Abstract
Lois Shearing’s Pink-Pilled: Women and the Far Right is a pivotal step into the study of women’s radicalization in the digital age. While an extensive body of scholarship has examined how young men are drawn into far-right movements, the radicalization of women has remained comparatively understudied. Shearing addresses this gap with a detailed and timely mapping of how women are recruited into, participate in, and help sustain far-right groups.
Shearing challenges the assumption that women involved in far-right spaces are merely victims of misogyny, instead arguing that they may actively sustain and promote misogynistic ideologies. Shearing traces a lineage of women’s involvement in far-right organizing, detailing the history of women in the far-right – from the KKK’s Elizabeth Tyler to Rassemblement National’s Marine Le Pen – thereby rejecting common narratives of passivity and docility. Despite attempts by men inside to deny it, and women outside to overlook it, women have always been embedded in these movements and have often helped legitimize their ideological foundations. According to Shearing, this legitimization occurs through women’s dual roles as both propagandists and rewards. Women produce content that critiques modern feminism and capitalism, encouraging a return to “traditional” womanhood, while also being positioned as prizes for men who adhere to far-right ideals. In this way, the pain points of misogyny become the very mechanisms through which women are drawn into radicalization.
From the outset, Shearing emphasizes that there is no single pathway into far-right ideology for women. Their routes into radicalization are distinct from men’s and as varied as the women themselves. For groups centred on white supremacy and nationalism, Shearing identifies racism as the primary driver. Communities focused on traditional gender roles often frame their ideology through Christian duty. Groups that emphasize biological essentialism and reject queer and transgender identities are unified by sexual anxiety. While these strands are distinct, Shearing argues they frequently intersect and reinforce one another, creating a “slew” of misogyny.
This misogyny slew is especially pertinent online, the landscape that Shearing’s book largely examines. To collect their data for this book, Shearing adopted an alias and went undercover across social‑media websites, supplementing this with interviews with researchers and practitioners in online extremism prevention, as well as current and former members of the far right. Across these sources, the author discovered ways in which radicalizing content is presented to “unradicalized” women, often coded as a return to motherly duty, an emphasis on wellness and, in the face of the constraints of late-stage capitalism, a desire to return to a simple way of life. Shearing calls for a degree of empathy for the women who join these movements, as they are often drawn into these movements by the appeal of escaping the burdens placed on them by patriarchy while (ironically) working to uphold patriarchal values, therefore becoming both victims and perpetrators of misogyny.
The book offers a welcomed contribution to scholarship on gender and the far-right. Amid the current emphasis on men’s radicalization and rising literature and television shows such as Adolescence, Shearing makes an astute claim in recognizing the ways in which women, too, work to uphold misogynistic values. Still, the book has a tendency to lump together the various avenues and groups of the far-right in order to fit with previous analogies of pipelines and gateways to radicalization. By attempting to cover ground in Europe, the United Kingdom, and North America, Shearing runs the risk of homogenizing the varied experiences and historical backgrounds which shape the political landscapes these women find themselves in. While these fractions may share certain ideological drivers, members of these communities diverge quite significantly, and different cultural contexts shape unique and differing understandings of far-right politics.
Furthermore, when looking at the tactics used online to “recruit” people into far-right ideologies, further scholarship should explore the extent to which content-makers’ ideologies align with the content they produce. Indeed, these content creators may simply be performing for social clout and capital and/or (as is becoming more frequent) for paid sponsorships.
Due to the nature of digital ethnography, and the fast pace at which content is shared, research published is often already somewhat outdated. As such, some of Shearing’s examples of marginal groups (e.g., Tradwives) have already moved away from fringe and are now part of mainstream homesteading and glamorous cooking. Similarly, E-girls no longer wear the skull masks of the far-right described by Shearing, but instead are known for the “ahegao” face, while the sexual anxiety of incels has been somewhat replaced by the gamification of gooning.
Still, this book opens up a pertinent conversation about women’s radicalization and the pathways towards it, as well as what happens to these women once they are in far-right groups. I see this book as an important starting point for further research on the digital radicalization of women in the 21st century.