Ask an expert: Brad Congdon on violence against women and the importance of representation

Last week, the killer behind the wheel during the April 2018 vehicular attack in Toronto was convicted. He claimed he was on a mission for the incel movement, an online subculture of so-called involuntarily celibate men who direct misogynistic rage at women.

This week, for International Women’s Day, we take time to honour and recognize the progress that has been made to reduce gendered limitations. We can also use this day to acknowledge where dangers still exist and how societal structures continue to perpetuate and encourage harmful narratives about women.

Brad Congdon, an instructor with the Department of English whose research focuses on forms of masculinity, answers questions about misogynistic subcultures, the pervasiveness of violence against women and how we can continue to support positive gender identity.
   
Have groups like incel always existed or are they a product of online culture?

There’s nothing new about misogyny, or men meeting for the purpose of resenting women. It’s only because of online culture that we can speak of incels as a subculture, with their own terminology (e.g., Chads and Stacys; Supreme Gentlemen; gymceling; steroidmaxxing), routines, and spaces. It’s only because men from different localities, regions, and countries can easily and anonymously meet, communicate, and socialize in these online spaces that incels can collaboratively articulate and disseminate an extremist ideology. There was certainly male resentment in a pre-internet era—lots of it—but the fact that men can now go online and receive an informal “education” in, and ongoing encouragement for, a type of juvenile, insecure misogyny is relatively new.

There’s obviously a long history of men-only groups, but the latter part of the 20th century is when we started seeing “men’s rights” and “men’s liberation” groups. Most of these groups are post- or anti-feminist, arguing that women’s social and economic advances have negatively impacted men. Rather than focusing on, say, economic changes that might have resulted in men’s changing position, they accept the current political and economic system for what it is and turn their attention to either changing masculinity or blaming women generally, and feminists in particular.

The kind of stochastic terrorism that has been occurring against women is possible because the internet is such a powerful tool for communication and organization.

Women often seem to be the target of male violence. What does research tell you about why this happens?

I’m reminded of this quotation from Nicole Brossard, writing about, and not long after, the 1989 Polytechnique Massacre in Montreal. Brossard wrote of the killer, “All things considered, M.L. was no young man. He was as old as all the sexist, misogynist proverbs, as old as all the Church fathers who ever doubted women had a soul. He was as old as all the legislators who ever forbade women the university, the right to vote, access to the public sphere. M.L. was as old as Man and his contempt for women.”

Which is to say that, historically, violence against women is everywhere. It often takes the form of systemic or symbolic violence. Historically, systemic violence has involved laws that disadvantage women, that stop them from voting or owning businesses, holding office or opening bank accounts. It involves men controlling their bodies. It involves the ways that laws are shaped to make it difficult to prosecute sexual crimes against women. And the list goes on. Symbolic violence includes, among other things, the abundance of images in our culture that indoctrinate girls to be submissive, sexy, and unequal partners in society.
Research indicates that men target women for a variety of reasons, but I’d suggest that these incidents of physical, illegal violence all happen in the context of a society that has long been structured by violence against women. We’re pretty bad at preventing or punishing violence against women, at least comparably speaking, but we’re more likely to act out against acts of assault or murder than we are to punish those who, for example, work to limit women’s access to healthcare. Prosecuting individuals, though necessary, is a way of implying the violence is the result of individual moral failings, rather than a societal problem.

It’s been noted that there’s a powerful gender dynamic to most terrorism and violent extremism. In your opinion, how do certain gender perspectives or expectations foster extremism?

I admit that I’m not expert in extremism, but gender seems to play a substantial role. Cynthia Enloe wrote that nationalism comes from “masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation and masculinized hope.” Michael Kimmel’s recent book on extremism argues that, at the root of extremist, right-wing politics, is the idea that modern men have been emasculated and humiliated, and that part of what they seek is a restoration of the centrality of men’s bodies and authority. Similarly, Annie Kelly, writing about the alt-right, sees at the heart of this extremism “a discourse of anxiety about traditional masculinity.”

There are different forms of extremism and nationalism, but they’re united by the idea that the world as it is, is flawed. They’re typically conservative, in that they view a better version of the world in the past, whether it’s the past represented in history or religion or both. So, almost all extremism involves some idea of returning to previous social structures, and in particular what are considered traditional gender roles.

What are some of the steps we can take as a society to counteract the way we ascribe gender and support people of all genders in developing positive identities?

There are probably too many to list, but I’ll start by saying that representation is important. The more we see people of all genders in roles that have traditionally been set aside for cisgender white men — whether those are “real” roles, like parents, partners, friends, CEOs and presidents, or “imaginary” roles, like superhero or space captain — the more children will grow up seeing a degree of gender equality and acceptance, and thinking of those things as normal. More importantly, we need to see women, whether cis-gender or trans, in those actual roles, since popular representation can only do so much. And we need to see anti-sexist policies put in place, because without institutional and systemic support, it might all be tokenism or window-dressing.