How masculism is taking over the world’s culture

We are being propelled towards a new world order. A good place to start by way of explanation is with Pastor Doug Wilson’s raging misogyny. He rants that “life-style feminism”, unleashed by women’s suffrage, violates woman’s purpose as “a weaker vessel created by God to conceive”. To live according to her true nature, she should submit herself, her voting rights, and earnings, to the male family head.

Women who reject these roles are “meddlesome and quarrelsome” (Scott Jener), “miserable cat ladies” (JD Vance), and  “sterile” ‘spinsters’, incapable of succeeding in professional life. Simultaneously, they are “evil“, traitors, and sex toys.

Alarmingly, this unvarnished hatred is being actively mainstreamed and is exerting an ever-expanding cultural pull across Western society.

Misogyny is an ancient mindset that isn’t exclusive to Western Judeo-Christian culture. But this culture is my focus here because it’s where misogyny was supposed to diminish but has instead been shockingly re-vitalised.

It’s now embedded in a wider extreme right mindset according to which the great, white Judeo-Christian male is inherently superior, and rightfully presides over all other religious creeds, genders, and races. For brevity I’ll call this mindset ‘masculism’.

Masculist pushback

Masculism is currently pushing back. Pushback is a group’s desire to assert its dominance over other groups to protect its identity and efficacy against a perceived shift in norms and values. This process plays out across history, from Irish Protestantism vs Catholicism, the Crusades and 19th US nativism vs ‘papism’ to modern-day assaults on positive action policies.  

Masculist pushback is, I’d argue, best understood as an emotional response. Pathological fear of weakness triggers visceral hatred of, and an urge to control, objects which are perceived as potential sources of debilitation. These emotions drive pushback across diverse parts of the masculist agenda, from race, religion and gender to theories of the natural order, aesthetics, tech, governance, and modernity.

As the framework for a comprehensive extreme-right ideology, funded by a behemoth of super-wealthy global investors, masculism is an exceptionally powerful and ubiquitous instance of cultural pushback.

Why now? Arguably, Western endorsement of liberal values on human rights grew in the 1990s and early 2000s to a critical ‘unacceptable threat’ level, a crisis snapping point for a subset of ‘the right’. Enter powerful actors like Trump, Theil, Musk, Miller and co. who seized their moment. A co-ordinated major fightback project unfolded, using governmental powers, tech, social media, global blackmail, propaganda, and financial networking to subdue the threat.

Displacement in a zero-sum world

Pushback is a zero-sum perception – ‘your gain is my loss’. One group’s opportunities, improved rights and life chances are felt to detract from those of another group on the same pitch. Masculist anxiety about these losses is primarily psychosocial and focussed, not on material scarcity, but on “cultural displacement”,  loss of status, competence, and hegemonic power.

We see zero-sum pushback permeating incel thinking – they perceive women, and the positive discrimination they are perceived to enjoy, as the cause of their feeling diminished and displaced. In their heads, they’ve become oppressed second-class citizens whose efficacy and meaningfulness as males has been usurped.

In line with the Christo-misogynists quoted above, and Andrew Tate’s manosphere, the incel solution to this ‘corrosive weakening of maleness’ is to disempower the ‘hateful offenders’ by re-inventing them as traditional objects for subordination and exploitation.

Replacement horror

Masculist fear of weakness is equally evident when anxieties about positive discrimination and racial ‘replacement’ combine. Charles Q Brown held a distinguished military position as a US Airforce Chief of Staff. But he was fired by Trump in 2025 on the presumption that, since he was black, he must have obtained the post illegitimately via the DEI programme.

This is one instance in a constant flow of masculist fortifications of white identity – a ‘2-in-1’ pushback seeking to control non-whites and policies which advantage them. Musk speaks the masculist angst aloud when he argues that white dominance is necessary for self-protection since, if non-whites get the upper hand, they’ll use it to ‘destroy us’.

Masculism also fuels seething contempt for LGBTQ communities precisely because they threaten the prized purity of ‘maleness’. The US and UK extreme right, assisted by their media, fought against this perceived threat by transforming LGBTQ rights from a low public interest issue into a crisis. This shift worked because LGBTQ rights are such strong masculist fear-hate triggers.

The transphobic, racial, misogynistic hatred above is captured in Trump’s call to straight white men to get compensation for discrimination. Written all over this call is the zero-sum threat to white males, victimhood, and angry paranoia.

Mainstreamers and killers

Masculist narratives are formulated within organisations like the Heritage Foundation, ARC, CPAC, MEF, then pumped (via WSI, Tufton Street, IEA, Advance UK, etc) through Europe’s and the UK’s online arteries. The tech broligarchy’s shouty social media and AI pundits are mainstreaming inequalitarian narratives. Data analysis indicates that misogynistic objectification and sexual harassment of women on TikTok, for example, recently jumped from 13% to 56%.

Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, “the world’s scariest company”, argues for tech and state power mergers and fast-track AI expansion. Advantages, he claims, include our ability to build killer robots before our enemies do, and a significant reduction in the power of women. This echoes Yenner’s view of women as dangerous “backbones” of the ‘left world view’ needing restraint. Again, paranoid fear of being weakened is all over these narratives.

Within the masculist agenda there’s considerable cross-fertilisation. Tommy Robinson’s improbable foray into Christianity isn’t because he ‘got religion’ but because, like others, he spotted its value as a weapon in the masculist armoury, serving as a handy ‘sanctimony shield’ and a further tool for oppressing groups against which he’s pushing back. The Judeo-Christian arm of masculism can attack Islam and the ‘outrage’ of women’s desired bodily autonomy in one convenient hit.

Longing for super-strength

Meanwhile, Charles Cornish-Dale laments that the alienation and emptiness of contemporary life thwarts masculinity by hollowing out virility, risk, and vitality. Modernity replaces these ‘virtues’ with nanny statism, over-regulation, conformity, and anti-individualism. Masculists look to an alternative world of male inviolability and perfection through dominance, efficacy, and mental and physical prowess.

This masculist longing travels in two directions: backwards as far as a ‘Bronze Age’ when men were potent, and simultaneously forwards to a tech world where the weakness of feminised flesh is replaced by the digital muscularity of super-intelligent robots.

Musk and co retreat to, and preside over, this virtually post-human world as transcendent half-machine superheroes. Naomi Klein views this slide into ‘dark MAGA’ as a derangement caused by extreme wealth. I see it as a fight against the horror of frailty.

Perfection and nature

Either way, this two-directional hankering offers ‘barricades’ against the forces of disintegration.  So, too, does the masculist ideal of perfection driving the current male fetish for extreme body aesthetics: enter the looks maxxers and protein bodybuilders. These aspirations inoculate against weakness whilst providing online highways to the manosphere and extreme right politics.

Inevitably, masculists also revile disability as a key symbol of weakness, antithetical to physical perfection. Disabled people, like women, belong in the subhuman’, ‘loser’ domain as carriers of intolerable mental and physical infirmity. Trump’s alleged refusal to have disabled vets in his military parade epitomizes this abhorrence as does the cancellation in June 26 of the ceremony commemorating female vets.

Eugenics, another masculist preoccupation, seeks to overcome weakness by creating a master race where vulnerable groups (society’s ‘weakness carriers’) are strictly controlled. Trump’s obsessive admiration for handsome pilots and Hegseth’s super-fit, weight-controlled, testosterone-primed military aren’t just adolescent fixations, but masculist gestures towards eugenic control of the pernicious spread of deadly enfeeblement.

Testosterone Ubermensch

Male aesthetic perfection, as “the pinnacle of nature”, also links to masculist views of nature as inherently unequal. This imbalance provides a biological justification for patriarchal dominance, for equality as illegitimate, and for empathy as harmful where it weakens civil society by reifying the useless underdog.

True civilisational progress, then, requires a return to command and obedience models of gender and the re-emergence of the unfettered Nietzschean ‘Übermensch’. Here masculism offers a kind of extreme libertarian, testosterone ‘Christianity’, releasing white males from religion’s traditional ‘soft’ responsibilities and virtues.

Democracy for girls

As a system of governance based around pluralism, tolerance, compromise, and protective regulation, democracy is reviled by masculists as a ‘feminised’ poison within western society. Pushback is crystal clear in the US mission to save us from ‘civilizational erasure’.  After Vance’s Munich 2025 presentation, it gained momentum with Musk and co stepping in to boost support for the UK’s extreme right fraternity, including Restore Britain.

The US now parades the UK as a disgraced exemplar of the fate of systems that reject masculist governance. Apparently, we are a culturally crippled hellhole, enfeebled by woke policies on immigration, abortion, and DEI, infested with wandering ethnic grooming gangs and knife-wielders, and just too dangerous to visit.

Lashing out

Masculist pushback against weakness is a unifying principle in that it explains the great white Judeo-Christian male’s paranoid response to feeling encircled by usurpers (women, non-whites, LGBTQ, disabled people, Muslims, modernity, democracy, etc) all positioned to subvert his power and destroy him.

And he is lashing out, in all directions, all at once, with an overarching regressive, sometimes violent, agenda to restore his historic sovereign inviolability and dominance. Managing this fear is, for him, a dynamic process, requiring constant re-iteration of the narrative.

Masculism is ultimately pathetic – a grotesque case of pre-adult arrested development. Yet it’s gaining control of much of the planet’s key infrastructure. To respond effectively, turning off its financial taps won’t be sufficient. We must also tackle the emotional drivers that make it so compelling and so lethal.

Claire Jones writes and edits for West England Bylines and is co-ordinator for the Oxfordshire branch of the progressive campaign group, Compass.