‘If we don’t help men and boys heal, we don’t bring them on board to be the allies that they could be.’
Gary Barker, founder and CEO of Promundo
There is a parasite called a Guinea worm that lays its larvae in water. The larvae are eaten by water fleas and, when a person drinks water that contains the fleas, they become infected with the larvae. Initially, there are no symptoms. But, around a year later, a painful blister begins to form, usually on the lower leg. The blister causes a burning sensation, often leading the infected person to submerge their leg in fresh water, at which point the worm releases hundreds of thousands of larvae into the water, starting the cycle all over again. Over the course of the next few weeks, the worm begins to emerge from the blister.
Think of the manosphere like the Guinea worm. Its ideology, smuggled inside via other hosts, can infect you before you even realise it. Once inside, it spreads and grows, eventually causing great pain. In an attempt to ease that pain, hosts cause harm to others, and accelerate wider infestation. And, while only a small part of the problem is visible, a much greater portion lurks beneath the surface.
It isn’t possible simply to pull the Guinea worm out of your leg. Though only the tip protrudes, the body of the worm might be up to a metre long, and it will not simply slide out with ease. Pulling too hard or too quickly risks breaking the worm, which can be disastrous, causing putrefaction. The only way to extract the worm is to wrap it around a small stick and to slowly turn the stick a little each day, pulling the worm out gradually over a period of weeks.
The same is true of the manosphere. It won’t work to try to lop off just the visible tip. It isn’t enough to try to yank it out in one go or to focus only on one part of the problem. Quick fixes won’t do. The only method that will work must be slow and sustained, patient and thorough. We have to get the whole worm.
There is no single, simple solution to the complex problem outlined in the previous chapters of this book. But, if we want to find ways to tackle it effectively, perhaps we should start by acknowledging where action is not being taken. Where the gaps are.
While we’re finally beginning to wake up to the reality of white supremacy, white nationalism and the alt-right as forms of online extremism, we’re still lagging behind when it comes to recognising the extremist strains of virulent misogyny. A 2017 New York Times article, ‘A hunt for ways to combat online radicalisation’, examined the long-overlooked parallels between the use of the internet to radicalise young Muslim men and the ways it is leveraged as a grooming tool by white supremacists. The whole article explicitly focused on the ways some forms of extremism and online grooming had been disproportionately represented in the public discourse, while others had been overlooked. Yet, even within this context, the article repeatedly framed the issue as a dual narrative between Islamists and white nationalists – a perspective reiterated across the agendas of counter-extremism think tanks and government task forces alike. Indeed, the article explicitly emphasises this sense of duality:
Several research groups in the United States and Europe now see the white supremacist and jihadi threats as two faces of the same coin. They’re working on methods to fight both, together – and slowly, they have come up with ideas for limiting how these groups recruit new members to their cause.1
Nowhere is the virulent and deliberate dissemination of online hate against women, and the widespread incitement to rape and harm them, mentioned at all.
Unfortunately, evidence suggests that perhaps the weakest area of response to online misogyny and extremism, including the deliberate grooming of boys and men, comes from the very top. Looking at the major organisations and government groups tasked with tackling extremism, terrorism and radicalisation, it becomes clear that the threat posed by misogynistic communities is simply not taken seriously.
Published in October 2015, the UK government’s ‘Counter-Extremism Strategy’ is approximately 15,000 words long. Words and phrases with the root ‘Islam’ (including, for example, ‘Islam’ or ‘Islamist extremism’) appear fifty-two times, and the word ‘Muslim’ thirty-three times. The words ‘neo-Nazi’ or ‘neo-Nazism’ appear fourteen times. ‘White supremacy’, ‘white nationalism’ and ‘anti-Semitism’ are all referenced. The phrase ‘extreme right-wing’ appears ten times. The words ‘misogyny’ or ‘misogynistic’, ‘incel’ and ‘masculinity’ never appear in the document. In fact, it makes no mention at all of violent extremism that specifically and deliberately targets women.
A brief perusal of the document’s introduction sets out fairly clearly what the government sees as the components of extremism: it discusses race and faith, refers directly to ISIL (another term for ISIS), describes the ‘fight against Islamist extremism’ as ‘one of the great struggles of our generation’, and references anti-Semitism and neo-Nazi extremism. It refers to faith communities and British Muslims, and implies that these are the major loci for the stated aim of disrupting extremism and building ‘more cohesive communities’. It makes absolutely no reference whatsoever to gender. This isn’t only relevant to the gaping hole in which extremist misogyny should be. It also reveals a complete blind spot in recognising the fact that those behind other forms of terrorism are overwhelmingly male. It totally misses the gendered angle of the issue – and, therefore, one of the important strands for tackling the problem.
The document ‘Tackling Extremism in the UK’, a 2013 report from the prime minister’s task force on addressing radicalisation and extremism, presents a similar picture, again foregrounding Islamist extremism as the primary terrorist threat to the UK, before mentioning ‘extremism of all kinds’ and specifically referencing Islamophobia and neo-Nazism. It is completely devoid of any mention of male supremacy or misogynistic extremism.
The picture is similar in the US. For example, a 2017 report on countering violent extremism from the United States Government Accountability Office begins by stating: ‘Violent extremism—generally defined as ideologically, religious, or politically-motivated acts of violence—has been perpetrated in the United States by white supremacists, anti-government groups, and radical Islamist entities, among others.’2 A further breakdown of those ‘others’ includes ‘groups with extreme views on abortion, animal rights, the environment, and federal ownership of public lands’. It is quite extraordinary, given the fact that the report spans the dates 2001–16 (a period including the massacres carried out by George Sodini, Elliot Rodger and Chris Harper-Mercer, explicitly in the name of male-supremacist and incel ideologies), that any misogynistic form of violent extremism does not even merit a mention. Meanwhile, environmental and animal-rights extremism are included, even though the document states: ‘During this period, no persons in the United States were killed in attacks carried out by persons believed to be motivated by extremist environmental beliefs, [or] extremist “animal liberation” beliefs.’
The document includes a table showing ‘Violent Extremist Attacks in the United States that Resulted in Fatalities, September 12, 2001 to December 31, 2016’, separated into two categories: far-right and radical Islamist. I wonder whether the male-supremacist killings carried out during this period might be included under the category of the far right, given the broad overlap between the two ideologies. But neither Sodini nor Rodger’s massacres appear in the table, and there is no mention of Harper-Mercer. A detailed breakdown of the characteristics of far-right violent extremist attackers is included, but, while it includes factors such as nationalism, belief in conspiracy theories, white supremacy and a belief that one’s way of life is under attack, there is no reference to misogyny at all.
The report states that its list of violent extremist attacks is based on data from the US Extremist Crime Database (ECDB). I investigate further. The criteria for inclusion in the ECDB require that an incident satisfies a two-pronged test: ‘First, an illegal violent incident or an illegal financial scheme must be committed inside the United States. Second, at least one of the suspects who perpetrated the illegal act must subscribe to an extremist belief system.’3
It seems confusing then that the three attacks carried out by Sodini, Rodger and Harper-Mercer are not included, given the fact that this simple test would most certainly make them eligible. But then I reach the small print. Without reasoning or explanation, it simply reads: ‘The ECDB only includes violent and financial crimes committed by one or more suspects who adhered to a far-right, Al Qaeda-inspired, or extremist animal/environmental rights belief system.’
So there it is, in black and white. The extremist ideology referenced by Sodini, Rodger and Harper-Mercer does not qualify them to be included in the national government database of extremist crimes. In spite of the fact that these three men alone, explicitly acting in the name of violent misogynistic extremism, killed eighteen people and injured thirty-one more. Meanwhile, animal-rights and environmental extremist ideologies are considered serious enough to be included, despite no killings in the name of these belief systems being carried out during the same period.
The knock-on impact of this is clear when data from this body is included in a report from the Government Accountability Office examining the government’s response to violent extremism. It means that, when the US response to these forms of extremism is evaluated and recommendations are made for improvement, male supremacy and incel killers are not even on the agenda. How can we improve our response, or even begin to formulate a response to a major threat, if we don’t even know it exists in the first place?
Violent extremist hatred of women, supported by an organised mass movement and online communities of thousands of adherents, leading to dozens of real-life victims and fatalities, simply doesn’t count. Yet, by almost every definition of terrorism and extremism, those who have committed atrocities in the name of manosphere ideology fall squarely into both categories.
The accuracy of the definition is also warranted by the fact that the extremist misogynistic communities described in this book have not just coincidentally spawned individual attackers: they repeatedly and deliberately goad other recruits towards carrying out similar acts of violence. This is not just a community whose numbers happen to include some mass attackers; it is a community that has actively driven and motivated those men to carry out their acts of murder. In the police interview immediately following his arrest, Toronto van murderer Alek Minassian used the word ‘radicalised’ to describe his own experience in incel forums, described Rodger as a ‘founding forefather’, and told officers he had been in direct contact with both Rodger and Harper-Mercer. Just as they had motivated him, he said: ‘I was thinking that I would inspire future masses to join me in my uprising as well.’4 On 4chan, Minassian posted before his massacre: ‘There will be a beta uprising tomorrow, I encourage others to follow suit.’ Minassian told police ‘quite a few’ people congratulated him: ‘I suspect they probably knew what I meant by what I said.’ The release of the video and other documents relating to Minassian’s case also revealed that another man had been arrested in Ontario, Canada, for threatening to cause death to others. It was thought that he may have been inspired by Minassian’s attack.5
And still, in spite of all this, in each interview I carry out for this book, and in all the background discussions I have with people involved in counterterrorism at the highest levels of national governments, violent misogynistic extremism simply doesn’t seem to be on the radar. When I speak off the record to one major UK government agency involved in counterextremism, there is the usual immediate mention of Islamist and far-right extremism, and the spokesperson also references animal-rights extremist groups. When I ask about incels, there is a long pause on the other end of the phone, before I am asked to repeat myself. I get the strong impression that the spokesperson has simply never heard of them. I’m told they’ll look into it and ring me back. Several weeks later, a brief phone call confirms that they have no data or evidence in this area as yet.
It goes without saying that investigating Islamist and white-supremacist extremism, anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism, Islamophobia and all forms of terrorism is of huge importance. I don’t highlight these discrepancies to suggest that other forms of extremism shouldn’t be urgently tackled. But it is striking that, when it comes to the bodies specifically set up to protect us from extremist, terrorist threats, the notions of gendered hatred, overwhelmingly male attackers and misogyny as a form of violent extremism are entirely missing from the conversation.
The experts I speak to all agree that this is the case. Dr Lisa Sugiura says:
People are starting to talk about it, but it’s not spoken about in the same sort of discourses as terrorism, unfortunately… I don’t feel [the threats are] being taken as seriously as they should be yet, and certainly not in the same kind of consideration as, for example, Islamic extremism.
The same is true when it comes to any kind of effort to monitor or prevent the grooming and radicalisation of young people online by manosphere communities, as the omissions in the government’s own Prevent strategy reveal. When I speak to Dr Carlene Firmin, she notes: ‘It’s not really discussed. I observe a lot of multi-agency meetings and I don’t think I’ve ever heard this come up at a multi-agency meeting that I’ve observed before. But there would be discussion about other forms of online grooming.’
On a grey, spring afternoon, I visit the secret location of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based ‘think and do tank’ that pioneers policy and operational responses to violent extremism. The organisation combines research and analysis with government advisory work and delivery programmes, and, as such, is at the forefront of our response to extremism and terrorism. In a glass-walled conference room, looking out onto a bustling open-plan office, I meet with Jacob Davey, as well as an associate in technology, communications and education at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, and a communications co-ordinator.
Davey immediately confirms that the anti-extremist field is missing a focus on the issue of misogynistic extremism: ‘In terms of radicalisation, extremism and the role of toxic masculinity, that’s something that I think there’s not enough coverage on, as a sector.’
Within the Institute for Strategic Dialogue itself, Davey does the most work on the manosphere and misogynistic extremism, with some of his colleagues carrying out separate work on ‘the role of women in extremist movements’. But, while he is extremely well informed, he is quick to admit that his expertise on specifically male-supremacist communities is something ‘I sort of touch upon… tangentially’, when it intersects with his ‘primary focus’, which is the ‘extreme right wing’. When I ask if there is any staff member at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue tasked solely with focusing on misogynistic extremism, he tells me that there isn’t, though the organisation’s website lists fifty-six members of staff. ‘I take the bulk of the men-specific research and the men’s movement research, but there’s no one who has that specific portfolio within the organisation.’
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue is far from unusual in this – indeed, the fact that Davey himself has built a consideration of the intersections with the manosphere into his work on far-right movements in many ways sets it ahead of other similar organisations. Davey believes it is an area in which the field is now playing catch-up. He says he is currently ‘seeing the transition – there has been a gap – behind the scenes, there’s an increased awareness of this as its own unique thing… a burgeoning recognition’. He points to the fact that the Southern Poverty Law Center only started to record male-supremacist groups in its listing of operational hate groups in 2018. At the time, the Southern Poverty Law Center noted: ‘The vilification of women by these groups makes them no different than other groups that demean entire populations, such as the LGBT community, Muslims or Jews, based on their inherent characteristics.’6 But, looking at most international organisations or task forces claiming to tackle ‘all forms’ of extremism or terrorism, it is clear that this transition, if it is occurring, is still in its very early stages.
There are several reasons this may be the case. One is that there have been comparatively fewer acts of mass offline violence carried out in the name of this particular form of extremism. But this is not a good enough reason to omit male supremacy from the spectrum of extremist ideologies investigated, tracked and tackled by anti-extremist organisations. Especially when animal-rights and environmental extremism are often included and have a far lower recent death toll. The number of murders and woundings racked up by the international incel community is by no means insignificant, particularly in light of the fact that, as a coherent, online movement, it is a relatively recent phenomenon, and there is evidence to suggest it is quickly growing, attracting large numbers of new recruits and actively inciting an increasing number of violent hate crimes. Nor can it be separated in any meaningful way from the terrorist violence carried out in the name of far-right ideologies, including white supremacy and neo-Nazism, which we have seen to be suffused with, and even, to a large degree, predicated on, misogynistic extremism. Yet it fails to be mentioned or considered, even when those groups, rightly and relatively newly, are included in analyses of, and policy responses to, extremist and terrorist threats.
Furthermore, acts of mass violence are not the only ways in which extremist threats and ideologies manifest themselves, and there is a very serious risk that the enormous spread of misogynistic extremism and male supremacy online, if allowed to continue unchecked, could have a more subtle offline impact in the forms of violence against women, such as relationship abuse and rape, which already go largely unnoticed and unremarked upon within our society.
This in itself may be another major driver of our blind spot when it comes to male supremacy; in a society in which misogyny and violence against women are so widespread and so normalised, it is difficult for us to consider these things ‘extreme’ or ‘radical’, because they are simply not out of the ordinary. We do not leap to tackle a terrorist threat to women, because the reality of women being terrorised, violated and murdered by men is already part of the wallpaper.
So the first major shift we need to see is for male supremacy and misogynist extremism to be included whenever organisations or governments are monitoring, legislating for and tackling other forms of terrorism. (Domestic terrorism laws, for example, should be introduced or amended to ensure that these crimes can be treated with the same severity as other acts of violence driven by extremist hatred.) It is shocking that terrorist charges have only once been brought (by the Canadian authorities) in an incel-related killing. Other countries must follow suit when these attacks fall clearly under the definition of terrorism. The second important shift we need to see is for that horrifyingly normal, everyday form of terrorism – domestic abuse – to be taken just as seriously, too.
We can no longer allow ourselves to be deterred from confronting the existence of extremist misogyny, just because of a squeamish distaste for identifying a problem that originates with the most powerful societal group: heterosexual, white men. Our tendency to provide members of this group with the benefit of the doubt, to afford them individuality and status far beyond that of women and minorities, has shielded extremists for too long from examination under a critical lens.
We are too afraid of being labelled ‘misandrists’ or ‘man-haters’, of encountering the traditional cry of ‘not all men’. Yet this is laughably oversimplistic. Of course, it is possible to confront the reality of this threat, and the existence of this movement, without suggesting that it somehow implicates all men. Indeed, as we have already seen, one of the biggest threats it poses is to men themselves.
One of the most powerful antidotes to the manosphere is to take real, concerted action against the threats it poses to men. To challenge the stringent, hyper-masculine stereotypes it blindly clings to, even as they stunt and suffocate its most devoted followers. To offer solutions to, and practical support for, the problems MRAs love to exploit as justification for their hatred, but don’t actually try to address. To confront the gender stereotypes that lead to assumptions about who should take on the majority of childcare. To demand greater flexibility for working parents. To campaign for better shared parental leave rights. To tackle the stigma faced by male survivors of sexual violence and domestic abuse, and ensure specialist support services are available to them, without needing to attack female survivors or undermine their services in the process. To fund and highlight mental health services, and find ways to make them more accessible to men, particularly young men. (A recent BBC Freedom of Information request revealed that just 31 per cent of those accessing university counselling services were men.)7
There are innovative and effective ways to achieve this. But they require a united effort and funding. CALM (the UK-based Campaign Against Living Miserably), for example, has created a powerful movement against suicide, particularly focused on supporting men and boys. It offers frontline services, such as a confidential helpline and webchat, but it also encourages community engagement by facilitating supportive spaces in workplaces, universities, pubs, clubs and prisons. It runs campaigns with popular figures, like celebrity comedians, to tackle male stereotypes and encourage ‘help-seeking behaviour, using cultural touch points like art, music, sport and comedy’. In other words, it adopts exactly the tactics of the manosphere, infiltrating cultural spaces and communities, but with a positive and constructive aim.
Many of those already most effectively leading this resistance are men themselves. Men who hate men who hate women.
The men’s liberation movement of the 1970s began a powerful and positive tradition of men tackling misogyny, which continues to this day. Men who recognise the extreme harms posed to their gender by rigid stereotypes and patriarchal structures have not stopped battling to try to stem the tide of sexism, and they do so, crucially, within a feminist framework.
This work takes place across a spectrum so broad that it encompasses international charities carrying out male-focused interventions, small organisations delivering workshops to boys in schools, and individuals using their own platforms to stand up and speak out against misogyny and gender inequality in all its forms. Two of the biggest and most widely respected such organisations are Promundo, a leading global NGO founded in Brazil in 1997, which promotes gender justice and prevents violence by engaging men and boys, and the White Ribbon Campaign, the largest network of men working to end violence against women worldwide.
I spoke to Gary Barker, founder and CEO of Promundo, to see what lessons he could offer about how to tackle the threat of misogynistic extremism. He stresses the importance of interventions that don’t rely on a self-selecting audience. ‘Put up a poster, a flier, an e-blast that says: “Come talk about how we as men overcome misogyny.” You get two and a half guys!’ Instead, he says, we have to take ‘what we do to where young men and adult men are’:
Make it part of the school session, make it part of the sports group they’re in, make it part of the occupational safety course that their employer gives them. Guys aren’t just going to walk in the door going: ‘Hey, let me talk about misogyny and gender equality!’ The guys who need it the most are not going to walk in the room, we’ve got to take the room to them.
Ultimately, in its most easily achievable and scalable form, that means incorporating these issues into mainstream education. Education has a vital role to play in tackling misogynistic extremism, preferably not as a responsive measure, but as a preventative one: inoculating boys against the persuasive impact of online grooming, and arming them with credible tools to confront the ideology of the manosphere before they encounter it, rather than trying to disentangle them from a web that already has them bound in its sticky threads. This is particularly important in light of the extent to which the far right, from manosphere groups to white supremacists, rely on misinformation and sowing distrust of reputable information sources, which makes it very difficult to extract recruits using logical argument once they have already become enmeshed.
The London teacher I interview, who shares her concerns about her students being radicalised by manosphere content, says:
I’ve tried to counteract the “it’s just banter” argument by showing students the Pyramid of Sexual Violence (starting with sexist jokes and ending with violence), but I’m aware that, as a female teacher, it can be difficult to be taken seriously by students who are already engaging with MRA arguments. I feel nervous that, when I try to crack down on students’ misogynistic views, I could end up reinforcing them.
As somebody on the frontline of trying to tackle the problem, she believes: ‘There needs to be more teacher training about how to engage with students on these issues.’
Education then – nationally mandated, properly funded and supported with effective training – is another important part of the solution. This doesn’t only mean directly educating young people about extreme misogyny. It also means providing them with basic tools and knowledge about issues like gender stereotypes and healthy relationships, sexual consent and respect – foundational ideas that will help to fortify young people against some of the toxic misconceptions they may encounter online later on.
Ben Hurst, of the Good Lad Initiative, emphasises that teaching young people to analyse and evaluate news sources must be high on the list of effective interventions. ‘The thing that makes it really dangerous is that, in school especially, kids are not taught to be critical of source materials – they’re used to being in science, learning from a science textbook and not questioning what they’re learning.’ He points out the irony that, after exposure to the manosphere, many of the young men he works with become extremely resistant to accepting facts from robust sources, because they have been primed to consider them ‘fake news’, even though the information that is actually skewed or outright fabricated comes from the manosphere itself.
Hurst’s many years’ practice facilitating these conversations directly with young men have given him a rich wealth of experience to draw on when making recommendations about how such education should most effectively be delivered. He reflects that the topic of masculinity is currently very underdiscussed in interventions, particularly at school level, and that people find it ‘really hard to know how to navigate [those] conversations’. He says:
Parents don’t know how to talk to kids, teachers don’t know how to talk to kids, no one knows how to talk to kids, but also people don’t know how to talk to each other about the male experience. It’s hard to problematise it without it feeling like an attack, which means that people shut down really quickly.
So educating parents and teachers about the reality of what young people are confronted with online is a vital first step. A 2014 study found that the five most influential figures among Americans aged thirteen to eighteen are all YouTube stars.8 Figures like PewDiePie and Logan Paul are major celebrities in the adolescent world, with hundreds of millions of followers. They shape and influence young people’s lives, yet they are so completely unknown to adults that parents may not even recognise their names. That represents a massive disconnect between the world young people are living in and their parents’ perceptions. So parents need to get online, explore some of the content young people are exposed to, and give themselves a foundation from which to start talking to their children.
Where to begin? YouTube, of course. Take a look at some of the content teenagers are stumbling across, like the endless ‘angry feminazi destroyed by… ’ compilations. Browse some of the manosphere videos like pickup tips and MGTOW rants. Let the algorithm pull you into the rabbit hole of increasingly misogynistic ‘facts’. Spend half an hour immersing yourself in the comments; I promise they will be illuminating. Visit some bodybuilding forums or take a look at some of the more mainstream ‘red pill’ content on Reddit. Sign up to some of the biggest meme accounts on Instagram and see what floods into your timeline. All this will give you a basic foundation in the sort of background noise teenagers are hearing every single day.
Look out for manosphere language cropping up in young people’s conversations: any mention of being ‘blue pilled’ or ‘cucked’ is a telltale sign of derision towards those uninitiated into the manosphere. Words like ‘triggered’ or ‘butthurt’ suggest they’ve already been taught to mock anyone who objects to bigotry. ‘Feminazi’, ‘snowflake’ or ‘SJW’ are terms to look out for, too.
When a red flag crops up, challenge it. Challenge it again and again. The manosphere is an echo chamber. The very reason it is so persuasive is that the nature of its closed communities and algorithmically supported video loops totally indoctrinates. No opposing views are shared. So share them. Expose young people to other ideas, other options. Challenge and question manosphere assumptions. Explore the limits of the false facts and shoddy science young people might have been provided as ‘proof’. Giving young people as much reliable information as possible, and allowing them to draw their own conclusions, is the best way to tackle this problem without alienating or patronising them.
Instead of simply telling young people the information they have accessed online is bogus, Hurst says, it can be more productive to accept it as a starting point and then help them to engage in a process of examination that enables them to realise the limitations of such ideologies for themselves.
‘My objective when I’m in a room is not to tell them the person they’re listening to is chatting shit, but more to say: “Okay, let’s explore that together – where does it come from? What are the consequences of following that worldview or opinion to the logical conclusion?” ’ This, he suggests, is more likely to yield positive results, because it doesn’t play into the hands of the manosphere ideologues who have already framed themselves as tragic Cassandra figures, daring the world to dismiss them as false prophets.
YouTube star Natalie Parrott, aka ‘Contra’, who runs the hugely successful ContraPoints channel, is a brilliant example of how to approach these conversations. She meets the alt-right on their own turf, taking their bizarre, funny, stunt-driven tactics and replicating them in her own videos, ContraPoints disseminates robust but entertaining videos, countering everything from the manosphere idea of the ‘alpha male’ to the portrayal of feminists as ‘social justice warriors’. And it’s working: while individual educators might be able to visit several schools a week, speaking to a few hundred students each time, Parrott is reaching over half a million subscribers with every video, many of them racking up millions of views. Her approach is a vital example of the need to update our tactics and the vehicles we use for messaging, which have, in many cases, become outdated and preachy, in contrast to the tech-savvy communication perfected by online extremists.
If we’re going to try to protect boys (and, by extension, potential future victims) from the manosphere quagmire, we’ve got to understand what pulls them in in the first place. We have to recognise that our current societal version of masculinity is failing them. It leaves them isolated, forced to adopt a swaggering bravado that prevents them from talking about how they feel or forming mutually supportive relationships.
I am not particularly interested in a ‘redemption’ narrative for incels. That is a question for those individuals to ponder. We do not implore the victims of other forms of terrorism to absolve and educate their tormentors. Nor do we require that other extremists be acknowledged as some kind of wounded, misunderstood victims. It is ironic that so much pressure is brought to bear on women to allow for the humanity and individuality of fallible men when it is precisely this courtesy that incels unfailingly refuse to pay to women.
But I am interested in the men in between. The boys who fall through the cracks. The ‘good’ men who feel scared. The ones who went looking for help, because they felt frightened or sad or lonely, and haven’t been able to disentangle themselves. The ones who just haven’t heard about any of this yet. The ones who look the other way on the bus. Because we can’t change anything without those men. So how do we reach them?
Hurst says: ‘My understanding of it is that, for most guys who engage in those movements, it comes from a place of pain and a place of hurt and a place of not being able to understand why they are not who they think they should be.’ He describes the discovery of manosphere movements as a great release or soothing salve for such men. It ‘gives them a really easy out, because they can just blame a system or they can blame women, and say: “It’s this person’s fault, because they won’t give me what I deserve.” ’
‘The demands and strictures of manhood are difficult for any man to live up to,’ adds Michael Kaufman, co-founder of the White Ribbon Campaign. ‘Always be in control, never back down, be fearless, take the pain.’
Barker agrees, pointing to the high percentage of boys who experience physical violence:
There is trauma, there is fear of other men, there is violence, there is undiagnosed depression – the list goes on in terms of what it means to be a victim of some kind of violence during childhood. If we don’t make space for that, we don’t help men and boys heal, we don’t bring them on board to be the allies that they could be.
When boys bring up manosphere obsessions like false rape allegations, Hurst says:
[They] aren’t talking about that stuff just to be difficult, they’re talking about it because they’re scared, and a big part of masculinity is not showing fear. So they’re not going to say: ‘I’m really scared that, if I try to have sex with someone, they’ll say I raped them.’ They’re more likely to say: ‘Women lie about false rape.’ But essentially it’s the same conversation.
Emotions are equated with shame, and boys are encouraged to hide them. Isolation breeds longing for community. Shame breeds desperation for prestige, for respect, for a sense of purpose. A sense of vulnerability, arising, in part, from the fact that boys are most at risk of being victims of violent crime, leads naturally to a desire for the security of a group allegiance. All these cravings are gleefully satisfied by manosphere communities, keen to seize upon disenfranchised, angry young men and fill their gaping holes with false promises, skewed logic and hate.
So how do we prevent young men from becoming isolated in the first place? The answer is both social and political. We are reaping the fruit sown by local authority cuts and community centre closures: the gradual, systematic disappearance of real-life places for boys to hang out and socialise. So they turn to online hangouts instead. We need to provide meaningful, fulfilling offline spaces they can make their own.
But we also need to address the social divisions that are driven by stigma, prejudice and absurd stereotypes. The low-level racism that allows white boys to grow up already thinking boys who don’t look like them are different, threatening, invaders. The sexism that shames and sexualises mixed-sex childhood friendships, and leads to near-total gender segregation by the early teens. As simple as it sounds, if young men knew other people from different communities, if they had meaningful friendships with girls their own age, they wouldn’t be so easy to trick into believing monstrous distortions about what those ‘other’ groups represent. They would push back, because they would know better. I’m reminded of David Sherratt, whose journey out of the manosphere was so simply facilitated by meeting a girl who talked to him.
Part of the problem with trying to protect young people from exploitation and grooming by extremist elements of the manosphere is that our understanding of exploitation, and how to tackle it, is still hopelessly out of touch. Dr Firmin explains that the very hallmarks of adolescence that most attract young men to these online communities are also the ones least understood by traditional support mechanisms. During adolescence, Dr Firmin explains, young people prioritise belonging, self-autonomy and independence. This, she says, is a period in which young people are struggling with intense emotions: they are ‘more inclined to take risks’ and are particularly unlikely to think about ‘long-term consequences’. As such, traditional support services are not well suited to this period, because they tend to be ‘targeted at individuals who don’t like to take risks and will think about the long-term consequences of their behaviour and will be generally emotionally stable’.
While support structures struggle against these typical adolescent behaviours, Dr Firmin explains, those who exploit young people ‘will tend to work with’ them, offering children
a sense of risk or going against the grain, focus on short-term gains, what it means in the here and now, and push aside the potential negative long-term consequences… They will provide means by which you can be very emotionally driven and passionate… and also validate those emotions as authentic when other adults are saying: ‘Don’t get so worked up.’
All this resonates powerfully with the tactics of the manosphere. Young people are offered a highly emotive narrative and a sense of deep belonging and community. They are repeatedly encouraged, in incel forums, for example, to take violent action that would position them as countercultural disruptors, without thinking too much about the consequences. ‘It’s very easy to sell those ideas,’ Dr Firmin adds, in a community that boasts about ‘going against the norm’. In the case of the manosphere, she says, that manifests as ‘pushing against this idea of new masculinity… or men’s increased role in parenting’: ‘This narrative would push against all of that, push against #MeToo, so it’s very easy then to sell it as a risk and sell it into this idea of wanting a sense of self, a sense of personal identity.’ In some respects, she says, given the current climate, the attractiveness of the manosphere to young men is ‘not very surprising at all’.
In response to the ineffectiveness of traditional models of intervention when it comes to adolescents, Dr Firmin has pioneered a model known as ‘contextual safeguarding’. The theory emphasises the importance of taking interventions and support to the environments in which young people spend their time, rather than assuming that harm only comes to young people within their own homes. ‘Individuals embody the rules of certain environments when they have spent time in them and engage with the rules at play in any given environment in order to navigate them and achieve status,’ her website explains. The framework has so far been applied to locations like high streets and public parks, pioneering the notion of co-operation with people who might not normally be involved in safeguarding work, from shopkeepers to park authorities. But it strikes me that it might also have a radically transformative impact online. After all, the online world, from the casual sexism of social media to the persuasive misogyny of manosphere forums, is the perfect example of an arena within which we haven’t traditionally considered young people to be at risk of harm, and against which effective intervention could be enormously valuable.
Dr Firmin agrees that there may be positive applications of contextual safeguarding in the online world, but stresses that far more research and strategising would be necessary before it could be widely delivered in practice. She notes the importance of consent in a safeguarding relationship. (‘The difference between a high street and an online place is that, on a high street, young people know the youth worker is there.’) Some of the most effective interventions Dr Firmin has seen, she says, have involved detached youth workers: those who interact with young people in their own environment, rather than in an official session or office space. This involves the gradual build-up of a trusting relationship and, Dr Firmin says, provides meaningful opportunities for disruption of misogynistic assumptions and extremist messaging. Though the practice is currently in its infancy, Dr Firmin has heard about the use of detached youth workers online in some Scandinavian countries, and describes youth centres that have begun trying to create internet spaces for young people to interact, with the aim of establishing similar opportunities to disrupt internet misogyny. There are practical barriers, yes. But they are not insurmountable.
Based on my own experiences of speaking to young people about these issues, Dr Firmin’s words immediately resonate. The conversations I’ve had with young people in smaller groups, on their own turf, are almost universally more productive and revealing than those in settings like a whole-school assembly or a teacher-observed discussion session. Talking to Dr Firmin about detached youth work, I am galvanised by the exciting prospect that here, at last, is a potential solution to the insidious infiltration of extremist misogyny into adolescent communities.
But, perhaps to a greater extent even than other public services, funding for detached youth work has been decimated over the past decade. Between 2012 and 2016, more than 600 youth centres across the UK were closed, and council funding for youth services plummeted by 62 per cent between 2009 and 2017. Experts like Leigh Middleton, chief executive officer of the National Youth Agency, suggest that the cuts are particularly likely to affect ‘lonely, isolated young people’ – his description exactly matching those most inclined to be vulnerable to the pull of manosphere communities. Devastatingly, detached youth work (a long-term project involving one-to-one support) is exactly the kind of service that tends to be first in line to be cut. And, as Dr Firmin succinctly explains, ‘when you cut away opportunities for people to disrupt that narrative, it gives space for it to breed’.
Yet these are precisely the services we need to invest in if we want to tackle the impact of the manosphere proactively and preventatively. If my hundreds of school visits have taught me one strikingly clear lesson, it’s that early intervention is far simpler and more effective than trying to change the minds of those already radicalised later on.
For those already in the grip of the manosphere, however, we also need a responsive solution. So we must be able to rely on law enforcement to tackle existing crimes rooted in extremist misogyny. To police what is already illegal sounds like a simple demand, yet the vast swathes of illegal activity currently undertaken by manosphere trolls with absolute impunity suggests otherwise. The disconnect between traditional policing and online crime is a massive barrier. In the UK, it is illegal to threaten to rape or kill someone online, just as it would be in real life. Yet hundreds, even thousands, of men get away with such acts every day online, with no punishment whatsoever.
We know that institutionalised prejudice is a problem within the police force. We know that women and certain groups – in particular, women of colour and LGBT people – have not always had positive responses when reporting to the police. System-wide anti-bias training would help to tackle issues around victim-blaming and the fact that these crimes are often not taken seriously. But this is not just an issue of individual failings. Indeed, many individual officers and forces are championing and supporting victims, but a widespread lack of funding and training hampers progress. Outside of specialist e-crime units, there is often little understanding or specialist knowledge to support officers in tackling these crimes, which, in my own experience, has repeatedly led to cases simply reaching dead ends and being closed.
When I first reported a spate of death and rape threats to the police, the local officers sent to take my statement arrived fresh from a dangerous-dog incident, pencils and notebooks in hand, and kept interrupting me to ask politely what a Twitter handle was. After they were unable to trace any of the hundreds of IP addresses I had provided, or take any action against the online incitement of a mob to bombard me with targeted harassment (because the forum on which the attack was co-ordinated was registered overseas), the case was closed with no action taken.
The first time I arrived at a police station with a thick sheaf of printed-out death threats clutched in my fist, which I showed to the officer at the desk, I was met with a surprised look, and asked: ‘Do you think they will track you down?’
A lack of understanding of the severity and real-life impact of online misogynistic extremism may be having a dire knock-on impact in other areas of policing as well. As I write, UK police have just announced plans to ask victims reporting rapes to hand over their mobile phones to police or risk prosecutions not going ahead. A policy that makes victims feel like they are on trial, that risks reinforcing the notion of women lying about rape. Even though we know that, in reality, in a seventeen-month period in which there were 5,651 prosecutions for rape in the UK, there were just thirty-five for making false allegations of rape.
But how could the police possibly know, with their apparently limited awareness of misogynistic online crime, that, in the manosphere forums I’ve spent the past year wading through, there are thousands of threads connected to conspiracy theories about widespread false rape claims, urging men to manipulate women the morning after a sexual assault? These messages specifically instruct men to send text messages the following day, designed to solicit responses that would weaken a woman’s case if she tried to make an allegation of rape. Pressuring her to reply about the previous night, breezily referencing the great time had by all, doing everything that might coerce a traumatised victim into a placatory or ambivalent response. Of course, the police would know this if there were any police effort focused on looking into these online communities. But, in all my research, I have come across none.
Then there are the ways in which online abuse, underestimated and repeatedly belittled, bleeds into offline abuse. It is a reality consistently ignored in the response from authorities. The lacklustre reaction to online threats against female politicians. The dismissal of cyberstalking as a tool used by bullying ex-partners, until the escalation from online to offline violence proves fatal and intervention is too late. As case after case reveals that the police have missed opportunities to intervene before women are murdered by their stalkers, frequently failing to join the dots between multiple incidents and forms of harassment, these are very real concerns.
Davey believes that the adoption of misogyny as a hate-crime category would help to shift the dial on the public and institutional perception of male supremacy and extremism, stressing the importance of acknowledging that gendered hatred can be as forceful a driver of criminal acts as other already existing strands, such as race and religion. Davey submitted his recommendation to the Home Affairs Select Committee on hate crime, and feminist activists have campaigned fiercely for the category to be introduced, but there has been a powerful and predictable backlash to the suggestion, from police sources and media alike, with tabloid headlines suggesting that the police would be inundated with reports of wolf-whistling, and senior police figures suggesting the issue would be a trivial distraction from the important ‘bread-and-butter’ work of mainstream policing.
The next source we must look to if we are to meaningfully tackle these issues is social media platforms themselves. This book has explored the many ways in which these companies and their algorithms proffer space and persuasive recruitment tools for far-right extremists, enabling them to reach millions of men, and groom and radicalise vulnerable young people, rewarding and actively promoting their content to exploit its financial value, providing revenue streams and propaganda platforms, facilitating mass attacks and cyberstalking, failing to protect victims and avoiding accountability whenever possible.
For a while, these companies were able to feign credible ignorance. That is no longer the case. Yes, it is possible that the ways in which their technology aids and abets online extremists was originally unintentional. But that is no excuse at all for failing to take action to fix it once the problem has been made clear. Yet, again and again, profit is prioritised over responsibility. In 2019, journalists alerted YouTube to a deeply disturbing trend: its algorithm was grouping together videos it automatically identified as footage of partially clothed, prepubescent children, and recommending them to viewers who had watched similar content. Without intending to, the platform was serving long, unbroken chains of fodder to paedophiles, hundreds of whom would comment on the videos, recommending specific time stamps to other users, letting them know exactly when a crotch or nipple was accidentally revealed by an innocent child playing in their bathing suit. The algorithm was so accurate that it repeatedly swept up completely innocuous home movies in the trend. Families were suddenly alerted when the clips of their young daughters playing in the paddling pool racked up hundreds of thousands of views in a matter of days.
Just like the facilitation of manosphere radicalisation on the platform, the problem may have been completely unintentional, but the outcome was horrifying. What matters is that, once YouTube was alerted to the issue, it was given a clear solution. Researchers suggested that the platform simply turn off its recommendation system on videos of children. It was a change that could have been implemented automatically and with ease. And it would have stopped the exploitation in its tracks. But YouTube declined to put it into practice. Why? Because recommendations are its biggest traffic driver, it told the New York Times, so turning them off ‘would hurt “creators” who rely on those clicks’. In other words, it would have hit YouTube’s bottom line.9
If you think social media platforms are already doing all they can to avoid the victimisation and exploitation of their most vulnerable users, you need to think again. We know that YouTube has a breathtakingly influential impact on young people. We know it unilaterally controls the content served to millions of people around the world every hour. It is not an exaggeration to describe it, as Zeynep Tufekci has, as ‘one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century’.10 So changes to its algorithm to prevent viewers from being deliberately nudged down the rabbit hole of extremism could be transformative.
Evidence suggests that social media platforms, like the media and government, approach different forms of extremism and radicalisation in dramatically different ways. A 2016 study, comparing white-nationalist versus ISIS-related social media networks, revealed that, during the data collection period on Twitter, three white-nationalist accounts and four Nazi accounts were suspended, compared with around 1,100 ISIS accounts.11 This despite the fact that the same study revealed American white-nationalist movements ‘outperform ISIS in nearly every social metric, from follower counts to tweets per day’.
Recommendations for improvement in this area are not lacking. But the will to implement them is. The Data & Society report suggested, for example, that YouTube should take into account the influencers hosted by the platform, rather than just the channel’s own content, when making moderation decisions.
Yes, freedom of speech is vital and valuable. But it is not infinite and unbounded. There are myriad examples whereby the use of these platforms by male-supremacist movements already well exceeds the bounds of free speech, in its active incitement to violence, its targeted, vitriolic harassment and doxxing, and its deliberate nurturing of division and hatred. When this bar is reached, social media platforms must be held accountable for the content they host, and forced to concern themselves with the safety of their users. When the threshold is not reached, we need to see a mass mobilisation of bystander action online, in the same way we frequently advocate in ‘real-life’ spaces, to take collective responsibility for the atmosphere of our online world and the tenor of its debate, to support those with less of a platform, to denormalise the culture of online harassment and encourage the online equivalent of stepping in, instead of crossing to the other side of the street. Here again is an opportunity for the men who declare themselves keen allies to step in and play a significant role.
Clearly this is complex. In order to prosecute the perpetrators of online abuse, it is necessary to compel social media sites and other platforms to reveal users’ IP addresses, which are then used to access their legal identities. Such compulsion is bound up in online anonymity and must be balanced with the rights of whistleblowers, dissidents and others. Heavy-handed legislation risks abuse by governments and international actors. Yet it is possible to create complex legislation to deal with complex problems. This is not enough of an excuse not to take action.
Then there is the question of no-platforming. Experts tend to express concern that simply shutting down entire extremist communities risks driving them further underground, particularly in light of the existence of platforms like Gab, generally perceived as the social network of the far right, which prides itself on enabling its users to bypass any form of what it describes as ‘rampant corporate censorship’.12 It has provided a safe haven for many a group, after they have finally expressed sentiments violent or deplorable enough to be evicted from more mainstream social media spaces. Davey describes it as a platform that ‘give[s] host to extremists with virtually no regulation or moderation whatsoever’. The same might be said of platforms like 4chan and 8chan.
There is, of course, a risk of pushing these conversations further and further from the reach of challenge and debate, and of playing into these communities’ narratives of victimhood and persecution by being seen to tar entire groups with the same extremist brush. But there is hardly constructive dialogue happening on incel forums and subreddits at the moment. I’m reminded of Ellen Pao’s conclusion that oxygen has simply allowed these communities to proliferate. And there is powerful evidence to suggest that no-platforming does work effectively when it comes to individuals – particularly the high-profile leaders and spokespeople of these groups, whose audience inevitably shrinks when they are forced out of mainstream online spaces, even if they do paint themselves as martyrs, and subsequently take refuge in more fringe forums.
Christian Picciolini has provided another powerful argument for the no-platforming of extremists – cutting off their funding:
These groups are generating revenue, for instance, through serving ads on some of their propaganda videos. If ads are being served on their videos, chances are good, depending on how many views, they’re making ad revenue based on Google, Facebook, YouTube, serving ads against their content. So, in that sense, de-platforming is good. It does slow them down quite a bit.13
When social media companies have been brave enough to take these steps, the impact has been significant: Milo Yiannopoulos saw his influence and platform greatly reduced after his ban from Twitter, with reports of his finances plummeting and tours being cancelled. ‘If you look at [far-right conspiracy theorist] Alex Jones, for example,’ Davey points out, ‘when he got de-platformed, he lost a zero off his regular viewing figures.’ As I write this chapter, the news comes in that Facebook, having taken many months to pluck up the same courage as Twitter, has decided to permanently ban Yiannopoulos and Jones, alongside five other high-profile extremist figures. It subsequently announces plans to ban ‘praise, support and representation of white nationalism and separatism’ on Facebook and Instagram.14 In the very recent past, domain registrar GoDaddy has taken down Richard B. Spencer’s alt-right website, and fundraising pages like Patreon have begun to prevent far-right extremists from using them as a revenue stream (though a number of controversial figures, including Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin, immediately announced plans to launch an alternative crowdfunding platform, exemplifying the problem of what can amount to a game of online whack-a-mole). Nonetheless, the actions taken against prominent hate figures by social media platforms not only curtail their mainstream reach, but also send a vital societal message about what we normalise and consider acceptable fodder for public ‘debate’. This recent activity suggests that progress is finally starting to be made, in this area at least.
Yet governments remain remarkably reluctant to hold social media companies to account in any meaningful way. And their reluctance does not go unnoticed by extremists and trolls, who are well aware of the likelihood that they will continue to be able to operate with impunity. One breathtakingly clear example of this came in 2019, at a US House Judiciary Committee hearing on the rise of hate crimes and white nationalism. The hearing was intended to give congress the opportunity to grill representatives of major tech platforms like Facebook and Google (owner of YouTube) on their role in allowing such extremism to spread. But, even as proceedings got under way, the comments section beneath the YouTube livestream of the event quickly flooded with white-nationalist memes, anti-Semitic slurs, misogynistic comments, and complaints about ‘white genocide’. Within an hour, YouTube moderators were forced to disable comments on the video altogether. Observers reported that the tech company representatives present ‘mostly sat back, fielding overly simple questions about whether Facebook allows people to report hate or how YouTube spots videos that violate its policies’, while committee members failed to pin them down or hold them to account.15
Seyi Akiwowo, who experienced blistering racist and misogynistic online abuse after her speech at the European Parliament went viral, chose to respond by setting up Glitch, an ambitious not-for-profit organisation with an intersectional lens, aimed at ending online abuse. The results have been impressive. Within just two years, the organisation’s digital citizenship workshop has provided over 3,500 young people with tools to navigate the online world and play an active role in confronting online harms, like bullying and abuse. It has also provided digital self-defence training to women with a public presence, including those in politics, resulting in a 55 per cent increase in participants feeling safe to express themselves online.
But Akiwowo stresses the need for social media companies themselves to take responsibility, in order to achieve real change in the atmosphere of ‘toxic online spaces’. When I interview her, she says we need ‘investment in data gathering to identify patterns and join the dots between all forms of online abuse and “in real life” attacks’, plus investment in digital citizenship education, and the inclusion of marginalised communities and voices in discussion and decision-making around online abuse. Pointing to the increased levels of abuse faced by women from black and minority ethnic backgrounds online, she suggests social media companies widen the pool of experts with whom they work on these issues. ‘Not only is an intersectional approach to addressing online harms necessary, but also the inclusion of many diverse civil society groups working on online harms.’ Online users, she believes, should ‘have more of a stake and say in how their online spaces are governed’.
This might also be extended to the actual funding of such groups, which is often woefully underprioritised. Sara Khan, UK lead commissioner for countering extremism, tells me:
Although not acknowledged enough, women continue to play a critical role in countering extremism and working to establish peace and security, both at a local and national level. Yet women’s civil society groups often operate on a shoestring. This must change if we are to strengthen our counter-extremism response.
Glitch has also taken the bold step of suggesting that tech giants themselves should fund action on online abuse, campaigning for 1 per cent of the UK government’s new digital services tax to be ringfenced specifically for tackling the problem.
As social media has exploded into a billion-dollar industry with massive influence, women like Akiwowo have continued to act as the – often unheard – canaries in the coal mine, yet they are frequently the people best placed to suggest the changes that would make a real difference to issues such as online abuse.
A recent article highlighted a mass-harassment and misinformation campaign, launched by anonymous 4chan trolls in 2014 to undermine and damage the reputations of black feminists.16 Shortly before Father’s Day, the trolls started a Twitter hashtag, #EndFathersDay, using sock puppets and fake accounts purporting to belong to black feminists, with offensive, exaggerated stereotypical language and tropes about angry black women. The hashtag quickly began trending worldwide and picked up a maelstrom of media coverage from conservatives, ready to use it to pillory real black women working for change.
The story, like so many in which the focus of vitriol has been a marginalised group, was largely forgotten, particularly in comparison with the greater weight and analysis given to a bigger campaign like Gamergate. And, alongside it, we have also forgotten the smart, co-ordinated and tech-savvy campaign of resistance launched by the black feminist movement in response. Women like Shafiqah Hudson and I’Nasah Crockett quickly uncovered the source of the hashtag, revealing it to be a deliberate hoax by MRAs, who had launched it on a forum thread (titled ‘#EndFathersDay Straw Feminist!’) rife with racist language, rape jokes and fake statistics, like the claim that ‘1 in 2 mothers will abuse their children’.
Hudson then launched a new hashtag, #YourSlipIsShowing, which members of the black feminist Twittersphere could use to flag and report sock puppets and fake accounts purporting to represent black women, exposing those that were deliberately stirring up hatred, and highlighting incidents in which photographs of real black women were being used, without consent, by trolls. The anti-harassment campaign was significant, because it saw the victims of a mass-trolling attack using similar electronic tactics and online co-ordination to retaliate against the perpetrators. Black women with large platforms helped to spread the word to their followers, and activists blocked users revealed to be trolls and shared their block lists widely with others, which then enabled them to report hundreds of perpetrator accounts to Twitter en masse, increasing the chance of action being taken (though the women at the forefront of the campaign told Slate that little was done to tackle the problem). These women uncovered the roots of mass-harassment campaigns, the co-ordination of weaponised misinformation by trolls and the use of forums to plan tactics, long before the mainstream media had picked up on the problem. And they demonstrated a targeted, multi-faceted, scalable response, from which social media companies and other actors might have learnt valuable lessons before the Gamergate catastrophe, if only anybody had been listening.
Alongside the immediate actions we might demand of social media platforms then, we might also urge more long-term investment in civil society groups leading the way on these issues, particularly those representing marginalised groups, and an investment in increasing diversity in STEM fields, in order to change the dynamics of a sphere in which women and minorities face systemic harassment while playing little role in the processes designed to respond to that abuse. A 2018 report revealed that, across the British technology sector, just 8.5 per cent of senior leaders are from a minority background, and women make up just 12.6 per cent of board members. Almost two-thirds of boards in the sector, and more than 40 per cent of senior leadership teams, have no female representation at all.17
The next area in which we must see change, if we are to make meaningful progress, is the mainstream media. By amplifying and spreading the messages of those peddling hate in the service of controversy and clickbait, the media has provided vital offline oxygen to the vitriol of online bile. By framing hate speech as one side of ‘balanced debate’, it has normalised and legitimised what should be acknowledged as extreme and unacceptable. By presenting a trivialised and exaggerated version of feminism to stoke controversial outrage, it has helped fuel the fire of misogynist conspiracy theorists and harassing mobs. By failing to recognise the extremist nature of violent attacks on women, it has obstructed us from recognising and tackling misogynistic terrorism for what it really is. As such, it has, sometimes unintentionally, aided and abetted the spread of once-fringe extremist online communities into the centre of acceptable discourse.
And yet the media also has one of the biggest opportunities to help us solve the problem, instead of worsening it. Through responsible reporting, through editorial decisions driven by ethics not eyeballs, the media has the capacity to help delegitimise and undermine hate-fuelled extremist ideologies, evicting them from general conversation, rather than propelling them to greater prominence.
A 2018 report starkly described ‘the relationship between journalism and the amplification of harmful, polluted, or false information’ around the 2016 US presidential election, and the ability of online extremists to deliberately target journalists with manipulative techniques, leading to the risk of ‘filter[ing] violent bigotries into mainstream discourse’ and ‘catalyz[ing] the visibility of alt-right manipulators’.18
Even the very fact of covering such antagonists as slavishly and repeatedly as the media did had a huge impact, writes lead report author Whitney Phillips:
However critically it might have been framed, however necessary it may have been to expose, coverage of these extremists and manipulators gifted bad actors a level of visibility and legitimacy that even they could scarcely believe, as nationalist and supremacist ideology metastasized from culturally peripheral to culturally principal in just a few short months.
After interviewing dozens of reporters and newsroom employees, Phillips determines a host of recommendations for editorial best practice, designed ‘to minimise narrative hijacking by bad-faith actors’, including reporting on objectively false information without creating a false equivalence. She also recommends avoiding personal details in reports on bigots and abusers, using the term ‘troll’ as sparingly as possible, minimising the inclusion of identifying information about victims, and avoiding the publication of euphemistic dog-whistle quotes.
But, even at the most basic level, the media must surely learn lessons from the copycat nature of recent mass murders, whose manifestos overlap and echo each other, often having been given a massive platform in the international press. The New York Times published Rodger’s manifesto and video statement, with its national editor, Alison Mitchell, defending the decision at the time: ‘In this case, the video and manifesto were so integral to understanding the motivation for the crimes [that, had we not published them], we would have very consciously not have been telling a big part of the story.’ Yet it is difficult to imagine such a justification being used for the publication of a jihadi terrorist manifesto in the wake of an ISIS massacre. And, in the years since, as this book has detailed, mass killers have repeatedly cited Rodger as an inspiration. It is perfectly possible for the media to cover the crimes of these men without amplifying their instructional, propagandist screeds.
Ultimately, there are major changes that need to happen across a wide range of sectors, from government to tech companies, from media to education, if we are effectively to analyse and respond to the threat of online misogynistic extremism. But, as men like Kaufman, Hurst and Barker – men who hate men who hate women – suggest, there is also perhaps a need for a fundamental shift in our approach to the very idea of masculinity, if we want this change to take hold at a mainstream, attitudinal level. This may seem several levels removed from the direct challenges of the manosphere itself, but, just as male supremacists have become astonishingly adept at optimising their ideologies to fluidly permeate the boundaries between on- and offline, so we must work on creating equally powerful narratives about masculinity that can flow the other way. Not least as a preventative measure to try to fill in the vacuum that risks leaving young men so vulnerable to the messaging of the manosphere in the absence of accessible alternatives.
As our society changes and shifts, men have lost their traditional, stereotypically prescribed means of asserting their maleness. But, where we have been good at picking up on this, at critiquing those traditional requirements of masculinity and their potentially toxic effects, we have not necessarily been effective in our communication of that critique, or in the provision of alternative, realistic, positive visions of masculinity.
When feminists talk about ‘toxic masculinity’, we mean the enormous potential damage posed by an outdated version of what it means to be a man: showing strength and hiding weakness. Dominating and asserting control in all personal relationships. Never admitting vulnerability or emotions. Stoically bottling up fear or distress and avoiding support or communication at all costs. Assuming the household role of head, provider and protector. Treating female spouses and children as vulnerable secondary dependents, extensions of the self or property, instead of equal partners and sources of support. Prioritising strength, physical prowess and sexual triumph over intellect, emotional intelligence and friendship. Secretive self-flagellation and self-medication over admission of failure. Money and status over job satisfaction. Career over parental involvement. Society over self.
All this is true. But it is too often assumed that the potential damage we highlight is only damage to women and children, when the truth is that the damage toxic masculinity causes to men and boys is also enormous. The problem, I am repeatedly told by boys, men and activists, is that, when we say ‘toxic masculinity’, people hear ‘toxic men’.
Nowhere was this more painfully apparent than in the recent explosive response to the aforementioned Gillette advert that caused such extreme discomfort. The advert sought to tackle toxic forms of masculinity and encourage men to play an active role in addressing the problem. It was really a fairly tame video, showing men intervening to prevent harassment, and including lines like: ‘We believe in the best in men.’ Nonetheless, it sparked an enormous wave of vitriol that united manosphere communities, alt-right YouTubers and the mainstream media alike, with the video instantly becoming the most disliked in YouTube history (with 1.4 million ‘down votes’). Men across the internet videotaped themselves snapping Gillette razors in half and burning other products made by the company. (‘Got six cuts but it was worth it!’ enthused one incel forum member, after destroying his razor. ‘Fuck Gillette!’)
As much as these might feel like (and are often portrayed as) very modern forms of unease, borne out of gendered tension over the recent explosion of fourth-wave feminism, and resentment that the #MeToo movement has somehow criminalised ‘maleness’, the reality is that these conversations have been percolating for decades. In November 1958, in an article in Esquire magazine, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr asked:
What has happened to the American male? For a long time he seemed utterly confident in his manhood, sure of his masculine role in society, easy and definite in his sense of sexual identity. Today men are more and more conscious of maleness not as a fact but as a problem. The ways by which American men affirm their masculinity are uncertain and obscure. There are multiplying signs, indeed, that something has gone badly wrong with the American male’s conception of himself.19
So how do we provide those role models and create those positive new ideas about what it means to be a man? Hurst laughs as he remembers the advice he was given when he first started designing courses about masculinity to deliver to boys in school. ‘There were loads of people who were like: “You need to take men into the woods and get boys to cut down trees, and that’s how they’ll get in touch with their masculinity.” But I was never that kind of kid – I liked art and music and drama.’
Sitting across the table from him in a crowded London café, it strikes me that Hurst himself epitomises exactly the kind of role model we need. A young, charismatic, athletic man, who arrives in a hoodie and effortlessly pulls off several items of jewellery, Hurst is about as far as you could get from the uptight feminist harridans teenage boys might be expecting to lambast them about sexism. He is, I suspect, likely to receive much more candid insight into their influences and opinions than I am. And, as he tells me about his journey to becoming involved in gender-equality work, it occurs to me that there might be nobody more powerfully placed to win boys away from the lure of the involuntary celibates than a man like him, who quite literally represents the opposite. His career in intervention work only started after he was thrown out of theological college for having sex when he was supposed to be celibate.
Hurst emphasises the importance of diversity in our new ideas about what it means to be a man – of not replacing one stereotype with another:
One of the really shit things about masculinity is that it’s so prescriptive, so I don’t ever want to walk into a room and say: ‘This list is out and we’re now giving you a new list of what you need to be.’ Because inevitably that’s going to lead to more of the same stuff, like failing and feeling like you don’t live up to the standards, and then rebelling against it or weaponising it against other people. But giving people space to come up with their own alternatives is really important.
There are men quietly modelling a different, complex version of what it means to be a man. Barack Obama, with his willingness to cry publicly and his decision to make sexual violence on campus a central focus of his presidency. Andy Murray, who frequently, unshowily corrected reporters when they attributed to him records already broken by female tennis players like the Williams sisters. Men like Jordan Stephens, of the hip-hop duo Rizzle Kicks, who sat next to me on a Newsnight panel discussion about #MeToo with a wreath of flowers in his hair and talked openly about the need for men to be allowed to breach constrictive stereotypes and experience intimacy with themselves and others.
These different and apparently ‘unusual’ versions of masculinity can have an enormous impact on young people. Adam, the 20-year-old student who told me how so many of his friends had been impacted by extreme online misogyny, credits his own recovery from serious mental health problems to one of his favourite bands. He says he had always struggled with societal pressure, having ‘never been a particularly outwardly masculine person’, leading to teasing and name-calling at school. After coming out as pansexual at college and ‘trying to figure out who I am’, he began to experience depression and anxiety, eventually reaching the point at which he barely felt able to leave the house. But Adam found solace in an unexpected place. He is a huge fan of the English rock band IDLES, who he credits with rejecting the ‘performative macho bluster’ more typical of male celebrities. Their single ‘Samaritans’, released at the peak of Adam’s depression, refers to the ‘mask of masculinity’, describing the pressures on men to ‘man up… chin up… don’t cry… just lie’, and includes the lyrics ‘I’m a real boy/Boy, and I cry’. The potential impact of a band this prominent, nominated for British Breakthrough Act at the BRITs, choosing to discuss these issues so openly is massive, Adam says, particularly for their thousands of fans. ‘It allows us to start the conversation that maybe, in other circles or in other times in history, probably wouldn’t have been had.’
It might sound simple, but the impact of role models on opening up wider conversation is crucial, especially in an area in which discussion can be so deeply stigmatised. And it becomes critical to offer alternative spaces to talk about issues otherwise seized upon, and jealously guarded by, toxic online discourse. When I ask Jack Peterson, the former incel, about the appeal of such forums, he says:
Part of the problem is that it’s kind of taboo to talk about these things, you know, outside of an anonymous internet forum.… I think the problem is that there are barriers within our society to what we can talk about, and I think male loneliness is definitely one of those. There’s definitely a barrier where most people don’t want to hear stuff like that, and so these guys are just forced to either keep quiet or go on some of these online forums… I think, if we could just be more willing to discuss these issues as a society, then that would be a big improvement.
Adam points out that finding the physical space for such conversations to take place is as important as the emotional territory. He refers to the cutting of funding for youth clubs, without which, he says:
[Boys] don’t have an outlet for their anger and their energy, so where else are they going to go but online? And that’s where the flames start to appear, because they’ve got nothing else to do, so they’ll go online, they’ll find this outlet for their energy, they’ll find this YouTube or this right-wing commentator that speaks to them, and then it just escalates from there.
The same warning is echoed by Picciolini, who told The Atlantic:
Thirty years ago, marginalized, broken, angry young people had to be met face-to-face to get recruited into a movement. Nowadays, those millions and millions of young people are living most of their lives online if they don’t have real-world connections. And they’re finding a community online, instead of in the real world, and having conversations about promoting violence.
Individual men are often powerfully placed to be the ones to critique, challenge and undermine the messaging of male-supremacist extremism, on- and offline. For every good man who asks ‘what can I do?’, there is an opportunity to join this chorus, speaking to the men around you and contributing to a wider ripple effect.
When the manosphere conspiracy theories about Katie Bouman began to overshadow the work she had done to capture the first image of a black hole, for example, the resistance was led by Andrew Chael, the same white male scientist MRAs were trying to credit with Bouman’s achievement instead. ‘Once I realised that many online commentators were using my name and image to advance a sexist agenda to claim that Katie’s leading role in our global team was invented, I felt I should say something to make it clear I rejected that view,’ Chael told CNN. He immediately took to Twitter, to amplify his message in the same forum being used by the perpetrators, describing misogynistic attacks on his colleague as ‘awful and sexist’, correcting false statistics being spread by the manosphere, and writing: ‘So while I appreciate the congratulations on a result that I worked hard on for years, if you are congratulating me because you have a sexist vendetta against Katie, please go away and reconsider your priorities in life.’
Men like Professor Green, Doc Brown, Grayson Perry, Robert Webb, and many more, continue to use their personal platforms to speak, write and rap about the problem with prescriptive masculinity, exploring nuanced and new ways to examine being a man. We need the bulk of this work to come from men. If masculinity is the problem, it is men who must decide and drive new forms of manhood. The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that it is fairly fruitless for feminists to be seen to be telling boys the right way to be a man. That doesn’t mean that the project of reforming masculinity has failed. It means that, as with so much of the heavy lifting of the pursuit of equality in our society, the hard work has been foisted on the wrong people.
We need to harness the energies of those men who are afraid of women, because they have been misled by the lies and inflammatory rhetoric of other men. The men who have been sold the lie that they should fear women, because women who report abuse risk tarring all men with the same brush. The truth is that it is abusive men who risk tarring all men with the same brush. So these are not really men who are afraid of women at all. They are men who hate men who hate women. They just don’t know it yet.
Crucially, none of these interventions will work unless we see the problem for what it really is, and take it seriously. You don’t know what’s out there until you look. We don’t want to talk about a mass movement encouraging violent hatred of women. We would prefer not to confront it. It is much easier to paint sexism as a vague, perpetrator-free issue, hazily floating in the ether, waiting to affect women. It is much easier to dismiss or belittle manosphere communities than to tackle them. But, the more we look away, the worse it gets.
It wasn’t until I started researching the manosphere to write this book that I began to stumble across increasing numbers of casual forum discussions and chatroom threads dedicated to fantasising about raping and murdering me specifically. As I work my way through the different manosphere communities, I see the way they treat women who have dared to write about them, or even simply to make the briefest comments about them on social media. Borrowing the wording of jihadist terrorism, an incel message board contains an announcement about a female journalist, who made a single YouTube video about incel message boards: ‘fatwa on this cunt. all incels have a duty to do her harm if they see her. INCELU AKBAR!!!!’
I’m scared about this book being published. Unlike some of the trolling victims I’ve interviewed, I have foreknowledge of what is to come. I have done everything I can to anticipate and mitigate it. In the years since the death threats started, I have moved house several times and I have restricted my personal details further and further from social media, taking care never to share anything specific about my family or friends. I have stopped writing about personal things. If I’m interviewed or photographed at home, I ask the journalist not to mention the area, persuade the photographer to make sure the street doesn’t feature in the picture. It’s an exhausting way to live. I don’t know what’s going to happen next. But, in a way, I’m throwing down the gauntlet. The men from the groups I have described, if they become aware of this book, will be faced with something of a dilemma. They will claim it misrepresents and maligns their communities. But, if they choose to deluge me with threats and abuse, as they have done countless times before, they will be proving me right. I like to think it will be a confusing moment for them.
So writing this book is scary, but it is also an act of resistance. We can’t tackle a problem if people don’t even know it exists. And, once we do know, we all have a responsibility to answer a simple question: what are we going to do about it?
The shift we need to see is achievable. I know, because I’ve seen it first-hand.
In my experience, a school can be a very revealing microcosm of society. It has its cliques and communities, its leaders and citizens, its culture and norms. So observing different schools trying to come to terms with the infiltration of extreme misogyny has been extremely enlightening. I’ve watched as schools have attempted to yank the worm out too quickly, thinking it’s possible to solve the problem with a single whole-school assembly, to tick the box and move on. I’ve seen them lop off the head, doling out a single punishment to a single ringleader, in the hope that it will magically treat the deeper elements of the problem. And I’ve seen the putrefaction that follows, as prejudice becomes more entrenched, victims face backlash, normalisation fails to shift, and the cycle continues.
But I’ve also seen one school that did things differently. They had a major problem and they knew it. To say that the attitudes I encountered on my first visit were deeply misogynistic would be an understatement. The girls were deathly silent. The boys shared classic manosphere tidbits. The atmosphere was toxic. But the school, galvanised by a small but determined group of teachers, had taken one vital first step: they had acknowledged the problem. What they did next was groundbreaking.
They thought about the many different possible approaches for solving the problem. And then they implemented all of them. They convened a student council, so that the pupils themselves could work out what the issues were and make suggestions for fixing them. They had big assemblies, yes, but they were led by male members of staff, and visibly supported by the entire senior leadership team. They sent the message that this was being taken seriously at every level. And they didn’t leave it at that. They followed up the assemblies with tutor-group discussions, looking at a wide range of different subjects, and going into depth about issues like gender stereotypes and mental health, looking at how young men were impacted, as well as their female peers. They gave the students a safe space to explore and discuss the problem. Where young people might have encountered misleading information online, they provided facts. And it wasn’t just talk. The school started to take action, too, to tackle sexual harassment and to send a message that it was unacceptable. They appointed a counsellor to offer mental health support. They worked with parents, inviting them to a talk to educate them about the issues facing their children, and the online content they might be unaware of. They provided the tools, information and confidence for parents to start vital conversations with their teenagers.
As time passed, the school invited me back again and again. Each year, they asked me to visit and deliver the same talk to a new year group. And so I watched things shift.
The second year I visited, the dial had moved just a little. A small, brave group of students had started a feminist society. There were fewer than ten of them, and they’d encountered some pretty stiff resistance from their peers, but they were determined to battle on. The atmosphere remained hostile, but there were fewer outright abusive comments from boys in my session. Misogyny no longer had a stranglehold. One or two girls even raised their hands.
The next year, the feminist society had doubled in size. There was a sense of openness to debate. There were still plenty of misogynistic ideas, and a good amount of misinformation, but it no longer went completely unchallenged. Female staff no longer looked devastated during the question-and-answer session.
By the time I paid my final visit, five years on from that first difficult day, the school felt unrecognisable. We sat in the same classrooms, I spoke in the same assembly hall, but the atmosphere was transformed. It wasn’t groupthink. Students still had different views and, of course, not everybody was magically convinced. There were still disruptive boys and difficult questions. But, among a critical mass of students, something had shifted. The girls put up their hands. The place no longer felt infected.
It doesn’t happen overnight, but it is possible – with enough effort, on enough different fronts, and enough willingness from male role models to take responsibility for the work.
That’s how we get the whole worm.