Credits: Fred PO / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.
On January 21, 2026, the High Council for Equality Between Women and Men publishes its annual report in France. This report focuses on the state of sexism and shines a spotlight on “the masculinist threat.” Based on an online survey conducted with 3,061 people aged 15 and over, it describes hostile sexism. This sexism feeds on the virality of platforms and warns of a risk of ideological mobilization. Prevention, regulation, and safety, says the HCE, must go hand in hand.
A Heavy Word, A Nervous Time
In administrative language, “threat” is a word that is weighed carefully before being put on paper. It usually comes with boundaries, alert levels, procedures. Yet the HCE chooses it to speak about something that, until recently, was still shoved aside as a matter of culture-war squabbles, questionable jokes, and old habits of domination.
The report makes a simple claim: some expressions of sexism no longer belong only to individual missteps, but to dynamics of collective buy-in. Hostility can be organized, turned into a story, shared, and then radicalized. This shift, says the HCE, is not just a social debate: it also touches public order.
The diagnosis rests on a distinction that runs through the whole text. On one side, paternalistic sexism is falsely well-meaning. Indeed, it protects by assigning roles and praises by shrinking. Moreover, it “loves” by governing. On the other, hostile sexism is direct, violent, accusatory, and ready to cast women as enemies. The first dresses itself in softness. The second walks in the open.
Measuring Buy-In, Taking A Country’s Temperature
The 2026 barometer, carried out with Toluna Harris Interactive, does more than ask about feelings of injustice. It seeks to measure support for masculinist theses—in other words, the temptation of a narrative in which equality would no longer be a horizon, but a conspiracy, a dispossession, a humiliation.
This is an online survey, conducted on a sample presented as representative of people aged 15 and over. The method does not tell us everything, but it already tells us this: the issue is no longer limited to the froth of comments. It can be measured and tracked over time. Furthermore, it is possible to identify shifts. In this way, action can be taken at least in part before violence settles in as a common language.
This is one of the report’s contributions: it does not simply say that sexism exists, it maps its forms. According to the HCE, 17% of people aged 15 and over endorse hostile sexism, or nearly 10 million people. Even if the figure is debatable and relative, it takes on political weight. Indeed, a durable core is enough to shape norms. Moreover, it can contaminate conversations and impose reflexes. Above all, it provides an audience for entrepreneurs of hostility.
This is also what the gap in perceptions shows. The HCE notes that people are no longer arguing only about solutions, but about the reality of the problem itself. And when what seems obvious starts to weaken, the ground becomes fertile for oversimplified narratives.
A Continuum, From Everyday Sexism To Hardening
The report rejects both the temptation of apocalyptic thinking and panic. It proposes a continuum. Everyday sexism prepares the ground, with jokes, suspicions, and small humiliations. Hostile sexism plants more aggressive signs there. In some cases, sexist radicalization attaches itself to it, sometimes in incel communities, with a group logic, a combat vocabulary, and a promise of revenge.
This idea of a continuum demands caution: not every harsh remark leads to action, and not every provocation is a threat. But it also demands rigor: when an ideology takes shape, it can produce organization, and therefore violence.
In this framework, Bérangère Couillard’s leadership gives the HCE a particular tone. The body, which is consultative and independent, does not condemn, and does not judge. It documents, warns, and proposes. Its role is to make visible what society sometimes prefers to leave in the shadows, because the shadows are convenient.
Platforms, An Echo Chamber And An Amplification Machine
The report describes social networks as spaces that amplify discrimination, online sexual harassment, and violence. It identifies cybersexism as the leading form of online hate speech and cyber violence, with 84% of victims being women. Behind that percentage, messages fall like stones. Moreover, mobs organize and launch smear campaigns. These shrink lives and push them out of public speech.
Digital technology adds speed, but also an industrial logic. A statement becomes content. Content becomes a format. The format becomes a series. The series is monetized. The machine does not create hate out of nothing, but it gives it repetition, and therefore normalization.
The HCE stresses a point that has become central: automatic recommendation. The algorithm does more than show; it steers. It can trap an audience in a tunnel of hostility where the same messages echo, intensify, and reinforce one another. The report calls for greater transparency around these mechanisms, because the invisible is in charge.
An Economy Of Influence, Figures, And Caution
Masculinism in the manosphere often takes shape in individual figures. Names circulate: manosphere influencers, personas, promises of success, slogans of manhood. The report urges us not to confuse this visibility with simple causation. The point is not to turn a figure into proof. It is to understand an ecosystem.
On a global scale, Andrew Tate has illustrated a flamboyant, staged, exported, monetized form of masculinity. He is also associated with legal proceedings abroad, which he disputes. Here, the issue is not the case itself, but the dynamic: when a posture becomes a model, it creates a common language, and that language can feed hostility.
In France, other names exist, closer to home and more familiar. Indeed, they are known to people who spend their evenings scrolling through short video feeds. Alex Hitchens was heard by the National Assembly during a committee on TikTok’s effects on minors. Adrien Laurent, known as AD Laurent, was heard in the same context. In these sequences, criticism can become audience fuel, and audience can turn into a resource.
The report does not need to accuse in order to warn. It is enough for it to show how provocation, when rewarded, shifts the very idea of limits. Public debate then finds itself trapped: respond, and you amplify; stay silent, and you let it pass.
Alongside coaching, another vein is thriving: sexualized provocation. It presents itself as harmless entertainment. However, it works on the boundaries of consent and dignity. The report stresses the overlap of audiences and the circulation of clips. Moreover, the halo effect of celebrity turns excess into currency.
The Roots Of A Backlash, From The Street To The Feed
Masculinism did not begin with smartphones. It is part of a history of reactions to emancipation. The report recalls this genealogy, made up of counter-movements, nostalgia, and identity-based anxiety. In the 2010s, groups like Hommen mimicked activist codes in order to turn them upside down, especially during the debates over same-sex marriage. Public performance was already announcing a politics of emotion: presenting oneself as a victim, turning resentment into identity.
What changes, says the HCE, is the industrialization of distribution. The report refers to a bombardment of content that normalizes certain forms of violence. Moreover, in its most extreme forms, it can even go as far as the glorification of rape and murder. It does not claim that the screen mechanically produces the act. It says the screen can provide a backdrop, a narrative, a permission slip.
Between permission and action, there are thresholds, resistances, and turning points. The challenge for public policy is precisely to strengthen those turning points, to offer exits, to make equality desirable rather than humiliating.
Saint-Étienne, The Arrival Of The Legal And The Symbolic
The report comes out in a context where the issue has sometimes left the purely cultural register. In Saint-Étienne, in early July 2025, an 18-year-old high school student was detained by the DGSI. He was then formally charged and placed in pretrial detention. The case was handled by the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office. Authorities suspect him of planning an attack targeting women. The proceedings are ongoing and the presumption of innocence applies.
This case, however, marks a symbolic threshold. Hatred of women, when it becomes organized and targets victims because of their gender, is cause for concern. Thus, it is beginning to be viewed as a security issue. The HCE takes up this shift without escalation. It emphasizes the collective dimension: when an ideology feels legitimate, it seeks enemies, rituals, and narratives of humiliation.
The delicate point is this: speaking of threat without turning fear into spectacle. Writing about these drifts without reproducing their propaganda. The report walks a tightrope. It names the risks, but refuses the show.
Recommendations To Take Back Control
The HCE puts forward 25 recommendations. The spirit of the text is not to leave schools and digital platforms alone in the face of a phenomenon that cuts across families, peer groups, and imaginations. It calls for strengthening education about emotional, relational, and sexual life, known as EVARS, so that adolescents are given tools for consent, empathy, and discernment.
On the digital front, it calls for stronger reporting and oversight. Moreover, better traceability of responses is requested, along with greater algorithmic transparency. This is not a fight against speech, but against the machinery that pushes and sorts it. Then that machinery repeats it until it becomes familiar. The recommendations also target procedures and timelines. In addition, they concern the ability to document and punish what falls under harassment and hate.
The HCE also calls for security doctrines and training to incorporate the possibility of misogynistic terrorism, when an ideology seeks to terrorize a group through violence. Again, the point is not to criminalize everything. However, it is important to name what sometimes takes shape as a form of collective action. It should not be treated as a mere slip-up.
Finally, the HCE proposes being given a national observatory mission on masculinism and sexist radicalization, with dedicated resources. The goal is to monitor, measure, and anticipate rather than discover too late.
A Democratic Issue, A Battle Of Narratives
One question remains, broader than the recommendations. How do we respond to loneliness, humiliation, and fear without offering a license to hate in return? How do we talk to boys without humiliating them? Moreover, how do we address men without caricaturing them? Finally, how do we reaffirm equality without turning the debate into a permanent trial?
The report does not spare the ambiguities of the times. It reminds us that the majority rejects sexism. However, a structured minority can work to delegitimize equality. It can make hostility look like clarity and turn violence into a response. In that game, democracy loses twice: first when part of the population is threatened, then when conversation is reduced to shouting.
In the street, the refusal of violence continues to be voiced, stubbornly.
The phrase “masculinist threat” only makes sense if it does not, in turn, produce its own vertigo. It must serve to clarify, not to stun. The HCE offers a framework: distinguish sexism disguised as chivalry, sexism displayed as hostility, and the moments when that hostility gathers, organizes, and imagines itself as action.
At bottom, the issue is democratic. A society that lets the idea grow that equality is aggression eventually shrinks its own freedom. The algorithm, for its part, knows no nuance: it knows attention retention. It is up to schools, platforms, the justice system, and politics to reintroduce restraint, law, and shared culture.
This is not about pitting women against men, or reducing boys to suspicion. It is about refusing to let frustration be converted into a license to harm. Moreover, violence must be prevented from becoming just another language among others. The 2026 report, with its figures and recommendations, recalls a stark truth: equality is never guaranteed. It must be defended like a light that has to be kept burning.
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