Going Mainstream: Male Supremacy, the Manosphere, and Implications for Higher Education

PERIL’s publication Going Mainstream: Male Supremacy, the Manosphere, and Implications for Higher Education explores how misogynistic and male supremacist narratives are increasingly reaching young men online, and how students, faculty, staff, and administrators in higher education can respond.

• This resource, funded by the Lumina Foundation, focuses on the intersection of gender-based harms, extremist narratives, and violence on college campuses.
• Male supremacist ideas once confined to niche corners of the internet have become mainstream and support the conditions for gender-based harms online and offline, particularly against women and LGBTQ+ students, faculty, and staff.
• Research from numerous fields—including security studies, criminology, and gender studies—finds that male supremacist beliefs are a risk factor for perpetrating multiple forms of violence, from sexual violence to extremist violence.
• By learning to identify and respond effectively to harmful narratives and behaviors, higher education institutions can strengthen safe, inclusive, and resilient learning environments where all students can thrive.

To learn how your institution can take meaningful action today, download the resource here. Interested in a customized training session at your institution or organization? Reach out to PERIL at: PERILTrainings@american.edu.

About this publication

This resource is intended to raise awareness among administrators, faculty, and staff in higher education about the ways online extremist narratives about gender filter into campus culture, harming students, impeding academic success, and undermining campus cohesion. It supplements PERIL’s Building Resilient & Inclusive Communities of Knowledge (BRICK) toolkit developed in partnership with the Lumina Foundation. The BRICK toolkit identifies a set of tools and resources to help constituents across higher education—from campus leadership, to faculty, staff, and students—build resilience to violent supremacist ideologies, conspiracy theories, mis/dis/mal-information, propaganda, and hate speech.

Male Supremacy Increases the Risk of Violence

College-aged men are a key audience for male supremacist influencers as they are entering a transitional life stage and are often looking for guidance on relationships, finance, and identity. Male supremacy is an ideology which promotes male dominance over women and LGBTQ+ individuals based on pseudoscientific arguments for male superiority. Based in a deep sense of grievance, male supremacist ideas frames feminism and LGBTQ+ rights as existential threats to society, pitting men against women and LGBTQ+ people with negative outcomes for women, LGBTQ+ people, and men themselves. Substantial research finds robust connections between holding harmful gender norms and male supremacist ideas, and a heightened risk of perpetrating numerous forms of violence, including bullying, sexual harassment, interpersonal violence, sexual violence, political violence, and mass targeted violence. Alternatively, support for gender equality is associated with a lower likelihood of perpetrating intimate partner violence.

Male supremacist ideology is a gateway to white supremacist online communities and intersects most violently with white supremacist, antisemitic, and xenophobic narratives and conspiracies in the Great Replacement Theory, which has motivated mass shootings and targeted violence around the world. At its most extreme, violent male supremacists have committed four mass shootings on four college campuses since 1989, killing more than 60 people.

Mainstreaming the Manosphere

Male supremacy and misogyny are increasingly mainstream and often presented as “harmless” through humor and irony. By the time young men enter college, most will have interacted with misogynistic content and harmful gender norms through the manosphere, gaming, social media, or pornography, which has grown nearly three times as violent over the past 25 years. Online influencers and social media algorithms increasingly promote manosphere content to young men, often leveraging their insecurities about dating and self-esteem to sell products on fitness, dating, and finances, while blaming feminism, women, and LGBTQ+ people for the modern challenges men face. The rise of the manosphere coincides with lower support for gender equality in Gen Z men compared with the generation before them.

Gender-based Harms on Campus

While much male supremacist rhetoric exists online, it often spills over into real-world environments. In higher education, male supremacist ideologies fuel hostile environments for women and LGBTQ+ students. Rates of gender-based violence and harassment on college and university campuses are significant, with undergraduate women as a whole, specifically women of color, and nonbinary and transgender students experiencing especially high rates. Choking, an unsafe practice portrayed in pornography, has become an increasingly common sexual practice among undergraduate students, reported by over half of women, a quarter of men, and more than half of transgender or non-binary students in 2022.

Women and LGBTQ+ faculty also experience gendered harms and harassment both on-and offline. The rise of the internet, especially social media and AI, has introduced new methods of technology facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV), including nonconsensual distribution of intimate images, doxxing, and online harassment. TFGBV has many harmful impacts on physical and mental health, as well as negative financial, professional, and educational consequences.

What Higher Education Can

Universities have the responsibility to create a healthy campus culture and explicitly establish norms and values that affirm everyone’s right to a safe educational environment, regardless of their race, gender, or sexual orientation, among other identities. Campus communities should be prepared to address harmful misogynistic rhetoric when it manifests. Ignoring harmful rhetoric risks normalizing supremacist ideologies. Campus leaders can create safe academic environments both online and off by reaffirming campus norms and values, strengthening reporting systems, and by engaging in respectful discussions about dating, mental health, and identity, subjects that are frequently coopted to promote male supremacist rhetoric and gender-based harms. By learning to identify and respond effectively to harmful narratives and behaviors, higher education institutions can strengthen safe, inclusive, and resilient learning environments where all students can thrive.

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