On a Friday evening in November 2018, a 40-year-old man opened fire in a second-story yoga studio in Tallahassee, Florida, killing two women and injuring five others, including four women, before his weapon malfunctioned. It is hard to imagine a case with more red flags indicating an ongoing and escalating violence toward women. The shooter had a decades-long history of harassing, stalking, and assaulting women. He wrote songs, stories, and screenplays with fantasies of torture, rape, and murder of women, with titles like “Stalker” and “Locked in my Basement.” In dozens of separate incidents over the course of years, he was kicked out of apartments, jobs, family birthday parties, teaching positions, and the military. He was repeatedly implicated in incidents of unwanted touching, harassment, stalking, and battery against girls and women, as well as using school district devices to search for pornography involving yoga and cheerleaders. The man was arrested several times and completed court-mandated counseling with a sex addiction therapist. His parents were so afraid of him that they slept with their door locked when he was home.
A series of attacks that killed over two dozen people and injured dozens more — including the Florida yoga studio attack, as well as mass shootings targeting women at a California sorority and at Atlanta massage spas, a Toronto vehicle-ramming attack, and an attack at a New Jersey judge’s home – have thrust violent misogyny and misogynist incel (involuntary celibate) extremism into the public eye.
Yet even as the problem garners more attention, misogynistic and male supremacist violence is still often relegated to a category of “other” threats, or dismissed as the personality problems of challenged individuals, rather than addressed as an ideological belief system of its own. The misogynistic and gendered dimensions of extremist movements are often ignored or brushed aside in media reports, policy analyses, or during prosecution. Defense attorneys for the Michigan militia members charged with plotting the kidnapping of the state’s governor dismissed the alleged extremists’ language – in which they repeatedly referred to Governor Gretchen Whitmer as a bitch or a “tyrant bitch” while plotting her kidnapping and execution – as just “big talk” and “blowing off steam.” After a man killed eight people in Atlanta spas in 2021, the police chief initially explained the shooter’s actions as rooted in his feeling of being “fed up” and “having a really bad day.” It’s not just legal authorities who have helped minimize violence and misogyny. Ordinary people also normalize online hate as part of the cost of engaging. After a gunman attacked an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, his extreme misogyny and violent threats against teen girls online came to light. Teenagers who had observed his digital rage said they didn’t report it because it’s just “what online is.”
It is impossible to understand the rise of modern extremism, especially on the far-right, without recognizing how it is fundamentally gendered – and especially the role that misogyny plays in radicalizing and mobilizing many men to violence. Misogynist, anti-women, and antifeminist rhetoric is nearly always present in accounts of terrorist radicalization or motivation. Violent misogyny, stalking, harassment, and abuse of women or the LGBTQ+ community are constantly present in the details of mass shootings or terrorist attacks, although these behaviors are infrequently acknowledged and even more rarely analyzed. In case after case, misogynistic rage against women and the LGBTQ+ community, or prior reports of intimate partner violence, are a documented part of violent perpetrators’ histories, even when their official motives lie elsewhere (or are unidentified).
The white supremacist terrorist who killed seventy-seven individuals, mostly children, in Norway in 2011 wrote that feminists were waging a “war against boys” and should be blamed for low white birth rates. The 2019 terrorist attacker in Hanau, Germany peppered his manifesto with incel references, while another attacker that same year in Halle, Germany included a livestreamed playlist that began with a neo-Nazi rapper whose lyrics are also deeply misogynist. The neo-Nazi who murdered eight people in an Allen, Texas shopping mall in May 2023 left behind extensive writings detailing violent fantasies rooted in an expansive belief system about “real” manhood, violence, and the defense of nation and race, which included a “fixation with sex, pornography, and punishing women by violently raping them.” The attackers who killed dozens at a Virginia university, a Florida LGBTQ+ nightclub, a Parkland high school, and a Maryland newsroom all had prior reports of stalking, domestic violence, or harassment of women.
Some male perpetrators direct their violent rage toward the abstract enemy of “feminism” itself or the idea that women’s gains come at the direct expense of men and white civilization more broadly, especially because white women are, in their view, not having enough white babies. This type of misogyny often intersects with antisemitism or the scapegoating of Jews or racial and ethnic minorities for the so-called great replacement of white civilization. In dozens of incidents – at a Black historic church in Charleston, a California synagogue, a Buffalo grocery store, and others – attackers blamed feminism, falling white birth rates, frustration with women who did not meet their sexual needs, or blamed minorities for “raping” white women as motivation for their attacks.
In a growing number of other instances, misogynist and male supremacist perpetrators act out their rage in violent mass attacks that specifically target groups of women. Many of these attacks are committed at the hands of men in the violent, misogynist incel movement, who lash out at women in anger at their inability to establish romantic or sexual relationships. Dozens of people have been killed over the past decade in misogynist incel attacks targeting women at a California sorority, the Florida yoga studio, an Oregon community college, and a New Mexico high school – in addition to similar attacks elsewhere across the U.S., in England and Canada.
Evidence is clear that support for online misogyny makes violent attacks by terrorist and extremist groups more likely. People who hold hostile sexist views are substantially more likely to express support for political violence and violent extremism. The relationship is robust and reported across a wide range of national and ideological contexts, with the evidence showing that hostile sexist and misogynist attitudes are often a more significant predictor of support for violent extremism than any other factor – including, in some countries, religiosity, age, gender, level of education, and employment.
The targets of these episodes of violent rage are not always women, however, a fact demonstrating the complicated ways that different forms of supremacism and hate overlap and mutually reinforce each other. Toxic online subcultures that are misogynistic can easily introduce or strengthen exclusionary ideas about national purity, degradation, and degeneracy that are racist and dehumanizing. It is therefore critical to understand the key role of misogyny as an ideological glue across various forms of extremism.
How a Crisis of Boys and Men Connects to Rising Online Misogyny and Mass Violence
It is worth noting that boys and men are not only the predominant perpetrators of violence in a culture that valorizes and rewards dominance and aggression as hallmarks of masculinity, they are also often victims of that same violence, including as childhood victims of domestic abuse, bullying, and street fighting. Boys and men are struggling in a bevy of ways that have only recently gained mainstream attention, including the labor loss of traditional male jobs in a post-industrialized economy, the declining percentage of men relative to women who earn higher education degrees, and the fact that men account for the significant majority of “deaths of despair” (overdose, suicide, alcohol abuse) amid surging reports of male loneliness, depression, anxiety, and isolation.
There has been periodic, public acknowledgment of how these outcomes are a part of a “masculinity crisis.” There has been far less open discussion, however, about how that masculinity crisis is evolving into a misogyny crisis – even though that emergency is strikingly clear online through the repeated scapegoating and harassment of women and the LGBTQ+ community, as well as growing evidence that American adults are experiencing increased online harassment, often due to gender.
Scholars have tracked significant increases in online misogyny starting in 2011, with misogyny and hostile sexism now regularly described as a “routine” part of women’s daily lives, an emerging “established norm” of digital spaces, and an “epidemic.” Graphic rape and death threats are now a “standard discursive move” for expressing disagreement or disapproval of women online, as some men communicate in ways that not only challenge ideas, but also aim to scare and silence women’s voices.
While the misogynistic ideas being expressed online are not new, online spaces and places offer novel ways to communicate those ideas. Direct messaging on social media platforms, live in-game voice chats, and other communication features of online spaces have made the use of gendered slurs, rape and death threats, and other forms of gendered discrimination a ubiquitous part of online engagement. New forms of digital media and the ever-present ease of smartphones enable the effortless sharing of sexually explicit photos and videos, including AI-generated images or videos and revenge porn, alongside cyberstalking, doxing, harassment, sextortion, verbal abuse, and hacking. Social media platforms amplify and increase exposure to harmful and hateful content and spread misogynistic attitudes contagiously – in part because the structure of social media incentivizes angry and salacious posts, which garner more attention and are more likely to go viral.
Misogyny is “Historically” Absent from Security Discussions
Violence itself tends to emanate from the fringes, but the problems are much bigger than “extremists” per se. Extremist violence is underpinned by and mobilized through conservative mobilization, mainstream normalization, and liberal silencing of misogyny and gender-based bigotry. This includes the fact that the problem of misogyny – and of women’s security concerns more broadly – has “been historically absent” from traditional security discussions. The oversight is strikingly evident across a wide variety of government and nonprofit reports on terrorism and mass shootings. The silence in official reporting is as shocking as it is deafening.
Even more tellingly, the U.S. government does not include gender or sexual orientation as categories within our national threat assessment classification of domestic violent extremism, where attacks motivated by gender or sexual orientation are folded into a catch-all category of “other.” Even animal rights extremists – who pose a risk to property damage at wildlife facilities and laboratories but are considered a “low threat to the United States in relation to other extremist movements” – get a category. Not so for gender or sexuality. This oversight helps explain why existing approaches have done little to eradicate the problem. Gendered violence, at least in the U.S. government’s assessment, is merely an “other.”
Misogyny: A Path to Violent Extremism That Must Be Addressed
Misogyny is an inextricable root of, and an underacknowledged pathway to, violent extremism. In the present context, in which hostile sexism and misogyny are frequently mainstreamed and incubated on social media, taking a closer look at where those beliefs come from and how ubiquitous they are can help shed light on the pathways to violence, including when and how society might best be able to interrupt them. The collective failure to connect everyday misogynist encounters, as well as the normalization of sexist experiences, with rising mass violence against a wide range of groups has left a gaping hole in efforts to prevent it.
