US President Donald Trump responded recently to a reporter’s question about the Epstein case by telling her to be “quiet, piggy” – just the latest evidence in a well-documented global backlash against progress in women’s and LGBTQ+ rights, alongside spikes in online and offline misogyny, and increases in gender-based violence, especially among teens. This is worrisome enough on its own, but because misogyny and hostile sexism are significant predictors of and precursors to later escalation to mass violence, there is an additional concern: that rising misogyny will drive increases in violent extremism.
There are several ways that misogyny helps fuel radicalisation, recruitment, and mobilisation to extremist violence, even when the target of extremists’ rage lies elsewhere.
The protection of white women from threats to their safety and purity has long been a rallying cry for men on the extremist fringe.
Behaviourally, we know that interpersonal violence against women often precedes escalation to mass violence. Perpetrators of mass violence almost always have prior histories of violence against intimate partners or sexual assault, anti-LGBTQ+ violence, harassment and stalking, cyberpornography, or other forms of gender-based bigotry and harm. All of the two dozen neo-Nazi defendants in the legal trials that followed the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally in the United States in 2017 reportedly had prior histories of domestic violence.
Ideologically, we also know that white supremacist extremists rely on narratives that claim white, Christian women’s bodies need to be protected from the threat of rape or contamination by immigrants and racial and religious minorities. The protection of white women from threats to their safety and purity has long been a rallying cry for men on the extremist fringe as well as racist and anti-immigrant policies, from segregation laws to border restrictions.
Misogyny also amplifies other forms of hate in intersectional ways. We see this in antisemitic and antifeminist arguments about an orchestrated “Great Replacement” of white civilisations with multicultural ones – a conspiracy that suggests abortion and contraception are being used deliberately to reduce white births. We also see a coupling of those conspiracies into a hypothetically Jewish-led “Cultural Marxism” that is blamed for a wide range of progressive policies, including gender-neutral bathrooms, pronoun usage, and other developments the far right perceives as dismantling Western civilisation.
Extremism experts – and many parents and educators – are already well aware of how dangerous these kinds of conspiracy theories have been for the mainstreaming of hate. But what they might not know is how easily these conspiracies are introduced or reinforced by misogynist influencers who peddle antisemitic or racist ideas alongside antifeminism.
Self-described misogynist influencer Andrew Tate is one of the clearest examples. Tate not only advocates for physical abuse of women alongside sexual exploitation as mechanisms of control and profit, but also makes antisemitic references to “globalists” and has minimised the Holocaust and Nazi history. With 20% of UK and US teenage boys – and a third of Australian teen boys – reporting they approve of or admire Tate, it’s easy to see how misogyny can carry other hateful ideas into the mainstream.
Offline recruitment also blends misogyny and racism. Former porn star and online sex coach Stirling Cooper – who is a close companion of Tate – is now engaged in recruiting Australian teenagers to the neo-Nazi National Socialist Network. Neo-Nazi movement leaders have urged followers to sign up for Cooper’s “sexual domination” courses so they can learn how to make white women “submit”. Women’s sexual submission is essential to the white supremacist goal of establishing ethno-states and ensuring a phoenix-like rebirth of white civilisation – fantasies that require control of white women’s reproductive capacity and their complicit participation in birthing and rearing white babies.
We are in a global cultural moment of misogynist backlash, which must be challenged and contested.
Parents, teachers, coaches, mental health counsellors, and everyone in the lives of young men should be aware of rising online misogyny and its intersections with all forms of hate, and try to engage youth in open, non-judgemental conversations that help unpack the kinds of content youth see online and encourage them to view it more sceptically.
We also have strong evidence on the effectiveness of media literacy efforts called “pre-bunking”, which teach how to recognise manipulation tactics to prevent harmful ideas before they take root. Pre-bunking doesn’t just counter hate – it builds resilience to it before people are exposed to it – in highly scalable ways that work on social media channels, reaching young people where they are most vulnerable to hateful content. This enhances critical thinking and manipulation awareness rather than just countering conspiracy theories or arguing against hateful ideas directly.
These kinds of media and digital literacy efforts help teenagers recognise and reject hateful and harmful content, creating more sceptical consumers online and disrupting the fertile ground that hateful actors exploit on social media. My research lab, the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL), has tested short-form pre-bunking videos with thousands of participants and found remarkable effectiveness in this approach.
There can be little doubt that we are in a global cultural moment of misogynist backlash, which must be challenged and contested not just because misogyny amplifies and carries other forms of hate into the mainstream but because it aids in the recruitment of young people into extremism. The fight against all forms of hate – and the investments needed to prevent them – are now more urgent than ever.
