To our knowledge, in recent years there have been more than 100 victims, between deaths and injuries, of attacks committed by incels: an online community of men who resent women for not wanting to have sex with them. They call themselves “involuntary celibates” and believe they are victims of a world dominated by perfidious females who deny them the “right” to coitus. They grow up sheltered from the manosphere, the most misogynistic corner of the web, where they coexist with other groups such as (ahem) pick-up artists or the men’s rights movement. The British writer Laura Bates immersed herself for a year in that network of testosterone and hatred, the result of her research published in her Men Who Hate Women (Captain Swing).

He maintains that terrorism is not used to define massacres in the name of the ‘incel’ ideology because we are afraid of offending men.

The fear of offending men is considered more important than the lives of women. There is a convergence between two blind spots. Racism first: We have a hard time acknowledging that white men can be terrorists. And second, misogyny: we have difficulties conceiving violence against women as extreme because it is so normalized and accepted that it is very difficult to recognize it as something serious enough to deserve a word like terrorism. But it meets all international definitions. There are people being groomed and radicalized online against a specific demographic group – women – who are incited to commit massive acts of violence in the name of instilling fear among that group and promoting that ideology. And they are doing it. But we ignore it over and over again.

Do we not give importance to what happens in the network?

It is a radicalization with total impunity. But online attacks against women also go unpunished. It has become completely normal for female politicians to be bombarded with threats of rape or death.

There will be those who say that men also receive threats…

There is a difference between someone who disagrees with a politician and someone who tells a female politician that they are going to rape her until she keeps quiet.

Misogynistic forums do not stop growing, but it would be a mistake to focus only on the users. Is this ideology seeping through?

In the United States, 27% of men say they would not have a one-on-one meeting with a woman at work for fear of being sued. It does not mean they are members of incel forums, you may not have even heard that word, but that is a conspiracy originating from these forums. In Spain, a fifth of young people think that gender violence is an invention. The impact is significant and what is worrying is that there are many politicians around the world, from Vox in Spain, to Donald Trump and others in the US, in the UK, Australia… who see these attitudes resonating among voters and profit from supporting anti-feminist ideas.

What is happening for these kinds of messages to resonate with so many men?

Fear is incredibly effective and creates a great deal of interest and attention. And that creates financial interest. For example, Andrew Tate is financially exploiting vulnerable youth for his own benefit. His ideas have had 11.4 billion views on TikTok alone, more than the population of the planet. Then the big media capitalize on the controversy it creates and the clicks it generates. A lot of this has to do with money.

He criticizes that big technology companies promote these messages because they keep users connected. Is misogyny fueled by business?

They don’t even do it deliberately. Its algorithms are programmed to keep users connected. For this they offer increasingly extreme content. It might be harmless if you start watching a video about running and end up watching Ironman contests, but it matters if you start watching a video about women and end up watching videos telling you that women are taking over the world, that the pay gap and gender is a myth, that maybe women should have no rights and should be sex slaves. It is algorithmically enforced radicalization and companies benefit financially from it.

More and more young people say they feel victims of feminism

For the first time, men have much more extreme and conservative views in terms of misogyny and gender roles than past generations.

Is there a connection between misogyny and the extreme right?

The far right sees misogyny as a gateway, a way to attract young people. One ideology cannot be separated from the other. The incel ideology is explicitly racist. They have incredibly racist terminology for women of color, they are furious with women who choose to have sex with black men. On the other hand, how deeply misogynistic white supremacism is is often not recognized. They see white women as dehumanized merchandise, they talk about the sterilization of women of color… You can see it in the manifestos about the “white Sharia” or the theory of the great replacement. The vast majority of white supremacists who commit mass shootings have a history of sexual or domestic violence against women.

And what can we do?

The big media have an important role. Online radicalization is enabled and lubricated by the way the media portrays feminist progress. When they throw out questions like “Is Me Too a witch hunt?”, “Has feminism gone too far?”… What they are doing is facilitating the recruitment of young men into extremist misogyny. By introducing these concepts into mainstream culture, it legitimizes them.

Is it linked to the fact that most of the media is still run by white men?

tremendously. In the UK women write only a quarter of front page articles and the upper echelons of newsrooms are dominated by white men. The same is true in politics. We expect our politicians to take action, but 56 members of parliament are under investigation for sexual misconduct. Almost 9% of our representatives. How can we have faith in that institution to address these issues?