Ignoring misogyny has left a gaping hole in how we understand political violence.
A conversation with sociologist Cynthia Miller-Idriss about her new book Man Up, on misogyny, gendered violence and political extremism. Read an excerpt from Man Up here.
Things are changing, but by and large, the field still doesn’t get it.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Jackson Katz: At one point you considered calling your new book “Just Grab the Bitch,” a statement made by one of the militia members during the foiled the 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. How and why did you end up choosing Man Up?
Cynthia Miller-Idriss: I lobbied hard for “Just Grab the Bitch,” in part because my overall goal in this book is to make the invisible visible, and it seemed like that title would force people to look at the issue head on. But of course, there was a big debate in marketing about whether such a harsh title would turn possible readers away.
The publisher did a survey of independent booksellers to test the title, and it was completely split, 50/50, love/hate. In the end, the words of one of the booksellers who hated it really stuck with me: “Why would we center the words of these violent men?” That pretty much did it for me, and I thought that centering the messages that boys and men get about the need to be dominant, aggressive and ready to be violent—to man up—would much more clearly situate this issue: as not just one of hatred or violence against women, but of how all of us experience gender policing in ways that shape our behavior, relationships and propensity to violence.
Katz: You’re a woman in an academic field that studies extremist violence and various forms of political radicalization. It’s a very male-dominated field that often attracts men with law enforcement and military backgrounds. Generally speaking, a lot of these men hold more traditionalist views about gender.
What skills did you bring to this work, and what are some you’ve had to acquire and develop along the way?
Miller-Idriss: That is such an interesting question.
I would probably describe it as less a skill than a disposition, which is that over all the years of listening to boys and men talk about their views on race, national identity and belonging, I have somehow learned to talk with men about masculinity in a way that doesn’t shut them down but rather opens up the conversation.
I have been criticized for this approach by some feminists who argue it’s rooted in “himpathy” for men—i.e., too much empathy for perpetrators of violence at the cost of maintaining a focus on the continuing inequities and lack of safety that women face. I’m sure that can happen, but I argue that it is essential to approach the issue with some empathy for the boxes that men have been forced to fit inside of for their own survival—to avoid the bullying and violence from other men, the shaming from parents and adults, and to adhere to what many men tell me were the rules they had to live by in order to stay safe.
Also, for many years I was much more comfortable talking with men about race than about gender. I’ve spent my entire career interviewing and studying mostly white teenage boys and young men on the fringes of racist, neo-Nazi and violent movements. I believe their willingness to talk to me was both racialized and gendered. They were willing to talk to a white woman about their racist and nationalist ideas in ways I could take advantage of, using what I learned to create interventions to try and keep boys and men like that on the periphery or move them further from the core of those movements and onto offramps.
It also helped me design tools for prevention that inform teachers and adults about the harmful ideas kids and young adults are exposed to. But in retrospect, I realize I should have been pressing them on questions of sexism and misogyny. It’s important to me to own how belatedly I came to have more of a voice on these issues, and how much I likely overlooked.
Now that I am asking those kinds of questions, I know that it helps that I’ve spent my whole life basically surrounded by men—from my brother and his friends to my best friends in high school to a large group house in college with roommates who were two-thirds men. I was on the college cycling team at a time when there were 50+ men and three women on the team.
As I now start foregrounding issues of gender and misogyny much more, though, it’s important to note how much these ideas intersect with and underpin the racist and exclusionary beliefs I originally studied and wrote about. All these forms of hate, as so many Black feminists have argued for decades, are intersectional and mutually reinforce each other.
Over all those interactions, and especially in discussing the issues at the core of this book on misogyny, I have learned that I could have the exact same conversations much more productively when I talk about men’s wellness and the real and perceived grievances that can lead them into scapegoating rabbit holes—instead of using phrases like “toxic masculinity.”
As I learned from Mark Greene and others in the men’s wellness world, you can do a lot when you call men in—even as you still have to call out bad behavior and choices. This isn’t a pass to behave badly. But I’ve learned that some framings shut down the conversation before it begins. Teenagers taught me that, actually—what they want most are non-judgmental spaces to process their lives—and those spaces then open up dialogue with ways to pivot and change.
Katz: To what extent do you think your perspective as a woman has shaped your thinking about violent masculinities?
Miller-Idriss: There are so many ways my perspective as a woman has shaped my work and how I engage in the field in ways I don’t think I even really understood until decades into my career. I am intimately, automatically familiar with what it is like to feel unsafe in public or private spaces, to walk with keys in my hand, to be hypervigilant on running trails and in parking garages, to name just a few banal examples. My experiences as a girl and as a woman have completely shaped my thinking about violent masculinities, my empathy for victims and survivors but also my desire to create interventions, including for boys and men, that steer them away from violence and hypermasculine ideals and toward a fuller embrace of the full range of human emotions.
Age plays a role here too: Things are changing as I cross into what I refer to in Man Up’s epilogue as the age of invisibility, or my “Oh, sorry ma’am” era, in reference to a guy who recently catcalled me from behind while I was jogging and then when I looked at him over my shoulder, stepped back with his palms raised toward me and said, “Oh! Sorry, ma’am.” The experience of realizing I am aging out of the kind of sexual objectification—that was so omnipresent I’d forgotten it was there—is fascinating. It makes me feel even more compelled to work on misogyny and masculinities—because that guy wasn’t apologizing for catcalling in general—he was apologizing for catcalling a woman who was presumably old enough to be his mother. Younger generations of women still need us to bring all the fierceness to the worlds they still live in, even as I start to be liberated from it.
… that guy wasn’t apologizing for catcalling in general—he was apologizing for catcalling a woman who was presumably old enough to be his mother.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Katz: What are some of the ways in which being a woman has affected your leadership in the field, and/or the way others in the field respond to you and your work?
Miller-Idriss: I realized, early on, that those boys and men would talk to me, tell me things and often express gratitude for being asked—because they don’t have other spaces in their life where people ask them about their experiences as men. So in many ways, I think being a woman who has spent a lot of time around men has really helped me navigate uncomfortable subjects like masculinity or gender-based violence.
That’s not to say I haven’t felt my gender keenly in almost all policy discussions in the U.S., which as you say are heavily dominated by white men who are former military or law enforcement. I have. I trace some of the anecdotes in the book—the kind that every woman has in their pocket, from a colleague suddenly and unexpectedly trying to kiss me to a senior professor commenting in a sexualized way about my outfit as a junior professor. Mostly though, being a woman has been a net positive in my work in the field, also because I’ve spent most of my career as a professor of education.
I am often credited with coming up with ‘out of the box’ or innovative solutions in those groups—but actually, the ideas I propose are not at all unusual within education or social work and therapeutic settings. I didn’t fight my way to a leadership role in male-dominated spaces—I was largely in female-dominated ones in education and sociology, and I’m sure that had an impact on my experiences as I moved later in my career into security and extremist violence fields.
Katz: Why do you think academics and journalists who study and write about violent extremism have for so long failed to recognize, acknowledge or analyze the critically gendered aspects of this phenomenon? On a related note, you’ve said that over time you’ve come to see gender and misogyny as more central to understanding far-right political extremism than you had at an earlier stage of your work. Can you briefly describe the process of your evolution on this topic?
Miller-Idriss: I think it’s hard to look at the issue of the gendered dimensions of extremism directly—so hard that a lot of people just look away, or relegate the many things we already know about that relationship to a blind spot. When we talk about gender and extremism, people automatically think we’re talking about women’s roles in extremist movements. Or they might think we mean “toxic masculinity.” But the role of misogyny—and violent gender policing and exploitation—barely comes up, especially for domestic extremism.
There’s a fair amount of reporting on the issue when it comes to Islamist extremists that has clearly established that sexual and gender-based violence against women, men, girls and boys—including rape, sexual assault and genital or sexual mutilation, sexual trafficking, sexual slavery, forced prostitution, forced marriage, forced reproduction and other forms of gender-based and sexual violence—is a tactic of terror. Terrorist groups use gender and sexual-based violence to subjugate and terrorize communities, maintain territorial control, recruit and reward fighters, promote particular aspects of extremist ideology, finance terrorist operations or create revenue and income streams and create a supply of future fighters.
You only have to think of the Yazidi women, the Nigerian schoolgirls, the public beheadings and stonings of LGBTQ+ people, the use of forced marriage as a strategy of territorial control or the rape, sexual torture and sexual mutilation of women and girls by Hamas in the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks on Israel to know what I’m talking about. These aren’t just opportunistic elements of extremism—they are deliberate, organized and large-scale forms of gendered violence aimed at increasing pain and humiliation of victims, witnesses and family members.
Domestic extremists do this too, but this is where we have really turned a blind eye to exploitation and gender-based violence. White supremacists are fundamentally obsessed with gender through an ideological focus on white birth rates, demographic change and white women’s reproductive capacity. But there are also repeated cases of neo-Nazis charged with running sexual trafficking and prostitution rings or otherwise profiting from the sale of women’s bodies, including through sold footage of rape and assault on the dark web, both in the United States and across Europe and Russia, which receive very little attention. To name just one familiar example, in 2022, a neo-Nazi was arrested while plotting the mass rape of white women as part of a group called Rapekrieg.
These aren’t just opportunistic elements of extremism—they are deliberate, organized and large-scale forms of gendered violence aimed at increasing pain and humiliation of victims, witnesses and family members.
Miller-Idriss
Katz: In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, influential right-wing voices in government and media seized on the idea that “left-wing” extremist violence is one of our most urgent problems. More measured conservative and establishment commentators decried violence coming “from both sides.” Leaving aside for the moment that little is currently known about the alleged killer’s ideological affinities, what do the data show about how much domestic political violence in the U.S. emanates from the right versus the left?
Miller-Idriss: It’s so important to fact check this. There is recent data [from the Center for Strategic and International Studies] showing increases in far-left violence in the U.S., but the numbers the reports are relying on are so small (five events in the first half of 2025) that there is no way to draw any kind of statistical conclusion from them.
What is clear is that over the past decade, with tremendous consistency, the vast majority of political violence, and the most lethal attacks, have come from supremacist and anti-government movements associated with the far right. There just is no equivalency to attacks from the far left—even though there has been a recent increase in far-left violence.
It’s critical to not ignore the possibility of continued or spiking violence from the left, especially given data showing increasing willingness of Americans across the spectrum to support the use of violence to achieve political goals in some cases. But the facts on this are very clear and it’s essential to speak with clarity to the public about where the continued sources of threats come from in terms of the biggest risks.
I’m even more worried about violence that is not identifiably ideological, but which comes about after an extraordinarily high-online young man has incubated in hateful spaces online, sometimes for years. We are increasingly seeing mass shooters with no apparent clear ideological bent and no manifesto, but who have spent hours and hours per day in online gaming spaces whose in-game chats and community servers and forums can be incubators of misogyny, racism, antisemitism and homophobia, among other forms of hate. Or they have spent time on mass shooter fandom sites, true crime gore forums and other places that valorize and celebrate horrific violence. But because the targets of their violence don’t always clearly relate—i.e., a Uvalde elementary school or a Highland Park July 4 parade—we don’t identify those attacks as ideological.
The issue of online hate and how it can desensitize, dehumanize and incubate mass harm—most often at the hands of boys and men—is one of the most important things I can think of to address in terms of harm reduction.
Katz: Feminist writers and activists have known for years that, as you write, “Previous violent and misogynistic action against women and girls is a consistent red flag among mass shooters and terrorist actors,” and is a common element in the personal histories of nearly all mass killers. I, and many others in the domestic and sexual violence fields, started talking about this link 15 or 20 years ago. Is this now widely acknowledged and understood in the mainstream of violent extremist studies? Or is it still an uphill struggle to get people to draw these basic connections?
Miller-Idriss: This is actually the thing I was most insecure about in writing this book—and why I did so much outreach to experts who have been waving this flag for so long. That includes you—whose work I’ve long known but who I met as part of my effort to make sure I wasn’t stepping on toes with this book.
Because so many others have been saying this for so long—people in the DV/IPV space, women’s studies and gender studies scholars, so many Black feminist authors and feminist activists across the board, I wondered if I really had anything new to contribute.
But as I wrote and had conversations with people in my field, I find I’m still blown away by how few people will acknowledge the connection.
I share an anecdote in the conclusion to the book that illustrates where I think so many people in the field still are. I was talking with a major funder and mentioned my new book, and he just confidently said, “Misogyny doesn’t mobilize violent extremism,” then explained, “I mean, it’s not as if these guys want to wipe women off the face of the earth.”
Even after so many years of seeing gendered issues get sidelined in discussions of extremist violence, I was caught off guard by his certainty that gender wasn’t a factor in the very issues he was seeking to combat. It’s not that he is wrong about white supremacist men needing white women—after all, the fantasy of a white ethnostate that features so heavily in white supremacist propaganda depends on white women’s complicit or forced participation in birthing and rearing white children. There could be no ethnostate if women were wiped “off the face of the earth.”
And yet it’s hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that the desire for elimination should be the main criterion by which we gauge gender’s relevance for violent extremism. Things are changing, but by and large, the field still doesn’t get it.
This conversation continues tomorrow in the final installment of our three-part series on misogyny and political violence.
Great Job Jackson Katz & the Team @ Ms. Magazine Source link for sharing this story.
