I am a novelist, but my novels are rooted in reality rather than fantasy. Recently, while researching my latest book, a feminist crime thriller, I went down a dark rabbit hole. I found myself trawling through the online ecosystem known as the “Manosphere”: a web of forums, podcasts, YouTube channels, and self-styled gurus who peddle varying degrees of misogyny under different banners.
There are the “incels,” men who call themselves involuntary celibates and explain their unhappiness with women as evidence of female corruption. There are the MGTOWs, Men Going Their Own Way, who claim to have rejected women entirely in favour of a supposed self-sufficient life, but who somehow cannot stop talking about women’s supposed evils.
And there are the pick-up artists, a seedy branch that purports to teach men psychological tricks of seduction; there are bizarre “tutorials” which reduce intimacy to a transaction. What struck me was not simply the anger and bitterness that defined these groups but the extent to which their language, once relegated to obscure corners of the internet, has seeped into the mainstream.
The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan once observed that fantasy is often a cover for fear, and misogyny is perhaps the clearest illustration. In Fantasy, Online Misogyny and the Manosphere, Lacan’s interpreters cast light on the fragile egos at the heart of male supremacy. Outward aggression conceals a brittle core, and that brittleness is prone to violence, most often against women.
One need not search long for examples. In Britain this summer, as the Netflix film Adolescence was released, the public was still processing the news that Kyle Clifford, the so-called crossbow killer, had spent hours watching Andrew Tate’s War Room videos and listening to misogynistic podcasts before murdering three women from the Hunt family. Not long before, fifteen-year-old Elianne Andam was stabbed to death on her way to school after rejecting a seventeen-year-old boy’s advances.
Adolescence captures with chilling clarity how an apparently ordinary teenager—shy, withdrawn, his rage invisible to teachers and parents—can be radicalised by hours online. In the film, a boy named Jamie disappears into forums where “red pill” believers promise to reveal the truth about women, where pseudo-statistical claims like the so-called 80/20 rule insist that only a minority of men are ever desired, and where failure with girls is rebranded as structural injustice.
What I had assumed was the sad hobby of a few lonely boys in their bedrooms turned out to be a thriving ideological movement whose influence on young men’s identities is profound and accelerating.
The movement is not confined to the margins. In North America, it has been given a veneer of legitimacy by figures like Jordan Peterson, the Canadian academic whose carefully modulated lectures disguise a worldview in which female emancipation threatens male identity. Even more troubling is the late Charlie Kirk, one-time darling of conservative America and close ally of JD Vance, now Vice President of the United States. The misogyny of these figures is bound up with racism; in the States, the two ideologies are rarely separate.
Kirk once invoked scientific racism to claim white intellectual superiority, citing data that my husband, Atam Vetta, and other progressive academics such as Leon Kamin of Princeton had long since debunked. Kamin exposed the British psychologist Cyril Burt’s fabricated research, which had lent spurious credibility to the notion of innate class and racial hierarchies. Time and again, the supposed foundations of supremacy—male over female, white over Black, rich over poor—turn out to rest on lies.
What unites these groups is a vision of male identity constructed against women. In the West, this comes cloaked in the rhetoric of freedom and choice, but elsewhere it manifests more brutally. In Afghanistan and parts of the Middle East, women are still forbidden from appearing in public life, silenced by edicts that reduce them to property.
Margaret Atwood foresaw this trajectory with terrifying clarity in The Handmaid’s Tale, where women’s subjugation begins not with overt violence but with the loss of financial independence. Once their livelihoods are taken, their bodies swiftly become the property of the state, which is, of course, male. Look at the photographs of Donald Trump’s all-male panel discussing women’s reproductive rights, or the Saudi ministries governing women’s affairs without a woman in sight, and Atwood’s dystopia appears less a fantasy than a premonition.
The current Vice President, JD Vance, is a keen admirer of Nick Fuentes, a self-described “Christian nationalist” whose slogan, “Your body, my choice,” parodies and inverts the language of women’s autonomy. Fuentes invokes the old Nazi doctrine of Kinder, Küche, Kirche—children, kitchen, church—while presiding over online spaces like “Get Back in the Kitchen,” which amass millions of views.
At Texas State University, a man hoisted a sign reading “Women Are Property.” In middle schools, boys chant slogans lifted directly from manosphere forums. Disturbingly, some women endorse this regression: Kirk’s widow, among them, parroting calls for women to abandon public life.
Vance himself derides childless women as “cat ladies,” as though lacking children were a moral failing. What once sounded like satire now reads as policy. The overturning of Roe v. Wade during Trump’s first term was only the beginning. Kirk declared that, faced with a choice between saving the life of a mother or her foetus, he would choose the fetus. In this worldview, women are not full persons but vessels. On the far right, the Left is depicted as “pure evil,” its supposed demonic influence requiring eradication. Violence becomes not an aberration but an obligation.
Charlottesville in 2017 provided an early glimpse of where such thinking leads. There, Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and white nationalists marched openly. When James Alex Fields Jr., a self-professed white supremacist, drove his car into counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring dozens, the movement’s latent violence was made explicit.
Yet even within these circles, rivalries abound. Fuentes’s America First loyalists once heckled Kirk’s Turning Point rallies, vying for dominance within the same hateful ecosystem. When Kirk himself was killed, conspiracy theories bloomed: his followers claimed the Left was responsible, because in the echo chambers of the internet, believers will accept any narrative that flatters their cause.
Peter Pomerantsev’s book This Is Not Propaganda foresaw this digital landscape, where social media algorithms, indifferent to truth, amplify outrage until democracy itself is destabilised. Milo Yiannopoulos, another erstwhile star of the alt-right, flamed out after scandals involving pornography and pedophilia. Yet, his career remains instructive: outrage can be commodified, monetised, and repackaged, regardless of human cost.
For those of us raised on the promise that fascism was a relic of history, the rise of movements like Fuentes’s “Groyper Army” is a shock. This cohort of primarily young, online activists cloaks its extremism in irony, memes, and pseudo-Christian moralising. Yet their influence grows. I recall being fifteen when an American evangelist visited my church, eager to show us how South Carolina churches did outreach.
The footage he played was notable for the absence of Black faces. When I asked why, he shrugged: “They have their own churches.” It was my first glimpse of the quiet segregation that undergirds much of American Christianity. Even then, I sensed that such communities would have turned away a dark-skinned Jesus at the door.
Now, in 2025, armed so-called Christians align themselves with political strongmen, ignoring that the man they claim to follow was a pacifist who counselled turning the other cheek. Jordan Peterson’s insistence on a Judeo-Christian civilisation overlooks the fact that Jesus rejected worldly power, famously telling his followers to render unto Caesar what was Caesar’s.
Yet Peterson’s rhetoric has found eager audiences in Britain, where Reform rallies organised by the notorious Tommy Robinson have welcomed Elon Musk as a keynote speaker. Musk declared their platform “the moderate centre.” If hatred of Muslims is moderation, then what lies beyond?
I met my husband, Atam, in the West Midlands during Britain’s most racist election campaign in Smethwick (1964), and I learned early that you cannot combat hatred by conceding to it. Patrick Gordon Walker, who attempted to win over racists by echoing their concerns, lost in Smethwick.
His successor as Labour candidate, Andrew Faulds, who instead defended tolerance and inclusion, won the seat back from Peter Griffiths. Prime Minister Harold Wilson was unafraid to call Griffiths a “parliamentary leper.” Few remember him now, and that is the point—leaders who named bigotry for what it was ensured that those bigots vanished into obscurity.
-30-
Copyright©Madras Courier, All Rights Reserved. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from madrascourier.com and redistribute by email, post to the web, mobile phone or social media.Please send in your feed back and comments to [email protected]
