Governing Gynocracy: The Evolution of Anti-Feminist Conspiracy Theories (EXCERPT)
In the wake of the San Diego mosque shooting, we have received requests for our work on anti-feminist conspiracism. The following is an excerpt from the chapter that appears in the book Conspiracy as Genre: Narrative, Power, and Circulation, edited by Cat Tebalbi et al (Bloombury 2025). This excerpt lays out the significance of anti-feminist conspiracism and its relationship to other conspiracy theories.
Authors Alex DiBranco and Megan Kelly are cofounders of the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism.
Introduction
Anti-feminist conspiracism grew with the successes of feminist movement and threats to cisgender men’s entrenched dominance and continues to shape anti-feminist and male supremacist movements and the US right, both online and offline today. The array of contemporary anti-feminist mobilizations, both within the Christian Right and secular ideologies, are influenced by the 1970s Men’s Rights Movement (MRM)’s assertion that feminism’s advances were unfairly leaving men behind. Anti-feminist conspiracism unites male supremacist groups around a core narrative: feminists are secretly wielding control over government, law, education, media, culture, and society to advance women’s interest at the expense of men (the truly oppressed). Anti-feminist conspiracism is based in a deep suspicion and demonization of women, a firm belief in cisgender men’s (sexual) entitlement and their control of women’s bodies and autonomy. Anti-feminist conspiracism should be understood not merely as anti-feminist (as in self-identifying feminists) but also fundamentally anti-women.
Anti-feminism is central to the conspiracy genre. In the anti-feminist imagination, feminists are behind other perceived threats, such as “wokeism” and “Cultural Marxism,” and anti-feminist conspiracism shares many elements with anti-Semitic, racist, and anti-government conspiracies. This concept of a powerful feminist behind-the-scenes elite is reminiscent of long-standing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that name Jewish people as a “global elite” who exert global control (Kosse 2022). Some versions assert feminists are pawns of the “Jewish elite”—mirroring the structure of racist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that communists and Jews must be behind the US Civil Rights Movement, as Blacks were dehumanized as irrational and incompetent (Lyons 2022). This reflects a tension between anti-feminist conspiracism that paints women as intelligent and evil, and that which views them as incompetent and base (sometimes holding this contradiction within the same text or ideology) (Hodapp 2017). This chapter focuses primarily on the “women as evil” trope and beliefs that women control government. Skepticism toward the government, especially after increases in women’s and civil rights, tends to lie at the center of conspiratorial thinking. Anti-feminist conspiracism, like anti-Semitism, has an ambivalent relationship with government: seen at once as a source of threat giving women illegitimate power and as a structure to reclaim from corruption (for some, by any means necessary). Some, like the Proud Boys, aim to build nationalist mobilizations in support of a white male supremacist symbol like president Donald Trump—both through democratic electoral means and through anti-democratic violence such as the January 6 assault on the US Capitol.
We analyze here the genre of anti-feminist conspiracism. First, we argue that anti-feminist conspiracism should be understood as a structuring mechanism of society, a mechanism intertwined with misogyny and a host of other forms of structuring conspiracism. Second, we argue that the individuals and movements that promote anti-feminist conspiracism have an ambivalent relationship with the idea of government and government intervention: just as they disavow government intervention and decry feminism as interfering in people’s lives and rights, they simultaneously call upon government and institutional intervention to instill their own values and policies, often policies that would limit or abolish women’s rights.
Male Supremacism, Anti-gender, and Identifying Anti-feminist Conspiracism
In Male Supremacism in the United States, Carian, DiBranco, and Ebin outline several events that they identify as male supremacist, that is “the belief in cisgender men’s superiority and right to dominate and control others” (Carian, DiBranco, and Ebin, 2022). These events include the 2020 attempted assassination of a New Jersey federal judge by a self-identified “men’s rights lawyer,” the far-right kidnapping plot of Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, then president Trump’s call to the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” and the later involvement of the Proud Boys in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. These events are all also strong examples of anti-feminist conspiracism, a major motivating force in male supremacist ideologies and movements.
While there are some important works that highlight anti-feminism on a global scale, and the ways in which anti-feminism acts as an “ideological glue” between the manosphere and the far right, there is little scholarship that focused on investigating the ways in which historical anti-feminist mobilization and conspiracies underlie contemporary conspiracies.
