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Boys and men are suffering. There is a loneliness epidemic. There are a lot of problems. But why is it that we see these influencers scapegoating girls and women instead of asking for, say, structural resources around mentoring or job training programs?
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Welcome to the Healthy Screen Habits podcast. I'm Hillary Wilkinson. Whether you're starting your parenting journey with a newborn or looking to connect with your teen on technology, let's learn some new Healthy screen habits together.
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Foreign.
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My guest today is an award winning author and a scholar of extremism and radicalization. She's the founding director of Peril, the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation lab at American University in Washington, D.C. where she is also a professor in the School of Public affairs and in the School of Education. She regularly testifies before the U S Congress and briefs policy, security, education and intelligence agencies in the U. S U N. And other countries on trends in domestic violent extremism. Today she's sitting down to speak with us about what is happening to our boys. She's got a newly released book titled man up the New Misogyny and Rise of Violent Extremism and it covers this in depth. We're going to talk about that a little bit more, but for now, thank you for being here and welcome to healthy screen habits. Dr. Cynthia Miller Idris, thank you.
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Thanks so much for having me here.
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Let's start with kind of establishing common language. Right? So I feel like we hear the word misogyny being used a lot in media and different interviews, but many of us don't actually understand what that is. Yeah, start at the very beginning.
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So yeah, great question, because I also use the term. There's different terms that circulate about it, and I think in popular usage it often means hatred of women. That's not how I use it. I use it in this broader, more expansive way, which is the policing of gendered norms and expectations that hold up kind of patriarchal systems. And so that means women can do it as well as men. It means that it's enacted on our boys as well as our girls. So, you know, girls and women experience the vast majority of misogyny. And when we're talking about misogynistic hate online or what's happening that's usually directed at girls and women. But we also see things like you play like a girl or you know, homophobic slurs, toss at boys, like that kind of gender policing fits within a more expansive definition of misogynity. Misogyny, because it's about the norms and expectations that hold up patriarchy.
B
Okay, wow. I knew you were the right person to answer that question. Okay, so on page 79 of Mana. Loved and hated reading this, you introduced the impact that memes and kind of explore the role that humor has had in grooming for misogyny. Can you talk? I just wonder if we can, like, explore how not just the messaging, but the framing of harmful content as, like, ironic or it's just a joke, you know, how is that weaponizing our youth?
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Yeah, so there's so much over the last decade, really the introduction of memes, but also a kind of countercultural, ironic stance in highly online youth communities. And we've been seeing this in online gaming a lot, for example, and in recent political violence. We've seen it with, you know, memes written on bullets and, you know, all kinds of things that we're actually communicating back to an online audience to make jokes, to make fun of the adults that were reading those memes out at press conferences. Right. I mean, it's a. It's a horrifically desensitized environment to violence, and an environment that makes fun of everything is just for the lulz, just for the jokes. And anybody who, who, you know, tries to challenge a teen on it, let's say, is written off as a kind of triggered snowflake who can't take a joke. You're just a boring mainstream. So it has really this, this use of satire and humor and irony to position really harmful ideas, including, you know, anti Semitic ideas, all kinds of hateful ideas, misogynistic ones, as just a joke while saying things like, women shouldn't vote or we should REM rights. It's okay to stone women who cheat on you or something. Right. That I just, it was just a joke. Like, I wouldn't really do that, but it kind of desensitizes our boys in particular to some of the ideas that actually can be quite harmful.
B
Yeah. And even I think this is a dated reference, but I think the whole, like, okay, Boomer, like, reference, it kind of like, it goes along those lines of like, if you, if you are somebody who wants to engage with someone who has posted maybe an inflammatory meme of being like, like, you know, the Holocaust, you know, actually it's just kind of a no fly zone.
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Right, Exactly.
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You know, we're not going to make fun of that. They just being discounted is like, okay, Boomer or whatever.
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Exactly. You're just. You just don't get it. Right. And, and that stance kind of makes it. It's very hard to argue with that stance. Right. Because you can't argue that stance with facts. You have to kind of help kids realize, like, it's not to make light of the Holocaust. This actually happened. It's not funny. I had a journalist one time stop me in the middle of an interview like this and tell me he had overheard his son, 15 year old son and a friend in the kitchen putting a frozen pizza in the oven. And I will not repeat what he said, but he made a reference to the Holocaust when he put the frozen pizza in the oven. And when his dad asked him about it, he said, oh, dad, it's a meme. Like, lighten up, everybody says it right? Like everybody says that when you put a frozen pizza in the oven. And I googled it and sure enough, there are a lot of memes comparing the gas chambers to pizza ovens. And so it becomes this. Like he wasn't even realizing he was saying it or how horrific it is to say that kind of thing. And so that's what the memes and the jokes can do. They can just make it be impossible to even see it anymore. It's so detached.
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Mm. So because we're healthy screen habits and because we are continually fighting for the rights of those online and those who have been harmed by online arms, I have to ask the big, the big question. Do you find social media platforms culpable in supporting this climate of toxicity?
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So I personally find that yes, they are culpable. And I also know that they will never have accountability. And I don't believe that they're really going to have accountability. I'm, I'm a pessimist on that front, which is why I work on the side of trying to equip communities with better tools, to be skeptical, to be media literate, and to make sure that we have, you know, safety without censorship. Right. I think that that's the goal here is to prioritize the freedom of expression as much as possible while keeping kids especially, and families and, and our older adults safe from scammer manipulators, from bad actors who are trying to trick them, and content that desensitizes and dehumanizes other people and makes that easier to move toward violent action. So that said, you know, I would really like to see more accountability when there are things like the failure in the algorithm that Meta apologized for from February 26, they apologized for on February 27 that flooded a lot of users content feeds with really, really violent content. And I had kids in a high school tell me about that the week after livestream, murder, suicides, animal Abuse, child abuse. They couldn't get it off their screens. It just kept coming. And Meta apologized for the error in the algorithm. But that apology was was all there was. Right. And the media coverage of it was like CNN's story. I think said Meta fixes algorithmic error that led some users fee right like it and so I wish there were a world in which when something like that happens and anyone who had to see that content would get some mental health resources would get some help for how to process that. Because we know that kids who accidentally saw beheading videos from ISIS or jumpers on 911 had PTSD symptoms. Some of them.
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Mm. And before we started recording, you had mentioned some of those resources that Harold has put together. Can you just mention a few of those and everyone who's listening. I am absolutely going to or include all of these in the show notes.
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Great. Yes. We have Our first guide was for parents and caregivers to sort of online radicalization and exposure to harms. That led into several other resources often created on request. So we have a resource for faith leaders created after a group of evangelical pastors approached us and asked for help to create resources for what they were seeing in their churches. We have resources for mental health counselors, for teachers, for educators. We often we call it caregivers because we think grandparents are really important set of resources in these and aunts and uncles. And then we also released our first substantive guide because we were so worried not just about like online worlds in general, we were so worried about in particular what kind of content is coming to boys. We produced a guide that came out in December called Not Just a Understanding and Preventing Gender and Sexuality Based Bigotry which really looks at some of these issues of what's the so called Manosphere, which is a collection of sort of blogs and websites and forums that really promotes some very violent and horrific content against girls and women, but also scapegoats them for the very real and legitimate problems that boys and men are facing.
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Yeah. So when we come back we're going to talk more about the Manosphere and what is happening in online gaming platforms to groom extremism. Need a fun school assembly that provides research backed content, actionable tips and great presenters? Look no further. Healthy Screen Habits presents digital wellness material for all ages in developmentally appropriate, interesting ways that encourage kids of all ages to make good digital decisions, create lasting, healthy screen habits and learn safe methods of dealing with sketchy content. We have assemblies are in class visits for all ages and stages give your school the best foot forward on digital wellness by reaching out to us@healthyscreenhabits.org Click the book a speaker button and let's chat. I'm speaking with Dr. Cynthia Miller. Idris. So the manosphere like we were talking about before break is defined by Merriam Webster as a. It kind of refers to male centered websites, Internet communities and other digital media regarded collectively as espousing anti feminist views, misogyny and is associated with far right ideologies. So that's Merriam Webster's version. Increasingly, I would say this term refers more generally to a broader media environment which criticizes emotional displays in men particularly and promotes ultra conservative models of masculinity. So in your book man up, you reference this whole thing of that I have certainly seen seen in my own home. You call them gateways and rabbit holes.
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Yeah.
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And so how does the online space kind of fall into this, how does gaming, online gaming fall into this zone of manosphere rabbit hole?
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So the first thing about online gaming I always try to point out is that is that something like a third of the world's population are gamers. And so it is a very, it can be a very pro social and affective space and a lot of fun. And there isn't research. And this came up after Columbine, of course. For years there was concern that gaming itself and violent video games was connected to violence, but it's not. So the research is very clear that gaming itself doesn't produce violent outcomes. However, online gaming today has this other set of features that were not there when I was growing up or when other people and late millennials and Gen Xers were growing up who are parents today, which are the online features. And so the in game chats, which are live chats with strangers for example, are really can be a very dangerous place. And just imagine you're sending your 10 year old into like a park with they could talk with any adults who say, you know, just anyone at all. And so there's all kinds of things that happen in those chats, including predators lurking around and trying to get to know kids, people saying they're not who they are, people trying to recruit kids into extremist groups to get them and especially recruit into some of these nihilistic harms that we've been seeing with, with networks of people getting kids to self harm, for example, on video there's you know, 500 law enforcement investigations of those incidents of harm and abuse of kids across the country. And they do. Those are the kinds of places, any place you can meet an adult online and gaming is really an easy place to do. It can be very harm those communities. The online forums are also rife with a ton of policing of boys. Right. You play like a girl, like I talked about before, the, the homophobic and, and kind of misogynistic and racist comments that are constant there so much that over half of girls who game game under a boy's name so that they don't actually have to, and then, and then don't use the audio feature so that they can just play a game without harassment.
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We talk about the online space as we need people to remember that it's a place, not a space. We often draw this correlation between you would never take your child, like you said, to the park or you know, to the busy and busy city intersection and drop them off on Saturday night, you know.
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Right.
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But I would like to push back and state that, you know, honestly, they would be safer there than they would actually be in an online space. Because there you're going to have a lady like me driving home from the show that I've seen, I'm going to see an 8 year old by themselves and stop over and go, hey, do you need me to call your mom? Are you okay? You know, I mean, you're going to have other people looking out for you, whereas in that online space you don't, you don't have me in my Subaru.
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Yeah, exactly. And it's true. I mean, every parent listening to this did the same thing that I did, I'm sure, with my kids, which is the first piece of advice we give. If you get lost, look for a mom, right? And so you look for a mom if you're lost, you don't know where you are, you need help, you look for a mom, you find somebody pushing a stroller or have little kids and you get help from them. And that is what you do when you're surrounded by strangers. And so, you know, our kids in this sense are surrounded by strangers online, some of whom are not who they say they are, which makes it even harder because they're pretending to be a kid or they're pretending to be someone else. So, you know, those in game chats are one thing, I think another thing is that there are these communities set up around gaming servers like Discord communities and Steam and Twitch. And so you see a lot of these communities that emerge where a lot of bad things have happened, like the planning for the Charlottesville Unite, the Right rally or a lot of other. They host a lot of. And they're trying, I mean, I know there are good trust and safety teams there. They're trying to remove content and kick users out, but really it's. It's just like a wild west right now still in terms of the lack of. Of effective moderation that is fast enough and effective enough and error free enough to keep kids safe.
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So let's take kind of a step forward. We're going to use this stepping stone of extremism and move into political violence.
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Yeah.
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And you state that there have been several recent studies across a wide range of national context that hostile sexism and misogynistic attitudes emerge as significant and in some places are the biggest predictors of support for political violence and violent extremism. I think I lifted those words directly from you. Yeah. So. So what role would you say the online life plays in what we see to be. I mean, the very real effects of offline violence, like the murder of Minnesota state legislator Melissa Hort and her husband, the assassination of Charlie Clerk. Like, what. What do you see? Can you draw the. Connect the dots for us?
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You can. I mean, there's, there's so many ways to connect the dots. I mean, one of the, the thing that got me sort of one of the things that got me most interested in the. In writing this book was, was understanding how much we were not paying attention to the connection between misogyny, hostile sexism and rising mass violence, political violence, mass shooting, school shootings, and other forms of violent extremism. It's really almost every case. I had a hard time finding a case where there was no connection back. There are a few cases, but 60% of mass shootings have. The shooters have a history of domestic and intimate partner violence themselves. Right. In the Charlottesville case, the Unite the Right rally of those neo Nazi groups, it was. Every single one of them had a history of it. And so there are these warning signs, right, that come sometimes years in advance, where if you effectively intervened in these sort of earlier mobilizations of exertions of power, of hatred, of anger, of uncontrollable rage, maybe it would not have escalated. I was surprised when I first started writing the book. A researcher said to me, I was giving a talk at Penn State and had lunch with another scholar. And he said, you know, our new data shows that the biggest predictor of support for political violence is sexism. And I was like, what? I couldn't believe it. I mean, I'm a researcher in the field. I'm a woman. I had not read that. And so I started digging in. And sure enough, every study I found across seven countries. And then I just stopped because I was like, that's enough. I need to work on another part of the book. So it's, it could be more. It's either hostile sexism or misogyny, depending on how the researchers define the term. But basically, either way, it's a extreme hostility toward women. Anti feminist ideas, belief that, that women are devious, are lying, are, you know, are conspiring against men. Those kinds of beliefs are the biggest or among the top three predictors of support for political violence. And so to me, when you see that those exact things are also increasing online right now we have so many influencers targeting our boys. The most well known one is Andrew Tate. But there's thousands of guys like that who really position women as, they have to be subservient. It's okay to use violence. It's even preferable to use violence against them that they hit using the whole
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catchphrase, make me a sandwich, make me a sandwich.
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Right? So they're subservient, but also like this idea that women hit their, hit the wall. They call it their sexual market value. It's an actual, like term used in these spaces. Expires like in their mid-20s. I mean, so really trying to promote the idea that you want a woman who's like 18 or 19 because they're more compliant, they're more naive, they're more manipulable.
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Right.
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In order to have more control as a man. Those are actual guidance points given by these influencers to teenage boys as they start to seek relationships. And so when you see those kinds of ideas, and he has like an 18% approval rating among teenage boys in the U.S. right. Like, this is not fringe. This is, you know, really having an influence. And it's what we hear from parents, from teachers, that they all of a sudden don't know what to do with kids in their lives who are saying things that they can't believe, like, I don't think women should actually have the right to vote.
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Right.
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Or, you know, girls have it easier and women's rights have gone too far. Those are all statements that have increasing approval rates among American boys. And not just American boys, British boys, other boys. Right. It's, it's. And, and that's because this is the worst part about it. They get this content without looking for it. It comes to them regardless of what they do. They don't have to search for it. In fact, they don't search for it at all. Often they search for something that codes them as a teenage Boy like a search for fitness for how do I get rich? Or how do I get a girlfriend? And then that leads them within four minutes of a new 16 year old boy's account, they start getting content from the manosphere. If they hover over it, even for a couple of seconds or more, content comes to them. If they watch a video all the way through, within a couple hours, two to three hours, they have. The majority of their content is like that. So when I talk to, I do a lot of talking to high schools and colleges and young men who are always very grateful for the opportunity to talk about these questions. They tell me things like a lot of their friends are on testosterone. They just say like they all take tea, right. They get steroid advertisements constantly in their feeds. They think they're supposed to have stronger jawlines. They're being sold packages of stale gum kinds of products to create a stronger jawline or believe they have to have shin lengthening surgery to get taller. I mean these are, it's a. Girls have gotten this kind of content for years, of course, pro anorexia, you know, skinny talk, all this horrible stuff. And now boys are really being coached to be more muscular and strong as a condition of being a man.
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And just to further illustrate how powerful those algorithms are just in me getting ready to sit and talk to you, my feeds have been, I'm just going to use the word toxified by manosphere content. And of course it is a little scintillating. It's a little like I can't stop watching. Oh my gosh, who is this guy? You know, and as much as I, I mean it's one of that, you know, the whole phrase, like what enrages, engages. Exactly. I am certainly engaged.
A
Yes, well, and the algorithms, as you know, the, the way the platforms are designed is to encourage that some of them prioritize as much as five times they prioritize the dislike button over the like button. So if you hit dislike, you're five times more likely to get content like that. Right. Because content you dislike keeps you engaged more.
B
Right.
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So you know, so that's one of the things I tell kids is don't even hit the dislike button because you will get more of that content. Right.
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And taught me something. Right.
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And so it's terrible. But that's, you know, once you understand the entire purpose of these platforms financial model is to keep you engaged, to keep you scrolling. Outrageous, salacious content keeps you scrolling, things you dislike, keep you engaged, watching the whole thing, sharing it because you can't Believe it with your friends. Can you believe this content? Like you're mad now, how bad is that for our mental health too?
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Yes.
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That we're spending our time kind of in this really unhappy state watching things that are awful. And it can skew your view of actual goodness in the world.
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Right.
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Because you're not watching like the good content, you're watching the stuff that makes you mad.
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So we've got algorithms, but also we're entering this brave new world of AI and virtual reality which, which is, I mean, just like the ultimate zone of exploitation.
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Yes.
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Do you have strategies or ideas of like how do we talk about this with our kids, about these heightened areas of vulnerability where as of now, I mean, no protections exist?
A
Yes. So we do. And in your show notes, hopefully we can put the website, direct website to our kids curriculum which is developing and using critical competencies. It's called Duck. It's built around an animated character called Daniel the Duck. And it was created first by a group of undergrads who won a national competition in my class with the concept of an animated video to teach kids how to stay safer online from false, you know, false information. And then they came into the lab with the support of a donor who funded them for the year and they went after a grant with faculty support and they won $800,000 to develop that. And now it's in, it just got recommended to a thousand New York City schools as part of their cyberbullying week. It's in over 100 other educators classrooms around the country. It's free, it's downloadable and it has some, it's all animated videos and curriculum for schools. And, and one of them is about AI. And so we have Daniel explaining kind of what AI is. Is it a real, you know, how do you not anthropomorphize it? Right. Make sure that you understand it's not a real person. So you know, we do a lot of that kind of work with older kids. We right now we don't have a scalable curriculum. We go on request into middle schools and high schools right now. And because there, what you're seeing is needs a really sensitive and in person discussion. We're having a lot of calls from teachers, teachers about the use of AI generated nude undressing apps, for example, where the boys have created in some cases nude photos of all the girls in some cases, in some states that's now criminally prosecutable as distribution of child pornography. So then you have a 13 year old boys who are getting arrested on those charges after using an app that showed up in their feed for free, you know, and that they thought was just amusing.
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Right.
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And I'm not excusing it because there are real victims to this, of course, but I also don't want a 13 year old boy going to juvie or having a record or being registered as a sex offender because they were persuaded that this was a cool or funny thing to do instead of having an advance warning. And in every case where we've been asked to do that, the adults at the school didn't even know that technology existed. And so, you know, that's changing. People are becoming a little more aware of it now that it happened to Taylor Swift and it's happened to other stars. But, you know, the technology moves so much faster than adults are aware of. And so I think trying to stay equipped with some of those tools and just up to date and listening to podcasts like this is a really important thing for anyone working with youth.
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So we have to take another short break, but when we come back, I am going to ask Dr. Miller Idris for her Healthy Screen Habit. Extra thanks goes out this episode to Danielle Waters for her unwavering support of the podcast and the Healthy Screen Habits organization. If you'd like to make a difference and contribute to the education and empowerment of families building their healthy screen habits, Please go to Healthy Screen habits.org find the take action tab and scroll down to click the donate button. 100% of your donation will be used to spread awareness and bring families the tools they need to develop healthy screen habits. I'm speaking with Dr. Cynthia Miller Idris, author of the new book man up the New Misogyny and Rise of Violent Extremism. So we have spent the better pass of this half hour talking about all of the scary things. And because we always want to come from help and hope, let's focus on some tools. All right, so what red flags should parents be looking for if they're concerned particularly about their sons?
A
Yeah, I think there are a couple important things. One is the same as any other behavioral change you might see in a kid when they start to isolate themselves from old friends or if they are behaving differently, really having trouble detaching from their phones in a way that might be an addiction to kind of content either, you know, sometimes pornography or spending too much time in spaces with bad actors who are really becoming their entire community. That's a warning sign. And parents often recognize that, you know, pretty early on, the same way that they know something's wrong when there's, you know, abuse of substances or, you know, they can tell something's wrong, they might not know what it is. So that's the first thing is just pay attention to your kids behavior into personality changes or change when they quit a sports team or something like that, just to make sure. But we also recommend listening. Right. And often the carpool is a great place to listen the dinner table, just to hear are they, you know, what are they talking about, what's coming out of their mouth and when they start to say, I, you know, we hear this all the time. I have a friend whose son came home from, from ninth grade from a new high in the first week and all of a sudden was like, you know, I actually don't think that women should work. And so like it was just a new, you know, and, and that's, you know, you can hold whatever opinion you want about working or not working or raising kids. But, but it was such a change. It was a sudden change. And so he had a new peer group and that peer group was a group of kids who were heavily consuming some of this manosphere content and he was just listening to it and then started to watch more of it online. And so I think when your kid exhibits sort of sudden changes like that, or is saying things like feminism is a cancer or, you know, women's rights have gone too far, those are good examples on the gender side that we hear a lot of because those circulate a lot and you know, they, it's a chance to have those conversations about that boys and men are suffering. There is a loneliness epidemic. There are a lot of problems. But why is it that we see these influencers scapegoating girls and women instead of asking for, say, structural resources around mentoring or job training programs?
B
Yeah, and I think I, I like that process of coming from like connect before you correct kind of stuff. I think like with any, any form of parenting, you know, coming and coming from a place of curiosity.
A
Absolutely.
B
Like, no shame.
A
No, Just like sort of the. Yeah. Riskiest thing you can do, I think, is shame. Yeah. Asking. We often say, this is why I love grandparents to do this, because grandparents put the kids in the position of the expert. Right. And so we will say like, can you tell me what it. How does a meme actually work? How can you change it? Where do you post them? Right. Like grandparents can say stuff like that and kids will sometimes have a little more patience than when it's a parent or just like, hey, you know, I'm starting. I really feel like I Should be using Instagram more for my professional career and my branding. Can you help me understand how you build an audience? Right. And then you. It opens up conversations with an older teen, for example, about how these platforms work. Or my office is thinking about starting a TikTok account to reach kids. How would you suggest we do it? And you know, those kinds of things give you a chance to have these bigger conversations about what content they're seeing too. But they like feeling important. They really do. They want, they want your approval and they want to be seen as a, as an expert. And so why not give them the chance to do that for sure.
B
I feel like this is a moot point at this point, but on every episode of the Healthy Screen Habits podcast I asked for a healthy screen habit. I feel like that was a great one, but that's a great one.
A
Yeah.
B
Do you have any others?
A
I will give you one that I just heard from a 20 year old young man I interviewed because I, I always ask what, what do they think parents should know that they think parents don't know? And he said something I had not thought about but which makes, makes perfect sense of course. He said, I think parents should be very cognizant of how much of their kids feed is made up of content they didn't subscribe to. Follow and, and I think that's really important. And then help guide them to the filters you can set up on most of the platforms like your for you space or whatever so that you're not seeing as much of the promoted and recommended content or the content that your friends are seeing which shows up in your feed. So sometimes like I will open it up and then I'm like 10 or 12 posts in before I see something from one of my actual friends.
B
Right.
A
And so you know, a lot of parents think oh let me see who they're following and then I'll know if they're safe. But actually if 90% of their content is from people they're not following, then you don't really know what they're seeing. And so really that's a place to think about and help your kids make sure their feeds are filtered depending on how old they are or helps you know or help that they understand a 17, 18 year old what that content actually might be. Not something that's healthy or that draws them into like true crime fandom or fake, you know, content that can be really gory and violent and harmful.
B
As always, you can find a complete transcript of this show as well as a link to get the book we've been talking about, man up, the New Misogyny and Rising of Violent Extremism, and the link to all of Dr. Cynthia Miller Idris's books, which are fabulous, as well as the Peril Lab and those resources we talked about by visiting the show Notes for this Episode and you do that by going to Healthy Screen habits.org Click the podcast button and scroll to find this episode. And I cannot thank you enough for this conversation and the work that you're doing. I mean, as, as a mom and just a general member of society, you're, you're doing the most important thing.
A
Thank you. It's very rewarding work and we really rely on kids themselves being super open with us to tell us constantly in focus groups and interviews what they think adults should know. And so I'm really grateful to their voices because that's how I know what I know.
B
For more information, you can find us on Instagram and Facebook at Healthy Screen Habits. Make sure to Visit our website, healthyscreenhabits.org where you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts or via RSS so you'll never miss an episode. It's free, it's fun, and you get a healthy new screen habit each week while you're at it. If you feel if you found value in this show, we'd appreciate you giving us a quick rating. It really does help other people find us and spread the word of Healthy Screen Habits. Or if you'd simply like to tell a friend, we'd love that too. I so appreciate you spending your time with me this week and I look forward to learning more healthy habits together.
Episode Title: Misogyny and the Manosphere Explained
Guest: Dr. Cynthia Miller-Idriss, PhD (Director, Polarization and Extremism Research Lab, American University)
Host: Hillary Wilkinson
Date: December 10, 2025
This episode features a conversation with Dr. Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a researcher and author specializing in extremism, radicalization, and the impact of digital spaces on youth. The discussion centers on the rise of misogyny in online spaces, the "manosphere," and the mechanisms by which boys and young men are groomed into harmful ideologies via social media, gaming platforms, and online communities. The conversation explores the connection between online culture, harmful memes, political violence, and offers actionable strategies for parents to protect and guide their children.
“It means that it's enacted on our boys as well as our girls… things like 'you play like a girl' or homophobic slurs tossed at boys, that kind of gender policing fits within a more expansive definition of misogyny.” (02:06, Dr. Miller-Idriss)
“It becomes… impossible to even see it anymore. It's so detached.” (06:42, Dr. Miller-Idriss)
“I'd like to see more accountability… anyone who had to see that content would get some mental health resources.” (08:46, Dr. Miller-Idriss)
“There are all kinds of things that happen in those chats, including predators… people trying to recruit kids into extremist groups.” (13:19, Dr. Miller-Idriss)
“Within four minutes of a new 16 year old boy's account, they start getting content from the Manosphere… They don't have to search for it at all.” (21:21, Dr. Miller-Idriss)
“Either hostile sexism or misogyny… are the biggest or among the top three predictors of support for political violence.” (19:21, Dr. Miller-Idriss)
“The technology moves so much faster than adults are aware of… trying to stay equipped with some of those tools… is really important.” (27:56, Dr. Miller-Idriss)
“When your kid exhibits sudden changes… or says things like feminism is a cancer, those are good examples… to have those conversations.” (29:32, Dr. Miller-Idriss)
“No shame. Sort of the riskiest thing you can do, I think, is shame… Kids want to be seen as experts. Why not give them the chance to do that?” (32:00, Dr. Miller-Idriss)
“A lot of parents think ‘Oh, let me see who they're following and then I'll know if they're safe’… but if 90% of their content is from people they're not following, you don't really know what they're seeing.” (34:10, Dr. Miller-Idriss)
On Meme/Humor and Harm:
“Anybody who… tries to challenge a teen on it… is written off as a triggered snowflake who can't take a joke.” (03:38, Dr. Miller-Idriss)
On the Peril of Platforms:
“Their entire purpose, their financial model, is to keep you engaged… Outrageous, salacious content keeps you scrolling… How bad is that for our mental health?” (24:11, Dr. Miller-Idriss)
On Algorithmic Traps:
“If you hit dislike, you're five times more likely to get content like that. Because content you dislike keeps you engaged more.” (24:12, Dr. Miller-Idriss)
Dr. Cynthia Miller-Idriss emphasizes the importance of equipping parents, educators, and communities with modern skills and ongoing awareness. By fostering supportive, non-shaming dialogue and understanding the social and technological forces shaping kids’ online lives, families can build resilience against harmful ideologies and better guide youth toward digital wellbeing.
For more:
Visit healthyscreenhabits.org for show notes, transcripts, resources, and links to Dr. Miller-Idriss’s work.