Elizabeth Grosshans looks at what’s responsible for the wave of online misogyny and rising sexism, and how we can fight it
Last year Glamour magazine declared that the “biggest trend of 2025” was misogyny, citing the behaviour of men like Donald Trump and growing online sexism.
Louis Theroux’s new Inside the Manosphere documentary gives a glimpse of this world—the online space where male influencers like Andrew Tate push a reactionary and extreme sexism.
This misogyny is manifesting in the real world in dangerous ways.
We are seeing women school teachers quit their jobs over uncontrollable misogyny from young boys in their classrooms.
A recent global survey showed that Gen Z men (born between 1997 and 2012) were twice as likely as baby boomers to have sexist views, with 24 per cent of Gen Z men thinking women should not appear too independent or self-sufficient compared to 12 per cent of boomers. Some 33 per cent of Gen Z men said a husband should have the final word on important decisions.
Violence against women remains high. In 2025 there were 28 women killed due to intimate partner violence and 12 deaths in the first three months of 2026. In the past five years 41 per cent of women reported experiencing workplace sexual harassment.
Where does sexism come from?
Some blame the internet and social media or focus on better education to change boys’ behaviour. Others say that sexism is just deeply ingrained into men’s biology.
But none of this actually explains where sexism comes from or what can be done to end it.
As socialists we see sexism as a result of class society—and sexism today as the product of capitalism, a system that requires women’s oppression for its survival.
Socialists see the nuclear family—the monogamous heterosexual family structure made up of mum, dad and kids—as the heart of women’s oppression.
Capitalism is a system motivated by profit—and it is only possible to create profit if there are workers available. So capitalists are interested in guaranteeing that there will be future generations of workers at their disposal.
The family is the place where children are raised, housed, clothed, fed and supposedly nurtured into functioning members of society.
The nuclear family also shoulders the economic burden of raising children. It plays a major economic role for capitalism because without it there would be extra costs the system would have to bear.
The family has taken different forms in different societies through history. But the development of capitalism and the move from agricultural society to factory work in cities reshaped it.
The industrial revolution brought whole families into the workforce, with widespread child labour.
Parents worked such long hours they didn’t have the time to properly care for their children and as a result many died young. The working class began to call for better conditions. This eventually became a concern for capitalists too, who worried about having future generations of workers to exploit.
So something called the “family wage” was introduced: men were paid enough to support the whole family, allowing women to stay at home to care for children and manage domestic work.
Because this served the interests of the ruling class, they worked hard to ensure it would be the norm across society.
When people first moved to the cities, there was a brief period where relationships and sexuality were a little freer. But sex work and homosexuality were eventually criminalised and women were pushed out of many industries, entrenching their dependence on their husbands.
Today most women again have to work to help support their families. Thanks to the women’s liberation movement women have won greater freedoms.
But the family model where women do the majority of domestic labour, and continue to reproduce the workforce for free, remains.
Couples today may try to share domestic labour and childcare as equally as possible. But since the man is likely to earn more, this often means women are the ones to sacrifice paid work to handle domestic chores and childcare.
And even when women work full-time, they do double shifts—their paid work plus housework and child-rearing. In Australia women still complete 50 per cent more unpaid domestic labour than men.
Gender roles
To justify this the ruling class promoted a sexist ideology that tells us that men and women are naturally predisposed to particular gender roles.
Sexism says that women are more inclined to child rearing because of their natural motherly and nurturing instinct, that they are good at multitasking so they can manage child rearing and cooking and cleaning.
But at the same time women are weak, small minded and overly emotional so some jobs and making big decisions are far too difficult!
Meanwhile, men are tough and practical, made for the big “important” jobs in society.
The ideal of the nuclear family is shoved down our throats from a young age: from our own families, from films, from school and the online world.
Women are sold a vision of dependence on a man, of our perfect wedding, and are encouraged to ponder how many children we want. This helps to paint a picture of this as the “natural” way to structure our lives and relationships.
While men are not oppressed on the basis of their gender, the roles that are ascribed to them are also restrictive.
Men are told that vulnerability is a sign of weakness and that they should be capable of pushing through any adversity. They are also told that their worth is dependent on their ability to be a “provider”—in a world where it is becoming harder to make ends meet.
One ABC podcast featured a young man who had escaped the manosphere, who talked about being attracted to it because of the gap between what he was told being a man should be and what is actually possible. He described loneliness and feeling like a failure to meet those expectations.
The Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai, who wrote on women and the family, describes how under capitalism, “We still live and think under the heavy hand of an unavoidable loneliness of spirit. Man [people] experiences this ‘loneliness’ even in towns full of shouting, noise and people, even in a crowd of close friends and work-mates.”
This shows why some men might be attracted to the ideas put forward in the manosphere, which provides a community claiming that if they just go to the gym and focus on “boosting” their masculinity then they will be able to overcome that “loneliness of spirit”.
The family is held up as the place to satisfy our emotional, spiritual and physical wellbeing. And the romantic relationship within the family is expected to provide all the love, security, sexual pleasure and validation that we crave.
Karl Marx called the family both a haven and a hell, because while romantic and family relationships can be deeply satisfying they are still unable to make up for the deep loneliness that is the product of the lack of control over our lives and alienated social relationships.
We are supposed to rely on the family to meet our emotional needs. But the people who support you and love you can easily become the people you blame when they are unable to meet these needs.
As Kollontai put it, “Because of their loneliness, men are apt to cling in a predatory and unhealthy way to illusions about finding a ‘soul mate’ from among the members of the opposite sex.”
The result of this is that, “Property rights are extended into the emotional and spiritual world of the other person, creating an intense pressure to control and possess.”
This helps explain why romantic relationships feel so high-stakes.
It also explains why violence against women is so often concentrated in the home. When the family fails to meet their needs, the frustration and sense of failure men feel can result in violence.
A new wave of misogyny?
Capitalism has relied on sexism from the beginning. But in times of economic crisis, the pressures on the nuclear family and the intensity of sexist ideas and behavior also increase.
In a scramble to save money the system will try and push more of the burden onto the family. Another product of this is the rise of the far right and its promotion of traditional family values.
Donald Trump’s National Security Strategy released last year even claimed that restoring US manufacturing industries “cannot be accomplished without growing numbers of strong, traditional families that raise healthy children”.
We need to take every opportunity to fight for reforms that will relieve pressure on the family, such as increased single parent benefits, free childcare, community centres, wage rises to end the gender pay gap, gender affirmation leave for trans people and equal parental leave for men and women.
These reforms could go a long way to improving the lives of working families. However, the logic of capitalism means it will always look to reverse them.
Ending women’s oppression once and for all requires a revolution to smash capitalism and the nuclear family along with it.
We need to replace capitalism with a system that is driven by need not profit, where domestic and childcare responsibilities are taken on by the whole of society.
The Russian revolution of 1917 gave us a glimpse of what that could look like. The revolution brought full equality for women, marriage was separated from the church and divorce was made simple. Women gained control over their fertility and were freed from the burden of domestic work through communal kitchens, childcare centres and laundries.
The attitudes of millions were shifted and women were drawn into public life and active participation in building the new society.
Ending the reliance on the nuclear family would also throw out gendered expectations and the loneliness and alienation that comes with them. This vision for a world without women’s oppression could allow a flourishing of expression and a feeling of fulfillment that capitalism can never deliver.
