Finding common ground to fight misogyny and political violence

As misogyny spreads online and vaults violently into the physical world, the tenets of democracy, family and individuality are being challenged.

Whether a backlash against hard-won gains or artificially generated by algorithms, the phenomenon of misogyny and the harms it brings is intensifying.

“There is a considerable backlash in so-called populist politics and around the world to the idea of gender equality,” Global Institute for Women’s Leadership (GIWL) founder Julia Gillard warns.

If not now, when

It has been almost 15 years since then Prime Minister Gillard delivered “the misogyny speech” in parliament, subsequently stunning millions of viewers around the world.

“I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. I will not,” she declared, gesturing towards the Leader of the Opposition Tony Abbott.

“The government will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. Not now, not ever.”

Speaking at a recent GIWL panel discussion, Gillard acknowledged what she described as a “targeted attack” on Independent MP Helen Haines and the heaviness brought onto the shoulders of other women in parliament by the act of political violence no one expected to see in Australia.

“In the aftermath of the circumstances that Helen is now facing we do have a genuine opportunity for a deeper form of national reflection about who we want to be and what political culture we want to have,” Gillard says.

Finding common ground

“Coming together now is more critical than ever,” says Dr Elise Stephenson, Deputy Director at GIWL.

“There’s importance in solidarity, in the care and compassion that we can show each other in the fight for equality. Not just as a core tenet of democracy but in thinking about the societies we want right now and that we want to leave our future generations.

“We are leveraging some of the world’s leading researchers when it comes to gender equality, but also practitioners, people on the frontlines with deep expertise,” she says of the Institute.

Gillard agrees that there’s never been a more important time to find the common ground on which to fight misogyny.

“Of course, political violence happens to men,” Gillard says.

“But we know from all of the research and the statistics and the lived experience of women who are in public life, that the targeting of women on social media and the metastasising of that into real world events does disproportionately happen to women.”

What does misogyny look like today?

Professor Michelle Ryan, inaugural director of GIWL, says there’s more to the concept of misogyny than simply the hatred of women.

“If the patriarchy is the system within our society where men have power over women, the misogyny is what polices that, what keeps it going,” Ryan explains.

What then happens is the “policing” of the behaviour of men and boys, non-binary people, and anyone that might not uphold the ideas of the patriarchy.

“For me, this expanded view of misogyny is really important because it shows it’s not just women who need to be pushing back against misogyny, it’s all of us,” says Ryan.

“There’s a hierarchy of men in the manosphere. We’ve got Alphas, we’ve got Betas, we’ve got Cucks, we’ve got Soyboys.”

These derogatory terms categorise other men based upon apparent dominance and effeminacy.

The strict, traditional idea of what we think it means to be a man is what Ben Vasiliou, CEO of The Man Cave, refers to as “living in the ‘man box’”.

“Those rigid tired norms are actually super harmful to us as men, but also in terms of how we show up in the lives of women and girls and others.”

The Man Cave has worked with 115,000 teenage boys and is seeing age-old trends and challenges but now in a modern context are spending an average of seven hours a day on screens.

“The access to harm has been accelerated,” Vasiliou says.

Reinforcing a rigid view of masculinity, they are being fed unfiltered and unfettered content and are being told they’re not good enough, and the harm and the pace at which the harm is arriving is hard for a teenage brain to process and question.

Compassion, kindness, an understanding of gender equality, and the idea that feminism is not bad for you, can be included in what modern masculinity means.

“Instead of brute force, being a strong man is actually about being able to ask for help. Being a strong man is actually about being able to be vulnerable,” Vasiliou says.

Going backwards

The latest GIWL findings disrupt the assumption that every coming generation will be more progressive on gender equality and the role of women than past generations.

Gen Z men, the youngest cohort in the GIWL research at 18-30 years old, are twice as traditional as Baby Boomer men in their expectations of their own behaviour and their sense of what it is to be a man.

When Gillard founded the Institute, she says she had the sense the world was only going to make progress if there was better evidence.

“Every year since has reinforced that sense in me and it’s also reinforced in me that whilst we’ve made so much progress on gender equality we are at risk of going backwards,” she says.

It would be easy to either retreat because it’s all too hard or get caught in fraught and divisive debates about roles and who is responsible for the backlash.

Neither is the productive way forward, she says.

“Instead, we need to be working together and when we are talking about gender equality we’re very clearly explaining that gender equality is not zero-sum game, more for women is not somehow less for men.

“A gender-equal world would be a better world for men and for women because it would lift the weight off everyone of gendered assumptions about who you are and who you should be and what you aim to do in your life.”