The Link Between Misogyny And Violent Extremism

0:00Cynthia Miller-Idriss:This message comes from the BBC with their podcast The Global Story. With Asma Khalid in D.C. and Tristan Redman in London, The Global Story brings you daily news from where the world and America meet. Search for The Global Story from BBC Podcasts.

0:24Cynthia Miller-Idriss:and we are following breaking news in minnesota where the manhunt is now underway for the person who shot and killed a lawmaker and her husband a second lawmaker and his wife were also shot breaking news out of utah conservative activist charlie kirk gunned down during a campus speech On to more news now. A break-in and arson at the Pennsylvania governor's residence has cast scrutiny on its security measures. Chaos as gunfire rings out at an elementary school in New Valley. People taken to the hospital. More than a dozen children killed. The deadly shooting inside a Charleston, South Carolina church is being investigated as a hate crime.

1:02Cynthia Miller-Idriss:A shooter opened fire during a prayer meeting in the church Wednesday night. Those were just a few of the incidents of extremism and mass violence we've seen in the U.S. over the last few years. In the days, weeks, and months after these acts, we seek motives. We try to understand why violence is perpetrated in hopes of preventing it in the future. One expert argues that in that search for answers, we're missing something crucial, something that keeps us from addressing this violence and extremism head-on. That blind spot? Misogyny. Cynthia Miller-Idris is a sociologist. She's also the founding director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, or PERIL, at American University.

1:46She's also the author of Man Up, The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism. It's out now. Cynthia joins us after the break to discuss her new book and how misogyny relates to violence. I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast. Stay with us. We've got a lot to get to.

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2:48Cynthia Miller-Idriss:This is Ira Glass. On This American Life, we look for stories that are surprising that you won't hear anywhere else. Like, for example, this one astronaut who went to the moon. You know what he's not into? Space. Was it cool to float around weightless? No, no, no. This American Life, Unexpected Stories, wherever you get your podcasts. Cynthia, it's great to have you. Hi, Jen. Cynthia, since you began writing this book, the issue of extremist violence has become even more urgent. An Axios report says that there's been more high-profile assassinations or assassination attempts in the past 14 months than at any point since 1968 in the U.S.

3:32When you examine the background and history of the perpetrators or likely perpetrators of that violence, what often connects them? Well, what we see in mass violence perpetrators across the board is that the vast majority of them have a history of, so 60 % of them have a history of domestic and intimate partner violence in a documented way. And that is in a world where half of domestic violence incidents go unreported to begin with. And then in addition to that, they often have stalking, harassment, rape threats, sexual assault histories, anti-LGBTQ issues. So the kind of gendered motivations and gender-based histories, gender violence histories are vast and often unacknowledged.

4:13On the assassination attempts, we're seeing a much trickier kind of scenario where sometimes there's misogynistic histories just as there are with mass shooters. But often it's a much murkier, not even ideologically motivated situation, but very gamified, meme-driven almost relationships where they're communicating in many ways back to an online audience. And that's a whole other set of issues. But, of course, they're almost all unified by the fact that they're young men, a lot of young white men behind these guns. This was a difficult book for you to write because you had to overcome your reluctance to tackle this subject.

4:51What were you grappling with in that process? I think there were a lot of things that made me reluctant to do it. I think, one, as a woman, I felt I'd be pigeonholed to some extent if I were writing on gender, and I really wanted to be seen as an expert on extremism and not only on gender. So I had my own little hang-ups, as one might have. I think I also looked past it the way that we all look past some of the things we have to face to get through, right? Whether that's microaggressions that are racist or sexist kind of comments from colleagues. And I pepper the book with anecdotes just to show people how often that kind of thing happens, right?

5:28And so I think I was used to soldiering through and not paying attention to it. And I also was worried intellectually that I would marginalize the topic by focusing on it somehow. Like that people would say, oh, here's where we look at gender, but let's get back to the main issues in political violence. And so I really wanted this to be an unflinching account of the foundational ways that gendered and misogynistic components link all forms of hate. But in general, there's a lack of scholarship in this area. Why do you think that's the case? I think that part of the reason is that the targets of violence often are not women or the LGBTQ community.

6:10So the motivations are in the lead up, the early foundational radicalization process or the kind of early expressions of violence in interpersonal situations. Or they are part of the ideology motivating the attack, but they're not actually the targets. Well, we often hear about misogyny through the lens of what's happening online, cheered by prominent male influencers. It's known as the manosphere. If you are responsible for someone's safety, that means you have a degree of authority over them, right? So I think with men and women also need to understand this.

6:44Cynthia Miller-Idriss:If you want a guy that's going to be a dominant, assertive, strong man who's going to protect you like he should, by the way, he needs to have some degree of authority over you. I don't think you're in a position to give me advice, especially as a woman, honestly. I don't think women, you know, this is something in the right wing. We say we're anti-feminist. And then women go around telling men what to do or not their husbands. And, you know, I don't really buy into that ideologically, but. Society was built to protect women. And when you protect something, you must restrict something. We have taken that restriction.

7:13Cynthia Miller-Idriss:We've taken that protective instinct, conflated it into subjugation. The society we live in now, women are permanent prey every single time they leave the house because of all of these liberal, femme-minded, garbage, girl feels, girl balls. That was the voices of podcasters and right-wing influencers Myron Gaines. Nick Quentes and Andrew Tate. Cynthia, it's important to note that misogyny is bigger than just digital content. So how should we understand the presence of misogyny in our society and culture more broadly? Well, I think one of the first things when you hear those clips, you know, something that used to be kind of the quiet part is now suddenly being spoken out loud.

7:52And so we see a lot of these influencers having tremendous popularity among teenage boys, something like 18 to 22 % approval ratings for guys like Andrew Tate across countries. And so we see that spillover effect in real life. I hear all the time when after a conversation like this, I get emails and messages and friends coming to me telling me their daughters have had, you know, 10-year-old in the recess playground had a little boy say, your body, my choice, right? Does he even know what he's saying? A 12-year-old in Maryland had a boy in the hallway say, go put on your handmaid's dress, right?

8:31And an 18-year-old in Virginia, a mom I know had her butt grabbed at a coffee shop. And when she turned around to look at the guy, he said, we can do that now. And so these real-life effects of online influencers, you know, asserting dominance and power over women are very real for girls and women and gender expansive folks across the country. How is it showing up in our politics? Well, the politics, of course, we've seen a lot of mainstreaming of this, the belittling and diminishing of things that would have been clear exclusions for elected officials at one time saying that they're going to grab a woman's private parts and they can do that, or having a history of domestic violence and sort of framing that as a private problem that shouldn't have an impact on their public life.

9:17These are things that would be hard to imagine even 15 or 20 years ago being acceptable. I want to get to this comment we got from John because I expected to get this comment. You and your guest are presuming that all men are misogynists. And this is something you address in the book, Cynthia. Yes, absolutely something I address in the book. Absolutely not the case that it's all men. And not only that, the way I define misogyny, which is not as hatred of women, but as the gender policing that reinforces the patriarchy, right? The policing of gender norms and expectations. Women do it as well as men.

9:51I mean, plenty of women police little boys' behavior and say, don't cry, force men into a box and require them to adhere to this stoic, dominant, aggressive situation. Well, that takes us to this message we got from one of you. Hi, I'm the mom of a nearly 22-year-old son. And my son has become attracted to podcasts and to other cultural commentators who tell him that he's strong and good as he is. Of course he wants to hear, any human wants to hear, that they're strong and good. We need to do a better job of not villainizing young men or blaming them or saying that they are the problem. They're not.

10:30We have a lot of problems that we can work on together. They're not the result of one class of people or gender of people. Cynthia? Yeah, absolutely agree. I mean, I think part of the problem is that, you know, I was just talking with a 16-year-old boy who, after a presentation that I gave at high school, often it's boys who come up to the platform and want to talk. And I love that because I love that they feel they have a space now to have these conversations. And one of them, I asked him what he thought that adults don't know about his age group and what it is to be a boy at this age. And he said, I don't think people understand what it's like to suddenly realize the world sees you as dangerous.

11:08And then a girl nearby him said, well, I don't think boys understand what it's like to suddenly realize you're a sexual object. And I said, maybe the two of you should be having this conversation and maybe the school could help facilitate. So actually they're starting a little club at that high school to have these conversations about their online worlds and what their experiences are. I think that's great. I'll go back to that high school in the spring to help move that conversation along. But I think that's part of the problem is we don't create spaces for young men and young women. They're increasingly isolated and divided online into different worlds.

11:39and then we get these real-life effects. More to come in just a moment.

11:49Cynthia Miller-Idriss:This week on Consider This, the former Prince Andrew, the brother of King Charles, is arrested, the first senior royal to be arrested since the 1600s. It's in connection with an investigation stemming from the Epstein files. What will this case mean in the story of this ongoing fallout of the Epstein files here in the U.S.? This week on Consider This. You can listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Jonathan Haidt's book, The Anxious Generation, sparked a movement to warn kids and their parents about the harms of social media. Yes, my claim is that will change brain development in ways that will make you less capable, confident, happy, and sociable as an adult.

12:28But what do young people think?

12:29Cynthia Miller-Idriss:Gen Z is just going to think, well, we're cursed. That's on the TED Radio Hour. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Is there an acquaintance in your life that you'd love to turn into an actual friend? And have you thought about saying, hey, we should hang out sometime? Maybe think again. The more specific you are, the more likely it is that you're actually going to get together. You know, pull out your calendar, pick a time, pick a thing to do together, and actually follow through. Listen to the Life Kit podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Cynthia, you started to talk about this.

13:04How do rigid expectations and cultural norms around masculinity play into the frustration and loneliness that men are experiencing today? Yeah, I mean, the data is terrible right now for men and boys, as we know, and we're finally starting to see some structural conversations about this with executive orders in California and initiatives in Maryland to start looking at what it might take to reduce the loneliness among men and boys, but also create better job opportunities and higher education encouragement to sort of right-set some of those inequalities, which doesn't mean that women are doing better than men, right?

13:43It's not an either-or situation, but men are certainly declining. And what we see is that some of these cultural norms around stoicism, around manning up, not crying, which boys talk about all the time. One of the things someone told me is that a young man told me is that you kind of live your life trying to chip off parts of yourself in order to keep yourself safe from the bullying of others and the gender policing of other boys. And then all of a sudden you're a man and now you're being critiqued for not being empathetic enough or being a caregiver or being able to access those emotions. But you actually have spent your whole teenage life just trying to put yourself in this box to keep yourself safe from those kinds of normative expectations from other peers and survive the locker room essentially.

14:31And so I think we really have to think about what the cultural expectations are of boys to be a certain kind of way and how, when they're suffering and struggling, how easy it is to be attracted to influencers online who offer them, often starting a conversation like men are suffering and I'm the only one who will acknowledge it, and then scapegoat women or racial and ethnic minorities for their problems. I'm curious to hear you describe how in your research you find misogyny acts to amplify other forms of hate like anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia. Yeah. I mean, this is one of the most interesting and disturbing things is that, you know, I often talk about, and there's a podcast out right now in accompaniment of my book.

15:18I encourage it's free and encourage people to listen to it. They can find it anywhere you get your podcasts. And the first episode is with Amy Spitalnik, who ran the organization that sued the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville. And she talks in that episode about how much of that trial, the documents that led to the conspiracy charges and guilty convictions, were peppered with the misogynistic language that they used, the fact that almost all the defendants had domestic violence histories. And you see things like, and a trigger warning here that I'll use some language that includes sexual and gender-based violence, but the Charleston shooter who attacked peaceful black worshipers in a church while he was doing that attack said, I'm doing this because y 'all are raping our women.

16:01So there are these gendered motivations that often are there about reproductive control over white women's birth rates in the Great Replacement Theory that intersect anti-Semitism and anti-feminism where the targets are often Latinos or Jews or black Americans or Muslims in Christchurch. But really some of that is about anti-feminism because the argument is that white women aren't reproducing enough because feminists are taking them away from their rightful place in the home. What's interesting, though, is when we look at extremist groups, one of the tools they use to financially support their movements is sexual exploitation of women.

16:42Absolutely. And this is one of the hardest parts of the book for me to write and to research because it's just a very difficult topic to talk about and there's so much suffering inherent in it. But we do actually a decent job of talking about this when it comes to Islamist groups. And people are familiar with the Yetzidi women or the Nigerian schoolgirls or how al-Shabaab uses forced marriage as a tactic of territorial control or the sexual violence that Hamas perpetrated in order to increase the pain and humiliation of Israeli citizens and their family members who often witnessed it. But we don't look at the same types of things here.

17:20And one of the things I found is that white supremacist groups, when they're broken up and arrested, they're arrested on one of three charges, or usually all three, racketeering, drug trafficking, and weapons trafficking charges. But the DEA says itself, drug trafficking and sex trafficking go hand in hand. Where there's one, there is the other, like 97 % of the time. And so you'll see something like in California last year, 63 neo-Nazis arrested on racketeering, drug trafficking, weapons trafficking charges. And there's one little line in the news coverage that says the hostage negotiation team was also on hand to assist.

17:54Well, who do you think the hostages were, right? But that data is invisible in our field. We don't bring it to light. Some of that's because you can't protect the victims. Some of that's because it's easier to put them away on those charges. But really, you can add an enhancement charge. District attorneys can do that to make that problem visible and bring justice to that situation. But does that point to a larger blind spot that we have to tackle in order to have a real conversation about this connection between misogyny and extremist violence? Absolutely. And that's part of what I hope the book does is actually empower people to feel you don't have to wait for the government or for someone else to sell tech companies to solve the problems that we're talking about here to keep communities safer.

18:41we can engage on a local level in our individual across the dining table and in the soccer field to help reduce some of these blind spots and the misogyny in general in ways that we know provably have an impact on the mobilization to school shootings or other forms of mass violence. In your book, you organize it into five chapters that explore how gendered understanding of the world helps reinforce patriarchy and spread extremist ideas. You call them strategies for enforcement. They include containment, punishment, exploitation, erasure, and enabling. And I want to talk about containment because this is the idea that women and girls should be kept out of or play subservient roles in male-dominated spaces.

19:26So in short, keep women in their place. How do you see that showing up across politics, religion, and popular culture? Yeah, you see it all the time with phrases, and, you know, it took me a while to see it, and I see it, and in the book, I describe it by doing an analysis of my own hate mail, in which I realized that almost all, once you wipe away the nasty parts of the hate mail that come almost all from men, they all want me to move someplace, right? Stop being front and center. Go back under the rock. Go back to Russia. Whatever it is, one of them just wrote to me and said, I would like you to get out, in all caps, but didn't say where, you know, where should I go to?

20:02Just get out, right? And so there's this idea of containment that is, you shouldn't be on air. You shouldn't be in charge, you know, having this conversation. This should be the domain of men. And so you see that with language like lock her up, send them back, keep them barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. Or with LGBTQ folks, you know, get back in the closet. So it's these containment metaphors are very strong and very present in terms of who should be in the public sphere and who should be in the private sphere. And I think that factors into a lot of different ways that we then think about misogyny and how it can escalate into mass violence.

20:42We got this email from Carol who says, my sister and her husband are members of a church that believes wives should submit to their husbands and in return, husbands should cherish their wives. This thinking seems to me a more subtle way of advocating misogyny, what do you think? Yeah, and I do have a section in the book that talks about this concept of biblical patriarchy, and it's usually around this point in the conversation that I also point out that I'm a preacher's kid, a PK myself, and so this isn't a bashing of Christianity per se. This is about a particular form of biblical patriarchy that says that there's a natural divide that men should be and are biblically ordained to be heads of households and women should be submissive to their husbands, should be, you know, not complaining and should be raising the children and in charge of the household.

21:29That is completely a reflection of patriarchal—you know, patriarchy itself is a power distribution system that gives more power to some men over other men and over women, right? So some men also suffer at the hands of patriarchy. It's not just a very even type of thing. and biblical patriarchy when it's a kind of argument that this is written in the Bible and so it must be so. That is a way of reinforcing that. But as we read in that message, that message is being sent in churches. It's being shared by elected officials. It's not just, you know, dark corners of the internet. Exactly. Yeah, that's why the book, you know, is really an effort to sort of connect in that chapter in containment.

22:16and it's very ordinary and everyday kinds of ways. And so it shows how you kind of can open pathways and how we all have to challenge some of these beliefs within ourself, which is why it was hard for me to write. I also had to confront ways that I have supported these same kinds of systems, raising kids, you know, taking on certain kinds of household tasks without complaint or without realizing it. I think that these are all things that we have to be continually conscious of in our lives and in our relationships with children who we're raising. I want you to connect the dots for us, Cynthia, because it's one thing to talk about misogyny in the abstract.

22:53But what do you understand about how that connects to the type of violence we're seeing today? Yeah, so we have the vast majority of mass shooters, including school shooters, had some personal history of misogynistic or gender-based violence, stalking, harassment. You know, over half of mass shootings themselves have as the target of the shooting is a domestic partner. And everyone else is sort of collateral damage, right, if you will. So that's a terrible situation. So if we address the domestic violence side of things and connect that to some of these mass violence things, we might see some changes.

23:31But we also see that views of women and of women's proper role as reproducers, particularly as integrated with race, white women's roles to reproduce the white nation, that is part of the conspiracy theory called the Great Replacement that has motivated mass shooters in El Paso and Pittsburgh and Buffalo. we see that there's a constant kind of through line of gender-based harms, either exploitation for profit or containment of women in their roles as part of this, even though the targets often are racial and ethnic minorities. And so it's a way of pointing out that these forms of hate and harm are interconnected and have to be addressed more holistically.

24:14Yeah. Pull on that thread a little bit. when we talk about the way this intersects with race, with the LGBTQ community, what did you find in your research? Well, first of all, a lot of black feminists have been writing about this for a long time. And so I really try to lean into that in the book and bring their work to light a little bit around the concept of misogynoir, which is the intersection of misogyny and racism that black women in particular experience. And so this isn't new per se, but I think showing its connection to mass violence that's targeting racial and ethnic minorities or religious minorities is where we haven't paid as much attention.