Tristan Bridges

In Cynthia Miller-Idriss’s Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism, she argues that one of the most underrecognized forms of political violence today is gendered. Man Up documents the ideological and institutional failures to name misogyny as a central logic of extremism and shows how that refusal leaves governments unprepared for extremism’s consequences. As Miller-Idriss explains, misogyny is not just another form of hate; it is a central pillar of modern extremism. Throughout the book, Miller-Idriss traces how antifeminist backlash has migrated from the internet’s periphery into mainstream politics. Drawing on years of research, the book documents a gendered politics of resentment that incubates on message boards, metastasizes through influencers and media ecosystems, and materializes in physical violence. The book is less a catalog of bad actors than a cultural autopsy of a political formation that thrives on moral panic about gender itself.   

Particularly striking is how much the masculinities Miller-Idriss describes differ from those sociologists and gender theorists examined even a decade ago. Much recent work on men and masculinities has focused on softening: men performing inclusivity, irony, or self-awareness as part of what I have called “hybrid masculinities,” strategies that reconcile men’s privilege with changing gender norms by appropriating the symbols of equality and empathy. Here, Miller-Idriss documents a movement away from hybridity toward more hardline masculinities: forms of manhood that reject ambiguity, renounce irony, and recast domination as moral obligation. If hybrid masculinities sought legitimacy through symbolic distance from patriarchy, hardline masculinities seek it through open embrace.   

In Miller-Idriss’s analysis, the call to “man up” is not merely a cultural trope but a political imperative, a disciplinary slogan that polices emotion, vulnerability, and gender nonconformity. Miller-Idriss shows how this rhetoric builds an emotional infrastructure of resentment: loneliness recoded as moral outrage, rejection as conspiracy, insecurity as righteous defense of civilization. The result is a worldview where men’s disaffection becomes both symptom of and solution to social decay. The book suggests we are witnessing the cultural redefinition of gendered violence as virtue.   

If Man Up were only a cultural ethnography of online misogyny, it would already be important. But Miller-Idriss goes further, tracing how these gender ideologies migrate from fringe subcultures to institutions, from internet forums to police forces, political movements, and parliaments. Misogyny, she argues, is not incidental to authoritarianism but should be understood as one of its governing rationalities. This extends a line of feminist theorizing that views patriarchal power as reproduced through the architecture of governance itself. Treating misogyny as governance helps make sense of how gendered violence underwrites statecraft; the book documents how control over women’s bodies, reproduction, and representation become central to nationalist and authoritarian projects. Misogyny not only motivates terrorist acts but also animates legislation, social policy, and the broader politics of resentment defining the past decade.   

Man Up presents readers with an uncomfortable question: Why is misogyny’s political nature so difficult to see? Miller-Idriss devotes part of the book to this epistemology of invisibility: the bureaucratic and conceptual mechanisms that make misogyny hard to count. Because US counterterrorism and hate-crime systems do not categorize gender-based violence as “political,” it remains statistically invisible. Domestic violence, for instance, is recorded as “private,” even when perpetrators are explicitly motivated by antiwoman ideologies. This institutional blind spot allows misogyny to flourish undetected within national security frameworks, despite its patterned role in radicalization and violence. Here, the book’s policy focus and feminist argument converge. Miller-Idriss makes clear that the refusal to track misogyny is not an oversight but an epistemic choice. The result is that this absence of data is mobilized as evidence of the absence of a problem. This claim is not only empirical but political. To recognize misogyny as a category of extremism would be to admit that gender is not peripheral to public safety; it may be its best measure.   

I read Man Up as simultaneously a feminist diagnosis and demand. Miller-Idriss insists that gender cannot be treated as an “identity issue,” separate from the economy, nationalism, or political violence. The book argues that the “crisis of masculinity” is not a pathology of men’s feelings but a structure of power organizing how those feelings become weaponized. It reminds us, too, that data infrastructures (what governments choose to see or ignore) are themselves instruments of gendered governance. Miller-Idriss brings these domains together, balancing empirical grounding with a feminist social scientific call to action. I know Man Up will be essential reading scholars of gender and extremism, but I hope it travels much farther and is read and engaged by everyone attempting to understand how misogyny has become the lingua franca of contemporary political life.   

The deeper lesson of Man Up may be that misogyny no longer hides behind euphemism. In some corners of society, hybridity has hardened. The benevolent patriarchs of yesteryear have ceded ground to unapologetic assertions of men’s gendered resentment as truth. I see this not as evidence of the end of patriarchy’s malleability but as its newest mutation. If misogyny today functions as a mode of governance, then learning to name and count it as political violence may be the most radical act of accountability we have left. 

Amy Farrell

It is hard to make it through the twenty-four-hour news cycle today without seeing a story about violent extremism. We in the US are increasingly attuned to the rise in violent extremism in its multiple forms – terrorism, politically motivated violence, and hate crimes. People are targeted for their political ideologies, their beliefs, and their identities. Despite a multitude of state and federal laws focused on curbing extremism and bias-motivated victimization, people are attacked in their homes, in public, in schools, and in houses of worship. As a nation, we fund research on violent extremism, track extremism and hate groups, and provide some support for victims of extremist violence (though much more work is needed to help keep targeted people and communities safe). Yet extremism continues to rise, and larger shares of the American public are concerned about political violence and extremist beliefs. We know more about extremism than at any other point in history, but we seem to be at a loss to stop it.  

At the same time, there is a parallel set of threats to women’s security and freedom. From loss of reproductive rights, increased online and offline stalking, or unfathomably undisguised antifeminism in public dialogue and public policy, women are being targeted. That these two forces are rising at the same time is no coincidence, and it is time we understand the threads that connect them.  

In their 2024 report, “The Year in Hate and Extremism,” the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) examines timely issues in extremism, including how anti-LGBTQ+ groups have turned their focus to immigration (connecting the dots between anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-immigration ideologies within a framework of demographic displacement) and how white supremacist groups waged political attacks on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programming. Within this report, the SPLC also includes a short section on male supremacist hate groups. They note that “while the number of male supremacist hate groups remains relatively low, this ideology is a facet of all other supremacist ideologies the SPLC tracks, and these groups have outsized influence on society.” But what is this outsized influence? In Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism, Cynthia Miller-Idriss directly examines this question, ultimately arguing that misogyny is not just influential but is, in fact, at the root of all violent extremism.  

While extremism scholars, including Miller-Idriss, have historically assumed the existence of misogyny within extremist movements, most work has failed to put gender at the center of the analysis, relegating it to the side as an “other issue” or assuming its importance is understood. What Miller-Idriss finds is that gender is, in fact, a central framework or scaffolding that amplifies and supports other forms of extremism.    

Man Up is filled with head-spinning data on extremism that Miller-Idriss deftly connects to current extremist events that have involved gendered violence. Miller-Idriss makes a strong case that gendered understandings of the world establish the foundation upon which violent extremism can rise. These substantive chapters are a slow burn to the conclusion that misogyny is the “incubator that reinforces ideas about entitlement, superiority, and the expected subordination and servitude of others.” In modern society, where there is increased equity for women and the LGBTQ+ community, discrimination, containment, and violence become tools for men to regain control. Coupled with loneliness and alienation, which drive larger swathes of the population into online spaces, conditions are ripe for misogyny to fuel misinformation and belief in conspiracies.  Miller-Idriss cautions that violence born out of men’s loss of assumed control and power is not always directed at women; other perceived threats, based on race, religion, or ideology, may be targeted, obscuring the central role of gender in motivating the entry and escalation into extremist violence.    

For Miller-Idriss, addressing extremism requires centering gender. It means that efforts to prevent extremism must recognize misogyny as a primary organizing framework that supports extremist violence. Despite the importance of this call, US extremism policy lacks meaningful attention to gender and generally fails to connect gender-based violence to extremism. Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that we are losing this battle. Fighting extremism requires us to broaden our lens – to get at the root of the problem by countering patriarchal assumptions and combating everyday discrimination, sexism, and gendered violence before more extreme forms of violence can grow. This call will not be news to most feminist scholars, but it can critically reframe scholarship and policy on extremism. 

Alex DiBranco

During my years as an early career scholar in right-wing studies and an emerging leader of a nonprofit confronting supremacism and authoritarianism, Cynthia Miller-Idriss and I shared a number of conversations about sexism and cisgender white men’s dominance in our field of work—and the bias that has accompanied that, especially when it comes to recognizing and analyzing misogyny. So it makes sense that her new book on misogyny weaves her own professional and personal experiences with sexism into the narrative, as part of understanding male-supremacist societies globally and why it took so long for a book like this to appear.  

Miller-Idriss’s book calls attention to misogyny as an oft-overlooked yet primary organizing framework of supremacist violence. What I would point to as the book’s most important contribution is its demonstration that “extremist” violence, such as misogynist incel mass violence and forms of gender-based violence and harassment that are often inaccurately perceived as nonideological—such as intimate partner violence, rape, stalking, and harassment—are all rooted in a shared misogynist ideology.  

The relationships among these forms of violence and their dependence on male-supremacist ideology are not new. They have just been overlooked, evaded, and denied. But this erasure has become increasingly difficult to sustain in recent years, as more overtly antifeminist and misogynist rhetoric, movements, and violence have paralleled advances toward the goal of gender justice, from #MeToo to the first woman nominated for the presidency by a major party. Other scholars have drawn attention to this shift, such as Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes, who highlight misogyny as the “glue” holding together contemporary right-wing groups that expanded their numbers by recruiting men of color.  

Miller-Idriss’s book enters into this moment by making a clear case for the foundational significance of misogynist ideology in extreme right-wing movements and general society, building upon the authority she has previously established through her work on white supremacism.  

My main divergence with Miller-Idriss’s approach concerns the concluding takeaways about what to do. Many of these takeaways draw on frameworks and approaches common in the “boys and men” field. In particular, this involves “healthy masculinity” programming andrecruiting (cisgender) men to opposepatriarchy by highlighting its negative impacts on their own lives. This trend in the field concerns me in that it replicates the framing that led to the creation of the men’s rights movement in the 1970s. Cisgender men recruited into the feminist movement through the message that “sex roles” harm men too became aggrieved, perceiving women’s basic advances toward equality as leaving them behind.  

And while Gen Z increasingly discards the gender binary, “healthy masculinity” programming assumes categorization into “boys” or “girls”—at an age where children may still be figuring out their own identities and with mediocre recognition of trans or nonbinary identities—and then teaches boys a “redefined manhood” that, despite its pro-equality intention, is fatally flawed by reinforcing the gender essentialism that underlies male supremacism.  

The narrative that “men are experiencing real harm” (the implication being, greater harm than others) is often supported by erasing the experiences of women and nonbinary people. In the course of conducting research, I have found concerning misrepresentations and cherry-picking of statistics in the “boys and men” field, and they are presented in ways that can deceive researchers and journalists who utilize these sources. For instance, Miller-Idriss’s book mentions the “epidemic of men’s loneliness” and draws on data from the nonprofit Equimundo’s “State of American Men 2023” report, including the statistic thattwo-thirds of young men say that “no one really knows me.” The since-released 2025 report is more revealing, as behind the talking points emphasizing men’s suffering, it includes data on women. While the report’s landing page trumpets, “Isolation is an epidemic. Over half of men say ‘no one really knows me,’” the report itself reveals that men and women give this answer at the same rates. In other words, despite being framed as a “men’s issue,” loneliness is a contemporary human issue.   

I argue instead for a turn to a justice-based framework and human-centered lens. We are all called to oppose male supremacism, and all forms of supremacism, because it is an injustice–not because it may serve our self-interest–and to do so through work that develops universal human values. In recent conversations in the “boys and men” field, I have been heartened to see a new openness to considering a shift in the traditional framework, a development I hope to see grow. 

Jasmine Mithani

My reaction to reading Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism was blunt: I know this already. As a reporter covering gender, politics, and policy, many themes in the book are stories my colleagues and I have been reporting for years. Going back further, as someone who has been studying and engaging with topics around gender, technology, and media for nearly a decade, much of the information Cynthia Miller-Idriss presents in her newest release was familiar.   

What I didn’t know was how overwhelming the evidence is for the role of misogyny in fomenting violent extremism and how little the federal government acknowledges this in its national security strategy.   

Man Up comes to us a decade after GamerGate, a coordinated antifeminist attack that weaponized social networks and anonymity to harass notable women and queer people who infringed on men-dominated spaces. GamerGate was a pivotal event in my understanding of politics in the twenty-first century. It was a moment of backlash to the perceived overreach of marginalized people, much like the legal cases and executive orders against diversity, equity, and inclusion today. Miller-Idriss carefully deconstructs the undercurrents of gaming spaces to show why they are such significant vectors pushing men toward violent extremism.   

She also reveals that despite years of similar attacks, the United States government does not include misogyny in its national security threat models. The Biden administration, one of the most progressive administrations in terms of gender equality in history, did not define a category for domestic terrorism motivated by misogyny.   

As a reporter, I will be keeping Miller-Idriss’s book on my desk as an essential reference text. The density of citations has already led me to include new experts and research in my reporting. At the same time, it’s frustrating to see the sheer amount of evidence she had to include—and the amount of social, political, racial, and professional capital she had to attain—in order for hostile sexism to be taken seriously by those in power. Each chapter could spin off into its own book-length exploration: the role of homophobia in extremist networks, the cultivation of white women as essential partners to the white supremecist cause. In that sense, Man Up is a stepping-stone to more robust, specialized inquiry.   

The influence of technology and new communication media is woven in throughout the book. Miller-Idriss frequently discusses the messages young people are receiving about gender online, and proposes solutions to “inoculate” kids against gendered grievance narratives. These solutions are meaningful in the time of “techlash,” when people — and politicians — are increasingly pressuring Big Tech to be accountable for harms allegedly facilitated by platforms. State and federal tech policy sees little movement due to powerful lobbying and First Amendment concerns. The strategies discussed in Man Up can be implemented in the carpool drive home or at the dinner table.  

The book includes an accessible guide for applying this research to the real world, but still I worried the text would be too academic to reach the people who need it the most: parents, teachers, and religious leaders. But when checking out another one of Miller-Idriss’s books, I found my local library has a weeks-long wait list for Man Up.  And it seems further research is on the horizon as well: In the course of my reporting, I watched a book event with Miller-Idriss at a local bookstore in DC. The room was packed, and the Q&A was filled with thoughtful questions from college students and early-career researchers. Miller-Idriss has created a text that will be foundational to the next generation of journalists and leaders. 

Cynthia Miller-Idriss

Reading these responses to Man Up, I was immediately reminded of my favorite essay. “Rotes Haus” (Red House) is a very short text by the poet Hermann Hesse, in which he reflects on the many things he is gratified by—among them, that his writing has spoken to people and had an impact. It’s hard to imagine a more satisfying moment in my career than having four incredibly smart scholars, journalists, writers, and activists respond to my work with such thoughtful analyses and critiques. 

Tristan Bridges’s elegant, precise analysis intuitively captured exactly what I wanted to convey with better phrasing than the original on every point he raised. I was particularly struck by his useful framing of the book’s disentangling of the “emotional infrastructure of resentment”—in which loneliness “is recorded as moral outrage, rejection as conspiracy, insecurity as righteous defense of civilization.” He also presciently identified a subtle through line in the book, describing my illumination of misogyny as a governing rationality of authoritarianism. These are ideas I have recently started to develop more fully and explicate in a new book-in-progress, and I am very glad to see that these ideas were seeded in visible ways in Man Up. 

Amy Farrell’s apt take, from a slightly different disciplinary base, deeply reassured me that scholars in security studies will consider seriously my message about misogyny’s foundational role in mobilizing political and hate-fueled violence. She correctly points out that the arguments I make will not be news to most feminist scholars—whose work is indeed at the root of so much of what I argue. I was also heartened to read her assessment of the importance of broadening the lens prevalent among prevention and counterterrorism scholars in order to get at the root of problems while intervention at earlier stages of gendered violence is still possible. 

Interventions are a key part of Alex DiBranco’s timely and fair critique of the men’s wellness world and the approaches I and my lab, the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, take in our work with boys and men. DiBranco is rightly concerned about the possibility that “healthy masculinities”—a concept developed as a counter to the notion of “toxic masculinity”—can reify and reinforce gender essentialism and gender binaries. This is a concern that the men’s wellness field has taken to heart, recently moving (including in my own work with boys and men) toward an approach that focuses more centrally on the messages that kids get about growing into adulthood, including norms and expectations about what it is to be a man or a woman. But in my lab’s prevention work and in my own research with boys and men, I have found it essential to meet people where they are and start from there—and that means finding ways to help everyone process the ubiquitous, everyday, colloquial, and normative ideas we all encounter about what it is to be a man or a woman, however any individual does or will identify.  

Where I diverge from DiBranco more is on the issue of harm and the impact of loneliness. There is no implication in my writing, as DiBranco writes, that the phrase “men are experiencing real harm” means that that harm is greater than others. It just means that some grievances and harms are perceived and some are real—and that we must address it all if we are going to understand and interrupt the proliferation of misogyny, especially online. Of course, it matters tremendously that girls and women are lonely too. Loneliness is indeed a human issue, as DiBranco points out, and we need programming and structural solutions for everyone. But it is men and boys whose loneliness is being weaponized by profiteers and by politicians who scapegoat women and feminists as the source of their problems. Too many boys and men receive manipulative messaging from misogynist influencers within minutes of being online and are subtly being conditioned to embrace a reactionary stance against equality, women’s rights, and inclusive values more broadly. 

In other words: this isn’t a zero-sum game. We can acknowledge that women, girls, and nonbinary and trans people face more of the harms and inequity and deserve resources and support while also investing in work that helps boys and men recognize and reject propaganda and manipulative content that ultimately creates further cycles of that same harm.  

Finally, I am deeply gratified by Jasmine Mithani’s self-described “blunt” reaction to the book’s arguments, which indeed have been so thoroughly articulated already by writers like her (and by DiBranco, Bridges, and Farrell). So many experts have been shouting from the rooftops for so many years—including Black feminists, experts on domestic and intimate partner violence, and scholars of women’s and gender studies, among others. The silences among the rest of us, including most of the national security field, are what is most deafening. It’s on all of us to acknowledge and change this. I was surprised, too, to learn of the library wait lists Mithani describes, and would simply say this: if any would-be reader encounters a “weeks-long wait list” for Man Up, please let me know so that I can donate an extra copy to those libraries.   

In closing, I’ll simply say this: my email inbox is frequently peppered with messages from readers. But it is rare that I get to read responses like the ones Tristan Bridges, Amy Farrell, Alex DiBranco, and Jasmine Mithani articulate here, and I am truly honored and humbled by their time, their thoughts, and their engagement with my work—and grateful to Signs for this exchange.