An Online Movement to Silence Women Is on the Rise

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Now, there may be growing divisions within Trump’s MAGA base, but the rejection of feminism appears to be a unifying force for right-wing males.

 

With the help of social media, misogynistic views are being increasingly normalized. “The Atlantic” staff writer Helen Lewis has been keeping an eye on this growing frontier and it’s the subject of her new June cover piece. She joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss her observations.

 

HARI SREENIVASAN: Bianna, thanks. Helen Lewis, thanks so much for joining us. You wrote a recent piece in the Atlantic, and it’s titled “The Men Who Want Women to Be Quiet,” where you describe this ideology called masculinism. Just kind of break that down for our audience, set the table for us.

 

HELEN LEWIS: Yeah. I mean, people might have heard already about the manosphere, which is often described as a kind of network of male influencers who, you know, talk about whether or not it’s boosting your testosterone or making yourself more attractive or working out whatever it might be. And I think this is a sort of the political wing of that, essentially. So Masculinism is a kind of antidote or a backlash to feminism to say that men are, have been shamed for being men. Women have feminized society in ways that the masculinists contest. One of the big examples of that is that they think that empathy is now too dominant in politics. That women are empathetic and too many female politicians, you know, they feel sorry for illegal immigrants or they feel sorry for violent criminals. And so, you know, borders aren’t being enforced, laws aren’t being enforced. 

 

So they have this really top to bottom critique of society and everything that’s happened really in the last, well, you could say a hundred years or more. At the very extreme end, you have people who, you know, who want women to be legally paid less than men or women who don’t even vote in some of the more extreme cases.

 

SREENIVASAN: Yeah. You start the article out by talking about someone named Douglas Wilson, who has a lot of policy prescription. And he has also the ear of Defense Secretary or Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. You write that, “Wilson believes that women should ‘not ordinarily’ hold political office and should never serve in combat roles in the military. Husbands should have dominion over misbehaving wives weight, spending habits, and choice of television programs.” I mean, he’s part of this movement and you write that he’s the co-founder of the Communion of Reformed Churches based in Moscow, Idaho. Tell me a little bit more about him. 

 

LEWIS: Yeah, he’s a really fascinating figure. I mean, he has been blogging for over 20 years now, and he has written an extraordinary number of self-published books. He has kind of founded a little empire in Idaho. So he has a publishing imprint that seven members of his family write for. He has a streaming platform. He makes documentaries. You know, and he has this church that has planted 170 other churches around the U.S. And, you know, he’s been saying the same things for a really long time, but he feels that his moment has come to some extent. He feels that there is now an openness to the things that he’s saying. 

 

And yeah, that link to Hegseth is really important. So Doug Wilson went into the Pentagon in February, led a prayer service and told everybody there to be un embarrassed, unapologetic Christians. And now the interesting thing about that is that there’s, that is not all flavors of Christianity, right? He’s a Calvinist, he’s a Protestant, and he doesn’t, you know, in his, he would like America to be a theocracy and he actually wouldn’t really like expressions of Catholicism in the public square. So he doesn’t like processions related to the Virgin Mary and that kind of thing. So he has got a very particular vision of what he thinks America should look like. And, you know, it is a very narrow one, very kind of — few people need apply, really. 

 

SREENIVASAN: You know, these voices like Mr. Wilson would’ve been considered fringe. And what you’re saying is they are far more mainstream, perhaps because of their, you know, the people who subscribe to them like Pete Hegseth.

 

LEWIS: Yeah. And also because of the reach of the internet. For better or worse, we have moved into a much more of a free-for-all media environment. You know, there would’ve been a time when people like Doug Wilson would’ve been kind of treated as a curiosity. And actually what’s happened is that he has been able to build his own apparatus, right? There is no point in you or me platforming Douglas Wilson. He has built his own platform and it’s very popular and successful. 

 

And you could say the same thing about, you know, the manosphere influencers. You know, lots of them, Nick Fuentes, who I mentioned in the article, you know, he has been banned from a whole load of social media platforms, but not all of them. And also he has an army of fans who clip up things that he says and then distribute them. That was something that also worked very well for Andrew Tate. So, you know, there has been this democratizing of the discourse, which has been wonderful in lots of ways and given a lot of people more of a chance to speak. But it has also allowed some ideas that would once have been considered pretty extreme to be put in front of millions of people.

 

SREENIVASAN: So how does that kind of overlap, right? You have, on the one hand, you’re talking about somebody who has kind of religious motivations, and then how does that slide over into kind of political action and activity when it comes to this younger generation of men who might be listening to him, but they might also be YouTube influencers that are selling kind of how to look better and how to take the right vitamins or whatever it is.

 

LEWIS: Right. And all of it’s wrapped together with kind of anti-elitist message, right? So, you know, they are doing this to you. They are keeping you from, you know, expressing your natural masculine, innate kind of sensibilities. So there is a kind of anti-establishment tone that goes all the way through it. 

 

The other thing I found when I was researching this was that this is one of the few things that really binds the entirety of the New Right, the online right, together. And that hadn’t really kind of occurred to me before. You know, if we look at the MAGA movement now, there are some pretty deep splits on, you know, whether the tech companies should be better regulated, whether or not Israel should be treated as a, you know, a staunch military ally of the U.S. or if it should be treated in more arms length way, protectionism in trade versus tariffs. You know, there are big ideological divides within that movement. But the one thing that pretty much everybody can agree on is that there are a few too many bossy women around the place telling everybody what to do. And wouldn’t actually everybody be happier if we reverted to a more kind of 1950s model of gender relations?

 

SREENIVASAN: Yeah, you write that, “Masculinism has become the single most important force uniting the American right, bringing together an unlikely constellation of pastors, posters, senators, preachers, influencers, podcasters, and fan boys.” Was there any kind of a triggering event? Is — do they see the success of President Trump as license?

 

LEWIS: I think Trump is definitely a big part of it. You know, he has always been someone who’s traded on his kind of edginess and he’s willing to take on whatever you might call it, political correctness. He’s also, you know, he has run against and beaten two female opponents who are presented in this way that the manosphere hates, which is this managerial, bureaucratic, coddling idea of like — the women are kind of the world’s HR managers. They’re the kind of the world’s nannies or moms telling you what to do. And so, yeah, I think you, you can’t see this story without a figure like Trump. 

 

Also, just this feeling in lots of online communities that are very popular with men, that being edgy is a kind of passport. It’s your kind of credibility kind of waiver to get you into that space. You know that you are cool, you are chill. You don’t mind if people use racist words or sexist words. You know, you’re not kind of scold. All these negative ideas that they have about the left. It’s become Richard Hanania who used to identify as a white nationalist, calls it “the based ritual,” right? You show to the other people that you are based, you are cool with this kind of stuff. And you do that by being, by being racist or sexist or saying something like, Well, actually I think women shouldn’t vote. And it’s understood as being slightly joking, slightly edu — deliberately edgelord, provocative. But also there are people around this movement who very seriously, if, if they were allowed to, you know, constitute America’s political landscape, that is what they think should happen.

 

SREENIVASAN: You know, I, I could see someone from the White House spokesperson’s office saying, Hey, look the, the President Trump keeps his arm’s length from this. We’ve got the Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, we’ve got the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. We have cabinet women who are high-ranking officials. So we’re not masculinists. We’re not, we’re not trying to court that vote.

 

LEWIS: Right. And I think there’s a really interesting thing that’s gone on there. You might also mention Susie Wiles, who is…

 

SREENIVASAN: Sure. 

 

LEWIS: …America’s first presidential chief of staff. So I’m not gonna make the claim that Donald Trump is a feminist. I don’t think that’s a claim he’d made for himself. But he is clearly actually not completely ill at ease with women in positions of authority. Although I think the only person he really likes being in a position of authority is himself. So it’s all, it’s all slightly relative. 

 

But there is an interesting thing that some of these people are more extreme than Donald Trump. And that’s something that kind of often gets, I think, underrated. You know, he kept off from the Republican platform in 2024, a federal nationwide abortion ban, which the pro-life movement has wanted for a really long time. And Donald Trump had a sense that was too far. That would actually be the kind of thing — And if you look at where people vote, yeah, people have genuinely have, you know, concerns about abortion, but lots of Americans do support it in some circumstances. So Donald Trump correctly identified that was a step too far. 

 

And there’s a similar thing I think that happens with, you know, with some of these masculinist ideas. He’s, at the same time, he can be very sexist, you know. He told a female reporter being a “quiet piggy,” 

 

(INSERT SOT)

Donald Trump: Quiet. Quiet, piggy. 

(END SOT)

 

LEWIS: This very belittling, sexist put down that I actually found quite shocking. I can’t really imagine George W. Bush or, you know, recent Republican presidents doing such a thing.

SREENIVASAN: You know, it’s interesting right now we also seem to be in a place where there are a lot of women who are embracing the traditional wife or tradwife philosophy and ideology. I don’t know if that’s just a, you know, a phenomenon on social media that’s becoming popular, but I see them having groups and conventions, I mean, which kind of lines very nicely along with the masculinist that where, but the women are opting into this, and then all of a sudden it says, well they’re not being oppressed into it. They’re choosing it.

 

LEWIS: Yeah. And I think that’s very different. If any couple in America, you know, goes, we’d actually like a really traditional split of breadwinner and homemaker and maybe, you know, we’re gonna make some economic sacrifices to do that, then God bless them, I’m all for it. The difficulty is about, you know, not being able to make that choice, having it forced on you. 

 

But the interesting thing to me, yeah, I think the trad wife phenomenon is a bit related to the, you know, manosphere, in the sense, I think both of them are entrepreneur-led by people who are playing characters on social media that may not be reflected in their everyday lives themselves. You know, you see lots of people who are preaching things and living a lifestyle for the benefit of, you know, the ‘gram.

 

And the same thing happens with a lot of trad wives. You know, most of them are essentially small business owners. You know, they’re actually, their content is their product, their lifestyle is their product. So they’re, you know, they’re just as, just as much as a female CEO. They are participating in that kind of capitalist economy.

 

SREENIVASAN: We’ve had multiple conversations on this program with different people who’ve come on and said, you know, look, there is a problem that young men are facing right now. There’s a loneliness crisis. They are struggling for economic viability. You know, is there something about that audience that makes them more vulnerable to hearing or subscribing to masculinism when they see it online?

 

LEWIS: The thing that I hear a lot, particularly from parents of teenage boys, is that there has been this message to boys that they are in some way inherently toxic. That they’re sort of stained by original sin. Or that they are, you know, mini patriarchs in waiting, they have all this power. And you know, it’s been a while since I was a teenager, but I can imagine that teenage boys feel like this, you don’t feel very powerful. You feel insecure. You know, you want people to like you, you don’t really have a kind of CV that you can boast about whatever it might be. And so I think that audience, I — you know, I feel for them. If you are a 17-year-old boy who is, you know, really desperate to find a, a girlfriend or boyfriend, who doesn’t have a, you know, weekend job who’s worried about being popular at school, and then you get told there are all these ways to be an awesome alpha guy, then I can see why that’s a really, really appealing message. And I can also see why it’s a real turnoff if you get told that you are, there’s something sort of wrong with you, and that being a man is to be innately in the wrong. 

 

SREENIVASAN: You know, you, you write that really MAGA is a response to feminism. I mean, are we looking at these large cycles here when, when feminism succeeds, you inevitably have this kind of pushback? 

 

LEWIS: Yeah, I mean, I think that is the history of feminism in America, really. And it’s always also interlaced with kind of economic and, and social and technical changes. So they all tend to happen at the same time. I don’t think you really get the second wave of feminism without the contraceptive pill, right? Which just puts women in charge of their fertility in a way they haven’t been before. 

 

But then you get this kind of tenseness, right? Well, if women don’t, you know, if women can support themselves without a man, then, you know, how do you kind of keep control of them? Like, how, what if they don’t have children? You know, what if they don’t get married? And I think if you look a lot through the online right now, those are really big fears. 

 

You know, one of the big obsessions of the online right, is birth rates. Now, that’s often also racially infused, right? That is the sense that maybe there are parts of the world that are having a lot more babies than the developed world. And it is framed as a kind of civilizational threat, but it’s also about if we give women choices, maybe they’ll make choices that we disagree with. And so, you know, I think that those things, you have to look at them in a broad historical sweep. Yeah.

 

SREENIVASAN: One of the pieces of data that you have in there is that 83% of Republican men under 50 years old agree that society has become feminine. Now whether they continue to hold those views, I don’t know. But that’s an enormous number, and that is going to be the group that takes over the party.

 

LEWIS: Yeah. I think it’s really interesting that that data, because there, it’s not wrong in the sense that, you know, I went back 20 years and Congress was 16% female. 3% of S&P CEOs were female. So there have been really big advances. You know, there are more women around. Some people for the first time will have a, you know, a female boss for the first time in their life. 

 

One of the things I wrote about in my book on feminism was, you know, how difficult it can sometimes be for male teachers. And they can be the only man in the staff room. And that was an experience that was uncomfortable for women entering male-dominated workforces, right, and finding that they were kind of the odd person out. And the same thing might now be happening to more men that they, you know, they might not be in the big dominant group and in publishing or in academia or wherever it might be. 

 

So, you know, I don’t think that, that the criticism is completely invalid, right? The social changes have happened. But the question is whether or not the slightly overblown claim that this is a kind of threat to civilization and everything’s going to hell in a handcart, is actually, that’s the bit that I think is harder to prove is women’s fault.

 

SREENIVASAN: Yeah. You, you cite different evidence-based claims that are being made by different people. You talk to Helen Andrews, a religious historian, you talk to a political commentator, Charles Cornish-Dale. You know, there was a quote in there, “Leftists have now openly embraced emasculation and having low testosterone as part of their identity.” What are they claiming? Why should it be taken seriously? Is this an edge case that they’re amplifying or is this something that has happened to the mainstream left?

 

LEWIS: Well, the thesis there from Charles Cornish-Dale who, whose internet handle is Raw Egg Nationalist. He believes in eating 12 raw eggs a day in order to boost your testosterone levels. Just a little bit of news you can use there. But the idea is essentially that, you know, that sperm counts have been falling, testosterone rates have been falling. There seems to be some evidence for that. I wouldn’t say it’s completely obvious and cut and dried. But the secondary claim is that actually, if you are a high T, aggressive, virile man, then you like inequality. You like entrepreneurs and you like striving, you like all those values that we traditionally associate with the right of politics, that kind of competitive energy. What — his claim then goes on to say is that low T equals liberalism, right? More concern about equality, more concern about making sure everybody’s feelings are kind of solved.  

 

You know, I just, I feel like that’s imposing a kind of frame of gender onto some fairly big and, you know, abstract concepts. 

 

SREENIVASAN: You mentioned the birth rate, and there was a recent event at the White House where Health Secretary, RFK Jr was talking about the falling birth rate in the United States, and he called it an “existential crisis.” And Dr. Oz, the head of CMS, warned that Americans are “under-babied.” What do you hear when the administration officials are using rhetoric like this? I mean, is the birth rate falling? If so, what’s wrong with calling attention to that?

 

LEWIS: There’s nothing wrong with calling attention to that. And actually, as I write in the piece, the U.N. has been warning about this since the 1990s because it is a really well established finding that as soon as women get more education access and more access to the job market, the number of children that they have falls. And you have countries that are below now 2.1, which is seen as the replacement rate. So this is — demographically, it’s a big challenge. But part of that, unfortunately, has — re-tilting of society has become the fact that we support the seniors a lot more than we support young families. And actually, the difficult thing about that is that perhaps we haven’t yet found the carrot that really works to encourage birth rates. You know, it’s been tried, various things have been tried: baby bonuses in Singapore, or income tax changes in Hungary. And at the moment, you know, they’re not massively shifting the needle. 

 

In America, meanwhile, you are much more left on your own. You know, there’s no federal maternity leave. Actually, the tax system is not written in a way to support those, you know, those young families in the really crunch years that are hardest for them. And I think that’s the kind of thing that would be totally legitimate for a government to look at and study and say, Well, hang on a minute. Yes, this is a problem. What can we do about it? 

 

For me, the bit that’s worrying is that the idea if the carrots don’t work, actually how many people want the stick? How many people want to exclude women from education and employment opportunities and stigmatize people who don’t have kids? You know, that’s the bit that is always slightly lurking under the surface. And I can never quite sure, you know, how sincere people are in wanting to find a solution that works for women rather than just sort of berate them or punish them in some way.

 

SREENIVASAN: Helen Lewis, thanks so much for your time.

 

LEWIS: Thank you