Abstract
Misogyny is a malady that affects people across the political spectrum. In recent years, more attention has been paid to the misogyny of the right and its use in mobilising right-wing politics. As a result, the persistent misogyny in left-wing politics and communities has mostly escaped analysis and critique by academics. The increasing visibility of misogynist left-wing discourse during the 2015 Presidential primaries attracted popular media attention to the issue of toxic masculinity in the left by ‘bro-gressives’ and even elicited a statement from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) about issues in their organisation regarding sexism. Left-leaning networked misogyny has resulted in online harassment campaigns against women of colour, vitriol against women politicians, and alienation of women from progressive political spaces like the DSA. This chapter explores the phenomenon of the ‘Dirtbag Left’ made popular by podcasts like Chapo Trap House, and the ‘Bernie Bro’, and how these two cases illustrate examples of violence toward women and minorities through harassment, symbolic violence, and hostility.
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Notes
- 1.
Post published under pseudonyms.
- 2.
The support for Bernie Sanders was across gender and racial lines. The most prominent faces of the harassment were white men, but that does not in any way imply that these were the only aggressors.
- 3.
He walked back his stance on this during the 2020 primaries.
- 4.
He walked back his stance on this after backlash.
- 5.
Lewinsky came to public prominence after she was involved in a high-profile government scandal when news broke that Lewinsky, then a 22-year old White House Intern, was involved in a sexual relationship from 1995 to 1997 with then-President of the United States, Bill Clinton. Despite Clinton obviously abusing his power and position in their relationship, Lewinsky bore the brunt of the scandal and became a decades-long punchline and target of misogynistic harassment, suffering the consequences of the affair for nearly her entire adult life which still persists.
- 6.
Cuck, short for cuckold/cuckoldry, is typically used to emasculate men and is a common insult among the far right, but has been co-opted by leftists (i.e., “cuckservative” in place of “conservative”).
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Menon, P., DeCook, J.R. (2021). The Dirtbag Left: Bernie Bros and the Persistence of Left-Wing Misogyny. In: Powell, A., Flynn, A., Sugiura, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Gendered Violence and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83734-1_19
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