A recent documentary on masculinists depicts them as monstrous and marginal men. He thus forgets to talk about the entire spectrum of male domination which infuses our society, at all levels, and which concerns everyone.
Masculinists are in fashion. This is evidenced by the recent success of several excellent works on this theme in France, such as the essay by my colleague Pauline Ferrari, Trained to hate womenor the short documentary film Fluid Mechanics by the artist-researcher Gala Hernández López, awarded a César. This media coverage is a good thing: we must take stock of the rise in anti-feminism and misogynistic discourse, on the web and beyond. Alas, it also inspires clumsier productions, like the documentary Mascus, men who hate womenbroadcast last week by France Télévisions.
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Journalist Pierre Gault depicts his discovery of masculinists online. This embodied posture immediately sabotages its subject, completely depoliticized, replaced by a personal and naive quest. The author films himself scrolling through YouTube and TikTok channels of men who treat women like animals (luckily, he also watches kitten videos to relax); he participates in a training course for physical confrontation (the voice-over insists that he is “not uncomfortable “); is initiated into the “ street flirting » (and ends up annoying girls on a hidden camera); struggling to respond to the lies of a man described as a masculinist influencer (would we imagine giving the floor without filter to a “racist influencer ” or one ” homophobic influencer » ?).
Women are strangely absent. Only one expert is interviewed, disinformation researcher Stéphanie Lamy. The others are relegated to the rank of victims, like the comedian Typhaine D. who recounts her cyberstalking, and the vile case of a woman murdered by her ex-partner, detailed for long minutes, photos of the crime scene at the 'support. This unbearable sequence is followed by a supposedly touching conclusion of a young man, a claimed ex-incel, who has found love since his deradicalization.
“Not all men”
We need mainstream content on masculinism, and I have no problem with prioritizing pedagogy over comprehensiveness. Here, we remain desperately on the surface. No reflection on the history of masculinism (which is not from today), how it is today driven by the economic model of social networks, how these discourses contaminate traditional media, the nuances of a sprawling movement…
“ Incels are trendy; they attract clicks. But this interest tends to blur a certain number of essential nuances regarding the most banal and everyday aspects of violent misogyny. “, wrote Canadian researcher Luc Cousineau in 2022, cited in Pauline Ferrari's essay. This banality is not mentioned in the documentary. Somehow, it is reassuring to see masculinists as monstrous and marginal, holed up in their Discord servers and Telegram loops. I'm not like that! I'm sensitive, I like watching kitten videos! To insist on the difference between them and us is to ignore the roots of the problem or to not want to understand them.
A few weeks ago, I was chatting with an activist against gender-based cyberviolence, who highlighted the wide media coverage of deepfakes She suspected a certain fascination with the technological and extreme aspect of deepfakes. All these practices are, however, symptoms of the same phenomenon: the desire to dominate and control women. We cannot think about masculinism and its effects on society without dissecting the patriarchal system that feeds them, and admitting that it is this same system that favors a part of the population, including the best-intentioned. We cannot talk about masculinism without talking about all men.