And Misogyny today!?

Misogyny

The three stories we have posted in recent weeks are just a few of many that could and should be told. And they already show: historically, misogyny is not just an old and sophisticated tool for the oppression of FLINTA*, but closely intertwined with capitalist exploitation, antisemitism and colonial violence. Its basis is always the creation of a fixed femininity and its result is exploitation, murder, rape and men in positions of power.
In addition to historical considerations, it is important to look at what new misogynist narratives are currently emerging that are part of a current anti-feminist backlash¹. Entire books could be written about each of these narratives. However, we will only offer a small and incomplete insight here:

Prominent figures who are currently talking a lot about what constitutes women and femininity include Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate. The former declares that it is right for women to earn less than men and proposes forced monogamy as a solution to violence against women. Tate, on the other hand, promotes rape to his very large youth fanbase, portrays women as the property of men and has been charged with rape and human trafficking - to name just a few of their misogynistic ideas.

A frighteningly large network of people with a specific, formulated gender image are the Incels - short for 'involuntary celibate'. It is the self-designation of a group of men organized worldwide on the Internet who feel betrayed by society because women do not have sex with them. Their world view is permeated by antisemitic conspiracy theories and racist enemy stereotypes. The phenomenon became known through a series of attacks and shootings by Incels targeting women or 'attractive men'.

Since the 1990s, there have been new waves of witch-hunts in various African countries. Similar to our second story, they can be seen as a consequence of land privatization, which in turn is enforced by the World Bank and the IMF (International Monetary Fund) as part of 'development policies'. This continuation of colonial exploitation mixes in the respective cultural and religious contexts to form different gender images than in Christian Europe in the 15th century. However, it leads to gendered violence in an astonishingly similar way.

The Vatican and the Catholic Church remain a solid rock of sexist ideology and scaremongering. Pope Francis, for example, compares 'gender theory' with nuclear weapons and the Hitler Youth and equates abortions with contract killings.

In the USA, feminist achievements of decades of struggles for bodily self-determination are being attacked and legally reversed. With a wave of decisions in parliaments and courts - above all the Supreme Court - bans on abortion are being (re)established and defended.

The current anti-feminist backlash can be well analyzed with the basic blueprint of misogyny. Misogyny is always based on defining and explaining what women are or what femininity is in order to justify exploitation and violence. Therefore, one of the crucial points that misogynist movements have in common is to resist any dissolution of clear, binary, definitive and 'biologically' determined gender images. The first step in putting women 'back in their place' is to ensure that it is clear what a woman is and how she should be. To do this, it is important to burn this ideology into bodies with biologistic² pseudo-science. This is why the most widespread and most openly expressed common denominator of misogynist movements at the moment is trans hostility and the ideology of binary gender. This is why the most widespread and most openly expressed common denominator of misogynist movements at the moment is transphobia and the ideology of binary gender. They thus appear primarily in the form of "anti-gender movements".
These new movements, which are also compatible with the left-liberal or self-described 'feminist' spectrum, declare 'gender ideology' to be the greatest threat to humanity. They dream themselves back into an absolutist patriarchy that never really existed, in which women are 'in their place', men rule strong and unchallenged and gender is unambivalent and 'natural'. The 'gender ideology' constructed as an enemy can include everything from feminist politics, to the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community, to anti-racism and especially the very existence of trans people. It is not surprising that transphobia and antifeminism have repeatedly been shown to be gateways for right-wing extremist and fascist radicalization and ideology.

Knowledge about misogyny is important in order to fight against perpetration and for feminist politics. And it can help us to defend what we have already achieved and to counter the fascist potential of the "anti-gender movement".

In the following, we have compiled some further sources that we know of on some of the topics mentioned (without any claim to completeness):

About Jordan Peterson:

About Incels:

On with-hunting:

On resistance to unpaid housework:

On the anti-feminist backlash and transphobia:

Feminist responses to self-proclaimed 'dating coaches':

ℹ️Explaination of terms:

¹The anti-feminist backlash is a reaction or backlash against feminist movements and achievements of recent decades.

²Biologism refers to the approach of reducing all social and interpersonal phenomena to biological considerations such as genetics, hormones or anatomy.