On January 21, 2026, the High Council for Equality between Women and Men publishes its annual report in France. This report addresses the state of sexism and shines a spotlight on "the masculinist threat." Based on an online barometer conducted with 3,061 people aged 15 and over, it describes hostile sexism. This sexism feeds on platform virality and warns of a risk of ideological mobilization. Prevention, regulation, and security, the HCE says, must go hand in hand.
A Weighty Word, A Tense Era
In administrative language, "threat" is a word you weigh before putting it on paper. It usually comes with perimeters, alert levels, and procedures. Yet the HCE chooses it to talk about something that until recently was relegated to moral disputes, dubious jokes, and old habits of domination.
The report asserts a simple idea: some expressions of sexism are no longer merely individual deviations, but logics of collective adhesion. Hostility can coalesce, be narrated, shared, and then radicalize. This shift, the HCE says, is not just a societal debate: it also touches public order.
The diagnosis is anchored in a distinction that runs through the text. On one side, paternalistic sexism is falsely benevolent. Indeed, it protects by assigning roles and praises by narrowing. Moreover, it "loves" by governing. On the other, hostile sexism is frontal, violent, accusatory, ready to designate women as adversaries. The first dresses itself in softness. The second walks in the open.
Measuring Adhesion, Taking the Country’s Temperature
The 2026 barometer, conducted with Toluna Harris Interactive, does not content itself with questioning the feeling of injustice. It seeks to measure adhesion to masculinist theses, in other words the temptation of a narrative where equality would no longer be a horizon but a conspiracy, dispossession, and humiliation.
This is an online survey carried out with a sample presented as representative of those 15 and over. The method doesn’t say everything, but it already says this: the subject is no longer limited to the foam of comments. It can be measured and its variations tracked. Moreover, shifts can be spotted. Thus, action is possible at least in part before violence settles in as a common language.
Here lies one of the report’s contributions: it does not merely state that sexism exists, it maps its forms. According to the HCE, 17% of people aged 15 and over adhere to hostile sexism, about 10 million people. The figure, even contested and relative, takes on political weight. Indeed, a durable core is enough to influence norms. In addition, it can contaminate conversations and impose reflexes. Above all, it provides an audience for entrepreneurs of hostility.
This is also what the fracture of perceptions shows. The HCE observes that disputes are no longer only about solutions, but about the very reality of the problem. When evidence becomes fragile, the ground becomes fertile for simplifying narratives.
A Continuum, From Everyday Life to Hardening
The report resists the temptation of dramatic rupture and panic. It proposes a continuum. Ordinary sexism prepares a ground made of jokes, suspicions, small humiliations. Hostile sexism plants more aggressive signposts there. In some cases, sexist radicalizations graft on, sometimes within incel communities, with a group logic, a combat vocabulary, a promise of revenge.
This idea of a continuum demands caution: not every brutal remark leads to action, not every provocation is a threat. But it also imposes a requirement: when an ideology structures itself, it can produce organization, and therefore violence.
In this context, the presidency of Bérangère Couillard gives the HCE a particular tone. The body, consultative and independent, does not condemn or judge. It documents, alerts, and proposes. Its role is to make visible what society sometimes prefers to leave in the shadows, because the shadow is convenient.
Platforms, Echo Chamber and Amplifier
The report describes social networks as spaces that amplify discrimination, online sexual harassment, and violence. It identifies cybersexism as the primary form of hate speech and online violence, with 84% of victims being women. Behind this percentage, messages fall like stones. Moreover, mobs organize and launch smear campaigns. These narrow lives and expel people from public speech.
Digital adds speed, but also an industrial logic. A remark becomes content. Content turns into a format. The format is serialized. The series is monetized. The machine does not fabricate hate from nothing, but it offers repetition, and thus normalization.
The HCE stresses a now-central point: algorithmic recommendation. The algorithm does not just show, it steers. It can trap an audience in a tunnel of hostility where the same messages reply to, excite, and confirm each other. The report calls for greater transparency about these mechanics, because the invisible governs.
An Economy Of Influence, Figures, And Cautions
Masculinism, in the manosphere, often takes shape in personalities. Names circulate: manosphere influencers, postures, promises of success, slogans of virility. The report urges not to confuse this visibility with simple causality. It is not about turning a figure into proof. It is about understanding an ecosystem.
Globally, Andrew Tate illustrated an ostentatious, staged, exported, monetized virility. The man is also associated with judicial proceedings abroad, which he contests. Here, the issue is not the file, but the dynamic: when a posture becomes a model, it forms a common language, and that language can feed hostility.
In France, other names exist, closer and more familiar. Indeed, they are known to those who spend their evenings in short video feeds. Alex Hitchens was heard in the National Assembly during a commission 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 convert into a resource.
The report does not need to accuse to alert. It is enough to show how provocation, when rewarded, shifts the very idea of limit. Public debate then finds itself trapped: to respond is to amplify; to be silent is to let it happen.
Alongside coaching, another vein prospers: sexualized provocation. It presents itself as mere entertainment. However, it tests the boundaries of consent and dignity. The report stresses the porosity of audiences and the circulation of clips. Moreover, the halo effect of a celebrity turns outrage into currency.
Roots Of A Backlash, From Street To Stream
Masculinism did not arise with smartphones. It is inscribed in a history of reactions to emancipation. The report recalls this genealogy, made of countermovements, nostalgias, identity anxieties. In the 2010s, collectives like Hommen mimicked militant codes to invert them, notably during debates on marriage for all. The public performance already announced a politics of affects: presenting oneself as victims, turning resentment into identity.
What changes, the HCE says, is the industrialization of diffusion. The report evokes a bombardment of content that normalizes certain violences. Moreover, in its most extreme forms, it can go as far as praising rape and murder. It does not claim that the screen mechanically produces acts. It says the screen can provide a setting, a narrative, a permission.
Between permission and passage to action, there are thresholds, resistances, and forks. The public policy challenge is precisely to reinforce those forks, to offer exits, to make equality desirable rather than humiliating.
Saint-Étienne, The Legal And Symbolic Breakthrough
The report arrives in a context where the question 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 indicted and placed in pretrial detention. The case was handled by the National Anti-Terror Prosecutor’s Office. Authorities suspect he planned an attack targeting women. The procedure is ongoing and the presumption of innocence applies.
This case nevertheless marks a symbolic threshold. Hatred of women, when it organizes and targets victims because of their gender, becomes a concern. Thus it begins to be seen as a security issue. The HCE takes up this turn without escalation. It insists on the collective dimension: when an ideology feels legitimate, it seeks enemies, rites, and narratives of humiliation.
The delicate point is this: speak of threat without turning fear into spectacle. Write about these drifts without reproducing their propaganda. The report attempts a tightrope. It names risks but refuses exhibition.
Recommendations To Take Back Control
The HCE makes 25 recommendations. The spirit of the text is not to leave schools and digital spaces alone facing a phenomenon that crosses families, peer groups, and imaginations. It calls for strengthening education in affective, relational, and sexual life, called EVARS, to give adolescents tools of consent, empathy, and discernment.
In the digital field, it demands reinforced reporting and controls. It also asks for better traceability of responses and increased algorithmic transparency. This is not a fight against speech, but against the mechanism that pushes and ranks it. Then this mechanism repeats it until it becomes familiar. The recommendations also target procedures and timelines. Moreover, they concern the ability to document and sanction what constitutes harassment and hate.
The HCE also asks that security doctrines and training integrate the possibility of misogynist terrorism, when an ideology aims to terrorize a group through violence. Again, the idea is not to criminalize everything. However, it is important to name what sometimes prepares as a collective action. It should not be considered only as a simple lapse.
Finally, the HCE proposes to be entrusted with a national observatory mission on masculinism and sexist radicalizations, with dedicated resources. The ambition 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 to respond to loneliness, humiliation, and fear without offering permission to hate in return? How to speak to boys without humiliating them? How to address men without caricaturing them? And how to recall equality without turning the debate into a permanent trial?
The report spares no ambiguities of the era. It recalls that the majority rejects sexism. However, a structured minority can work to delegitimize equality. It can pass hostility off as lucidity and turn violence into a response. In this game, democracy loses twice: first when part of the population is threatened, then when conversation is reduced to shouts.
In the streets, refusal of violence continues to be voiced, with stubbornness.
The term "masculinist threat" only makes sense if it does not produce its own vertigo. It must illuminate, not stun. The HCE proposes a framework: distinguish sexism that disguises itself as gallantry, that which displays itself as hostility, and the moments when that hostility aggregates, organizes, and dreams of action.
The core issue is democratic. A society that lets the idea that equality is an assault prosper ends up shrinking its own freedom. The algorithm, it, knows no nuance: it knows attention retention. It is up to schools, platforms, justice, and politicians to reintroduce brakes, law, and common culture.
It is not about opposing women and men, nor reducing boys to suspicion. It is about refusing that frustration be converted into a license to harm. Moreover, it is necessary to prevent violence from becoming just another language. The 2026 report, with its figures and recommendations, recalls a stern truth: equality is never guaranteed. It must be defended like a light is maintained.