Introduction
The subjugation of women to physical harm and socioeconomic oppression is a fundamental component of white supremacy. For centuries, media or forms of mass communication have been the predominant tool of the dominant class (i.e. cis-gendered White men) to maintain this subjugation. Recently, government agencies such as the U.S. Secret Service developed the term ‘fringe groups’ for categorising the White men responsible for terrorist or violent extremist attacks against women and other marginalised groups. This label significantly absolves the social and political structures designed to encourage this form of violence. If this mislabelling continues, the use of mass media and related technologies for spreading extremist views will go unchecked, putting the most vulnerable in society—Black women—at high risk of assault or murder.
In 2014, US government agencies were strongly urged to classify incel (or involuntarily celibate) groups as domestic terrorists after Elliot Rodger killed six people. Rodger’s 140-page manifesto and YouTube videos sparked an international conversation about a new male supremacist movement using the Internet as its primary recruitment and radicalisation tool. However, nothing is new about the number of under-reported and unsolved cases of femicide involving Black women. The epidemic predates 2014 and has often occurred at the hands of extremist groups using media to promulgate the ideology behind their actions.
Media promoting ‘misogynoir’, or hate towards Black women, is commonplace; it’s visible in the recent conversations about Keke Palmer and Megan Thee Stallion on social media and blog sites. This hostility appears in podcasts, movies, television shows, and the online gaming community as well.
This Insight aims to investigate the evolution of mass media misogynoir over the past 400 years, illustrating how the White male supremacist communities, including incels and manosphere channels, arrived at their current blueprint for digitising this specific form of misogyny. This article will also investigate why Black women remain an easier target for these men by evaluating the systemic discrimination within the global media industry.
Misogynoir, Explained
First coined by Black feminist scholar Moya Bailey, the term misogynoir refers to the form of misogyny experienced based on the intersectional identity of Black women. More specifically, Bailey mentioned that she uses misogynoir “to describe the unique ways in which Black women are pathologized in popular culture”. Bailey’s book Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance is an academic collection of statistical and anecdotal evidence of how technological advances in spreading ideas correlate with the increasing misrepresentation of Black women in digital spaces. However, an argument could be made that even historical innovations created as much damage to the perception of Black women, and laid the groundwork for portrayals we now see spreading at an exponential rate.
Origins of Misogynistic and Misogynoir Propaganda
The template for using mass media to spread misogynistic propaganda starts with Joseph Swetnam, a 17th-century British pamphleteer quoted almost verbatim in Jordan Peterson’s lectures on ‘enforced monogamy’ and Kevin Samuels’ live streams. Swetnam’s most infamous work, ‘The Arraignment of Lewde, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women’, was the first instance of technology (e.g. the printing press) being co-opted to connect men via their shared frustrations regarding sexual and/or marital rejection from women. In Swetnam’s words:
“many [men] live in disdain of Women; the Reason is, for that their Affections are so poisoned with the heinous Evils of unconstant Women…”
The side-by-side comparison of Swetnam’s words with recent male supremacist talking points is eerily similar:
“A Buck may be enclosed in a Park…a [tiger] may be tamed, but a froward Woman will never be tamed…”- Joseph Swetnam
“You cannot be responsible for a dog if it doesn’t obey you…or a woman that doesn’t obey you…” – Andrew Tate
“If there were not so many Knaves, there would not be so many Whores…” – Joseph Swetnam
“Men have become more feminine…the reason that girls act crazy right now is because guys don’t check them anymore.” – Myron Gaines from FreshandFit
“I do now but scare them with false Fire; but my next Charge shall be with Weapons…and tread and trample them under our Feet…” – Joseph Swetnam
“Women’s rejection of me is a declaration of war…It will be a war that will result in their complete and utter annihilation.” – Elliot Rodger
Fig. 1: Joseph Swetnam’s pamphlet, The Arraignment of Lewde, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women (1615)
Old male supremacist literature was a combative response to the rise of early feminist writers like Christine de Pizan and Rachel Speght (the latter published a direct response to Swetnam’s pamphlet). These women also took advantage of the printing press to promulgate their progressive views about gender roles and women’s right to autonomy. Similar to the way trolling occurs on Twitter or Reddit boards, Swetnam’s pamphlet attacked the women who accused him and the patriarchal society of promoting what would be labelled as, in modern terms, toxic masculinity.
Resisting Misogyny: Advantages and Disadvantages by Race
Barring the suffrage movements across America and Europe, the past 50 years gave White feminists particular protections and capital to use mass media to their advantage. More often than women of colour, White women have gained coveted platforms to exercise greater leverage in controlling how they are depicted in media.
Take, for example, the popularity of television series like ‘Sex in the City’ and its reboot ‘And Just Like That’. The series, based on the life of journalist Candace Bushnell, touted 3-4.3 million viewers on average and was praised for candid portrayals of women’s sex lives. The series was so popular that it earned HBO over $400 million USD in a box office spinoff. Shows with predominantly Black women casts haven’t seen as much commercial success. Instead, Black women are often pigeonholed into roles where they are hypersexualised or depicted as sexually depraved. Less than 25% of creatives in news and entertainment are Black, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Anecdotal evidence suggests an even lower percentage are Black women. Only 11% of books in 2018 were written by non-White authors, and 6.7% of authors in 2022 were Black.
There is evidence that the lack of racial and gender diversity in media is linked to greater showcasing of anti-woman rhetoric and unfavorable depictions of Black women. Feminist writers like Laura Bates lambasted the New York Times for publishing the Elliot Rodger manifesto, holding the editorial team’s shortsightedness responsible for propagating content that garnered appeal for white/male supremacist and incel movements. Specifically, the SPLC reported an additional 4,000 men were recruited to one popular online forum following the shooting. The same could and should be considered when discussing the use of media to perpetuate stigma and hateful rhetoric against Black women.
The Strategic Targeting of Black Women by Extremists
Since the start of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Black women have been violently silenced for standing up against this stereotype. The rise in mass media misogynoir is often unquestioned within a society that, for the past 500 years, has rarely punished crimes against Black women. For example, prior to the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, American courts ruled that Black women could not legally be raped because they were considered property. Both enslaved and born-free Black women spoke against these policies, and neither earned enough protection under the law against heckling and harassment for their protests. Such was the case with Marie Stewart, a nineteenth-century abolitionist who wrote anti-misogynoir pamphlets that were as widely distributed as Swetnam’s sexist pieces. Stewart was attacked several times while delivering speeches, including an instance when she was pelted with tomatoes by White male audience members upset by her criticism of slavery and patriarchy.
Today, White male supremacists remain on constant alert based on the perceived degradation of their class, economic, and familial rank. This explains certain groups’ rules for engaging with one another and maintaining the purity of their race. For example, the Proud Boys rebuke masturbation unless members perform it in the presence of a ‘qualified’ woman (e.g. prostitutes are prohibited). In a 2018 broadcast, Vice News summarised conversations in online chat rooms like 4chan insinuating that it is the ‘Stacy’—a high-value, blue-eyed, blonde and White archetype—who they see as the ideal romantic partner. The same Vice report states that “incels think that without a stigma on female sexuality, women will sleep with countless ‘high-status Chads’, leaving the remaining 80% of [them] sexless & resentful.”
Hence, some members of these supremacist groups may lash out by assaulting Black women when their need for sexual dominance isn’t satisfied. As White women refuse them, and more desirable men outcompete them, these men become upset as they are relegated to the bottom of the desirability food chain—Black women. This becomes the basis for their most incendiary attacks.
It’s not uncommon for Black men to also adopt the tenets of incel culture. The pattern of sexual anxiety and chauvinism among incels has always been associated with what is now coded as right-wing or conservative politics. History has shown that some Black men will endorse this worldview as a way to access power and privilege.This could explain why Black male Hollywood executives and social media personalities readily incorporate dog whistles and tropes in their content with little to no consequences for how this normalises white supremacist and violent extremist rhetoric aimed at Black women. Tyler Perry movies make huge profits at the box office depicting ‘angry’ Black women as miserable for settling for ‘Tyrones’ – the Black male equivalent of a ‘Chad’ in incel lexicon. Kevin Samuels’ YouTube channel gained more than 1 million subscribers after calling a Black woman “average at best” and claiming her high standards will result in her dying alone.
Resistance to Mass Media Misogynoir
Thankfully, Black women filmmakers like Michaela Coel are using their platforms to shine a light on these issues. An episode of Coel’s HBO series ‘I May Destroy You’ about negging and stealthing is one example of ways Black women creatives are calling out gender-based violence against Black women. Additionally, groups like Black Girl Gamers are collaborating with social media platforms and gaming companies to increase both the number of Black women coders and remove racist avatars and memes of Black women from video games.
Audiences also have a vital role in holding media companies accountable for their long history of fostering misogynoir and capitalising on it. Supporting Black women creatives financially through platforms like Patreon and through publicity on social media is an easy and essential way to skew algorithms, distribution deals, and political action in their favour.
Seun Shokunbi [pronounced Shewn SHōkoonbee] is a journalist with work published with Al Jazeera English, The Lancet Global Health, and Face2Face Africa. Her blog, Leading Like a Lady, addresses issues like the gender pay gap, Black/African women in media, and the promotion of women of colour into leadership roles. She has been a speaker for TEDx, Columbia Business School, Boston College, and Rutgers University. Seun holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Communications from Fordham University, and a Master’s degree in International Management (magna cum laude) from SOAS, University of London. She completed coursework toward an Ed.D. in Economics and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University.