The Backlash Is A Receipt

Content note: this post discusses male violence and political movements hostile to women's rights.

There's a number that predicts the far-right vote better than poverty does. Better than age, better than education, better than almost anything the pollsters usually reach for. Sexism [1].

Political scientists in Spain tracked the same voters, year after year, while the far-right party Vox grew from a fringe into a force. They controlled for everything: income, ideology, attitudes to immigration. Modern sexism, the polite kind, the she's-exaggerating kind, still came out among the strongest predictors of who ends up voting far right. And they found something stranger. Sexism moves. It isn't a fixed trait. It rises and falls inside the same man, and it rises fastest when feminism is gaining ground. They measured the surge, watched it convert into votes, and gave it its proper name: backlash [1].

Which means a far-right surge has a cause, and the cause is movement in the other direction. Nothing in politics gets pushed back unless it was pushing.

Britain is running this experiment right now. Reform, after a year at the top of the polls and narrowly second now, has pledged to scrap the Equality Act, the law that stops a boss sacking a woman for being pregnant. Nigel Farage has called maternity leave lunacy. He's called Andrew Tate an important voice for men. He's called the abortion time limit ludicrous and totally out of date, and promised that under Reform there would be fewer abortions and fewer divorces, as though both were his to reduce. One of his MPs says Britain suffers a totally unregulated sexual economy, wants no-fault divorce reversed, and says Reform would reset the country's sexual culture. And a Reform by-election candidate put it more plainly than any of them: I'm sexist, sorry but I am [2].

To Reform's right, something newer. Restore Britain, launched as a party in February by Rupert Lowe, the MP for Great Yarmouth, cheered into existence by Elon Musk. In May its local offshoot won all nine county council seats it contested in Norfolk. In July, Lowe sat down with Joe Rogan for two hours, on a podcast with 21 million subscribers, and said the plan out loud: take local government from the bottom up, then national government from the top down [3].

Who was that podcast reaching? Well, a 68-year-old former football chairman doesn't have 21 million young male listeners. But Rogan does. The far right's real machine is the pipeline that walks a lonely, humiliated young man from a gaming stream to a manosphere clip to a podcast to a polling station. The manosphere, if you've been lucky enough to miss it, is the online world that teaches boys their problems are women's fault. And the newest research has measured that stage of the pipeline too: among young men, sexual and romantic frustration works as a political grievance, and it converts into far-right voting [4]. That’s last week's blog happening in real time. Steep hierarchies manufacture humiliated men. Somebody has worked out how to harvest them.

The same tangle of sexism and vote choice shows up in British data [5]. And the parties themselves have stopped pretending it's anything else. Scrapping equality law, reopening abortion, praising Tate: that's a programme. The men building steep-hierarchy politics know what flattens hierarchies. Women with rights.

I understand the despair. I've felt it all week. This country has never had a Labour woman as Prime Minister, our own side keeps finding reasons why it's never quite her turn, and there are now two parties to the right of the Conservatives competing over who can promise the steepest country. It reads like losing.

Poland read like losing too. Eight years of Law and Justice government. Abortion banned in almost every circumstance. Then October 2023: almost 75% of eligible women voted, twelve points up on four years earlier, and for the first time in Poland's history more women voted than men. Turnout among the under-30s jumped from 46% to 69%. The government fell [6]. Nobody out-argued anyone. The women turned up, on an ordinary Sunday, with a pencil.

That's the receipt to keep. The backlash isn't proof the fight is lost. A backlash is what winning looks like from the other side. Nobody organises against a defeated movement, nobody spends billionaire money fighting a corpse. They're organising because the ground is moving under them, and they can feel it.

So the answer to what any of this has to do with feminism is the same as last week: all of it. If sexism drives the vote, then every vote held anywhere is a feminist front line. I can't deprogram the manosphere from my kitchen table. What I can do is refuse to treat politics as somebody else's department, and refuse the despair, because despair is what the pipeline is for. A humiliated man is sent to the ballot box. A despairing woman is sent home. Both on purpose.

Poland's women didn't wait for the perfect party or the perfect leader. They turned up in numbers nobody had ever seen, once, and a government that took their rights stopped being the government. A backlash only ever chases something that's moving.

Keep moving.

Receipts

[1] Modern sexism among the most important attitudinal predictors of far-right (Vox) voting in Spain, with within-person increases in sexism during periods of feminist momentum contributing significantly to the far right's rise; the study controlled for ideology, authoritarianism, nativism, populist attitudes, income, education and age. Source: Eva Anduiza and Guillem Rico, "Sexism and the Far-Right Vote: The Individual Dynamics of Gender Backlash," American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 68, No. 2, 2024.

[2] Reform UK's pledge to scrap the Equality Act 2010; Nigel Farage's reported description of maternity leave as "lunacy" and of Andrew Tate as "an important voice for men"; Farage's statements that the 24-week abortion limit is "ludicrous" and "totally out of date" and that under Reform there would be "fewer abortions and fewer divorces"; Reform MP Danny Kruger on Britain's 'totally unregulated sexual economy' and reversing no-fault divorce, House magazine via The Independent, 2026; Reform's Makerfield by-election candidate Robert Kenyon's unearthed comment "I'm sexist, sorry but I am." Sources: The Independent, "What Reform UK's senior figures really think about women and families," 2026; HuffPost UK and Left Foot Forward reporting on the "Women and Motherhood Protection Act," June 2026; The Independent on Farage's abortion comments, 2024. Reform's polling position to be re-verified on publication day.

[3] Restore Britain registered as a political party on 13 February 2026, led by Rupert Lowe MP, with Elon Musk publicly urging people to join at launch; Great Yarmouth First winning all nine Norfolk County Council seats it contested in May 2026; Lowe's appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience episode 2524, 8 July 2026, and his stated bottom-up strategy. Sources: Electoral Commission registration as reported, February to March 2026; Great Yarmouth Mercury, "Rupert Lowe appears on Joe Rogan Experience podcast," July 2026.

[4] Sexual and affective frustration operating as a gendered political grievance among young men and predicting far-right (Vox) support. Source: "From frustration to radicalization: sexual-affective grievance and modern sexism among young right-wing voters in Spain," Political Research Exchange, 2026.

[5] Ambivalent sexism related to electoral choice in Britain. Source: Roosmarijn de Geus, Elizabeth Ralph-Morrow and Rosalind Shorrocks, "Understanding Ambivalent Sexism and Its Relationship with Electoral Choice in Britain," British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 52, No. 4, 2022.

[6] Poland's parliamentary election of 15 October 2023: almost 75% of eligible women voted, a twelve point rise on 2019, against 73% of eligible men, with more women than men voting for the first time in Poland's history; turnout among voters aged 18 to 29 rising from 46.4% to 68.8%; reproductive rights identified as a key mobilising issue; the PiS government losing its majority. Sources: CBC News, October 2023; The Conversation, "Young, female voters were the key to defeating populists in Poland's election," November 2023.

For the research behind the dial itself, Sanday 1981, The Spirit Level, the World Inequality Report 2026 and the Femicide Census, see the Receipts on last week's blog, The Dial.

Sources checked at time of writing. Figures and reports current as of August 2026.