Many of the people rioting in towns and cities in England and Northern Ireland claim that their violent acts are their way of “protecting” Britain’s children. It’s a confusing paradox, but one that must be understood to get to the bottom of what has happened.
“Protecting” women and children is central to nationalist rhetoric. This is why the Southport attack that killed three young girls proved an instant trigger for the violence that subsequently unfolded. The death of three small girls struck to the heart of ultra-nationalist, anti-immigrant narratives about the threat posed by immigrant men.
Even though the teenager arrested over the attack is not an immigrant, misinformation was spreading that he was. And those rioting outside hotels housing migrants and mosques are presenting themselves as taking action against the threatening people inside.
White supremacy is founded on the narrative of a specifically gendered and racialised threat – the threat from “other” men to “native” women and children. This idea is the undercurrent to the Nazi slogan kinder küche, kirche (children, kitchen, church) which situates women inside and men outside the home. It’s explicit in the so-called “14 words”, the most famous slogan in white nationalism, which urges followers to “secure a future” for white children.
It is a threat that requires a particular masculine response: violence. This is what nations, and the far right, have long been built on.
The manosphere and the far right
During research for my book Extreme Britain (2023), I attended far-right demonstrations and talked to both men and women about why they were there. My conclusion was that, although individual reasons differed, extreme activism was focused on achieving masculine status, expressed in different ways.
Those associated with far-right group Britain First, for example, idealised military, disciplined Christian masculinity. The group itself adopts military symbols in its messaging. Its “security” staff wear paramilitary style uniforms. Members carry nationalist flags with military insignia, and demonstrators march to drums. The group is infamous for so-called “mosque invasions”, where they carry the cross into mosques.
Alamy/Milo Chandler
The culture of English Defence League (EDL) protest is different. They adopt the norms of the football grounds – such as drinking and chanting – and the casual violence of football hooliganism. To them, the EDL co-founder Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley Lennon) represented a particular expression of robust, “working-class” (their label) identity, that cannot be tamed, despite perceptions of state attempts to silence him. People I met chanted his name, posed for selfies with him and had his face on homemade T-shirts.
Following the Southport attack, Robinson told men that they need to prepare to become a “dedicated, fit, healthy, ready, British resistance”.
Robinson began the video in which he made this statement by telling viewers he had just completed a workout – emulating something misogynist influencer Andrew Tate is known for. Tate’s entire messaging is aimed at young men and is one long sales pitch of aspirational “warrior-businessman” masculinity, in the face of a culture of emasculation led by liberal government and empowered women.
While not explicitly far right, Tate’s messaging calls on the western “common man” to wake up, and he has shared far right propaganda, such as great replacement theory memes.
For Tate the message begins at home: “If you don’t feel like a king in your house, how are you to feel like a king anywhere else?” In his view, because western men are so downtrodden by a feminism that has destroyed the nuclear family unit, they do nothing to protect them. Tate regards himself as an alpha male, the superlative warrior and teacher. In a Rumble video entitled “Collapse”, published three days after the Southport attack, Tate said it was “men like me” that would stand up to someone attacking “little girls” – claiming politicians would walk on by.
Men are needed to build a counter narrative
For both Robinson and Tate, the response to one act of male violence – the Southport attack – is to ready other men to fight back. Online influencers made the attacker’s ethnicity the focus of the attack, not any other characteristics, such as, for example, his maleness, in order to justify further violence.
But the real problem here is male violence – across Britain, as in the Southport attack, and this needs to be confronted. Yes, women have been visible at protests and riots, and women can of course “do” far-right masculinity too. But they have so far been in the minority.
Confronting male violence with more male violence, believing in the worth of male violence, and giving it status, as Tate or Robinson do, will only perpetuate a cycle. There needs to be an alternative.
Some men are already trying, taking a positive masculinities message to social media and workshops, to try to counter the toxicity of Tate and others like him. Male gender scholars are also working with peace activists in conflict zones to reconfigure how we understand masculinity, and how to promote masculinities that can resist political violence, rather than resist other men. But as masculinities author and scholar David Duriesmith notes, men first have to acknowledge that gender shapes their lives as much as it shapes women’s.
Extremist gender norms are not produced in a vacuum. Ultra-nationalism is possible because we accept the validity of nationalist norms – that men should defend women, that attacks on women emasculate “their” men. Tate thrives because men like his messages. If we want to tackle Robinson, or Tate, or stop the epidemic of men’s violence against women and girls, we need a community of men, not a manosphere, ready to rescript gender roles and gender relationships. These men cannot afford to remain simply women’s allies, but need to be proactive, as role models.
