What is ‘the manosphere’, what has it got to do with masculinity, and why are high school teachers concerned by teenage boys’ attraction to it?
What is ‘the manosphere’, what has it got to do with masculinity, and why are high school teachers concerned by teenage boys’ attraction to it? In this episode, our guest presenter Associate Professor Kathryn Shine is joined by Dr Ben Rich and Dr Francis Russell, from the Curtin Extremism Research Network, to discuss the realm of the manosphere.
Dr Ben Rich is a senior lecturer in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry, and co-director of the Curtin Extremism Research Network (CERN), where his research focuses on the factors behind politically extreme views in areas such as gender, race and public health.
Dr Francis Russell is a lecturer and researcher in various areas across the humanities, including cultural studies. Along with Dr Ben Rich, he is the co-director of the Curtin Extremism Research Network (CERN).
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Host: Associate Professor Kathryn Shine
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Voice over (00:00):
This is The Future Of where experts share their vision of the future and how their work is helping shape it for the better.
Kathryn
(00:09):
I'm Associate Professor Kathryn Shine. I'm a teacher, researcher, author and journalist, and I coordinate the Curtin journalism program, and I'll be hosting the podcast today.
After notorious online media personality Andrew Tate was arrested in Romania earlier this year, some media coverage focused on Tate's popularity with teenage boys. Tate endorses misogyny and has become an icon for an online realm known as ‘the manosphere’. His influence is causing concern for parents and teachers.
In this episode, I was joined by Dr Ben Rich and Dr Francis Russell to explore the manosphere. We discussed its causes and controversies and how the manosphere is informing discussions around masculinity.
If you'd like to find out more about this research, you can visit the links provided in the show notes.
Ben, the media coverage of Andrew Tate's arrest brought the manosphere to the attention of many people who may not have heard about it before. Can you tell us a bit more about what it is?
Ben (01:09):
So the manosphere is a sort of collection of various online communities that roughly overlap, and they are generally centred on a sense that masculinity is in a state of crisis. So these include pickup artists. These are individuals who basically focus on wanting to bed as many women as possible and basically turn it into a game of metrics with a focus on creating systems that basically get them to get their scores higher and higher and higher. You have men going their own way. These are men who typically have had some sort of negative experience romantically or have not been able to have romantic experiences at all and have basically decided that they want to construct lives that are completely without women in them. And then you have various other groups that have some sort of grievance against women and very much centre the experience of masculinity now in their identities.
(02:16):
And typically they're unified with a sense of aggrieved entitlement around their masculinity. And a sense of misogyny and potentially hatred against women, but a desire to be perhaps free of women as well. And these are communities that are really centred on the internet that while misogyny has been, and these kind of views have been with us since time immemorial, the internet has been really the key catalyst for bringing these people together. Because historically they would've in many cases been quite isolated and not been able to find fellow travellers in this space.
Kathryn (02:57):
So the internet has been a catalyst for this, but what other factors have led to it – to this sense of disenfranchisement that these men's groups are experiencing?
Ben (03:08):
To a degree, some of their views are legitimate. I think masculinity is in a state of crisis at the moment. I think that if you look around the western world today, you see that men are in a sort of state of many cases of relative decline to women. You look at educational outcomes, women are doing much better in education than men. If you look at the growth of wealth, women – while they still track behind men in real terms – in terms of salary, are on the uptick, and men are not generally matching that trajectory in the same way. So if we map this out at some point there will be an overtaking of that. You also have the side effects of redistribution of power in this system has been unleashed by feminism, which is that women have a lot more agency, a lot more choice now.
(04:02):
The role of the man, which was historically as a provider, which was so central to masculine identity and masculine aspiration, has been increasingly dislodged by female empowerment. And what this means is that women can now be a lot more picky about who they choose as partners. They can choose each other as partners. And what this means is that a lot of men as a result of this, don't have the truisms that they could rely on historically that they could plan their lives out now. Women have been transformed in many cases from something to be acquired to competitors now in many cases. And as a result of this, there's this sense of, in a lot of men, that the future is very uncertain. And then, "How do I even, what do I want out of life? How do I construct a legible kind of narrative for myself?" And this means that there's a lot of frustration out there.
(04:58):
And then add to this now, the factor of the internet. Add to this now a media that is very focused on stoking conflict, that's focused on stoking division that we see much more broadly in our politics. And you have a kind of wildfire that can take hold very, very easily to drive these more grievance-oriented, conflict-oriented communities.
Kathryn (05:21):
So you recently shared a news article on LinkedIn that referred to quite a few of the factors that you've just discussed. And it looks particularly at the impact of those things on intimate and romantic relationships and reported that about 60% of young American men are single and that there's this crisis of disconnection between men and women. Are you worried about the repercussions of this?
Ben (05:44):
Absolutely. I think if you look historically at societies that end up with a bunch of what we might say is excess men, those are men that don't really have a purpose and a sense of moorings in societies. You go back to mediaeval Europe, you can go look at the precursors to the Arab Spring. Oftentimes those become the kind of tinder upon which you get wider forms of social unrest. Historically, the way that was dealt with, if you were say the Swiss, you would send your young men off to fight in mercenary armies overseas. But we try not to do that so much these days. But I think if you look at flashpoints and points of conflict that can emerge, I think the concerning thing is you do have this growing body of young men who don't seem to have a place in society.
(06:35):
Romantic intimacy relationships are a key point of that. But the thing that article also refers to is meaningful friendships, which are a big part of it as well. There's much more evidence that men feel increasingly isolated within society, more generally. Men are four times more likely to die of suicide than women – and of course there are nuances in that, but that is still a pretty stark statistic. So there is this growing sense I think, of despair and disconnection. And we know in communities where you have a sense of relative decline, you do get these very destructive outcomes. So if we look at, for instance, in the United States where you see White communities that are in a state of relative decline, so maybe they are not getting as many resources or many opportunities as they predecessors. Even if they are in real terms, much better off than, say minority communities which have a sense of progress, have a sense of hope, have a sense of moving up.
(07:35):
You see this explosion in deaths of despair, which are very much an illustration of this sense of wider social decay. And then they become these flashpoints where conflicts can emerge. Great example of this is when we saw January 6th in the United States with the riots on Capitol Hill – or the insurrection on Capitol Hill, depending on where you interpret that – a lot of the people there were not crazy poor people. They were people who owned jet ski dealerships. They were people from upper-middle-class backgrounds or even upper-class backgrounds, but they still felt that they were in this community that was in a decline. And I think that's really the critical thing here. It's that self-perception. And when we talk about men today, you see a lot of men who even though they are in real terms still much better off than other parts of society, they still feel there is this sense of losing control, losing the opportunities of the past. And that can lead to these reflexive and reactionary moments as a result.
Kathryn (08:36):
What do we know about solutions to this sense of despair or sense of decline that people are experiencing? I suspect it's probably a complex answer, but...
Francis (08:50):
I think that the interest we would have is in trying to think about how we approach these problems, both in terms of gender but also in ways that don't make gender central or paramount. One of the things that players within the manosphere do is take quite complex social issues and reduce them down to often forms of gender essentialism. And you can probably find this in forms that predate the online manosphere. I remember when I was young, there was a book published called Raising Boys that was a bestseller in Australia. And that book argued that one of the challenges that most young men face is they're raised in schools mostly by women, that they lack male role models. And so complex social questions around alienation get reduced down to questions of men versus women. So I think one of the things we're interested in doing is not entirely ignoring the fact that there are unique challenges that different people face depending on their identities, but also to look at broader social questions.
(09:58):
So in what's commonly referred to as the Trente Glorieuses or the 30 golden years after the Second World War, there was in most industrial countries a situation where a male, a father figure in the family would have a single income, they would support their family through that. And generally that was viewed as a stable model that people could reasonably aspire to. As our economies have become a lot more competitive, we've seen real wages stagnate for decade on decade. The housing market is incredibly tight, education's incredibly expensive. So is healthcare, et cetera, et cetera. These are issues that cut across the gender divide. And in some ways they actually disproportionately negatively impact women. So I think while in the same network we might have some people who have more radical progressive politics in the short term, I think we're all social democrats. In the short term, what probably would go a long way to solving a lot of these issues is to look at how can we give young people more hope for the future? How can we make sure that young people's lives are not so governed around the need to find employment?
(11:10):
So much of young people's lives is based around ensuring that you get into the right school, get into the right course, get into the right internship, and that makes it very hard to grow as a person, discover yourself, make friends, just have fun. But a lot of what the manosphere thrives on is presenting false scarcity that is largely the result of political choices as if this is just a natural scarcity that is unavoidable. And presenting men with a picture of the world where either women get the lion's share and we are second class citizens or we as men reassert ourselves. So when we are trying to think about solutions, we do like to think about ways that don't treat these problems as being fundamentally about gender and being more about the need for a more equitable society for everybody.
Kathryn (11:58):
Yeah, fantastic. That makes sense. Staying with you, Francis, you're an expert in cultural studies. Do you see racial and religious elements within the manosphere?
Francis (12:08):
Yeah, absolutely. There is definitely hierarchical view of the world that bleeds into most forms of identity. So it is very common to see white supremacist ideas in the manosphere, it's very common to see a very archaic homophobia. I say archaic because a lot of homophobia these days is more subtle. There's a realisation that certain kinds of overt homophobia are not going to be accepted in civil society. In the manosphere, that's often not the case at all. It is very, very old-fashioned prejudice against against LGBTQ+ people. So that definitely is part of it. And there's a lot of overlap too between racist theories, like the great replacement theory that mirrors the man versus woman paranoia with a white versus non-white paranoia.
(13:01):
So again, central is always this idea that male identity is fundamentally under attack. And you could even argue that to some extent in the manosphere, what being a man means today is to be besieged. There's often not much of a positive, and by positive I just mean concrete or definable sense of what members of the manosphere think it means to be a man. It's very protean, it's constantly shifting. But the thing that it seems everybody can agree on is that to be a man is to be a victim of some kind. And that means whether it's being overlooked because of your race or overlooked because of your heterosexuality or overlooked because you are a man. So yeah, it's very common to see overlap between all sorts of reactionary movements in the manosphere.
Ben (13:51):
And something that's really interesting to add to the complexity that Francis is alluding to here, as we talk about in our space, this notion of salad bar ideology. Which is that ideologies today and belief systems today are very customised to the individual. So an individual will basically come along, they'll go online, they'll see a bunch of different ideas they like, and they'll adopt those as part of their identity. And oftentimes those ideas are at odds with one another. But because we are humans, we're very good at ignoring the discrepancies and the paradoxes that oppose there. And a really fantastic example of this is, as Francis says, there is a significant representation of homophobia, anti-LGBTQ and racist components of the manosphere.
(14:38):
But actual data analysis and polling has shown that significant chunks of the manosphere, so there was a poll that was done by a scholar by the name of Malashenko recently that looked at incel communities in particular. And we forgot to mention incels when we were talking about what constitutes the manosphere. That found that the majority of people there actually had left wing dominant ideas about how society should be ordered, about social justice and things like that. So that sits at odds, but also in kind with the persistence of those ideas.
(15:12):
And it means that in our understanding of this, it's a case of we can't just go, "Well, they're all just a bunch of racist white supremacists." It's actually a much more complicated milieu. And what it means also is that we need to be able to build a degree of empathy with these people because they are complex human beings. They're not just a group of people that we can sort of classify and go, "Yep, they're irredeemable." And throw them away. They're actually people with all sorts of internal contradictions and paradoxes and fears and grievances and senses of displacement that we all experience. And I think that's really critical in redressing this type of issue in our society of any group that feels aggrieved. Of any group that feels disconnected and builds an identity out of that and a politics out of that.
(15:56):
And you also have obviously the incel community, the involuntary celibate community. And this is a group that is often the most seen commonly as representative of the manosphere. It's arguably the most extreme kind of group in the manosphere or elements of it are the most extreme. So these are individuals who feel that, as opposed to pickup artists who feel like there's a system they can exploit or men going their own way who feel like they've just checked out, want to have romantic intimate relations and feel like they have been denied that because of this post-feminist society that we live in. So because women have agency, they now occupy this lower social strata that they can no longer access sex, they can no longer access romance.
(16:46):
And I think it's really critical from the outset that we talk about it's not just sex. Because this is often the very public kind of conception of it, but it is about romance. It is about feeling valued, it is about feeling seen, it's about feeling that you have enough value in the world that someone would actually want to commit to you and love you in that way. And that's often when you drill down into the incel grievance, what is at the heart of it, not the physical interaction. But they generally see this as an outcome of two things. What's termed as evolutionary psychology, which is the idea in their case, they talk about things around hypergamy. So this idea that, in their mind, women are basically evolved to only pursue the most "high-value males".
(17:32):
And so if you create an environment in which women are given full agency that by their just natural genetic programming, they will only seek out the most attractive, most wealthy, most emotionally advanced, developed funny guys. And that basically constitutes about 20% of men. So they sit at this top and all the 80% of men are basically out of luck as it goes. And they're also very, very fixated on morphology. So your actual physical appearance. And so you get all this, they have this very complex way of understanding and critiquing themselves and they get very hung up on the idea that, "Oh, if I just had a bit more of a chin, if I had two more inches of bone in my chin, I would actually be successful."
(18:22):
So they have this very reductionist way of looking at the world. But one of the things that is consistent through all these groups is they offer a way of understanding reality, even if it's incredibly misguided. And a way of explaining their lack of success or their unpleasant experiences in life that fit within a wider kind of scientific, I put that in parenthesis, way of looking at the world.
Kathryn (18:47):
Francis, what do you think is the future for the manosphere?
Francis (18:51):
It is hard to tell because in some ways the manosphere is itself a evolution of earlier male grievance movements. And so in some ways, one of the most interesting things academically about the manosphere is the ability to redefine exactly what the grievances are, how it's expressed to embrace new technologies. We've seen various unsuccessful attempts to censor figures in the manosphere, to ban them, to try to educate young men against them. But there's been a real ability in these spaces to latch onto new social and cultural questions to find new spaces to disseminate ideas. Most likely what you'll see is a transformation of this space as there is a growing cultural condemnation of the messages that are presented. I would also say that it is likely given the incredibly reactive and hostile culture that is emerging around trans issues, that you're going to see a greater fixation on those questions. Simply because the existence of trans people does go a long way to challenge some of the very essentialist and binary ways that members of the manosphere think about gender and sexuality.
(20:15):
But I think also too, that in the short term, it is very worrying that it doesn't seem there's going to be too much of a concerted effort in liberal democracies to do something about the declining standards of living for young people. Certainly I used to feel pretty hard done by as a millennial, the defining historical moments for myself being 9/11 and the great financial crisis. But now comparatively to Gen Z and to their younger peers, I feel incredibly privileged. So I think it is worrying that if something is not done to give people a sense of a positive future to move towards more and more people will be receptive to these arguments.
(21:00):
I think something as well that's like a general comment and then you might have some thoughts about this too. Something that we've noticed that has helped fuel the manosphere and has also been a really ineffective way of combating it, is broadly speaking what we could call a liberal approach to challenging members of the manosphere. Whether that's Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson or various other prominent public figures, which largely reduces it to a question of individual morality. Often you'll see commentators condemn Tate or Peterson on the basis that they just have bad archaic views. That the rest of society has moved on and they just need to get with the programme.
(21:36):
And I remember there was one quite telling moment of this where I think it was on the BBC, Jordan Peterson was being interviewed and he was asked the question of, if there wasn't an issue around the wage gap, why were there so few female CEOs? And Peterson's response was more or less, "Who cares? There's very few in the scheme of things, male or female CEOs, they make up a tiny percentage of the population." What was interesting there was that rather than say, "Why is it that nurses who are disproportionately women, who provide one of the most essential services in society, why are they paid so little?" Which might be a tricky question to answer for Peterson. The example was used of, "Why have so few women risen to the ranks of being multimillionaires and billionaires." And I think that shows a discomfort with addressing the bigger social questions that give ammunition to people like Peterson.
(22:30):
And that is worrying. That I think if we're going to challenge these figures, we need to pull the rug up from beneath them by acknowledging that there are some parts to society that are unfair, that people do have some legitimate reasons to be alienated and unhappy. But these aren't necessarily issues about gender.
Ben (22:48):
And I think there's a term that is becoming more popular around my PhD kind of cohort and I. We use the term "vibes-based analysis". Which you have a group of people who have emerged, Peterson, Tate, these influencers in the manosphere who are very, very good at getting a kind of sense of what the current zeitgeist is. And the grievances, and the sense of society, and where the gaps are, and where the pressure points are. And I think the reason these people are incredibly effective, as opposed to these counter programmes, because one of the things we encounter when we go out and we talk to, for instance government stakeholders, is government stakeholders are obsessed with quotes, evidence-based approaches. And this is this idea in social science that we go out and we create data and we analyse the data and then we build good policy out of it. And what we can see in our space, in the broader countering violent extremism space is that these programmes, by and large, have not been particularly effective ever since 9/11.
(23:53):
And then you get these much more adept, adroit, agile people coming out who explode onto the scene like Tate, make millions of dollars very, very quickly, amass these massive followings. And they're not operating on these hard data-driven spreadsheet-based approaches. They get what's happening and they tap into that underlying vibe. And I know this is something that a lot of social scientists will recoil at this idea that these kind of almost undefinable elements that they're dealing with, but that's the reality of the societies we live in. Because of that sheer level of complexity, you almost have to be able to internally and viscerally understand what's going on more than just being able to "quantify" that.
(24:38):
And I think that's going to have to ultimately come to inform policy, however discomforting institutions may be with that. And again, that goes back to what Francis is talking about, are these kind of liberal responses where we need to create everything, quantify everything, create everything as a tangible, observable sort of fact. And the reality is that the people who are effective in this space are not doing that. And so we have to be able to in some ways adopt some of the approaches and methods that they do to be able to counter that. Otherwise we're going to be 20 years behind them and just constantly playing a game of catch up if we're ever going to try and address these issues.
Francis (25:19):
What's interesting, there was an interview with Andrew Tate, I believe it was after he'd been banned from several social media platforms. He was interviewed on a podcast and he was asked about some of the awful and derogatory statements he'd made about women. Now in a fairly cynical way, he tried to downplay those statements or say that it was parody or that he was just joking or that they'd been edited and taken out of context. But then he reasserted what he calls his theory of the matrix. Which is that for the vast majority of men, he tends to focus on men, the path open for them is to spend most of their time in fairly alienating schools. This is in the US. To amass enormous amounts of debt to get a university education, then to get an insecure and low paying job and then struggle to be able to afford a house. And more or less to wait for the next global economic crash that might completely wipe them out.
(26:18):
And so his alternative is a kind of aristocratic set of values. That young people need to turn their backs on the values of democracy, social justice, and instead realise that we live in a very competitive world where someone needs to just reassert their own individual prowess and power. The thing that disturbs me is that it's quite easy to point out that Tate's comments about women and minorities are derogatory and harmful. And when challenged on that, Tate will back down often. However he will maintain that the majority of young people have really nothing to hope for and people like him are truth tellers brave enough to explain how bad things are.
(27:03):
And I think that's where it's tricky because very rarely do you see the people criticising Tate on his derogatory and hateful speech give you a very meaningful challenge to his theory of the matrix. That if everybody is a bit nicer to each other, will the housing market magically become more affordable? Or will there be more secure jobs for young people? Is the environment going to sustain itself or fall into ecological collapse? So I think again, that's where we feel it is important that we can respond to the vibe of anxiety and dread that seems to be with a lot of young people and is reflected in soaring rates of mental illness diagnoses, suicides and social isolation.
Ben (27:46):
This is really the power of influencers like Peterson, like Tate, pretty much consistently across the entire manosphere spectrum, is they all basically say, "We live in a benighted world. It sucks and here's what you can do something about it. So here is an actual pathway for you to recapture a sense of dignity, a sense of agency, a sense of pride." And I think that it stands at great deal of odds with what we see, our institutional responses. Which like Francis says, basically go, "Look, basically this is a great society, everything's kind of egalitarian and fair, so all you really need to do is just make a few self modifications and fall in line and opportunities will open up for you." And when you're particularly talking to people who've been through recurrent senses of, have experienced recurrent perverse outcomes where they feel like they've done the right thing and they've just hit a wall, those kind of solutions are not going to be particularly appealing.
(28:45):
So I think that ability for Peterson, Tate to tap into this very much felt, lived experience that a lot of people have and to say that your feelings about this are actually legitimate, which you may not necessarily be able to articulate tangibly. This is often the role they have, is they come in and they have the language to express the feelings and the experiences people have. And then through their self-help approach, whether that's Peterson's 12 Rules, whether that's Tate's Hustlers' University, they offer a kind of pathway. So in a way they're basically offering hope and a believable hope that I think, again, a lot of the official responses to this just out of touch about and not offering in a way that seems legitimate, seems realistic to the people on the ground who are experiencing this.
Francis (29:40):
Because we probably just take this as such a basic assumption that it doesn't need to be said, but we probably should say this, that we fundamentally accept that we do live in a patriarchal society. And as a result of that, young men are, through a diffuse process, through culture, particularly popular culture, but also through their family structures and to some extent through even civil society institutions given the idea or the image that men are still meant to be the more active, the breadwinners, the ones that have the most agency in society. And that is something that sits at odds with the progressive attempts to build a society where one's identity does not determine their destiny.
(30:23):
We're completely aware of the fact that, as of yet, there is not a female Andrew Tate-style influencer. That is because again, the relative disadvantage that Tim was talking about, the perception that one is, even if privileged, not as privileged as their father may have been or their forefathers. That is something that is in many ways the product of living in a patriarchal society. And that's why the work that feminists do is incredibly important in that space in terms of trying to break down the idea that to be a man is to be the agent in the social world.
Kathryn (31:00):
We're just going to pause for a quick break. We'll be right back.
Voice over(31:04):
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Kathryn (31:59):
Tell us a bit more about what draw [drew] you to doing research in this area?
Ben (32:05):
Honestly, I guess it's almost like a bit of a selfish introspective. I was once a young, kind of lost guy when I was a teenager. And I think as I got older and I fell into the study of terrorism and extremism through a series of very random events in my life, in many ways. I started to reflect and because I was looking at all these individuals who had gone off and engaged in violent extremism and acts of terror, and I was reading their biographies. And one of the things that really struck me was how normal the biographies were that if you looked at the history of so many of these people, it wasn't a case that they were insane or had led these extraordinary existences. It was that at some point they had gone down a couple of pathways and had led them into this space.
(33:06):
And I think I was very lucky. I had a very influential strong mother and she certainly taught me to appreciate a lot of the things that I think a lot of men now are struggling with. Things around you're dealing with your own emotions, expressing emotions, talking to people and being open to other people. And I think what a lot of the issues that we're facing today, particularly in the manosphere are, despite the fact we are living in a society that says we're sort of kind, that we're more open, we encourage men to be more, adopt more perhaps what we would historically describe as feminine qualities. We aren't actually offering them a roadmap how to do that. So there's a case of, "Well, you need to just do these things." But we're not providing them, in many cases the pathways to actually doing that. Sort of like what Francis was talking earlier.
(34:02):
Even though we live in these progressive societies, in many cases there is still this underlying expectation that men adopt these roles or continue to act in these ways. And in some cases that is the society, in some cases that are these communities that become self-reinforcing and you create these positive feedback loops. But I think it became a sort of space that I felt like I actually had something to add because of my own experiences, because of the luck I had in the education that I got out of it and bringing those kind of things together. Because my academic training started off in a slightly different space, looking at things around Islamic extremism and foreign fighters and stuff like that. And so I wanted to be able to figure out a way that I could take some of those skills, those knowledges, that awareness that I built up in that and maybe apply it in a more positive way.
(35:03):
I think the other thing is looking at my own history, I have a lot of doubts and concerns about the way we constructed a threat of violent extremism post-9/11, the way that Muslim communities were demonised and terrorised as a result of that. And in some ways I can see in the public discourse now, there's a parallel effort to perhaps do that with some of the communities in the manosphere, particularly with incels. And the way that because you have a very small number of incidents of violent extremism linked to people who were in or adjacent to these communities, you now see this wider public effort to demonise these often very vulnerable people.
Kathryn (35:48):
You two lead a research centre. Francis, can you tell us a bit more about the aims of that?
Francis (35:54):
I think, and in many ways this is Ben's kind of genius, definitely not mine, was to try to lead an interdisciplinary approach to these kinds of questions. And particularly as Ben has alluded to, there is often what's called a securitization approach where we try to come up with accurate models of people who are likely to cause harm. And then we go about finding those people and intervening. It doesn't help us to really understand why people end up in that situation in the first place. And often it doesn't take into account how the very act of intervening early, based on assumptions about what someone might do, can harm them or stigmatise them or even lead them to become more alienated and potentially hostile. So the centre was formed with the idea that, "Could we bring humanity's perspectives to some of these questions that sit outside of the bag and tag approach of a lot of security approaches?"
(36:54):
To give you an example with the book that Tim [Ben] and I are working on incels' ableism and extremism failing to win, we were interested in how disciplines such as disability studies, for instance, which have a lot to tell us about the ways people's perceptions about what a normal or desirable body is, could really provide some crucial insights into incel culture. And not really taken seriously at all in the countering violent extremism space or the countering terrorism space.
(37:25):
So we believe that there's a lot of amazing work that's being done in cultural studies, philosophy, fine art, and the traditional social sciences that can be brought together in an interdisciplinary way to look at these issues. And to try to understand them in a way where we're not just attempting to lock up marginalised people, but to look at broader social questions and understand where people are coming from. And it's probably worth underlining that empathy isn't necessarily sympathy. We're not asking people to like Andrew Tate, but we are asking people to try to understand why he has emerged, what he's a symptom of, what the manosphere means. And we think attempting to understand first and then act means that our actions are more well-guided and more effective.
Ben (38:12):
And just to add to that, historically, the extremism space and the study of the extremism space has been dominated by these very security-centric approaches, what's termed in the field as the pointy end. And I think what CERN does is it brings together, or it attempts to bring together a much broader set of perspectives that have often been shut out historically. With the idea that by broadening that perspective, you also broaden the options and your abilities to address these issues in a way that aren't just about putting people behind bars or putting them through process-oriented, counter violent extremism programmes that have this very kind of catastrophizing approach to it. Our view is that these issues have a much broader, deeper, social, communal aspect to them. And so our view is that we need to also then create more of a whole of society response to that.
(39:04):
And so a lot of our efforts have been focused at how do we train up, how do we build awareness in society around that? How do we educate leaders in society to be sensitive to these issues and to also make them feel confident in actually addressing some of these issues. So the fact that they see something that perhaps makes them a little bit concerned and their first response isn't to call up the AFP and say, I've potential terrorists on my hand because they're watching Andrew Tate videos or something like that. One of the stakeholders we've been actually working with is the Department of Education because they're really seeing the influences of guys like Tate manifest in the classroom. And this is making a lot of tension in the classroom. It's making a lot of female students feel uncomfortable because obviously the young men are, or the boys are expressing these quite alienating views.
(39:55):
And so how do you, for instance, have a conversation or an engagement with those boys that don't make them feel further alienated and then play into the narrative that someone like Tate is spooling up. Which is basically saying, "Yes, you are going to be ostracised. Yes, you are going to be cast out because you have the correct views. You've all just been martyred." How do you make them feel seen and heard so that the views of someone like Tate become less salient and less appealing? Of your own volition rather than force them to be, than not have those views? And which will obviously have on many cases counterproductive outcomes.
Kathryn (40:31):
So you're about to release the book that Francis just mentioned. What impact do you hope it will have?
Francis (40:37):
I think primarily we hope that within the study of incels, there is a slight de-escalation of the catastrophizing that Ben was just mentioning. So in a lot of the literature about incels, there is a hastiness to identify certain violent actors with the incel phenomena when on closest scrutiny it's not really clear if they have anything to do with incels. So in some ways it's become a bit of an easy term to apply to anyone who is violent and disaffected. But also we want to try to understand how many of the troubling aspects of incel culture are simply extreme versions of some of the things that we maybe don't feel great about in everyday life and in our societies, incels believe that there is a hierarchy in society based on physical appearance. Well, that's true. There is a hierarchy based in society on physical appearance.
(41:36):
Now their views or the consequences they draw from that observation are often out of touch with reality or dangerous. But nevertheless, we want to try to understand where these ideas come from. A lot of the existing literature and research just begins from the brute fact that incels exist, condemns them and then talks about the need to do something about this emerging fascist threat. We're more interested in seeing how the everyday and normal parts of society, or at least the things that we just take for granted and see as being normal, can produce these really strange and extreme phenomena. And once again, as we've been saying, I guess consistently, to draw a lot of this alarming and weird stuff just back into the everyday issues that all people care about and are affected by.
Kathryn (42:27):
Great. Thank you Ben and Francis for joining us today for what was a really nuanced discussion that will really challenge our assumptions about the manosphere.
(42:36):
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