What incels really think (and four other stories)

Five reads on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism to end your week.

Dear readers,

I hope you’ve had a good week. Welcome to the new subscribers among you, and welcome back to the readers who were here before. I’ve been ill this week, and the illness incapacitated me exactly in the days that I usually write this newsletter, which is why I missed last week’s edition. My sincere apologies for not sending it out.

P.s. That week, I published an interview in the New Statesman with the only British MP of Palestinian descent, the Liberal Democrat Layla Moran, who has relatives trapped in Gaza. We talked about the war and the Middle East crisis more generally. Here is a link, in case it’s of interest.

Now, over to the reads….

1) In Alabama, embryos are now children

This week, Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos can now be considered children under the law of the state. The Court’s decision came after three couples undergoing IVF sued a fertility clinic where their frozen embryos were accidentally destroyed by a patient. According to Al Jazeera:

A lower court ruled the embryos could not be defined as people or children and dismissed the wrongful death claim.

However, in a 7-2 ruling, the all-Republican Alabama Supreme Court disagreed. Citing Bible verses and an 1872 state law called the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, Justice Jay Mitchell declared parents may sue over the death of a child regardless of whether the child is born or unborn.

According to Sean Tipton, chief advocacy and policy officer at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine:

“This is the first full-act, for any judicial or legislative entity in the states, that has attempted to legally equate the fertilised egg in a freezer in a clinic, as being the same as a foetus being gestated in a womb as the same as a born baby”.

Now, fearing repercussions and lawsuits, multiple fertility clinics in Alabama have stopped operating, placing IVF services in the state at risk.

2) What incels really think

A study of 561 self-identified “involuntary celibates” (incels for short) has found that action on mental health and ideology is likely to be the most effective in addressing violence committed by this subset of the manosphere. The report, commissioned by the UK government’s Commisson for Countering Extremism, the largest survey of incels to date, polled incels in the UK and US to gain insight into their demographics, attitudes to violence, and political beliefs. The authors also considered whether there should be a counter-terrorist response to the incel community, given the rise in attacks by incels. Here’s a snippet:

Incels are a primarily online sub-culture community of men who forge a sense of identity around their perceived inability to form sexual or romantic relationships. The incel community operates almost exclusively online, providing an outlet for expressing misogynistic hostility, frustration and blame toward society for a perceived failure to include them (Speckhard et al., 2021). In recent years, the online community of involuntary celibates (incels) has risen to the top of the news and security policy agenda. This is largely due to several high-profile terrorist attacks, resulting in 59 deaths, including Isla Vista in 2014, Toronto in 2018 and Tallahassee in the same year (Moonshot, 2020), although in some cases, there has been a debate as to whether incel ideology was the driving force behind the attacks.

…..

The purpose of this study was to use a large sample of incels from the UK and US to establish (a) their demographic make-up; (b) the consistency of their attitudes and beliefs; (c) their adherence to a common world view, (d) how they network with other incels; (e) whether there are cross-cultural differences between incels from the UK and US in the above; and finally, whether there is a predictive relationship between incel mental health, networking and ideology and the extent of their harmful attitudes and beliefs.

3) The feminist marketing of medical tests

Research by University of Sydney academics has found that various companies and organisations are promoting tests, treatments, and healthtech to asymptomatic women using the language of feminist empowerment. In a piece on The Conversation the authors write:

Feminist narratives around empowerment and women’s rights are being co-opted to market interventions that are not backed by evidence across many areas of women’s health. This includes by commercial companies, industry, mass media and well-intentioned advocacy groups.

Some of these health technologies, tests and treatments are useful in certain situations and can be very beneficial to some women. However, promoting them to a large group of asymptomatic healthy women that are unlikely to benefit, or without being transparent about the limitations, runs the risk of causing more harm than good. This includes inappropriate medicalisation, overdiagnosis and overtreatment.

4) Voices on sexism in British schools

In Cosmopolitan, Amber O’Connor has put together a symposium of students and teachers on how bad misogyny in the UK’s schools really is. It’s a fascinating read. One teacher in West London made a connection that I haven’t seen made anywhere else (have I just missed it?) between the rise in the influence of the likes of manosphere influencer Andrew Tate and Covid-19:

"Many students don't agree with feminism and hold Andrew Tate as a role model, although the Tate references have improved since he’s been in prison as he hasn't been on their phones as much. At one point when Tate was in the media every day there were multiple incidents of boys asking female teachers what ‘colour is their Bugatti’ [a clapback in response to criticism implying ‘I’m superior to you’]. The real turning point was during the pandemic; students were spending more and more time online and on TikTok without supervision and the algorithm funnels them down a very anti-women rabbit hole.

5) “A referendum on anti-feminist backlash”

As a US election nears, Sarah Jones at New York magazine argues that, given Donald Trump’s likely return to the fray, the vote will in part be “a referendum on anti-feminist backlash”:

The events of 2024 won’t determine the future of backlash, or that of feminism itself, but they will be an important marker. Trump has become the presumptive leader of a reactionary, deeply anti-feminist movement. A victory for him in this year’s election would be a victory for gender traditionalism. As Adam Serwer wrote in The Atlantic, traditional beliefs about gender are “inarguably a big part of the Republican policy agenda, which includes abortion bans and anti-LGBTQ legislation.”

Bonus: Man convicted in first US federal hate crime trial over gender identity | When mainstream feminism lost its fangs | Italy and the Vatican are the frontline in Europe’s gender wars

Thank you for reading. See you next week.