Masculinism is on the rise. In the age of the internet, male influencers such as Andrew Tate preaching the belief that men should have more rights, power, and opportunities than women have a bigger platform than ever. So widespread has the phenomenon become that in July the British Police said that violence against women and girls had reached “epidemic levels” and now constituted a “national emergency,” pointing out to 3,000 offences being recorded each day across England and Wales. Elsewhere in Europe, mass killings by incels are being foiled by the police and domestic violence is growing.
With this in mind, the UK government’s new home secretary, Yvette Cooper, has called to treat extreme misogyny in the same way as the far-right and Jihadism. And if there’s one woman who’ll agree with her, it’s Stephanie Lamy, a lecturer in civil society and human security at Sciences Po Toulouse in France, and the author of “Masculinist terror” (“La terreur masculiniste”). Out in October in France, the book urges authorities to take the masculinist threat seriously and delves into its groups, their organisation, business models, networks and links with Big Tech. We spoke with her about how to tell masculinist movements apart and how we can defeat them.
Natalie Sauer: Could you start off by defining masculinism for our readers?
Stephanie Lamy: There are a variety of definitions for masculinism, especially in French. So in French, one would consider masculinism as a branch of anti-feminism. Now I go a little bit further than that because for me it’s not just anti-feminism because some of the groups don’t confront feminism directly, it’s always in a roundabout manner.
So I define masculinism as a set of ideological offers, which are based on male identity and have been constructed, broadcast and operationalized in various radical milieux, on and offline. These ideologies glorify violence under all forms in order to maintain, if not reinforce male domination on women and gender minorities.
It’s my definition. The definitions that exist kind of make them sound like they’re social movements, and I want to make it very clear that they are not regular social movements: these are milieux of radicalisation – I believe the Hague’s International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) uses that term as well – that build these ideologies over time and spread them through different media.
Then, within masculinism, you have different movements. Incels (Involuntary Celibates), who are heterosexual men who believe that society discriminates against them because of their looks and therefore owes them “genetically superior women”, are probably the movement that most people focus on, though they’re not the ones that produce the most propaganda, which would be Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOWs).
MGTOWs are based on a libertarian ideology. For them, heterosexual relationships are a form of taxation on men, which is actually very perverse because it’s the other way around in reality. But what it is today is men deciding that they can sexually and financially exploit women. A very famous MGTOW is Andrew Tate, for example.
Then you have people called pick-up artists (PUA). This is a radical milieu that allows men to transmit knowledge to other men on how to circumvent women’s consent in order to multiply access to women’s bodies
Incel, MGTOW and PUA are three forms of ideologies basically where men get together, think about how they can assert their domination over women. I call these “relationists”, because their ideology is based on how these men situate themselves in relation to women.
This isn’t the case of every masculinist movement. Take, for example, the Father’s Right’s movement, who believe that fathers are being discriminated against in Family Courts because of what they call “feminised Justice”, which you have in the UK as well: Their way of performing masculinity is not through the relationship they have with women or lack of or wanting to have a relationship with women, but by ensuring that even after divorce, the privileges fathers have are preserved.
Do we know how many men in Europe are actively involved in masculinism?
It’s difficult and the trajectories are very fluid. So men can participate for a while, come out of it, go back into it, just like Jihadism, right?
So we have no estimates of numbers whatsoever.
What about the men that join? Is there a typical masculinist profile, sociologically?
Good question. If you look at the incels, for example, it’s more younger men, but it’s not only white men, right? There’s a huge incel community in India, where there is a perceived lack of access to women. With the Father’s Rights movement, they’re mostly divorced men in their thirties and forties.
The specificity of these different ideological formats is that they will always provide an answer to a dilemma in a man’s life. So, if somebody is divorcing, well, you have the Father’s Rights. If you can’t get a girlfriend, you have the pick -up artists. If the pick-up artists don’t work – which they don’t – they’ll renounce them, and they might go to the incels. So it’s really something incredibly smart to be able to offer men a packaged solution to re-empower them somehow based on a conspiracy theory that feminists are at the origin of all their problems.
Let’s talk about how masculinism is impacting our democracies. You are based in France and have been monitoring masculinism there in particular. How did the community react to the rise of the far-right prior to the snap elections in July?
I watched different channels before and they weren’t very implicated.
I think it’s wrong to think that all of the different milieux de radicalisation are far right. What I’ve observed is that they don’t talk about regular politics that much. For them, everything is about access to women’s bodies or men’s rights or men’s needs. It’s not about far right, far left, right or left. And that’s actually one of the tactics these ideology these militants use to recruit from anywhere on the spectrum and then bring it to the far right. So for me, masculinism has to be seen like some form of meta politics.
This is with the caveat that masculinism’s ideas and the ideologies in themselves do have these elements of hierarchy of people and groups, essential Darwinism linked to the far right. But if you ask the members of these communities, they’ll all say they’re apolitical, which is false, of course, given their objective is to normalize violence against women and male domination. Pickup artists like Alex Hitchens will prone rape.
Despite this, you have to bear in mind that modern masculinists started in the 60s, with the far left.
You had women’s groups talking about their working conditions, and then men decided to go off and talk about their own condition as well. Half of them continued talking about how you can deconstruct that, and the other half used the tools that they learnt with the feminist movement and used it against feminists and women in general. So, you always need to remember that masculinism did start on the far left and it brought people to far right ideas, for want of party politics.
Let’s talk about your book ‘Masculinist Terror’, which comes out in French this autumn. Could you tell us what the main thesis is?
The book is a plaidoirie to securitize the subject of masculinist violence, because it is an underlooked form of terrorism. I go through the different ways that security doctrines have marginalised gender-specific violence in their fight against radicalisation. I know it’s not quite the case in England, but it is the case in France. So if you look at the different documentation on anti-radicalisation programs there, they will not probe into the background of the person to check whether there were instances of domestic violence as a child or as an adult. They won’t look at whether these acts of violence are inspired by masculinist ideology. And even the way that media portrays these acts of violence is more as interpersonal violence than terrorist acts.
Could you bring up concrete examples of masculinist violence in France?
We had a masculinist attack in 2020, with the murder of Mélanie Ghione, who was knifed 80 times by her ex -partner, Mickaël Philetas. He produced a huge amount of MGTOW propaganda, which is still online.
But he’s been sentenced for life for murder, not on terrorism charges. And even his lawyer said that he was completely radicalized by the MGTOW movement. On his YouTube channel, you can actually see when he was radicalized, in 2017. You can see somebody asking him: “Hey, are you MGTOW?”. And him replying by video “My God, I’m discovering this movement”.
You can really see it in the videos where he’s been conscientized to the ideology. He starts looking it up on Wikipedia, starts reading about it, and then does a video saying: “MGTOW forever”. It’s the same thing as the Jadists propaganda since 2014. For me, it’s exactly the same thing: the same motivations, the same rhythm of talking, the same way of saying that yes, “They’re all in for the cause”. And that was Mickaël Philetas.
It was first portrayed in the media as a femicide, which is great. But it was more than that. It was actually a terrorist attack because motivated by a violent ideology.
He clearly said in his videos that if a woman did something bad to him, that she needed to be punished. He did it. He killed her. He tried to rape her sister and he tried to kill her new companion. He was equipped. He bought night goggles. This was a commando operation.
The book is about trying to understand why we’re not talking about this kind of violence in security terms.
So what policy recommendations do you make, if any?
So you asked whether in Europe or in France there have been progress. I know that at a European level they’re already looking at incel violence as an emerging threat. I know that’s the case in Canada and in the UK, where you had a horrific incel attack with Jake Davison, who killed five people in August 2021 in Plymouth, was radicalised in the incel milieu. In France that’s not the case. But I think we need to move out of just looking at incels and look at it more holistically.
You need to do more education in schools. There’s currently a huge debate in France about how boys and girls are supposed to relate to each other. Far-right groups want to ban gender and sex education, which teach things like anatomy, respect and consent. I think there needs to be more education, not less.
The other thing is we need more male role models that will be able to talk to young men. And I think that’s a huge point because it can’t always be women talking to children, which is again, you know, fairly sexist.
Another issue is how terrorism and the media production feed one another. I think we need to train journalists also to ask the right questions. When there is domestic violence, when there is rape, always ask the question: has this person been in this milieu de radicalisation? If there is a rape, have they been in contact with pickup artists? This is something very simple that one can do and that would probably produce more information about these movements, which we don’t know much about.
We also need to finance more research. If it became a national security issue, then that’d be the case.
Have you met with masculinists in real life?
So funny story, not so funny story: When I was researching the MGTOWs in early 2020 in Toulouse, it happened that I was just at my dog park, 50 metres away, and one of the guys that I regularly talked to was sitting on the bench and he said: “So you’re a feminist?”
I said: “Yeah”. And he said, “Well, I’m a masculinist”. And I said: “Okay. So what movement do you belong to?” And he said, “MGTOW. Hey, did you know that what just happened was horrific? There was one of the guys, he killed his ex.”
That’s how I learned about Mikaël Philétas, before all the information came out. I was probably the first person outside of the milieu to know that one of the MGTOW’s had killed Mélanie Ghione.
And so I was sitting there, watching the dogs, and he tells me this horrific story. I said “Well, you know, don’t you think that’s kind of horrific? And he said “Well, yes”. And I said “Well, don’t you think maybe it’s time to move on from those people?” And he said, “Yeah, I’m thinking about it. I liked the self-help side”. I said, “Well, there are a lot of self -help books that don’t actually say that you need to kill women.”
That’s basically one of my weirdest, physical encounters with a masculinist. Have I met them otherwise? Yes, they’ve physically intimidated me, found out where I lived and came. Those were the Father’s Rights. Have I talked to them? I’ve talked to them through my online persona. I think at one point when you’re researching these movements, you need to protect yourself as well as not put yourself out there physically.
Let’s say a reader of this interview is in touch with someone they suspect drifted towards masculinism. What can they do?
I think we need to look at the research about conspiracy theories. Because that’s what it is: ideologies which view feminists as this little group of people who have the means to transform the world, just as many conspiracy theories are based on antisemitic tropes.
So the first thing is to humanize women and their point of view, because the whole point of these ideologies is to erase women’s point of view. Encourage that person to ask themselves: What does she think? How does she feel? I think if you start humanizing women’s voices, that’s already huge. I’ve spoken to other journalists who cover this issue. So Pauline Ferrari said to me in June that what she does is leave little hints all over the place. She’ll leave out a book, or a documentary recommendation.
You need to keep in touch with these people. You need to keep the human link going, because the radicalization process tends to tear individuals away from their support systems.
Now, there is another thing that happens a lot on social media is that a lot of people try to argue with different masculinists – don’t do that. First of all, it’s a waste of time. If you don’t know the person personally, they will never believe you. There is no point arguing with them. And it gives them the attention that they seek and they will be able to reaffirm their own belief system, right?
So you need to treat it like one and you need to treat people who are radicalized by these movements also like what you said. There is a huge link about how to react, how to portray them. And I think we have to stop laughing at them. That’s for sure. We need to take them very seriously and listen to what they’re saying.
