IRMS Releases White Paper on Dehumanization, Entitlement, Anti-Consent Ideology
In my first full-time job, I worked on a campaign pushing Facebook to enforce their own policies against violence and hateful content by removing pro-rape pages from its website. One such page was titled, “Riding your Girlfriend softly, Cause you dont want to wake her up.”
The CNN reporting about 62 million visits to a website that hosts tens of thousands of euphemistically named “sleep content” videos, in which men rape unconscious women, brought me back to that campaign of more than a decade ago, and the struggle to convince Facebook staff that these pages were not “jokes” that could be left up under satire. It took a second campaign two years later led by Women, Action, and the Media (WAM!) in coalition with about 100 gender and social justice groups to finally get these pages banned.
The investigation into websites where men share their rapes and teach tactics for assaulting women is disturbing. But this type of content isn’t new. Ten years ago, a woman found the details of her own assault on a pickup artist blog that recounted the outcome of lessons in which instructors and students committed rape.
The deep dehumanization of women and entitlement by misogynist men forms the subject of our new white paper, released today. Read the IRMS release below for more details.
IRMS Experts Release White Paper on Dehumanization and Entitlement
Today the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism announces the release of a white paper, “The Foundations of Male Supremacism: Dehumanization, Entitlement, and Conspiracism.” This paper, a transnational, multidisciplinary collaboration among eight authors, identifies the core elements of male supremacism as groundwork for research.
The paper identifies biological essentialism, anti-consent ideology, and justification of violence as three core elements of male supremacism that derive from the supremacist belief system of dehumanization and entitlement. The paper finishes with a discussion of conspiracism as a tool for mobilization against advances for equality and justice.
Unfortunately, the topics discussed in this paper remain all too urgent.
Recently, the white male supremacist Nick Fuentes, who popularized the anti-consent slogan, “Your Body, My Choice,” decried women as “the number one political enemy in America” and advocated for the imprisonment of all girls and women in “breeding gulags” until (cisgender) men determine their worthiness to reenter society. He averages 500,000 viewers per show.
The paper is the first in a series offering new understandings and approaches for researchers, practitioners, journalists, and community members challenging male supremacism in day-to-day life and societal structures. To read this first installment, download here.
