Another reason to kill alt-rightists.

Why the alt-right is obsessed with sexuality

Neofascism wants to regiment our desires.

As US troops withdrew from Afghanistan in August, Fox News host Tucker
Carlson asked why the Taliban had won. �The people of Afghanistan,� he
speculated to viewers, �don�t actually want gender studies symposia� They
don�t hate their masculinity. They don�t think it�s toxic. They like the
patriarchy.� What he called the �neoliberal programme� of equal rights
was �grotesque�, �contrary to human nature,� and answered �none of our
deepest human desires�. He added, almost wistfully: �so now they�re
getting it all back�.

Carlson is only the most prominent voice blaming America�s decline on
sexual liberalism. On the alt-right forum Gab, users agree that the US
lost its war in Central Asia because it was no longer the same country
that invaded in 2001 � a �Christian nation� that outlawed gay marriage,
considered trans people �mentally ill� and banned gays from the military.
Memes by Taliban supporters around the world adopt a strikingly similar
attitude, depicting Islam as a defender of the patriarchal family against
gay rights, feminism and other �woke� ideologies.

[see also: The Taliban has taken lessons from the global jihadist
movement]

The alt-right is jubilant over the Taliban�s return to power because it
is a sign that sexual liberalism has been defeated. A post on the
Telegram service run by supporters of the neofascist group Proud Boys
praised the Taliban for taking �their nation back from globohomo�. They
were referring to a supposed �Globalist-Homosexual agenda�, an alleged
left-wing conspiracy to destroy white men. This meme was also cited by
the perpetrator of a ghastly massacre at two mosques in New Zealand in
2019.

The global far right is saturated with theories of sexual evil. For
incels (the �involuntary celibate� movement), the erotically successful
American � caricatured as �Chad�, �Stacy� and �Tyrone� � enjoys a sexual
despotism over lonely single men. The far right also obsesses over
treacherous Muslims luring Hindu girls to embrace Islam � what Hindu
nationalists call �love jihad�. It is consumed by conspiracy theories
around �leftist paedophiles�, child sex trafficking �across continents,
through the Vatican, and underneath the cover of charities and child
protective services� (as a QAnon bestseller puts it), �gender ideology�
out to �destroy the innocence of our children�, and fake reports of �gay
kits� in Brazilian schools featuring baby-bottles with penis-shaped
teats. These fantasies usually come with an apocalyptic impulse that
licenses extreme violence, from vigilante episodes, to mob violence and
state repression in India, to incel massacres across the US and now
Britain � in August this year, a gunman linked to the incel movement shot
and killed five others and then himself.
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[see also: Why the Plymouth shooting was preventable]

The new far right is particularly galvanised by a conspiracy theory which
believes that �gender ideology� is destroying civilisation. From the
Catholic right in Poland to evangelicals in Brazil, reactionaries have
declared �gender ideology� a Marxist-inspired attack on traditional male
and female sex roles. This fight has been the �symbolic glue�, as the
gender studies scholar Andrea Peto put it, cementing together religious
rightists, secular nationalists, militarists and fascists. In 2016, the
alarm over �gender ideology� was even used by right-wingers to sink a
peace deal between the Colombian government and the guerrilla Farc group,
because it included LGBT rights. Whatever the issue, deviant sexuality
acts as a node in which all kinds of fear and loathing gather and are
raised to boiling point.

Frequently, these sexual terrors fuse in volatile ways. This summer,
violent protests erupted in the streets of Los Angeles after a video was
circulated on social media showing a woman complaining about a �man with
a penis� in the women�s section of the Wi Spa in the city. The �man� had
allegedly exposed her penis to �the other women� and �young little girls
underage�. When another customer suggested that the �man� might be a
trans woman, she said �there is no such thing as transgender�. According
to America�s moral panic about trans people, laws allowing trans women to
access women�s spaces gives perverts and paedophiles complete licence to
act on their desires. This is the strategy of homophobes who have
historically linked gay men to paedophilia, while also leveraging the
American tradition of moral panic over predators.

The video was amplified by rightist websites such as Breitbart and the
Blaze, and by Fox News�s Tucker Carlson. A protest, advertised as the �Wi
Spa Anti-Pervert Protest,� drew in the notoriously thuggish Proud Boys.
�Arrest all the pedos�, protest signs said. Others bore the QAnon slogan,
�save our children�. In a bonus for the entrepreneurs of sex panic, it
was later reported that the trans woman in question has a history of
indecent exposure. However, the transphobic backlash had no more waited
for this revelation than it will now judiciously weigh its conclusions
based on the evidence. Nor did it conceal its hostility to trans people
as figures of deviant sexuality.

[see also: The symbolic politics of Judith Butler are all very well, but
sometimes reality interjects]

What does this new far right actually want? Why does neofascism put so
much emphasis on regimenting sexuality? Is it a matter of male
entitlement, as most analyses of the incel movement argue? Is this a
movement of straight white men restoring their traditional privileges? Up
to a point. �Women want to be conquered,� the alt-right activist Markus
Willinger writes. �Men want to win a woman who is worth the effort� � a
�beautiful princess� not a �scowling feminist or a jutting man-jaw�. The
TradWife fetish, celebrating submissive femininity, instantiates this
ideal. There is also some evidence that alt-right attitudes find their
strongest base among men who have been divorced by their wives.

However, there are problems with this picture. As the political scientist
Robyn Marasco argues, contemporary fascism offers women access to exactly
the sort of �transgressive � destructive impulses and antisocial forces�
that the 20th-century Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich argued were
typical of fascism. Women have long been important organisers in far-
right movements. But whereas traditional conservative antifeminism
offered women the security of patriarchal control, today�s fascism offers
women celebrity, prestige, and even the chance to become �martyrs�, as
when former Air Force officer Ashli Babbitt was shot by a plain clothes
police officer as she tried to storm the Capitol building on 6 January.
There, in the mob violence incited by Donald Trump, women fully
participated in what Reich, writing in the 1930s, called the fascist
amalgamation of �rebellious emotions and reactionary social ideas�, the
mentality of she who �is enslaved and craves authority and is at the same
time rebellious�.

Neofascism offers some gay men a similar depth-charge of transgressive
violence. For example, the fascist writer Jack Donovan celebrates a
version of what the radical conservative Hans Bl�her called the
�M�nnerb�nde�. As someone against gay identity rooted in a civilisation
too �complex, cosmopolitan, individualistic� and disunited to sustain
real manliness, Donovan enjoins a tribal, homosocial bonding he calls
�androphilia�. �The repudiation of violent masculinity,� he insists, �is
the murder of male identity.�

The core metaphysical obsession guiding this violence, as the sociologist
Chetan Bhatt argues, is the fear of �white extinction�. Intellectuals of
the far right draw a direct relationship between deviant sex and a threat
to white men. The �deconstruction of the European male�, writes Swedish
neofascist Daniel Friberg, is the sharp edge of the �left�s project of
destruction�. He excoriates �the ridiculous pseudoscience of �gender
studies� as the latest weapon in this offensive. Following a similar
logic, a series of governments, in Hungary, Romania and Brazil, have
effectively banned gender studies. The French �New Right� propagandist
Guillaume Faye agrees that European societies have been lured by leftist
propaganda into �sexual confusion� by removing the supposedly traditional
prohibition on �homophilia�, �inter-ethnic unions�, and �legal homosexual
unions�: acts tantamount to �ethno-masochism�. He blames this for the
decline in the European family and, concomitantly, the falling birth
rate. In fact, the declining birth rate is part of a wider transition
following a similar decline in death rates, but demographic obsessions
haunt contemporary fascism. �It�s the birth rates,� the Christchurch
murderer�s �manifesto� insisted. �It�s the birth rates. It�s the birth
rates.� White revival requires bringing sexuality under control.