It’s not just backlash: Rethinking the manosphere and gendered resistance
The way we frame resurgent misogyny may inadvertently legitimise its grievances
by Professor Steven Roberts & Dr Stephanie Wescott, Monash University
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.
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.
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.
Your theory of masculinist permission and how it works to mainstream misogyny could be applied towards Christian Nationalism. Both work from the basic idea that they’re being threatened by cultural changes. Both are seeking, often in conjunction, to restrict women’s rights and enforce the structures that gave them power.
This is such an important distinction. Calling it backlash can make it sound like a temporary reaction, when some of what we are seeing feels more organised and sustained. I think it matters to ask whether we are looking at discomfort with change, or a wider movement that is actively shaping what becomes acceptable.