Not Just a Joke: Understanding & Preventing Gender- & Sexuality-based Bigotry

Young men don't have to be lost to radicalization. There is help.

By Pasha Dashtgard

About once a week, an email will find its way into our inbox from a concerned parent, a blindsided school teacher, or an appalled campus administrator who are equal parts shocked and unprepared to manage an incident of a young man endorsing male supremacist ideology. These incidents range from school boys telling girls in their class “your body, my choice” to secret group chats where students were sharing audio of a sexual assault with each other, to middle schoolers sharing AI-generated nudes of their classmates. The messages we receive usually take the form of an urgent request: “Please tell me what I should do. Please tell me what I should say. Please help me understand how this happened.” All they know is that this is a crisis and they have to do something before this young man is lost to a belief system that is hateful, toxic, yet holds an undeniable appeal.

Like any other grievance-based ideology, male supremacy appeals to young men by stoking their insecurities, anger, and frustration, and then offering simple solutions while creating a clear set of enemies to blame for their misery and for the difficult emotional, financial, and social situations they find themselves in. Young men are engaging with an online ecosystem that is deliberately pushing content and influencers that cast the world in black-and-white terms. One that makes them feel bad about who they are and how they look, and that frames normal life experiences (such as struggling to get a date or feeling nervous talking to people you’re attracted to) as part of a broader conspiracy to undermine men and masculinity. Can’t get a date? That’s feminism’s fault for making women too picky and too independent. Feeling insecure about your looks? Well you should, because your jaw isn’t the right shape to ever be loved by a woman. And what should you do if you’re feeling unlovable or failing to thrive? The most common advice you’ll find in incel spaces is to “LDAR” - lay down and rot. It is shockingly easy to come across this kind of content, because ideas once relegated to the Manosphere – an interconnected network of sites, platforms, apps, and forums that often promote and disseminate male supremacy and other far-right ideologies – are now found across mainstream websites and all of the most popular social media platforms. Unfortunately, social media algorithms have calculated that this content is both profitable and captivating. This is the context within which the Not Just a Joke guide was created.

Parents, teachers, school administrators, mental health professionals—really any trusted adult in the life of a young person—can benefit from the information and skills outlined in this guide. Not Just a Joke: Understanding & Preventing Gender- & Sexuality-Based Bigotry provides information and resources that can help anyone recognize vulnerabilities to radicalization and allow them to intervene with youth safely and effectively. Not Just a Joke explains what male supremacy is, how it intersects with anti-LGBTQ+ movements, how this bigoted ideology employs racist and antisemitic myths to reinforce a male supremacist worldview, and ultimately offers empirically-proven strategies for fostering psychological resilience to manipulative rhetoric and propaganda. And we know our resource actually helps people because we tested it.

Our research lab at PERIL (the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab) asked 1,508 adults who care for and support young people in their homes, schools, and throughout their communities to read the Not Just a Joke guide and answer questions about their understanding of male supremacy and their readiness to intervene with the young people in their lives. We found that our guide significantly improves awareness and knowledge of gender- and sexuality-based bigotry, increases confidence in identifying youth extremism, and boosts willingness to address extremism with young people in their lives.

These are conversations any adult can have with a young person in his or her life, because plausibly, most young people have already been exposed to the kinds of harmful, deeply bigoted narratives about gender and sexuality that are bubbling up from the Manosphere and finding their way into mainstream digital platforms.

One key finding that has emerged from our research on these guides and toolkits is that overconfidence is an underdiscussed barrier that parents, teachers, and mental health practitioners must address. People presume they understand the problem. People think they know what the youth are being exposed to. The truth is that until they find the group chat, until they actually see the videos their son or daughter are sharing, they often have no idea the level of toxicity and the frequency with which young people encounter harmful, misogynistic rhetoric online. Highly educated urban-dwellers are the most susceptible to this kind of overconfidence. But it can be anyone. The color of your shirt collar will not protect your children from exposure to radicalizing content. Instead, open, honest dialogue and frequent conversations coming from a place of curiosity are your best tools in this fight.

Though it may seem daunting, these conversations can also serve as a gateway into a broader discussion around dating, relationships, sex, consent, and (in)equality—topics that most teens and adolescents have many questions about and seek out opinions on. Often, exposure to the Manosphere starts from a place of genuine curiosity – how do I talk to women? How do I dress better? How important are looks when trying to get a girlfriend? But depending on your algorithm, these simple questions are met with responses that can draw straight from the toxic depths of the Manosphere. Exposure to male supremacist ideology is not happening only to men and boys who are explicitly seeking out this content. Instead, it is catered to those who are looking for answers to questions that we all have asked ourselves, our friends, or our family at one time in our lives. Only now, there is a cottage industry of influencers and content producers who meet these queries with radicalized and radicalizing responses.

There’s an adage that young children are “always listening” so parents need to watch what they say and do in their presence. This truth doesn’t fade as they get older, but who they listen to expands from parents and caregivers in the home, to friends, teachers, and now social media influencers. The Not Just a Joke guide is an earnest attempt by PERIL and the Southern Poverty Law Center to address an urgent need that we encounter daily. The scope and depth of the problem might feel overwhelming—how do we help protect our young people from harmful gender- and sexuality-based propaganda that is flooding the internet?—but there are things we can do. There are resources available. There are proven, tested strategies for approaching these kinds of conversations. And we are here to help.

Pasha Dashtgard is the Director of Research for the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL). Dr. Dashtgard leads PERIL’s research and evaluation team, overseeing national testing of all prevention and intervention tools alongside primary research in the form of nationally-representative surveys, focus groups, and ethnography. Pasha’s research interests include masculinities, online radicalization, PTSD, and large-scale mental health policy/service delivery. He has a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the department of Psychological Science at the University of California, Irvine, and was formerly a postdoctoral Fellow at Loyola Marymount University’s Psychology Applied Research Center (PARC).