To mark PPE@10 this feature continues a series of posts to celebrate ten years of Progress in Political Economy (PPE) as a blog that has addressed the worldliness of critical political economy issues since 2014.
Feminist political economists all have a friend called Tom (or Richard. Maybe not Harry). Our Tom comes to us with questions about how class and gender collide or coincide in various aspects of the contemporary global economy. When the Economist released a report on a widening divergence in voting behaviours between young men and women, our Tom shared it in the group chat, cognizant that we had been interested in what appeared like rising rates of misogyny among young men in Australia and the implications for national security.
As feminists working at the intersection of critical political economy and international security, we’ve long been frustrated by the mainstream’s recognition that gender plays some role in the rise of extremist ideologies and violent extremist actions without a clear understanding of how and why.
The default political economy explanation of men’s shift to the right is that neoliberalism has reduced economic opportunities for men, leading to frustration, anger, resentment, and scapegoating. The Economist explains the divergence through women’s increasing success in education, that gender equality programs have reduced opportunities for men and boys, and that social media echo chambers amplify extremist views. Liberal sensibilities have tended to pathologize the problem as one of a particular class of ‘deplorables’ who lack rational capacity to vote in their own interests.
However, we argue (with Yolanda Riveros-Morales) in a report issued this year on ‘Misogyny, Racism and Violent Extremism in Australia’, that the divergence should not be understood in terms of a traditional left/right political ideological divide and that political economy analysts are missing the elephant in the room: patriarchy. Not only the Economist report, but also a plethora of sociological studies across advanced industrial countries show that the key determinants of political divergence between men and women is on attitudes to women’s rights. Longitudinal research shows that the voting gap is in fact due to women having become significantly more feminist, while men have become more patriarchal in their orientations than even their grandfathers. A rapid increase in men aged 18-29 now report feeling ‘discriminated against’ as men.
With young men increasingly likely to express sympathies for regressive and patriarchal ideologies, combined with the increased recognition in scholarship and in many states of the security challenge posed by extreme right ideologues, we sought to investigate precisely what is the role of gender ideologies in driving radicalisation.
While much of the feminist work on gender and violent extremism has focused on the role of gendered norms, gendered logics, and gendered narratives as drivers of extremist ideologies and extremist violence, as materialist feminists we are interested in not just ideology as determining of extremist violence. It’s inaccurate to think of gender relations as only a normative system of ideas, rather than a system of distributional inequalities and their material implications. It’s for that reason that we operationalize our measurement of how “gender” is a key variable in understanding violent extremism by focusing on misogyny and violence against women as material features and expressions of patriarchal relations. We are interested in how ideology is imminent in and constitutive of the material relations of patriarchy.
Using a novel instrument, we surveyed 1020 Australians in a sample aligned with Australian Bureau of Statistics population parameters and found a strong and significant relationship between gender attitudes and support for various forms of violent extremism salient in the Australian context. We identified seven forms of violent extremism in Australia and hypothesized that misogynistic attitudes and attitudes supportive of violence against women would be predictive of all forms of violent extremism. And it was.
In our data, the oft-theorised demographic variables of education, religion, and income (the very same that the Economist identified as causal) were not predictors of support for any form of violent extremism in Australia. Age and religiosity were only weakly predictive of support for some forms of violent extremism.
A surprising, unanticipated result of our research was the popularity of support for the legitimacy of using violence to resist feminism. As a result of this finding, we isolated a novel form of violent extremism we called ‘anti-feminist violent extremism’ and found support for this form from nearly 20 percent of male respondents. Compare this to only 4.31 per cent of respondents supportive of religious violent extremism and four per cent supportive of white supremacist violent extremism.
While policy and grey literature on misogynistic attitudes and violent extremism have focused almost exclusively on incel extremism, this finding suggests that these attitudes are not restricted to incels. Instead, the sentiments expressed by the perpetrator of the Montreal massacre, Marc Lépine, when he declared his act was motivated by “political reasons… to send the feminists… to their Maker”, are more widely shared amongst the general population than previously believed.
Were policy to define violent anti-feminist beliefs as a form of extremism, it would be the most prevalent form in Australia and ought to be seen as a significant extremist threat.
Author: Sara Meger
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