"Misogyny slop" (and four other stories)
Five reads on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism
Happy Sunday everyone! I’ve just come back from a soul-nourishing afternoon with one of my oldest friends. Hope yours has been alright.
And now for the reads….
1) Covid-19 and the new misogyny
Today is five years since the first Covid-19 lockdown in the UK. I remember vividly standing in the kitchen the day that Boris Johnson made the announcement. Rumours that London was going to be locked down had been circulating and everything felt outlandish and exaggerated while, evidently, it was also actually happening. I remember not quite believing we were living through it.
As the anniversary has been approaching I have been trying to force myself to remember what those days were like. My mind conjures up: the benches taped up in our local park; the queues outside the supermarket; the initial urgency and community of friendship via Zoom; long days, in my case, with a small child who wasn’t old enough to do much without me. I have also been thinking about how that time spent at home, alone and online, has shaped what we are living through now, these extremely dark times demarcated by anti-feminist backlash.
At the time, I wrote about the “shadow pandemic” of domestic abuse spiking all over the world (yes, really) amid lockdown restrictions and about how remote working and economic crisis had hit women hardest, which would inevitably adversely impact gender equality. I wrote about what lockdown restrictions did to maternity services here and around the world. Something else was happening too: mass online radicalisation as result of people spending far too much time isolated and on the internet. (On her Substack,
has written about how the “psychological consequences of that prolonged period of isolation” led to numerous public figures “[going] culture-war”).Last summer, after the anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant riots in Britain, the Manchester Mill published a piece about how many of the extreme-right influencers who had been active in the riots had initially moved to the extremes during Covid. Now they are firmly ensconced in the online far-right. Those circles often overlap with the manosphere, or at least with misogynistic thinking. In October last year,
wrote for Prospect about one of these far-right influencers, James Goddard:Goddard is neither the most powerful nor the most profitable among the far-right “influencers” who stoked violent unrest across Britain after 30th July, the day following a stabbing attack in which three children were murdered. But his Telegram channel provides a case study in the information dynamics of modern fascism—that is, of fanatical racists and misogynists with an overt project to violently overthrow democracy.
We are surely now seeing the confluence of these things IRL in the political developments of a certain global superpower.
2) “Misogyny slop”
On her podcast,
talks to feminist content creator Ophie Dokie about the “misogyny slop ecosystem… a sprawling network of online creators and communities that manufacture and boost smear campaigns against women who speak out for women's rights, or have been victims of gender-based crimes like sexual assault, harassment, or abuse”. They mostly take the reams of content about Blake Lively vs Justin Baldoni as a case in point, but they also talk about the Amber Heard and Jonny Depp trial, which had online dynamics reminiscent of the former. They argue that this ecosystem is pushing women to the alt-right.P.s. This week I came across an excellent piece by Sincerely, ShaiAnne about the dehumanisation of Heard. Here is a snippet:
Whenever a woman comes forward about being abused and people instantly find a reason to label her a liar, I think of Andrea Dworkin’s essay “In Memory of Nicole Brown Simpson,” specifically this part of her essay:
You won’t ever know the worst that happened to Nicole Brown Simpson in her marriage, because she is dead and cannot tell you. And if she were alive, remember, you wouldn’t believe her.
I want to think that if Nicole Brown Simpson’s murder happened today, there would be more conversations about domestic abuse and how powerful, abusive men never let their ex-wives truly be their ex-wives. I want to think that if she were alive, maybe she could have had more people on her side and there would be conversations about her being abused and how fearful she was for her life. Then I remember how Amber Heard was treated during the Amber Heard vs Johnny Depp trial in 2022, and I know there’s a high chance that this isn’t true.
3) India’s “boss husbands”
In early March, a video went viral of six men being sworn into a local council in a rural part of India. Why the scandal? These men were the husbands of six women who had actually won the vote—but the women were not present at the swearing-in ceremony. In the New York Times, Alex Travelli and Suhasini Raj report that “this kind of unofficial substitution is commonplace in rural India, in exactly the places where small-time leadership positions have long been set aside for women”. And also:
Since 1992, the national rules concerning panchayats, or traditional village councils, have promised that one-third and in some cases one-half of all seats will be set aside for women. The idea was to lift up a generation of female leaders and to make the councils more attuned to women’s needs.
The spirit of this law, however, is often disregarded, even when the letter is obeyed. The women who are supposed to take seats in the panchayat end up serving as deputies to their own husbands, who wield power alongside the elected men. There is a well-known term in Hindi, pradhan pati, for this “boss husband” role.
4) Texas midwife arrested over illegal abortions
In Texas this week, a midwife was arrested on criminal charges that she allegedly provided illegal abortions. This was the first time the state—which has one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the US—has brought criminal charges under its near-total ban on abortion. Maria Margarita Rojas, 48, faces up to 20 years in prison. According to the heroic
newsletter:Who gets targeted in these cases is no accident. The Texas Tribune reports, for example, that Rojas’ clinics “provided health care to a primarily Spanish-speaking, low-income community.”
[Attorney General Ken] Paxton, a political operator who picks cases strategically, likely chose Rojas because he believes Americans won’t find her sympathetic—whether due to racism, classism, or the stories his office plans to spin. That’s what’s happening in Louisiana, where prosecutors have arrested a mother they say ‘coerced’ her teenager into having an abortion. (Tellingly, they didn’t charge with her ‘coercion,’ just abortion.)
5) The men are just fine
In Liberal Currents, Toby Buckle responds to an article in the Free Press saying that men “need to be heroic—or at least seen to be heroes”. He writes:
If there is a significant societal change that these articles are responding to, it’s not a matter of men losing something—we demonstrably haven't—it's about women gaining something. They can now make their own way in the world. Women can be heroes too! We men can still earn respect in all sorts of ways, but are no longer granted it simply by virtue of being men. People like always having someone beneath them. That, I think, is what the ‘male malaise’ genre is, at its core, about.
When we’re asked to consider the poor, left behind young men, we’re often reminded that girls are now exceeding boys in most aspects of education. This is true and, on the surface, a reasonable enough thing for public policy to think about (for instance, is this gap due to different socialisation, different learning styles, etc?). Beneath the surface, I think something uglier is sometimes being said: That it is an unbearable indignity for boys to have girls ‘above’ them like this.
And also:
There’s an urge in liberalism to debate the highest version of the opposing argument. Steelman, not strawman. That’s valid and useful, but we shouldn't let it get in the way of plainly understanding what the manosphere is complaining about. These are not tortured souls, reading Homer in a world of hyper-feminists who no longer care for it. They’re useless miserable prats who wish they had the courage to call their female boss a b**** and live vicariously through Trump because they imagine he’d do that.
Bonus: “Fragile men control the internet” | Zara goes tradwife | pubes are a personal preference | Trump is no feminist hero (obvs)
Thank you for reading, see you next time.
thank you so much for recommending my piece!! ❣️
That piece from Lorenz is really good, thanks for pointing to it.