Mayday! Misogyny Has Gone Mainstream and It’s Fueling a Political Crisis
- CAIS PVM working group
- 2 hours ago
- 6 min read
Dr. Shana MacDonald, Dr. Brianna Wiens, Dr. Suay Melisa Özkula, Dr. Patricia Prieto-Blanco, and members of CAIS PVM* Working Group
Misogyny isn’t fringe anymore—it’s strategy.
As the Netflix Show Adolescence demonstrates, there is a cost to ignoring it. The show sparked a global conversation in the Spring of 2025 around the rise of the “manosphere” and its real world impacts. This has had a ripple effect across different countries since its release. The manosphere is a loose collection of digital media influencers united by a focus on selling largely toxic forms of masculinity and anti-feminist sentiment. Adolescence examines this from the perspective of a teenage boy under the influence of the manosphere and the aftermath of him killing a female student at his school. The show makes the link between the misogynist messaging of the manosphere and the real world struggles and violence at times undertaken by those who are listening. From viral debates to political action (like the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s move to make Adolescence freely available in secondary schools), there is a growing recognition that misogynistic digital content is no longer a fringe issue. Indeed, it is a cultural and political crisis. As an international network of interdisciplinary scholars of digital media, we welcome this moment of public attention to these issues. We hope it opens up even further pathways in the conversation to include the ways we might support young men and boys lured into manosphere discourse as well as those on the receiving end of manosphere hate.
The manosphere network of online communities united by misogynistic beliefs includes incels, MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), and earlier iterations such as men’s rights activists and pick-up artists. While these groups differ in focus, they share a common goal of reasserting gender conservative norms. They blame feminism for men’s perceived struggles and often promote harmful ideas about gendered hierarchies in relationships. As our colleague Elisa García-Mingo wrote recently, Adolescence shows how these ideologies aren’t just online. They shape real-world attitudes, relationships, and, in some cases, fuel radicalization and violence.
What Adolescence gets right is simple but crucial: young men and boys are being actively drawn into harmful online ecosystems––ones that not only dehumanize women and gender minorities, but also pose deep mental health risks to the very boys consuming them.
Loneliness, the Pandemic, and the Rise of Digital Hate
One theme that Adolescence surfaces powerfully is loneliness. In the post-pandemic world, loneliness has become a key driver of radicalization. The pandemic didn’t just isolate people—it transformed how hate spreads. While women bore the brunt of unpaid care work, many men expanded their use of online platforms, which include ones where gendered hate flourishes. Lockdowns led to skyrocketing screen time and exposure to radical content. Here, a growing cohort of men, especially young men and boys, found community not in care work, jobs, or civic responsibility, but in the omnipresent and easily accessible spaces of the internet. Algorithms reward fear and outrage. And in this context, the manosphere didn’t just survive, it thrived.
These digital spaces––forums like Reddit, 4chan, TikTok, podcasts, and YouTube channels run by manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, and Adin Ross––offered a sense of respite and belonging built on resentment. Here, men found easy explanations for their alienation: blame feminism, blame women. This uptake in such digital spaces didn’t just reinforce misogyny—it helped to mainstream it. The polarization we once associated with fringe corners of the internet has become more normalized and is impacting politics, culture, education, and policy.
Misogyny as Political Strategy
Alarmingly, recent insights suggest this wasn’t just a social shift. Instead, it laid the groundwork for new political strategies rooted in resentment and gender hierarchies that largely benefit a shift towards political conservativism. Manosphere influencers not only gesture towards “a return to simpler times,” but vocalize deliberate enactments of traditional hierarchies. That phrase echoes far beyond online forums. This suggests that manosphere content seeks to influence and solidify conservative values within a population of listeners and influence their voting behaviours as well as how they view gendered roles in their everyday lives. These simpler times, as Harrison Butker outlined in his commencement speech at Benedictine College last year, includes women’s primary role in society as a mother and caregiver, outside of the public workforce, and in service to her husband.
In the U.S. in the aftermath of the pandemic, this discourse supports such varied conversations as those around the 2022 Dobbs decision to overturn federal abortion rights, “tech bro” culture’s reassertion of hyper-masculinist ideologies, and the framework for the Project 2025 playbook, aimed at consolidating executive power through a sweeping reorganization of the U.S. government grounded in right-wing, patriarchal, gendered vision of governance. We’ve seen this kind of nostalgic appeal in mainstream politics for decades. In 1993, British Prime Minister John Major launched the “Back to Basics” campaign, championing traditional values and a return to conventional morality (a call he recently acknowledged as “counter-productive”). Slogans like Trump’s “Make America Great Again” have served as coded calls to an idealized past—one where gender roles were rigid, power was centralized, and social change was minimal.
European institutions have since taken an active role in making digital spaces transparent and safe, above all through a range of regulatory efforts such as the GDPR, the Digital Services Act, and the AI act. Here too, the TV and film industry have given rise to debates on “masculinities in crisis”. While shows like Machos Alfa and The Roosters (the Dutch equivalent) have, through comedy, sparked conversations on men’s place in a modern world, Adolescence has led to conversations about potential smartphone bans in schools, for example in the UK, with such prohibitions already being in place for reasons of focus and safety in the Netherlands and Austria. These decisions come hand-in-hand with renewed attempts of stymieing digital hate groups, such as the UK Labour party’s attempts to steer young men away from toxic influencers. Even so, the past few years have shown a renewed rise of the far-right sweeping across Europe: from the UK’s Brexit conservatism to the growing popularity of far-right and Neo-fascist parties in France, Germany, and Austria. While some of these developments have been heralded by female conservative leaders (Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, France’s Marine Le Pen, and Germany’s Alice Weidel), their gender rhetorics remain conservative and do not provide pathways for addressing the current crisis.
These are not isolated events nor are they entirely specific to the moment but rather a part of a longer history of misogyny in public and political conversation. This is not just a social shift; it reflects a coordinated retrenchment of gender progress. Misogyny, increasingly, is not merely tolerated or overlooked by some political actors––it is deployed as a strategic tool. These narratives, whether on TikTok or the campaign trail, tap into the same emotional impulse of nostalgia: that the world was better before, and that reclaiming power means going back.This has laid the groundwork for new political strategies rooted in resentment and gender hierarchies.
What This Means for Policy and Research
To treat misogyny as simply a cultural byproduct is to miss its political potency. It must be recognized and addressed as a political force.
For researchers, policymakers, and platform designers, the takeaways are clear:
Policy makers and educators must incorporate analysis of digital misogyny into curriculum reform, particularly around social and sexual health education; as well as empower users with skills to use platforms critically.
Digital platforms must evolve content moderation practices to account for the emotional toll on those confronting hate online.Platforms should a) incorporate "wellness" by design, limiting features like infinite scroll and others that perpetuate isolationist, maximalist behaviors; and b)provide safeguards to content moderators.
Researchers and funders should invest in understanding feminist digital labour and support those engaged in it.
Public discourse must center the impacts of misogyny on those most affected, including women and gender-diverse individuals, not just those drawn into hateful ideologies.
This work isn’t just about protecting free speech—it’s about protecting public safety and preserving the possibility of broad-based equity and participation in digital life. The current moment offers very little incentive for women and other targeted communities to be present in a world of trolling, doxxing, and online hate that perpetuates without much consequence.
Misogyny has gone mainstream
*This text provides some insights into the endeavours of the CAIS working group Critical Interventions into Platformed Visual Misogyny: Methods, Concepts, and Cases
Members of the CAIS PVM working group are close colleagues of CIFRS who support the work of this organization with collegiality and encouragement.