothers them, and what they do about it. And they have seen horrific things. I hear a lot of things that shock me, and only in two cases – I mean, in hundreds and hundreds of kids – I've only had two cases where a kid has said they've told an adult about what they saw, and in both of those cases, they lost their phone. And so, you know, the reason why they don't tell adults, they say, is because they're afraid they're going to lose their phone.

And so I do think that losing their phone, losing their devices, losing access, can also be a disincentive for kids to talk openly with adults about the harms that they encounter online. But I also find that they really want spaces to do that. They just don't want them to be, in the words of two 10-year-olds who we talked to, "preachy", or in a ninth grader's word, he said, "sanctimonious", right? So they don't want them to be finger-wagging or cringey, or adults telling kids what to do. They want open spaces for dialogue and conversation about those harms, how they're affecting them, how they process them, including just gendered content that tells them what it is to be a man or a woman, that tells them they should be thinner or more muscular or have a stronger jawline. I mean, the looksmaxxing content, the pro-anorexia content that kids get is outrageous and ubiquitous.

And so I think we're going to see some of that be reduced in ways that we should celebrate and replicate, I hope, globally. And it's not the end of the solutions that we need.

Lydia: Now, you also don't just admire the problem. You don't just analyse these issues and explain them to us. You actually do lots of work in terms of addressing it and intervening and preventing it through your work at the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, PERIL. And I was wondering if you could talk to the programmes that you run there, particularly the public health approach that your lab takes. Can you explain to our listeners what that public health approach is and what that looks like in terms of preventing some of these challenges?

Cynthia: So the public health approach is motivated by public health interventions over the years that figured out, maybe some 30 years ago in the US anyway, that it wasn't only effective to treat the incidences of disease like cardiac disease or diabetes by just waiting for those diseases to show up and then treating them medically, but that actually you could intervene in communities. So with things like heart-healthy classes or information classes that help communities understand the choices that they can make that might lead to better outcomes for themselves and their families around exercise and food habits.

I think there's several different things about it that are important. One, that the evidence shows it's not just media literacy – in other words, it's not just teaching people about the choices they can make. You also have to look at the whole ecosystem systematically. So if there are food deserts, as we call it, and there's no healthy food to buy, or there's no exercise trails that are safe to go on, or there's no time to exercise, there are other systematic things. And I think we have to look at, for example, the online ecosystem and the tech companies and the platforms and the content moderation issues as some of that kind of ecosystem. It's not enough just to teach people how to be grittier about the content they encounter online.

But that said, we try to take the same approach, which is that you can prevent some of the violent harms that come from online exposure and radicalisation by intervening earlier and teaching people how to recognise and reject manipulative tactics, to be savvier about the content they consume. It's basically digital safeguarding and media literacy work. But it also then includes the public health approach – includes secondary prevention approaches that are reporting and intervention, tertiary approaches that include de-radicalisation and disengagement work.

So it's a holistic, whole-of-society approach that has to look at things like social determinants of public health, like loneliness, as well as how do you de-radicalise and disengage someone. So there are four levels of it – at a primordial, primary, secondary and tertiary level – that we work on. Our work is almost exclusively focused on primary and some secondary work around behavioural threat assessment, but that's because that's where the gaps are. And so we see it as one part of a much bigger ecosystem, and we advocate for the country and for the world, really, to think about this in a more public health approach that sees violent extremism as an outcome of something that could be prevented much earlier, with earlier intervention.

Lydia: So in the United States, this work has been supported across administrations for a long time, even with the first Trump administration. But now we're seeing it with the second Trump administration – a lot of winding back of that support, not just winding back, but actually attacking and targeting that type of work. How has that impacted the work that you do, and also colleagues in the United States around this violence prevention work?

Cynthia: Oh, it's such a hard moment to be doing the work in the States, particularly. Researchers have been targeted. I would say there's a culture of scarcity, first of all. The dismantling of all federal funding and support for the field has meant that a lot of people had lost either all their money or significant amounts of money. We're unique in the sense that we had hardly any federal funding to begin with. We did lose our one federal grant, but we really built the lab on foundation support and on private philanthropy and on state and local government support.

So unfortunately, where others have really struggled, we have grown since the election and seen it also as an opportunity right now to bring the most talented people from across the US government and give them a place to thrive and build out what we're doing and scale up, at least for the next three and a half years, while we try to hopefully rebuild eventually, after that, some federal support.

I will say on the optimistic side, there's still a lot of state and local government work going on. And so one way that we've thought about this is you can't scale up everywhere at once. We were six years old. We spent the first three years just testing ideas. Would anything work? We got a lot of evidence. And we're now in a scale-up phase. And so you can't scale up everywhere at once. And so in some ways, if we just scale up in the places where we can scale up right now, expanding to six or seven states for our regional work, expanding in the tools and partnerships globally as well, we hope, with our new work with the Christchurch Call Foundation and others, and then hopefully when there maybe is someday another infrastructure there to support federal engagement, we'll be able to bring that to other states where there's not the possibility.

I think one of the things we're seeing right now is there's going to be tremendous inequities in the US, among which states are willing to continue to support this work and which states are not, and so some communities are going to be safer than others.

Lydia: Well, finally, let's zoom out a little bit. Australia has an international gender equality strategy, and that outlines how Australia is driving gender equality in our international engagements. There's been longstanding efforts globally around this effort in terms of mainstreaming gendered perspectives in foreign policy and engagement, in terms of putting a gendered lens on peace and security issues. It seems like your work is also highlighting the role of gender and misogyny in a way, is advocating a similar approach to violent extremism. So do you see value, or even a prospect, for a more concerted global focus around gendered lenses on violent extremism?

Cynthia: I do. I think there's been so much more positive reception to this book than I ever could have anticipated. That's been very surprising to me, and also, I think, rewarding in the sense of seeing that there's a moment maybe for these conversations to be happening globally at the same time. I mean, I look a little bit at what's happened with our colleagues in Canada, where the former prime minister openly declared this was a feminist foreign policy moment for the country, and now the new prime minister says the era of feminist foreign policy is over. And so there's a kind of retreat from some of that. And I think, you know, we're going to continue to see ebbs and flows. We have now in our country a secretary of defence who has called for male standards in the military, a tech leader who has called for masculine energy in the corporate sector, right? Mark Zuckerberg. So I think we're not... it's not like a straight and steady line of progress that is globally going to welcome this. I think we'll have more momentum and then backlash and less momentum.

And at the same time, I think once you see that these connections are there for people who genuinely care about violence prevention and about the reduction of violent extremism and the harms that it causes globally, and you see how the data shows the foundational nature of gendered motivations in so much of it, I think it's inevitable that we will continue to see more interest, because everyone wants ways... you know, as I often say, people are very concerned about the prevention of political violence. Now it's the number one issue on Americans' minds, for example, which has never been the case in my life. It's always been the economy. Now it's political violence and political division. And if we know that misogyny is one of the top three predictors, and sometimes the top predictor, of support for political violence and willingness to engage in it, why wouldn't we want to address misogyny if we actually know what the data says about how to prevent things? It seems like a good place to start.

Lydia: Well, Cynthia, it's been terrific talking with you on the podcast today, and thank you so much for your time with us and for your work that you're doing in this space.

Cynthia: Thanks, Lydia, thanks so much for having me.

Lydia: You've been listening to Lowy Institute Conversations. This episode was produced by Andrew Griffits. You can find past episodes from across the Institute's podcast network on lowyinstitute.org, our YouTube channel, or wherever you stream your podcasts. And be sure to hit follow or subscribe so that you don't miss any new episodes. Thanks for listening.