Tag Archives: Alt-Right

The misogyny of the alt-Right.

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Comments about Green MP Golriz Ghahraman by ACT MP David Seymour on a reactionary radio talk show, and the threats that followed and which the Police deemed serious enough to merit a security detail for her, got me to thinking about how grotesquely disturbed the Right is in its present form. Seymour, supposedly a Libertarian, calls Ghahraman an “menace to freedom” because she wants to tighten legislation on hate speech (which, unlike protected offensive speech involves the incitement to or support for violence against others). His smear is a deliberate incitement to the alt-Right extreme and an implicit call for censorship, an irony lost on him.

The radio host that he was talking to, Sean Plunket, is a man with serious issues when it comes to women. His track record on gender matters is wretched, so Seymour’s comments gave him room to vent more generally on the subject using Ms. Ghahraman as a foil. What is disturbing is that, as readers may know, violent extremists are surrounded by enablers and accomplices, that is, those who simply look the other way when perpetrators plan and prepare for violence or those who in one form or another, passively or actively help perpetrators in the lead up to the commission of acts of violence.

In that conversation Plunket played the role of enabler while Seymour moved from enabler to accomplice because his dog whistle did in fact, provoke the alt-Right scum to crawl out from under their keyboards in order to heap vicious, often violently sexualised misogynist abuse on the Green MP. Seymour has denied being responsible for the threats made against her, which is akin to Donald Trump saying that he has nothing to do with Russia or the rise in attacks by white supremacists since he took office.

That got me to thinking about a core belief structure of the alt-Right and their white supremacist kin: misogyny. Now, I am no psychologist, psychiatrist or psychotherapist, but one thing is pretty clear: this crowd hates women.

In the case of people like Seymour, it seems that this hatred is born of unrequited lust. Ms. Ghahraman is attractive, smart, and self-assured to the point of being “stroppy” (or as a senior male professor once said to my wife when assessing her suitability for an academic career, “precocious”). But she would never be seen in the company, much less succumb to the courting, of the likes of David Seymour because he is simply a loser who has risen above his proper station in life, one who’s social interaction skills are on a par with the greesy-palmed and pimply 14 year olds that inhabit private schools and believe Ann Rand is “hot.” Boys like these like to bully girls who deep down inside they really, really like but from whom they cannot attract a sideways glance. That is why they get mean. For his part, Plunket projects the image of a guy who has been through a bad divorce or two and/or who has been turned down more than few times in spite of his relative fame and wealth. He is pissed off with women in general, and particularly the mouthy ones who disagree with him yet get to make decisions that affect us all.

We should remember that the misogynist streak pervades the alt-Right, here and elsewhere. It has led to the rise of the so-called “Incel” (involuntarily celibate) culture that has produced several murders of women by blue-balled freaks who think that all of their frustrations and disappointments in life are due to the fact that women will not recognise their genius and consent to having sex with them. Some do not even care about consent but still cannot get laid. This leads them to believe that women are the root of all evil and responsible for the decline of traditional culture, at least when”traditional” refers to a patriarchical white male hierarchy calling the shots over everyone else and enjoying the benefits of their status as Alpha males. These are the type of people to whom Seymour was whistling and for whom Plunket provides a space in which to be safe and comfortable in their views.

If one looks at the common denominators amongst the alt-Right, neo-Nazis, Klansmen, white nationalists and assorted other denizens of forums like 8Chan and 4Chan (which, incidentally, as of yesterday are still viewable in NZ and which continue to have long threads about the “accelerant” characteristics of the Christchurch killer’s actions), there is more than racism, bigotry and xenophobia at play. There is also an unmistakable hatred of women and loathing of what they supposedly represent. Terms like “pussy,” “cuck” (as in cuckold), “wench,” “slut,” “bitch” etc. compete for space with homophobic slurs in the alt-Right discourse. In fact, I am surprised that Seymour and Plunket were able to control their urges to indulge in a few sexist slurs of their own with regard to the Green MP.

It is not just the alt-Right/white extremist extremes that voice such views. Perusal of the comments pages of supposedly Right-Centre blogs regularly turns up variations on misogynist themes in spite of attempts at “moderation,” and Plunket is not the only prominent media commentator who gets to indulge, even if in “wink-wink, nudge-nudge” fashion, a few jabs at females in order to make a point about weakness versus strength (which almost inevitably such opinionating comes down to).

Of course, many if not most women in positions of authority are the subject of misogynist attacks. Equivocators for Seymour like Paula Bennett (now calling for the names of the Parliamentary rapists apparently mentioned in the report on Parliament’s toxic work environment) will try to draw false equivalences by saying that they too were the subject of sexualised attacks, conveniently forgetting that people like Bennett are attacked because of their hypocrisy and nasty policy positions more so than being female per se, and are not in need of security protection an any event. Fellows like Seymour and Plunket will claim that they have (had) plenty of female friends and partners so they cannot possibly be misogynists. This omits one basic thing: the attacks on Ms. Ghahraman are based on who/what she is more so than anything that she does, so regardless of the marital status or physiology of the critic, such attacks are gendered at their core. Even Judith Collins knows that much.

The real issue is that deep inside the abuse of Ms. Ghahraman lies male insecurity–that of sexual rejection and a loss of masculinity. People like Seymour hate women like Ghahraman because they cannot have her and never will, which they fear is a public sign of weakness on their part. This frustrates them immensely, and because they have neither the intellect, looks or social skills to attract such women, that frustration has no place to go other than onanistic rage. Beneath the smirks and the boy’s banter is a deep abiding fear of not measuring up.

That, more than any ideological difference, is what is at play here. So the next time that you hear or read attacks on Ms. Ghahraman and women like her, take a moment to reflect on why, exactly, critics take issue with them.

Angry losers who can’t get laid.

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What do Islamic extremists, alt-Right adherents and the Incel movement have in common? Many people might say “nothing,” but the truth is that for all their differences when it comes to socio-economic, cultural and ethnic identity, these almost exclusively all-male groups all share at their core the same misfortune: they cannot get laid. The inability to find sexual relief in turn fuels their regressive views of the social order and penchant for authoritarian governance because rather than fault themselves they blame others for their predicament, whether the others be infidels, “libtards” or women.

Of course, not every single jihadist or white supremacist is involuntarily celibate. Socio-economic and cultural conditions clearly factor into the extremist equation. But underlying all of that is sexual frustration expressed as sociopathic rage and, in many cases, violent to the point of homicidal tendencies. In some cultures, religiously-codified sexual repression produce a seething mass of angry young men unable to make basic connection with the opposite sex and/or drive them, at considerable peril, into closeted relations with other men. In other instances it is the inability to fit into the sexual mainstream (i.e. get a date) that drives individuals to extremism.

In previous years these social losers would by and large retreat into mastubatory isolation. Now, easy access to porn and the networking reach of social media allow them to feed off of each other’s misery and accelerate their descent into darkness. It allows them to mutually sharpen their objectification and contempt for those who would not have them. That makes them susceptible to manipulative explanations that their plight is the fault of others rather than themselves.

I say this because I have seen a fair bit of pop psychologising about terrorists but relatively little about other angry male sub-strata. When news broke of a Canadian incel running down people with a van in Toronto, it dawned on me that a common thread amongst virtually all male extremists is sexual frustration and rage. Again, this is not to claim that the trait is universal or that it is exclusive to Right wing militants, but there is enough evidence of it to suggest a pattern. So here is my pop psychology theory (which I shall call the “Psychosexual Theory of Extremism” in order to make it sound serious and give the impression that it is based on years of in-depth research): most Rightwing extremism has at its core a deeply rooted sexual origin, specifically manifest as sexual frustration translated into manipulable rage.

I am not sure which is worse, culture where sexual oppression is religiously condoned and institutionalised, or culture where sexual expression is by and large free but vacuous materialism and impossible to achieve post-modern notions of physical and social appeal combine in practice to limit carnal choices by the socially maladjusted or inept. And, whereas women tend to respond to feelings of social alienation by turning on themselves, men are more prone to act out their anger and frustration on others (I realise that I am generalising here so am happy to stand corrected).

Nothing I have said is new. The role of suppressed sexual desire in fostering rage that can be politically exploited is bound to be a constant in psychological studies of individual and collective violence. In fact, back in my days of working with unconventional warfare and counter-insurgency types, the joke was that many on the Left side of the extremist continuum joined in order to get laid (by other impressionable young militants) while those on the Right did so because they could not get laid even if their lives depended on it. That could well still be true.

Even so, it was my introduction to the incel crowd thanks to coverage of the Toronto murders and a conversation with an academic who thinks about such matters about the degree of misogyny and murderous anger expressed in incel circles that made me twig on the fact that they may well overlap with Alt-Right freaks and jihadi wanna-be’s much more than has been commonly acknowledged. Perhaps readers can illuminate me as to who has written in depth on the subject if that indeed is the case.

I cannot offer a remedy to the problem of sexual frustration leading towards violent extremism because the causal mechanisms are not simple and the remedies are not just a matter of finding girlfriends, boyfriends, prostitutes, spouses or partners. I do not know how to properly “channel”  the sexual rage of politically and socially reactionary angry males. So if anyone has ideas in this regard, feel free to share them because anything short of electroshock or forced conversion therapy that reduces the chances of such types going off the rails is worth trying.

In the meantime, beware the wrath of the blue-balled monsters.