This tendency does not challenge patriarchy as a material system rooted in class and imperialism. Instead, it substitutes moral policing, behavioural surveillance, and individual shaming for revolutionary analysis and collective liberation.
Men are increasingly disciplined not for what they say, but for how they speak. A loud voice is labelled “aggression.” Anger at genocide, or injustice more broadly, is rebranded as “toxicity.” Passion in political struggle is pathologised as domination. When accused of being too gruff, I am often reminded of Yeats' line in the poem 'September 1913': "the best lack all conviction, the worst are full passionate intensity" where the poet observed the vilification of passion and dedication, and the elevation of the petty-bourgeois who "fumbled in the greasy till" and who were "born to pray and save".
The material conditions producing anger around oppression, such as precarity, dispossession, war, unemployment, or alienation are too often left untouched by those who pose as radical feminists. This is what liberal social control looks like.
This trend represents a shift away from structural analysis toward idealism. Patriarchy is treated as a set of personal traits embodied by men rather than a historical system tied to class rule and imperial power. Men are asked to police their tone, posture, and emotions, while capital, the state, and imperial violence go unchallenged. The result is a politics of manners instead of a politics of power.
This anti-men moralism disproportionately targets working-class men, racialised men, and men engaged in militant, anti-imperialist politics. The banker, the general, and the corporate executive are rarely told to “lower their voice.” But the trade unionist, the protester, the revolutionary speaker is. What is being disciplined is not masculinity in the abstract, but resistance.
Ironically, this reproduces the very gender essentialism it claims to oppose. Men are cast as inherently dangerous, emotionally suspect, and in need of constant correction. Women are positioned as moral arbiters and victims in waiting. This binary does not liberate anyone. It reinforces reactionary ideas about gender while fragmenting the working class along moral and identity lines.
I have been in many situations where I have experienced and witnessed an unspoken rule take hold the moment conflict emerges. If a woman frames herself as feeling uncomfortable, offended, or harmed, other women are expected to line up behind her, regardless of the political substance involved. In fact, one such incident at a protest at the British Embassy illustrates the point more clearly.
In December 2025, I chaired a demo organised by the Peadar O'Donnell Socialist Republican Forum in support of the five demands of several hunger strikers, who were, at the time, protesting British state collusion with the Zionist entity and its active participation in genocide. As the demo closed, calls for a protest encampment at the British Embassy were made by a woman. This seemed like a good time to remind the audience whom she was addressing—that an encampment was already in existence for over 100 days, five minutes down the road at UCD: the Break the Academic Chains of Zionism Encampment.
As I was encouraging the crowd to support, or just visit the camp over the Christmas holidays, another woman, unknown to me, who had taken to the railings and had been chanting repeatedly, interrupted me and shouted, "Do not support the racist camp at UCD." Naturally, I was not expecting such an attack, which was clearly designed to disrupt and divide.
When my comrade and I questioned her, in holding her serious accusations of racism to account, we were abruptly shut down—not with counterarguments, but with appeals to gendered harm. The woman who interrupted me, who threw the "racist" card at me and the encampment, was surrounded, protected, and minded, as if she were the victim.
To challenge this most serious and harmful accusation was treated as cruelty. When I asked for evidence or political clarity, I was recast as just siding with my comrade...who is a man, surprise, surprise.
What troubled me most was how quickly class analysis vanished in that moment when one woman, who cast serious aspersions on an on-going 24/7 hour encampment, the like of which has never happened before in Ireland, suddenly became the victim.
Our comrade’s material role at UCD Break the Academic Chains of Zionism, their principled, dedicated, political conduct, and their alignment with working-class interests all became secondary. I was expected to suspend my criticism of the provocateur, as an anti-imperialist, and speak only as a woman, and to automatically take the side of a woman claiming to be victim, irrespective of the fact that she attempted to politically damage our work, and reputation. That demand itself is reactionary. It reduces women to an identity bloc and strips us of political agency.
This is not feminism. It is a form of toxic femininity that mirrors bourgeois individualism, where emotion is elevated over analysis, identity supersedes principle, and sympathy trumps truth. It creates a culture where challenge of a female provocateur is treated as callous, and accountability as oppression. What is the overall outcome? This behaviour simply leaves movements weak, fragmented, and easily neutralized. Perhaps that was the intention on 18 December 2025.
Revolutionary movements have never been built by division, or through silencing, but are no strangers to these tactics. Passion for justice is not a male flaw; it is a human response to exploitation. The task of revolutionaries is not to suppress that energy, but to direct it toward collective struggle against the real enemy: capitalism and imperialism.
Anti-imperialist feminism does not fear men’s voices. It challenges men to break with chauvinism, yes, but also recognises them as fellow subjects of exploitation, not perpetual suspects. It understands that patriarchy harms women most severely, but it also damages men by stripping them of dignity, purpose, and humanity under capitalism. Liberation cannot be built on contempt.
The policing of tone, volume, and expression is especially corrosive in movements that claim to be radical. It replaces political line with social etiquette. It rewards conformity over clarity and passivity over courage. In doing so, it weakens movements at precisely the moment when boldness, discipline, and unity are required.
Revolutionary politics does not attack anti-imperialist protest. It does not hurl spurious, unfounded allegations at revolutionaries. It does not ask who spoke too loudly. It asks: who owns the land, the banks, the weapons, and the media? Who benefits from our division? Who fears a working class that speaks with confidence, anger, and collective force? The answer is not men. It is the system.
If our movements cannot provide space for righteous anger, principled confrontation, and unapologetic resistance from all genders, then they are being managed and reshaped to serve liberal order, not revolutionary change. We do not need quieter men. We need organised people, women and men speaking clearly, collectively, and without fear against imperialism and exploitation, without the weaponisation of identity politics. Anything else is not liberation. It is containment. As a working-class woman, I reject this logic.
Anti-imperialist women activists do not want protection from criticism. We want liberation, and liberation requires the courage to assess politics honestly, no matter who is speaking, or driving the movement forward (or backwards, as may well be the case by unknown disrupters).
⏩Róisín McAleer is an activist with Social Rights Ireland. Follow @ Twitter & Instagram
Men are increasingly disciplined not for what they say, but for how they speak. A loud voice is labelled “aggression.” Anger at genocide, or injustice more broadly, is rebranded as “toxicity.” Passion in political struggle is pathologised as domination. When accused of being too gruff, I am often reminded of Yeats' line in the poem 'September 1913': "the best lack all conviction, the worst are full passionate intensity" where the poet observed the vilification of passion and dedication, and the elevation of the petty-bourgeois who "fumbled in the greasy till" and who were "born to pray and save".
The material conditions producing anger around oppression, such as precarity, dispossession, war, unemployment, or alienation are too often left untouched by those who pose as radical feminists. This is what liberal social control looks like.
This trend represents a shift away from structural analysis toward idealism. Patriarchy is treated as a set of personal traits embodied by men rather than a historical system tied to class rule and imperial power. Men are asked to police their tone, posture, and emotions, while capital, the state, and imperial violence go unchallenged. The result is a politics of manners instead of a politics of power.
This anti-men moralism disproportionately targets working-class men, racialised men, and men engaged in militant, anti-imperialist politics. The banker, the general, and the corporate executive are rarely told to “lower their voice.” But the trade unionist, the protester, the revolutionary speaker is. What is being disciplined is not masculinity in the abstract, but resistance.
Ironically, this reproduces the very gender essentialism it claims to oppose. Men are cast as inherently dangerous, emotionally suspect, and in need of constant correction. Women are positioned as moral arbiters and victims in waiting. This binary does not liberate anyone. It reinforces reactionary ideas about gender while fragmenting the working class along moral and identity lines.
I have been in many situations where I have experienced and witnessed an unspoken rule take hold the moment conflict emerges. If a woman frames herself as feeling uncomfortable, offended, or harmed, other women are expected to line up behind her, regardless of the political substance involved. In fact, one such incident at a protest at the British Embassy illustrates the point more clearly.
In December 2025, I chaired a demo organised by the Peadar O'Donnell Socialist Republican Forum in support of the five demands of several hunger strikers, who were, at the time, protesting British state collusion with the Zionist entity and its active participation in genocide. As the demo closed, calls for a protest encampment at the British Embassy were made by a woman. This seemed like a good time to remind the audience whom she was addressing—that an encampment was already in existence for over 100 days, five minutes down the road at UCD: the Break the Academic Chains of Zionism Encampment.
As I was encouraging the crowd to support, or just visit the camp over the Christmas holidays, another woman, unknown to me, who had taken to the railings and had been chanting repeatedly, interrupted me and shouted, "Do not support the racist camp at UCD." Naturally, I was not expecting such an attack, which was clearly designed to disrupt and divide.
When my comrade and I questioned her, in holding her serious accusations of racism to account, we were abruptly shut down—not with counterarguments, but with appeals to gendered harm. The woman who interrupted me, who threw the "racist" card at me and the encampment, was surrounded, protected, and minded, as if she were the victim.
To challenge this most serious and harmful accusation was treated as cruelty. When I asked for evidence or political clarity, I was recast as just siding with my comrade...who is a man, surprise, surprise.
What troubled me most was how quickly class analysis vanished in that moment when one woman, who cast serious aspersions on an on-going 24/7 hour encampment, the like of which has never happened before in Ireland, suddenly became the victim.
Our comrade’s material role at UCD Break the Academic Chains of Zionism, their principled, dedicated, political conduct, and their alignment with working-class interests all became secondary. I was expected to suspend my criticism of the provocateur, as an anti-imperialist, and speak only as a woman, and to automatically take the side of a woman claiming to be victim, irrespective of the fact that she attempted to politically damage our work, and reputation. That demand itself is reactionary. It reduces women to an identity bloc and strips us of political agency.
This is not feminism. It is a form of toxic femininity that mirrors bourgeois individualism, where emotion is elevated over analysis, identity supersedes principle, and sympathy trumps truth. It creates a culture where challenge of a female provocateur is treated as callous, and accountability as oppression. What is the overall outcome? This behaviour simply leaves movements weak, fragmented, and easily neutralized. Perhaps that was the intention on 18 December 2025.
Revolutionary movements have never been built by division, or through silencing, but are no strangers to these tactics. Passion for justice is not a male flaw; it is a human response to exploitation. The task of revolutionaries is not to suppress that energy, but to direct it toward collective struggle against the real enemy: capitalism and imperialism.
Anti-imperialist feminism does not fear men’s voices. It challenges men to break with chauvinism, yes, but also recognises them as fellow subjects of exploitation, not perpetual suspects. It understands that patriarchy harms women most severely, but it also damages men by stripping them of dignity, purpose, and humanity under capitalism. Liberation cannot be built on contempt.
The policing of tone, volume, and expression is especially corrosive in movements that claim to be radical. It replaces political line with social etiquette. It rewards conformity over clarity and passivity over courage. In doing so, it weakens movements at precisely the moment when boldness, discipline, and unity are required.
Revolutionary politics does not attack anti-imperialist protest. It does not hurl spurious, unfounded allegations at revolutionaries. It does not ask who spoke too loudly. It asks: who owns the land, the banks, the weapons, and the media? Who benefits from our division? Who fears a working class that speaks with confidence, anger, and collective force? The answer is not men. It is the system.
If our movements cannot provide space for righteous anger, principled confrontation, and unapologetic resistance from all genders, then they are being managed and reshaped to serve liberal order, not revolutionary change. We do not need quieter men. We need organised people, women and men speaking clearly, collectively, and without fear against imperialism and exploitation, without the weaponisation of identity politics. Anything else is not liberation. It is containment. As a working-class woman, I reject this logic.
Anti-imperialist women activists do not want protection from criticism. We want liberation, and liberation requires the courage to assess politics honestly, no matter who is speaking, or driving the movement forward (or backwards, as may well be the case by unknown disrupters).
⏩Róisín McAleer is an activist with Social Rights Ireland. Follow @ Twitter & Instagram
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