New cult of militant misogyny poisoning boys’ minds

It’s not just porn parents should worry about. Teen boys are being brainwashed online to violently hate women. In a truly shocking exposé, LAURA BATES says it’s as dangerous as terrorism

Parents have no idea what their boys are engaging with

targeting teenage boys for recruitment. In a ‘ style guide’, a leading figure in this deeply misogynistic and racist online world says his followers should specifically look for boys aged ten and up.

‘We want to look like superheroes. We want to be something that boys fantasise about being a part of,’ he wrote, adding that antifeminism is an ideal ‘gateway’ to white supremacy.

Encouraging teenage boys to dehumanise their female peers is the thin end of the wedge. From there, for some, things can quickly spiral out of control. In 2019, two

British teenage boys were jailed for encouraging farRight terrorism online. The boys were neoNazis, but they also ran blogs advocating the rape, torture and murder of women.

These extremist communities also explicitly advocate using cultural references, jokes and memes to help smuggle hateful ideas into young people’s minds. ‘Like adding cherry flavour to children’s medicine,’ wrote Andrew Anglin, the founder of one such website.

The spaces boys frequent online, from bodybuilding forums to gaming channels, are used as a kind of hunting ground. They might have liked an ‘ironic’ Instagram meme, for example, before following a link down a rabbit hole of increasingly extreme content about women stealing men’s jobs.

On one bodybuilding forum, there seems to be more misogynistic content than actual chat about bodybuilding. Tragically, those who might have real fears and anxieties are likely to be met with vitriol and extreme opinions.

Take, for example, over 15 different queries from users of that forum, all asking: ‘Is it rape if . . . ?’ The responses include: ‘Rape is the most common female fantasy. You’re just playing into her fantasy.’ ‘They enjoy it even if they say they don’t.’ And: ‘If she’s not conscious IT AINT RAPE [sic].’

Hardly the guidance you’d want your teen to receive in answer to such questions.

Gaming is a particularly rich recruiting ground given that 97 per cent of teenage boys play video games, often with parents having no idea who they are communicating with. Online extremists take advantage of multiplayer games, where players can team up with strangers online and communicate via headsets.

It starts with casual sexist jokes and slurs (which might be appealing to a teenager who feels rejected by girls), then escalates to private chat rooms, where misogynistic propaganda and links to more extreme content are shared.

One mother contacted me in horror after she heard a man shouting ‘feminism is cancer’ over the speakers as her teenage son played a popular game online.

A 2018 Ofcom report revealed that more than 450,000 children aged 12 to 15 spend six to eight hours a day online at weekends.

But a lot of parents have little idea of the content their children might be accessing. I spoke to a teacher of 14 to 18yearold pupils at an innerLondon comprehensive, who told me: ‘ There’s a significant, dangerous lack of awareness from parents and teachers. If young people are watching videos on their phones in their bedrooms, their parents have no idea what they are engaging with.’

We are familiar with the challenges posed by pornography, but there are other dangers facing our boys (and, by extension, our girls), that we don’t even realise exist.

I spoke to Ben Hurst, project coordinator at the Good Lad Initiative, an organisation that delivers workshops on gender inequality, particularly focusing on talking to boys in Year 8 and above.

He says: ‘About 70 per cent of the boys we have contact with have come into contact with that kind of material. It is almost completely under the radar. Staff in schools aren’t aware of the kind of materials boys are accessing, or aware they’re doing it.’

So we end up with cases like that of Ben Moynihan, a video game player with a ‘normal upbringing’ who was 17 when he stabbed three women in Portsmouth in 2014. He wrote: ‘All women needs to die and hopefully next time I can gauge [sic] their eyeballs out.’

One note continued: ‘ When women won’t talk to you it’s heartbreaking, why are they fussy with men nowadays.’ With it was a symbol from the Tomb Raider game.

It should go without saying that no teenage boy is automatically sexist or womanhating. Nor will all of them respond in the same way to these online influences.

But the risks are very real. This deliberate targeting of children ought to be described as radicalisation. Indeed, if it were any other group, it would be. But this particular kind of grooming seems to escape our attention entirely.

When I spoke to counter extremism organisations about the issue, they didn’t even seem to have heard of incels or other extremist misogynistic groups at all.

Ultimately, this is tragic: both for the boys and young men who are exploited and offered hate instead of support, and for the young women and girls who find themselves on the receiving end of the vitriol some of their male peers learn online.

We might not use the word terrorism to describe the acts of these men when they slaughter women in the name of their ideology, but that is what it is.

And their deliberate grooming of young boys deserves to be seen for what it is: radicalisation.