The images that circulated around the world during the final days of the Trump era will long remain in the collective memory: images of enraged white men storming the Capitol Building and rioting in the chambers of Congress and in the offices of elected officials, all while the cameras were rolling. Five people died, and numerous others were injured. These images are iconic because they stand for so much of what had become the political programme during the presidency of Donald Trump. The footage and photographs of the events at the Capitol provide, in a condensed form, a scathing testimony to the times.

It is hardly a coincidence that the vast majority of the rioters were men. Moreover, they were men playacting as men, complete with paramilitary garb: in the photographs, we see militiamen in full battle gear, including bulletproof vests, automatic weapons and combat helmets. In addition, we also see a topless shamanistic warrior with a pelt around his waist and a horn helmet on his head – all while brandishing a spear. We also see QAnon supporters, Proud Boys and members of the Boogaloo movement wearing Hawaiian shirts either over or under their bulletproof vests. Many of these men are carrying Confederate flags, waving around Nazi iconography or wearing gas masks familiar from the world wars. The wackier the outfit, the clearer it is to see just how overexaggerated the militant ideal of masculinity has become. Because it was such a central feature of politics during the Trump era, militant masculinity has become a caricature.

All of these men have one thing in common: they are at war. Against what or whom, exactly, is made explicitly clear in the images themselves, and especially by those from the office of Nancy Pelosi. It is no coincidence that, of all places, the workplace of the highest-ranking American woman then in office stood at the centre of the riots. In the images, the men are pictured staging a denigration of Pelosi for the press photographers: one man, who prototypically embodies the stereotype of the ‘old white man’, stood in his heavy boots on Pelosi’s desk – on the centre, that is, of her political work. This is a typically masculine gesture of disrespect that could have been taken straight out of a cowboy movie. Gallows were erected in front of the Capitol Building, and it was reported that they were set up for Pelosi. Whether the intention was really to hang the female politician or merely to stage a threat, we’ll never know. The message, however, was clear: women should be removed from political office, with force if necessary. These men were wildly determined to retake what they thought had been stolen from them: ‘their’ votes, ‘their’ country, ‘their’ privileges.

Donald Trump was the first president to engage in identity politics with white masculinity, the first president of a Western nation whom an authoritarian backlash had helped to put into office. The so-called ‘storming’ of the Capitol was merely the climax of a development that we became used to seeing during his time in office – namely, the phenomenon of armed men rampaging around in public. This backlash is gendered; it is masculine, as I will show in this book. It is a reaction to the fact that women and other political minorities have become much more visible over the last twenty years, and have been fighting for rights and spaces like never before. The internet made this possible. Without the ‘digital revolution’ and the counter-public of social media, a movement such as #Metoo would have been unthinkable. This movement brought to light an unexpected and eruptive amount of potential and had a decisive influence on the patriarchal structures of the analogue world. It still, in fact, continues to influence the media, the economy, society and politics. Yet a formidable opposition has risen up against this shift towards more equal rights. By all available means, the actors involved in this authoritarian backlash seek to resist, throughout the West, the renegotiation and redistribution of privileges that many people have simply because they are male, white and hetero-cis.

This reactionary backlash movement existed before Trump – again, it helped to put him into the most influential political office in the world. Also, Trump’s political downfall was not brought about, for instance, by the fact that images of men terrorizing the public had become an almost daily occurrence during his time in office. Trump’s fall in popularity among certain sectors of the population was in fact brought about by the Covid pandemic. For he responded to this, too, with the same political programme of toxic masculinity, the heart of which consisted of lying, suppressing information and downplaying things. When Trump himself ultimately became infected with the virus, his political response was to dismiss the illness as being too weak for really strong men, and this message was heard loud and clear by his core supporters. An article in Mother Jones described how Trump staged this masculinity: still recovering and still contagious, Trump climbed up the stairs to the White House balcony, ripped off his mask in a pathetic gesture, and gave a salute to the presidential helicopter as it flew away in the direction of the Washington Monument. Later, a propaganda video of the scene was uploaded to Trump’s Twitter account. The video is set to an instrumental version of the song ‘Believe’, which appears on an album titled ‘Epic Male Songs’.¹

A virus, however, cannot simply be gaslighted away; it will remain and spread unless measures are taken against it. The coronavirus demonstrated the limits of Trump’s politics of toxic masculinity. The political gestures of ‘strongmen’ such as Trump, Bolsonaro or Putin – and the male domination associated with these figures – have come under especially strong criticism during the pandemic and have increasingly been regarded as the negative foil to the leadership that women heads of state have shown during the crisis.² Even the consulting firm McKinsey stated in a paper that the old leadership style was in a state of crisis. Today’s leaders, according to the authors of this paper, need to be able to work in teams, display deliberate calm and demonstrate empathy in order to manage new global challenges such as the pandemic.³

This has not been without consequences. Whereas the mainstream media praised women leadership, an additional discourse also emerged – a counter-discourse: in the semi-public spheres of social media, comment sections and internet forums, there has been an outpouring of frustration about women in power. When the British writer Matt Haig posted the picture of the seven women heads of state on Instagram, together with the remark ‘Time for women to lead the world’, this quickly led to comments such as: ‘Incel tsunami incoming’.⁴ With this reference to an incoming tsunami of incels, the commenter was simply anticipating what typically happens whenever something is posted about women who succeed in public domains, which are still regarded by many as domains for men: the post is mobbed, ridiculed, threatened, hated, and sometimes these threats are even translated into action, as demonstrated by the many attacks on women in recent years.

Women politicians such as Nancy Pelosi and the former German chancellor Angela Merkel, however, are not the only women who have been the target of verbal, and occasionally physical, attacks. Rather, all women who operate in the public sphere and have had success in (even presumably harmless) ‘masculine domains’ – such as women football commentators or women in ‘male’ film roles, for example – face the same risk. During the 2018 World Cup, every game with a woman announcer was followed by a shitstorm on social media devoted to denigrating the women commentators in question.⁵ And, however silly this might sound, a great many men regard the masculinity of Ghostbusters as sacrosanct. When the trailer for a female version appeared in 2016, it was ripped apart in YouTube’s comment section as stupid and unworthy – not, for instance, because it’s a trashy ghost story, but rather because the main roles were played by women. The clip was watched more than 46 million times; it was ‘disliked’ more than a million times, and it prompted more than 260,000 largely disparaging or even openly misogynistic comments.⁶ By way of comparison, the trailer for one of the most successful films of all time, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, from 2019, attracted fewer clicks (44 million), received only 114,000 dislikes, and instigated just 90,000 comments, which are not discriminatory.⁷

The reactionary counter-discourse has emerged from a field of tension. On the one hand, male privileges persist today and are deeply and structurally embedded in our society. For centuries, masculinity has been the norm around which everything has been oriented, and beneath which everything is expected to be subordinated. In her book Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, Caroline Criado Perez has recently demonstrated how deeply these androcentric structures in fact reach.⁸ In so many areas of life, women are still disadvantaged, despite the fact that they have long been on supposedly equal footing with men in the eyes of the law. The needs of men remain the standard by which everything is still measured, whether in daily life, at work, in product designs, in medicine or in the public sphere. Regardless of whether we have in mind crash-test dummies, automatic doors, workloads, tools, devices, safety equipment, bulletproof vests, seatbelts, medications, pacemakers or the temperatures in climate-controlled buildings, man is still the measure of all things.

On the other hand, however – and like never before – women and other political minorities in Western societies have been calling into question this norm and the related privileges associated with white, male, hetero-cis domination. Ethically, normatively and discursively, the patriarchy has increasingly come under pressure. The prevailing social consensus is that equal rights are a desirable goal, and this view also sets the tone in the liberal progressive media.

This tension between the factual reality of the patriarchy and its discursive downfall is an essential reason why, in recent years, we have experienced a glut of denigrating and often hateful rhetoric against women. The polemics against equal rights – in the form of men’s forums, comment sections, or on social media – are only a small part of a large movement whose agitations against women and women’s rights can be observed in many social and political spheres. And, as chaotic as the storming of the Capitol Building may have seemed, scenes like this in public space are in fact well orchestrated. From Canada to New Zealand, from Brazil to Poland, there is a well-organized network of misogynistic, extreme right-wing actors who operate globally, as I will show with many examples in this book. Before the proponents of this movement take to the streets, there is first a verbal smear campaign; before women are treated with actual violence in the material world, violence-glorifying content is first shared on the internet. There is an online–offline continuum at work, and it is clear to see. The verbal attacks that trigger hatred towards women do not, however, come from extreme right-wing corners or generally extremist corners alone. Denigrating rhetoric targeting women is far more widespread in our societies: it can be found in the writings of Catholic clergymen, in statements made by the anti-abortion movement, in the verbal loutishness of right-wing populist or conservative politicians, and of course in the misogynistic and violence-glorifying ideology of incels.

Three large movements have thus converged and become interconnected: incels and masculinists; conservatives, right-wing populists and right-wing extremists; and religious hardliners and fundamentalists. They share misogynistic and sexist views; they want to force women back into a subordinate position in the social hierarchy, restore the patriarchy and make the needs and privileges of men dominant once again. For all three groups, feminism represents the enemy, and this is what binds their ideologies together. Why, however, are right-wing factions around the world mobilizing against the specific themes of gender studies, LGBTQ+ rights, and gender roles? What is society’s breeding ground for this?

The process can be understood as a reaction to the deep shocks that have altered male self-perception over the past few decades, and as a fierce defence of masculine privileges and male dominance, which de facto still exist but have been challenged by our value system. In this tension, hegemonial masculinity has been problematized and politicized.⁹ Trump’s staging of masculinity during the pandemic is just one of many symptoms of a political conflict that is being waged on the field of gender relations. In the name of masculinity, right-wing groups mobilize and engage in politics; calls for the restoration of ‘genuine masculinity’ and the patriarchy fall on fertile ground, from mask deniers to incels. Right-wing populists, masculinists and Christian anti-abortion activists gather under the banner of male dominance in order to mobilize against the so-called ‘gender ideology’. In doing so, they invoke a recurring motif, which plays a central role in the ideas expressed by many of the protagonists of political masculinity: in the relations between the sexes, or so they believe, a natural order would prevail, a natural hierarchy in which women are subordinate to men – if only the social experiments of liberal activists, green activists and gender activists weren’t standing in the way. The modern conception of equality – whether before the law or from an economic perspective – is at odds, they think, with this natural order. Right-wing reactionary ‘thinkers’ such as Jordan Peterson or Jack Donovan lend to this authoritarian movement the pseudo-scientific tools for its ideology of hegemonic, natural masculinity.

This new discourse of masculinity is reflected in the rise of right-wing populist parties and in the rise of strongmen such as Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. Like a common thread, misogynistic agitation pervades the statements and programmes of populist and authoritarian parties and politicians. Hardly anything unites the recent authoritarian efforts as strongly as the fight against ‘gender mania’, against the relativization of masculine power, which is felt as a degradation. The new discourse of masculinity is closely connected with the political convulsions over the past few years. The tension that exists between real and ideal gender relations has given rise to something which the sociologist and gender-studies researcher Michael Kimmel has called ‘aggrieved entitlement’. Men with a misogynistic worldview, according to Kimmel, believe that they are entitled to a wife and to a traditional masculine role (that is, a dominant role) within the family and within society at large. They derive this presumed entitlement from ‘tradition’, and whether this tradition is factual or imaginary is irrelevant to them. From this aggrieved entitlement, politicians such as Trump have formed a political programme of male sovereignty. They harness the frustration, disappointment and rage of those who are convinced that they’ve been left behind, and lure them with the promise of restoring their entitled privileges. This promise of restoration, in fact, is the method of choice among right-wing populist politicians: ‘Make masculinity great again.’

During his presidency, Trump delivered what he had promised to his constituency – above all, to his supporters from the evangelical and alt-right milieus. The rights of political minorities, which had been arduously fought for over the course of decades, were scaled back during the four years of the Trump administration at a rate and to an extent that no one had thought possible before he entered office. Certain women’s rights – for instance, those concerning domestic violence or sexual assault – were set back around fifty years.¹⁰ The rights of LGBTQ+ people were drastically reduced, the official government use of terms such as ‘transgender’ was banned, and gender transitioning was criminalized. Funding for women’s health was blocked, and thus resources were lost to protect against such things as maternal mortality, genital mutilation or sexually transmitted diseases. Access to reproductive medicine was restricted, while obtaining abortions was made more difficult – and even impossible in certain states. That was one of the central campaign promises that Trump honoured during his time in office: by nominating Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, three decidedly anti-abortion judges under the age of 55, to serve on the Supreme Court, he paved the way for decades of important legal battles in the United States.

These are just a few examples of the countless political measures employed by Trump to reduce the rights of women and other political minorities. It is no coincidence that the aim of such measures is to ensure that women are unable to make decisions about their own bodies. Reducing women to their bodies – and then regulating and controlling these same bodies – is a central element of authoritarian politics, and an expression of the patriarchal and misogynistic understanding of gender roles, an understanding that puts women in a subordinate position. Trump did damage to the American political system that will be felt for generations. The forces that he released will not disappear simply because he is no longer president. On the state level, the Republicans, as before, still hold clear majorities in the legislatures. In the general population, too, the Trump era will live on; the radical right, above all, remains just as mobilized. He ensured that American society will remain polarized on either side of the culture war, a divide that clearly deepened with his rhetoric and his politics.

The angry white men who benefited from Trump’s politics were already there before his presidency and they remain today – not only in the United States but in all Western countries. Evangelicals, right-wing extremists and masculinists, whose alliance Trump helped to form, have grown into a globally active authoritarian movement that will not go away any time soon, as this book will show. Instead, this movement will probably become even more dangerous for liberal Western democracies, as attested by the rise of right-wing terrorism in the United States and other Western countries such as Germany, Norway or New Zealand. The various ideological influences of this global masculinist, right-wing radical and fundamentalist community can sometimes come together like set pieces in a single person. This much is clear from the storming of the Capitol Building, whose participants stem primarily from the right-wing extremist milieu, but whose worldviews extend far beyond that.

One of these participants was Samuel Fisher, who, in the guise of a ‘misogynistic dating coach’ named Brad Holiday, sold tips on the internet for how to hit on women. By analysing Fisher’s online footprint, a reporter at the New York Times was able to trace every step of his radicalization.¹¹ Fisher teaches young men ‘how to be a man’ and how to become pickup artists who are able to manipulate women for sex. He also sympathizes with the QAnon movement. His dating tips are infused with misogynistic, right-wing extremist and conspiratorial views. Fisher complains about his ex-wife and about the fact that he’s not allowed to see his daughter, thereby taking a position familiar from the men’s rights movement. He not only falls back on exaggerated stereotypes of women – he also presents himself as the victim of an advancing emancipation movement and, in response to this supposed threat, he bought a shotgun, machetes, tactical vests and more than a thousand rounds of ammunition. He travelled to the Trump rally in Washington, posted photographs of himself in front of the Capitol, and was later arrested and tried for his activities there.

So much of what has been brewing for years is embodied in the person of Fisher. There is a decidedly political current in which sexism has been radicalized and has taken on a political dimension. A comprehensive effort to explain why sexism and misogyny have become such important elements of the authoritarian backlash – an explanation that includes all the actors involved and examines their networking activity and reactionary collective potential – has yet to be undertaken. The present book seeks to explain, in gendered terms, the origins of this new predilection for authoritarians and the rise of the authoritarian right.