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Key points
- Hostility toward girls and women is flourishing in the digital world, where anonymity and algorithms are fuel.
- Young people are at risk for living in a world where gender-based hate and abuse is normalized.
- We can help counter online misogyny by talking about and fostering crossgender empathy in real life.
It's easy to see how feminism and the movement for women's rights has brought huge changes over the decades (notwithstanding what many consider to be regression in women's reproductive rights since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.) We've seen the modern intersectional women's movement expand focus on racism, sexual orientation, and poverty, and take on entrenched sexual harassment and abuse. Every day we see strong female politicians, CEOs and entrepreneurs, technology experts, scientists, astronauts, film directors, artists, musicians, athletes. Girls can aspire to anything. More women are graduating from college than men, men are parenting more (even doing laundry!) Women's health, the rights of nursing mothers, and menstruation have emerged as public issues as never before.
But there are very real obstacles to progress for the safety, equality, and progress of women and girls. A relatively small (compared to the entire population) but very vocal minority of misogynistic voices are creating gender wars everyday—especially in cyberspace. Many of the proponents are part of online communities sometimes named under the umbrella of "the manosphere," including "incels" culture and other extreme "men's rights" groups.
An array of examples include: "redpiller" rants on Reddit, Discord, and more recently on the alt-right platform Gab, as well as widespread "revenge porn" and deep fakes victimizing women and girls, rape threats, virtual sexual assaults and harrassment in online and VR gaming, and a sense among some men that women are "the enemy" or don't warrant being treated like humans.
The larger issue of why men—young men especially—have become attracted to misogynistic or anti-feminist ideologies is complicated but laid out well here. In a nutshell, they are told feminism's attempt to change gender relations is "toxic propaganda" that undermines natural sexual differences. According to "incels" ideology, feminism makes women unavailable to regular (non alpha) men, much to their frustration. In "allowing" women sexual autonomy and economic power, the ideology claims, men are not getting "what they're entitled to" and have become the victims in society.
While movements of hate and movements against equality have plagued us for centuries, digital life has provided new fuel. In our social media centered world, ideas of all stripes are accessible easily 24/7 and spread quickly. Algorithms, not people, push content to users that they “think” the user might want. Repetition of similar and related content creates feedback loops, preventing exposure to different points of view and "big picture" thinking. The anonymity that's possible in cyberspace can allow people the freedom (or audacity) to say, create and share the most extreme and hostile content, things that many people would not say or share if another human being was in front of them. And as research and experience shows, sensational inaccurate ideas are more likely to spread on social media than sensible truths.
Sociologists and historians tell us that backlash to social movements is part of history. In 1991, author Susan Faludi famously chronicled cultural moves to undermine the substantial progress for women which emerged in the 1970s and 1980s in her popular book "Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.”
In 2024, the forms and venues for hostility towards women and girls may be different than in the 1980s and 90s, but the backlash effect remains. Social change can prompt fear, uneasiness and insecurity among those who fear they can be hurt by it, disagree with it, or feel they are being left out by it. Belittling, humiliating, hating, and villainizing women and girls—which conveniently can be done from behind a screen—emerges as some mens' and boys' outlet for deep frustration, loneliness, resentment, or confusion.
While it's important to remember that "the manosphere" hardly represents a majority of men in the world and rightly shouldn't even be named after the whole gender, the extreme hostility expressed in these cyberspaces, the reach they have, and the damage and trauma they can cause is very real.
In her new book, Over The Influence: Why Social Media is Toxic for Women and Girls and How We Can Take it Back, author Kara Alaimo points to how the mainstreaming of misogynistic and violent content against girls and women online is particularly harmful, and can lead to these attitudes and behaviors becoming normalized, both online and in the real world. She points to how jokes about sexual humiliation and sexual violence against girls and women are being shared casually and widely among young people on popular platforms like TikTok. “We have to change and prevent the normalization of misogyny” says Alaimo. “We don't want to engage online with abusive content, because algorithms will amplify content that has more engagement. But we have to have conversations with people offline who are sharing this content to talk about why it’s wrong and to socially stigmatize the practice.”
Part of the solution also lies with increasing the responsibility of tech platforms to maintain a safe and non-violent user experience—especially for young people still in the formative years of brain development, impulse control, and values formation. Recognizing that online hate, misogyny and sexually violent content can have real health consequences is fundamental. The Kids Online Safety Act, currently working its way through Congress, would impose a greater duty on tech companies to restrict access to online and social media content that's harmful to young people. And concerted grassroots activism putting pressure on tech platforms who aren't doing their job of monitoring and removing dangerous content can come from the user community as well. Advice and resources to remove non consensual pornagraphic images from the web are available.
At the highest level,The White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse, established in 2022, will be reporting its recommendations later this year after gathering input from an array of experts and victims of online gender-based abuse.
Of course we need more dialogue and less diatribe. We need authentic conversations and creative solutions, both online and in the non digital world, from educators and peacemakers, parents and mental health providers, upstanders, and those who harbor hate themselves.
The digital world reflects all that we are as humans—the good, the bad, the ugly, and sometimes very very ugly. It's a mirror for us, a mask behind which to hide, an escape vent for strong emotions for some, and a ginormous communication network spreading what lurks inside us everywhere, in a nanosecond. And it's certainly not going away.
We need to make sure young people have regular, safe and engaging places for being heard about what's going on in their digital worlds. And we need especially, to have inclusive, honest, face to face, authentic conversation about gender roles, what they mean for all of us, boys in particular, as young people are developing into adulthood. We can and should be sharing those struggles, vulnerabilities, insights, and experiences with each other with empathy and understanding, across the male-female "lines", reminding ourselves regularly of the shared needs we all have: respect, recognition, equality, and safety.
