More and more content about misogyny and gender-based violence proliferates across social media every day, with the research and lived experience of women repackaged into shareable frameworks and keynote-ready lines. But whose knowledge is being drawn on, and whose safety is still at risk? Dr Stephanie Wescott and UK-based Women’s Safety Consultant, Karen Whybro share this piece. Read Stephanie’s recent take on Louis Theroux’s Netflix doco on the manosphere here.
In recent years, content about the manosphere, gender-based violence and misogyny has become a rapidly expanding market across platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn. Reels, carousels, podcast clips and keynote-style posts now circulate widely, translating research into digestible talking points for various audiences. And while it makes good business sense to simplify complex societal issues and violence reduction concepts into bitesize consumables for modern media, those producing content remain ethically responsible to those at risk of vicarious trauma being at the sharp end of research.
But production of this content, which most commonly draws on the experiences and expertise of women, many of whom are not only experts but also victim-survivors, should also come with a clear set of principles.
Much of the simplified online material circulating in these spaces draws heavily on ideas developed by women researchers, educators and advocates, often without acknowledgement.
Feminist scholarship, community work and lived experience are translated into neat frameworks, shareable graphics and corporate-friendly language. Once reframed in this way, these ideas can travel far beyond the contexts in which they were first developed, inviting resistance that frames this work as hypothetical rather than grounded in expertise. And there is a very specific type of betrayal that comes from seeing devastating lived experience of misogyny and violence undermined, challenged or questioned by individuals who proclaim to be doing work in the same spirit of violence prevention.
And, at the same time, the stakes for women doing this work remain far higher—particularly for women who are already marginalised, who risk not only gendered abuse but also racialised harassment, coordinated online attacks and the amplification of existing structural inequalities.
Women and non-binary people who speak publicly about misogyny are significantly more likely to face harassment, abuse and reputational attacks. They are more likely to be described as controversial, angry or ideological rather than authoritative. And, the professional risk attached to naming misogyny remains unevenly distributed, even when the conversation itself becomes mainstream.
From our own experience, these risks are not abstract. They include persistent gendered abuse and threats online, coordinated trolling, repeated attempts to hack our social media accounts, and hostile questions in public forums that seek to undermine our knowledge and expertise. They also include the quieter but cumulative pressures: emails explaining why our research is wrong or unnecessary, public challenges to our ideas and professional credibility, and the emotional and psychological toll of working on violence every day while simultaneously defending the legitimacy of that work. Taken together, these experiences illustrate how speaking about misogyny and gender-based violence is not simply intellectual labour for women, but labour that is regularly met with attempts to discredit, intimidate and exhaust us.
One thing that is important to acknowledge among people who do this work is the somatic experience of misogyny that is lived and felt by those who are its targets. This resonance can live within your body from the first moment you learn that the world is not safe for you—this typically happens for the first time when we are still children.
For many women working in this field, our expertise is not only intellectual. It is also embodied. Our understanding of misogyny is informed by a lifetime of experiences that our bodies remember long before we develop the language to describe them. It lives in the tightening of the stomach when a conversation shifts tone, when a person comes too close or says something that edges toward threatening or inappropriate, while knowing just where that line is. It lives in the subtle recalculations we make in professional and social settings—hundreds of them per day, an exhausting constellation of micro-movements to protect ourselves. It lives in the knowledge that the hostility we analyse academically is also something we encounter directly. It is in our classrooms, among our colleagues and within our professional networks.
This creates a complicated relationship to the work itself.
The research we produce, the public commentary we write and the conversations we facilitate are often also activating experiences. We do this work because we are drawing on the lived experience of having our lives shaped by men’s violence, and we are motivated by preventing that from happening to another child or another woman. When misogyny is discussed, denied, minimised or defended, the body registers it immediately. It is not simply a theoretical disagreement. It is a reminder of the conditions we navigate daily.
Misogyny has an atmosphere.
It is not only expressed through explicit statements or acts of violence. It is felt in the register of conversations, in the dismissive tone of an email, in the dynamics of a meeting room, in the subtle ways credibility is undermined or authority questioned. It feels hostile, repressive and, at times, quietly violent.
This atmospheric quality is difficult to explain to people who have not experienced it. It is something you recognise through accumulated encounters rather than abstract reasoning. You know it when you feel it.
This is also why allyship cannot be evaluated purely through aligned theoretical frameworks.
In practice, many women assess safety through a far more immediate register: the felt sense of being in the presence of someone our bodies recognise as posing no threat. This is not a checklist or a slogan; it is not reciting key terms and phrases made known through allyship content. It is an instinct built from experience.
People who genuinely contribute to violence prevention create environments where women and gender-diverse people feel able to speak without anticipating hostility, dismissal or retaliation. They listen without defensiveness. They credit the work they draw from. They recognise that expertise in this field is often forged under conditions that are themselves shaped by misogyny.
When these conditions are present, the difference is palpable.
This is why there is a particular luxury in approaching misogyny and the manosphere purely as an intellectual problem that can then be distilled for LinkedIn posts or Instagram carousels that deploy a reasoned and detached tone.
For many people entering these conversations through professional or academic spaces, the subject can remain theoretical. It can be analysed, debated and reframed without fundamentally altering the conditions of one’s own safety. It can also lead to professional opportunities that might have instead been offered to a woman or gender-diverse person with lived experience, who for reasons of the perceived palatability of their messaging, may receive fewer invitations to share their work in paid roles.
For women and gender-diverse people, this distance rarely exists.
Misogyny is not simply a topic of research or commentary. It shapes how safe we feel in our workplaces, online spaces and communities. It determines the risks attached to speaking publicly, and influences the constant calculations women make about when to intervene, when to withdraw and when to endure. When educator Karen shared feminist education content on TikTok, she was doxxed and her account was mass-reported by anti-feminist trolls, ultimately leading to a permanent ban from the platform.
Men who speak out can also become the targets of other men’s misogyny. Kon Karapanagiotidis, human rights lawyer and CEO and founder of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre and Tarang Chawla, lawyer, writer and activist, have both faced racist, sexist and misogynistic abuse online. What differentiates their work from others on the issues around violence against women and girls and misogyny, is that their activism often carries a visible register of anger, grief and outrage. That anger signals solidarity with victims, and it is precisely this alignment that attracts backlash from other men invested in maintaining misogynistic norms.
This is why the growing professionalisation of responding to sexism, misogyny and the manosphere deserves careful attention.
If expressing strong opposition to misogyny and violence against women is becoming a professional opportunity for many, then we should also be asking whose knowledge is being drawn on, whose voices are amplified, and whose safety is still at risk. We should be asking whether the people most affected by misogyny are recognised as experts, or whether their work is being repackaged in ways that obscure its origins.
Ending violence against women is not a branding exercise or a thought leadership opportunity. It is about safety.
It is about women’s safety. It is about the safety of girls. It is about the safety of non-binary young people growing up in a culture where misogyny continues to circulate both online and offline.
Engaging with these issues responsibly means recognising that behind every neat diagram or viral post is a body of work, and a body of experience, that often carries a far heavier burden than the content itself reveals.
The conversation about misogyny may now be trending, but for many of us, it has been the enduring language of our entire lives.