On Wednesday, January 21st, the French High Council for Equality published a new report on sexism, identifying “masculinism” as one of the new dangers to national security.
Masculinism constitutes a “real threat” and must be recognised as a public security issue, according to the report. This hateful and anti-feminist ideology, spread on social media, is likely to generate violence and radicalisation and, according to the document’s recommendations, should be the subject of a national strategy to combat it.
The High Council for Equality, which reports to the prime minister’s office, even refers to “misogynistic terrorism” and calls for intelligence services to be trained to deal with this new danger. According to the report, 17% of French people subscribe to “hostile sexism,” which “devalues women” and could lead to violence against them.
The report expresses alarm at France’s delay in addressing this public danger, compared to other countries that are much more ‘advanced’ in this area, such as Canada and the United Kingdom.
Unsurprisingly, once it has identified the masculinist enemy, the High Council for Equality is careful not to define the terms precisely. It notes a radicalisation against women that could lead to violence or terrorist acts but never questions the possible origins of such a social drift. Immigration of Muslim origin and the importation into France of predominantly male immigrants from cultures that traditionally place women in a position of inferiority or even encourage the habitual use of violence against them is obviously not called into question here.
The existence of “misogynistic terrorism” also raises questions. One case was reportedly identified in 2025 in Saint-Etienne, involving a young man who planned to attack women with knives. But is this really the number one threat facing French society today? We should be more concerned about the safety of women who are assaulted and harassed every day in the street by ordinary individuals who do not belong to an obscure masculinist movement, whose organised existence is nothing more than a conspiracy theory. As for the real victims of terrorism, they are well known. Eleven years have passed since the Charlie Hebdo killings in January 2015, and this was not misogynistic but Islamist terrorism.
Bérengère Couillard, president of the High Council, recommends that intelligence agents be trained in “masculinist language.” When we consider that mastering Arabic dialects is a difficult challenge for intelligence services, which are confronted daily with Islamist terrorism from the Maghreb, Syria, and Afghanistan, we realise that the state clearly shouldn’t waste time and money on such recommendations.
But the High Council for Equality does not claim to be targeting only misogynistic terrorist recruits. 23% of French people are targeted for being followers of “paternalistic sexism”—which simply refers to people who make the mistake of valuing the traditional roles of each sex, which “traps women in stereotypical representations of fragility or dependence.” The High Council is outraged that 78% of French people believe that men should bear financial responsibility for the family.
Quite clearly, the High Council’s targeting of ‘masculinism’ appears to be a receptacle for a whole set of fads cultivated by the progressive Left. The very real existence of a slowdown in the militant feminist movement and the return among many men—and women—to an interest in traditional masculinity and clear gender differentiation is not enough to believe in “misogynistic terrorism” as an avatar of fascism. There are many ideological conflations on the part of those who cry out against the masculinist offensive: masculinism is viewed as just one of the many faces of fascism, and the destabilisation of Western societies due to mass immigration with cultural codes opposite of ours is simply not seen as an issue.
Right-wing essayist Julien Rochedy is outraged by these facile conflations on the part of some spokespeople for the feminist cause, who see him—or Éric Zemmour—as apostles of violent masculinism and attribute to him statements he never made about the “right to rape.” For them, masculinism and the ‘far right’ are obviously one and the same. We are still waiting for the same energy to be deployed to denounce the violence that women suffer each day in France at the hands of men whose only excuse is that they do not have “the right cultural codes.”
