Review: Man Up. The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism, by Cynthia Miller-Idriss.

Men, what is to be done about them? With new urgencies, that question keeps returning. Today it is not just misogyny and men's violence against women and gender dissidents, once key issues for the second-wave feminism back in the 1970s, but men's role in fuelling the rise of far-right extremism that is troubling many scholars. Chief among them is Cynthia Miller-Idriss, founder of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) in Washington, D.C. in 2019. She has been researching the far-right, white supremacist movements for decades, and this work informs her latest book, Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism. Throughout the book Miller-Idriss challenges the downplaying of gender issues in the growing support for far-right politics. Her book provides a sweeping account of the horrific extent of hatred towards women across both the virtual and concrete world, making it ever harder to keep them apart. Moreover, such misogyny amplifies other forms of harm, including racism and xenophobia, as well as discrimination against disabled and vulnerable people everywhere. Worst of all, Miller-Idriss tracks the dramatic increase in interpersonal and public violence in the USA over the last few years, almost doubling year on year over that time.

The strength of Man Up lies in its exhaustive empirical coverage of the different forms of rising violence. Miller-Idriss’ definition of misogyny is expansive, defined as ‘the enforcement mechanisms used to defend patriarchal norms and expectations’, hence including not only men's direct physical and sexual violence against and abuse of women, but also the hatred and policing of non-heteronormative sexualities and gender expressions. She focusses less on race and ‘misogynoir’ though there is mention of the lynching of Black men in the American south to terrorise and emasculate them, along with the degrading of Black women in online pornography and their systematic rape by white men. Miller-Idriss also highlights the hostility and misogyny she herself faced as a researcher with a public facing role and a certain level of prestige, reminiscent of Mary Beard's now famous talk reporting that, the greater her success, the more hatred she attracted from men. The book abounds with ample examples of the misogyny and violence against women leaders everywhere ‘which fundamentally undermine inclusive democracies’.

Man Up is especially depressing in suggesting how little impact feminism has made on the raising of boys. It recounts the continued gender policing of boys, still insulted as weak, feminine, inadequate or soft when seen as insufficiently masculine, all serving to maintain the gender hierarchy. Hence boys and men are still being encouraged, if not forced, to deny vulnerability, gentleness and caretaking in favour of toughness and courage, while girls remain socialised into more demure, deferential nurturing. There is no mention of possible class, ethnic or other differences in her analysis, which might have added useful nuance to these generalisations.

However, Man Up is undoubtedly strongest in pointing to the role of social media and other incitements to machismo and misogyny in spreading escalating stories of male grievance and revealing the rise of the incel movement (men who were involuntarily celibate). Social media's routine contempt for, derision and abuse of, women became known as the ‘manosphere’, a term first appearing 2009, with Andrew Tate one of its best-known figures. As others have, Miller-Idriss also highlights some of the social issues behind such coercive male chauvinism. These include the familiar argument that the economic precarity many men have faced for some time undermines the traditional trappings of male dominance and hence places traditional ‘masculinity in crisis’. For certain men, the resort to violence becomes one way of restoring dominant ‘manhood’, when men are no longer breadwinners. Or again, it seems likely that the isolation and absence of any secure sense of belonging that many men feel today creates a troubling sense of vulnerability that this book depicts as a male ‘crisis of connection’. These crises, this book argues, leaves men prey to different forms of recruitment to violent extremism.

Miller-Idriss quotes approvingly Margaret Atwood's suggestion that men feel threatened by women because they're ‘afraid women will laugh at them’, while women feel threatened by men because ‘they're afraid of being killed’. Of course, men also feel threatened by other men who they rightly fear might ridicule, dominate or punch them, again motivating some to show coerciveness towards women and socially less powerful groups of men—the ingredients of misogyny and all forms of white supremacism. The book notes as well the support some women offer in the maintenance of male supremacy, whether as ‘trad wives’ or perhaps themselves attracted to far-right extremism, such as Sarah Palin and her ‘Mama Grizzlies’. Miller-Idriss reports that while just 6 per cent of women were involved in far-right extremism in the USA in 2018, that had almost doubled to 11 per cent by 2022.

This is not a theoretical text, with little mention of all the earlier theorising of masculinity that precedes it. There is no interest at all in any psychoanalytic reflection on sexual difference and issues of violence, with its emphasis on how boys come to distance themselves from mothers to identify with patriarchal fathers. This means there is no account of why boys and later men may come to fear intimacy and dependence, viewing the body as something to be mastered rather than enjoyed, as discussed by scholars such as Stephen Frosh. Nor does this book look back historically, as some now do, drawing upon writers such as Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Arendt's account of modern totalitarianism, though lacking any gender dimension, did speak of the decline of community and civil society as engendering the isolation that renders unsettled individuals’ easy prey for totalitarian manipulations. There is no mention either of Klaus Theweleit's significant two volumes on the emergence of Hitler's archetypal fascist regime, where the hatred of women is presented as an integral part of authoritarian violent movements.

Finally, there is no reference to other feminist scholars who have been busy theorising the political force of gender violence. Most prominently here is the recent writing of Judith Butler, whether in Who's Afraid of Gender (2024) or in all her ongoing analytic work on how to end political violence, including The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (2020). Butler insists that it is only when men and women alike manage to acknowledge our shared vulnerability throughout our lives, along with our shared capacity for violence, that we can begin to undermine that persisting, all-too-dangerous, gender binary. Nothing could be more relevant and important for addressing the dangers and cruelties of the present, with its hyper-macho postering, whether coming from Trump and his MAGA movement or the rising xenophobic far-right politics globally. These are movements that threatens us all, hence Man Up provides a useful description of the urgencies of moment. However, progressive movements everywhere need to share a fuller understanding of the political and social forces that might combine to resist and undermine old gender hierarchies, while also working together to create a vision and politics for securing a more egalitarian and inclusive sense of belonging. Replacing patriarchal white supremacist defensiveness and attempted domination will be a tough job in these times of peak individualism, inequality and carelessness, but it remains the only way to confront and transform the new misogyny and violent extremism described so well in Man Up.

Man Up. The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism, by Cynthia Miller-Idriss. Princeton UP. 358 pp. £25