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We're hearing more from and about American extremist groups lately, like white supremacists and Incels. One thing their members have in common is misogyny. Today's guest is Jessica Reaves, the Editorial Director at the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League. She and her team monitor extremists across the ideological spectrum. In today's episode you'll hear what she's learned about these groups, why she thinks misogyny should be treated as another form of extremism, and how we can put a stop to it.
RESOURCES:
Report: When Women are the Enemy: The Intersection of Misogyny and White Supremacy
TRANSCRIPT: We do our best on these, if you see an error, let us know!
Lauren Schiller: I'm Lauren Schiller and this is Inflection Point, with stories of how women rise up. On today's episode...
Jessica Reeves: It's a terrible moment and yet I'm hoping that when we look back on it, future generations look back on it, we recognize the extent to which this has been a moment maybe that led us to a place of honesty on these issues that we've never had before.
Lauren Schiller: You can only hear that conversation on Inflection Point coming up.
Jessica Reeves: My name is Jessica Reeves and I'm the Editorial Director at the Center on Extremism at ADL or the Anti-Defamation League. My job mostly consists of, well, it entirely consists of overseeing the entire body of work produced by Center on Extremism staffers. We're a staff of about 12 around the country, and we monitor extremists across the ideological spectrum and produce reports and work with law enforcement and the community to educate them on extremism and the risks that various movements pose.
Lauren Schiller: Does that mean that you and your staff are looking at these movements and events as they unfold from the outside in or are you deeper inside what's going on? Do you or any of your staff actually have relationships with people inside these movements?
Jessica Reeves: Our research is outside in, we tend not to participate in any of the activities even as sort of observers. We just look at it from a journalistic perspective. We do have ways, which I will not get into here, but we do have ways of keeping track of what's going on inside of these movements, and some of that is based in technology, some of it's based in experience, some of it's based in past relationships. So we have a fairly broad toolbox to work with when it comes to understanding what these groups are doing, what their activity looks like on a day-to-day basis. It helps us stay abreast of the very quickly changing landscape these days.
Lauren Schiller: I'm Lauren Schiller and this is Inflection Point, with stories of how women rise up. In today's episode, I'm talking with Jessica Reeves of the Anti-Defamation League or ADL, and she, as you just heard, studies extremist groups. Many of these groups that she studies including white supremacists and incels, so-called involuntary celibates, have one thing in common, they would like to keep women down.
Jessica Reeves: This has always existed. This has always been there. We are a country founded on white supremacy. We are a country founded on misogyny. There are so many things that formed the backbone of this country in our society that we have to deal with, and we have never dealt with any of these things. And I just think it's such a... it's a terrible moment, and yet I'm hoping that when we look back on it, future generations look back on it, we recognize the extent to which this has been a moment maybe that led us to a place of honesty on these issues that we've never had before.
Lauren Schiller: We hear about white supremacists, we hear about white nationalists. Let's just start there. Is there a difference?
Jessica Reeves: There is no difference, no. White nationalism is just a sort of prettified version of white supremacy. If somebody says there are white nationalists, there are white supremacist. They may try to differentiate themselves by saying, "Oh well, as a white nationalist, I believe that white people should have their own space. We should have our own territory within the United States and non-whites can have their own territories. So I'm not advocating for the injury of anyone else or for the expulsion of anyone else per se, I just want my own space. But in fact, it all just comes back to I believe that white people need to be separate because I believe they are superior and different and better in all of these different ways, and I want my own country based on race."
Lauren Schiller: Well, let's talk about misogyny. Define misogyny.
Jessica Reeves: Misogyny is just a step up from everyday sexism. Misogyny is taking action that will injure women. That doesn't mean physically, it could mean emotionally, it could mean in terms of jobs, it could mean professionally or educationally or any of those things, but you're doing something to injure women, you're doing something against women, and it doesn't even have to be knowingly, there's a lot of internalized misogyny as we know, as we saw in the last election, there's... All of these things can play out in a non-extremist looking way and I think that's what's so interesting and challenging about studying misogyny is that we all have experienced sexism.
Most of us have probably experienced misogyny, it's just harder to put our finger on what made it different. And I'm still grappling with how to explain the nuance there because sexism is treating women differently, misogyny is treating women differently in an overtly or explicitly harmful way. Misogyny is rooted in a hatred of women and often a fear of women.
Lauren Schiller: You've recently released a report on the connection between white supremacy and misogyny. And it's very obvious just in the first few minutes that we've been talking, that those two things are connected by hate of an other, but there's so much more to it. There was something that you wrote in that report that was, they want femininity over feminism. And so now the next question is really, what are their views on feminists that make us so vile?
Jessica Reeves: Yes.
Lauren Schiller: I laugh wickedly, [crosstalk 00:06:53] -
Jessica Reeves: Feminism and feminist more generally are the enemy of white supremacists as well as misogynists, and I can talk more about the various strains of misogyny that we're following and that have come to the fore, especially in recent years, but the beef with feminism and feminist is that women are attempting to take stature away from white men, and this victimhood narrative is just pervasive throughout white supremacists ideology and misogynists landscapes. So this is one of the things that connects them, is this sense that, okay, all of these opportunities, all of these things that I've theoretically worked for, and I'm using air quotes, which is not helpful on an audio recording, but these things that are supposed to be mine, and this is the white man talking, are being threatened by advances by women and advances by people of color, and God help them if they get close to a woman of color, then that's a whole other... All of their fears wrapped up in one.
It's just a victimhood narrative, it's a sense of being cheated out of something, it's a sense of being denied their birthright, and they see this as an encroaching issue. They also, white supremacists also are very clear in that they link feminism back to the Jews because everything always comes back to the Jews, and this is part of a larger white supremacists conspiracy theory about Jews controlling things including immigration, which is a plot to replace white people with non-white people.
Anyway, there's a whole underbelly of horribleness that we could get into there, but just to keep the focus on feminism, again, we're back to that grievance. There's just a constant state of grievance among misogynists and among white supremacists. And when I started working on this report that you mentioned, it was spurred on by the Alek Minassian van attack in Toronto, which happened in 2018, and that was definitely not the first time that we'd seen someone who identifies as an incel, which is involuntary celibate, act out against women violently, strike out against them, murder them, but it was a sort of turning point in the sense that people were starting to really pay attention to this issue in some cases for the first time, or they were starting to take a broader look at this issue for the first time.
The Alek Minassian attack led me to start looking at some of these message boards where incels spend a lot of time and I noticed how frequently their language mirrored the language that I saw on white supremacists message boards, their language about women. White supremacists have a very specific view of how women should behave, how women should be... Of their role in the household, of their role in society. White men in the white supremacist movement want women who are fertile, a, that's their most important function. They are breeders who can create the next generation of white warrior babies. And then after that they're supposed to be supporting their husbands, they're supposed to be building and keeping a beautiful home. And then of course raising all these many white children.
That's the very specific set of demands that are placed on women in the white supremacist movement, and there's a lot of overlap in terms of what the misogynist sector of the internet, which is broadly referred to as the manosphere, they have their own views of how women should behave, but it's all very retrograde, like it's 1950 all over again. They're, women need to know their place. Women need to understand that men are in charge. Women are taking too many liberties with the way they dress, the way they speak, the way they run for public office. So there's very much a need to contain women, and that's true across the board, there's just different ways of expressing it in the white supremacist community versus the misogynist online sphere.
Lauren Schiller: The first question I have is, why would a woman go for that? I imagine that half of the population is women just like the rest of us and that many of them are bought in full force. What are some insights around why that would be?
Jessica Reeves: There actually aren't... There aren't a huge number of women who are active in the white supremacist movement. There are [crosstalk 00:12:14] -
Lauren Schiller: They're not all married? They're not all married to women who are buying into this idea of the breeder?
Jessica Reeves: A lot of them seem to be single based on what I've seen, and or suffer from tremendous marital problems, which is in some ways not all that surprising, but certainly there are women who provide support to these men, who make sandwiches for them or whatever when they're going out to protest against a synagogue or a gay rights rally or whatever they are doing that Saturday. But there are just not that many sort of visible members who are women. So it's been hard to understand them, that population, because they just don't speak publicly.
There are a couple of women who do and who will coach other white women on how to behave, and that's where the 1950s housewife ideal comes into play. That's how we know what's expected of white women in the white supremacist movement. But again, we come back to the good old internalized misogyny. If you are brought up in a situation where you're led to believe that you are less than, that you're not a full person, that your worth is dependent on the acceptance and love of a man, and that a man is supposed to control everything in your life, you're going to seek that out obviously in your own relationships. Or if you just have really low self-esteem, that's a running issue throughout extremism.
A lot of these people who are most susceptible to being recruited into extremist movements, they're looking for a place to belong, they're looking for a purpose in life, they're looking for a group that will accept them. Many of them struggle with social anxiety or social alienation growing up, and we see recruiters from the white supremacist movement capitalizing on that. We see exactly the same thing happening when let's say ISIS wants to recruit people. You seek out the people who do not have a sense of who they are yet, what they believe, where they stand on issues, and you mold them. So that recruitment process is very similar across extremist movements.
And it's true for the women as well. We know that a lot of these women do not have strong senses of self. There's not a huge amount of self-esteem going on. Sometimes we have to take on the role of armchair psychologist, but sort of a fascinating subcommunity and I think we're just starting to learn more about these women. We're seeing some women leaving the movement and they will of course be the best sources for inside information. You know, what goes on, what kind of recruitment happens for women.
I gather there are matchmaking efforts made to sort of pair up the men in the movement with eligible women. And by eligible, generally speaking, we're talking about quite a bit younger, I would imagine mostly legal age, but still quite a bit younger than the men or at least a bit younger, and the key thing is, for the white supremacists, is that the women cannot have ever had a relationship with a non-white man. Because if that happens then they're ruined and they are off the table altogether. They are no longer even considered human in the eyes of the white supremacists.
Lauren Schiller: I'm Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point, with stories of how women rise up. I'm speaking with Jessica Reeves, the Editorial Director at the Center on Extremism, at the Anti-Defamation League. You can reveal your true power with a contribution to our production at inflectionpointradio.org, and by subscribing to our podcast on your favorite podcast app. When we come back, we'll talk about why extremism seems to be on the rise and what we can do about it.
I'm Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point. My guest is Jessica Reeves, the Editorial Director at the Center on Extremism, at the Anti-Defamation League. What is happening in our country right now that it feels like we're seeing a rise in this movement? And subquestion, are we seeing a rise in this movement or is it just sort of the same percentage of our population but they have risen more to the surface or somehow seem to gain more attention or possibly even power? I don't know.
Jessica Reeves: Yeah, it's all tied up. Certainly in the last presidential election in 2016, we heard language used that we have never heard in mainstream politics before. Language about immigrants, language about women, language about non-white people, and that changed the game. This was a signal to a lot of these extremists, a lot of these white supremacists, a lot of these misogynists, that it was, "Hey, come on out. Everything's safe here. You're allowed to say these things." You can express your views freely because this guy is out here talking about these issues and using these words and nothing's happening to him.
So we can't discount how powerful it is for these people to hear someone at the upper reaches of power in this country talking about women and non-white people in a way that we literally have never heard before from a public official.
To your question about whether there's more of these people or if they're just more visible, I would say there are more of them in the sense that if we define them as [inaudible 00:19:46] people who can engage with other racists and white supremacists in chat rooms or online otherwise. That doesn't necessarily mean they're out in the streets, that they're going to Charlottesville, that they're taking part in these white supremacists rallies, but it does mean that they are spending time in these forums, on these message boards, where these views are shared and celebrated and elevated and where they're egging each other on too often to commit horrific crimes, obviously not anywhere near all of them commit crimes, but we do see this echo chamber effect which is just creating a really very like sort of a cacophonous space where these guys are all yelling and screaming at the top of their lungs and they're finally finding people who will listen to them.
These people have always existed, but they just have a much broader reach now because of the internet, and they've also been to a certain extent, given a microphone, because of some of the discourse we see from public officials.
Lauren Schiller: Yeah. Well, that's another thing I've been thinking about is what this rise in their vocality... Is that even a noun? Means for who runs our country, and which one led to the other? Did Trump get elected because these guys felt emboldened and ran to the polls to vote for him? Or are there sort of like less vocal people who hold these views that felt emboldened and they felt like they found their guy without necessarily describing themselves as white supremacists? Somehow normalizing that behavior.
Jessica Reeves: A lot of white supremacists, I will say, do not like Trump. They think he's a sellout. They don't like that he's friendly with Israel. This goes against a lot of their fundamental core beliefs. But they love it when he says things, and we've charted this on our blog posts, at Center on Extremism, they love it when he comes out and says overtly racist things about immigrants or non-white people. When he made that comment about, why aren't we seeing more immigration from Norway? They loved that. That was right up their alley.
Lauren Schiller: Is that a classic dog whistle?
Jessica Reeves: That's another term, the dog whistle. Yeah, sort of having... White supremacists have long been enamored of all things Nordic, all things Scandinavian. So whether he was using it as a dog whistle, I don't know, but it certainly resonated within the white supremacist movement as, "Hey, this guy knows the lingo. He's speaking our language."
Lauren Schiller: Does that mean I need to get rid of the hygge book in my bathroom?
Jessica Reeves: No. We've all been feeling very, very, sad for all the very nice Norwegian and Swedish and Finnish people that we know and work with because their culture has been co-opted to a certain extent by white supremacists. That's been the case for quite some time. The Odinists are a group of white supremacists who have essentially co-opted a lot of these symbols, but anyway, no, you don't have to. We want to defend our Scandinavian friends as best we can. So, no.
Lauren Schiller: Okay. I guess one of the bigger questions I'm asking is, because we are hearing more about white supremacists, their views on misogyny, misogyny being normalized by our president, but at the same time we're in the wake of this Me Too movement and Time's Up, and sexual harassment being something that's on the front page as often as an extremist act is in some ways, is that a coincidence that those two things are happening together? Or have you thought about what the connection is just in terms of the pendulum swinging back and forth like this?
Jessica Reeves: Right. Well, two things. One, I think Hillary Clinton was robbed of this election victory because of misogyny, I will say that, and sexism. I think we all just have to accept that and recognize it for what it is. The white supremacists, even the full-on racists in the United States, do not make up a large enough voting block to have changed the outcome of the election. I think there's certainly evidence that there were people who just were uncomfortable, and I'm using air quotes again, with the idea of a woman being in charge and specifically with Hillary Clinton.
And obviously we can get into... There's so much political background there, but fundamentally, this is a country that did elect twice a black man to be president and we could not get it together to elect a woman, a white woman, but a woman, and it's like that means something. That means something about where we are as a country. I think a lot of us after 2016, I felt... I really internalized a lot of that.
It was sort of like, "Geez, this country hates women." And... I don't know, there was so much that came out of that that I think emboldened men who had a baseline of feeling that women were not on par with men, but it also fueled so much anger and so much frustration and so much righteous rage from women that, I have to believe that that was tied into women saying in workplaces, in Hollywood, around the world saying, "Enough. Enough. I'm not dealing with this. We just listened to this guy talking about assaulting women with impunity and he just got elected to be president of the United States. I personally am not going to put up with this anymore."
I think there are historians and social scientists who know this, what this pendulum looks like and how the... Could probably graph all of this out, but that's my lay person's opinion of why we saw what we saw.
Lauren Schiller: You study extremism, but then there's all these other tentacles that leak into the mainstream points of view, even as those same people might say they abhor the views of a white supremacist or a misogynist.
Jessica Reeves: Yeah. There are a lot of people who are perfectly comfortable and perfectly willing to live with what we consider sort of low grade misogyny or sexism, who wouldn't consider themselves to be sexist or misogynist. Which is exactly the same thing we see with racism. It's what you're conditioned to be okay with, again, with the air quotes. But it's all about what we are willing to put up with in our daily lives. What people of color are willing to put up with to keep their jobs, what women are willing to put up with to keep their jobs. That's sort of what defines what's acceptable and that's putting all of the onus on the people who are experiencing the discrimination. That's not cool. To put it scientifically.
Lauren Schiller: One of the things you say in your report on the connection between white supremacy and misogyny is that misogyny is dangerous and under-reported. How do we make it more reported and less dangerous?
Jessica Reeves: When I wrote the report, I was trying to really drive home the fact that we talk about prejudice in a certain way when it affects certain populations. So we talk about antisemitism, we talk about racism, we talk about xenophobia, we talk about homophobia, and all of those things are tied into extremist movements in different ways. But we rarely discuss misogyny, which is a, as we discovered through doing this research, is a cornerstone of white supremacy, but also of this specifically misogynistic group of men who exist primarily online and occasionally lash out in murderous rages as we've seen over the last couple of years. But how often do we call out misogyny as part of these extremist movements or as its own form of extremism?
I just wanted people to see them on the same level and to talk about them with the same frequency and to be willing to call people out on it. I just think that we let a lot of misogyny go, we let it fly, we let it sit, and that's really dangerous for women and for the young boys who are hearing it and who are hearing it be okay over and over and over again. And in terms of reporting, I think we just need to elevate misogyny into this space where people are taking it seriously, where people are calling it out for what it is, and where people are recognizing that it has real life impact, it has impact on women's bodily autonomy in terms of domestic violence, it has effect on women's ability to go to a hot yoga class or to walk down the street in Toronto or to belong to a sorority in Southern California.
These are all places where men have attacked women because they have felt that women were not treating them the way they deserve to be treated, specifically, that they were not having sex to the extent that they felt they deserved. And those are incel attacks, those are involuntary celibate attacks, all of which I chart out in the report.
Lauren Schiller: Incels and white supremacist, they share this misogynistic view, but if you're one, you're not necessarily the other?
Jessica Reeves: Right. Incels view women specifically through a sexual lens, whereas white supremacists tend to view women more through this traditionalist retrograde lens of being a housewife, being a mother. They do have very different views on women, but both of them denigrate women. It's part of their ideology.
Lauren Schiller: Going back to identifying violence against women as a demonstration of misogyny, but then also the connection between domestic violence and mass violence, it seems like in many of the attacks that we've seen in mass shootings, specifically, that these guys had already been in trouble for hurting their wives or girlfriends, would bringing misogyny more into the limelight so to speak and institutionalizing that as a problem that could lead to bigger problems be helpful?
Jessica Reeves: Yeah, absolutely. The New York Times did a really... Several reporters in New York Times did a really great piece in August, and the headline is A Common Trait Among Mass Killers: Hatred Toward Women, and they tracked a bunch of these mass murderers and looked at the relationships they'd had with women. I think we're getting to the point where we are starting to understand that there is a connection between violence that happens in private and violence that happens in public. And I think that there... Yes, absolutely. One of the things we can do is to talk to law enforcement and make sure that they understand, "Hey, this is not something that you dismiss. This is not something that you just write-off as boys being boys. This is a serious issue that can lead to violence against one woman, violence against many women." And I think the more law enforcement is talking about this, frankly, the better.
Scott Beierle, who's the guy who shot up the Hot Yoga studio in Tallahassee last year, he had been called in a couple of times to the police station because he had been groping women. He had been groping them, he had been following them, he had been stalking. I think one... There were all kinds of red flags going on, but in a couple of cases women didn't press charges. I think that speaks more to what's going on with our policing system and how women are treated when they do bring charges, and I can't speak to their specific cases obviously, but we know that women who bring charges of assault or violence or harassment against men are not often treated as well as they should be.
But if these things had been taken more seriously and if Beierle had not been able to get a gun, which he should not have been able to, then we might not have had that mass murderer in Tallahassee. It's all tied up in law enforcement response, in gun laws, and closing loopholes, and just legislation generally, both on a state and national level, taking violence against women more seriously and pursuing charges in a more vigorous way.
Lauren Schiller: What about these websites like 4chan and 8chan? 8chan, the founder even said there's too much violent rhetoric happening on this website. It should go away. Does that actually make an impact?
Jessica Reeves: Honestly, what we've found is that when one site shuts down another one springs up. For the tech companies at this point where it's sort of a whack-a-mole situation, they're trying to, to some extent and with varying degrees of success, monitor the conversations that are going on on their websites, on their forums. But when they shut one thing down, very quickly these guys find another place to be, another more forgiving or "Open" place to be.
There are a couple of tech companies that seem to take a very antagonistic view towards anybody trying to encourage responsible monitoring or enforcement of terms of service. That should be commonplace, but we just don't see that happening in a lot of these sites.
Lauren Schiller: How does that make you feel after you've spent an hour crawling through some of these websites?
Jessica Reeves: It's a challenge. I was a reporter for many years before I joined ADL and I think that really helped me set up a compartmentalization in my brain. I covered some rough stuff as a reporter and I got good at, reasonably good at coming home, turning that part off and focusing on the rest of my life. That's not to say everyone on the team doesn't have recurring nightmares. The people that you come to rely on in this work, are the people who really understand what you're going through on a psychological and emotional level on a day-to-day basis. So I rely on my co-workers and colleagues too. If I need a sounding board, if I'm just feeling run-down or just under too much pressure or if I just can't take it anymore, I know how to take a break, but I also know that I can call people that I work with and just vent.
Lauren Schiller: Yeah. So when you go on vacation, is it just like a no technology zone? Like are you able to insulate yourself for a minute?
Jessica Reeves: Yeah, I try really hard to just leave everything at home. The problem is that, and this is something that affects our work in a global way, but I mean extremism is part of our everyday news cycle these days. So it's not as if I can just say, "Okay, I'm not going to look at extremist news." It means I can't look at the news generally because extremism has infiltrated so much of our day-to-day lives and it's in our political landscape, and the news cycle is just all about these stories. And so, yeah, I just have to say, "Okay, I'm not even going to look," and that's really hard for me to do as a former reporter and just as a sort of interested human. But it's so important to do it and I know I need to do it more often.
Lauren Schiller: All right. Jessica, what's the best advice that anyone's ever given you about how to stand up to someone who is spouting a worldview that is totally an opposition to what you believe to be right and true?
Jessica Reeves: Honestly, I think if you can stomach it, you just need to talk to people. It's very hard to hate someone when you know them. And I think the more people reach out to each other and spend more time around people who are not like themselves, the less likely we are to see racism or sexism or misogyny or white supremacy. We need to surround ourselves with people who think differently than we do, and that doesn't mean accepting terrible worldviews and dangerous worldviews, it just means talking to people and trying to get people to understand a more compassionate and empathetic worldview, and I know that's easier said than done.
My first reaction is always to write people off when they express views that I think are horrible, and certainly if they're dangerous views, you want to get away from them as quickly as possible. But I'm talking more about the, again, the garden variety racism or the sexism. You want to talk to people and you want to find out what's going on and you want to figure out if you can present yourself or someone in your circle or family, and this is only if you can do it safely obviously, but if you can present yourself as an opportunity for them to learn more about why diversity or being kind to each other or not embracing racist ideology is a good thing, then I think that's a moment of opportunity. And I don't think we can pretend that they come along all the time, but I think it's something that we need to be on the lookout for.
Lauren Schiller: I'm Lauren Schiller and you're listening to Inflection Point. Coming up, Jessica Reeves will tell us how to respond to misogyny when we encounter it online, at school, and at work.
I'm Lauren Schiller and you're listening to Inflection Point. And here's Jessica's toolkit.
Jessica Reeves: I tell parents, pay attention to what your kids are doing online. Everybody knows this. It's parenting one-on-one, but there's just so much out there that's so incredibly dangerous, and I will often refer them to a really amazing piece in the Washingtonian from May of this year that was written by a parent of a 13 or 12 year old, I think 13 year old boy, who had an incident at school where he was chastised for treating a girl badly, came home and started to look for support online because he was feeling wronged by whatever disciplinary action had been taken. And he went online and found all of these sites where he could talk about girls and how they were bad and they were taking things away from boys, and that escalated into full-on misogynistic commentary and forums and participation in that. And then he got sucked in to full-on alt-right websites.
Literally there's just this like algorithm to disaster that YouTube has perfected and it's just, it's incredibly unnerving to see how quickly all of this can happen and snowball online. So pay attention to what's happening online. We need to raise kids who are good at asking questions. We need to raise girls who aren't going to take guff. We're going to raise boys who respect women in a meaningful way. And we're going to make sure that we're calling out misogyny when we see it or hear it, and it doesn't matter where it's coming from. Whether it's coming from the president of the United States or whether it's coming from the leader of your cub scout group.
Lauren Schiller: Can you talk for a minute about the world of gaming, which everyone's got a different point of view on the world of gaming and its influence on our children? But you happen to have some data around what happens inside these online video games and what it means for recruitment of mostly young guys, I'm imagining?
Jessica Reeves: We are increasingly seeing these games that you can play on an open network used by extremists to recruit, especially young boys. So these games that you can play with people around the world where you're chatting with them, where you're having interactions with them. These are becoming recruitment opportunities for white supremacists, just as they've long been recruitment opportunities for people who are pedophiles and other horribleness.
The extremists are looking into these open network games because they know that they're finding boys especially who'll be susceptible to their teachings, to their way of thinking. They want to find new recruits, that's something that white supremacists are constantly doing. They're keeping an eye on college campuses. We've seen a huge rise in propaganda efforts on campuses, because again, you're targeting people who are at the right age, who haven't quite figured out who they are yet. So the idea of targeting these gaming platforms, these gaming systems, falls into the same line of thinking. If you can grab these kids before they have themselves sorted out altogether, you're finding a really... It's a very vulnerable population.
Lauren Schiller: So now that we've scared the crap out of some parents who are listening, who have kids who play on these open network games, what do you suggest to parents?
Jessica Reeves: If it were me, I would be closing those networks down. Just play with people you know. Just play it close. Play with the people in your family, play just with your friends who you can identify specifically online. I don't know that there's any reason for kids to be so exposed for hours at a time to a world that we know is not particularly safe at the moment.
It's really important not to dismiss sexist or misogynist comments just by laughing them off or saying, "Boys will be boys," and I will advise people, think about whether these comments were targeting a person of another race or ethnicity and does that change your perception of how serious the slur is? And it can be a really powerful teaching tool because we are reasonably good at detecting... Of responding to racism. What if we were that good at recognizing when sexism and misogyny were happening?
Lauren Schiller: What happens when you're in a moment as an adult where you are spotting sexism or misogyny in your professional or private life?
Jessica Reeves: Yeah, I think as with other prejudices and expressions of hatred, we need to be more comfortable with being uncomfortable. We need to call these things out when we see them. If you see something happening in your workplace that you know is wrong because a woman is being treated differently or talked about differently, or her femaleness is the butt of a joke, or anybody who's identifying as a woman is being treated poorly based on her gender or gender identity, that is a moment to speak up. That's a moment to say, "Hey, I don't appreciate hearing this. I don't think it's right. I want you to stop." And if you need to elevate it to an HR situation or if that's available to you, that's really important because I think systemically we are not set up to take these things seriously.
The more that the change agents, and I do think of HR department sometimes they can be change agents in their best iterations, the more that change agents hear about these things happening and these misogynist or sexist expressions, the more likely they are to start incorporating that into their teaching or into their training, and that's how change happens. It just has to happen on a personal level, at the same time that it's happening on a societal level. Because one really can't happen without the other.
I think we need to really demand that our law enforcement officials and agencies generally take violence against women seriously. We need to make sure that they are responding to calls in a meaningful way, meaning that they're not just brushing things off. We need to train law enforcement to understand what domestic violence can look like. We need them to understand when they're called into a situation that they need to look for specifically misogynistic red flags. And I think that's just part of a broader societal sort of teaching moment where we can all figure out, "Okay, we're going to start taking this seriously, misogyny as a social problem, as a social ill, as a form of prejudice, as an extremist mentality. We're going to start taking it seriously." Law enforcement is often the first line of defense and I think that we just have to make sure that they're well trained.
We also need to train our educators better to understand the language that can happen in classrooms, the language that will often happen between kids, and I believe firmly in the right to free expression. I think that the way to counter bad speech is with good speech. I don't believe that we should be censoring people for normal exchanges, and people should be able to ask questions. But I do think once you get into inciting violence, once you get into specific threats against specific people, that's when people have to act, whether that's law enforcement acting, whether it's tech companies acting, whether it's individuals reporting things to tech companies, I just think we all have to be much more vigilant about the language that's being used.
And we also need to ask that our public officials call out misogyny. We need to also ask that they not actively participate in or contribute to misogyny, which unfortunately seems to be beyond the scope of what's possible at the moment. But hopefully down the line we will get to a place where we are able to expect a degree of civility from our elected officials at large.
Lauren Schiller: That was Jessica Reeves, Editorial Director at the Center on Extremism, at the Anti-Defamation League. I've got a link to her paper on white supremacy and misogyny on my website at InflectionPointRadio.org. This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller, and this is how women rise up.
That's our Inflection Point for today. Today's program was produced in part by the generous donation of [Paul John Turco 00:51:13]. All of our episodes are on Apple Podcast, RadioPublic, Stitcher, Pandora, NPR One, all the places. Give us a five star review and subscribe to the podcast. Know women leading change we should talk to? Let us know at InflectionPointRadio.org. While you're there, support our production with a tax deductible monthly or one time contribution. When women rise up, we all rise up. Just go to InflectionPointRadio.org. We're on Facebook and Instagram at Inflection Point Radio. Follow us and join the Inflection Point Society, our Facebook group of everyday activists who seek to make extraordinary change through small daily actions. Follow me on Twitter @LASchiller. To find out more about today's guest and to be in the loop with our email newsletter, you know where to go: InflectionPointRadio.org.
Inflection Point is produced in partnership with KALW 91.7 FM in San Francisco NPRX. Our community manager is Alaura Weaver, our engineer and producer is Eric Wayne. I'm your host, Lauren Schiller.
