How misogyny lures men to the far right

In the same way that the far right is predominantly made up of men, the individuals who study the far right are also overwhelmingly male. This may partially explain why the misogynistic views that imbue far-right ideology often do not receive the attention they require. Nevertheless, awareness of the symbiotic relationship between the two schools of thought is thankfully growing.

While I am not someone who buys into the ludicrous perspective that weed is a gateway drug for crack and heroin, it is a helpful analogy in this context.

Misogyny (a hypothetical spliff) is often the gateway drug that lures men into more extreme and toxic far-right schools of thought, which can encourage violence and abuse, among other things. Now, while the far-right spectrum is in no way a unified, monolithic global movement, misogyny and male supremacy are things that rear their ugly heads throughout the far right.

In recent years, the far right has ballooned in size and power around the world, with the so-called alt-right, white supremacist movements, xenophobic populism, anti-migrant groups, the Identitarian movement and incels all falling under this same noxious banner.

But far-right sentiment has not just swelled at the grassroots, activist levels; it has also found new and reinvigorated power in the political sphere. In the twenty-first century, far-right parties in Western Europe have become increasingly, disturbingly popular.

This has spanned from the growing popularity of far-right populist parties in France, Spain, Germany, Sweden, Finland and Greece. After all, French far-right leader Marine Le Pen won a historic 13.3 million votes – which amounts to just over 41 per cent of the total – in April 2022. Moreover, authoritarian demagogues have also gained power at the national level, winning elections and becoming world leaders – as we have seen in Brazil, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, the Philippines and the US.

The far-right renaissance has been coupled with an acrimonious backlash against gender equality. A key example includes gender studies being banned in Hungary. When announcing the ban, Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjén made the bigoted, flawed and nonsensical argument that gender studies ‘has no business in universities’ because it is ‘an ideology, not a science’ while a spokesperson for Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s far-right prime minister – a world leader who has been called ‘Trump before Trump’ by Steve Bannon – said: ‘The government’s standpoint is that people are born either male or female, and we do not consider it acceptable for us to talk about socially constructed genders rather than biological sexes.’

In 2019, Orbán, who has earned the moniker of ‘Viktator’, announced Hungary will ensure mothers who have at least four children do not have to pay income tax for their entire lives in an attempt to drive up birth rates, as well as offering subsidies for families with more children to buy larger cars.

As you have probably already gathered, far-right thought often employs reductive, essentialist notions of biology, which favour nature over nurture, in a bid to bolster views of male dominance and supremacy over women and to transmute women into submissive breeding machines. This stretches back to the famous Nazi slogan ‘Kinder, Küche, Kirche’, which was centred around Hitler’s belief that women’s lives should exist around children, cooking and church. Such views might sound antiquated to many, but the notion women should stay home to serve their male partner and look after the kids remains prevalent in the far right.

Another core element of current far-right attitudes to women involves weaponising violence against them to further racist, xenophobic ideals by pushing the idea white women must be protected against migrants. This repulsive phenomenon, which manifests in a range of ways, ran rampant during the 2015 so-called refugee crisis.

Since then, these issues have become even more pressing as the so-called ‘alt-right’ movement – which has been widely associated with racism, antisemitism and misogyny – amassed growing power and attention in the wake of Trump’s presidential bid and his time in Washington’s corridors of power. Meanwhile, another key tenant of far-right thought often centres around a fierce animosity and disgust towards feminism. Take the crowds at rallies for the former far-right Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro who chanted they would feed feminists dog food.

Research, entitled ‘When Women Are the Enemy: The Inter- section of Misogyny and White Supremacy’, previously found that misogyny is a key element of the so-called alt-right move- ment. Researchers at the Anti-Defamation League discovered that the increasingly popular narrative of white men being victims of feminism has been a key driving force behind the misogyny that has become rife in far-right movements. The report argues that hatred of women is a ‘dangerous and under- estimated component of extremism’.

Of course, the far right is not only profoundly misogynistic, but also racist, homophobic, transphobic and xenophobic.

The incel movement would arguably be one of the most overt examples of the intersection between the far right and misogyny. An incel, which stands for a combination of the words ‘involuntary’ and ‘celibate’, is a heterosexual man who desperately wants to have sex with women but fails to do so, consequently heaping blame on women for his own inability to form sexual relationships.

Jake Davison, a self-proclaimed incel, shot dead five people in the unlikely port city of Plymouth on the south coast of Devon – with his mother, Maxine, and a three-year-old girl among his victims – before aiming the gun at his own head on a sunny summer evening in August 2021. Davison, who had a track record of violence, was fixated on mass shootings, guns and serial killers.

After the tragedy, it emerged that Davison, who was diag- nosed with autism in 2011, had previously uploaded videos referring to himself as an ‘incel’ and lamenting the fact that he had not lost his virginity as a teenager. Davison’s murder spree was the deadliest mass shooting to take place in the UK in over a decade.

This is just one tragic example of the deadly nature of the incel movement and sadly there are more. Incel men, who are affiliated with far-right, neo-Nazi movements, victimise themselves and attribute their dearth of sexual and romantic relationships to problems with society, construing women as the common nemesis. Incel communities, which have grown in recent years, have sprung up on Reddit, Facebook, 4chan and on websites established by incels themselves. Members of the dark community spout hate-filled, misogynistic abuse about women on online forums, as well as venting about people who are sexually active and making vitriolic comments about the women who reject them – even plotting against them.

Of course, hatred of women is not always this obvious among the far right. Take Andrew Tate, for instance. The former kick- boxing world champion turned self-avowed ‘success coach’, who is one of the most googled people in the world, claims ‘women are the most precious things on the planet’. Tate claims he loves women but simultaneously argues that men and women are unreservedly different. For this reason, he believes in very distinct gender roles, which remind me of a bygone era I am not keen to return to: the 1950s.

Tate posits himself as an ‘alpha male’, as well as openly admitting he is a misogynist. Tate has argued it is ‘disgusting’ and ‘revolting’ for women to have lots of sexual partners but men are allowed to. Tate once referred to married women as ‘property’ that their husbands own, and I have previously reported on research by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which unearthed 47 videos of Tate pushing what it describes as ‘extreme misogyny’. The report uncovered adverts on videos where Tate discusses abusing women, encouraging his audience to ‘grip her up by the neck’ in one video, which has been viewed 1.6 million times, as well as referring to putting his ‘imprint’ on 18–19-year-old girls in other footage, which has accrued 8.4 million views.

But who is Tate? His content on TikTok has been viewed more than 12.7 billion times at the time of writing. It is worth noting that nobody else on the popular video-sharing platform comes anywhere near this number. Whether you love him or hate him, Tate has accrued fame and ‘success’ at an extraordinary rate. And I would hazard a guess that it is this that his apostles hold so dear. They are drawn in by his opulent lifestyle, which centres around ostentatious cars, shiny private jets and upsettingly garish properties. People love Tate’s inane video soliloquies, too, many of which I genuinely struggle to make sense of. They remind me of a certain caricature stoner at a house party trying to be incredibly deep and profound but who is making absolutely no sense and is spouting braindead, pointless gibberish.

Now, Tate, who has been banned from a number of social media platforms for hate speech and voicing misogynistic views, would not like being in this chapter as he does not market himself as being far right. And, to be fair, his nonsensical ramblings do subvert the traditional spectrum of left- and right-wing politics. But the extremity of Tate’s misogynistic, homophobic, racist content does feel like it shares parallels with the far right, with experts warning that it can open the door to young men accessing material that is even more extreme.

In essence, the uncompromisingly hateful and cruel views of the far right can be difficult to make sense of. The comments I receive from online trolls, some of whom appear to be on the far right, not only are belligerent but often feel disconcertingly estranged from reality. Many trolls engage in ‘whataboutism’, defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as ‘the act or prac- tice of responding to an accusation of wrongdoing by claiming that an offense committed by another is similar or worse’. If you have ever had a debate with someone and felt like they weren’t properly listening to you and were completely missing the point of what you were saying, you may have encoun- tered ‘whataboutism’ without knowing the name for it. When someone on Twitter wields ‘whataboutism’, it makes debating with them impossible and futile.

Not that I bother with that. Life is far too short.

› Men made up the overwhelming majority of the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville in Virginia, which saw ugly clashes between neo-Nazis, KKK members and alt-right supporters and anti-fascists. A 32-year-old woman, Heather Heyer, was killed after a car ploughed into a group of anti-fascist protesters in a separate incident.

› A Secret Service report has found that men who label themselves ‘involuntary celibates’ are a growing threat in America, with researchers examining a slew of instances where men linked to incel movements have killed women.

› Andrew Tate has substantial connections with the far right, which means the misogynistic influencer is a danger to young men and teenage boys, research by Hope not Hate warns.

› Tate has stated that he has spent time with Tommy Robinson ‘untold times’, referring to the former English Defence League leader as being a ‘solid guy’ with a ‘good heart’.

› In elections stretching from 1988 to 1995 in Austria, France and Germany, the radical right’s electorate was approximately 40 per cent women and 60 per cent men.

*This is an extract from Maya Oppenheim's new book The Pocket Guide to the Patriarchy.

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