Book Review: Pink-Pilled

Pink-Pilled: Women and the Far Right is a book from Lois Shearing about women in the far right. We tend to think of the far right as a purely male phenomenon – they are the favoured in-group after all – but there's also a lot of women in far right spaces.

The book first gives a survey of the far right, including how many women are sympathetic to it. Men dominate the far right, but there is a non-trivial minority of women involved. The second chapter goes over the history of women in far right movements and was very interesting. Women have often been used as a friendly face for fascism, and they've even started fascist organisations – the British Fascisti were founded by a woman. Women do a lot of the reproductive labour these organisations need to continue.

The bulk of the book is about the far right's vision for women (it's not great) and the way this vision is sold by and to women. The core of this is shown through the "trad-wife" genre on social media. This consists of women in floral dresses staying at home, looking after children, and doing a lot of baking – the tasks of women in an imagined glorious past. Behind the baking lies a reliance on their husband, resulting in a lack of autonomy. The far right take this to the extreme, seeing women as the property of their husbands, and believe that their value is due to their capacity for reproduction.

Trad-wifery is not the only on-ramp to the far-right. Gender critical views are another pathway to the movement that many women go down. Mumsnet, a forum for, well, mums, is a hive of transphobia. These views are a gateway into other right wing beliefs. Women are also not immune to other right wing rhetoric used to radicalise men: anti-immigrant sentiment, racism, and conspiratorial beliefs all affect women too.

There's also a chapter on women's experiences in far right movements. These are horrible, in a word. It's unsurprising that far right men don't treat women very well given their views on women. I suspect that a lot of radicalised women are miserable. Shearing does well at showing sympathy for the women who've been through such things, while also not excusing their actions as part of the movement.

We end with a rather half-hearted chapter on solutions to women's radicalisation. I think non-fiction books must be required to include a final chapter about "the future" or "what we can do", which often leads to them being weak. This is the weakest I've read, I think. The solutions given are "Education", "Tech Moderation", and "Building Communities".

Education would be great, but the society we live in – and educate children to continue – contains the bigotries and anxieties preyed upon by the far right. When those who decide the curriculum benefit from the conditions of society that produce the far right, how will we ever get education against it?

Tech moderation always feels like an excuse to put more power in the hands of big technology companies. In order to moderate, they must surveil. I'm of the opinion that the root of the social media influence is algorithmic recommendation systems that feed more engaging (and hence more radical) media. The way to stop this is to end those algorithms, not to ask tech companies to further stalk us.

Shearing also laments that people can create far right websites, like Stormfront, and you can access them by "typ[ing] in the URL like you would for ASOS or the BBC." The world in which this is prevented would be worse, I think. The open web is on the whole a social good – anybody can publish their work! Nobody could read these very words without it! The alternative of having someone deciding what is allowed is dangerous. We might think that far right websites should be prevented, but that same power could prevent LGBTQ+ resources being published. Social Media platforms are the real danger to me. Before the platforms, one would have to seek out the daily stormer, and its reach was limited. It's only since Facebook that we're given a constant feed of propaganda.

Building communities also seems rather wishy-washy. It probably would be good to talk to more people in real life. It's a shame that the most concrete example sounds like a bunch of left wing people who already agree with each other talking about what the right wing are doing. I don't know how many people vulnerable to radicalisation this kind of community will help.

This section also says off-hand that experts believe that deradicalisation should not involve validating concerns that lead people towards radical communities. I'm in agreement if we're talking about racism, but many people's concerns are rooted in their material conditions. Shearing themself says that many of the concerns have a kernel of truth when discussing the appeal of trad-wifery! Denying the kernel of truth seems like it wouldn't be an effective strategy for deradicalisation to me.

The final chapter explains that this book was a podcast first. This put everything into place for me. Throughout reading, I thought that there was a lack of focus. It felt as though I was reading interesting excerpts from other works or from experts, then getting some half-related example of a social media influencer. The most striking instance was when Shearing is talking about women who left the far right. One ex-far-right woman claims that "Like 70 percent of the time, the women earn the money and the men do podcasts." Shearing then talks about how one right-wing influencer is a woman who does a podcast.

When an interesting idea is presented, it's rarely dug into. Even the title, Pink-Pilled, referring to women's radicalisation by other women, barely comes up explicitly. The most glaring of these missed chances is in the final chapter. Here, Shearing explains that a pipeline is the wrong model for radicalisation, and it's more like an ocean. It would have perhaps been better to explain this in the introduction, and not use the term "pipeline" for the process throughout the book!

This lack of depth was reflected everywhere. The book is great at describing the landscape of far right rhetoric, but it lacks analysis of the rhetoric. I'd hoped to hear more about why the media described are effective at radicalising women, and to hear more stories from women who have since left the movement describing how they got radicalised.

I also felt there was a lack of attention to detail. One particular point was that Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) were referred to as Dial-Up Bulletin Systems (DBS). It's possible I (and DuckDuckGo's index) have never heard of this alternate name, but it certainly smells like a backronym built on a mishearing. This is a minor nit pick, perhaps, but it certainly coloured the way I looked at information I didn't already know.

Overall I thought there could be an interesting book on this topic. The other works this book cited certainly sounded fascinating. I felt this was a bit disappointing though. I suppose it's good if you're after a shallow grounding in far right rhetoric, but I felt it was missing depth about the ostensible topic.