Yale Alum Founds Institute to Study Male Supremacism

Alex DiBranco, Ph.D. ’22, did not always expect to launch an institute for studying violent misogynist movements.

But as a graduate policy fellow with Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS), she gained insights into leadership and how she might apply her sociology training toward influencing policy and democracy.

“ISPS was a space early in my graduate career where I incubated an understanding of how supremacist movements built power,” DiBranco said of her mentorship under Jacob Hacker, ISPS faculty fellow and the Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science.

In 2014, a 22-year-old man killed six people and injured 14 others in an attack he described in a series of videos as retribution for his inability to find a girlfriend. Since then, a growing community of self-described incels, or involuntary celibates, have gathered online to — in some cases — celebrate the attack and share hatred against women. And while only a small percentage of incels advocate or perpetrate violence, The Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center has recently described such individuals as illustrative of the behavioral themes the center tracks to prevent acts of targeted violence. 

In 2019, DiBranco founded the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism (IRMS), comprised of “a team of predominantly women scholars [who] believe that women must be respected leaders in responding to an ideology threatening our own lives.”

“I knew when I came into academia I wanted to pursue an alternative career path, though I didn’t know I would found a new organization,” she said. “ISPS provided a bridge to see how the work we do as scholars can have a real-world impact.”

We spoke recently with DiBranco about her organization and what she thinks we need to learn about male supremacism.

ISPS: Why did you create the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism (IRMS)? What need does it fill that wasn’t already being addressed by existing academic institutions and scholars?

Alex DiBranco: When I founded the institute in 2019, I had been working on topics around misogyny and male supremacism with a few colleagues. As we conducted our initial outreach to potential fellows, we found people in institutions around the world who were working on some aspect of male supremacist movements, but they were completely isolated. IRMS brings them together. We were all frustrated with research within academia and the nonprofit research field around different forms of supremacism and extremism, because there was not a lot of attention to understanding misogynism through the lens of ideology.

ISPS: Can you please expand on that? For example, haven’t recent incidents of mass violence targeting women drawn increasing attention to male perpetrators who identify themselves as incels, or involuntary celibate, and who direct their hatred toward women?

AD: These attacks have brought attention, but the causes are often discussed as poor mental health or loneliness. IRMS applies research to place the proper emphasis on the ideology of male supremacism and misogyny in the same way we can link anti-Black violence to racism and white supremacy.

ISPS: Why is it wrong to attribute incel-inspired violence to poor mental health or loneliness?

AD: You are asking why we don’t understand misogyny as ideology, and that’s a big core of the problem. I’ve written about how in misogynist incel violence, the attackers often select locations such as yoga studios or sororities — symbolic targets in the way an antisemitic or racist killer might select a synagogue or a Black church. For them, this is a symbol of the kind of women they are targeting, and they often say in writings and videos that they are seeking to strike fear in the hearts of other women.

ISPS: But you are saying that much of the conversation and even the research around the causes of such incidents do not scrutinize the ideology of the attackers.

AD: Correct. The violence is not coded as supremacist. It’s just something we oddly accept. That acceptance is a product of male supremacism, too. Our work at IRMS seeks to dissect all these things we are so used to glossing over and recognize them as male supremacist in the same way we understand White supremacism and the visibility of racism not just as individualized hatred and bigotry but as a structuring mechanism of society.

ISPS: How do you define male supremacism?

AD: It’s the belief or system of cisgender men’s dominance over women and the erasure of anyone who is not a cisgender man or woman.

ISPS: Cisgender describes someone who identifies with the gender assigned to them at birth. In other words: not transgender. What do you mean by “erasure?”

AD: It’s not just dominance over nonbinary or transgender people but the belief that there is no such category as nonbinary gender — someone who identifies as neither male nor female — or transgender men or transgender women. According to this ideology, such people — and gender identities in general — simply do not exist.

ISPS: How old is this ideology? Has it always existed in some form?

AD: Male supremacism, or patriarchy, is core to our society. Men have asserted dominance over society for thousands of years. Over the last half century, there’s been a shift to active points of mobilization to preserve the core of cisgender men’s dominance in response to the advances of the feminist movements. The achievements of women’s rights activists, though still falling short of gender equity, have prompted misogynist men (and some women) to protect what had been an unquestioned status quo.

ISPS: What does male supremacism share with white supremacist, antisemitic, anti-gay, and anti-trans ideologies or other supremacist and prejudiced ideologies that target vulnerable populations?

AD: They share a sense of superiority, entitlement, and a belief that the dominant population are actually the victims. There are elements of conspiracism, such as false antisemitic theories of hidden elite Jewish people pulling the stings of power. They learn from each other. Since 1990, male supremacists have spread the unfounded theory that feminist elites are calling the shots behind the scenes. And they can intersect in alternate ways. Male supremacism has been used to recruit cisgender men of color, for example, which makes such groups look different from traditional white supremacist groups.

ISPS: If male supremacism is so old and embedded in our culture, why do you think it hasn’t been widely understood as an ideology?

AD: I think one of the things that, sort of perversely, makes male supremacism as an ideology so invisible is how ubiquitous it is. For example, look at how we count hate crime statistics. If we counted the disproportionate amount of intimate partner and sexual violence against women as hate crimes, it would overwhelm the statistics. Because the numbers of domestic, interpersonal, and sexual violence against women are so large, and they are universal across the globe. It requires completely restructuring how we think about things.

ISPS: Do you have a sense as to the scope of the problem? Can we estimate how many people might identify as or be fairly labeled as avowed male supremacists or misogynist incels?

AD: It is challenging to quantify, because people access misogynist forums online without being counted, and there are so many different male supremacist groups and forums. Also, the organizations that typically monitor supremacist groups — such as the Southern Poverty Law Center — only recently started looking at male supremacism and are still developing their tracking of such groups. For some available numbers, the most prominent misogynist incel forum has about 25,000 participants at present. A 2022 website traffic report found 2.6 million visitors. The Men’s Rights Reddit community has about 350,000 subscribers. The last available statistic for r/TheRedPill subreddit before its quarantine was more than 200,000 subscribers.

ISPS: Is the problem getting any better in the United States? What is your sense of the current state of male supremacism?

AD: The implicit beliefs in male supremacism have been shaken by the woman suffrage movement, by the feminist movement, by #MeToo, and others organizing for gender justice. As a society, we do not have the same level of belief in cisgender men’s superiority or laws supporting their control as 50 or 100 years ago. But in terms of male supremacist mobilizations, these movements are growing and becoming a greater problem as they attempt to re-establish cisgender men’s dominance and influence in society, especially over the past decade. Misogynist speech from political leaders have emboldened male supremacist supporters. There have been recent increases in violence against cisgender and transgender women, including femicide. It is a major threat that requires serious attention.

ISPS: In the preface to your book, you list the explosion in state abortion restrictions as evidence of male supremacism. And yet, a Pew Research poll this year found 38% of men and 33% of women believe abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. Do these women endorse male supremacism?

AD: Yes, they do. One of our chapters is about Phyllis Schlafly, who was the key leader in stopping the Equal Rights Amendment, and her influence in promoting patriarchy. There is a lot of complicity.

ISPS: Schlafly is a unique historical figure. What about other women who may share some of these beliefs? Especially when many would not think of themselves as endorsing male supremacism.

AD: True, but we are all part of the same society, which is culturally male supremacist. Some are more complicit in the operations of male supremacism than others, such as certain conservative religions, certain wings of the atheist movement, so-called trad wives who are influenced by patriarchy to support patriarchy. It’s a system of belief that women can also share, to varying extents. Some might not admit to the reality of the kind of society we live in. Some, like self-described men’s rights “honey badgers” or trad wives, participate more directly in male supremacist movements, arguing that men are being oppressed or that women belong in the home.

In 2020, Pew found that 28% of men and 17% of women in the U.S. believe that women’s gains have come at the expense of men. That said, I don’t want to lose track of the fact that the majority of supporters of male supremacism and perpetrators of violence are cisgender men. Even with respect to abortion, the contemporary movement of abortion “abolitionists” with the most severe stance supporting criminalization is led by activists and politicians who are cisgender men.

ISPS: What about people who don’t belong to any religious or ideological groups?

AD: Supremacism is a spectrum. I try not to use terms like extremist or radical, which can create a false understanding that someone is either a white supremacist with the KKK or not. That’s just not how it works. We know that everybody is somewhat racist or somewhat sexist. If you test us, the results almost always reveal some bias. And getting back to your question about abortion rights, the belief that women can be reduced to objects that are incubators, and that it’s OK to take away their bodily autonomy — that belief is male supremacist.

ISPS: Even if some women believe in protecting the right of an embryo to grow and be born?

AD: If your goal is to reduce the number of abortions that occur, outlawing the procedure is not effective. When you endorse the anti-abortion movement as it exists, that movement is a supremacist movement.

ISPS: An incel blames women for their lack of sexual or social status. What drives this type of thinking?

AD: The core elements of the misogynist incel belief system are the same beliefs that domestic violence perpetrators hold. They both hold patriarchal beliefs and a deep-seated sense of entitlement. They believe they are provoked unjustly into violence. In addition, for misogynist incels or so-called red-pillers, they add a framing that it is unfair they don’t have access to sex with women on demand. They present it as an injustice some find worthy of endorsing mass violence.

ISPS: Should we as a society be concerned that any self-described incel is potentially violent?

AD: We use the term misogynist incel to distinguish from the roots of the incel movement in the 1990s on a forum created by a bisexual woman for people of all genders and sexualities. Later on, sexist men within that movement aligned with misogynist online movements like pickup artists in online spaces such as the 4Chan forums, and they began to separate. But to address your question, only a very small number of people actually turn out to commit mass violence. What we have seen at this point is that this is a movement that develops disproportionate numbers of violent perpetrators. The movement itself is a threat, but the threat can manifest in all sorts of other ways, such as sexual harassment, stalking, vitriol, threats, and more common forms of sexist behavior.

ISPS: How much can be blamed on our online culture? Were there ways of spreading incel thinking before the internet?

AD: I think there can be an overemphasis on the significance of online culture. Misogynist terrorism existed before the internet. Men’s rights activists organized before the internet. Social media is a technological change in the same way that nonprofits reaching supporters through massive mail campaigns were a change in the 70s and 80s. It is easier to reach more people today for sure. And it is easier to be anonymous, leaderless, and not have a big organization behind the messaging. On the other hand, because there are so many possible inputs, you don’t always catch people’s attention. But overall, looking at the history of social movements, it’s not new to have a movement that leads to many acts of violence and death. Supremacists have been learning how to do this for a long time.

ISPS: Is this a chicken and an egg problem? I mean, the question “Why don’t more conventionally attractive and sexually active women hook up with angry, insecure, male loners” seems to answer itself, right? If the problem is self-reinforcing if not self-created, how can the cycle be broken?

AD: That’s the reason I make the point about violent misogynist incels having the same belief system as domestic abusers. The problem is not that they lack partners. It’s sexual entitlement and dehumanization fueling these movements. The root cause of why someone ends up in the misogynist incel movement or the men’s rights movement — which is driven by divorced men — is this core of sexual entitlement and dehumanization going down different paths. Our work at IRMS especially seeks to intervene long before anyone develops these root beliefs.

ISPS: What does that look like?

AD: We talk about comprehensive sex education based on consent and the humanization of others. We focus on K-12 curriculum. Introducing different perspectives into an English literary canon that is overly focused on cisgender boys as protagonists and women who are single-dimensional, objectified, and often sexually harassed without critique. We currently have a white paper in progress that will discuss this approach in more depth.

ISPS: What are some behaviors that can serve as red flags that someone might commit an incel-inspired violent act?

AD: Universal indicators for mass violence, which is almost always by cisgender men, include previous instances of harassment or assault on women. Of course, violence against women is so widespread in the United States, it’s hard to use it as a warning of mass violence. And if we were the kind of culture that took seriously behavior like stalking and sexual harassment, we would be a different culture when it came to ideological violence as well.

ISPS: So, is there a better way to look at this problem that can lead to fewer acts of violence?

AD: The framework of dangerous speech is useful to help determine if we are going to have attacks from one particular culture or movement. I have written and contributed a case study to the Dangerous Speech Project, an organization which aims to limit violence while protecting free speech. The point is that in a movement like male supremacism, we are not necessarily going to be able to identify the specific person who is about commit an act of mass violence. But we know it’s going to happen because we know this is what this kind of dangerous ideology and speech leads to.