How do we tackle online misogyny?
We’d like to share this podcast from The Ferret, which is, in our opinion, one of the best examples of alternative independent new media in Scotland. You can join them for only £5 a month HERE.
Misogyny has existed throughout history, but in recent years a newly-packaged form has taken hold online, promoted by influencers and online communities with thousands of young, male followers including in Scotland.
The Ferret hosted a panel discussion to discuss the issues, chaired by equality campaigner and researcher Talat Yaqoob.
On the panel were:
Lisa Sugiura: Associate Professor in Cybercrime and Gender at the University of Portsmouth, and author of The Incel Rebellion: The Rise of the Manosphere and the Virtual War Against Women
Clare Duffy: Playwright and founder of Civic Digits Theatre Company. Their new project, Many Good Men, examines the impact of incel culture and how young men can fight against it.
Iain Corbett: Youth worker and participation advisor for Strathclyde University’s Children and Young People’s Centre for Justice. He has been leading “positive masculinity” workshops inside Polmont Young Offenders Institute, looking at what it means to be a 21st century man, so-called toxic masculinity, and online misogyny.
Katie Horsburgh: Policy and Practice Office for Children and Young People at Scottish charity Zero Tolerance, which works to end men’s violence against women through tackling gender inequality
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How do we tackle returned online censorship and group identity politics?
@SteveH, but who can fathom the military mind, with its obsession for censorship, codes of omerta and a fascination here with matching tartan skirts and all the accoutrements?
In The Changing of the Guard: The British Army since 9/11 (2021), Simon Akam devotes Chapter 7 to Amalgamation, noting the Black Watch play hit at National Theatre of Scotland from 2006 Festival premiere. While in the Royal Regiment of Scotland, the real Black Watch appears to lead spats about spats: p150 “The Scottish regiments are very publicly arguing about buttons at a time when the rest of the infantry are focused on operations.”
Well, perhaps it is a military thing: for the want of a button, etc. Joe Glenton reports on our military obsession with ‘ally’ (military slang equivalent to cool, apparently), and his section on the identitarian Blazerism tendency is eye-opening/watering. Regimental identity and (mythologised) history is obviously very important to these chaps. And inter-service tribalism. And friction with Allies. And appropriate hatred for one’s own civilians.
But you’ve blood-and-soiled yourself, so what’s living in this mindset like, Captain Manwhoring?
Interesting conversation, but didn’t really cover female forms of misogyny (for example ‘slut-shaming’ anonymous trolls or ‘trad-wife’ influencers), or forms of toxic feminity presented by males.
If some men see football as emblematic of masculinity, they surely have a problem with women’s and girl’s football. What’s odd here is that a distinctive feature of gaming valorisation — playing the underdog role, winning against the odds — is missing from this overdog view of masculinity and the reflection on playing life at an easier or harder level. In one computer game I played, taking the role of a lower class woman was explicitly the hardest level, while the upper class man was the easiest. The game of life is certainly rigged, but you can make it fairer.
The logical missing legislative piece is outlawing misogyny as another hate crime. But how are you going to deal with technology that effortlessly surpasses national jurisdictions?
Disparity in emotional intelligence was a concern for my Psychology lecturers decades ago. But the emotionally unintelligent are easier to manipulate by authorities, so perhaps that is why the problem is endemic. However the presented evidence suggests that public misogyny is typically more extreme and deranged than I’ve seen in my lifetime.
I worked in environments with roughly equal men and women employees, female and male bosses, where open misogyny existed but was fairly successfully suppressed (it appeared). And sometimes ridiculed. The challenge appeared to come from crypto-fascist managers who gathered around them ex-military (or adjacent) recruits. I would say that challenge failed in my workplace during my employment, but perhaps fascism is no longer simply ridiculous and relatively easily dismissed. The tension was largely between the ‘teamwork’ model and the ‘managerialism’ model which was a hangover from Thatcherism but once considered a debunked failure.
OK, so I’ve started reading Marijam Did’s Everything to Play For: How Videogames are Changing the World, where the author lays out the problem in the Introduction: Main Menu:
p21 “Nothing was inevitable about gaming growing into its current state: a toxic, misogynist, imperial wasteland with few, albeit crucial, saving graces.”
Did covers #Gamergate, and recounts the participation of Steve Bannon of Breitbart news (which apparently initially ridiculed gamers before editorially seeing an opportunity to mobilise them for the alt-right), hiring Milo Yiannopolis who wrote a series of misogynistic articles before being apparently cancelled for advocating pederasty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Yiannopoulos
So, I would have hoped The Ferret would have put a gaming specialist on its panel. I’ve been to The Ferret website and read their recent articles on misogyny, and they don’t really mention gaming. Panellist Lisa Sugiura does mention Gamergate in The Incel Rebellion: The Rise of the Manosphere and the Virtual War Against Women (Emerald Studies In Digital Crime, Technology and Social Harms) — the ebook is free on Amazon — and gaming in the Manosphere, but The Ferret coverage seems lacking.
The other aspect that comes out is the significant numbers of the UK male prison population with ACEs, not just domestic violence. I don’t want to draw any general point from the prominence of Milo Yiannopolis, who Did mentions several times, but we should not assume that male misogyny is essentially a heterosexual phenomenon. If the patriarchy doesn’t have a gender, it surely doesn’t have a sexual orientation either. The difficulties and rage that some young males may experience could be related to not being attracted to women, yet expected to perform to societal expectations. Perhaps this also relates to the popularity of games and other content without sex/romance/gender elements (for all Did’s disappointment with the gaming world, Did recognises Minecraft as the supremely popular cultural pastime, vastly more so than any music or video product).
And we have to be specific sometimes about which demographics and backgrounds are associated with violence against women and girls, and research in the UK and USA has highlighted men with military backgrounds as over-represented in this category. Even the UK government recognises that military families have some extra likelihood of domestic abuse, and the British military authorities have been faced with a torrent of complaints from women serving in the armed forces or in the Ministry of Defence. Some of those military offenders will also be in the current prison population.