Misogynistic Extremism: Towards an Operationalisable Definition

This paper argues that certain forms of misogyny constitute a distinct mode of extremism. Drawing on Manne (2017), we treat misogyny not as hostility towards women but as a coercive mechanism that disciplines resistance to patriarchal norms through individual conduct and institutional practice. Misogyny becomes misogynistic extremism when organised around male supremacism: a worldview that asserts men’s entitlement to dominance, rejects gender equality, and legitimises coercion and violence as means of patriarchal enforcement. In extremist contexts, male supremacism functions as what we call a coercive ideology. Its content is partly constituted by the practices that enact it—harassment, retaliatory fantasy, glorification of violence, and dehumanisation. The claim is not that ideology and practice causally reinforce each other but that the content of male-supremacist belief is produced through its enactment, with no principled separation between belief and enforcement. This marks a departure from Manne’s distinction between sexism (the ideology of patriarchy) and misogyny (its enforcement), which works for everyday patriarchy but breaks down in extremist contexts. Mutual constitution operates on a spectrum. At one end sit incel communities, where antecedent codified doctrine is thinnest. At the other end sit doctrinally-grounded religious extremisms, where background doctrine plays a larger enabling role without exhaustively determining content. The framework also explains why misogyny can be extreme—severe and harmful—without being extremist : the threshold is crossed only where coercive practices are organised around the ideological project of rejecting gender equality and restoring male domination. On this basis, we develop an operationalisable definition and a taxonomy of the contents, acts, and practices through which male supremacism is promoted, enacted, and reproduced. Conceptualising misogynistic extremism as a coercive ideology reframes gender-based violence as a problem of structural domination rather than individual hostility, and provides a principled basis for distinguishing it from everyday misogyny.