The manosphere’s growing presence in school environments reflects broader challenges for gender-based violence (GBV) prevention. Therfore, it is essential to examine current responses to this phenomenon within the political economy of GBV prevention.

By political economy, we mean the ways funding environments, policy priorities and institutional arrangements shape what kinds of interventions are developed, delivered and sustained.

What we are seeing in schools is that because they are places of harm and intervention, they are ideally positioned for the introduction of market activity that promises to alleviate the problem, marketed inoffensively as mental health support rather than an intervention in gender-based violence.

This is a problem for multiple reasons, but primary because it defies best-practice evidence, sidesteps the violence prevention curriculum that has been available in Australia since the 1990s, and necessitates a discursive devaluation of the role of educators in doing this work, which they are ideally positioned and skilled to deliver.

The entrepreneurialisation of gender-based violence prevention

The growing influence of the manosphere has been accompanied by an expansion of programmatic responses positioned as solutions to its effects. It is now a significantly competitive market to offer education, small-group work and whole year-level assemblies that promise to correct the harm we are seeing unfolding.

Many of these ‘solutions’ are delivered by entrepreneurial providers who present themselves as experts in masculinity, wellbeing and behaviour change, and whose work increasingly circulates across schools nationally.

Here, education is rhetorically reframed as a space in which targeted interventions can be purchased to address specific problems, positioning schools as consumers within a broader market of services rather than as institutions capable of delivering systemic, relational and curriculum-based prevention by the experts who already work within them.

We know that undertaking any large-scale or whole-school approach is contingent on both commitment and resources, and therefore, it is important to recognise the structural conditions that make these responses attractive. The decision to purchase external programs rather than invest in existing curriculum, teacher expertise and whole-school approaches reflects both a political landscape in schools that is sensitive to work around gender and relationships, but also one of, in many cases, scant resources, and in most cases, challenges of time.

This mix of challenges is further accelerated by a prevention landscape that increasingly privileges visible, discrete and marketable interventions.

Part of the marketing pitch of one-off or programmatic solutions is the claim that schools and teachers should not be expected to undertake this work alone, and that they are already over-committed and under-resourced. While this reflects the realities of underfunded education systems and escalating demands on educators, it also speaks to a broader political economy in which systemic underinvestment creates opportunities for market actors to position themselves as solutions to complex social problems.

Importantly, this framing can suggest that violence prevention sits outside the core work of schools. Yet evidence supporting whole-school approaches to Respectful Relationships Education demonstrates that prevention is most effective when it is embedded across school culture, curriculum, policy and practice, rather than delivered as an isolated add-on.

Gaps in schools’ capacities to undertake this work are increasingly met by entrepreneurial actors offering relatively rapid and easily implementable solutions. These interventions operate within a political economy that rewards simplicity and scalability over evidence and transformation, privileging market-ready programs over the deeply relational and sustained work required for whole-school change.

The pathologisation of misogyny

A notable feature of the current prevention environment is the expansion of boys’ and men’s mental health programming into the gender-based violence prevention space.

There are now multiple program providers who characterise their work interchangeably as both violence prevention and boys’ mental health support, despite the relationship between violence perpetration and mental ill-health being far more complex than such framings imply. This dual positioning reflects the broader political economy of the field, where alignment with multiple policy agendas enhances both visibility and viability.

As a result, misogyny is being reframed as a symptom of a boys’ wellbeing crisis rather than understood as a manifestation of gendered power relations. While all young people’s mental health is an important issue in its own right, conflating mental health intervention with violence prevention can obscure the social, cultural and structural conditions that we know produce sexism, misogyny and violence.

Evidence for the effectiveness of many of these interventions also remains limited. Evaluations of programs focused on healthy masculinities and boys’ attitudes towards women and girls have frequently fallen short of critically engaging with the relationships between school cultures, gender norms and violence.

Recent small-scale evaluations in Australia similarly point to the limits of these approaches in shifting broader gender norms. While participants may become more comfortable expressing emotions within the program setting, there is little evidence of substantial change in conformity to dominant masculine norms or attitudes towards sexism and gender inequality. This raises important questions about their capacity to address the underlying drivers of violence.

Indeed, some interventions may inadvertently reinforce the very gender identities and allegiances they seek to challenge. While they can provide valuable spaces for young people express vulnerabilities and discuss difficult ideas (dynamics that also occur within classrooms with educators), they may also reproduce the gendered categories and assumptions that need to be transformed if meaningful prevention is to occur.

Challenging the profit model of prevention in schools

The popularity of once-off programs and external interventions can appear attractive because they promise action without requiring the difficult, long-term work of institutional transformation. But, unless we commit to the latter, we will not see fundamental change in school climates.

Further, the place of schools in primary prevention work therefore needs to be more fully recognised, understood and advanced. Despite decades of evidence supporting whole-school approaches, schools continue to be positioned as ‘consumers’ of prevention rather than as central sites in which prevention can occur.

Whole-school approaches to Respectful Relationships Education are proven to prevent violence not only within schools, but across young people’s present and future relationships and communities. However, this work is demanding, resource-intensive and often confronting. It requires schools to examine the structural and cultural conditions that enable misogyny to flourish and to commit to long-term transformation rather than short-term intervention. This is not easy work, and it is also not malleable to a quick-fix product model.

But, we must acknowledge and accept, and then act on the truth that a complete response to school-related gender-based violence and the broader social problem of violence against women and girls requires sustained engagement with the gendered norms, power relations and institutional conditions that enable violence to emerge and persist.

Market-based responses and entrepreneurial interventions are therefore wholly inadequate alternatives to whole-school prevention. Their proliferation reveals their adeptness at reshaping the story and positioning themselves as market leaders in the work, in a landscapes that privileges approaches that can be packaged, marketed and delivered over the slower, relational and structural work required to transform school cultures.

Misogyny and gender-based violence in schools are urgent problems that are causing significant harm. Our responses must be commensurate and appropriate, and must draw on best practice and high quality evidence.

And that evidence tells us one thing pretty clearly already; that schooling misogyny will not be solved by entrepreneurs.

The manosphere doesn’t just exploit boys’ insecurities. It manufactures them

It’s pretty likely that you’ve now heard or seen the term ‘manosphere’, in the news, in your social media, on your TV, or maybe from the mouths of your kids.

It’s the term that denotes the loose collection of online content creators promoting misogyny and restrictive, harmful forms of masculinity. Much of the attention it attracts centres on a familiar question:

Why does the manosphere have such traction among boys and young men?

A common explanation is that boys are lost, unmoored, searching for meaning, and looking online for answers to who they are. This account is not entirely wrong, but it is a bit misleading and undercooked, and it risks overstating the novelty of what we are seeing while distorting where we look for its causes.

Since youth research first emerged in the post-war period as a distinct field examining adolescence as a unique stage of life, studies have consistently shown that young people undertake active “meaning work” as they navigate the transition to adulthood.

In the 1950s and 60s, studies of emerging youth cultures such as Teddy Boys, Mods and Rockers – and the Bodgies and Widgies in the Australian context – documented how young people used music and style as vehicles for collective identity, and to carve out spaces of belonging and distinction.

By the 1970s, scholars were analysing punk and other subcultures as forms of symbolic resistance, through which young people interpreted and responded to broader social and economic change. Youth was never a period of stability. It was a site of experimentation, uncertainty and identity-making.

A generational condition, not a male one

Framing contemporary boys as uniquely “lost” therefore mistakes a longstanding feature of youth for a new and gender-specific crisis.

Current indicators suggest that uncertainty and distress are widely shared. Young women report high, and often higher, levels of anxiety, depression and loneliness.

To be clear, this does not mean boys and young men are merely imagining things. Their individual experiences of loneliness, rejection and mental health struggles are valid. But they are not proof that men collectively have been robbed.

Structural pressures like housing unaffordability, insecure work, and delayed transitions to independence are reshaping the conditions under which all young people are trying to establish a sense of self.

What we are seeing, despite efforts to yet again imagine it into existence, is not a wholescale crisis of boys or masculinity, but the intensification of a generational condition.

Identity formation in the digital age

What has changed is not the search for meaning, but the environments in which it takes place.

Where previous generations turned to music scenes, political movements or localised subcultures, today’s young people navigate identity within digitally mediated spaces.

Platforms such as YouTube, TikTok and Reddit function as contemporary sites of youth culture. They are places where identities are tried out, affiliations are formed, and interpretations of the world are encountered and contested. To read this as evidence of a uniquely “unanchored” generation is to confuse a shift in medium with a transformation in the underlying process.

This matters for how we understand the appeal of the manosphere. It is often suggested that these spaces gain traction because they fill a gap for boys who feel overlooked or disconnected. But this gets the dynamic the wrong way around. The manosphere does not simply respond to a pre-existing void; it actively manufactures one.

As young men move through ordinary processes of identity exploration online, they encounter content that aggressively reframes everyday experiences of, for example, dating frustrations, educational outcomes, and shifting gender norms as evidence of systemic men’s disadvantage.

These are not neutral interpretations. They are highly selective narratives that elevate particular grievances, strip them of context, and present them as proof of a broader condition of male dispossession. This is a form of instructed victimhood. This process does not just answer questions young men already have; it tells them what questions to ask. The danger of the manosphere is that the answers it offers are manipulative.

The manosphere manufactures grievance

The commercial logic matters here. The manosphere is more than simply a cultural space or a set of ideas. It is a grievance economy. Its most successful figures sell courses, coaching, supplements, subscriptions, private communities and lifestyle products.

The model is circular: identify ordinary insecurity, recode it as masculine deficiency, blame women, and then sell young men a route back to status and control. The “void” is not merely filled. Instead, it is actively produced, intensified and monetised. This is why the language of confidence and self-improvement can be so misleading as it belies an uglier truth. This is not support for boys. It is a business model that depends on keeping them aggrieved.

For the young people caught in its web, the manosphere does more than offer clarity or certainty. It promises power and presents dominance not only as desirable, but as necessary and something to be achieved, learned and performed.

The appeal lies not simply in making sense of the world, but in claiming a position within it: One defined by hierarchy and entitlement.

The “problem” and the “solution” are inseparable, bound together in a narrative that first produces a sense of grievance and then channels it into a particular vision of masculinity.

A more convincing account would situate the appeal of the manosphere within the broader dynamics of youth itself: A period defined by searching, experimentation and exposure to competing frameworks of meaning.

What is new is not that young men are looking for answers. It is that some of the loudest voices they encounter are intent on telling them they are lost, and on defining the terms of what it would mean to be found.

The opportunity for deeper conversation across the field and amongst stakeholders in the GBV prevention space is welcome. The open letter also explicitly rejects men’s rights framings and affirms key feminist principles, including the role of power and structural inequality. How consistently these are carried through in the framing of the problem sits in tensions with these claims, though.

Accordingly, a central concern running through our (somewhat lengthy) response that follows pertains to the framing of the problem itself. The way the field, its tensions, and its priorities are described is not neutral, and it shapes what is seen as the problem, what responses are considered legitimate, and how different forms of work are positioned.

It is precisely because this moment matters that it is important to engage closely with that framing, the assumptions that underpin it, and the differences it brings into view. These divergences, at least in part, undermine the call for co-ordination, and render the framing of the field as fragmented as a fundamental misdiagnosis.

The central conflation: Men’s mental health and men’s violence intersect but are not the same problem

At a high level, the open letter brings together two distinct (though related) domains: men’s wellbeing, and men’s use of violence. Both are shaped by patriarchal gender norms. But they operate through different mechanisms, require different forms of accountability, and sit within different traditions of practice and knowledge. Crucially, they are defined by different kinds of problems.

Work on men’s wellbeing tends to centre what might be understood as the interior dimensions of men’s lives: disconnection, loneliness, identity, mental health and help-seeking. Work on violence against women, children and gender diverse folks centres the exterior of men’s lives: behaviour, power, control, and the impact of harm on others. These distinctions are not superficial. They shape what is understood as the problem, what change looks like, how success is measured, and imply different forms of accountability. Treating these as a single-agenda risks collapsing these distinctions, and in doing so, diluting what is specific and necessary in each.

This is not to deny that these domains intersect. Experiences such as loneliness, shame, grievance and social disconnection can intersect with harmful online cultures and gendered practices, particularly in a rapidly evolving digital landscape shaped by algorithmic amplification, online misogyny, AI-facilitated harms, manosphere cultures and platform dynamics.

These conditions are transforming both the contexts in which violence emerges and the ways in which boys and men form identity, belonging and grievance, creating points of overlap between experiences of wellbeing and patterns of harm. However, acknowledging this complexity does not collapse the distinction between wellbeing and violence, nor establish a straightforward causal pathway between the two.

Fragmentation is being misdiagnosed

It is this distinction that helps explain why what is being labelled as “fragmentation” may, in fact, be a reflection of the field working across fundamentally different problems and towards fundamentally different aims. This is not just a difference in emphasis, but a difference in ontology - what the problem is understood to be. In one case, the problem is framed primarily as one of boys’/men’s wellbeing and social connection; in the other, as one of power, inequality and harm. These framings generate different theories of change, different forms of intervention, and different expectations of accountability.

It may be helpful to briefly think about this in more practical terms. In medicine, different conditions can share a common underlying cause while still requiring distinct diagnoses and treatments. For example, diabetes may lead to both vision problems and nerve damage, but treating one of these does not resolve the other. Each manifestation requires its own form of intervention. In a similar way, while both men’s wellbeing challenges and men’s use of violence must be understood as emerging from patriarchal, capitalist and colonial norms, improving one does not automatically resolve the other. Conflating them risks assuming a causal relationship that is more complex and less direct in practice.

The framing as described in the open letter also risks overlooking the history of the field it is seeking to organise. Work to prevent gender-based violence and advance gender equity has been built over decades through feminist activism, organising and practice. This includes not only violence prevention, but broader gender equity struggles - for women’s rights in economic, political, social and reproductive domains, and their intersection with trans rights movements, which have shaped the conditions in which such work now operates. This history is not uniform, nor without critique. Feminist movements have not always adequately centred the experiences of Black women, Indigenous women, trans women and other marginalised groups, and have also not always been unified on key questions such as the drivers of violence, the role of patriarchy, and appropriate responses to harm (and arguably are still not entirely unified, as per recently revived debates on the size of the role of trauma in GBV). However, this does not diminish the extent to which this work has established the foundations on which current approaches are built.

What must be understood here is that much of what is being called for in terms of systems thinking, collaboration, and cross-sector engagement, has long been recognised and enacted within this work, often under conditions of significant underfunding..

What is being described as fragmentation, then, seems to better reflect substantive disagreement across the field about causes, evidence, power, and purpose. These are not peripheral tensions, but central to how the work is understood and carried out. Rather than breakdowns in relationships or modes of miscommunication or mistrust, they are disagreements about how power operates and how harm should be addressed.

For many in the women’s safety sector, these tensions arise not from an absence of collaboration, but from long-standing concerns about how violence is conceptualised, how accountability is maintained, and how feminist knowledge and practice are engaged (or not).

Alignment is not a neutral solution

If fragmentation is not simply a technical problem, then alignment is not a neutral solution. While the open letter positively gestures toward holding multiple perspectives, calls for co-ordination inevitably reflect a position about how the field should be organised, what should be prioritised, and whose frameworks should lead.

The call for a “shared agenda” warrants particular attention. While the letter emphasises the need to come together, it also outlines what that agenda could look like, without a clear process for how it would be collectively shaped, contested or governed. This creates a tension between the language of collaboration and the reality of agenda-setting (and, indeed, a ten point agenda of work is provided in the letter).

Without explicit mechanisms for disagreement, negotiation and accountability, there is a risk that “shared” becomes a shorthand for alignment around a pre-existing frame, rather than a genuinely co-produced direction. This is important because, while multiple perspectives may coexist, they do not carry equal weight in terms of power, harm and material impact. Treating them as equivalent risks obscuring important differences in accountability.

There are also practical implications to this framing. Positioning the field as fragmented and in need of integration can shape how funding, policy attention and legitimacy are distributed, potentially privileging new or centralised approaches over existing work, rather than investing in and strengthening what is already in place. Further, as is established above, what is being conflated here are two distinctly different problems and fields, and therefore, we need to question who this alignment seeks to benefit.

There are also differences in how knowledge is understood

Alongside these ontological differences are epistemological ones. That is, differences in how knowledge about the problem is generated and applied. The distinction drawn between “research” and “practice” in the letter suggests a divide between those who produce knowledge and those who implement it. In reality, that boundary is far more porous. Beyond this, the framing of “practice” appears to implicitly apply to organisations working to support the social and emotional wellbeing of boys and men.

This overlooks that women’s safety and violence prevention organisations are also deeply practice-based and have for decades been generating knowledge through frontline work, community engagement, and sustained interaction with victim-survivors, in behaviour change work, and prevention work with boys and men. Social research on both experience and perpetration of violence, in turn, routinely engage with lived experience and qualitative insight.

The result is not simply an incomplete picture, but a misleading one: a false distinction that obscures the extent to which practice, evidence and expertise are already embedded across the field. The distinction isn’t really between “research” and “practice” — it’s between different focus areas and goals. People work across both men’s wellbeing and violence prevention, in research as well as in practice.

To frame this as a divide between those who generate knowledge and those who apply it is at best misplaced. It positions some forms of work as grounded, practical and connected to lived experience (men’s health work), while implicitly casting others as abstract, removed, or overly theoretical (violence prevention). This false and unsustainable binary obscures the depth of practice expertise within violence prevention and women’s safety work, and re-centres authority in ways that are not reflective of how knowledge and practice are actually organised across the field.

More fundamentally, these differences are not only about who is involved in producing knowledge, but about how the problem itself is known. Different parts of the field draw on different ways of defining, measuring and interpreting what matters. Measures of emotional wellbeing, connection or help-seeking, for example, do not necessarily map onto, or serve as proxies for, understanding patterns of violence and entitlement. Treating them as such risks a category error: assuming that insight into one domain provides reliable knowledge about the other.

This matters because what we choose to measure shapes what we see, and what we see shapes what we do. If the indicators used to understand men’s wellbeing are taken as indicators of reduced risk of violence, there is a risk that important dynamics of power, control and harm remain insufficiently examined; and then there is no shift in dial on rates of gendered violence.

(some of) what might be needed to more generatively proceed

This is already getting too long, so let us move to some requests to the authors and endorsers of the open letter. The invitation to dialogue requires more than a call to align. It requires in our view engaging directly with the differences in how the problem is understood, and the implications of those differences for the work. This, in turn, requires at least four things (and, we are sure, a whole lot more).

1. Acknowledge differences in problem definition, and don’t equate this to fragmentation

The letter explicitly acknowledges the importance of healthy disagreement, noting that tension, contestation and critique are necessary parts of this work. This is an important and welcome position. However, when co-ordination is framed as an obvious good, and fragmentation as a clear problem, a tension emerges. It becomes difficult to express not only disagreement, but also more fundamental differences in how the problem of gendered violence and its causes are understood, without those differences being read as evidence of fragmentation.

In this way, the framing risks becoming self-reinforcing, with differences in approach, purpose or underlying assumptions at risk of being interpreted not as signals of meaningful divergence, but as problems to be resolved. This creates a subtle pressure toward alignment, even where those differences are substantive and unresolved (and in some ways unresolvable).

2. Make power and accountability explicit

Violence against women and children cannot be understood without reference to power, entitlement and inequality, including misogyny, and intersections with class, race and colonialism. Framing concerns raised by women’s safety advocates as matters of “discomfort” risks mischaracterising what are, in many cases, questions of safety, power and evidence.

While the open letter states that safety is non-negotiable, there is less clarity on what accountability to women and gender diverse victim-survivors looks like in practice within this framing. If work with men and boys were to sit alongside violence prevention, rather than dilute it, power and accountability must be made explicit, particularly where tensions arise between different practice priorities and approaches.

This requires clarity about how accountability is enacted, not just stated, particularly where work intersects with the safety of others. Accountability is not just something to be aimed at the boys and men who participate in such work, but also, and fundamentally, the people who lead and staff the organisations that do any work in the name of gender violence prevention.

In practice, this could take a number of forms. For example, organisations working with boys and men on prevention may consider formal accountability structures, such as advisory or governance roles for representatives from women’s safety and violence prevention organisations, or mechanisms for ongoing input from victim-survivor expertise

Relatedly, describing feminist or violence prevention work as “shaming men or boys” should be rejected. While some men and boys may experience shame when engaging with questions of gender, power and behaviour, this is not the same as those approaches being structured around shaming. Greater precision is needed here. Claims of “shaming” risk reframing critical engagement with harm and accountability as an interpersonal injury, and in doing so, redirect attention away from behaviour, power and impact. If accountability is to be meaningful, it requires holding space for critique without recasting it as harm where harm is not being enacted.

3. Step back from chastising informal critique

The characterisation of informal critique or “backroom conversations” as a problem, as per the open letter, warrants careful reconsideration, and better still retraction.

For many women and practitioners, these spaces have not emerged arbitrarily, and have in actuality been historically necessary. They are responses to working within contexts shaped by gendered power, where men, including well-intentioned actors, continue to hold disproportionate influence over agendas, resources and narratives. In such contexts, informal spaces can provide a degree of safety for sense-making and the sharing of concerns that may be difficult to raise openly without consequence.

These dynamics are not incidental. They are shaped by broader logics of masculinity and power, including norms around authority, defensiveness, and control over how critique is received and responded to. Where those dynamics are present, informal networks can become a pragmatic and protective mechanism, particularly for those raising concerns about harm, accountability or the limits of certain approaches.

In this light, “whisper networks” and other forms of informal discussion are not a symptom of dysfunction, but part of how accountability has been maintained in uneven conditions. Treating them as inherently problematic risks overlooking the power relations that have made them necessary, and may inadvertently shift attention away from the conditions that constrain open critique.

This is not to suggest that informal critique is without risk or limitation. But in naming it as a problem, there is a need for care. Without attention to the gendered power dynamics in which these practices arise, such characterisations risk reinforcing the very conditions that necessitate them in the first place.

4. Strengthen evidence, evaluation and accountability for claims

If we are to advance claims about what works, particularly in prevention via work with boys and men, those claims need to be grounded in robust, transparent and contextually relevant evidence. This requires more than evaluation focused on levels of participation, satisfaction or short-term shifts in attitudes. Measures of whether participants enjoyed a session, felt engaged, or reported increased awareness are not indicators of reduced risk of violence or meaningful change in behaviour. There also needs to be questions around whose expertise is diminished or framed as problematic when market-based interventions are positioned as solutions to social problems.

The prevention evidence base consistently points to the importance of sustained, intensive and contextually embedded work. Duration, frequency and depth of engagement matter. Gender-transformative approaches that seek to shift norms, power relations and behaviours require more than one-off or short-term interventions, and cannot be confined to a focus on the interiority of men’s lives alone. They must also engage with the external conditions in which behaviour is enacted, including relationships, institutions and broader social norms.

In this context, claims about impact should be proportionate to the evidence available. Where programs are positioned as contributing to prevention, there should be clarity about what outcomes are being measured, how they relate to harm reduction, and what level of evidence supports those claims. Calls for alignment, scaling or system reform should therefore be accompanied by a clear articulation of the evidence underpinning them, including the evaluation frameworks required to test, challenge and refine them over time.

Closing thought

There is also a broader question of how the open letter’s framing lands publicly. Naming fragmentation in such a visible and expansive way does not simply describe the GBV prevention field. Instead, it shapes how the GBV prevention field is perceived, particularly in a context of already heightened scrutiny. This creates a tension between the intention to strengthen the work and the potential to reinforce narratives of dysfunction. It may also position some actors as arbiters of coherence within a fragmented field, rather than participants within it.

There is much in the original letter that speaks to real and pressing issues, including the need to better support men and boys in a rapidly changing social and digital landscape and to respect the value of the work of women and gender diverse people to create the foundations for prevention work. But if this is to be a genuine invitation to dialogue, it requires more than a call to align. It requires being explicit about the assumptions being made, the evidence they rest on, and the differences that remain unresolved. This would allow for conditions that we need to enable us to have the kind of conversations that we all want to help us ensure that the safety of women and gender diverse people is not at risk of being side-lined by a disproportionate focus on the wellbeing of men and boys.

Reams of research evidence now clearly show that misogynistic language and behaviours are circulating in schools (and other workplaces), alongside the mainstreaming of anti-feminist talking points across social media and wider political and cultural discourse. There is well documented, valid and necessary concern about the influence of the manosphere and related online spaces on boys and young men. The harm is undeniable.

These developments, including the growing reach and traction of the manosphere itself, are often described as a form of ‘backlash’: a reaction to feminist gains, to changing gender roles, or to a perceived loss of men’s ‘natural’ status.

This designation is intuitive and makes sense in many ways. Feminist scholars have long shown that progress toward gender equality is rarely linear, and that gains are frequently met with resistance. Susan Faludi’s work on backlash in the 1990s remains a touchstone here, capturing how feminist advances can provoke cultural and political responses aimed at reasserting patriarchal norms.

Image: https://exhibitions.lib.udel.edu/50-feminist-books/exhibition-item/backlash-the-undeclared-war-against-american-women/

Important cultural flashpoints of the last decade or so, such as Gamergate scandal and reactions to #MeToo movement can quite readily be understood through this lens. Coordinated harassment campaigns targeting women in gaming, and the intense resistance to public reckonings with sexual violence, appear to exemplify the kind of reactive pushback that the concept of backlash was designed to capture.

Yet, as we suggest in our recent article in the Journal of Gender Studies, the way the term is now used risks obscuring as much as it reveals. While this might at first appear to be an academic question about how we define and use concepts, it also has implications for those working in gender-based violence prevention, education, and anti-misogyny advocacy.

“Backlash” is often deployed as a catch-all to explain a wide range of phenomena, from everyday expressions of misogyny to coordinated political efforts to roll back gender equality. It tends to foreground reaction, affect, and grievance—framing what we are seeing as emotional or individualised responses to change.

This is particularly evident in discussions of the manosphere, where attention is often directed toward anger, resentment, or confusion among boys and men. Such accounts help explain how these dynamics are experienced and why certain narratives resonate. At the same time, they risk narrowing the analytic frame, and intervention practice, to questions of feeling; and this may underplay the extent to which these formations are organised and politically meaningful.

One reason for this lies in how masculinity is typically understood. It is often approached as a matter of identity or affect, rather than as a site of mobilisation. By contrast, feminism is widely recognised as a coordinated political project. Masculine formations, even when they operate at scale, are more likely to be interpreted as expressions of discomfort or instability.

As scholars such as Lucy Nicholas and Chris Agius argue, contemporary ‘masculinism’ (a dominant ethos that normalises and privileges masculinity across contexts) is not simply residual or reactive. It is an active, ongoing project that works to reassert authority and reorganise gender relations in the context of progress in gender equality.

This dynamic is reflected in recurring narratives of ‘crisis’ in masculinity that resurface across successive moments of gender change, often presented as novel but in fact cyclical over at least the past 150 years.

This becomes clearer when we consider the role of grievance. What is often understood as individual frustration is, in many cases, shaped and sustained through online networks that provide shared narratives about loss, unfairness, and entitlement. These spaces do more than express dissatisfaction; they organise it. As Kate Manne has argued, misogyny operates not simply as an attitude, but as a system that disciplines behaviour and maintains the patriarchal social order.

Share

In this sense, what we are seeing is not simply reaction, but evidence of a masculinist countermovement operating across cultural, political, and digital domains. This is not a recent development, but part of a longer history of organised responses to feminist gains and that continually adapts to new social and political conditions.

This countermovement does not require central coordination to be effective. It is constituted through the alignment of multiple actors, institutions, and platforms, from influencer networks and online communities to mainstream political rhetoric, including the deployment of anti-feminist and anti-‘woke’ discourse by figures such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Viktor Orbán.

It is also sustained through wider infrastructures, such as legal challenges to gender equality measures, the work of think tanks and lobbying organisations, and the circulation of funding and resources, that together reinforce a shared logic in which men are positioned as under threat and the reassertion of masculine authority is framed, to lesser or greater extents, as necessary.

One effect of this is a widening of what might be called ‘masculinist permission’: an expansion of the space in which misogynistic ideas can be expressed more openly and with less challenge. This is evident in the mainstreaming of manosphere discourse, the rise of gendered harassment in schools, and the increasing normalisation of aggressive behaviour in public and online spaces. These developments signal not just expression, but a shift in what is tolerated and defended.

If these dynamics are understood primarily as backlash, responses are likely to focus on individual attitudes and emotional responses. Recognising them instead as part of a structured and politically mobilised formation brings into view questions about how these narratives are produced, how they circulate, and how they are reanimated an re-gain legitimacy.

It is this shift in how we understand these dynamics, not as episodic reactions but as ongoing formations, that shapes what becomes possible in response.

Our forthcoming book, Schooling Misogyny, is available for pre-order from May 8.

In schools, organisational structures and cultural logics are deeply shaped by broader relations of power, particularly those tied to gender, race, class and sexuality. Within these institutions, structural and cultural inequalities are actively reproduced and do the work of permitting what can be told, what is regarded as a truthful retelling and the language that is permitted to be used in put a shape to an experience.

We have written about this in a previous paper, drawing on the concept of institutional gaslighting—a structural and epistemic mechanism that draws on the resources of the institution to determine that truths are permitted and which are to be recast.

Subscribe now

Originating in the 1938 play Gas Light and its subsequent film adaptations, the term gaslighting describes a form of intimate partner violence in which a woman is manipulated into doubting her perception of reality. While early uses of the term were grounded in interpersonal dynamics, contemporary scholarship has extended its application to structural contexts.

In particular, Sweet (2019) conceptualises gaslighting as the production of a ‘surreal social environment’ within structurally unequal relationships. Here, the destabilisation of perception is not simply an interpersonal tactic, but one that is made possible by broader social inequalities. Gaslighting, in this account, draws on and amplifies dominant cultural narratives that render some subjects inherently less credible than others.

In school settings, these dynamics are readily observable. When women teachers report experiences of sexual harassment and are met with suggestions that they require improved behaviour management, their accounts are not simply dismissed; they are reinterpreted through gendered scripts that position women as professionally deficient or emotionally unreliable. These responses are enabled and permitted by institutional cultures that render these reinterpretations both plausible and legitimate.

These dynamics can be further understood through Alison Bailey’s (2020) concept of the unlevel knowing field. In this framework, institutions are not neutral sites of knowledge adjudication. Rather, they actively organise whose knowledge is recognised as legitimate and whose is subordinated.

Within schools, this uneven terrain becomes particularly apparent when women teachers report harm. Their experiential knowledge is frequently positioned as secondary to institutional priorities, including reputational management and procedural compliance.

The effect on women not only compounds what has already been exacted by the experience itself, but the harm of experiencing epistemic subordination—when one’s version of reality is deemed intolerable, impermissible or impossible.

This remains a persistent epistemic equity issue in schools: whose knowledge is immediately afforded recognition and trust, and whose is cast as dangerous, subversive and risky? What are we willing to accept as real and occurring, and what language are we willing to use to offer recognition of what is happening?

In previous public incidents of gendered violence in school settings, euphemisms such as ‘bullying’ have been used with a clear intention to create distance between the drivers of gendered violence and school settings. In journalist Jane Gilmore’s groundbreaking advocacy and activism correcting newspaper headlines that purposely erased women from stories of their own murders at the hands of men, Gilmore provided a powerful lesson about what language users permit to be written into existence. Culpability, motive, violence, guilt, capacity, misogyny … when we deploy euphemisms or avoid naming misogyny and gender in school violence, we afford incredible generosity to perpetrators. We demonstrate an unwillingness to acknowledge boys’ and men’s capacity and socially normative, culturally afforded desire to harm. We make them innocent of the very specific set of harms that happen to women, and we diminish their intent.

The effects of these discursive avoidances aren’t theoretical either. In our first study on Andrew Tate’s impact on women in schools, 2 of our 30 participants left their schools over persistent failures to recognise the harm they were experiencing; many others thought about leaving and described similar occurrences of failure to acknowledge gendered harms.

This is a key reason why we must avoid assumptions that gender-based violence and misogyny in schools is benign or inconsequential. That it’s a rite of passage, to be expected, or the harmless purview of adolescent coming of age. Fundamentally, schools are powerful sites of epistemic regulation. They are institutions that do not simply transmit knowledge, but actively govern it, determining what counts as truth, who is authorised to speak, and whose accounts are rendered credible.

In the context of gender-based violence, this regulatory function is particularly consequential. Women teachers are often positioned within a contradictory dynamic: they remain highly visible as targets of misogynistic behaviour, yet they are systematically undermined as legitimate knowers of that behaviour. Their accounts are subject to scrutiny, reinterpretation, and, ultimately, dismissal.

To name institutional gaslighting, then, is not to invoke metaphor but to identify a patterned and predictive mode of institutional operation. It is to insist that questions of harm in schools are also questions of knowledge: of who is heard, who is believed, and whose reality is allowed to stand.

Share

Our forthcoming book, Schooling Misogyny, is available for pre-order from May 8.

If that question is meant to surface recognition, we might then ask a more confronting one. Ask a woman when they first felt a man’s anger directed at them. Not for anything they had done, but for simply existing. To go further, men could ask a woman where she feels misogyny. Not as an abstract idea, but in her body. Where in her body does she receive the signal of the omnipresent threat? Where does it land and how does it register? The tightening, the calculation, the knowing of exposure and risk?

Do men know that long before there is language for it, we come into knowing, atmospherically, intuitively and somatically? That it is taken in as instruction, written into our sense of self? Quietly and persistently, and as a rite of passage, women are taught to accept their own diminishment.

In our forthcoming book, Schooling Misogyny, it was important, as an academic convention, to theorise what we mean when we write about misogyny. We drew on Kate Manne’s work, particularly Down Girl, to articulate misogyny as a system that disciplines and enforces gendered norms.

But how slippery misogyny makes itself. And with such ease it finds ways to cower within plausible deniability. It’s rarely clean or ambiguous. It is often most legible only to the woman it targets, and felt with precision, but difficult to prove.

One of the central arguments of our book is that misogyny is not aberrational, but institutional. It is historical in its formation and enduring in its reach. So deeply embedded in social life that it is routinely enacted as if it were neutral. For many men, it does not register as hostility at all, but as common sense. This is the script about women that is so pervasively encoded that it evades conscious recognition. When it does announce itself, it’s rarely interpreted as extremism. But to hate women with such intensity and conviction must—should—be considered extreme. And yet, extremism, we posit, is encountered on the fringes, not in the fabric of our lives. It’s a set of beliefs and projections at the most immoderate on the spectrum of human feeling and knowing, not at its most banal.

Women, meanwhile, learn agility as part of the embodied response to misogyny. We anticipate, sense, placate, deflect. We find ways to elude the more dangerous edges. Still, every now and then, or more often than that for many women, it catches, managing to pull a thread or rip the seams, and then, creates a wound that becomes a type of intelligence, something to file for future protection or to warn, lessons stored and warnings carried forward, adjustments made in advance.

Subscribe now

Misogyny is not the only structure that governs human lives. Racism, transphobia, homophobia and the compounded violences at their intersections operate with their own logics of enforcement and harm. But misogyny has quite a particular intimacy. It attaches to the everyday, the familial, to the mundane, to the interactions that are easiest to dismiss and hardest to name. What it shares with other bigotries, is that its existence is continually denied, even as its effects are unmistakably registered in the bodies of those who encounter it.

It remains fairly easily to deny the existence of something we are intellectualising. When we theorise misogyny, we consent, sometimes unknowingly, to entering an argument about its shape, its scope, its prevalence. This is often when we are asked to offer evidence to a sceptical other and to meet a burden of proof that is absurd. A burden so disproportionate, so relentlessly applied, that meeting it can become its own form of injury.

To translate something somatic into something discursive is not a neutral act. It has the same somatic resonance as the experience of the harm itself. When a reality of your entire existence, something you have known since before it was fair or reasonable for you to know, becomes a combat of logic, rhetoric and defence, well, it registers for women in precisely the same place as the threat.

When confronted by a woman’s story where misogyny is the arc, the through-line and the antagonist, a more human response is to ask her not what else it could be, or to theorise, to hypothesise, to recast, but to imagine, and then ask, what does that feel like? And then, consider what you will do with her answer.

Share

Schooling Misogyny: Exposing and eliminating the influence of the manosphere in education settings is available for pre-order from May 8.

Over the past decade or so, a widening field of boys’ and men’s mental health organisations and advocates has positioned boys’ social and emotional wellbeing as a key pathway to the prevention of gender-based violence. Recent concern about the allure of the manosphere and its offer of space to respond to ‘unmet needs’ and the persistence and reanimation of misogyny has further sharpened attention on boys and young men. Well-meaning actors in this space often draw on feminist scholarship to frame concern for boys’ emotional lives not only as compatible with feminism, but as one of its necessary extensions.

Mostly, this claim is fairly uncontroversial. As bell hooks insists, feminism is a project of liberation, and it is “for everybody” precisely because patriarchy constrains and distorts the lives of all who live within it. Also clear in hooks’ writing is that, alongside her emphasis on boys’ differential access to power according the logics race and class, patriarchal cultures demand from all boys a form of “psychic self-mutilation”, which requires them to sever themselves from vulnerability, care, and emotional expression in order to inhabit dominant forms of masculinity. That insight has been taken up widely, and rightly so.

But this is also where a slippage begins. What hooks describes as an effect of patriarchal socialisation and one of the ways patriarchy reproduces itself comes to be treated as its underlying cause. In this move, hooks’ analysis is often flattened: a structural account of patriarchy’s demands is recast as a generalised account of boys’ suffering, abstracted from the uneven conditions under which those demands are lived, including the enduring effects of racism, colonialism, and the historical production of anti-Blackness that is vividly discussed on hooks’ work. This flat reading is part of the foundation where boys’ pain, rather than the structures that produce it, become positioned as the primary and most urgent problem to be addressed. It’s also common to see benefits to boys and men offered as a key justification for alignment with feminist thinking, as if it should be marketed to them in order for them to support it—a self-interest clause that makes its existence more palatable.

But this has never been what feminism names. To centre men’s suffering in this way risks missing what feminist analysis does at its sharpest. Statements such as this might likely be considered by some to reflect the actions of what Sara Ahmed calls the feminist killjoy: the one who “kills the joy” by pointing out what others would rather not see or choose to obscure; this is especially apposite given we are out here calling out efforts to engage men in preventing gender-based violence, where the focus on boys’ pain often appears as an intuitive and hopeful response to the problem. But that is precisely the point: to interrupt a framing that feels generous and intuitive, to an extent even admirable in aspiration, and to insist on returning to questions of power might feel like killing the joy. But feminism is not, has not and should never be defined by its capacity to centre men’s pain, but by its willingness to make structures of dominance visible, even when doing so is uncomfortable.

Share

While the boys’ and men’s health approach increasingly makes claim to feminist principles and often quotes feminist scholars, the foundation is awkward. Feminist scholarship has long insisted that patriarchy is not primarily a matter of interior life. It names domination, hierarchy, and the organisation of institutions as key parts of the structured social relations that systematically privilege men over women and gender-diverse people. It enables a perspective on the world that looks outwards, rather than inwards, illuminating the convergences and flows of patriarchal power in every single corner. These arrangements do not hinge on whether individual men are in touch with their feelings, or if a man is mentally unwell. Indeed, these are phenomena located at the individual level, rather than the cross-cultural, population-level experience of patriarchal harm, or racism, or homophobia, for example. Expanding boys’ emotional repertoires may change how masculinity is lived at this individual level for those who are willing to abide feminist imaginings of otherwise, but it does not, on its own, unsettle patterns of authority, entitlement, or control.

What is at risk in the current framing is a subtle reversal. Men’s psychic wounds begin to appear not as an effect of patriarchal socialisation, but as its underlying cause, as though the system is sustained because boys were first required to shut something down inside themselves. The broader set of grievances around socialisation also include claims that there are no ‘safe’ spaces for men and boys, nor are they taught, at any point of interaction, that gendered expansion is possible. This has the character of what Raymond Williams described as an “emergent” structure of feeling: a shared, affective sense that something significant is happening at the level of boys’ interior lives. But an emergent way of feeling a problem is not the same as an account of how it works.

This way of feeling the problem begins to reshape the epistemological terms on which it is understood—that is, how it is known, believed and explained. A structural account of power is displaced by one grounded in individual experience, in which both the diagnosis and the remedy are located in the interior lives of boys. The consequences of that shift are not only analytical but political. As attention turns inward, patriarchy is increasingly recast in individualised, even therapeutic terms and as a problem of damaged psyches, emotional deficits, or unmet needs.

This is often and we would argue increasingly presented as an extension of feminist insight, particularly for those who make efforts to lean on bell hooks. But treating men’s pain as foundational is, at best, a partial reading of hooks and of feminist texts more broadly. From MacKinnon’s analysis of hierarchy and power, to Connell’s account of hegemonic masculinity, to Ahmed’s insistence that changing how things are felt does not in itself transform social relations, the throughline is clear: The organisation of power cannot be reduced to the psychic states of men. This tendency begins to look like what philosopher Kate Manne describes as himpathy: excessive or disproportionate sympathy extended to men who engage in harmful or violent acts.

When the focus settles on healing boys’ pain, instead of centering consequences for the underlying beliefs that both benefit men and boys and drive gendered violence, the centre of gravity shifts. Attention is drawn away from how harm is structured and distributed, including the disproportionate violence experienced by women—particularly women of colour and First Nations women. Questions of accountability, redistribution, and structural inequality recede, while empathy for men’s suffering comes to the fore. The problem begins to look less like a system of dominance that must be contested, and more like a diffuse social malaise in need of therapeutic response.

None of this is to suggest that boys’ and men’s experiences are irrelevant. They matter, including politically. It is worth underscoring that boys and men do not stand in a uniform relation to power, and their access to the benefits - and harms- of patriarchy is unevenly distributed. It is, in fact, neglectful to boys and men to divert attention and policy focus away from the structural and systemic changes required to improve outcomes for all boys. A knee-jerk response to an emotional plea of wellbeing, indeed, reflects the key narratives of the manosphere itself. For, they do not explain patriarchy, nor can they act as substitutes for an analysis of how power operates. The fact of their palatability does not make centering them useful or ethical. The task is not simply to offer better narratives of masculinity, but to do so without losing sight of the structures that continue to organise advantage and disadvantage along gendered lines. These arrangements are not only endured but, at times, inhabited and reproduced by men, including through the everyday exercise (and in many cases, the taken-for-granted enjoyment) of the advantages they confer.

Patriarchy produces immense pain. Treating that pain as its cause risks leaving the structure itself intact. And that structure is not abstract: it is visible in persistent gender pay gaps, in the unequal distribution of care work, in the normalisation of men’s violence against women, and in the everyday organisation of institutions that continue to privilege men over women and gender-diverse people.

To make an authentic contribution to GBV prevention, work on boys’ and men’s mental health must be grounded in, and led by, an analysis of structural power, rather than allowing a selectively feminist focus on boys’ pain to stand in for it.

Subscribe now