The Misogyny Paradox and the Alt-Right

Abstract

This essay offers a philosophical analysis of the misogyny women experience in the alternative right (alt-right) movement. I argue that this misogyny takes on a paradoxical form: the better alt-right women propagandists promote hate, the greater the hostility they experience from their fellow racists and critics; the more submissive women alt-right members become, the harsher the impact of misogyny on them. I develop this argument in four parts. Part I explores the self-conception of racist white women using the concept of social imaginaries. Part II describes three dominant images in racist propaganda—the goddess/victim, wife and mother, and the female activist—which inform the more popular images of the white power Barbie and the tradwife in the alt-right. Part III explores the misogyny paradox and presents how alt-right women could be seen as both misogynists and victims of misogyny. Part IV reflects on the absurdity of the alt-right's dependence on women's economic labor, a feature that could make the movement vulnerable to political intervention.

Prominent white racists today mistreat their mothers, girlfriends, and wives. Richard Spencer, an American white nationalist and conspiracy theorist, was accused by his ex-wife Nina Kouprianova, a pro-Moscow propagandist and fellow conspiracy theorist, of verbal and physical abuse throughout their marriage. They divorced in 2018 (Lenz 2019). The Center on Extremism of the Anti-Defamation League reports that Richard Poplowski, J. T. Ready, Matthew Heimbach. and William Fears II, notorious white supremacists and terrorists, have been charged or implicated in crimes of domestic violence (Center on Extremism 2018). Public notoriety aside, the alternative right (alt-right)—the current generation of organized white racism—exploits their misogyny for recruitment. Extremism researcher Ashley Mattheis points out that recruiters use antifeminist rhetoric to identify potential converts to the alt-right. Their pitch goes something like this: “you were owed something, or your life should have been X, but because of the ridiculous things feminists are doing, you can't access them” (Lewis 2019). Once misogyny becomes a regular topic of conversation, recruiters then introduce their targets to other areas of their racial ideology, for example, how the rights, privileges, and traditions tied to the white race are being disrespected, stolen, or erased by immigrants of color, Democrats, Jews, Muslims, Black Lives Matter supporters, and Antifa (see Marwick and Lewis 2017).

These cases are hardly surprising to us feminists. Racism and misogyny are not independent forces in Western patriarchal cultures; acting in concert, they undergird the dominant social hierarchy where the straight, cisgender, white man is king¹. In the extremist culture of the alt-right, racism and misogyny brew a potent mix. But what may strike us as irrational is that some white women join and vigorously support the alt-right movement in spite of the misogyny they practice. Why would these women champion an ideology that is inherently designed to take their freedoms away? Why would they celebrate a movement whose foundations are rooted in the power to oppress them? Indeed, the critique of ideology, which interrogates how people internalize their oppression and support conditions that undermine, alienate, and exploit them in patriarchal, colonial, capitalist, and racist systems, is broadly articulated in feminist, decolonial, Marxist, existentialist, and critical race traditions (see Marx 1867; Du Bois 1903; Sartre 1943; Fanon 1952; 1961; Beauvoir 2010). But an analysis of women embracing explicitly racist and extremist ideology has been paid scant attention in academic philosophy, with the exception of writings such as Eli Portella Perreras's recent essay on antifeminism and internalized misogyny (Perreras 2020) and texts familiar to social and feminist philosophers, such as Andrea Dworkin's Right-Wing Women and the works of Black feminist scholars Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Patricia Hill Collins on white women's participation in white supremacy (Dworkin 1983; Lorde 1984; Collins 2009; hooks 2015).² Even less examined, with good reason, is the misogyny that racist white women experience in their hate groups and from their own critics. I attend to this overlooked task in this essay, which frames the misogyny experienced by racist white women in philosophical terms as a starting point for reflection. Accounting for the paradoxical dynamics of alt-right misogyny is an important task for feminist philosophy if it is to remain true to its aim of critically examining all forms of ideology that work against women. This essay also has an ameliorative dimension: it seeks to identify markers of emancipatory or liberatory potential from these less explored experiences of gender oppression.

Key to my analysis of alt-right misogyny is the pernicious role that women propagandists play in the movement. Misogynist talk appeals to white men, since it is a shared feature across various forms and intersections of alt-right groups that include men's rights activists, pickup artists, and involuntary celibates (Wilson 2018; see also Love 2020). However, talk of violence or misogynistic behavior against women does not (always) work with women recruits, since it can risk alienating them from the alt-right cause. In response, Lana Lokteff, Ayla Stewart, and Lauren Southern, women propagandists extraordinaire, frame the alt-right as supportive of white women's interests. Lokteff is an American white supremacist and host of the podcast Radio3Fourteen; Stewart is an American religious blogger behind the now defunct online journal Wife with a Purpose; and Southern is a Canadian white nationalist and alt-right YouTube celebrity now based in Australia. They transform the alt-right's antifeminist agenda into attractive options for potential recruits by appealing, insidiously, to the intersectional particularity of whiteness and womanhood in their propaganda. Yet this is hardly the end of the bizarre tale of alt-right misogyny, since women propagandists in particular, and alt-right women in general, are victims of misogyny, too.³ Although Lokteff, Stewart, and Southern are guilty of mongering (and profiting from) hate, they are also being punished for being successful at this effort, both by their fellow racists and by antiracists. For some alt-right women, experiences of misogyny have become too much to bear, leading to either their disengagement or exit from the alt-right movement.

I develop my philosophical analysis of the misogyny experienced by women in the alt-right movement in four parts. Part I introduces the alt-right movement and the presumed role of white women in racist hate groups. Using Louise Richardson-Self's work on social imaginaries, I explain how dominant images in racist propaganda could be used as resources for exploring the self-conception of racist white women. Part II offers a description of three dominant images in the racist social imaginary: the goddess/victim, wife and mother, and the female activist. These images accord white women a revered status in virtue of their gendered subordination to white men and the white cause. I present the white power Barbie and the tradwife as the contemporary iterations of these social images in the alt-right movement. Part III explores the misogyny paradox as experienced by alt-right women. Beginning with a description of gender relations in the racist patriarchy, I show how alt-right women could be seen as both misogynists and victims of misogyny; in other words, as perpetrators and victims of misogynist harms. It then moves to a twofold discussion of misogyny through the lens of contemporary feminist philosophy. The first section engages Kate Manne's writings on the dynamics of misogyny to explain hostility against women propagandists, and the second section discusses Manon Garcia's Beauvoirian argument of the concept of submission to explain the misogyny hurled against conformist women. The paradoxical form that the misogyny against alt-right women takes can be summarized: the better alt-right women propagandists promote hate, the greater hostility they experience from their fellow racists and critics; the more submissive women alt-right members become, the harsher the impact of misogyny on them. Part IV briefly reflects on the absurdity of the alt-right's dependence on women's economic labor, a feature that may make the movement vulnerable to political intervention.

I. Racist White Women

The alt-right movement is a spectrum of contemporary extremist groups espousing a dangerous mix of “racism, nationalism, and far-right populism” (OSCE 2019). It frames white identity as threatened by nonwhite immigration, multiculturalism, and the politics of the global left. Active largely online, members of the alt-right movement are mostly white and male, recruited from Reddit, Twitter, and forums such as 4chan and 8chan's /pol/ discussion boards. Examples of recently formed groups include the Proud Boys, Turning Point USA, and the Traditionalist Worker Party, which have connections to historically established white supremacist organizations in the United States such as the Ku Klux Klan, National Alliance, and Aryan Nations. In contrast to the hostile, estranging image of earlier racist groups, the more tech-savvy alt-right takes a strategic “neighborly” approach, aiming to make racism palatable to an already politely racist audience. Physical, mental, and verbal violence against target groups, along a scale of mild to extreme harms, is an alt-right norm. In 2020 alone, extremist right-wing groups, some with alt-right affiliations, were responsible for over 67% of domestic terror attacks in the US (Beckett 2020).

Racism is its most identifiable feature, but alt-right groups are also deeply misogynistic. A view shared by men in traditional racist groups and the alt-right is their perception that the reproductive freedom of women is a threat to Western civilization. White women are needed for the continuation of the white race, and the reality of mixed-race partnerships, the sexual freedom of women, and the fear that nonwhites are procreating at a far higher rate than whites today are treated by racist extremists as pressing global issues. White racists see themselves as responding to the threat of being “overrun” by what they regard as “impure” races, their culture being “soiled” by the tribalism of “lesser” peoples, and facing the ultimate danger of “white genocide.” The control of white women is thus an underlying concern for all white racist groups, since the autonomy of women diminishes white men's access to their bodies and impedes white procreation.

In this type of hypermasculine extremist discourse, misogyny is hardly concealed. But it would be misleading to assume that racist white women, whether in earlier racist groups like the KKK or the contemporary alt-right, embrace outlandish claims that reduce them to mere mediums of propagation. In the racist hierarchy, white women are inferior to white men by virtue of their gender, but they are superior to everyone else.⁴ This presumption of social superiority entails its own narrative, distinct from (and even contrary to) the crude misogynist vitriol that many racist men engage in. Kathleen Blee, one of the leading scholars on women in organized hate movements in the United States, argues that Klanswomen, and the women in neo-Nazi, Christian identity, and racist skinhead groups were able to reconcile “the male-agendas of the racist movement with understandings of themselves and gendered self-interests” (Blee 1996, 685). True, most of them rationalized their participation in racial politics in terms of their relationship and responsibility to white men and the white race. But they also saw their whiteness as a source and proof of dignity and social entitlement, occasioning self-esteem on account of their presumed higher status over other groups of people. In short, racist white women have a self-conception of their own, irreducible to the childbearing role emphasized in extremist discourse.

How might we describe the racist white woman's self-conception? This task is complex and dependent on many factors. In this article, I focus on describing the dominant social images of white women tendered by past and present racist propaganda, taking them as idealized expressions of the racist white woman. These images serve as key resources for racist white women to articulate who they are, at best, or who they must aspire to be, at least, in the context of their hate groups. My analysis is inspired by Richardson-Self's discussion of “imagined subjects,” which explores how the self-identity of people belonging to particular groups is preformed and creatively developed in relation to particular social imaginaries. Inspired by Michèle Le Doeuff, Moira Gatens, and Marguerite La Caze, Richardson-Self describes social imaginaries as “shared impressions of ‘our world’ as conveyed to us by oft-repeated images (or impressions)”; they function to

convey a meaning-generating narrative (which entails affective investment), and tell us which material practices are appropriate, establishing social norms. They are already-formed systems into which we are thrown at birth. Because they pre-date our own existence, we are immersed in them, and because of this immersion social imaginaries usually convey meaning and shape our actions below the level of conscious awareness. They are also that which establishes and maintains power dynamics institutionally and between social groups. (Richardson-Self 2021, 28)

In racist and extremist social imaginaries, the character of imagined subjects is infused with racist and extremist meanings, norms, and power dynamics. But these meanings, norms, and power dynamics register in different ways, depending on various aspects of one's identity. In the case of white women, their “visible identity,” as Linda Martín Alcoff would put it, lies at the intersection of their race and gender, the visual mark of their imagined subjectivity to the world.

Dominant images in racist propaganda convey the white woman as an imagined subject in racist hate groups. Blee highlights three positive images or ideals of white women in racist propaganda: the goddess/victim, the wife and mother, and female activist (Blee 2002).⁵ Other cross-cultural stereotypes about white women abound, but these images of white women in racist propaganda have a political agenda. They elicit affects of duty and pride in being part of a racist movement. They illuminate the nature of a racist white woman's relationships to those who have power over them (white men) and those they have power or social dominance over (everyone else). Designed to be action-engendering, they work to provoke or inspire targeted women to do something for the white cause. In the next section, I briefly present the goddess/victim, wife and mother, and female activist ideals in the racist social imaginary. I also connect how these images substantiate the racist propaganda of white power Barbies and the tradwives in the alt-right movement.

II. The Shieldmaidens of the Racist Patriarchy

The goddess/victim ideal captures how women are seen as helpless prey and men as glorified actors in the racist social imaginary. It peddles the notion that white women represent the ultimate feminine ideal, and thus a desirable victim to both white men and racial outsiders. White women are therefore in need of protection by the white male hero: “Neo-Nazi and Klan groups issue mountains of cartoons, flyers, lyrics, and articles that portray African American men as rapists and victimizers of young white women, Nordic-looking goddesses as the archetypes of white womanhood” (Blee 2002, 115). In this narrative, white men engage in the deeds of racist heroism, whereas white women, epitomizing beauty and purity, need saving and protection; in other words, “if white women represent innocence and potential racial victimization, then white men represent actual, engaged racial agency” (115).

The wife and mother image represents the naturalist patriarchal logic that there are only two genders: man and woman. Men are the providers and heads of the family, suited to building a respectable career and earning money. They have lives and identities independent of their family. Women are the carers and nurturers, at their prime best when laboring in the domestic sphere and shielded from the worries of the outside world. In the racist patriarchy, women ought to devote all their energies to raising good, white children, considered as the most vulnerable members of society and the future of the white race. Indeed, the image of the domesticated white woman is so compelling in the white social imaginary that it emboldened conservative (and mostly white) women, led by Phyllis Schlafly, to rally against second-wave feminists and defeat the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s (see Dworkin 1983).

Finally, the female activist as the imagined subjectivity of the white woman is the most complex. Different aspects of the white woman's identity as a political actor are inflected and intertwined in racist propaganda; for example, the white woman is presented as an “idealized comrade-wife” (linked to white men's identity), a racial combatant (linked to the white cause), a white sister (linked to white sisterhood), a racist heroine (linked to racist actions), or a combination of these different elements (Blee 2002, 120–22). Clearly, this image of the female activist is a source of friction for two reasons: first, its action-oriented aspects clash with the passive and domestic characters of the goddess/victim and wife and mother ideals, respectively; and second, some versions of the racist female activist suggest that white women are on equal footing with white men. The gendered friction resonant in this ideal, brimming even on the level of social images, is a prelude to the misogyny inflicted on racist white women that I explore later on.

I consider the goddess/victim, wife and mother, and female activist ideals as central to the imagined subjectivity of racist white women. They are central in the sense that the meanings they carry as social images persist in the racist and extremist social imaginary, even when these images are constrained to evolve for various historical and practical reasons. Case in point: as the alt-right shifted its recruitment focus to online forums and social media in response to rapid changes in technology and processes of social communication, the movement also modified the content of their propaganda to appeal to the current generation of potential recruits. Today, propagandists offer two contemporary iterations of the racist white woman as an imagined subject: the white power Barbie and the tradwife. These alt-right versions emphasize features of the goddess/victim, mother and wife, and female activist ideals in varying degrees. Lokteff, Southern, and Stewart not only market these images but also appear to personify them; put differently, their appearance, bodies, words, and personalities are the propaganda. In their videos, podcasts, and Twitter feeds, they are the ideal of alt-right white women fleshed out in real life, the imagined subjects of today's racist social imaginary made literal. Rebecca Lewis describes the process of becoming alt-right social media influencers as political self-branding: “Blending the ‘glamour’ of celebrity with the intimacy of influencer culture, they broadcast gender traditionalism and performed ‘whiteness.’ In this way, influencers display the way they live their politics as an aspirational brand” (Lewis 2018).

The white power Barbie exhibits glamor, the allure of sex, and power of alt-right women in the age of Instagram (Hunter 2019). Its chief representatives are Lokteff and Southern. This image plays up the white power Barbie's desirability to white men and sets an aspirational model for white women. In her alt-right podcast, Lokteff fetishizes the figure of Viking shieldmaiden as a symbol of feminine fragility and activist strength. She thinks that the natural role of white women is to love and serve white men, and in return they receive the men's protection and support. White women, she states, are the “‘life givers’ of the Euro/White future” and that “men's ultimate romantic gesture to white women is the building and defense of Western civilization” (Mattheis 2018). But, argues Lokteff, white women like her are compelled by circumstances to step up politically—in other words, to transform into white power Barbies—in order to defend the white race from liberal politics, the feminist movement, and other evil forces in the alt-right narrative. In her 2017 video interview with Jared Taylor, founder of the racist, pseudoscience think-tank New Century Foundation and the editor of the racist magazine American Renaissance, Lokteff sketches the ideal alt-right white woman as

well-rounded, reads, is interested in fighting back against anti-white politics, keeps a nice home, raises the kids well, teaches them about their tribal ethnic consciousness, has a good marriage. But then she might have time to do a blog post, or a video, or produce something here and there, to fight back against anti-white politics. (Center on Extremism 2018)

Southern, who began her social media career by making antifeminist commentary, rose to fame in 2017 for promoting the Great Replacement, a conspiracy theory that asserts that Western nations are being replaced by non-European peoples. She is adept at catching ordinary viewers off guard and turning their attention to the alt-right. She would usually package her lifestyle videos, watched by millions of young viewers, as skincare routines or makeup tutorials—indeed, using her Barbie-like appearance to lure unsuspecting women recruits—before launching into an anti-Islam tirade or a conspiracy theory about immigrants abusing Swedish women.

The tradwife, which stands for “traditional wife,” is a social ideal defined by the white woman's submission to the husband, the task of bearing and raising children, and her devotion to the family, or “tradlife.” Utah-based Stewart is a prominent representative of this brand, gaining fame for instigating the white baby challenge online, which called on white women to match or beat the number of her children (she has six) in 2017. Tradwives lure their viewers on YouTube and Instagram by projecting the picture of the perfect wife and mother: they don retro swing skirts and floral aprons, cook seasonal dishes with homegrown and organic produce, and offer parenting advice while criticizing the feminist movement and defending conservative, antiwomen policies. They hold feminism responsible for belittling and vilifying the decision to be a homemaker and a mother, corrupting their natural appeal to women. For tradwives, the pressure for women to be part of the workforce, at the expense of and on top of their primary domestic responsibilities, is a misguided turn. As pushback, they frame their choice to be stay-at-home spouses and mothers as a liberatory move, an assertion of their autonomy in the face of stigma and social pressure. In Sisters in Hate, Seyward Darby explains that tradwives, who are mostly white, “embrace a dream of comfort, contentment, and affluence specific to lived white experiences. . . . Tradwives and white nationalists share core objectives (more babies), myths (America's moral decline), and iconography (happy heterosexual families)” (Darby 2020, 119). Tradwives link feminism to the deterioration of Western civilization, the core of which is the white nuclear family—making them, and people who venerate the vision of 1950s American family life with misplaced nostalgia, natural allies of the alt-right.

Unlike pre-alt-right racist propagandists, today's white power Barbies and tradwives monetize their online racism. Lokteff is a successful businesswoman: she co-owns and manages the far-right multimedia company Red Ice with her husband, Henrik Palmgren. In an interview, Southern admitted to financially supporting her white nationalist ex-partner, George Hutcheson (Lombroso 2020). There's money, fame, and power involved in the global alt-right industry, and therein lies the misogynist rub. In the next section, I use contemporary feminist philosophy to examine the paradoxical dynamics of alt-right misogyny. I argue that success in the profession of women alt-right propagandists requires the acquisition and display of what Manne calls “masculine-coded goods,” turning them into regular targets of misogyny. But more disquieting is that even when alt-right women play the role of good racist girls—that is, even when they fully acquiesce to living by the alt-right code—the more conscious they are of and affected by the violence and abuse from alt-right men. In short, the alt-right woman's unique situation, borrowing from Simone de Beauvoir, is a life inevitably shaped by misogyny.

III. The Misogyny Paradox

The lives of alt-right women propagandists, as the examples I raise in this part of the article will show, are toxic. They receive copious amounts of hate mail. They are regularly threatened with rape and violence by alt-right members, racist sympathizers, and their critics. Their families are also targets of abuse. Women propagandists recognize this everyday cruelty as connected to their gender and a regrettable part of their alt-right activism. Lokteff confessed that her notoriety in public life was the consequence of having “an overactive ‘guy brain,’ the assertive and argumentative part of herself,” and Stewart saw herself as a victim of feminists and liberals, “the good white mother castigated as a hate-monger simply for trying to protect her children from harm” (Darby 2020, 179, 104). These statements reflect the friction existing between the dominant images of white women in the racist social imaginary, namely, the passivity and domesticity encoded in the goddess/victim and wife and mother ideals clashing with the political prowess and independence of the female activist ideal. This conceptual tension—one that recalibrates racist white women's roles and priorities to the white cause and agitates relations between white men and white women in the alt-right—translates to hostility and punishment against white power Barbies and tradwives in real life, a form of misogyny exclusive to alt-right women propagandists.

For any person who finds the alt-right cause abhorrent, reflecting on the abuse, pain, and humiliation of women like Lokteff, Southern, and Stewart is a challenge. It would be overly charitable to paint them as exploited or oppressed; their suffering seems merited and undeserving of our empathy. After all, they participate in the alt-right movement deliberately, despite having access to epistemic views that challenge them and the resources to leave the hate group. They purposely endorse and sugarcoat the evils of racist extremism. They directly profit from their hate-mongering, which, in the digital age, has become a lucrative business. Most important, they expose people to great harm and endanger vulnerable communities. They are, in short, repulsive. Yet they remain victims of a type of misogyny unique to their status and experience as alt-right women, one also worthy of feminist critique. How, then, do we start evaluating the issue of misogyny against racist white women with intersectional nuance? What liberatory potential exists in examining this uncanny form of gendered oppression?

In contrast to the idealized images of white women and their alt-right evolution into specific imagined subjects, I now turn to the actual experience of white women in racist groups to interrogate their lived reality of misogyny. In this part of the article, I explore the paradoxical dynamics of alt-right misogyny using feminist philosophy. My discussion begins with an exploration of the character of gender relations in the racist patriarchy and the alt-right. I then present Manne's substantive account of misogyny and apply the framework of the “uneven, gendered economy of giving and taking of moral-cum-social goods and services” (Manne 2018, 107) to acts of misogyny against alt-right women propagandists. I end this section by engaging Garcia's Beauvoirian feminist analysis of the concept of submission, which I use to interrogate the misogyny against conformist women in the alt-right. What will emerge from this philosophical analysis is that the alt-right woman's situation is deeply conditioned by misogyny, regardless of her failure or success in conforming to the appropriate imagined subjectivity of the racist patriarchy. I take the oppressive situation of white women in racist hate groups as a vulnerability, the kind that is open to the redemptive possibilities I gesture to in the conclusion.

The alt-right movement, like its predecessors, sees itself as defending a monolithic Western culture from perceived threats. Tradition is important to racist extremists, which may explain why they take pride in their display and performance of traditional gender roles, often to the point of caricature. In the past, Klansmen and Klanswomen would document their racial marriage by wearing gender-coded robes in a formal Klan ceremony; R. G. Comer, Imperial Commander of the Women of the KKK in the 1920s, published racist pamphlets featuring her photograph in feminine Klan regalia (Comer 1924). Similarly, today's alt-right men dress up as Nazi guards or confederate soldiers in their group rallies, and alt-right women brand themselves as Valkyries and shieldmaidens, the maternal defenders of Western values. It is against this background of gendered accountability, which exists not only on the level of social images but also takes on a public and political form, that we see the curious and ambivalent position of white women in racist hate groups. As white, they are considered full-fledged members of the alt-right in-group. They are indispensable to the overall success of the racist patriarchy. But as women, they are ranked as subpar and are expected to submit to white men. Their role in the hate movement could be aptly described in terms of what Marilyn Frye explains as women's service work:

Women's service work always includes personal service (the work of maids, butlers, cooks, personal secretaries), sexual service (including provision for his genital sexual needs and bearing his children, but also including “being nice,” “being attractive for him,” etc.) and ego service (encouragement, support, praise attention). (Frye 1983, 9)

Put differently, white women are valued in relation to their ability to cater to the needs, interests, and feelings of white men. They are also valued for their service to the white cause, that is, in terms of their capacity to give birth and nurture white children, a form of labor that in the racist patriarchy takes place chiefly in the domestic sphere. Their racial activism is needed if, and only if, immediate danger to the white civilization exists. These service expectations match up to the imagined subjectivity of white women that we find in past and present racist propaganda. When this asymmetrical picture of gender is translated into real life, it means that all other human freedoms and possibilities—to have an active political life, to pursue higher education, to have a career, and the like—are superfluous and nonessential to the idea of a good life for racist white women. Women in the alt-right are thus being judged for their capacity to meet their main role as service workers to white men and the white cause. Their racial activism is a secondary feature of their identity, undertaken out of necessity, and embraced by the idealized white community only if these women are simultaneously performing their gendered service work adequately. Their neglect or incapacity, or even the appearance of failing to fulfill their subordinate role of serving white men, can provoke hostility against them.

Alt-right women propagandists, compared to ordinary racist women, are walking targets of misogyny given their political role in the movement and their public visibility. But more interestingly, the misogyny they experience takes on a paradoxical form: the more successful these propagandists are in promoting hate for the alt-right, the greater the intra-group punishment they get in return. Manne's account of misogyny is useful in illustrating the paradoxical nature of the misogynist backlash against them.

Manne and Bad Racist Women

Manne's Down Girl defines misogyny as the hostility and punishment that women experience on account of failing to comply with the standards, norms, and behaviors expected from “good” women in Western patriarchal societies (Manne 2018, 13, 19, 33–34). This definition shifts the perception of misogyny from being the individual, psychologistic hatred of all women qua women (the naïve conception) to the recognition of misogyny as a property of the social environment, pulsing through the structural mechanisms, agents, and social practices that discipline and exact compliance from women who violate patriarchal norms and relations (the ameliorative conception). If we follow Manne's definition, then alt-right women propagandists, without question, are misogynists. Their job as white power Barbies and tradwives entails ramping up antifeminist rhetoric, entrenching sexist norms, and reviving the worst of them in the service of promoting the racist patriarchy. But they are also victims of misogyny, maligned on account of being “bad women” by their fellow racists for failing to exemplify the patriarchal standards they promote.

Some examples of this sort of misogyny stand out. In a 2015 livestream on the alt-right blog Millennial Woes, Lokteff was harassed for acting like “the same old tainted, fucked-up strong womyn” (displaying non-submission) according to one commenter, and for criticizing the “Men Going Their Own Way” (MGTOW) subculture for refusing to have relations with women (imposing duty on white men), according to another. The event prompted Palmgren, her husband, to interfere and chastise far-right listeners on air for attacks against Lokteff (Darby 2020, 178). Responses to Lokteff's public appearances are regularly laced with admiration and insult; take, for instance, the reaction to her speech titled “How the Left is Betraying Women” at the 2017 Identitarian Ideas conference in Stockholm, Sweden:

Some viewers described Lana as an “Aryan Goddess” and compared her to Joan of Arc. Several encouraged her to go to politics. One even joked, “I'm with her.”

There were also sexist replies. Some were objectification masked with adulation: Men said they wanted to sleep with Lana or touch her flowing blond hair. Other comments were cruelly blunt. “If women are busy giving speeches and making YouTube broadcasts,” one read, “they are not going to have time to give birth.” On the Daily Stormer, a commenter who took it upon himself to rate Lana as “maybe a 7” said he didn't have any interest in “spending 15 minutes listening to a female who isn't singing and/or playing a musical instrument.” (177–78)

Common in the backlash Lokteff received from alt-right critics circled around prioritizing her alt-right career and failing to produce white children in her mid-thirties. Since then, she has bowed down to the pressure and had two kids.

In a scene in the documentary White Noise (2020), where Southern was outlining her lucrative social media projects, her ex-partner Hutcheson interjected and reminded her that she needed to serve her country and bear children; ironically, this is the same person whose meal she paid for as a business expense during the interview (Lombroso 2020). Being called out for being childless is not new to Southern, who was often criticized for failing to embody the traditional family values she champions in her alt-right videos. In 2017, she uploaded a vlog entitled “Why I'm Not Married” to explain to her viewers why she remained single and childless at twenty-two. Southern's increasing fame made her a frequent target of stalking, verbal abuse, and unwanted sexual advances; one of her harassers includes the Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes. At the height of her popularity, Southern withdrew from the spotlight. Although remaining active as a media commentator for the conservative media channel Sky News in Australia, Southern has since dissociated herself from well-known members of the movement and expressed mild, if ambivalent remorse for her actions. Asked for her advice for women entering the alt-right, she hesitated and said: “Don't” (Lombroso 2020).

We can make sense of the hostility hurled against women propagandists through Manne's substantive account of misogyny. Manne points out that what remains operational in Western patriarchal societies is a gender-based economy and exchange of moral-cum-social goods. Reminiscent of Frye's depiction of women as providers of personal, sexual, and ego services to men, Manne argues that women remain society's givers of feminine-coded goods and services, which include “attention, affection, admiration, sympathy, sex, and children (that is, social, domestic, reproductive, and emotional labor); also mixed goods, such as safe haven, nurture, security, soothing, and comfort” (Manne 2018, 130). Women are shamed, diminished, or penalized either for their inability or failure to fulfill this giving role. They also experience misogyny for their perceived or successful attempts at possessing goods that are not gender-coded as theirs; expressed differently, women are viewed with suspicion and often chastised when they start acting like “takers” of masculine-coded goods instead of being good-willed givers. The goods, perks, and privileges that women must refrain from enjoying or taking away from men include “power, prestige, public recognition, rank, reputation, honor, ‘face,’ respect, money and other forms of wealth, hierarchical status, upward mobility, and the status conferred by having a high-ranking woman's loyalty, love, devotion, etc.” (130). Women (and men) are thus judged in relation to their capacity to adhere to and play the social roles expected from them on account of their gender. The failure of women to stick with the patriarchal script—that is, their inability to give feminine-coded goods, and their appropriation of masculine-coded goods—results in punishment. That women like Lokteff, Southern, and Stewart can obtain and project power, influence, and social prestige in their roles as white power Barbies and tradwives reveals the source of tension. In the alt-right, the success that women propagandists enjoy is tolerated because of its instrumental value, and if they (appear to) overreach, they get punished. Their punishment, naturally, is coded in terms of their failure to fulfil their primary obligation as racist white women: to serve white men and the white cause.

This misogynist dynamic is not unique to alt-right women propagandists; women in other, earlier racist groups and extremist movements who attempted to stake their claim on masculine-coded goods, perks, and privileges have also been punished for the same reason. Women are often perceived as incidental members in the KKK, Christian identity, and neo-Nazi organizations, needed mostly for recruiting their husbands, sons, and extended family and friends into the racist fold. This perception belies the fact that women are indispensable to the everyday operations of organized racist organizations (Blee 1996; Newman 1999; Blee 2002; Gordon 2017). Though most women in these extremist groups performed auxiliary roles, some of them rose to key leadership positions and exerted political influence. As a result, these women experienced reprisal from men:

Misogyny forced Elizabeth Tyler out of the Klan that she'd built. Tyler and Edward Young Clarke, her business partner, were both married to other people but were having an affair. Clarke's former secretary—a man—suggested that this gave Tyler undue power. “Her experience in catering to [men's] appetites and vices had given her insight into their frailties,” the secretary wrote. Klan leaders didn't like a woman wielding so much influence anyway, and they forced Tyler's resignation over charges of embezzling funds. She died in 1924. Later, when Gertrud Scholtz-Klink proposed titles that women could hold in the Nazi Party, male superiors objected because the honorifics were too similar to men's. “They perceived any autonomy on the part of the women as a threat,” historian Geraldine Horan writes. (Darby 2020, 180; see Blee 1991, 22; Horan 2003, 135)

I suspect that compared to Klanswomen and Nazi women, the means by which alt-right women deliver their propaganda puts them at greater risk of misogynist retaliation. Their online propaganda, which re-entrenches and amplifies the harms of the gendered economy, is successful only if their message is delivered and heard, that is, if it results in more internet traffic, increased alt-right membership, and higher income. But the conditions through which the reception of their propaganda is guaranteed depends on claiming, possessing, and flaunting masculine-coded goods in the public sphere, where money, global recognition, and success are prized. In short, Lokteff, Southern, and Stewart are in a double bind: on the one hand, they promote traditional patriarchal values and record themselves as giving, submissive, and domesticated, qualities that personify the ideal alt-right woman in their propaganda; on the other, they create racist paraphernalia designed to receive strong and consistent uptake in political life, a realm that is supposed to be closed off to women from the view of the racist patriarchy. Consequently, the better these white power Barbies and tradwives perform and earn as propagandists and professional recruiters in the public sphere, the more justified the charge of hypocrisy and the more frequent and relentless their experience of misogyny. Put differently, they pay for their success by being victimized by their own culture, in whose misogyny they are more than complicit.

Garcia and Good Racist Girls

The asymmetrical exchange of gendered goods and services in Western patriarchal societies suggests that bad women are ultimately set up against good women: the former are spurned and punished for failing to give feminine-coded goods and taking masculine perks and privileges for themselves, whereas the latter are celebrated and deemed worthy of admiration for being giving, nonthreatening women. It would be reasonable to assume that this bad girl/good girl dynamic would be enforced to a greater extent in the culture of racist extremist groups. But is it the case, as Manne puts it, that women experience misogyny for being rebellious, bad, and “nasty” women? Examining the negative experiences documented by alt-right women who have recently left their hate groups suggests that this is not the case. It turns out that when women conform to patriarchal ideals, that is, when they willingly subordinate themselves to men, perform their designated roles with care and sincerity, and refrain from taking masculine-coded goods, some of them still experience hurt and punishment worthy of being described as misogynistic. Worse, the more submissive they are, the more troubled their response to the intra-group misogyny they experience, a reaction that can be explained in part by the fact that these abuses were unprovoked and unexpected. The hostility experienced by some submissive racist white women in the hate movement, as I will argue in this section, further illustrates the dynamics of the misogyny paradox.

Let us look at two cases. Corinna Olsen, previously active in the National Socialist Movement (NSM) in Portland, Oregon, recalls feeling warmly welcomed in her first racist picnic. Her profile appealed to the neo-Nazi group for having directly contributed to their cause: when she expressed interest in joining the organization, she was already a mother of two white daughters. But even when she played the role of a perfect wife and mother, the racial patriarchy reared its horns toward more vulnerable kin: her daughters, who were sexualized by alt-right men who saw them as fair game. Harold Covington, founder of the Northwest Front, a white separatist organization that employed Olsen as a secretary, once insisted that “she bring her daughters to the NWF's Washington office, so that he could put eyes on two Aryan girls. The thought of an aging man sizing up her daughters made her sick to her stomach” (Darby 2020, 63). Covington also insisted that she produce more white children for the movement. Fear for her children's future partly caused Olsen's disillusionment and exit from the alt-right. Here, we find the case of a racist white man in a leadership role demanding more feminine-coded goods in two ways: first, by candidly expressing his entitlement and preying on young white women, and second, by insisting on increased service from an alt-right woman who has already professionally subordinated herself to him and the white cause.

Samantha (surname withheld), ex-member of the hate group Identity Evropa, narrates that her racist programming waned after she experienced misogynist abuse in the organization. When she first entered the group, she confessed to trying to approximate the ideal of the racist white woman: she “bought dresses with full skirts and nipped-in waists, clothes with which she wanted to project an ‘all-American, delicate sexuality’” (Reeve 2019). But playing the part of the goddess/victim did not save her from the cruelty of racist men. While deeply embroiled in alt-right culture, Samantha encountered fellow group members throwing around the “white sharia joke,” which goes something like this: “since white women are ruining Western civilization through promiscuity and voting for liberals . . . the only way to save it is to impose Sharia law on women and, in the supremacists’ twisted view of Sharia, treat them like property” (see Reeve 2019). This sickening idea, along with more experiences of intra-group sexual harassment against her and other women, led to Samantha's resignation from Identity Evropa. In this case, we find a racist white woman who has acquiesced to a submissive persona and presented herself as a giver of feminine-coded goods. Eventually she was humiliated for being a good white woman, both directly (individual cases of harassment) and indirectly (disrespect and objectification of white women as a social group). How might we make sense of the misogyny that takes place in these examples?

Garcia's We Are Not Born Submissive, recently translated from French, helps us interrogate this tricky problem of misogyny against conformist alt-right women (Garcia 2021b). The book subverts our approach to gender oppression by engaging the topic of women's submission. Heeding Beauvoir's observations about women's seeming complicity in their own oppression, Garcia explains that submission to the patriarchy can be framed as rational and pleasurable to women. To submit here means to acquiesce, to neither resist nor fight the patriarchal norms, standards, and interests that are antagonistic or detrimental to one's own interests in virtue of one's subordinated position. But this submission is not passive or disengaged; when women consent to the insidious demands and designs of the modern patriarchy—say, when they find themselves desiring and adopting socially endorsed standards of beauty and body size, even at the expense of their physical health or the risk of being objectified by men—they exhibit agency and engage in a way of life that promotes their oppression. But painting women as morally blameworthy for their submission, and framing their compliance as a free and active choice, fail to capture the character of the oppressive gender dynamics at work. Garcia maintains that women's habits of submission exhibit the dearth of good choices and opportunities for the self-flourishing of women in contemporary patriarchal Western societies. As Clare Chambers rightly points out:

We can only act within the options that are available to, and cast as appropriate for, us. And we want to act in ways that situate us happily within a social context, as deserving of social approval. Moreover, it is rational for us to make choices that are compatible with the options open to us and the expectations placed on us, for such choices enable us to succeed within our context. So highlighting the constraints in which we all choose does not entail that we are poor choosers. (Chambers 2013)

When mothers tell their daughters to tolerate their husband's infidelity or to give up their ambitions for their children, they endorse views that are detrimental to their daughters’ personal interests. But they may also sincerely believe that these are the best choices their daughters have, since they deter other harms and cruelties tendered by a sexist society that pities the fate of single or childless women. From this perspective, the social existence of women in modern patriarchal societies is conditioned by limited and substandard options for pursuing happiness or self-fulfillment. Their choices today remain determined by the superiority of men's interests and constrained by their subordinated position. As Garcia puts it: “women do not actively choose submission, but they consent to the submission that is prescribed to them by social norms, even though this submission can seriously harm them” (Garcia 2021a).

Interestingly, Garcia also points out that submission to the patriarchy isn't just reasonable; it can also be a source of pleasure and power. As Beauvoir puts it, a woman can derive “satisfaction from her role as the Other” and women can act as “willing accomplices to their masters because they stand to profit from the benefits” (Beauvoir 2010, 10). But where might this pleasure from submission come from? Not from women's essential nature, of course. Garcia interprets Beauvoir's The Second Sex as arguing that the patriarchy is responsible for imposing a social meaning on women's bodies, one fundamentally based on (sexual) objectification. Defined in various ways as an object of male desire, love, use, and ownership, the social body of a woman exists prior to her actual existence, representing and inscribing the norms and practices that define what a woman is in the world. Simply put, the journey from girlhood to womanhood is a narrative of women relating to their bodies as objects, a process that represents “the transformation of the oppressed into an other that is irreducibly different from the self” (Garcia 2021b, 85). Women are thus alienated from themselves because they are socially conditioned to view themselves as sexual objects, a mere reflection of the male gaze, instead of knowing and understanding themselves fundamentally as free and equal subjects (as men do). Women thus come to desire to be desired and adopt patriarchal norms and practices before they even get the chance to experience their own bodies as fully their own; as Beauvoir famously puts it, “One is not born a woman, but rather becomes [a] woman” (Beauvoir 2010, 293). Worse, living and moving in a patriarchal society constantly reinforces this alienated existence for women, rewarding them when they keep relating to their bodies as objects and punishing them when they refuse. The inescapability and power of the patriarchal gaze explain how submission can remain a source of pleasure for women. Garcia's analysis helps make sense of the guilt that feminists and socially progressive women feel for enjoying the pleasure they derive from submitting, for example, trying, enjoying, and vying for male attention. It also rationalizes how submission to the patriarchy could serve as a source of power over men and others. For example, the more beautiful a woman is, the more valuable a sexual object she is, and thus the more social advantages she has in Western patriarchal societies. But pandering to the male gaze, as feminists like Beauvoir, Garcia, and others have argued at length, comes at a big cost.

Given their ties to white men, alt-right women could be easily construed as racist white women who derive the most pleasure and self-fulfillment from contemporary patriarchal arrangements, a claim consistent with their socially superior self-conception outlined earlier. Submission is rational and pleasurable for them: although still oppressed, their association with the most privileged social class ensures that they are better off than others. But the consciousness of alt-right women is not only conditioned by their oppressive relations with racist white men; it is also impacted by the profound historical and social shifts in modern society since Beauvoir's time. The conceptual and practical repercussions of the modern feminist movement, in particular, are part of their shared vocabulary. Indeed, white power Barbies and tradwives voice their dissatisfaction with feminism as a core part of their rhetoric, but some also weaponize it if it suits them; tradwife Danielle [surname withheld], for instance, paints her decision to be led by her husband as an extension of women's liberation: “The modern traditional housewife is the ultimate example of female autonomy. She's not being forced to stay home with the kids; but at the same time she's also not forced to work outside the home. She makes the choice” (Judd 2020).⁶ What this suggests is that the thinking of alt-right women is influenced by concepts and ideas that have emerged as a product of the feminist enterprise of consciousness-raising, whether they reject, embrace, or insidiously appropriate them in their propaganda. These emancipatory ideas influence their perception and understanding of personal and political issues, so culturally ingrained are they in public discourse today. Concepts in the service of social justice, such as sexual harassment, marital rape, service work, and intersectionality, terms developed by scholars and feminist activists like Catharine MacKinnon, Marilyn Frye, and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, have played a key role in illuminating and vivifying previously unnamed and unrecognized oppressions and harms against vulnerable social groups. These concepts were designed to expose and counter the effects of social alienation and oppression through the restructuring and revision of legal and social norms. Alt-right members now have to contend with the power and application of these liberatory concepts and ideas, if they are to be successful in upholding their bigotry and keeping systemic racism intact—which is exactly the phenomenon unfolding in recent conservative attacks against critical race theory in both the United States and Australia. But this also means that these consciousness-raising resources exist for racist white women to use when they are accounting for and responding to their personal experiences in their hate groups.

Feminist awareness, I argue, may help explain why intra-group misogyny feels like a betrayal to victimized women in the alt-right. Racist women today expect to be treated like subjects, regarded with dignity as racist men's complement, and recognized as human beings with freedom and a full set of rights in the modern world; their understanding and self-consciousness as modern (racist white) women have been inevitably altered in comparison to that of white racist suffragists fighting for the right to vote or gain employment in the nineteenth century. The cases we examined showed alt-right women like Corinna Olsen and Samantha feeling baffled and disappointed to receive disrespect, abuse, and hostility instead of getting social approval for their submission. But this response only makes sense if they have a full grasp of themselves as nonalienated subjects, and not patriarchy's sexual objects, mysterious playthings, and givers of feminine-coded goods and services. In the Beauvoirian analysis of the patriarchy, men do not owe women their recognition as equal subjects; at their core, as Beauvoir puts it, women are simply “the Sex.” This system of oppressive gender dynamics is fundamentally at work in racist extremist groups, which represent the worst norms and practices of Western patriarchy. If a racist white woman's daughters are sexualized by white men in power, this should not be seen as surprising or unexpected: this is what racist white men do to beings whom the patriarchy objectifies. If alt-right men banter about enforcing complete submission on white women, this counts as ordinary, everyday misogyny in a hypermasculine movement. But the reason that alt-right women are offended and hurt, to the point of leaving the movement, is that they saw themselves as acting subjects: as persons who chose—who made an existential commitment—to play their designated subordinate role as women.

Of course, this is not to generalize that racist white women in the past perceived and related to themselves only as objects, or to reduce the nature of the harms and cruelties they have experienced in their hate groups. Rather, my point is that it makes sense for submissive women to react passively in the face of these abuses, since these actions would have been taken as a natural part of the macho culture of racism, where all women are punching bags. Passivity about misogyny before the alt-right is consistent with Blee's observations that women in the KKK and neo-Nazi groups were less likely to self-aggrandize about their hate group identity compared to men, and that racist women were less inclined to convert family members to the hate movement (Blee 2002, 46–47). Indeed, the developed social awareness of women about the evils of misogyny may explain the actions of far-right vlogger Tamara McCarthy, who “publicly decried male trolls who were harassing vocal women in the movement”; on her Twitter account, she wrote: “Men in the alt-right are going to have to decide whether they will continue to passively/actively endorse this behavior, or speak out against it. If you want more women speaking publicly about ethno-nationalism, I suggest you choose the latter” (Darby 2020, 180). It is unlikely that submissive women prior to the rise of the feminist movement could hold men accountable with such clarity and bravado in a public space, much less articulate their experiences of objectification and humiliation as forms of social injustice. In short, misogyny strikes obedient, submissive, and good racist girls, and the paradoxical nature that this experience takes on, that is, male cruelty and objectification in return for female submission, impacts racist white women more now than it used to, thanks to the conceptual and practical activism of feminists and social justice warriors.

IV. Women's Labor

The alt-right movement is predicated on the social dynamics of hierarchy and subordination. Nonwhites and women are accorded less power, dignity, and value than white men; acknowledging them as equals, as champions of democratic social equality and feminism, is antithetical to the alt-right's racial politics. Since its hierarchical nature will not change, the wounds of misogyny will eventually fester—and fester they have. Experiences of oppression have turned the disavowal of the alt-right into a living possibility for white women, especially those victimized and betrayed by their fellow hate group members. Even in cases where they do not completely break their ties and their association with the alt-right, abused women dissociate from political work and from racist activities in their personal life. Their disengagement can have a negative impact on the movement, especially when the participation of certain women members is pivotal to its daily operations and its capacity to recruit more members, as in the case of Olsen and Southern.

In the literature on white supremacism, women become disillusioned and leave their hate groups for various reasons: poor intra-group relations and experiences of betrayal, violence, and the gender and sexual hierarchies at play in the movement (Mehr et al. 2020). But my hunch is that there is a feature unique to the alt-right that makes it susceptible to political intervention, which until now has remained unexplored in contemporary extremism research. It has something to do with money: the alt-right is strongly reliant on the visible and invisible economic labor of women. The absurd situations that women in the alt-right find themselves in, in my view, hold liberatory and emancipatory potential that is worth examining at length in future work. Compared to previous iterations of white supremacist groups, where housewives worked for free or participated in racist activism as a side job, some alt-right women today work full-time to generate funding for their hate groups. Women propagandists often depend entirely on their wages from hate activity: Lokteff's company Red Ice generates profit from exclusive, paywalled content and participation from hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and Southern, who fancies herself an investigative journalist, produces her own content and earns a steady income from her gigs on social media. In comparison to these infamous influencers of hate, women involved in less lucrative alt-right ventures find themselves in an awkward position. A growing pattern in alt-right groups is that women earn the money to keep their online presence going while men generate and distribute harmful propaganda. As a reformed Identity Evropa member candidly quipped: “Like 70 percent of the time, the women earn the money and the men do podcasts. And they do podcasts about how women shouldn't have jobs” (Reeve 2019). In short, the conditions of possibility for the alt-right's rapid rise, and its ability to recruit people into its ranks, is now strikingly becoming dependent on the labor and freedom of white women that the alt-right culture seeks to eliminate. Women like Lokteff, Southern, and Stewart, who are now enjoying the lucrative fruits of their media careers, are not even supposed to exist in the future patriarchal alt-right “utopia” they are pandering for, much like the fate of the character Serena Joy in The Handmaid's Tale (Atwood 1985). Women members of the alt-right, fortunately, are picking up on this absurdity and choosing to leave (Reeve 2019).

Of course, the idea that women can take part in preventing and countering a life of hate, violence, and extremism is not new. Since many hate groups globally are fueled by a culture of toxic masculinity, women's empowerment has been widely considered as one way of preventing religious radicalization and countering terrorist activities (OSCE 2019). This article on alt-right misogyny reinforces the idea that a gendered approach is both significant and central to the process of dismantling contemporary racist ideology and weakening their political efforts. When it comes to targeting extremism and hate, the awareness and understanding of the character of racist white women's dissent, as well as the changing conditions of gender-based oppression, can serve as useful tools.