Babe, woke up, Farage is coming for your strings

 This is a longer version of an article entitled ‘Understanding the rise of ‘broscialism’ in the UK’ published originally by thred. 

The rise of Reform 

Recently in the UK we’ve been seeing the horrifying rise of the alt-right Reform UK party, led by Nigel Farage, of anti-migrant poster fame. A few weeks ago the party even topped polls for the first time. The former UKIP leader’s fascistic political views include boosting police numbers, leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, and achieving  “Net Zero Immigration”. Given his politics then, it perhaps comes as little surprise that Farage has also endorsed notorious incel leader Andrew Tate as “an important voice for men”. 

If you’ve been following along with the insidious permeation of the manosphere - an online subculture of men promoting rape, misogyny, and toxic masculinity - you’ll be equally unsurprised by the venn diagram that links this red-pill-blue-pill-community to Farage’s political party. Both are born out of a rhetoric of male loneliness and the subsequent scapegoating of women and migrants. 

The last UK election provided pretty stark evidence that while Tate may have captured the hearts of young men, Farage is collecting up their votes. By contrast, the lack of young women voting for Reform only seeks to exacerbate the perceived divide between men and women. 

The rise in young white men not only voting for Reform, but also following the party’s leader on TikTok and Twitter, has been termed the ‘bro vote’. This is a play on bro-culture, which is in turn characterised by the prioritisation of work and achievements (capitalism) over personal interests and family obligations (socialism). 

This ‘bro-culture’ has led, again unsurprisingly, to the male loneliness epidemic, which sees a disproportionate number of young single men struggling with mental health issues, with more than 1 in 7 men admitting that they have no close friends. 

It would seem obvious to me that the isolation many men are feeling is due to the aforementioned (societally endorsed) prioritisation of capital over emotional and social connection. This certainly seems to be the case given that women, who’ve historically been excluded from the world of work while femininity has been stereotyped as overly emotional, aren’t having the same issues to the same degree. Then again, Trump just won the last US election so it would seem that many men have been acting a little hysterical recently. 

It’s no wonder that so many young men are seeking a sense of community and solidarity with other people they can relate to. It makes sense, also, given Gen Z’s sense of political fatigue and the increasing isolation of the generation as a whole, that many of them are likely to follow a party which is made deliberately accessible to them on social media channels that they frequent anyway. In fact, I’m sure the Nazi party even used a similar tactic with the materials available to them during the second world war. 

To put it bluntly: now isn’t a great time to be anything other than a straight white male if you’re looking to feel safe in the streets and supported by the UK government - despite what the straight white men themselves might believe. 

Bros to the Left 

If only to complicate matters further, early in the 2010s, out from the insidious depths of sexist Reddit forums crawled the infamous “brocialist”. First coined by socialist Ben Silverman, the term was born out of a need to call out sexism in socialist circles. Broscialism followed the “manarchism” identification of misogynistic anarchists. Which means: even on the Left women aren’t safe.

Memes and internet culture tells us that the “broscialist” is the type of guy who carries around a tote bag, wears carhartt trousers and a condom hat, is probably vegetarian, and takes you on dates to see Karl Marx’s grave. 

On a slightly more serious note, this type of person is usually someone who frames class struggle as not just fundamental (which it is, obviously) but also more important than racial and gender struggles, rather than viewing genuine socialism as an intersectional political identity. 

However, as Silverman is eager to assert early in his article, is not to say that “all socialist men are all sexists”, and in fact there have been statistics to suggest that straight men who hold more Leftist/liberal views are not only more likely to be proponents of things like feminism and humane immigration laws, but also more attractive to the women they may want to have sex with. It’s funny how respect works like that isn’t it. 

The harmful aspect of the ‘broscialist’ archetype then is the use of fake “woke” politics in order to attract women, whilst continuing to benefit from the system of patriarchy that oppresses women. This phenomenon has also been called out under other names such as “fauxcialism” or “faux feminism”. 

As Silverman points out, those who fulfil this characterisation don’t tend to respond very well to being called a ‘broscialist’, least of all be convinced by, and subsequently attempt to rectify, their sexist behaviour/ideologies. 

Nevertheless, the use of broscialist memes as a sort of humour against misogynistic oppression carries a sense of humour in solidarity that we’ve seen in other female-led movements, such as the #womeninmalefields movement, or women’s mockery of ‘bro culture’ in general. 

It’s true that the likelihood that someone branded with the ‘broscialist’ brush is unlikely to respond well to this term, least of all be convinced by, and subsequently attempt to rectify, their sexist behaviour/ideologies. However, as Silverman explains, as long as the problems we see reflected in the origination of the term ‘broscialist’ persist, then “the word still has a certain amount of utility.” 

Oh, and persist they do. 

Our collective obsession with the softboy: Too cute to cancel 

Despite their striking similarities, it’s important to make a distinction between the more insidiously intentioned “broscialist”, and the “softboy”, otherwise known as “Hollywood’s baby girls” who also populate our social media. 

For one thing, it’s more difficult to be mad about scrolling endlessly through photos of celebrities who look like Eddie Redmayne, Andrew Garfield, and Paul Mescal - and no, it’s not just the gladiator skirt and the accent, although they certainly help.  

While the differences at first glance may not seem stark, I think a significant factor is that the broscialist has undoubtedly risen out of - and contributed towards - the “pick-up” industry that is centred on manipulating women and asserting masculine dominance. That is to say, this identity is most problematic when his “woke” politics are a direct result of his desire to make himself appeal to women. 

By contrast, the softboy seems to mostly just benefit from pretty privilege. These men inarguably do hold certain privileges thanks to their position within a patriarchal system, and certainly a feminist label won’t harm their brand - or its appeal to women. However, unlike the brocialist, the softboy isn’t inherently political. Funnily enough, that’s our next problem. 

See, for the “hollywood baby girl”, their political wokeness was never their point of appeal. Rather it’s their softness, their harmlessness, an almost childlike resistance to political systems as a whole. This persona is carefully structured to render them ultimately blameless in line with the understanding that ignorance is a kind of bliss. 

Take, for example, Redmayne’s role as a trans woman in The Danish Girl 2015. Redmayne has since admitted his mistake in partaking in “years of cisgender success on the back of trans stories”. What’s more, he’s been incredibly vocal in his support of gender equality and the trans community. Nevertheless, he did receive a Best Actor Academy Award nomination for his role. 

Rather than dismiss issues of women’s oppression as less important identity politics like a broscialist might be likely to do, softboys are, as the name suggests, presented as ‘boys’. This diminutive attempts to convince us that it’s reasonable not to expect these men to have even thought to engage in the first place. Consequently, this is also the reason why, despite Paul Mescal and Eddie Redmayne’s ignorance of women’s vulnerability in certain situations demonstrated on national television, the two ‘hollywood baby girls’ remain just too cute to cancel. 

Taking inspiration from socialist Raewyn Connell’s book Masculinities, video essayist and author Alice Cappelle tells us that hollywood baby girls speak to a subordinate and complicit masculinity. This means they’re still heterosexually desirable and they don’t deliberately perpetrate misogynistic or sexist attitudes. However, their complicity within the system is what allows them to benefit from the hierarchical structures which remain in place. Cappelle suggests that people like Paul Mescal have a lazy view of social justice which ignores their own agency in the patriarchal system. 

Ironically, this is where we see how important identity politics are in fact in conjunction with social politics. While “men can be victims of patriarchy…they still hold a lot of power over women. Men still have agency, they’re not puppets of patriarchy.” 

The softboy then, is arguably less mal-intentioned than the broscialist and therefore less harmful as a result  - depending on where you stand on the deontology of Kantian ethics that is. 

On the one hand, we can see this ignorance and innocence as an endearingly antithetical version of masculinity compared to the toxicity of people like Tate. This is what video essayist Elle Literacy has termed ‘medicinal masculinity’. 

Elle argues that the behaviour of men displaying ‘medicinal masculinity’ is often validated by their appeal to heterosexual women who, at this point, are fighting for their lives (literally) when it comes to their romantic and/or sexual options. When, in reality, masculinity shouldn’t be subject to verification by anyone. Especially not by heterosexual desirability that continues to reinforce a harmful gender binary. People shouldn’t feel more like themselves because someone is more likely to sleep with them. 

While as a socialist I’m of the firm belief that we’re all part of a collaborative system which is essential for the sustainment of humanity and communities as a whole, a belief in the essentiality of shared materialities is not the same as the belief in the commodification of oneself that holds that without other people you are less valuable. 

What’s more, it’s exactly this conflation of personality with desirability that has led to the specific performance of masculinity and the growth of the pick-up industry in the manosphere - and which, counterintuitively, means that the absence of external validation makes someone feel not only less themselves, but also less, themselves. 

But while the softboy may be comfortable wearing less “masculine” clothes and crying on camera, in order for us to see real change/progress, they too need to learn how it feels to be uncomfortable and deeply disturbed by oppression of more than half of the population. 

This is not to say that they’re not learning! However, arguably the malleability of these soft boys makes them fundamental to the feminist movement. 

If we’re serious about men’s need for better social education (for their benefit as well as women’s) - and alarmed enough by the male gen z uptake of Reform UK membership - then perhaps a more useful approach is to view the ignorance of the softboy as a willingness to learn. A susceptibility to progressive, intersectional feminism, if you will. 

Because it’s not enough to be a feminist by name, these men also need to demonstrate - by disrupting the patriarchal systems of privilege that they continue to benefit from - that they do actually care about women’s rights. 

Most importantly of all: the Left must get to them before Reform UK does.