Julie Shayne has spent the better part of her teaching career navigating campus politics made complicated by being a woman.
Each semester, she once again finds herself on edge at the beginning of the Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies course she teaches. While most of her students have been pleasant, she said she has had to remain cautious of red flags.
“My classes meet a diversity requirement, so I get students in there who don’t want to be in there, or at least initially, they think they don’t want to be in there,” said Shayne, who is a teaching professor at the University of Washington Bothell. “So they’re almost resentful that they’re having to spend time learning something that they think is just political or opinion or however they feel.”
Professors are subject to pushback from students regardless of gender because of these requirements, but “it’s easier for them to take it out on the women professors, of course,” Shayne said.
Since becoming a professor more than two decades ago, she has grown accustomed to the sexism and double standards that women in academia face. “One of my favorite moments was back when papers were hard copies [and] returning a paper to a student that had marks on it about his writing, and he came up to me afterwards and said, ‘I just wanted to tell you that you’re wrong.’ That’s how he started the conversation,” she recalled.
However, in recent years, Shayne has seen the same gendered biases that have come to define her career as a professor also make their way into the mainstream. This has been exacerbated by the political ascent of President Donald Trump, social media and, more specifically, “the manosphere” — an online community of loosely connected blogs and websites that are characterized by anti-feminist and misogynistic ideas and content, according to Dr. Mariel Barnes, an assistant professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has tracked the movement’s origins and expansion.
“The kind of key thing here is that there’s lots of different subgroups within the manosphere, but they’re all linked by this idea that men are being systematically subjugated by women,” Barnes told The 19th.
The effects the manosphere has had on the zeitgeist have grown increasingly evident outside of online message boards. The language has been embraced in the political realm by the White House and has entered the pop culture lexicon through terms like “-maxxing” and “-pilled.” Politicians such as Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico, a Democratic state representative, and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican, have appeared on podcasts like the Joe Rogan Experience — which Barnes has described as manosphere adjacent -– in an effort to court younger male demographics.
To scholars who have monitored this online ecosystem for years, its growing popularity isn’t unexpected. “I always saw this as a problem and I think in the last maybe four years it’s maybe accelerated more than I anticipated, but, for me, this is kind of not surprising,” Barnes said.
What was once an online subculture largely confined to the darkest peripherals of internet forums has now emerged as a cultural and political force. And women professors are experiencing it firsthand.
For Shayne, it’s almost as if her classroom is a chatroom brought to life. “They kind of treat us like it’s part of the comment section. Like you can just say what you want as if we have no authority or expertise that we are drawing on.”
For her, this experience culminated in being anonymously reported to Turning Point’s Professor Watchlist, a directory that publishes the names of professors who express left-leaning views. It was an experience she described as nerve-wracking. “You feel this surveillance presence in the classroom because I don’t know how I got there. I certainly didn’t report myself.”
She doesn’t know if there is a definite throughline from internet spaces to her classroom. Instead, she’s tied the problem directly to Trump himself.
“Starting in 2015 with his [first presidential] campaign, he has legitimized and normalized misogyny in such horrific ways that when we say the manosphere, it makes it sound like it’s just online or in dark corners of the internet or however that works when it’s not,” she said. “It’s out in plain sight, and so I do think it manifests in that people feel more emboldened to just be disrespectful and rude to women.”
According to Gary Barker, founder and CEO of Equimundo: Center for Masculinities and Social Justice, there’s been a shift in behavior among young men since Trump’s first presidential campaign, the combined result of his history of sexual misconduct accusations and the targeted repeal of diversity-centered initiatives, which has disproportionately impacted women.
“Basically, you’ve got, you know, the misogynist-in-chief saying, ‘I’m going to use the power of the federal government to say this stuff is bad. Go back to the way it was. Men are in charge,’” he said. “I think there’s a big step to look at the federal government, and then watch how many people just followed.”
In a 2023 online survey, the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit found that in their search for community, more than 40 percent of young men in the United States trust one or more misogynistic voices online.
Equimundo has also been examining the global spread of the manosphere. A forthcoming study on online misogyny and online violence in South Africa and Brazil — in partnership with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and UN Women — found that men in both countries between the ages of 18 and 40 who are exposed to misogynist narratives online are 2.6 to 2.8 times more likely to perpetrate tech-facilitated violence against women.
“We don’t have this data point from the U.S., but we do have this from other countries that we’ve looked at: If you say that you’re a follower of some of the misogynist voices online — Andrew Tate, Clavicular — you are more likely to report that you’ve carried out some form of sexual harassment online,” he said. “That’s correlation, not causality, but it kind of follows that if this becomes normal, if you think such voices are normal, and particularly if you see lots of other young men following these guys, it does make some forms of harassment normal. So, you know, we believe it has an impact.”
J, who The 19th has agreed to identify only by her first initial due to her fear of retaliation, said she has experienced targeted misogyny since becoming a professor in the fall of 2020. Students made derogatory comments about race and gender during her first year of teaching. But she said she experienced misogyny more directly when she took a job teaching at a university in Texas.
“There were a lot of inappropriate comments that would just come out and, I guess, testing the waters with me like racist comments and homophobic and really gender-based [comments],” she said. While she managed to address these problems within her classes, since relocating to Texas, most of the misconduct has been lateral — and comes from her own male colleagues. “I think especially in Texas, it is absolutely like an old boys’ club, and you are expected to allow the men to speak first and not to have ideas.”
Though the spread of the manosphere’s ideologies is new to some, professors like J have long been aware of its existence. “To be honest, I think it’s something that a lot of us have known about if you have been aware of misogyny and basically social justice as a whole.”
She cited a CNN investigation in March that revealed more than 60 million visits to what the news outlet called an online “rape academy,” where men traded advice on how to facilitate the drugging and sexual assault of their wives.
“Part of me was like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe so many people clicked on that.’ And then part of me was like, ‘Actually, it doesn’t surprise me at all,’” she said. “Look at where we are in our society, you know, and everything else is going on. But I also think there’s a ton of people and a ton of professors that don’t recognize that and don’t even acknowledge that stuff like that exists.”
However, not all women professors are encountering the same problems, in part because of where they teach.
The University of Oregon’s Rebecca Schuman said that outside of a handful of students who expressed being fans of Andrew Tate in 2024, she hasn’t noted any “detectable manosphere influence” on her campus.
“However, something to keep in mind is that while ideological diversity exists everywhere, the University of Oregon is notoriously progressive-leaning in reputation, and so it does attract a certain persuasion of students, so my demographic of students is already self-selecting,” Schuman, an assistant teaching professor of English, said in an email. “Another thing to keep in mind is that the manosphere spends a good amount of its oxygen deriding education and higher education in particular, so the real devotees are not going to be in college.”
For women professors, men in the manosphere present challenges to how they are treated.
“They view them as illegitimate, right,” Barnes said. “This is a similar idea to affirmative action for Black and African-American individuals. It’s like they assume that those women got there because they are women and that they were prioritized because of that, not because of their credentials or their research.”
While she hasn’t experienced it herself, Barnes said there has been a noticeable uptick of misogynistic pushback in recent years, particularly on social media and against women professors. And the scale of the manosphere’s influence has steadily expanded, even if most people don’t recognize it by its name.
“I think part of it is it’s just a lot easier to find these people and then that kind of becomes a self-reinforcing worldview,” Barnes explained. “It’s like once you find these people, it lends credibility and legitimacy to your ideas about women. And so you kind of end up getting deeper and deeper and deeper into these kinds of ideologies.”
And algorithms further reinforce this belief system based on even the slightest online engagement.
“Websites that use algorithms have an incentive to keep eyeballs on them so they feed you more extremist content in order to do that,” she continued. Because of this, online users get exposed to this content simply by being on social media, even if they are not looking for it. The rise of manosphere-adjacent figures like Rogan and Jordan Peterson has contributed to popularizing this content as well, making these ideas more palatable for people to consume, according to Barnes.
As universities also undergo significant academic upheaval, some women professors, like J, have found themselves contemplating new careers.
“Especially in the last year, I have been looking really outside of the field of higher education and also at the staff side of higher education,” she said. “I love working with students. However, the hierarchy within higher education on the faculty side that I’ve experienced here in Texas is awful and just the risk and threat to academic freedom in Texas. I think it’s not worth it to even consider staying.”
The repeal of diversity initiatives has also played a role in J’s consideration to leave academia.
“They don’t even want us to acknowledge anything or even show that we accept anything other than the status quo,” she said. “And so to me, I think it’s just frustrating to be in a system at a university in a state where it was never really valued or accepted to begin with. And now it’s, ‘We don’t have to talk about it. We don’t have to think about it. It doesn’t exist here anymore. Just push it away. It’s DEI. We don’t even have to worry about it.’”
Other professors like Shayne, however, can’t envision doing anything else. Instead, she has become more determined to instruct — even as educators like herself field ongoing gendered mistreatment.
“I love what I do so much,” she said. “My feeling about it is that the more repression there is, the more we’re needed, and the more they attack us, the more that’s a sign that what we’re doing matters. I’m not getting bullied out of this at all. I can’t imagine doing anything else. I love, love, love being a professor.”
