My name is Alex Kempton and I am going to be talking about the men’s rights community, their far-right rhetoric and how easy it is for particularly boys and young men – but men in general – to be drawn into his kind of community and what that means for us.
I’m a PhD candidate at Sussex University, currently awaiting my final exam, and my thesis is all about the men’s rights community, how they perceive themselves and how they interact with other online far-right communities.
I want to just give a trigger warning upfront because I will be talking about some very bleak stuff, and using language I’ve come across while researching this community. If at any point you feel uncomfortable or want to leave please feel free to do so, I won’t take offense and I want you to feel able to safeguard yourselves.
I will start out by saying that this community is a danger to all men and boys, including black and brown men. Whilst there is a strong element of nationalism and white supremacy which I will discuss later, it’s entirely possible to be part of the community and not be white. In some of the major acts of real life violence committed by self-associated members of the community, the perpetrators were not white. Some of the leading figures in the community are not white, including believe it or not Andrew Tate and his brother. Their father was African-American and their mother was a white English woman, while Tate also claims to be a Muslim revert.
During the race riots last year, Tate was all over Twitter stating that the problem is immigration which causes men to want to fight for their country as its “in their DNA”. He states that white fathers don’t feel safe letting their white daughters walk the streets. Despite being mixed race, he upholds the white supremacist notion that borders must be enforced lest western countries fall to immigrants. In this way the community is both a danger to black and brown men and boys but also upholds the far-right ideology of white supremacy. You can get involved in the community as a black or brown boy, absorb and perpetuate the misogyny and male-supremacy which in and of themselves are dangerous. But of course, young white men are at particular risk due to the racial elements involved and where this eventually leads to white supremacist ideologies.
I also just want to take a second to talk about the word Manosphere. I started researching the community when I was doing my Masters in 2016, so nearly 10 years ago. When people would ask me what I was researching they would often respond with shock (and horror). Of course, we know that misogynistic men do and have always existed, but that there was such a thriving community online where this ideology was so openly discussed was disturbing news to most people. Nearly 10 years later, we can advertise a meeting using the word Manosphere, and a lot of people reading it will know exactly what we’re talking about, making it a really useful term. The problem with this term, however, and the reason I don’t use it if I can avoid it, is that it suggests that this is a fringe group. A small, or at least self-contained, group of men on the internet maybe bringing to mind middle aged men in their parents’ basement right? But it isn’t, and the spread of the ideology of the community and its influence on societal discourses – which I’ll be going into shortly – is testament to that.
So, instead I’ll be using the umbrella term men’s rights community, and then naming the specific subgroups when I’m talking about them in particular.
In terms of subgroups, the community can be roughly split into 4 subgroups and I’m going to give you a brief overview of each of them because it helps make sense of the community as a whole. It’s important to bear in mind that they all stand on the same foundational ideology and this will become clear as we go through it.
The men’s rights activists
These are the men who claim to speak purely for the rights of men and boys who, they say, have been and are being let down by a society which favours women and girls.A good UK example of this is Fathers 4 Justice, they of the spiderman costume wearing activists in the early 2000s. Father 4 Justice claim they stand for equal parental rights for fathers, and that the family court system in the UK has a heavy bias towards mothers over fathers. Now, no one is suggesting that there aren’t cases where fathers who wish to be involved in their children’s lives are stopped from doing that, and I’m not pretending to be an expert in UK family law. However, study after study has shown that, when fathers do request custody in court (after mediation and pre court agreements) – either full or partial – of their children due to parental split, they get it in around 90% of the time. The notion that there is a structural bias against men in family court is simply not backed up by facts.What this notion does do however is permeate into what we call broader societal discourses – that is the ideas, narratives and conversations we as a society have about our society. I would imagine that most people in this room have heard the notion that family courts are bias in favour of women. If you haven’t, I would think you someone you know has and this has come predominantly from father 4 justice and similar groups.
Mras use examples like women and children being prioritised during disasters and war times to highlight that men are second class citizens. That this completely misses that women are infantilised by a patriarchal society that sees them as as vulnerable as children is an irony entirely lost on them.Another favourite is to say that domestic abuse is most prominent in lesbian relationships – and I’ve seen this narrative repeated over and over again by men you wouldn’t associate with the community. The problem with this narrative is that it is a misreading of the statistics. The figures are taken from research where women were asked both their sexuality and their experience of domestic violence. Where women indicated they were lesbians, and also a victim of domestic violence, the majority of the perpetrators were previous male partners not current female partners. But again, this narrative had bled into wider discourses in an attempt to diminish the impact of male partner violence and shift the blame again to women.
The central pillar of their belief system is that we live not in a patriarchal society but one they term a “gynocracy” in that if favours women and girls over men and boys. This is something we’ll see repeated as we go through this talk.
Pick up artists or PUAs versus Men Going Their Own Way
There are two subgroups within the community which are in many ways at odds with each other. PUAs are obsessed with increasing their “game” which is just the term they use for sexual success with women. They give advice on things like how to get women who are wearing headphones to talk to you, how to keep asking when the answer to your date invite is no, and how to recognise whether a woman is worthy of your attention. If she has had sex with too many men, she is a slut. If she has not had sex with anyone she is either an amazing treasure or a frigid bitch depending on whether she accepts a date invitation.It is pretty common on social media to come across posts from these men – or from others commenting on them – where they talk about these things, they are not hiding behind the camera or mediating their speech for public consumption, they openly talk about how the first no shouldn’t be taken as a no. about how to force yourself into women’s space on public transport or cafes regardless of whether they are wearing headphones, reading a book or actively say they don’t want to talk to you. This entitlement, which is founded in the notion that women are there to be useful to men in sexual conquests, is of course not a new idea but it is one that is now easily accessible and visible.MGTOW are exactly men who actively choose to remove themselves from having female partners. Some will not have any romantic contact with women at all, some will have sexual relationships but not have active romantic relationships with them. They consider women to be the most significant problem for men in modern society, because the so-called gynocracy has moved women away from their true nature, that of homemakers and mothers.Whilst supposedly feeing themselves from the grasp of women, the men in this group spend a lot of time talking about how marriage is a modern day trap for men, in which a woman will turn into a different person once you marry her – a woman who doesn’t want to have sex is the bottom line here. Their lives essentially revolve around their ideas of women, despite wanting to free themselves from women.Despite believing in bioessentialism and the idea that humans are biologically determined to procreate, they will say that having children is the worst thing a man can do as the wife will take him for all his money and not give him the sex he is entitled to.
Both of these groups place the value of women on what they can offer them. For PUAs that is sexual relations, for MGTOW it is their reproductive and care giving ability.
Again, this isn’t a new notion. In my thesis I cite sourced from the 1800s in which men deride the rise of rights for wives due to the impact it has on them – mainly their ability to have sex and make money. However, again, these notions are seeping into our society at a far faster pace due to the internet. Phrases like Body Count are now commonly used – it means how many people you have slept with and if often asked in the early stages of dating someone. The higher a woman’s body count is, the less she is valued and it is the open discussion of this as normal not just between men but in open public spaces online is growing with pace.
Incels
Incels are the group that are currently being highlighted in the media due to the show Adolescant which came out earlier this year.In case anyone hasn’t heard of the term, Incel stands for Involuntarily Celibate. The men in this group are celibate, many of them claiming to never have had sex or a female partner, and they believe that this is due to them not meeting the unfairly high standards of masculinity promoted, again, by a feminised society – hence involuntarily celibate. It is this group of men which has given us the most widely reported acts of violence stemming form the men’s rights community – including here in the UK withe Plymouth Shooting in 2021.Their forums are full of incredibly disturbing conversations – and I really wouldn’t recommend anyone go looking for this content – where women are regularly referred to as “foids” which is short for female humanoids – i.e. reducing women to sub-human; blaming women and their ability to choose whatever men they like to date – god forbid – as the reason for the “80/20 Rule” which claims that the top 80% of women only go for the top 20% of men, leaving the bottom 20% of women for the bottom 80% of men – (their stats not mine obviously). This ideology is again built on the notion that society has been feminised to the point where it is directly bias towards women away from men.
Discussions also cover things like the great replacement theory (the idea that all white people will be replaced by black and brown people due to immigration and birth rates), western and white supremacy, tropes around Jewish people secretly running the world, hostility against the LGBTQI+ community and disabled people and open and regular use of slurs such as the n word. This goes completely unchallenged most of the time and is testament to the far-right foundation of this group.
In terms of spreading influence, there is a slang term “cope” which likely originated in incel and gaming forums (it’s actually pretty difficult to pin down the exact origins) and is used widely in incel forums in particular, often used cope or rope – it refers to either coping with the supposedly awful situation they’re in or hang themselves. It’s also used as a derogatory kind of “oh god just deal with it” way aimed at others who are perceived as moaning about stupid things. This term – cope – is now widely used by younger generations. I had a 13-year-old say it – not to me – but in a conversation a few weeks ago and when I asked if they knew where it came from they had no idea. Having told them they were horrified, but this speaks to the influence online communities have on each other and broader society. It may only be one word but if that can break out of the confines of enclosed communities then anything can.
As I’ve said, the core ideology of all the whole community is of course their misogyny and the idea that society has become a gynocracy in which women are favoured in and by every structure of society from schools to courts to government policy.
Like other far right groups, the community invokes metaphors of war to create a sense of fear among their members – fear that their way of life – or the way of life they would want – is under threat. This, along with the nostalgia narrative which runs through both the men’s rights community and the white supremacy community, is why you see videos like that currently on the Instagram page of the organiser of the national raise the flag campaign. This video – and thanks to Jenny for sending this to me – is a montage of real-life and movie scenes depicting various wars including the crusades and what appears to be the American revolution which is slightly odd, and marching soldiers holding British flags. It is accompanied by a voiceover of a 1930s Oswald Mosely speech about the youth of England standing up and remembering the past. I am not going to quote the whole speech because I refuse to long-quote Mosley, but you can imagine the type of rhetoric used.
Now the irony of this of course is that Oswald was a fascist in league with Hitler, but the same people who like and repost this video will speak of WWII as if it were the pinnacle of English power and prowess. They fawn over the veterans of that war as the greatest generation, while reposting Mosley.
And this is, in part, why it is difficult to get to grips with the community and its ideology because there are so many contradictions. They want things to be back to how they used to be in the good old days of the 1940s/10950s but if a woman they marry doesn’t work then they are a gold digger taking him for his money. They venerate a generation which fought the nazis while talking about killing Jewish people and idolising fascists like Mosley. They say the NHS is on its knees because of immigrants without any irony given that the NHS is held up by migrants.
This thing that allows them to hold themselves together and is in some ways the most important part of their ideology is that these ideas and so-called facts are only known to people who are “aware”. This so-called awareness is based on what is called red pill blue pill choice which in turn comes from the theft of a central plot device in the film The Matrix.
The lead character in the film is shown the truth about the world and then given the option of taking the red pill, which means he will continue to know the truth and join in the fightback, or a blue pill, which will take away his knowledge and allow him to go back to life as usual. This community consider themselves red pilled. They are aware of how society truly is, and everyone else is either unaware sheep or blue pillers, people who know the truth but choose to ignore it.
And herein lies the danger.
A young man who is struggling with life under capitalism, lives in relative poverty, is struggling to succeed in a school system which doesn’t priories individual needs, or can’t get a job because the economy has been tanked again. Or a young man who struggles to talk to girls, who sees a man like Andrew Tate who is surrounded by beautiful women talking about how much sec he is having. These boys are then presented with the notion that this is happening because of a secretive conspiracy in which he and men like him are deliberately disadvantaged, while their female peers apparently are not. They are told about bioessentialism, in that women and men are fundamentally different, that women are biologically destined to reproduce and be homemakers, want to be protected and looked after by men whose role it is to be protector and provider.
They are then drip fed other far right ideologies such as the reason the economy is tanking is because of immigrants coming and simultaneously taking their jobs and costing millions in benefits. They’re told white men are alpha –the real men while non western men are uncivilised and barbaric, coming to their country to rape their women as they supposedly do in their own country. They are told that being a real man means protecting your women and children from this threat from uncivilised hordes of men coming into your country, to be a real man means to fight for your country, to be aggressive and hostile in the face of threat.
It is easy to see how a lost young man who is struggling to find a job or a girlfriend can go into this community hoping to find answers to the problems he faces and come out radicalised into the far right.
I’m not in any way attempting to relieve these men of responsibility. There are, as we well know, plenty of men both young and old who have not and would not buy into the ideology of the men’s rights community or the white supremacist community. However, we live in a world were sexism and misogyny are still very much accepted and normalised. From objectification of women in the media, rape jokes going unchallenged, sexual harassment being so common I have yet to meet a woman who has not experienced it, rape basically being decriminalised in this country due to the shockingly low conviction rate, you can even think – especially with Christmas ad season almost upon us – of the way in which tv adverts place women as the ones who do all the shopping, pushing through even if they’re unwell, while their husbands sit at home or go and watch the football. The fact that the majority of power in this and other countries is held by men – despite the current government’s attempt to suggest otherwise.
Can we really be surprised that we have raised yet another generation of boys that they are superior to women?
So while misogyny and sexism are the symptom of this movement, and misogyny is dangerous in and of itself – even without the additional racist and nationalist ideologies – they are not the cause. The cause is inequality, rampant capitalism and politicians which continue to perpetuate the racist scapegoating which allows these communities to flourish.
Hastings and Bexhill Stand Up to Racism 