Confronted with masculinist discourse, part of feminist activism fixes on censorship and punishment. These responses target the most visible effect of patriarchy rather than its causes, and they borrow domination’s own weapons, the posture of judgment from above and the use of fear. I propose the concept of the “mimetic struggle” to name this mechanism, and to shift activist energy toward the one ground where the deeper work can be done, that of education.
“They should be silenced”
“They should be silenced.” A friend deeply committed to feminism was telling me recently how angry she was at masculinists, and above all at the fact that their discourse circulates freely on social media. In her anger, she imagined censoring them, even imprisoning them. Her reasoning was that their speech is dangerous, that it can persuade and recruit, the way it is said of the far right that giving it a platform is letting it spread.
I understand this anger, and I share her view of how vile most of these discourses are. But I answered that masculinist discourse is not, to my mind, the cause of a problem, it is its effect. Sexist and sexual violence did not wait for masculinists to become widespread; they were taboo, they could not be spoken of. Today, uninhibited masculinist speech circulates on social media, and feminist speech circulates there just as much. What has changed is above all that violence once committed in silence is now named, spoken, and publicly contested.
As the conversation went on, what really set her in motion came into view: these discourses shock her, and it is because they shock her that she wants them gone. It is from this anger that I want to start, not to judge it, but to understand what it does to the commitment that carries it.
Masculinism, the extreme form of ordinary patriarchy
Masculinism is an anti-feminist backlash movement, which claims that men are in crisis, victims of women and of feminism, and that their power must be restored. Mélissa Blais and Francis Dupuis-Déri, who studied it closely in Le mouvement masculiniste au Québec (2008), describe it as a counter-movement, that is, an organised reaction to a movement of emancipation. Raewyn Connell, with the concept of “hegemonic masculinity” (Masculinities, 1995), shows moreover that every society values a dominant model of masculinity against which men are required to measure themselves. The masculinist pushes this model to its extreme. He is consistent with standard patriarchy, he simply goes further, and that is why he recruits: young men who become masculinists were trained in domination like everyone else, and those who cannot dominate through money or cultural capital find in gender domination the ground that is left to them. Without this standardised patriarchy, which prizes virile domination from childhood on, there would be fewer masculinists, because the pool from which masculinism recruits is the ordinary formation of boys.
If masculinism is an effect, then attacking it as though it were a cause means spending one’s energy on the problem’s small leaves while leaving its roots intact. Masculinists are, moreover, a minority relative to the number of people who commit sexist and sexual violence, most of whom have probably never visited their forums.
The mimetic struggle
I have analysed elsewhere, in relation to the Covid period, how a community in crisis manufactures scapegoats, drawing on René Girard. The figure of the masculinist today serves a similar function in certain activist spaces: he is the visible enemy, someone to despise and attack, who symbolises the problem one denounces, and designating him binds together the group that fights him. Girard also shows, in Violence and the Sacred (1972), that adversaries caught in a rivalry end up resembling one another, to the point where he calls them “doubles”: the more the struggle intensifies, the more each reproduces the other’s gestures, and violence ends by making the rivals alike.
This is the mechanism I propose to call the mimetic struggle: a fight against a form of domination which, by fixing on that domination’s most visible and most contemptible figure, comes to adopt its logic. To censor is to decide who has the right to speak, and that decision assumes a position of authority from above, the very position patriarchy has always occupied. To punish in order to deter is to make fear the instrument of change, and fear is the oldest tool of systems of domination. Audre Lorde put it this way: “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Sister Outsider, 1984).
In another article I proposed the concept of « patriarchal feminism », to name the situations where the search for emancipation rests on unconscious assumptions that leave the logic of domination intact. The mimetic struggle is in a sense its activist side, the side where these internalised patterns turn into a strategy of combat: instead of opening dialogue, education, and context, one manufactures an enemy and wages war on him with the weapons he knows best.
There is a further effect in return, which my friend did not see. Censoring and criminalising masculinists would make them more vindictive and more bound to one another, because they would experience themselves as victims, and the narrative of the persecuted man is the very fuel of masculinism, which already presents itself as the defence of oppressed men. Censorship would give them the confirmation they are waiting for.
Men who are punished and do not understand their sentence
My friend added that justice works very badly, that impunity reigns, and that truly heavy sentences would act as a deterrent. On impunity she is right, and it is not normal that so few perpetrators of violence are convicted. But the idea that repression alone would change the culture seems to me refuted by what we know of prison.
The anthropologist Dorothée Dussy, in Le berceau des dominations (2013), conducted a long study of men imprisoned for incest. None of those she interviews understands his conviction; all experience themselves as victims of an injustice. Not that they are wrongly punished: their acts are extremely grave, the sanction is necessary, and society is right to remove them for a time from the space where they cause harm. But their incomprehension says something about our culture. These men grew up in a world where, to be liked by their community and desired, boys learn that violence and domination pay off, and where this domination is everywhere unpunished, even valued, until the day when some of their acts cross a line that nothing in their formation had made perceptible to them. From their point of view the punishment is incoherent, and if one puts oneself in their place, one can understand that they do not understand. Repression alone, without any support toward awareness and without work on the culture that produced these acts, removes men from social space for a few years, then returns them to the world unchanged, more convinced than ever of the injustice done to them, and passing that conviction on around them.
This critique of criminal punishment as the main lever has a name in feminist research. Elizabeth Bernstein has spoken since 2007 of “carceral feminism” to describe the currents that place prosecution and harsher sentencing at the centre of their demands, and Gwenola Ricordeau, in Pour elles toutes (2019), shows that this feminism reinforces the very relations of domination it claims to fight, by allying itself with the institution that embodies them most brutally. Michel Foucault had established in Discipline and Punish (1975) that prison does not correct, that it manufactures reoffending and delinquency, and Angela Davis drew the abolitionist consequence in Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003).
The justice that judges these acts is itself, moreover, steeped in patriarchal culture: in its internal hierarchies, in the way magistrates work among themselves, in its relations with those it judges, it operates according to logics of domination. There is something almost incongruous in judging acts of domination by methods that belong to it. As long as one stays within this framework, justice cannot function coherently on these questions, and punitive logics produce mainly hypocrisy: people do not change, and one lets oneself believe one has resolved what one has merely made invisible.
The ball at the centre of the schoolyard
The geographer Édith Maruéjouls, in Faire je(u) égal (2022), observed dozens of schoolyards. About 10% of pupils, nearly all of them boys, occupy 80% of the space, most often around a ball placed at the centre, while the girls, and the boys who do not recognise themselves in virile norms, are pushed to the edges, to utilitarian movements, toward the toilets or a bench. A girl who wants to play with the ball has no access to it. This is built very early, and it is built at school, that is, in the one place that reaches every child, whatever the family culture, including children who grow up in strongly patriarchal families. That is where public action is possible, far more than on social media.
Yet the French school, in the way it is run, does very little to dismantle the patriarchal system, because it is itself organised by logics that are consistent with it: adult domination and obedience to the arbitrary, on pain of exclusion from the social body; ranking by grades, by spelling, by narrow criteria that take no account of people’s dignity or of what they are rich in beyond those criteria. Patriarchy is consistent with these logics; it is only one of their forms. One cannot ask for equality between women and men from an institution that, on every other plane of life, trains people in hierarchy and obedience. Paulo Freire wrote in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) that the oppressed “host” the oppressor within themselves: domination is not transmitted only by those who exercise it, it lodges in those who undergo it, and who will reproduce it in turn, on someone weaker than themselves. The problem is therefore educational, in the broadest sense of the word.
I mean “educational” without anything condescending. It is not a matter of instilling the right thinking in the children of families deemed backward, which would be another mimetic struggle, a counter-propaganda, and which would rightly antagonise parents. It is a matter of organising school so that children encounter there another way of living together than the one they already know, within a gentle regulation that respects everyone’s culture. A child has what he lives at home, what he lives among friends, what he lives in public space, and what he lives at school; if school happens differently, he has a diversity of ways of doing things from which to form his own view. That is what critical thinking is: the room one has to think for oneself, and that room requires being confronted with a real cultural diversity.
Some schools already do this work. Édith Maruéjouls supports schools that redesign their yard after debates with pupils on freedom and equality, and the effects on the school climate are rapid. This work belongs to a long tradition, that of the so-called new pedagogies, many of which place the democratic question at the heart of the school. Célestin Freinet, from the 1920s on, organised his class around the cooperative council, where children deliberate and decide together on the rules of common life, learning equality by practising it rather than by studying it. This intuition runs through the institutional pedagogy of Fernand Oury, the Montessori schools, and the principles Paulo Freire addressed to the oppressed alike: in every case, the view is that the way a school is organised teaches as much as what it transmits, and that a hierarchical and arbitrary school trains people in hierarchy and the arbitrary.
These pedagogies are known, documented, tested for a century. They do not, however, organise the system, which remains receptive and hierarchical, and they survive thanks to teachers who apply them on their own initiative, often against the grain of their institution. Jean Piaget asked why, in Psychology and Pedagogy (1969), and his answer keeps its force. Active methods, he wrote, have made little progress because they are far harder to use than the ordinary receptive methods: they demand of the teacher a more differentiated and more attentive work, whereas giving lessons is less tiring and corresponds to a more natural tendency. He added that the drama of pedagogy is that of medicine and of every discipline that belongs at once to art and to science: the best methods are the most difficult. It is therefore not for lack of knowing what works that the school does not change, it is that what works demands more, a deeper training and a renunciation of the comfort of top-down transmission, and that nothing in the organisation of the system supports this effort.
Building it into the system would take political courage, because some parents would be unsettled by it, and it is for that very reason that gentleness, the refusal to be aggressive toward family cultures, is not a supplement of the soul but a condition of the work.
Taking satisfaction in having punished
My friend said we should do both at once, educate and censor. But activist energy is not limitless, and the two fights do not offer the same satisfactions. One must look closely at the satisfaction that punishment brings, because it is that satisfaction, to my mind, which locks everything else in place.
When one succeeds in having a man convicted, when an organisation exposes and dismisses the perpetrator of violence it had sheltered, one feels a strong satisfaction, and it is not an illusion. One has really acted. That person, removed, can no longer cause harm where he was causing it, and one has the sense of having helped make the world a little less dangerous. What fills one is this sense of effectiveness, the impression of having done something just and of having done it oneself. And it soothes the anger, and that is where the trap is. Once the anger is soothed by punishment, the problem seems settled, when one has only seen it through the lens of that anger. The contentment fills the space where the deeper cultural question should have stayed open. One feels on the right side of ethics, wholly legitimate, and that very legitimacy makes it impossible to see that one has done no work on the underlying ground.
I am not saying these actions should not be taken, or that perpetrators of violence should not be removed; they must be. I am saying that one should take no satisfaction in it, and that this is a fight against oneself, a hard one, because the satisfaction comes of its own accord and it is sweet. Act, yes, but setting aside the emotion and the contentment, so as to remain able to see that the deeper work remains wholly undone. For in punishing, one has worked on the effect, not on the cause.
Medicine knows this distinction well. Faced with an infection, I apply disinfectant: I work on the effect, I prevent it from worsening, and that is necessary. But if I do not look for what, in my terrain, allowed the infection to settle, I expose myself to seeing it return. The history of medicine even turned this tension into a quarrel, between the microbe Pasteur sought to combat and the terrain that others, after him, held to be what mattered most, up to the famous phrase, of uncertain attribution, according to which “the microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything”. The phrase is excessive, and both planes are real: one must treat the infection and cleanse the terrain. But the work on the terrain is the more decisive, because it is the terrain that determines how many infections are to come.
The masculinist, the abuser, stand in this image on the side of the infection, which patriarchal culture makes virulent. One can, one must treat it case by case, remove the one who causes harm. But as long as the terrain is not cleansed, that is, as long as the culture that produces domination is not transformed, in school first of all, it will always come back. bell hooks devoted an entire book to men, The Will to Change (2004), in which she argues that patriarchy also maims those it privileges, by cutting them off from their emotional lives, and that feminism needs transformed men rather than expelled men. She calls for loving them enough to demand that they change. It is a programme without punitive enjoyment, and it is the one that reaches the terrain. It is in the schoolyard, in the very organisation of the school as an institution, that this terrain can begin to change.
