Inside the ‘pink-pilling’ tactics the misogynist far right uses to recruit women
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Misogyny and male supremacy might lie at the heart of far-right ideology but that does not mean women are absent from such movements – with some caught up in the race riots that exploded across the UK this summer.
Author and journalist Lois Shearing has delved into the growing role that women play in far-right, neo-Nazi and white nationalist movements in her new book Pink-Pilled: Women and the Far Right.
Speaking to The Independent in the lead-up to the book’s release this February, Ms Shearing argues such movements are wielding a range of “cunning tactics” to radicalise women online. The author argues encountering transphobic, anti-immigrant views and Islamophobic views can lead to women being radicalised into the far right.
In the course of her research, Ms Shearing sought to consume the “digital diet” of a young woman who was being radicalised online. The investigative journalist spent 18 months using a fake identity to investigate far-right communities on forums, Facebook groups, Telegram channels, Instagram, X (Twitter), Pinterest, Tumblr, and other lesser-known platforms.
The author labels the process whereby women get drawn into the far right as “pink-pilling” – adding that it has parallels with the radicalisation process their male counterparts undergo.
“There are different routes that women come through – anti-feminism is a really big route for women – that surprised me quite a lot,” the author says. “They are similar to the manosphere. There are a lot of women who feel really frustrated with society and they blame feminism for that.”
Another issue is the proliferation of far-right material on social media platforms that do little to police it, under the guise of “free speech”. Ms Shearing said she has many friends who have encountered such content on their social media accounts despite never having interacted with similar material before.
“When we talk about journeying into the digital far right, it’s not really journeying anywhere,” the journalist added. “It keeps barging into our paths. I think the internet right now is such a swirling vortex of far-right content. Sometimes it’s almost harder to avoid it than it is to find it.”
Content retrieved from: https://uk.news.yahoo.com/inside-pink-pilling-tactics-misogynist-091135505.html.
