Male Supremacy

Male supremacy is a hateful ideology rooted in the belief of the supposedly innate superiority of cisgender men and their right to subjugate women, trans men and nonbinary people.

Overview

Male supremacists typically view women as genetically inferior, manipulative and stupid. Many male supremacists reduce women to their reproductive function – simultaneously shaming women for having sex while believing that sex is something women owe men. Adherents of this ideology are fixated on rigid gender roles and vilify any deviation from their strict gender dichotomy, seamlessly weaving together misogyny, transphobia and homophobia.

While male supremacist communities differ in their diagnosis of society’s problems, many of them share the same misogynistic ideas and assumptions. Male supremacists believe they are the victims of an oppressive feminist system that has unjustly deprived them of their rightful place in society. Some of these communities refer to this as “gynocentrism” and argue that we live in a society that favors women to the detriment of men. Another shared principle is the assumption that women are hypergamous by nature. Hypergamy is a misappropriated biology term male supremacists use to mean women will choose sexual and romantic partners who are of “higher status” than themselves or their current partner to elevate their own status.

Like white supremacy, male supremacy is both the unifying principle of an organized extremist movement and an ideology that is deeply embedded in American society. As scholars Emily K. Carian, Alex DiBranco and Chelsea Ebin argue in Male Supremacism in the United States, “A male supremacist system [is] a cultural, political, economic, and social system in which cisgender men disproportionately control status, power, and resources and women, transmen, and nonbinary people are subordinated.”

Male supremacy is evident in legislative attacks on trans people; bans on curricula that include discussions of LGBTQ+ people and families; restrictions and bans on abortion care that steal reproductive autonomy from people who can become pregnant; and other policies and practices that attempt to enforce restrictive gender roles and deny bodily autonomy to marginalized groups. Young and lower-income people are disproportionately impacted by anti-choice legislation, policies that criminalize transgender people’s existence, and gender-based violence. Male supremacy converges with white supremacy to reinforce widespread systemic oppression.

While male supremacy is often minimized as a steppingstone to extremism. The hatred of women and feminism is inherently a standalone extremist ideology. Male supremacy has motivated numerous acts of terrorism, and many of its adherents have openly called for and carried out acts of physical and sexual violence.

Male supremacy is a decentralized movement. As a result, the SPLC lists only a small number of male supremacist groups, though most hate groups – and many mainstream right-wing figures and organizations – embrace male supremacy.

Male supremacist groups congregate primarily online, operating within the so-called manosphere – a collection of websites, blogs and online forums characterized by their virulent misogyny and users’ belief that modern-day society victimizes men. Several key influential figures use mainstream platforms to promote their hateful messages and recruit and radicalize others.

Today there are four main communities that make up the manosphere: men’s rights activists (MRAs), men going their own way (MGTOWs), pickup artists (PUAs) and misogynist incels.

Men’s rights activists (MRAs): a subgroup of male supremacists who believe they are fighting against a feminist conspiracy to oppress men. While they claim to advocate for men, their primary focus has been attacking women and feminism.
Men going their own way (MGTOWs): a separatist male supremacist movement of heterosexual men who have chosen to remove themselves from the perceived toxicity of women.
Pickup artists (PUAs): a male supremacist community of heterosexual men who share predatory and coercive strategies aimed at manipulating women into sex.
Misogynist incels: a male supremacist movement of heterosexual men who believe they are entitled to sex with attractive women, but claim feminism and evil, selfish women have denied them of this right.

Key Moments

On May 6, 2023, a 33-year-old man opened fire at an outlet mall in Allen, Texas, killing eight people and injuring seven others. Online evidence suggests he was influenced by neo-Nazi and male supremacist ideologies. Prior to the attack, he repeatedly celebrated violence against women in his posts on a Russian website and shared content from a popular incel forum known for supporting violence. Additionally, a username registered on the incel forum on April 28, 2023, matched the username he used on the Russian site. This connection was celebrated by several members of the incel forum.

Another key moment took place in June 2023 when Andrew Tate, Tristan Tate and two of their associates were charged with rape and human trafficking. Andrew Tate went viral for his toxic misogyny in summer 2022 after he directed thousands of his supporters to inundate social media with his most controversial clips. The Tate brothers were first arrested in late December 2022 and have been accused by Romanian prosecutors of using “physical violence and mental coercion” to sexually exploit a group of women and force them to produce pornography.

Andrew Tate denies these charges; however, his narrative of innocence is undercut by leaked content from his moneymaking schemes. In 2018, Tate launched a $450 online course called the “Pimpin’ hoes Degree” (PhD) program. According to Rolling Stone, course videos revealed Tate sharing strategies with his students on how to manipulate their partners into doing sex work. Additionally, leaked screenshots of 2021 messages between Tate and his associates show him discussing one of the human-trafficking victims listed by Romanian prosecutors. The messages appear to show Tate bragging about manipulating the woman into doing sex work.

What’s Ahead

The number of male supremacist hate groups will likely remain stable in 2024 as their activities will likely continue to take place primarily online, though the number listed may increase as the SPLC continues to improve our tracking of these groups. However, this ideology will continue to have outsized influence on society and other hate groups.

Over the last few years, leaders of the anti-abortion activists who refer to themselves as “abolitionists” have mobilized a network of supporters across the country to lobby for legislation and taken to social media as well as the streets to normalize their extreme position on abortion. These groups will likely be the most active male supremacist groups in 2024 as they continue to expand their influence.

In their own words

“You’re going to shed blood in the womb, you’re going to reap it in the streets.” – Philip “Flip” Benham at a protest, July 20, 2023

“Some people in our culture want to protect murderers and rapists. I want to protect preborn human beings. Someone who murders a human being, they lose their life.” – T. Russell Hunter while street preaching in Norman, Oklahoma, July 2022

“Many men want to murder their filthy whore wives to protect their children In fact, calling this ‘murder’ is wrong, as it is actually an act of defense. … Death is much better than divorce.” – Andrew Anglin in “How to Kill Your Wife on a Cruise: Dump Her Off the Side and You Slide,” on the Daily Stormer, June 2021

“If you put yourself in the position to be raped, you must bare [sic] some responsibility.” – Andrew Tate on Twitter, Oct. 18, 2017

“Make rape legal if done on private property. I propose that we make the violent taking of a woman not punishable by law when done off public grounds. … If rape becomes legal under my proposal, a girl will protect her body in the same manner that she protects her purse and smartphone. … After several months of advertising this law throughout the land, rape would be virtually eliminated on the first day it is applied.” – Daryush “Roosh” Valizadeh in an article on Return of Kings titled “How to Stop Rape,” February 2015

“Feminists are obsessed with rape because we live in a rape fantasy culture, where feminists wish they were hot enough to be rape-able.” – Former New Hampshire state Rep. Robert Fisher on r/TheRedPill, April 2014

“Slapping a girl across the face isn’t just about hurting her, it’s a kind of neg. It says, ‘I can crush you like an insect, but you aren’t worth the effort.’ It’s a tacit acknowledgement that she’s weaker than you, beneath you, and if she crosses you again, you’ll put her in the hospital. You treat her like she’s a child throwing a temper tantrum, not an equal. ... Women should be terrorized by their men; it’s the only thing that makes them behave better than chimps.” – Matt Forney under the pseudonym Ferdinand Bardamu in Mala Fide blog in an article titled “The Necessity of Domestic Violence,” 2012

“All the PC demands to get huffy and point out how nothing justifies or excuses rape won’t change the fact that there are a lot of women who get pummeled and pumped because they are stupid (and often arrogant) enough to walk though [sic] life with the equivalent of a I’M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH – PLEASE RAPE ME neon sign glowing above their empty little narcissistic heads.” – Paul Elam in a blog titled “Challenging the Etiology of Rape,” Nov. 14, 2010

Background

The modern-day organized male supremacist movement emerged in the 1970s and 1980s in response to second-wave feminism and other identity-based rights movements. Not all “men’s rights” activists were reactionary; a small and loosely organized group of “men’s liberation” activists originally saw themselves working in concert with feminists to push back against “traditional” gender roles that, as they did for women, severely limited the social and familial roles men were allowed to play. “If men cannot play freely, neither can they freely cry, be gentle, nor show weakness. … A fuller concept of humanity recognizes that all men and women are potentially strong and weak and active and passive; and these human characteristics are not the province of one sex,” Jack Sawyer, a psychologist and proponent of men’s liberation, wrote in 1970.

But the reactionary, anti-feminist impulse of the era ultimately had greater cultural and political impact than the men’s liberation movement. As women made gains like greater parity in the workforce, some men’s rights activists began arguing that women had, in fact, greater societal power, and were victimizing men. Women, they claimed, were responsible for men losing jobs and losing earning power, increasing divorce rates and an endless list of other ills.

The progenitor of the men’s rights movement, Warren Farrell, gave voice to those feelings of male oppression in his 1993 bestseller, The Myth of Male Power, which has since become the seminal text of the men’s rights movement. A former National Organization for Women board member who used to rub shoulders with such prominent feminists as Gloria Steinem, Farrell – after his divorce – declared men were as oppressed as women, if not more.

The followers of this movement – who came to be known as men’s right activists, or MRAs – relied on pseudo-science and distorted statistics to downplay the prevalence and severity of violence against women and create false equivalencies between the systemic oppression of men and women.

Around the same time Farrell was giving shape to the men’s rights movement, others who felt men were too often denied sex began offering men a way to manipulate women into sleeping with them – something they women rightfully owed to men. These so-called pickup artists (PUA) share coercive strategies aimed at manipulating women into sex. They have a transactional view of relationships and believe feminism has granted women undue power in choosing partners. For PUAs, these predatory strategies can help them overcome feminist obstacles and elevate their “sexual market value.”

By the 1990s and 2000s, male supremacist proponents and activists were increasingly congregating online. Over time they fragmented into distinct communities. Around the mid-2000s, men going their own way (MGTOWs), advocated that men should entirely isolate themselves from women and broke off from MRAs as their own community. Similarly, the following decade misogynist incels broke off from PUAs and formed their own male supremacist movement. Misogynist incels grew from the same entitlement and dehumanization of women that gave rise to PUAs. They believe, however, that no amount of strategy or “game” can overcome their sexual frustration and therefore declare themselves “involuntary celibates.”

The Red Pill

While MRAs, PUAs, MGTOWs, and misogynist incels are the most distinct and enduring male supremacist communities, the manosphere has also included communities that are more fluid. In October 2012, New Hampshire Republican state Rep. Robert Fisher created the subreddit r/TheRedPill. The “Red Pill” is a reference to the film The Matrix. For this community, “taking the Red Pill” is the process of awakening to the feminist conspiracy that runs society and oppresses men. Members of the Red Pill community frame feminism as a sexual strategy women use to gain power and influence. The Red Pill ideology is thus framed as men’s reactionary sexual strategy to take back power and regain what they perceive as men’s rightful position in society.

The Red Pill was initially presented as a personal philosophy to redefine masculinity and help men transform from weak “beta” males into dominant “alphas.” During Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, the manosphere community constructed a new politicized identity that viewed Trump’s election as a way to fight back against the “war on men” and push back against the encroachment of feminism.

Fisher succumbed to public pressure and resigned from his seat in 2017 after his role was revealed. During his time as a lawmaker, Fisher asserted that rape was not a net negative because the rapist enjoyed it. He also wrote that women were inferior to men intellectually, that their bodies were the extent of their worth and that feminists (or most women) want to be dominated and raped. The emergence of the Red Pill subreddit – which included over 245,500 subscribers as of January 2018 but has since been quarantined – further contributed to the intermingling of the male supremacist sub-ideologies that make up the manosphere.

These communities are interconnected, sharing and competing for much of the same audience. Some individuals may consume content and identify with several of these communities simultaneously. Others migrate from one to another as their radicalization processes shift. Despite their overlap, these communities are distinct, each with its own unique ideology and mobilization. Infighting among key figures and communities is common.

Beyond the manosphere

While the communities that make up the manosphere are the most visible examples of male supremacy, they are by no means exhaustive. Male supremacy as a motivating extremist ideology predates and exists outside of the manosphere.

In October 1991, George Hennard crashed his pickup truck through the window of Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas. Hennard opened fire and shouted: “All women of Killeen and Belton are vipers! This is what you’ve done to me and my family! This is what Bell County did to me. ... This is a payback day.” Hennard had a history of stalking women, and in the investigation of the attack, the Killeen police chief noted Hennard “had an evident problem with women.” Most of Hennard’s victims were women, and survivors reported that he appeared to systematically target women, calling several of them “bitches” before shooting them. He later killed himself. During his massacre he killed 23 and injured another 27 in what was the most lethal mass shooting in U.S. history until it was eclipsed in 2007 by the shooting at Virginia Tech.

More recently in July 2018, Nicholas D’Agostino was arrested after shooting at women in six separate incidents. D’Agostino allegedly conducted these attacks because he believed only men should be allowed to drive. According to court documents, D’Agostino “held a very dim view of women” and used Facebook to post “rants and rambles about female motorists and how incompetent they are and that their sole purpose is to give birth to male children.” D’Agostino’s case is ongoing.

Abortion ‘abolitionists’

Abortion “abolitionists” – who strategically claim to be the successors of 19^th-century anti-slavery activists – are another example of a male supremacist movement that exists outside the confines of the manosphere where male supremacy has traditionally been understood to operate. Abortion abolitionists are an extreme sect of the anti-abortion movement that believes any attempt to end a pregnancy after conception is murder. They believe those seeking, “aiding and abetting” and providing abortions should be prosecuted under homicide laws and subject to the death penalty. They believe there should be no exemptions for rape, incest or when the pregnant person’s life is at risk. Abortion abolitionists distinguish themselves from the pro-life movement, which they criticize for being too secular and for “regulating child sacrifice” rather than abolishing it. T. Russell Hunter, the leader of Abolitionists Rising, has repeatedly emphasized that abolitionists are not “pro-life” but rather “pro-justice.”

This movement is heavily influenced by Matthew Trewhella, an extremist who endorsed the murder of abortion providers as “justifiable” in 1993. Abolitionist leaders follow the strategy Trewhella outlined in his 2013 book The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates, which calls on lower-level political officials to reject the federal or state authority and defy laws that interpreted as immoral or unjust. Drawing on the fundamentalist ideas of Christian Reconstructionism, abortion abolitionist leaders have called on supporters to reject the authority of the Supreme Court and the Constitution and work to reconstruct American society to align with biblical law.

Key abortion abolitionist organizations include Operation Serve America, Abolitionists Rising, End Abortion Now and Foundation to Abolish Abortion, and these groups are growing in both numbers and influence. According to a Political Research Associates report, abortion abolitionist groups are active in at least 21 states, and abolitionist bills have been introduced in 17 states since 2020.

Abortion abolitionists call for legislation that would provide equal protection for the “unborn,” which could criminalize women for “endangering” their pregnancies far beyond abortion. If passed, these laws could ban certain types of birth control, prevent pregnant people from taking prescription medications or receiving certain medical treatments, ban fertility treatments that create excess fertilized eggs and criminalize suicidality at any stage in a pregnancy. In her book Policing the Womb, Michele Goodwin warns that these laws “reduce women to symbolic wombs and human incubators for the state” and provide “a persuasive proxy for sex discrimination.”

Overlap with white supremacy

Misogyny plays a major role in underpinning and motivating white supremacy. However, the omnipresent nature of misogyny and its far-reaching influence on American society means the extent of the problem is often hidden in plain sight.

Male supremacists frequently bring in antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories to address the inherently contradictory aspects of their worldview. According to male supremacists, women are genetically inferior, lazy and stupid. At the same time, they are the all-powerful overlords who corrupted society with their feminist influence. To explain this inconsistency, many adherents present feminism as an invention of the Jewish elite to disguise Jewish influence over society. Antisemitism and misogyny often work together, animating each other and other forms of hate. A 2020 survey conducted in the United Kingdom found young people with negative views of feminism were more likely to endorse antisemitic conspiracy theories and hold racist beliefs.

As both white supremacy and male supremacy are driven by fear of the perceived loss of white male status, the ideological tenets that animate these hateful worldviews intermingle and bolster each other. Opportunistic leaders within the far right present feminism as a destructive force that is ruining men’s lives and weakening society. This framing aligns white supremacist rage towards feminism and social justice activism, which becomes an effective avenue into the movement.

The “great replacement” conspiracy theory is one example of this overlap. The conspiracy theory weaves together misogynistic anxiety about birth rates with nativist fears over immigration to falsely assert the existence of an active, ongoing and covert effort to replace white populations in white-majority countries. Adherents have cited the theory as their motivation for the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue, 2019 Christchurch mosque and 2022 Buffalo supermarket shootings. The “great replacement” theory is inherently white supremacist, antisemitic and male supremacist. With its obsession with fertility, birth rates and demographics and its adherents’ fixation on controlling women’s bodies, misogyny beats at the heart of the violent conspiracy.

While male supremacy is often seen as secondary to white supremacy – if it is seen at all – it is important to recognize it as a toxic and dangerous ideology in and of itself.