Credits: Fred PO / Wikimedia Commons — CC BY-SA 2.0.
On January 21, 2026, the High Council for Equality between Women and Men published 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 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 safety, 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, procedures. Yet the HCE chooses it to talk about something that, until recently, was relegated to moral disputes, questionable jokes, and old domination habits.
The report asserts a simple idea: some expressions of sexism are no longer just individual lapses, but logics of collective adherence. Hostility can coalesce, be formed into a narrative, be shared, then radicalize. This shift, the HCE says, is not just a societal debate: it also affects public order.
The diagnosis rests on a distinction that runs throughout the text. On one side, paternalistic sexism is falsely benevolent. Indeed, it protects by assigning roles and flatters by narrowing. Besides, it “loves” by governing. On the other side, hostile sexism is frontal, violent, accusatory, ready to designate women as adversaries. The first dresses in softness. The second walks uncovered.
Measuring Adherence, Taking the Nation’s Temperature
The 2026 barometer, carried out with Toluna Harris Interactive, does more than survey feelings of injustice. It seeks to measure adherence to masculinist theses—in other words the temptation of a narrative where equality is no longer a horizon but a conspiracy, a dispossession, a humiliation.
This was an online survey conducted with a sample presented as representative of those 15 and over. The method doesn’t say everything, but it already shows this: the issue is no longer limited to the foam of comments. We can measure it and track its variations. Moreover, it’s possible to spot shifts. Thus, action can be taken at least in part before violence establishes itself 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, or nearly 10 million people. The figure, even if debatable and relative, takes on political weight. Indeed, a durable core is enough to influence norms. Furthermore, it can contaminate conversations and impose reflexes. Most importantly, it provides an audience to entrepreneurs of hostility.
This is also what the gap in perceptions reveals. The HCE observes that we no longer argue only about solutions, but about the reality of the problem itself. When evidence becomes fragile, the ground becomes fertile for simplifying narratives.
A Continuum, From Daily Life to Hardening
The report resists the temptation to cry revolution or panic. It proposes a continuum. Ordinary sexism prepares the ground—jokes, suspicions, small humiliations. Hostile sexism plants more aggressive signposts. In some cases, sexist radicalizations graft onto this, sometimes in incel communities, with group logic, a combat vocabulary, a promise of revenge.
This idea of a continuum requires caution: not every brutal remark leads to action, not every provocation is a threat. But it also requires rigor: when an ideology becomes structured, it can produce organization, 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, warns, proposes. Its role is to make visible what society sometimes prefers to leave in the shadows, because the shadows are convenient.
Platforms, Echo Chamber and Amplification Machine
The report describes social networks as spaces that amplify discrimination, online sexual harassment, and violence. It identifies cybersexism as the primary form of online hate speech and cyber violence, with 84% of victims being women. Behind that percentage, messages fall like stones. Packs also organize and launch smear campaigns. These shrink lives and expel voices from the public sphere.
Digital technology 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 doesn’t manufacture hatred from nothing, but it offers repetition, hence normalization.
The HCE stresses one point that has become central: automatic recommendation. The algorithm does more than show, it guides. It can trap an audience in a tunnel of hostility where the same messages echo, excite, and confirm each other. The report calls for more transparency about these mechanisms 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, virility slogans. The report urges not to confuse this visibility with simple causality. It’s not about turning a figure into proof. It’s about understanding an ecosystem.
Globally, Andrew Tate has exemplified ostentatious, staged, exported, monetized virility. The man is also associated with legal proceedings abroad that he contests. Here, the issue is not the case 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 by 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 turns into a resource.
The report doesn’t need to accuse to warn. It is enough to show how provocation, when rewarded, shifts the very idea of limits. Public debate then finds itself in a trap: responding amplifies; remaining silent lets it happen.
Alongside coaching, another vein prospers: sexualized provocation. It poses 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 the Street to the Stream
Masculinism wasn’t born with smartphones. It’s rooted 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 subvert them, notably during debates on marriage equality. The public performance already announced a politics of affects: presenting oneself as victims, making resentment into identity.
What changes, the HCE says, is the industrialization of distribution. The report mentions 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 the act. It says the screen can provide a setting, a narrative, a permission.
Between permission and action there are thresholds, resistances, bifurcations. Public policy’s task is precisely to strengthen those bifurcations, offer exits, 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 arrested by the DGSI. He was subsequently charged and placed in pretrial detention. The case was handled by the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office. Authorities suspect he planned an attack targeting women. The procedure is ongoing and the presumption of innocence applies.
However, this case marks a symbolic threshold. Hatred of women, when it organizes and targets victims because of their gender, becomes a security concern. The HCE addresses this turning point without escalation. It stresses the collective dimension: when an ideology feels legitimate, it seeks enemies, rites, narratives of humiliation.
The delicate point is this: talk of threat without turning fear into spectacle. Write about these excesses without reproducing their propaganda. The report attempts a tightrope. It names the risks but refuses exhibitionism.
Recommendations To Regain Control
The HCE makes 25 recommendations. The spirit of the text is not to leave schools and the digital sphere alone in the face of a phenomenon that crosses families, peer groups, and imaginations. It calls for strengthening education about affective, relational, and sexual life, called EVARS, to give adolescents tools of consent, empathy, and discernment.
On the digital front, it calls for stronger reporting and controls. In addition, better traceability of responses is requested as well as increased algorithmic transparency. This is not a battle against speech, but against the mechanics that push and rank it. Then that mechanism repeats it until it becomes familiar. The recommendations also target procedures and timelines. They concern the capacity to document and sanction what falls under harassment and hate.
The HCE also asks that security doctrines and training incorporate the possibility of misogynistic 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 is sometimes being prepared as a collective action. It should not be seen merely as a lapse.
Finally, the HCE proposes being entrusted with a national observatory mission on masculinism and sexist radicalizations, with dedicated resources. The ambition is to monitor, measure, anticipate, rather than discover too late.
A Democratic Issue, A Battle Of Narratives
One broader question remains beyond the recommendations. How to respond to loneliness, humiliation, and fears without offering permission to hate in return? How to talk to boys without humiliating them? How to address men without caricaturing them? And how to reaffirm equality without turning debate into constant trial?
The report spares no ambiguities of the era. It reminds that the majority rejects sexism. However, a structured minority can work to delegitimize equality. It can pass off hostility 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.
On the streets, the refusal of violence continues to be voiced, stubbornly.
The phrase “masculinist threat” only makes sense if it does not produce its own vertigo. It must serve to illuminate, not to stun. The HCE proposes a framework: distinguish sexism that dresses up as gallantry, sexism that displays as hostility, and moments when that hostility aggregates, organizes, and dreams of action.
The issue, ultimately, is democratic. A society that allows the idea that equality is an aggression to flourish ends up shrinking its own freedom. The algorithm, meanwhile, does not know nuance: it knows attention retention. It is up to schools, platforms, the justice system, and politicians to reintroduce brakes, law, and shared culture.
This is not about opposing women and men, nor reducing boys to suspicion. It’s about refusing that frustration be converted into a license to harm. Also, violence must be prevented from becoming just another language. The 2026 report, with its figures and recommendations, reminds of a harsh truth: equality is never won. It must be defended like a light you maintain.