It's 2025. Is This a Good Time to Talk About Male Supremacy and Feminist Refusals?

A space to talk about backlash, feminist refusal, and changing the nature of power

Photo by Morgan Bryan on Unsplash

I’ve gone back and forth over whether to start this newsletter for months. It’s difficult - cognitively, physically, emotionally - to watch and think about anti-feminist backlash deepening, even if it’s happening at the same time as an explosion of remarkable feminist activism globally.

If you’re like me, you went through the past few months, including the holidays, in a double or triple-consciousness fog. I’d be talking to a friend, wondering, “Is she thinking about Gisele Pelicot, Hope Ngumezi, or Rebecca Cheptegai right now too?” Having a casual conversation with a stranger who mentioned his concerns about the boy crisis, I debated whether to ask him if he knew about the 70,000 men trading secrets about raping women for shits and giggles in a Telegram group? Does he think these are unrelated? At a professional lunch last month, I sat next to a scholar who went off for 10 minutes about the population crisis that “will end our civilization!” I took a sip of my water and said it was impossible to take him seriously because he hadn’t said the word “women” even once and suggested that he’d come perilously close to racist replacement theories. In disappointment, sadness, fear, and anger, petty has become my happy-making go-to.

There just never seems to be a good time to talk about male supremacy. To really share how backlash is pervading our lives and imaginations. I figure 2025, for me at least, is the time.

So, a newsletter it is because — despite the problems with this and every other platform — it seems like the best way to think about what’s happening and to listen to what other people have to say.

For this first post, I thought a quick explainer might be useful.

First, why is “male supremacy” the framework for my writing here? (Related, is why Unmanned, if you’re interested.)

Male supremacy is a worldview and a system that we all inherit. The Institute for Research on Male Supremacy, an international, cross-disciplinary organization, defines it clearly: “the belief in cisgender men’s superiority and right to dominate, control, or erase “others,” women, trans and non-binary people, and those with Indigenous gender/social roles.”

As a worldview, it perpetuates the overvaluation of masculinity and maleness and the denigration of femininity and femaleness, favoring cis men, heterosexuality, and masculine-coded culture over feminine-coded culture, women, LGTBQ, and gender-expansive peoples and cultures. Femininity is a defining feature of what is lacking and inferior. This might mean being a woman, being gay, being trans, being differently abled, being Black, being Indigenous. While this feminization-as-subjugation varies across cultures, what remains consistent is a structure of thought: binary, oppositional, and hierarchical. The primary way of relating to others is through domination, control, and exploitation.

Male supremacy is most vividly apparent in men’s overwhelming perpetration of sexual and physical abuse and violence, in global militarism, and in the normalized misogyny and, in the US, white supremacy at the heart of mainstream religious, political, and cultural narratives and conventions. To many people, “male supremacy” is only about extreme beliefs and violence, but it’s also evident in the drip drip drip of workplace biases, social prejudices, and the intimate inequalities of everyday life.

What might be surprising is that male supremacy hurts most men. It’s a system in which, first and foremost, men compete to lord over other men and are socialized to associate masculinity with violence and control. Women and people who are “like women,” whether as the result of birth, desire, choice, necessity, or structural violence, are really, ultimately, secondary; resources used to facilitate men’s status and domination of others. Only a relative few benefit from its psychic and material violence.

As a system, male supremacy is comparatively invisible. Studies show that we are all less likely to register it compared with other forms of discrimination and oppression. What does it look like? All the deficits and gaps, pick your fave: health, wage, wealth, sleep, stress, orgasm, leadership, leisure time, chores, sexual violence, glory, medical research, exercise, award-winning, authority, credibility, medical research, pain demands, and violence. This is the shortlist.

I know “male supremacy” rubs a lot of people the wrong way because of male supremacy itself. Friends and strangers have warned me that it feels so angry and aggressive. The words feel alienating and more assaultive than, say, patriarchy, misogyny, misogynoir, or even today, maybe white supremacy. Why not instead use honey and employ “neutral” words like “bias,” “prejudice,” and “discrimination?” Because the term acts on us in ways the others don’t by:

• Provoking strong emotional responses worth examining, including discomfort, the desire to be likable, status anxiety, emotional frailty, defensiveness, compensatory masculinity, systems justification, himpathy, and more. Because we are all born into male supremacy, we are all, in some way, complicit. We must compromise, reconcile ourselves to complex realities, and rail against our own helplessness. Many of us love people who directly benefit from male supremacy - that’s how heterosexual marriage, for example, is supposed to work — and so we benefit from male supremacy.

• Identifying a structure of thought, values, and power — supremacy — that links different axes of oppression, compounding their effects by creating hierarchies within hierarchies. Male supremacy not only relies on patriarchal identities, institutions, and violence but, in them, establishes rigid conceptual binaries necessary to rationalize white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia. It requires the control of women - as a category and as reproductive agents - to maintain them.

• Shifting our focus from individual actions and blame to systemic critiques and collective norms. Talking about male supremacy isn’t about indicting men but about understanding a system that we all live in. Yes, there are dangerous and extreme male supremacist outcomes, organizations, and influencers; however, the ideas they espouse - for example, a “natural order” in which men are intellectually, physically, and morally superior - are implicit in mainstream social norms, political habits, religious beliefs, and family conventions. We don’t talk about that enough, opting instead to silo the “bad men” from the rotten culture that cultivates and often rewards them and makes it impossible for us to have nice things - like peace, clean water, safe environments, dignity, democracy.

• Clearly identifying and naming a driving force behind global, transnational, anti-democratic social and political movements. While media, sociologists, analysts, and educators have gotten better, through necessity, at openly recognizing White Supremacy’s role in rising right-wing radicalism and violence globally, male supremacy’s role in these movements remains unexplored except in the most undeniably oppressive environments.

• Shining a spotlight on religious institutions and their immense power, both explicit and shadow power. We are all supposed to ignore male supremacy in faiths that billions of people adhere to and pretend that what happens in churches, temples, and mosques stays in churches, temples, and mosques, when, clearly, that’s a lie. Given that 100% of official Catholic priests, 99% of Islamic clerics, 100% of Orthodox rabbis, and 90% of Buddhist leadership roles are filled by men, it seems relevant, a laughable understatement, to center religion and its ripple effects fairlyregularly. Male supremacy in religion sanctifies the intimate, political, economic, and social systems that maintain inequalities. Religion affects everyone, regardless of personal beliefs or participation.

Naming male supremacy is complicated but vital. Its cultural and political resurgence is at the heart of our global poly-crises and powerful forces working across borders.

It’s an entrenched and resurgent transnational and cultural system.

But it’s also a personal dilemma that affects everyone.

This brings us to the other throughline of this newsletter: Feminist Refusal, the many ways that people have, and are saying, “No, enough,” to male supremacy, in and despite backlash. We see refusal in our “public life”: girls and women leading decolonizing racial, reproductive, environmental, and climate justice movements, understanding their dense entwinements. In their global fights for peace, LGBTQ rights, and gun control. In protests against the ongoing predations of theocracies around the world. In global networks and solidarity. It’s also evident in our “private lives”: from decentering men, boy sober, childless by choice, and a globalizing 4B movement to women’s choices about love, marriage, sex, work, and appearance. In movements dedicated to cultivating progressive, healthy masculinities - for men, in institutions, and in cultures broadly.

Speaking for myself, I want this newsletter to share what refusal looks like and what it represents, because also because it will be a useful reminder that:

1) Those of us who refuse to obey, conform, or be quiet are knowers and have left behind the idea that we should, first and foremost, be pleasers. We aren’t exaggerating, wrong, or, my favorite - irrational - when we see, experience, and resist supremacist norms and outcomes;

2) We can recognize and support each other and be isolated by justifiable shock, anger, dissonance, and outrage;

3) Genuinely good and even amazing changes are happening, even if terrible anti-feminist forces are alive and well;

4) It is possible to laugh, dance, rest, and find joy, antidotes to the deliberate strategies of chaos, sadness, and allostatic overload.

Each of us matters every day. Every act of resistance, every demonstration of quiet solidarity, every open-mouthed laugh, and every unapologetic no is part of making new worlds real.

Please use this newsletter to join and share this conversation. I hope we can have constructive conversations here about uncomfortable truths, empathy, humor, and compassion.

Take good care and welcome!