Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a professor in the School of Public Affairs and in the Baker School of Education at American University joined the Davies Forum virtually Sept. 22, saying, “Thanks for having me. I wish I could be with you in person. I gave another talk in New York today because it’s the UN General Assembly Week, and so there’s lots of side events on gender, and I came back in time to be with you all virtually.”
USF Media Studies Professors Bernadette Barker-Plummer and Mark Taylor opened the forum, with Barker-Plummer beginning by saying, “We are trying to make sense of some of the things that are going on online in terms of gender, sex and power. A huge thing, of course, that is going on online is the rise of misogyny, and so we’re really glad to have Dr. Miller-Idriss here to help us understand that part of the puzzle.”
In understanding her body of work, Miller-Idriss began with describing her thoughts prior to her research, as she said, “I didn’t feel like I was an expert on gender. It’s not what I had studied. I had studied youth and youth identity, so I felt, like, a little bit fraudulent even talking about it, and so it took me a long time to finally get annoyed enough, is the way I think of it, to write this book.” Miller-Idriss’s book “Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism” was the focus point for her presentation, and holds relevance for us today as examines a more expansive definition “we use the word misogyny in English often to mean the hatred of women, and of course it can and does mean that, but there’s a bigger meaning … which is that misogyny is the law enforcement arm of the patriarchy.”
Miller-Idriss continued later on, “What you see is that in the US, all mass violent attackers since 1949, a dataset of all mass shootings, mass attackers, terrorists, but also workplace, school shootings, etc., 60% of the perpetrators have a documented criminal history of domestic and intimate partner violence before they escalate to mass violence.”
However Miller-Idriss pushes us to consider: how is gender and misogyny foundational to extremism?
Here in the United States, we have seen a number of extremist violence on college campuses alone, with Miller-Idriss citing “the Virginia Tech shooting, which is a university-based shooting; the Parkland, Florida high school shooting; school shootings that we don’t normally associate with issues of gender. But before the Parkland, Florida shooter went into that school, he praised the incel shooter, called an involuntary celibate shooter, who had attacked a Santa Barbara sorority a few years earlier and became a kind of martyr for the movement.”
To understand the online communities which allow for the formation of a new misogyny, Miller-Idriss defines the incel label as “a subculture online that originally started as a self-help community, but eventually, for people who were unable to form sexual or romantic relationships, with others. It eventually evolved into, or was sort of hijacked into, a much more toxic and extremely violent and deeply misogynistic subculture that advocates for the punishment of women, and of men.”
The concept of incel subcultures are part of the ordinary and everyday kind of misogyny examined in chapter one of Miller-Idriss’s book, titled “Containment.” Miller-Idriss describes, “I ended up writing this chapter about these ordinary, everyday ways of policing people with homophobic bullying, with gendered slurs, with slurs that compare women to animals. … I also started talking a little bit about what’s happening with boys, in particular in men, that might make them more receptive to the kinds of messages that I’m about to tell you about.”
“Boys and men are not only the predominant perpetrators of violence; they’re also victims of that same violence at the hands of other boys and men.” Additionally, she said, “There’s no reason why a crisis of manhood or masculinity should have become a crisis of misogyny, but that’s what’s happened. We’ve had well-documented surges in misogyny online since 2011, which is basically right after, you know, social media started. … It’s not that misogyny itself is new; it’s that there’s so many new channels and platforms and ways to do it — especially now with synthetic media and AI.”
Prior to the question and answer portion of the forum, Miller-Idriss succinctly said, “The prevention of mass violence will only work if we understand the gender dimensions of violence, including in its everyday and interpersonal forms as foundational, right? We can’t keep othering it; we have to start centering it if we’re going to understand how to prevent it.”
In a poignant response to junior international studies major Ximena Villa Ibarra’s inquiry of “What conversations should we be having on college campuses?” Miller-Idriss said, “I think there’s a lot of educational stuff that has to be done, not just on the compliance side with Title IX, which also needs to be supported, and then, you know, and then as much support as possible on the compliance side … It has to be from the students … You have a lot of power as students to get stuff organized that the universities might not, in this climate.”
