Antifeminist, manosphere and right-wing extremist sentiment among men who use domestic and family violence: masculinism, misinformation, and the justificatory logics of violence

This paper charts the accounts of front-line workers in ‘Australia’ who work with men who use Domestic and Family Violence (DFV) on the extent, nature, and context of antifeminist and / or right-wing extremist (RWE) sentiment among their clients, and its overlap with ‘manosphere’ content and sentiment. It has previously been established that lone-actor terrorism and right-wing extremism that manifests in acts of public violence, have deep connections to male supremacy and the manosphere. However, despite the shared drivers of both DFV and lone-actor terrorism, there remains a dearth of research that interrogates the extent to which DFV users are also informed by manosphere or RWE content. The data reveals that service providers frequently encounter sentiment from their clients that strongly aligns with and draws on manosphere content and that we conceptualise as masculinist in sentiment: it is anti-diversity and anti-feminist, supports men recapturing a sense of masculism, and deploys ‘alternative facts’ to give credibility to the affective idea of male victimhood perpetrated by a system that is supposedly against men. We argue that some mainstream ‘Australian’ discourses amplify these sentiments; and that men’s aggrievement needs to be carefully acknowledged without collusion in both DFV and countering violent extremism contexts.