Yet another backlash election? (and four other stories)
Five reads on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism
I started writing this edition of The Backlash on Friday morning. It was sunny outside and still relatively calm, but by the time I came back to it on Friday night, after the kids were asleep, it felt like the world order had officially crumbled. This was due, of course, to the deeply unpleasant meeting between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House. Ambushing Ukraine’s leader in front of the cameras, Trump and JD Vance showed the worst side of themselves.
This very public smashing of a major international partnership stood in stark contrast with Trump’s protection this week of another, less immediately consequential, alliance. I refer to the president’s apparent association with the world’s most famous internet misogynist, Andrew Tate, and his brother, Tristan.
As I detail below, the US administration has reportedly gone to some lengths to help the Tates leave Romania, where they were awaiting trial. The US and UK dual nationals are facing charges including rape, human trafficking and organised crime. Given the chance, Trump seems eager to show us exactly which side of the decency-indecency divide he stands on. We should take him at his word—and at his deeds. More on this below, so now to the reads….
1) Germany’s election was a backlash election
Germans went to the polls on 23rd February, and the result was chilling. In Germany, of all countries, a far-right party (the Alliance for Germany, or AfD) came second, with particularly strong results in the east, but also in pockets of the west. And, much like in other parts of the world, one of the patterns discernible from the vote was a political and ideological gap between young men and women.
The former, according to John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times, voted at greater rates than the national average for both the populist right and the populist left. Among young women, there was a higher rate of votes than the national average for the far left, and a far lower rate than average of votes for the AfD. “The overall story,” he says, “is of young Germans rejecting the established centre-right and centre-left, but while young men are shifting to both populist flanks, young women are shifting overwhelmingly to the populist left.”
Here is a chart Alan Wager shared on BlueSky, showing voting for 18-24 year-olds, which illustrates this well (men are on the right, women are on the left, and “Linke” at the top is the far left party):
A similar trend is evident elsewhere, and notably in America’s recent election. The role of the online right (the likes of Andrew Tate) in these IRL political shifts is clearly significant. As
noted (also on BlueSky!): It seems “pretty obvious… that this huge gender divide in the politics of young people is being driven by men's rights / manosphere videos that act as a gateway into alt right politics.”See also this working paper, published in January, on the growing political polarisation between teenage boys and girls in Norway, based on data for 130,000 high schoolers over more than 30 years. Researcher Ruben Mathisen believes much of the divide is driven by “a surge in anti-feminism among young boys”.
2) The Tates and the Trumps
Speaking of backlash elections, the Tate brothers, noxious manosphere influencers who were arrested in Romania in 2022 on charges of rape, organised crime and human trafficking, are now safe and sound in America. The Trump administration reportedly pressured the Romanian government to rescind the Tates’ travel ban while they were awaiting their trial. “The dual US-UK nationals also face criminal and civil proceedings in Britain and the US”, the FT reminds us.
The FT reports that Andrew and Tristan Tate left Romania on Thursday, flying by private jet to one of the airports nearest to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. The Tates see themselves as playing a major role in the rightward shift of young men. After Trump’s 2024 election victory, Tristan Tate boasted that: “Millions of young men in Europe and the USA have a healthy rightwing approach to politics that they would NOT have if Andrew Tate had never appeared on their phone screens.”
In what ways are the Tates and the Trumps directly connected? Here is some more detail from the FT:
Signs of the burgeoning links between Trump’s circle and the Tates — who were arrested in 2022 and subsequently charged with rape, human trafficking and organised crime — became evident as early as 2023.
Andrew Tate that year claimed he “spoke to Barron”, referring to Trump’s 18-year-old son, after his detention in Romania. “I’m very close with the Trump family. I know them well. I spoke to Barron after the incident,” he said after Romanian authorities placed him and his brother under house arrest.
And also:
A few months later, when Tate posted a video about how he was “locked in my house” in Romania, Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr replied on X: “Absolute insanity.”
In the Guardian, Matt Shea dives deep into the making of the Tate-Trump alliance. In the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg considers the significance of Trump’s protection of the Tates:
The meaning of what looks like an astonishing American intervention on behalf of accused sex traffickers is clear enough. An implicit promise of the most recent Trump campaign was to restore patriarchy. Not the softer, pious kind of patriarchy once promoted by evangelicals like Mike Pence, but unfettered male domination. In seeking alienated and resentful young men, Trump appeared on podcasts and livestreams like Adin Ross’s. At the Republican National Convention, he was introduced by Dana White, chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, who was once caught on tape slapping his wife in a nightclub. Trump’s election, after a jury found him liable for sexual abuse, was a sign that the #MeToo movement was definitively dead.
3) Online harms and Sisyphus
This week, Britain’s broadcasting watchdog, Ofcom, released guidance to help reduce the harms experienced by women and girls on the internet. In a consultation paper, the body highlighted some pretty dispiriting statistics. See here (via the Guardian):
- Women are five times more likely to be victims of intimate image abuse.
-Nearly 70% of boys aged 11-14 have been exposed to online content that promotes misogyny and other harmful views.
-Almost a quarter of teenage girls (23%) regularly see content that objectifies or demeans women.
-Online domestic abuse is under-reported – half of survivors (49%) told no one about it.
-Nearly three-quarters of respondents in a survey (73%) had experienced online threats and abuse.
Ofcom has recommended some steps that tech companies can take, such as using “hash-matching” technology to remove revenge porn imagery at scale, and “‘abusability’ testing to identify how a service or feature could be exploited”, the BBC reports.
Meanwhile, an independent review into pornography commissioned in 2023 by former PM Rishi Sunak has published its findings and 32 recommendations. These include “banning the possession, distribution and publication of other degrading, violent or misogynistic pornography”, the Guardian reports. Here’s some more detail:
[Lady] Bertin said pornography had always been a fact of life, but in recent years its scale and impact had “transformed dramatically” owing to online distribution.
“The evidence is overwhelming that allowing people to view legal but harmful pornography like choking sex, violent and degrading acts, and even content that could encourage child sexual abuse, is having a damaging impact on children and society,” she said. “The law needs to be tightened with more proactive regulation of online platforms.”
Bertin’s review said non-fatal strangulation or “choking” sex had already been criminalised under the 2021 Domestic Abuse Act and should therefore be added to the definition of extreme, illegal pornography.
4) “The tradwives of men’s sport”
Here on Substack,
writes about the WAG in men’s sports as the equivalent of the tradwife. Here’s a snippet:So much of the recent attention on WAGs has been chalked up to Taylor-mania, and perhaps that's right. She's been lauded for fixing relationships between fathers and daughters and for the so-called "Taylor Swift Effect" on the league itself. But her place on the sidelines should make sports-watchers pause. The most visible "female role" available for one of the most powerful women in the world in the NFL’s cinematic universe is as a “wife and girlfriend” to Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. Swift, a billionaire and music icon, can cheer from the stands, while the men do big manly things on the field. How charming. How retrograde.
And also:
The men these WAGs are married to represent a kind of traditional masculinity that appeals to one of the most politically conservative fanbases in sports. If the players represent a traditional husband, who as the breadwinner of the family performs hard, literally brain-breaking labor, then who are these WAGs, if not their Tradwives?
5) “The Pelicot mirror”
For Liberties Journal, Anna Easton writes about her experience of going through the French courts after reporting her rape to the police, while reflecting on the Pelicot trial and the way in which the French penal code deals (or doesn’t) with the notion of consent. Here is a snippet:
Is the French legal system’s failure to adequately prosecute violence against women an instance of culture having far surpassed the glacial pace of codified law — in which case changing the law might be a solution — or is its institutionalized misogyny the logical consequence of a benighted culture? Behind the opacity of our institutions, after all, are individuals, shielded here by a bureaucracy subject to little oversight. What is in fact at issue might be less the verbiage of the French penal definition than the manner in which France’s Penal Code and its Code of Penal Procedure are wielded and applied by judicial actors themselves.
Bonus: Tradwives and “old money” on Instagram | Luis Rubiales convicted
Thank you so much for reading. See you next time.