Misogyny and climate denial, terrorism etc.

I don't cross-post often (I already posted this in Pro & Con) but I'm making an exception because some in the Pro & Con have difficulty believing misogyny exists or matters (women, who gives a damn about women...) And it's also something that I feel must be acknowledged here as well, given the trends:

Let me mention first that although the following article and the subtitle refer to right-wingers (subtitle: Why do right-wing men hate Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez so much?), what brought me to it was a discussion on France Culture about the misogynistic and ageist hatred for Greta Thunberg expressed by a number of prominent and not-particularly-right-wing (especially by US standards) French male intellectuals, including Michel Onfray.

Greta Thunberg, as the FC item mentions, was abused on social media by such people as the medical doctor Laurent Alexandre, in these terms: "I am not jealous of {Greta Thunberg}! I wouldn't want to have grave OCD, infantile depression, monoideational Asperger's, and serious nutritional problems causing me to be tiny. {...}"

That's an adult, and presumably someone who is or was entrusted, or at least educated, with the goal of helping people, sounding off to the world at large, no compunction, no shame, about a sixteen year old girl.

In the Mass Shootings thread there already came up the topic of misogyny as a weapon, condition, and instrument of recruitment for the right wing. This recruitment happens in an atmosphere of generalised misogyny, it's ordinary boys, not necessarily stone cold natural born psychopats from outer space who have "nothing to do with us" who go on to abuse and murder women and others.

The role of misogyny and anti-feminism in these phenomena is not coincidental; it's fundamental. It's not marginal, it's central. I don't have time to add more to this now, but I would definitely add to this the violence against so many women enviromentalists and activists in South America and elsewhere--start by googling Berta Cáceres...

Male gender wages war on peace and prosperity; women mostly oppose this. In a situation where women are increasingly entering politics and being visible in public spaces, misogyny and anti-feminism are also becoming increasingly public, loud, and murderous.

The Misogyny of Climate Deniers (New Republic)

(...) As Thunberg approached America, she was followed by a tsunami of male rage. On her first day of sailing, a multi-millionaire Brexit activist tweeted that he wished a freak accident would destroy her boat. A conservative Australian columnist called her a “deeply disturbed messiah of the global warming movement,” while the British far-right activist David Vance attacked the “sheer petulance of this arrogant child.”

In the U.S., former Trump staffer Steve Milloy recently called Thunberg a “teenage puppet,” and claimed that “the world laughs at this Greta charade,” while a widely shared far-right meme showed Trump tipping The Statue of Liberty to crush her boat. (...)

While these examples might feel like mere coincidence to some, the idea that white men would lead the attacks on Greta Thunberg is consistent with a growing body of research linking gender reactionaries to climate-denialism—some of the research coming from Thunberg’s own country. Researchers at Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology, which recently launched the world’s first academic research center to study climate denialism, have for years been examining a link between climate deniers and the anti-feminist far-right. (...)

In 2014, Jonas Anshelm and Martin Hultman of Chalmers published a paper analyzing the language of a focus group of climate skeptics. The common themes in the group, they said, were striking: “for climate skeptics … it was not the environment that was threatened, it was a certain kind of modern industrial society built and dominated by their form of masculinity.”

The connection has to do with a sense of group identity under threat, Hultman told me—an identity they perceive to be under threat from all sides. Besieged, as they see it, both by developing gender equality—Hultman pointed specifically to the shock some men felt at the #MeToo movement—and now climate activism’s challenge to their way of life, male reactionaries motivated by right-wing nationalism, anti-feminism, and climate denialism increasingly overlap, the three reactions feeding off of one another. (...)

The corollary to this is that climate science, for skeptics, becomes feminized—or viewed as “oppositional to assumed entitlements of masculine primacy,” Hultman and fellow researcher Paul Pulé wrote in another paper.

These findings align with similar ones in the United States, where there is a massive gender gap in views on climate change, and many men perceive climate activism as inherently feminine, according to research published in 2017. “In one experiment, participants of both sexes described an individual who brought a reusable canvas bag to the grocery store as more feminine than someone who used a plastic bag—regardless of whether the shopper was a male or female,” marketing professors Aaron R. Brough and James E.B. Wilkie explained at Scientific American. “In another experiment, participants perceived themselves to be more feminine after recalling a time when they did something good versus bad for the environment,” they write. (...)

As conservative parties become increasingly tied to nationalism, and misogynist rhetoric dominates the far-right, Hultman and his fellow researchers at Chalmers University worry that the ties between climate skeptics and misogyny will strengthen. (...)