Babe, wake up… you’re not actually a brocialist are you?
The UK is now witnessing the horrifying rise of the alt-right Reform UK party, led by Nigel Farage, of anti-migrant poster fame. Just last week, the party 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, 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 it 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).
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.
This type of person is usually someone who frames class struggle as not just fundamental (which it is, obviously) but 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, this is not to say that “all socialist men are all sexists”.
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”.
This is a common expression of late stage broscialist conversion as they make their way rightward. https://t.co/mGxvCuk2ab
— Friendpatine (@Nick_McGurk) April 22, 2021
The use of broscialist memes 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, “the word still has a certain amount of utility.”
Oh, and persist they do.
A cartoon about Brocialism pic.twitter.com/UOP3QnHAWQ
— Lily O’Farrell (@vulgadrawings) June 2, 2024