Since 2022, the year that Andrew Tate first went viral online, a spectre has haunted headlines, school playgrounds and children’s smartphones: the rise in anti-feminism among boys. This often-violent ideology, adopted by young men and boys in droves, promotes conservative gender roles, the idea that women are inferior to men and that progress on women’s rights in the last 50 years has been detrimental to society. These messages are disseminated by “alpha influencers” like Tate, who suggest that women should be seen as men’s property, or that rape is permissible in certain circumstances.
It’s obvious that this backlash against gender equality has serious consequences, but attention has focused predominantly on the risks to young men and boys. We hear about figures like Tate and such half-baked solutions as Labour’s proposal to create more “positive” male influencers and introduce classes in schools to challenge these beliefs. We don’t hear so much about the young women and girls who also come across these ideas online. Gen Z women are veering in the opposite direction, we are assured, with a growing “attitude gap” between young men and women—the former increasingly conservative and the latter more liberal. But this misses a disturbing, emerging trend: gen Z women are also subscribing to, and even encouraging, these same ways of thinking.
Across social media, there is a boom in right-wing women pushing a repackaged version of these anti-feminist ideologies, providing guidance and blueprints. They show and tell young women how they can perform the role of the “good woman”, propping up the misogynistic philosophy of some young men. A substantial portion of reactionary young women are beginning to buy into these ideas.
These new right-wing female influencers aren’t hard to find. You will meet them scrolling through social media (usually TikTok and Instagram, occasionally YouTube). Sometimes they sit behind a desk in a brightly coloured room, speaking into a podcasting mic. More often they are cooking, cleaning, doing makeup or taking care of children, while suggesting indirectly (or at times, directly) that modern women aren’t contributing to society, that sexual liberation and reproductive freedom are holding women back. All over social media, they stress that the ideal woman should be, above all else, “feminine, fit and friendly”.
These influencers range from the explicitly political to implicit lifestyle promoters. Hannah Pearl Davis, 27 (1.98m YouTube subscribers), and Brett Cooper, 23 (4.38m YouTube subscribers) are examples of the former. Both create “anti-woke” content on YouTube, promoting reactionary viewpoints as extreme as suggesting women shouldn’t be able to get divorced or vote. They often champion a soft, pseudo-feminism, co-opting “girl power” to mask more conservative stances. For instance, in August, Cooper celebrated the presence of US women’s rugby player Ilona Maher on the cover of Sports Illustrated, because, she claimed, seeing masculine-looking women would help push back against “transgender ideology”.
Many right-wing female influencers portray themselves as feminine, politically engaged women who have achieved beauty and success by rejecting feminist values. In a bid to counterbalance any feminist content creators whom young women may find on their feeds, they discuss a wide range of topics, from celebrities, dating and beauty, to the gender pay gap and abortion. And while these overtly political influencers do hold sway over the online female right, lifestyle promoters can be even more effective. They act as a Trojan Horse, making content that portrays men as strong and women as weak, gently nudging viewers towards being stay-at-home wives and mothers, while also encouraging adherence to punishing beauty regimens.
The most common genre is the “tradwife” who celebrates a return to traditional gender roles through glossy cooking videos, homesteading content and images of happy children (and happier marriages). Their footage, replete with cookie-baking and cow-milking, presents one idea of a perfect existence: the life that can supposedly result from shunning feminist ideals and harking back to a 1950s-era nuclear family.
Annie Kelly, a researcher at King’s College London, believes the tradwife originally emerged to remedy negativity towards women in far-right online forums. “Anti-feminist spaces tended to focus on all the things women were doing wrong, but struggled to articulate an actually positive vision of womanhood that female sympathisers could identify with,” she tells me. The beloved, endearing tradwife was the answer. This figure, Kelly says, is part of “a concerted effort to use social media to market a conservative attitude towards gender and feminism as an essential part of a healthy, fulfilling lifestyle”.
Across all social media platforms, there is a boom in female influencers pushing a repackaged anti-feminist ideology
The market isn’t just popular—it has become heavily saturated. “There’s always new ones popping up. A new tradwife popping up every week!” says Eviane Leidig, an associate fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism and author of The Women of the Far Right. In fact, tradwives and right-wing female influencers are so common now that it’s hard stand out. Many resort to more extreme messaging to carve out a niche.
The true scale of this phenomenon is hard to gauge. Citing statistics from short-form video platforms to assess the reach of this network of influencers—the phrase “tradwife”, for example, generates hundreds of millions of videos on TikTok and hundreds of thousands on Instagram—fails to capture the full picture, precisely because of the framing of much anti-feminist content aimed at women. Social media has entered a new era in the last year, with most platforms trying not to push political content to users, in an attempt to detoxify feeds (and to mitigate any consequences for platforms of harmful content going viral). By circumventing these political filters, tradwives and similarly implicit content makers offer a more effective way of reaching wider audiences. These influencers aren’t right-wing talking heads. They won’t directly tell viewers that men and women should revert to historic gender roles. Instead, we watch a woman serenely raising children and taking care of her home while her husband is praised as protector and provider.
One example is Estee Williams, 25 (120,000 Instagram followers), who styles herself as a sexy, suburban housewife. Her videos show her putting on formal dresses and a full face of makeup before her husband comes home from work. She argues that women need men to take care of them and says her life’s purpose is to be her “husband’s helper”. She is always filmed wearing hyper-feminine, pastel-coloured clothes. Leidig explains how some tradwives, like Williams, clearly perform for the male gaze—and presumably a more male demographic.
Such creators still target young women, too. In one video from 2022, Williams gives marriage advice to high school girls where she suggests ignoring the concerns of family and friends about leaving work and dropping out of university—or, instead, choosing a degree that gives you time to be a wife and mother.
Other influencers appear to pitch themselves to a specifically female audience, with a less sexualised image of domestic, conservative bliss. Hannah Neelman, better known as Ballerina Farm (10m Instagram followers), is incredibly popular with young women online. Her brand is less glamourised, rougher around the edges, showing the handwork of childcare and farming while pushing the idea of fulfilment and happiness in traditional gender roles. Nara Smith, a 23-year-old Mormon (4.3m Instagram followers), makes elaborate meals from scratch with perfectly manicured nails and high-fashion outfits, all while caring for her four children. Whoever the audience, the implicit message, says Leidig, is that “this is how a woman should act.”
There is little quantitative analysis of the audiences following the female influencers who peddle anti-feminism, but the comments underneath their content paint a rich picture. Posts such as “I <3 the patriarchy” or ones that encourage young women to get “dolled up” for their husbands garner responses like “it’s refreshing to see a female, like myself, not agreeing with what modern society says we have to believe” and “I hope one day I can be like this for a special man in my life”. Those who criticise these influencers are often dismissed as “sad feminazis”.
Nara Smith, a 23-year-old Mormon with 4.3m followers, makes elaborate meals from scratch with perfectly manicured nails
In these comments multiple women express admiration and relief at finding an account with this worldview (though it’s impossible to trace the real person behind each and every comment, it would appear that the people making these statements are real women). And while research indicates that anti-feminist content doesn’t appeal to most young women, lurking beneath the bigger numbers are concerning data points indicating a growing popularity. In a recent study by King’s College London, nearly one in 10 women and girls aged 16-29 agreed with the statement that “feminism has done more harm than good”. Though the research found that “alpha-influencer” Tate was not very popular with this cohort, large segments of British girls held favourable views of male influencers pedling anti-feminist messaging, such as YouTuber KSI and the American influencer Logan Paul (40 per cent and 25 per cent respectively). Both have been accused of monetising misogyny. KSI has also been called out by women’s groups for videos “trivialising rape”, making denigrating comments about rape survivors and calling women “sluts.”
Why are some women so compelled by anti-feminist content? The supposed shallowness of certain brands of feminism plays a part. “Gen-Z has picked up on a lot of the ironies surrounding things like ‘girlboss feminism’… where a lot of them say, ‘what’s the point of trying to have it all?’, because it’s a struggle,” Leidig explains. “Young people feel like society is failing them. Just look at things like employment, housing, healthcare. The trad and trad-adjacent conservative sphere is ultimately a reactionary movement against… this type of feminism.”
For many young women, consuming these videos is often less about searching for solutions than yearning for escape. It provides a brief “dopamine hit. It’s so visually appealing and it’s emotionally appealing in a way too—it’s a sense of calm and serenity,” says Leidig. And beneath the escapism lies another message, that these conservative women are a foil to a cautionary figure pervasive among the online right: the lonely catlady.
This is the “under-discussed flipside to the idealised tradwife”, Kelly says. The tradwife-versus-catlady trope is in part an anti-feminist “revenge fantasy” pitched at a male audience; it’s no coincidence that it has been deployed by Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance to appeal to voters. But it also has power as a “disciplinary tactic” on young female viewers.
“Its most important function is as a threat to the young women in their ranks, which plays on young people’s fears of loneliness and failure,” Kelly explains. “Once you look for it in anti-feminist content, you’ll be astonished by how often this figure is referenced and invoked.”
This kind of pressure is most effective on young women and girls as opposed to boys, explains Karen Mansfield, a researcher at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute. “Girls and non-binary people are much more susceptible to social comparison—especially young girls”—as well as to messaging over body image, she says. Online, women are repeatedly warned by other users and right-wing content creators not to end up like the cartoonishly frumpy, undesirable, feminist, and childless catlady.
Underlying this is the reality that the process of online radicalisation for girls is both similar to that of their male peers and an underreported blindspot.“ Young men’s radicalisation pathways simply tend to get a lot more attention because violence is seen as a possible outcome in a way it isn’t with women,” says Kelly. In fact, the factors which, researchers agree, cause radicalisation among young men on the right—including, says Kelly, “downward social mobility, loneliness or general social alienation”—aren’t exclusive to them.
Mansfield stresses that cognitive development happens rapidly in all genders. Research has suggested that these developmental changes are intensified by social media in positive and negative ways: children can be very quickly and severely impacted by what they see online. In suggestible young minds, new ideas become ingrained fast.
The risks of extreme misogyny spreading among young men and boys seem obvious—violence, restrictions on women’s freedoms, even political upheaval. The risks of a lower rate of young women and girls jumping on the bandwagon might seem less clear and perhaps less dangerous.
“Women are still a critical part of any reactionary movement that wants to gain power and legitimacy,” counters Kelly. “On a practical level, they tend to do a lot of the organisational heavy lifting but most importantly, because women are seen as more moderate and safe, they also ‘soften’ the off-putting associations of radicalism or bigotry. The more strategic minds in this sphere are extremely cognisant of this.”
In fact, we’re increasingly seeing conservative women floating variations on extreme, fringe ideas, such as the “great replacement” theory central to modern fascist ideology, in lifestyle content on mainstream social media. “Those ideas lose their ugly associations with violence and terror when presented by a female face,” Kelly says, “but they’re nonetheless extremely dangerous.”
Polarisation in itself damages social cohesion and toxifies public debate, but the experts I spoke to also emphasised the potential harm to our political culture of young girls choosing to stay at home and out of the public sphere. Leidig worries about this “regressivism effect” in the long term.
There are no quick fixes. The influence of these ideologies and the online figures who propagate them grows and grows. Addressing it requires cooperation from individuals and companies in Big Tech, whose interests don’t always lie in making harmful content less popular. This makes educating the public about the dangers of anti-feminist content more difficult, because many of the platforms appear to “like to keep people in the dark”, says Mansfield.
Myriad stakeholders, from teachers, parents and children to social media companies and parliamentarians, need to work together to stop the spread of extreme anti-feminism. But stemming this kind of radicalisation requires transparent algorithmic changes. This is hard to legislate, and platforms go to great lengths to avoid sharing the inner workings of their algorithms–Leidig uses the term “black hole” to describe how little information Big Tech shares with the public on this front. Last year, the UK passed the Online Safety Act: in reality, a toothless set of laws which fail to meaningfully address the secrecy surrounding these algorithms that determine the content we see online.
Some experts, public bodies and (unsurprisingly) social media platforms argue that people need to do more to protect themselves from online harm. Digital literacy—a major issue for digital natives as well as older generations—should be improved; parents should ensure they know more about what is happening on their kid’s phones. Both would help, but Leidig is cautious about placing the onus on individuals.
There is a “really delicate balance”, she tells me, between personal and corporate responsibility.
“There’s so much saturation with this content” that it’s hard for individuals to make a dent. Even basic interventions, such as blanket bans up to certain ages, will do little to address the real problem, instead stripping responsibility from social media companies to act, says Mansfield. “They’ll just say, ‘well, it’s fine because they’re adults anyway.’”
Of course, wherever the onus for change lies, shifting laws and algorithms won’t solve the real issues underlying this trend. This requires no less than the reshaping of our culture. The remedy—alongside education, regulation and transparency—has to be a culture committed to demystifying what Leidig calls the “generational amnesia” around the gains made by progressive movements.
When presented with a regressive vision of adulthood, young women need to be able to find a better option. The tragedy lies in women and girls instead believing that a life lived with less freedom, and with less equality, would be a welcome escape.
