I have spent the last few months reading about historical events that moved me, including the Irish famine, and the strange ways societies decide what is normal.
Turns out, building a fictional society for Marked requires paying close attention to what is happening right under our noses, too.
And, of course, the algorithm did what algorithms do.
It served me a video by a Brazilian reporter discussing an Australian study on misogyny, online radicalization, and young people.
I stopped scrolling. I just had to. The attitudes being described felt so backwards that I struggled to reconcile them with the 21st-century world I thought I lived in.
The subject was not unfamiliar. What stopped me was what the research suggested about the relationship between everyday attitudes towards women and support for violent extremism.
I looked up the study.
What the Study Measured
The research was published by the University of Melbourne in June 2026. Led by Dr. Sara Meger, Misogyny, Online Radicalisation, and Youth Extremism in Australia examined attitudes towards women, gender roles, violence, online behavior, and extremist beliefs.
The researchers surveyed 3,429 Australians: 1,122 young people aged 13 to 17 and 2,307 adults. They also conducted a separate survey of 511 Australian teachers.
The study examined support for six forms of extremism: incel, far-right, white supremacist, religious, far-left, and anti-feminist.
The finding that caught my attention was not simply that misogynistic attitudes existed among young people. It was how strongly those attitudes were associated with support for extremist violence.
Dr. Meger described hostile views towards women as the single strongest predictor of support for violent extremism among all the factors measured.
That deserves a closer look.
What Was Already There
I find one part of the research particularly important: extremist movements do not necessarily have to invent hostility towards women. They can draw on attitudes that people already hold.
The study found that hostile gender attitudes were associated with support for all six forms of extremism examined. The connection was not limited to one political position, religious belief, or ideological group.
That matters because it challenges the idea that misogyny belongs to a particular corner of the internet or to a clearly identifiable group of men.
The researchers also examined the relationship between online environments and these attitudes.
Three environments stood out: engagement with manfluencer content, online dating, and pornography.
Manfluencer engagement was the strongest predictor of misogynistic attitudes in the dataset. The term refers to online personalities whose content focuses on masculinity, wealth, fitness, discipline, self-improvement, and relationships. Some of these personalities promote hostile views of women, although the category itself does not mean that every creator in it does.
Online dating and pornography use were the online behaviors most closely associated with attitudes that normalize, minimize, or excuse violence against women.
The researchers then tested whether these online behaviors retained an independent association with extremist attitudes after accounting for people's gender attitudes.
This is where the details matter.
Most general online behaviors showed little independent effect once gender attitudes were taken into account. Online dating, however, remained the most consistent online predictor of support for extremism. It retained associations with incel, religious, and white supremacist extremism, as well as radical and violent intentions.
Pornography showed smaller independent associations with economic-reactionary extremism, left-wing extremism, and sympathy for radical violence.
The broader finding was that hostile gender attitudes, particularly attitudes that excuse violence against women, were much stronger predictors than online behaviors themselves.
I do not read this as evidence that online environments are harmless. Nor does it mean that they cannot introduce someone to new ideas. It does suggest that looking only at screen time, platforms, or the amount of time young people spend online misses an important part of the problem.
What are they being exposed to? What are they being taught to believe? And what do they already accept before they encounter that content?
Those questions are harder to answer than how many hours someone spends on a phone.
One in Four
Among boys aged 13 to 17, 24.7 per cent believed that feminism was damaging to society and should be resisted with violence if necessary.
Roughly one boy in four.
That is a specific survey response. It does not mean that one in four boys has committed violence or intends to attack someone. But agreement with a statement that explicitly accepts violence as a response to feminism is concerning in its own right.
The findings about girls also deserve attention.
In the report's comparison of teenagers and adults, 26.2 per cent of girls aged 13 to 17 agreed with the misogyny measure, compared with 14.1 per cent of adult women. For the gender-roles measure, the figures were 18.7 per cent of teenage girls and 8.4 per cent of adult women.
A girl can take in the same contempt from the same feed as her brother.
This is not a problem that affects only boys, even though the most alarming figure in the report concerns teenage boys' acceptance of violence against feminism.
The teacher survey adds another dimension.
Sixty-two per cent of the teachers surveyed identified online misogyny as a concern in their classrooms, and 57 per cent said they had personally observed students expressing anti-feminist views.
In its recommendations, the report also draws attention to teachers' accounts of children as young as six and seven making explicit gender-based exclusions, repeating misogynistic phrases, and refusing to follow female authority.
Think about that for a moment.
We are talking about children who are still learning how to read, write, share toys, and understand the world around them. Yet teachers are already reporting behavior that reflects ideas about who deserves authority and whose instructions can be ignored.
These children did not invent those ideas in a classroom.
What the Study Cannot Tell Us
There is an important distinction to make before going any further.
The research identifies associations and statistical predictors. It does not prove that misogyny causes someone to become an extremist, or that a particular website, influencer, dating platform, or type of pornography causes violent behavior.
The survey captures attitudes and online behaviors. It cannot establish the sequence of events in an individual's life or prove cause and effect.
A strong predictor is not proof of causation.
That distinction does not make the findings less important. It helps us understand what they can tell us, and where we need to be careful.
The researchers found that hostile attitudes towards women were strongly associated with support for extremist violence across different ideological categories. They also found that some gendered online environments were associated with those attitudes.
That is enough to justify asking why these beliefs are familiar to people in the first place, how they are reinforced, and what happens when they go unchallenged.
Culture Is What We Learn to Accept
This is where the research connects to something I have been thinking about while writing Marked.
When I build a fictional society, I have to consider how its rules become ordinary. How do people learn what is acceptable? How do they decide who deserves protection, who deserves authority, and who is expected to comply?
A society does not need every person to agree with every rule. It needs enough people to accept those rules as normal, or at least to stop questioning them.
That is part of what makes cultural beliefs so powerful. They are passed along through families, institutions, entertainment, jokes, social expectations, and the small interactions that rarely make the news.
A belief can become familiar long before anyone stops to ask whether it is fair.
I wrote about a related experience in This Got Under My Skin. It explored how an incident involving women's clothing and sexual assault exposed assumptions that can sit beneath seemingly ordinary reactions.
The details are different, but the question is connected: what have we learned to accept without examining?
We often talk about misogyny as if it begins when someone says something openly hateful. But the beliefs that make that statement possible can be much older and much more ordinary.
They can appear in the jokes we let pass, the behavior we excuse, the authority we question when it comes from a woman, and the expectations we place on girls and boys before either has the language to challenge them.
My reading of the research is that extremist movements do not need to invent contempt for women. They can pick up attitudes people already hold long before they join anything.
That is a difficult idea to sit with because it moves the conversation beyond a few notorious influencers or anonymous online forums.
It asks us to examine the culture that makes those messages recognizable in the first place.
Listening Before Correcting
I do not think the answer is to assume that every young person who repeats a misogynistic phrase is destined to become an extremist. That would be both unfair and unsupported by the research.
But I also do not think we should dismiss those phrases as harmless because the person saying them is young.
When a child repeats something about women, authority, relationships, or consent, we can ask where the idea came from. We can ask what they think it means. We can ask whether they would apply the same rule to a boy or a man.
And we can listen to the answer.
That does not mean agreeing with it. It means understanding what we are responding to instead of treating every uncomfortable statement as an isolated incident.
It also means examining our own assumptions.
Which jokes do we laugh at because everyone else is laughing? Which comments do we ignore because challenging them would make the table uncomfortable? Which expectations did we inherit and never think to question?
I have certainly had moments when I recognized an assumption in my own thinking only after someone else challenged it. Knowing more about culture, beliefs, and different points of view has not made every reaction easier. Sometimes it has made the simple answer harder to find.
But that is precisely why I think these conversations matter.
If we want young people to question what they encounter online, they need adults who are willing to question what they learned offline, too.
The research is Australian. The question is much bigger than Australia.
What do we teach people to accept? And what happens when the things we accept become the foundation for something more dangerous?
That is a question worth asking before the answer becomes familiar.
Exploring This Topic Further?
If this subject interests you, you may also want to read:
Huh? I Am a Minority? — On how minority status is not a fixed property of a person but something that happens in a room, shaped by context, visibility, and who decides the rules.
The Social Exclusion Faced by Immigrant Mothers. — On the specific forms of exclusion that operate through systems, institutions, and the quiet withdrawal of other people.
I am also documenting the historical and cultural research behind Marked in the Marked Research Series.
I would like to hear from you, too. Have you noticed beliefs about women, gender, or authority being repeated so often that people have stopped questioning them? What did that look like where you grew up, where you live now, or in the communities around you? Tell me in the comments below.
Sometimes the examples that tell us the most are the ones people have learned not to notice.
Jessica Gabrielzyk
References
Meger, S. (2026). Misogyny, Online Radicalisation, and Youth Extremism in Australia. Research Report. The University of Melbourne, June 2026.
https://doi.org/10.26188/33250176
Meger, S. (2026, August 16). Hostile attitudes toward women are driving extremism in young Australians. Pursuit, University of Melbourne.
https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/hostile-attitudes-toward-women-are-driving-extremism-in-young-australians
The University of Melbourne. (2026, August 17). Young people more likely to hold hostile attitudes towards women, study finds.
https://www.unimelb.edu.au/newsroom/news/2026/august/young-people-more-likely-to-hold-hostile-attitudes-towards-women%2C-study-finds
Frequently Asked Questions
What does the Australian study say about misogyny and extremism?
The 2026 University of Melbourne study found that hostile attitudes towards women were the strongest measured predictor of support for violent extremism across six ideological categories. The findings show a strong association, not proof that misogyny causes someone to become an extremist.
What is a manfluencer?
A manfluencer is an online personality whose content focuses on subjects such as masculinity, wealth, fitness, discipline, self-improvement, and relationships. Some promote hostile views about women or feminism. The University of Melbourne study found that engagement with this type of content was the strongest predictor of misogynistic attitudes in its dataset.
Does spending time online cause extremist views in teenagers?
The study does not establish that time online causes extremist views. It found that general online behaviors had little independent association with extremist attitudes after gender attitudes were taken into account. Some gendered online behaviors, particularly online dating and pornography use, retained smaller independent associations for particular extremist outcomes.
Do only boys hold hostile attitudes towards women?
No. The study found concerning levels of hostile gender attitudes among both boys and girls. For example, 26.2 per cent of girls aged 13 to 17 agreed with the study's misogyny measure, compared with 14.1 per cent of adult women. The findings do not mean boys and girls expressed identical attitudes or at identical rates.
How do cultural beliefs about women spread?
Cultural beliefs are passed through families, schools, peer groups, entertainment, online content, institutions, and everyday interactions. Repeated messages can become familiar and accepted, even when people have not examined the assumptions behind them.
