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Tammy Peterson's journey to Catholic conversion is really a ... - Florida Catholic

The Tradwives Trilogy is a systematic investigation into a growing movement of women on the internet who identify as traditional wives. Better known as tradwives, these women romanticize their occupation as homemakers and champion traditional gender roles, which appoint men as breadwinners and women as breadmakers. In thefirst installmentof this series, I scrutinized the faces of the tradwife movement three influencers, who have built profitable careers by urging women to quit their own.

When I set out on a journey to spiral deeper into the realm of traditionalism than any other chronically online individual had gone before to become a tradwife myself I resolved to take my research beyond the performances of domesticity that influencers put on for money. Instead, I had to seek out the communal spaces of the internet where real people gathered.

And so, I took my research inquiry to Instagram, where I encountered The Tradwives Club: A community of traditionally-minded, modern-day homemakers that promotes its pro-tradition, anti-feminist, evangelical messaging with 21st-century aesthetics. Immediately, I encountered my first lesson about real feminine traditionalism: Not all tradwives cosplay the aesthetics of a barefoot homesteader or a lobotomized, 1950s housewife. I repeat: Theyre not all blonde. This marriage of antiquated ideologies with contemporary visuals has produced a feed with an aesthetic that falls somewhere between Barbie Dreamhouse, Christian Girl Autumn and the contents of an Old Money Pinterest board.

As far as traditionalist messaging goes, there was nothing original about the cheap shots The Tradwives Club takes at left-leaning, feminist girlbosses: Somehow pink hats, slut walks, frequent random hookups (and) abortions are considered womens empowerment, one post reads, while another states, My pronouns are: trad/wife, anti/feminist, (and) sandwich/maker. The jokes that tradwives make are so unfunny that they somehow justify their sideways logic that women cant make anything but babies and sandwiches. Inadvertently, I learned my second lesson about what it means to be a tradwife: To placate all of the men who are emasculated by funny women, your comedy must fall as flat as Amy Schumers stolen sex jokes.

As ground zero for young, blue-jean-wearing, brunette housewives who render first-century ideologies in millennial pink, The Tradwives Club was the closest I had ever gotten to real traditionalist women. And so, I scoured the comments section of a handful of posts to sketch out an image of what these women really looked like. From a selection of random posts, I categorized a sample of 51 female commenters by the way they identified themselves in their Instagram bio, excluding accounts with no biographical information at all. I found that 82% of female commenters identified as married, 65% as mothers, 37% as homemakers and 65% as Christian.

Above all, the most striking observation I made across these 51 accounts was that 83% of female commenters who were married identified first and foremost as wives. Yes, you heard that right: A vast majority of tradwives really do privilege their status as a wife over their identification with religion, hobbies, interests or even motherhood. This fact taught me my third lesson about feminine traditionalism: Marriage dynamics, in the eyes of a tradwife, are no different than those outlined in thousands of matrimonial unions each year. I now pronounce you man and wife is code for Men can exist as autonomous individuals outside of marriage, while a womans personhood is superseded by her role as his spouse.

One tradwife, for example, makes not one but two allusions to her marital status in her Instagram bio: Wife, Mama, Producer, + Screenwriter is immediately followed by Married. When I clicked on her spouses profile, I was disappointed but not surprised by his lack of identification with his role as a husband. Instead, his bio reads like a man who doesnt put the toilet seat down after taking a piss: Army Veteran, I love playing video games, NASCAR, and Football. But why was this the case? Why were tradwives doting on their husbands so enthusiastically? You could mistake them for a middle schooler who makes their relationship Instagram official with a in their bio.

When everythings packaged in hyper-feminine aesthetics, its easy to overlook what truly lies at the heart of the tradwife movement: the promotion of red-blooded, patriarchal masculinity. From patriarchy appreciation posts to photographs of men who are never seen without a wife or child in their arms, the prevalence of masculine messaging from The Tradwives Club taught me my fourth lesson about feminine traditionalism: Your ascension to domestic bliss is only made possible by the presence of a hot, muscular man who looks like he drinks whole milk.

One particular post illustrates how The Tradwives Club advocates so strongly for hegemonic masculinity that theyll come to the defense of the kind of man who only talks about himself on the first date. In a carousel that claims to debunk the myth of toxic masculinity, a series of nine screenshotted tweets overlay an image of a man strutting out of a restaurant in a black suit, holding his daughter in his arms like an accessory. As a term used to emasculate and feminize men, the tweets argue that the nomenclature of toxic masculinity is a form of cultural brainwashing from feminist lies that demonize masculinity and condition women to court non-threatening males. This pursuit of sheep among wolves has blinded women from what the female psyche really craves: A lion among wolves. A man amongst men. A warrior in the world and a Lover in the home. This was it: an image of the enigmatic tradhusband, the self-identified alpha male who only appoints himself as the breadwinner of his family because hes allergic to washing his sheets.

But maybe I was wrong maybe traditionalism doesnt just appeal to the men who are looking for a woman who will force them to graduate from their collegiate navy sheets. And so, to better acquaint myself with traditional men, I looked to those lurking in the comments section of The Tradwives Club, which included a Trad Catholic who uses Based/Redpilled pronouns, a PragerU personality and four separate men who are so deluded by self-importance, they offer life-coaching services. Yes, that means you can pay $74.99 for a 30-minute coaching session with the kind of man who will offer you five solutions to your wife (keeping) your balls in her nightstand drawer. After surveying the pool of eligible (touch-deprived) bachelors in the comments section of The Tradwives Club, I still felt like I had to dig deeper to understand what else governs the psyche of a traditional man besides his obsession with playing the devils advocate.

Accordingly, I relocated my investigation of traditionalism to what I can only describe as the frightening male equivalent of The Tradwives Club. If the feed of The Tradwives Club is like a meticulously organized Barbie Dreamhouse, male traditionalists, on the other hand, envision their idyllic past more like the inside of a barf bag: a gag-inducing amalgam of ran-through Chad Wojak memes, teary-eyed soyboys, nearly naked male physiques, condemned Only Fans temptresses and fantastical European architecture. But as much as I disdained the Mojo-Dojo-Casa-fication of tradwife aesthetics, it wasnt the only thing that bothered me about male traditionalists.

When I started seeing traditional values through the eyes of a man, it became obvious how women fit into their vision of the restored past they dont. At almost every juncture, male traditionalists prioritize masculine self-improvement above all else. To rally men behind hegemonic masculinity, post after post after post after post after post (seriously, I could go on) dangles the promise of perfectly chiseled abs in front of you like a carrot on a stick. If you ask me, its a little homoerotic. Women, on the other hand, are antagonized, othered or cast as props in the campaign for radical male self-improvement. On eight separate occasions, provocatively posed female bodies are intercepted by the likes of Jordan Peterson, Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, GigaChad, Jesus Christ and others who appear before you to dispense wisdom like BREASTS ARE TEMPORARY, FREEDOM IS FOREVER.

Oddly enough, male traditionalists refuse to give the same treatment to their inhumanely proportioned anime waifus, making a post that frames the rejection of them as just a joke post btw. Apart from their waifus, the only other women they cast in a remotely positive light are female Wojak memes with large breasts and stock photos of women dressed in traditional European garments. Yes, thats right the objects of male admiration belong to a class of women who arent even real humans. Theyre pure, unadulterated fantasy.

I was dumbfounded by my discovery. It felt impossible for a traditional woman to center her life around a man who cares about himself first and his waifu second. But if this was really the case, how do tradwives fit into the lives of men who only embrace these imaginary women because theyre so clearly afraid of being emasculated by the real ones? The answer to this question is not only simple but also probably the most important lesson I learned about feminine traditionalism thus far: Tradwives act as agents of the alpha-male fantasy by casting themselves as the protectors of the male ego.

If this fact wasnt already made obvious by their vilification of man-hating feminists, just look at the marital advice tradwives prescribe to one another. When broaching conflict, tradwives are so scared of emasculating their husband with criticism that theyll advise each other to do just about anything but have a real, adult conversation. Seeking advice about a man who puts zero effort into his appearance/hygiene, one female commenter from The Tradwives Club asked how she could confront her husband when she cant have a serious conversation with him because no matter how gently (she approaches) the subject, he will see it as a personal attack. The best her fellow tradwives could offer in the way of advice was a lethal combination of prayer and mind games. Im being completely serious. One tradwife recommended dress(ing) like a hot mess for a month to let him know thats how (she feels) about him most of the time. Another suggested using sex as an ultimatum: I really dont think I can get in the mood right now unless you do A, B, or C, she wrote. A third tradwife advised her to maybe try setting out his hygiene products for him. To the fourth tradwife, if prayer wasnt enough to compel this man to take a shower, a conversation could act as the last resort, but only on the condition that instead of criticizing what hes doing wrong, try to let him know what you DO appreciate about him/his appearance. Evidently, this aversion to confrontation demonstrates how the alpha male ego is so fragile, tradwives will sacrifice everything, including their dignity, to shield it from a boo-boo.

If my immersion into The Tradwives Club taught me anything, it was the extreme lengths that real women go to in service of the male ego. Maybe this was it: The key to domestic bliss never depended on how well you could bake a loaf of sourdough or how neatly you could fold your husbands boxers. Instead, this ascension hinges on your willingness to shelter your alpha from seeing himself for what he really is: a man-baby. When you cast the tradwife movement in such a masculine light, it starts to lose its pink veneer.

Since the beginning of the 2010s, the internet has played a crucial role in the mobilization of mens rights activism, providing the substrate onto which misogynistic rhetoric has given birth to what scholars call the Manosphere. By now, the origins of the Manospheres subgroups like the red pill, involuntary celibates and MGTOWs are well documented. The origins of the tradwife movement, however, live in relative obscurity.

With a sudden uptick in popularity at the beginning of 2020, the tradwife movements overnight growth seems anything but coincidental. Its possible to trace the proliferation of female traditionalism to Alena Pettitt a tradwife who made headlines in January of 2020 following appearances in British media where she publicly avowed ultra-traditional gender roles. Even then, things still werent adding up. Pettitts radically traditionalist views couldnt have come from nowhere. As I suspected, the progenitor of the online tradwife movement wasnt a real woman like Pettitt. It was a 4chan meme. Trad Girl, also known as Tradwife, made her 4chan debut on July 9, 2019, bearing blonde hair and a blue floral dress. In the same month, her likeness multiplied across 4chan boards, where she became the face of debates surrounding traditional values. Trad Girl broke into the mainstream in October of 2019, when she appeared on Twitter for the first time as a meme and later fan art.

Suddenly, everything started to click: The initial push for feminine traditionalism had nothing to do with real, flesh-and-bone women. Instead, the tradwife movement descended directly from the Manosphere. By packaging their misogynistic, anti-feminist beliefs in girly aesthetics, the Manosphere has successfully marketed itself to communities of women who were predisposed to traditionalist ideologies by their fundamentalist interpretation of religion and politics. Its bad enough that ordinary women have become the target of the Manospheres contagious ideologies, but its even worse when you consider that a vast majority of these women are mothers. Yes, that means the Manosphere is infecting the way mothers are raising the next generation of promising young women young women who will be taught to follow men instead of lead them; to stop yelling and soften your tone; to allow him to speak first; or, worst of all, to offer to take off his shoes.

Having exposed the hairy beer belly of feminine traditionalism, I knew I had entered the late stages of my tradwife evolution. And so, I was finally ready to enter the mothership: Facebook.

Daily Arts Writer Bela Kellogg can be reached atbkellogg@umich.edu.

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The hairy beer belly of the Tradwife movement - The Michigan Daily

The Novelist: A Novelby jordan castro soft skull, 208 pages, $24

Jordan Castros The Novelist: A Novel describes a morning during which an unnamed writer struggles to resume work on an autobiographical novel. He cant stop himself from checking Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or his email; his progress is further impeded by anxiety, self-doubt, and the sheer variety of impressions and memories that flood his internal monologue. Perhaps he has good reason to avoid writing: His novel confronts his past as a heroin addict.

In the first-person past tense, the narrator agonizes about whether to tell his story in the third-person present tense, or some other, more literary manner. Really, hes worried about how much distance to place between himself and his narrative. The author of The Novelist has evidently wrestled with similar questions; yet the narrator, whatever his name is, turns out not to be Jordan Castro himself. In fact, he admires (a fictionalized) Castro from a distance, and has defended his work against hostile detractors, although he hasnt yet read Castros controversial new book.

At first glance, The Novelist appears to be an autofiction, a literary form less than half a century old. Autofictionists prefer to distinguish their work from both the old-fashioned autobiographical novel, as practiced by every major serious novelist from Goethe to Thomas Mann, and the non-fiction novel that was pioneered by Truman Capote and Norman Mailer in the 1960s.

No novelist can fully escape or transcend what he has lived, no matter how successfully he manages to transform his perceptions into art. Autofiction is an attempt to destroy the illusion that writers might discover truth through artifice, and to cultivate instead the illusion of radical honesty. Their work often feels like an attempt to transfer the writers undigested consciousness into the mind of the reader.

The most distinguished autofictionist in America is Ben Lerner, whose artfully artless 2011 novel Leaving the Atocha Station tells the story of a poet who wastes a year in Madrid on a fellowship and ends up as a not-quite witness to the Madrid train bombings on March 11, 2004. This is a self-portrait of the artist, warts and all, with a special emphasis on the warts, perhaps at the expense of any obviously admirable or redeeming qualities. In less capable hands, this would degenerate into a self-defeating exercise in narcissistic self-loathing. Yet Lerner writes so vividly that he gets away with the conceit.

Alas, Leaving the Atocha Station spawned legions of imitators. Jordan Castro turns out not to be one of these; indeed, one cant help but suspect that The Novelist is a cunningly malicious send-up of the very idea of autofiction.

The Novelist begins at 8:14 a.m. on a Friday, when the unnamed narrator opens his laptop to start his day. First he checks his correspondence, and finds only three unopened emails: one from a writer friend, another from his boss, and a third notifying him that his copy of the latest Jordan Castro novel has shipped. He tells himself that he doesnt want to check Twitter before getting down to work. The spirit is willing; but the flesh is weak.

He has tried to set a rule for himself: No Twitter before noon. But the more he clicks on Twitter, the more he feels compelled to continue. When he sees he has a new follower, his awareness of wasting time is defeated by vanity, which he misinterprets as good manners: He feels that he has to follow his new follower back. He loses interest in social media etiquette when he sees how awful other peoples tweets are and realizes that he should be thinking of novelsnot the one hes trying to read at the moment (Nicholson Bakers The Mezzanine), but the one he should be writing.

The reference to The Mezzanine, Bakers first book, is telling. This is not an autofiction, but a plotless stream-of-consciousness description of an office workers stray thoughts during his lunch hour. When this novel was first published in 1988, reviewers praised Bakers powers of observation and ability to get inside the mind of the common man. But the author took for granted that his readers lived in the same world he did. Now The Mezzanine seems trite and dated; readers under twenty-five will need footnotes to understand Bakers riffs on defunct technologies, quaint-sounding 1980s consumer products, and out-of-date brand names.

Castro has learned from Bakers mistakes as well as Lerners: He concentrates on capturing the effect of a mind wrestling with itself in real time. He has too much tact to spell out what he believes. Addiction is a memory disease, the narrator tells himself. He turns out to be quoting a line from a memoir by an academic. Then he shamefacedly remembers the lie he told the academic in an unsuccessful attempt to impress him. Writing is a memory disease, he thinksand instantly realizes how fatuous the idea is. He is self-aware as well as self-conscious; but hes not nearly as canny as Castro himself.

Castro cant resist reminding the reader of his presence. This is most glaring when his narrator begins gushing over Jordan Castros interesting tweets and claims to find the man himself beautiful. But he rarely overdoes the provocation, even when he makes himself sound like a cross between Jordan Peterson and Bronze Age Pervert. For the most part, Jordan Castro is glimpsed indirectly, as when the narrator recalls an argument he had about Castro with a pretentious hipster-communist art gallery owner, then fantasizes having dominated the encounter.

Over the course of The Novelist, the narrator reveals his reluctance to come to terms with his past. He has replaced an addiction to drugs with a compulsive social media habit that is merely another means of distracting himself from reality. This is Castros way of exploring free will: not through essayistic rumination, but by means of actively demonstrating how we consistently fail to do what we know to be right.

Artistically, The Novelist has a few weak spots. The passage in which the narrator searches for Jordan Castro on YouTube, then tries to watch a music video that someone has made using clips from an interview with Castro, is implausible, and too high-concept; the whole scene is impossible for the reader to visualize. Certain other passages, by contrast, are far too easy to visualize, such as Castros many graphic discussions of defecation. As a means of mocking the conventions of autofiction, this is brilliant. But after the point is proven, the toilet humor becomes as tiresome as constipation.

Happily, there is much more to The Novelist than this. Castro has a light touch, and a knack for deftly evoking not just atmosphere, but the passage of time. He can make the simple act of brewing tea into something dramatic, pregnant with meaning. The narrators inability to find a favorite coffee mug, and the agitation he feels until hot tea and Facebook help him forget about it, ring true, as does his vague guilt about snooping through photos on social media of people he hasnt seen since high school.

Autofiction is ultimately a self-defeating exercisea futile act of defiance in the face of death, as practiced by writers who equate death with annihilation. Castro is more hopeful than this; he tacitly acknowledges that there might be such a thing as eternal, absolute truth that exists outside his mind. This alone makes him stand out from most of his literary peers.

Without getting bogged down in theorizing or abstract speculation, Castro has written a novel about the soul, and the challenges we encounter in trying to save our souls in a world that seems engineered deliberately to endanger them. He has learnt the hard way that there is such a thing as the natural law.

God willing, The Novelist will help kill off autofiction as a literary form. Castro has made its internal contradictions impossible to ignore, and in doing so he has revealed that he has any number of potentially interesting stories to tell about the world outside the writers mind, as it exists beyond the confines of the room in which he writes. Castros next task will be to settle on a subject ambitious enough for his range of talents, which is generous indeed. Now its time to stop procrastinating and get to work.

Jaspreet Singh Boparai is a former academic.

Image byJuanedclicensed viaCreative Commons. Image cropped.

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This Insight is part of GNETsGender and Online Violent Extremismseries in partnership withMonash Gender, Peace and Security Centre. This series aligns with the UNs 16 Days of Activism Against Gendered Violence (25 November-10 December).

Introduction

In the decade following the 2014 Isla Vista killing spree by self-described incel Elliot Rodger, there has been increasing academic and media interest in the online incel community and the potential threat of violent extremism its members pose. Particular attention has been paid to social media websites like 4chan, 8kun and Reddit and their role as online sanctuaries that facilitate the growth and spread of extreme misogynistic digital rhetoric. Incels are one of many subgroups that comprise this loose coalition of antifeminist groups animated by the Red Pill philosophy, known as the manosphere.

A key concern for counterterrorism researchers is the apparent ease with which disaffected young men are radicalised and indeed, are self-radicalising through their participation in the manosphere via user-generated content like internet memes. The rise of the alt-right since 2015 and the election of Donald Trump have demonstrated the utility of memes on social media as a vehicle for the spread of far-right and misogynistic propaganda, simultaneously highlighting the inability of conventional P/CVE approaches to understand and intervene in these spaces. Incels, being terminally online and holding an outsized influence in meme subcultures, are particularly influential in the creation and spread of antifeminist memes, with popular templates such as Virgin vs Chad being widely used in mainstream digital spaces.

Since the incel worldview is preoccupied with the supposedly feminist-controlled gender and sexual hierarchy articulated in the nihilist Black Pill interpretation of the Red Pill philosophy, rigid representations of masculinities are a central visual and discursive feature of incel memes. Based on my research into incel memes (forthcoming), this Insight provides a comparative analysis of the Virgin vs Chad and Wojak incel-aligned meme templates through the lens of hegemonic masculinity theory, focusing on how masculinities are represented in these memes and the implications of this for their virality online.

I argue that the virality of incel memes is contingent upon their alignment with mainstream portrayals of idealised masculinities and their emphasis on individual agency, rather than the appeal of the incel worldview itself. They draw on the misogyny that already exists as a political force in the wider culture and further legitimise patriarchal structures. Securitising incels as highly misogynistic or extreme obscures this relationship and the real threat it represents; the political mainstreaming of inceldom into the hegemonic masculine bloc of patriarchy itself, a process already underway via antifeminist gurus like Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson.

Misogynistic Ideologies and Incel Memes

Both the Red and Black Pills portray gender relations as dominated by feminism and structured according to a hierarchy of physical attractiveness dictated by female desire, with men holding no power or privilege in society. This lookist hierarchy essentialises men into three broad categories of masculinities reflective of their desirability and access to female sexual attention: alpha males that sleep with the majority of women, beta males who can sleep with women that are undesirable to alphas, and incels, who are excluded from sexual relationships with women altogether.

The Red Pill philosophy allows space for men to move between these masculinities through a combination of self-improvement and manipulating women into having sex by hacking their supposedly inherent biological instincts. The Black Pill, on the other hand, is far more rigid and genetically deterministic. Since incels believe physical attractiveness is genetic, they tend to view these masculinities as impermeable and self-improvement near-impossible. Black Pill incels view themselves as doomed to a life of celibacy unless the structure of gendered social relations itself changes. This worldview is responsible for the nihilism and fatalism that characterises the incel subculture.

This lookist hierarchy, and the incel response to it, are reflected in the Virgin vs Chad and Wojak incel-aligned meme templates:

Fig. 1: Virgin vs Chad meme template

Fig 2: Wojak meme template

In Fig. 1, the left-hand Virgin character is associated with negative or undesirable traits, functioning as a stand-in for beta or incel masculinities. This is contrasted with the Chad character who represents alpha masculinities and is associated with positive, desirable traits. Since these characteristics are commonly behavioural as often as they are physical, this template can be seen as representative of the Red Pill exhortation to be an alpha male to gain female sexual attention. In Fig. 2, the Wojak character represents feelings of hopelessness, depression, fatalism or nihilism, and is regularly used as a reaction image in response to content that prompts these feelings in the user. In incel communities, it is often used to signify resigned acceptance of the Black Pill characterisation of the lookist hierarchy and express empathy for other incels experiences, failures, and feelings about it.

Hegemonic Masculinities and the Virality of Incel Memes

Both meme templates are extremely popular, ranking in the top 3% of the most popular memes on the Know Your Meme online database. My research found, however, that only the Virgin vs Chad template can be considered mainstream, due to its intertextual connections with various other popular memes, its place as an ordinary term in mainstream online discourse, and the sustained popularity of its derivatives. While the Wojak meme remains popular and has spawned its own series of derivatives, these templates have not broken into mainstream cultural discourse in the same way. This disparity in mainstream cultural integration has little to do with their portrayal of misogynistic discourses both meme templates are routinely used to illustrate extreme antifeminist or incel worldviews but rather their representation of masculinities and how these align with idealised expressions of masculinity in wider society.

Based primarily on the work of R.W Connell and a reformulation of Gramscis theory of cultural hegemony, hegemonic masculinity theory examines the power relations between multiple masculinities within patriarchal structures and how dominant conceptions of idealised masculinity are realised. Under patriarchy, masculinity always occupies the hegemonic position, but the particular configuration of idealised masculinity is constantly shifting to reflect changing gender relations and the cultural expectations of the day.

In the past century, three primary expressions of idealised or hegemonic masculinity have emerged: the traditional masculinity epitomised by figures like John Wayne or Don Draper from the TV series Mad Men; the transnational business masculinity or Sensitive New Man exemplified by Barack Obama or Phil Dunphy from the sitcom Modern Family; and the contemporary geek entrepreneur represented by Mark Zuckerberg or Tony Stark. These masculinities reflect cultural expectations of what constitutes a male role model in their respective time periods and the configuration of gender practice that legitimises mens domination of women under patriarchy.

In response to the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1970s and neoliberal globalisation in the 1980s, the self-sufficient, rational breadwinner archetype of traditional masculinity was replaced by the technocratic and educated New Man. This archetype supposedly represented a more caring and emotionally literate masculinity that embraced equality in domestic life and valued collaboration. In the Web 2.0 era, the geek entrepreneur figure has risen to prominence, combining the tortured genius technological innovator of Silicon Valley with the emotional suffering and interests of nerd culture that has come to dominate online spaces. However, while these masculinities differ enormously in their idealised traits, such as the accepted role of masculine emotional expression and the preferred competencies of their respective modes of production, all three portray individual agency as the most valuable trait of the ideal man. Under patriarchy, men are defined by their ability to impose their will on the world around them.

Conversely, the Black Pill nihilism of the incel worldview is predicated upon the impossibility of overcoming the lookist hierarchy imposed upon men. In this way, incel memes that represent masculinities solely in these terms do not go viral in mainstream digital spaces in the same way as templates that align with the idealisation of individual masculine agency in hegemonic masculinities. Iterations of incel memes like Virgin vs Chad that refrain from engaging in fatalistic or self-pitying representations of masculinity have no issue integrating with the mainstream and becoming embedded in popular meme culture. This phenomenon should compel scholars of gender and extremism to reevaluate exactly what cultural forces are responsible for the seemingly exponential growth of extreme antifeminist ideologies like inceldom.

Confronting Mainstream Misogyny

The relationship between inceldom and mainstream misogyny holds significant implications for extremism researchers seeking to understand the appeal of incel and other antifeminist worldviews are significant. The fatalistic nature of inceldom is the primary barrier to the incel worldview going mainstream. This is not to diminish the fact that inceldom is an extreme form of misogyny, but rather to highlight the tendency of conventional P/CVE approaches to securitise incels as somehow deviant or outside the broader societal culture of misogyny. This approach is misguided and obscures how the incel worldview both draws from and contributes to the reinforcement of patriarchy by situating incels in opposition to mainstream masculinities and the inherent misogyny these embody.

The true threat of inceldom, then, is its potential to normalise and reintegrate these ideologies into the hegemonic masculine framework of patriarchy. This is not mere speculation; the explosive popularity of antifeminist gurus like Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson indicates that this process is already underway. This shift carries severe political implications, as the Overton window of mainstream misogyny increasingly shifts towards the acceptance of violent antifeminist ideologies.

While there is a need for extremism researchers to find ways to intervene in extremist subcultures, we should not lose sight of the fact that terrorism and extremist violence serve a political agenda. The gradual normalisation of inceldom suggests that incel-related violence has already been somewhat successful in achieving this. To effectively counter the rising tide of antifeminism and misogynist extremism in society, gender and extremism researchers must examine incels within the broader context of hegemonic masculinities and acceptable misogyny.

Inceldom and other antifeminist subcultures have an outsized influence on the development of online meme culture. Still, it is social media algorithms on mainstream platforms that amplify these ideologies and make possible their normalisation into the mainstream, geared as they are to the interests of young, white men. If the rising tide of misogyny is to be pushed back, the role of mainstream misogyny in the function of social media algorithms needs to be addressed, and the algorithms transformed to reflect the composition of the entire online community. Failure to do so will see incel ideologies become integrated, possibly even dominant, in the hegemonic structure of patriarchy.

Jayden Haworth holds a Masters of International Relations by Research from Monash University, with his dissertation Men, Masculinities and Memes: Mainstream Digital Culture and the Legitimation of Incel Discourses undergoing editing for journal publication.

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Men, Masculinities and Memes: The Case of Incels GNET - GNET

The Jordan B. Peterson PodcastNov 27, 2023

Dr. Jordan B Peterson sits down with the Secretary General of Great Arab Minds, His Excellency Saeed Al Nazari. They discuss the origins of the United Arab Emirates, how the Abraham Accords and a Tri-Faith system have taken effect and opened dialogue, the projects spearheaded by Saeed for the education, entrepreneurialism and empowerment of young Emiratees, and why the unique vision and strong values of the UAE have lifted the country to unimaginable heights in only half a century.

His Excellency Saeed Al Nazari is the Secretary General of Great Arab Minds. He is also spearheading Transformational Projects and Creative Affairs at the Executive Office of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, in addition to the Mohammed bin Rashid Leadership Development Center and the Arab Strategy Forum.

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For His Excellency Saeed Al Nazari:

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On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/saeedalnazari?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_app

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An Alternative to Western Nihilism | His Excellency Saeed Al Nazari - The Daily Wire