Political Masculinity E-Book

Susanne Kaiser

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 390

Beschreibung

Men with assault rifles, balaclavas and Hawaiian shirts pulled over bulletproof vests. Horned warriors with painted faces and fur headdresses draped over their naked torsos. The storming of the Capitol brought together men who had previously come across one another only online in the Manosphere. These were men with a common interest, followers of a male-supremacist ideology, who rioted in order to fight for their privilege. Before then, the world had looked on as devastating attacks were carried out by incels: those who seek to gain unfettered access to women's bodies by redrawing the hierarchy of the sexes in order to ensure the subjugation of women. For all of these men, masculinity is a political project, and the events at the Capitol were one episode in a growing movement. From the US and Canada to New Zealand, from Poland to Brazil, right-wing extremists, religious fundamentalists and male supremacists are coming together in order to translate their reactionary dreams of male domination into politics, underscoring the masculine roots of the authoritarian backlash.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Notes

I Organized Misogyny

1 The Incel Movement

2 A New Type of Misogynistic Masculinity

3 The ‘Manosphere’: A Reservoir of Aggrieved Men

4 Violence against Women, Online and Offline

5 Attacks against Women

6 A New Form of Terrorism Emerges

Notes

II The Ideologies of Authoritarians: For the ‘Natural Order’

1 Aggrieved Entitlement

2 The Politicization of Masculinity

3 The Prophets of the Masculinists

4 White Sharia

Notes

III The Politics of Masculinity

1 Translating Aggrieved Entitlement into Political Action

2 Unholy Alliances

3 The Networks and Strategies of the Anti-Gender Movement

4 Follow the Money: How Transnational Movements Are Built

5 Riding Hegemonic Masculinity to Power

6 Biologism as an Attack on Democracy

7 Poster Girls and Female Architects

Notes

Conclusion: Masculinity in Uncertain Times

Notes

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Begin Reading

Conclusion: Masculinity in Uncertain Times

Index

End User License Agreement

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Political Masculinity

How Incels, Fundamentalists and Authoritarians Mobilize for Patriarchy

SUSANNE KAISER

Translated by Valentine A. Pakis

polity

Originally published in German as Politische Männlichkeit. Wie Incels, Fundamentalisten und Autoritäre für das Patriarchat mobilmachen © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2020. All rights reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin.

This English edition © Polity Press, 2022

The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5082-1

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021948547

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press.However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com

Dedication

For Jakob, Daniel and Luca

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jakob Krais, Renata Jakovac, Laurence Erdur, Jule Govrin, Elise Landschek and Marion Kaiser for reading my manuscript so closely, honestly critiquing my arguments, and intensely discussing the topics at hand. Without their help, the book would not be what it is. My gratitude also extends to my editor, Christian Heilbronn, who dug deeply into the material presented here and put his heart and soul into the text.

Introduction

The images that circulated around the world during the final days of the Trump era will long remain in the collective memory: images of enraged white men storming the Capitol Building and rioting in the chambers of Congress and in the offices of elected officials, all while the cameras were rolling. Five people died, and numerous others were injured. These images are iconic because they stand for so much of what had become the political programme during the presidency of Donald Trump. The footage and photographs of the events at the Capitol provide, in a condensed form, a scathing testimony to the times.

It is hardly a coincidence that the vast majority of the rioters were men. Moreover, they were men playacting as men, complete with paramilitary garb: in the photographs, we see militiamen in full battle gear, including bulletproof vests, automatic weapons and combat helmets. In addition, we also see a topless shamanistic warrior with a pelt around his waist and a horn helmet on his head – all while brandishing a spear. We also see QAnon supporters, Proud Boys and members of the Boogaloo movement wearing Hawaiian shirts either over or under their bulletproof vests. Many of these men are carrying Confederate flags, waving around Nazi iconography or wearing gas masks familiar from the world wars. The wackier the outfit, the clearer it is to see just how overexaggerated the militant ideal of masculinity has become. Because it was such a central feature of politics during the Trump era, militant masculinity has become a caricature.

All of these men have one thing in common: they are at war. Against what or whom, exactly, is made explicitly clear in the images themselves, and especially by those from the office of Nancy Pelosi. It is no coincidence that, of all places, the workplace of the highest-ranking American woman then in office stood at the centre of the riots. In the images, the men are pictured staging a denigration of Pelosi for the press photographers: one man, who prototypically embodies the stereotype of the ‘old white man’, stood in his heavy boots on Pelosi’s desk – on the centre, that is, of her political work. This is a typically masculine gesture of disrespect that could have been taken straight out of a cowboy movie. Gallows were erected in front of the Capitol Building, and it was reported that they were set up for Pelosi. Whether the intention was really to hang the female politician or merely to stage a threat, we’ll never know. The message, however, was clear: women should be removed from political office, with force if necessary. These men were wildly determined to retake what they thought had been stolen from them: ‘their’ votes, ‘their’ country, ‘their’ privileges.

Donald Trump was the first president to engage in identity politics with white masculinity, the first president of a Western nation whom an authoritarian backlash had helped to put into office. The so-called ‘storming’ of the Capitol was merely the climax of a development that we became used to seeing during his time in office – namely, the phenomenon of armed men rampaging around in public. This backlash is gendered; it is masculine, as I will show in this book. It is a reaction to the fact that women and other political minorities have become much more visible over the last twenty years, and have been fighting for rights and spaces like never before. The internet made this possible. Without the ‘digital revolution’ and the counter-public of social media, a movement such as #Metoo would have been unthinkable. This movement brought to light an unexpected and eruptive amount of potential and had a decisive influence on the patriarchal structures of the analogue world. It still, in fact, continues to influence the media, the economy, society and politics. Yet a formidable opposition has risen up against this shift towards more equal rights. By all available means, the actors involved in this authoritarian backlash seek to resist, throughout the West, the renegotiation and redistribution of privileges that many people have simply because they are male, white and hetero-cis.

This reactionary backlash movement existed before Trump – again, it helped to put him into the most influential political office in the world. Also, Trump’s political downfall was not brought about, for instance, by the fact that images of men terrorizing the public had become an almost daily occurrence during his time in office. Trump’s fall in popularity among certain sectors of the population was in fact brought about by the Covid pandemic. For he responded to this, too, with the same political programme of toxic masculinity, the heart of which consisted of lying, suppressing information and downplaying things. When Trump himself ultimately became infected with the virus, his political response was to dismiss the illness as being too weak for really strong men, and this message was heard loud and clear by his core supporters. An article in Mother Jones described how Trump staged this masculinity: still recovering and still contagious, Trump climbed up the stairs to the White House balcony, ripped off his mask in a pathetic gesture, and gave a salute to the presidential helicopter as it flew away in the direction of the Washington Monument. Later, a propaganda video of the scene was uploaded to Trump’s Twitter account. The video is set to an instrumental version of the song ‘Believe’, which appears on an album titled ‘Epic Male Songs’.1

A virus, however, cannot simply be gaslighted away; it will remain and spread unless measures are taken against it. The coronavirus demonstrated the limits of Trump’s politics of toxic masculinity. The political gestures of ‘strongmen’ such as Trump, Bolsonaro or Putin – and the male domination associated with these figures – have come under especially strong criticism during the pandemic and have increasingly been regarded as the negative foil to the leadership that women heads of state have shown during the crisis.2 Even the consulting firm McKinsey stated in a paper that the old leadership style was in a state of crisis. Today’s leaders, according to the authors of this paper, need to be able to work in teams, display deliberate calm and demonstrate empathy in order to manage new global challenges such as the pandemic.3

This has not been without consequences. Whereas the mainstream media praised women leadership, an additional discourse also emerged – a counter-discourse: in the semi-public spheres of social media, comment sections and internet forums, there has been an outpouring of frustration about women in power. When the British writer Matt Haig posted the picture of the seven women heads of state on Instagram, together with the remark ‘Time for women to lead the world’, this quickly led to comments such as: ‘Incel tsunami incoming’.4 With this reference to an incoming tsunami of incels, the commenter was simply anticipating what typically happens whenever something is posted about women who succeed in public domains, which are still regarded by many as domains for men: the post is mobbed, ridiculed, threatened, hated, and sometimes these threats are even translated into action, as demonstrated by the many attacks on women in recent years.

Women politicians such as Nancy Pelosi and the former German chancellor Angela Merkel, however, are not the only women who have been the target of verbal, and occasionally physical, attacks. Rather, all women who operate in the public sphere and have had success in (even presumably harmless) ‘masculine domains’ – such as women football commentators or women in ‘male’ film roles, for example – face the same risk. During the 2018 World Cup, every game with a woman announcer was followed by a shitstorm on social media devoted to denigrating the women commentators in question.5 And, however silly this might sound, a great many men regard the masculinity of Ghostbusters as sacrosanct. When the trailer for a female version appeared in 2016, it was ripped apart in YouTube’s comment section as stupid and unworthy – not, for instance, because it’s a trashy ghost story, but rather because the main roles were played by women. The clip was watched more than 46 million times; it was ‘disliked’ more than a million times, and it prompted more than 260,000 largely disparaging or even openly misogynistic comments.6 By way of comparison, the trailer for one of the most successful films of all time, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, from 2019, attracted fewer clicks (44 million), received only 114,000 dislikes, and instigated just 90,000 comments, which are not discriminatory.7

The reactionary counter-discourse has emerged from a field of tension. On the one hand, male privileges persist today and are deeply and structurally embedded in our society. For centuries, masculinity has been the norm around which everything has been oriented, and beneath which everything is expected to be subordinated. In her book Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, Caroline Criado Perez has recently demonstrated how deeply these androcentric structures in fact reach.8 In so many areas of life, women are still disadvantaged, despite the fact that they have long been on supposedly equal footing with men in the eyes of the law. The needs of men remain the standard by which everything is still measured, whether in daily life, at work, in product designs, in medicine or in the public sphere. Regardless of whether we have in mind crash-test dummies, automatic doors, workloads, tools, devices, safety equipment, bulletproof vests, seatbelts, medications, pacemakers or the temperatures in climate-controlled buildings, man is still the measure of all things.

On the other hand, however – and like never before – women and other political minorities in Western societies have been calling into question this norm and the related privileges associated with white, male, hetero-cis domination. Ethically, normatively and discursively, the patriarchy has increasingly come under pressure. The prevailing social consensus is that equal rights are a desirable goal, and this view also sets the tone in the liberal progressive media.

This tension between the factual reality of the patriarchy and its discursive downfall is an essential reason why, in recent years, we have experienced a glut of denigrating and often hateful rhetoric against women. The polemics against equal rights – in the form of men’s forums, comment sections, or on social media – are only a small part of a large movement whose agitations against women and women’s rights can be observed in many social and political spheres. And, as chaotic as the storming of the Capitol Building may have seemed, scenes like this in public space are in fact well orchestrated. From Canada to New Zealand, from Brazil to Poland, there is a well-organized network of misogynistic, extreme right-wing actors who operate globally, as I will show with many examples in this book. Before the proponents of this movement take to the streets, there is first a verbal smear campaign; before women are treated with actual violence in the material world, violence-glorifying content is first shared on the internet. There is an online–offline continuum at work, and it is clear to see. The verbal attacks that trigger hatred towards women do not, however, come from extreme right-wing corners or generally extremist corners alone. Denigrating rhetoric targeting women is far more widespread in our societies: it can be found in the writings of Catholic clergymen, in statements made by the anti-abortion movement, in the verbal loutishness of right-wing populist or conservative politicians, and of course in the misogynistic and violence-glorifying ideology of incels.

Three large movements have thus converged and become interconnected: incels and masculinists; conservatives, right-wing populists and right-wing extremists; and religious hardliners and fundamentalists. They share misogynistic and sexist views; they want to force women back into a subordinate position in the social hierarchy, restore the patriarchy and make the needs and privileges of men dominant once again. For all three groups, feminism represents the enemy, and this is what binds their ideologies together. Why, however, are right-wing factions around the world mobilizing against the specific themes of gender studies, LGBTQ+ rights, and gender roles? What is society’s breeding ground for this?

The process can be understood as a reaction to the deep shocks that have altered male self-perception over the past few decades, and as a fierce defence of masculine privileges and male dominance, which de facto still exist but have been challenged by our value system. In this tension, hegemonial masculinity has been problematized and politicized.9 Trump’s staging of masculinity during the pandemic is just one of many symptoms of a political conflict that is being waged on the field of gender relations. In the name of masculinity, right-wing groups mobilize and engage in politics; calls for the restoration of ‘genuine masculinity’ and the patriarchy fall on fertile ground, from mask deniers to incels. Right-wing populists, masculinists and Christian anti-abortion activists gather under the banner of male dominance in order to mobilize against the so-called ‘gender ideology’. In doing so, they invoke a recurring motif, which plays a central role in the ideas expressed by many of the protagonists of political masculinity: in the relations between the sexes, or so they believe, a natural order would prevail, a natural hierarchy in which women are subordinate to men – if only the social experiments of liberal activists, green activists and gender activists weren’t standing in the way. The modern conception of equality – whether before the law or from an economic perspective – is at odds, they think, with this natural order. Right-wing reactionary ‘thinkers’ such as Jordan Peterson or Jack Donovan lend to this authoritarian movement the pseudo-scientific tools for its ideology of hegemonic, natural masculinity.

This new discourse of masculinity is reflected in the rise of right-wing populist parties and in the rise of strongmen such as Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. Like a common thread, misogynistic agitation pervades the statements and programmes of populist and authoritarian parties and politicians. Hardly anything unites the recent authoritarian efforts as strongly as the fight against ‘gender mania’, against the relativization of masculine power, which is felt as a degradation. The new discourse of masculinity is closely connected with the political convulsions over the past few years. The tension that exists between real and ideal gender relations has given rise to something which the sociologist and gender-studies researcher Michael Kimmel has called ‘aggrieved entitlement’. Men with a misogynistic worldview, according to Kimmel, believe that they are entitled to a wife and to a traditional masculine role (that is, a dominant role) within the family and within society at large. They derive this presumed entitlement from ‘tradition’, and whether this tradition is factual or imaginary is irrelevant to them. From this aggrieved entitlement, politicians such as Trump have formed a political programme of male sovereignty. They harness the frustration, disappointment and rage of those who are convinced that they’ve been left behind, and lure them with the promise of restoring their entitled privileges. This promise of restoration, in fact, is the method of choice among right-wing populist politicians: ‘Make masculinity great again.’

During his presidency, Trump delivered what he had promised to his constituency – above all, to his supporters from the evangelical and alt-right milieus. The rights of political minorities, which had been arduously fought for over the course of decades, were scaled back during the four years of the Trump administration at a rate and to an extent that no one had thought possible before he entered office. Certain women’s rights – for instance, those concerning domestic violence or sexual assault – were set back around fifty years.10 The rights of LGBTQ+ people were drastically reduced, the official government use of terms such as ‘transgender’ was banned, and gender transitioning was criminalized. Funding for women’s health was blocked, and thus resources were lost to protect against such things as maternal mortality, genital mutilation or sexually transmitted diseases. Access to reproductive medicine was restricted, while obtaining abortions was made more difficult – and even impossible in certain states. That was one of the central campaign promises that Trump honoured during his time in office: by nominating Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, three decidedly anti-abortion judges under the age of 55, to serve on the Supreme Court, he paved the way for decades of important legal battles in the United States.

These are just a few examples of the countless political measures employed by Trump to reduce the rights of women and other political minorities. It is no coincidence that the aim of such measures is to ensure that women are unable to make decisions about their own bodies. Reducing women to their bodies – and then regulating and controlling these same bodies – is a central element of authoritarian politics, and an expression of the patriarchal and misogynistic understanding of gender roles, an understanding that puts women in a subordinate position. Trump did damage to the American political system that will be felt for generations. The forces that he released will not disappear simply because he is no longer president. On the state level, the Republicans, as before, still hold clear majorities in the legislatures. In the general population, too, the Trump era will live on; the radical right, above all, remains just as mobilized. He ensured that American society will remain polarized on either side of the culture war, a divide that clearly deepened with his rhetoric and his politics.

The angry white men who benefited from Trump’s politics were already there before his presidency and they remain today – not only in the United States but in all Western countries. Evangelicals, right-wing extremists and masculinists, whose alliance Trump helped to form, have grown into a globally active authoritarian movement that will not go away any time soon, as this book will show. Instead, this movement will probably become even more dangerous for liberal Western democracies, as attested by the rise of right-wing terrorism in the United States and other Western countries such as Germany, Norway or New Zealand. The various ideological influences of this global masculinist, right-wing radical and fundamentalist community can sometimes come together like set pieces in a single person. This much is clear from the storming of the Capitol Building, whose participants stem primarily from the right-wing extremist milieu, but whose worldviews extend far beyond that.

One of these participants was Samuel Fisher, who, in the guise of a ‘misogynistic dating coach’ named Brad Holiday, sold tips on the internet for how to hit on women. By analysing Fisher’s online footprint, a reporter at the New York Times was able to trace every step of his radicalization.11 Fisher teaches young men ‘how to be a man’ and how to become pickup artists who are able to manipulate women for sex. He also sympathizes with the QAnon movement. His dating tips are infused with misogynistic, right-wing extremist and conspiratorial views. Fisher complains about his ex-wife and about the fact that he’s not allowed to see his daughter, thereby taking a position familiar from the men’s rights movement. He not only falls back on exaggerated stereotypes of women – he also presents himself as the victim of an advancing emancipation movement and, in response to this supposed threat, he bought a shotgun, machetes, tactical vests and more than a thousand rounds of ammunition. He travelled to the Trump rally in Washington, posted photographs of himself in front of the Capitol, and was later arrested and tried for his activities there.

So much of what has been brewing for years is embodied in the person of Fisher. There is a decidedly political current in which sexism has been radicalized and has taken on a political dimension. A comprehensive effort to explain why sexism and misogyny have become such important elements of the authoritarian backlash – an explanation that includes all the actors involved and examines their networking activity and reactionary collective potential – has yet to be undertaken. The present book seeks to explain, in gendered terms, the origins of this new predilection for authoritarians and the rise of the authoritarian right.

Notes

1.

Madison Pauly, ‘The War on Masks is a Cover-Up for Toxic Masculinity: How Flouting Public Health Guidelines Became Synonymous with Manliness’,

Mother Jones

(8 October 2020),

www.motherjones.com/coronavirus-updates/2020/10/trump-masks-covid-toxic-masculinity/?utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=naytev&utm_medium=social

.

2.

Magazines, newspapers and news broadcasters such as the

New York Times

, the

Guardian, Forbes

, CNN – but also non-Western media outlets such as the Indian journal

Yourstory

– have lauded this ‘new leadership style’ as highly promising and future-oriented ‘in a new era of global threats’. The general conclusion is expressed neatly in the title of an article by Michelle P. King: ‘Women Are Better Leaders: The Pandemic Proves It’. See, for example, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, ‘What Do Countries with the Best Coronavirus Responses Have in Common? Women Leaders’,

Forbes

(13 April 2020),

www.forbes.com/sites/avivahwittenbergcox/2020/04/13/what-do-countries-with-the-best-coronavirus-reponses-have-in-common-women-leaders/?sh=6620923c3dec

; Leta Hong Fincher, ‘Women Leaders Are Doing a Disproportionately Great Job at Handling the Pandemic: So Why Aren’t There More of Them?’ CNN.com (16 April 2020),

www.cnn.com/2020/04/14/asia/women-government-leaders-coronavirus-hnk-intl/index.html

; John Henley and Eleanor Ainge Roy, ‘Are Female Leaders More Successful at Managing the Coronavirus Crisis?’

The Guardian

(25 April 2020),

www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/25/why-do-female-leaders-seem-to-be-more-successful-at-managing-the-coronavirus-crisis

; Amanda Taub, ‘Why Are Women-Led Nations Doing Better with Covid-19?’

New York Times

(18 May 2020),

www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/world/coronavirus-women-leaders.html

; and Nirandhi Gowthaman, ‘Coronavirus: How Have Women-Led Countries Flattened the Curve?’

Yourstory

(17 April 2020),

https://yourstory.com/herstory/2020/04/coronavirus-women-led-countries-flattened-curve

. For King’s article, see CNN.com (5 May 2020),

www.cnn.com/2020/05/05/perspectives/women-leaders-coronavirus/index.html

.

3.

Gemma D’Auria and Aaron De Smet, ‘Leadership in a Crisis: Responding to the Coronavirus Outbreak and Future Challenges’,

McKinsey & Company

(16 March 2020),

www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/leadership-in-a-crisis-responding-to-the-coronavirus-outbreak-and-future-challenges#

.

4.

Haig’s post can be viewed online at

www.instagram.com/p/B_NVSj5pv7R

.

5.

See, for example, ‘Weibliche Stimmen im Fußball: Hass gegen Kommentatorinnen macht Schule’, ntv.de (22 June 2018),

www.n-tv.de/sport/fussball_wm_2018/Hass-gegen-Kommentatorinnen-macht-Schule-article20493382.html

.

6.

The trailer can be viewed online at

www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3ugHP-yZXw&app=desktop%7D

.

7.

The trailer is available online at

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Qn_spdM5Zg

.

8.

Caroline Criado Perez,

Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

(London: Chatto & Windus, 2019).

9.

The term ‘political masculinities’ was introduced in 2014 by the gender researchers Birgit Sauer and Kathleen Starck. In the introduction to their anthology

A Man’s World? Political Masculinities in Literature and Culture

(Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), pp. 3–10, they take a cultural-theoretical approach and define the term as ‘[e]ncompass[ing] any kind of masculinity that is constructed around, ascribed to and/or claimed by “political players”. These are individuals or groups of persons who are part of or associated with the “political domain”, i.e., professional politicians, party members, members of the military as well as citizens and members of political movements claiming or gaining political rights’ (p. 6). In the preface to their collection

Political Masculinities and Social Transition

(special issue of

Men and Masculinities

22 (2019), pp. 3–19), Kathleen Starck and Russell Luyt use the term ‘political masculinities’ to denote broader contexts of social transition: ‘Whilst we fully agree that gender, and masculinities, are inextricably political concepts in the (re)production of power, the concept of political masculinities can usefully be applied in instances in which power is explicitly either being (re)produced or challenged’ (p. 10). Overall, these concepts of ‘political masculinities’ are far broader and based on a more consistent theory than the concept of political masculinity, as I understand it and analyse it in this book. This is clear to see in the most recent anthology edited by Starck and Luyt,

Masculine Power and Gender Equality: Masculinities as Change Agents

(Cham: Springer, 2020). Here, instead of focusing exclusively on hegemonic masculinity, the authors include, in their understanding of political masculinities, the concept of ‘change agents for gender equality’.

10.

See Maya Oppenheim, ‘Trump Administration “Rolling Back Women’s Rights by 50 Years” by Changing Definitions of Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault’,

Independent

(24 January 2019),

www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-domestic-abuse-sexual-assault-definition-womens-rights-justice-department-a8744546.html

.

11.

Sarah Maslin Nir, ‘The Misogynistic “Dating Coach” Who Was Charged in the Capitol Riot’,

New York Times

(4 February 2021),

www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/nyregion/samuel-fisher-capitol-riot.html

.

IOrganized Misogyny

1 The Incel Movement

When Stephan Balliet set out on Yom Kippur to create a bloodbath at a synagogue in Halle, he didn’t yet know that he would not crack the ‘high score’ that day. He would not kill ‘as many Jews as possible, or at least Muslims’. Thus, he would not surpass his idol Anders Behring Breivik and take the top spot in the ‘first-person shooter / single player’ ranking of the portal ‘Encyclopedia Dramatica’, and nor would he come close to Brenton Tarrant in fourth place. In 2011, Breivik had massacred a total of seventy-seven people, most of them teenagers, by detonating a bomb in Oslo and by going on a shooting rampage at a summer camp on the island of Utøya. In his terrorist attack in 2019, Tarrant had killed fifty-one Muslims at two mosques in Christchurch. Stephan Balliet did not, as he had probably hoped, become a celebrated star in the global shooting-spree scene, because he only managed to murder two people. To break into fiftieth place in the hate rankings, he would have needed to kill fourteen victims.

It quickly became clear to Stephan B., as the press later called him, that he would fail: ‘Ich bin ein complete loser’, he said in a mixture of German and English to the camera that was broadcasting the livestream of his terrorist act. The ‘guys’ on the internet were not especially impressed; only five were watching live. Later, the stream circulated a little in the scene’s hate forums, and Balliet earned points because his livestream functioned.1 He lost points, however, for everything that went wrong, and there was a lot that went wrong: he could not open the door to the synagogue; he punctured a tyre on his own getaway car with an errant shot; his self-made guns and explosive devices functioned only sporadically; and his shotgun, which he had built with a 3D printer, jammed and fell apart when he tried to reload it.

Nevertheless, Balliet and his attack received a great deal of attention from the German and international press, which reported extensively about his anti-Semitism, the gamer scene, neo-Nazi groups in Saxony-Anhalt, and online radicalization. Hardly any attention, however, was devoted to a theme that strongly pervades the story of Stephan Balliet and of other extremists before him: the theme of masculinity. Masculinity – of the militaristic type, above all – has played an utterly decisive role among the Western perpetrators of terrorist acts over the last decade.

Even in Stephan Balliet’s opening statement on his livestream, this theme features prominently: ‘Hi, my name is Anon and I think the Holocaust never happened. Feminism is the cause of declining birthrates in the West, which act as a scapegoat for mass immigration. And the root of all these problems is the Jew’, he said in English. With his chosen name ‘Anon’, Balliet placed his crime, from the very beginning, in the service of internet culture. On internet forums, authors who do not want to reveal their true identity simply call themselves ‘Anon’, the short form of ‘anonymous’. Far more important, however, is the middle part of his statement, which is almost always overlooked in the debates about Balliet’s ideology: that feminism is to blame for the declining birth rates in the West, and that this is the cause of mass immigration. ‘Foreigners’, as he would explain two weeks later before a judge in Karlsruhe, were the reason why men like himself were unable to get any women. He had never had a girlfriend, he said, and he remarked that he was a discontent white man. In fact, at the age of 27, he still lived with his mother, in a tiny room that he seldom left, as his parents reported to the authorities after the crime.

Balliet’s struggle with his masculinity runs through his livestream like a recurring theme. His voice is neither certain nor deep, but rather high and impatient. He is wispy, narrow-shouldered, short, and he walks with the gait of someone lacking confidence. All of this clearly weighs on him heavily, for he constantly belittles himself. Almost all of his sentences contain an expression of self-loathing. Even before one of his weapons fails to function, for instance, he anticipates his failure: ‘This isn’t right. My fucking god, man, load! Ach, screw it, on to the next thing.’ These are the first words that we hear from him, even before his camera is properly set up. He goes on to repeat the following phrase throughout the video: ‘It isn’t working, screw it.’

Stephan Balliet’s self-image is that of a loser who has grown accustomed to things not turning out as he would like them to. The prospect of emerging from this situation as an elite soldier in military garb, as a fighter for a secret organization with a global network, must have felt good for him. ‘Nobody expects the internet-SS’, he says to the camera and giggles, while driving to the synagogue. When he attempts to storm the synagogue, however, his planning is soon revealed to be a disaster: all of the entrances are locked. His homemade explosives are no match for the wooden doors. He will hear a good deal of ridicule for this from right-wing radical circles. Balliet runs back and forth without a plan, seemingly unaware of how to proceed. This is the situation in which a woman suddenly enters the scene. Stocky and with short hair, she crosses the street with a self-confident gait: ‘Does this really have to be going on when I’m walking along here – for God’s sake, man!’ she snaps at him brusquely, as though Balliet’s attack is just a silly carnival joke. The attacker doesn’t appear to know how he should react. By the time he has gathered his wits and loaded his shotgun, she is already past him. Therefore, he shoots her in the back. She falls immediately to the ground. Without having to pay any further attention to her, Balliet returns in silence to the door, but it still won’t open. Upset, Balliet runs across to the woman, who is lying prone on the ground, and he fires another series of shots into her back. This moment is his only triumph. ‘You pig’, he insults the dead woman. Later, during the trial, it is revealed that Balliet had previously referred to men – and, especially, women – as ‘pigs’ if their bodies did not live up to his slender ideal.

These seconds are a key scene in the crime video, because the act of murdering the woman has a conspicuous empowering effect on Balliet, at least momentarily, and it is the only scene in the whole stream to have such an effect. ‘Killing is not complicated’, he ruthlessly states. A little while later, he addresses a passer-by, who is standing near the dead woman and saying something inaudible on the video, with an authoritarian tone: ‘Excuse me?’ he shouts, as if to say ‘Do you know who you’re dealing with here?’ Yet then his shotgun jams again, he’s unable to shoot the man as well, who stumbles slowly and incredulously backwards towards his car. Balliet’s feeling of militant authority, which he briefly gained from his act of murder, is now gone. It is for this reason, perhaps, that he insults the dead woman by calling her a ‘pig’ yet again when he gets into his car. Then he sinks right back into his loser attitude: ‘What would you expect from a loser?’, ‘incapable loser’, ‘once a loser, always a loser’ – these are the utterances that he mutters to himself like a mantra.

These statements are important because they express an attitude that unites Balliet with other men: with incels – involuntarily celibate men who adhere to a radical misogynistic worldview.2 As the term is used today, an incel is not someone who has yet to have a relationship or sex but, rather, someone who is in this condition because women, feminism and society are responsible for making things the way they are. Mostly in the United States and Canada, but also in other Western countries, men organize themselves in online forums in order to exchange violent fantasies against women and, in certain cases, even to translate these fantasies into action. Having been rejected by women, frustrated men have crafted a comprehensive ideology on the basis of their misogyny. They are globally networked, especially within right-wing extremist and right-wing terrorist circles, as in the case of Balliet.

The ideology goes as far as containing plans for an ‘incel uprising’ against the system. These plans involve attacks intended to affect as many women and sexually active people as possible. In the end – or so the scheme goes – incels will assume power and subjugate everyone who is able to have normal relationships. They refer to this idea as a ‘beta male uprising’ or ‘beta rebellion’. Even though this idea sounds crazy, several men have in fact already acted on it, and killed many women in doing so. One example is the ‘incel killer’ Scott Beierle, who, towards the end of 2018, entered a yoga studio in Florida and shot multiple women. The media referred to Beierle and those like him as ‘male supremacists’ in light of their ideological proximity to the white-supremacy movement and the alt-right.

There are indeed parallels between the worldviews and methods of incels and those of right-wing extremists: what, for one side, is a beta rebellion carried out through terrorist acts, with the ultimate aim of taking over the system, is, for the other side, a race war waged through coordinated attacks. Brenton Tarrant, the Christchurch attacker, had announced on Steam, a platform for the gaming community, that there would be an ‘amokalypse’ almost a year before he went on his actual shooting spree.3 His post makes it clear how networked these scenes are: Tarrant made his plans known to a group devoted to David Sonboly, the right-wing extremist who, in a mass shooting in 2016, had killed nine people at the Olympia shopping mall in Munich. In some cases, these ideologies overlap in the worldview of a single person. Stephan Balliet is both a right-wing terrorist and someone associated with the incel community. The incel killer Beierle was a right-wing extremist. He was also, in turn, a model for Balliet, who drew inspiration from a long list of earlier misogynistic attacks: this list includes, in addition to Beierle, Tarrant and Breivik, Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian as well. There is a whole movement of men who organize their misogyny, which serves as the basis of their ideology and culture, in a sophisticated manner. They are networked, they communicate, and they goad each other on.

In the wake of such attacks, there is often talk in the media about a ‘deadly attack committed by a psychologically disturbed perpetrator acting alone’, as in the case of the discussion following Elliot Rodger’s killing spree in 2014. Rodger became the model for many further attacks against women, and yet many commentators downplayed misogyny as a motive for his crime.4 In reality, as I will argue in this chapter, these attacks by incels are a form of political violence and terrorism.

2 A New Type of Misogynistic Masculinity

Today’s online subculture of involuntarily celibate men has hardly anything in common with its early stages. Currently, the movement consists predominantly of men who cultivate a misogynistic and nihilistic ideology of hegemonic masculinity and who blame women for their involuntarily sexless lives.5 The term ‘incel’, however, was in fact coined by a woman. In 1997, a Canadian student named Alana Boltwood created a website and then a mailing list in order to share her experiences with involuntary celibacy and discuss them with like-minded people.6 Boltwood’s forum, which she called ‘Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project’, was not intended to be restricted to a single gender. At the beginning, it was conceived as an inclusive community for people who, on account of social phobias, marginalization or mental illnesses, did not have sex and were unhappy with their situation: ‘I was trying to create a movement that was open to anybody and everybody.’ As to what the movement has become today, Boltwood commented: ‘Like a scientist who invented something that ended up being a weapon of war, I can’t uninvent this word, nor restrict it to the nicer people who need it.’7

Since then, Boltwood has worked as a business consultant and has been working as a queer activist. She had nothing more to do with the incel movement by 2014, when the first incel attack was carried out and when the movement first entered the public’s consciousness: on the Isla Vista campus of the University of California in Santa Barbara, a 22-year-old man named Elliot Rodger killed six people before taking his own life. His initial plan was to storm a sorority house and unleash a bloodbath, but he never entered the building. Rodger left behind an autobiographical manifesto and several video messages that document his radicalization. Since then, attackers from the incel scene have referred to him and celebrated him as a martyr, venerating him as the ‘supreme gentleman’ or as ‘Saint Elliot’. For instance shortly before undertaking his van attack in Toronto, the incel Alek Minassian posted the following on Facebook: ‘The incel movement has begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!’

Of course, there are also incels who don’t even think about becoming terrorists in their wildest fantasies. That said, the organized incel world has meanwhile developed into something in which women are, at best, perceived as ‘the other’. For many years, women have mostly been excluded from the most prominent incel forums. When they are allowed to participate in one forum or another, it is usually under a term of their own: ‘femcels’. The exchanges between incels in forums, or on websites such as incels.co, Reddit or 4chan, are characterized by a deep-seated mistrust of women and often also by undisguised hatred, because they are blamed for the misery of involuntarily celibate men.

In fact, most of these online communication boards sooner or later devolve into misogynistic posts and threats. The language used in these forums is itself indicative of the deep disdain that incels have for women, and for sexually active people in general. Over time, an entire new vocabulary has developed to express this hate-filled worldview: women, for example, are called ‘femoids’, an abbreviation of ‘female humanoid’ or ‘female android’, which suggests that they are not regarded as being fully human. When incels speak about women, they often use the pronoun ‘it’ in order to underscore their lack of humanity. They refer to themselves with terms borrowed from evolutionary theory – for instance, as ‘beta males’ or, even more pessimistically, as ‘deltas’ or ‘epsilons’, in contrast to the ‘alpha male’. ‘Alpha’ designates the masculine ideal: a man with the best genetic material, who has success with women. Alphas are also referred to as ‘Chads’. According to incel theory, the typical Chad is a clichéd model of a man: musclebound, tall, broad-shouldered, with a handsome but chiselled face and a prominent jaw, and not least with a potent member. The feminine counterpart is known as a ‘Stacy’: a very desirable woman, often represented as a caricature of a busty blonde doll. When, shortly before announcing his attack, Minassian expressed his desire to overthrow ‘all the Chads and Stacys’, this was a reference to the ‘beta male uprising’, which in the minds of incels will lead to a new social system in which they will rule and be able to implement new rules for the relationship market. According to the incel worldview, this is their only possibility of rising to the top of society and becoming attractive to others, through their newfound power and influence. Under this new authority, moreover, women will be assigned or allocated to men, which means that male attractiveness will play a subordinate role, given that the women in this system will no longer be allowed to have a choice in the matter.

Couples who start a ‘normal’ family are ‘normies’. Before they start such a family, ‘femoids’ ride around for a few years on the ‘cock carousel’: incels believe that women are genetically conditioned to have sex with as many ‘genetically high-quality’ alpha males as possible. When they’re old and used up – and in the minds of incels, this condition is reached by the age of 30 – women enter the phase of family planning. At this point, they will seek out an average beta male who is faithful, or so the idea goes, and start a family with this man. This type of man is not to be envied, however, for his life involves constantly caring for his wife and children, and it consists of nothing else.