From Witch Hunts to TikTok, Same Script, New Platform

Notes from the trenches of a Gender Studies MA

On any given day on social media, women who are anything other than submissive, tradwives will face a barrage of comments from men who appear to be living in their mom’s basement.

“Typical hysterical feminist.”

“Women like you are why Western Civilization is collapsing.”

“Enjoy being alone with your cats when you’re 40.”¹

It’s so repetitive that it feels like I’m Neo in the Matrix, seeing that black cat.

These dudes couldn’t come up with an original thought if their life depended on it, but it’s not just that their insults are recycled from Gamergate. They are old.

How old?

Like if you stripped away the ring lights, podcast mics, and usernames, you could practically hear a town crier yelling, “Bring out the witch.”

That feeling has been nagging at me for a while, and this week’s readings for my Gender Studies MA finally gave me language for it. Between Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch and Debbie Ging & Eugenia Siapera’s Gender Hate Online introduction, you start to see a pattern: misogyny doesn’t really change its job description. It just keeps updating its platform.

Right now, the platforms are TikTok, X, YouTube, and Discord. Five hundred years ago it was woodcuts, sermons, and public executions.

In the early twentieth century it was posters and cartoons.

In the older Hallmark films, it was the career woman that has to leave all that behind to understand the real meaning of femininity: marrying a Christmas tree farmer and raising babies.

The technology changes. The political function is boringly consistent.

Misogyny is not a feeling; it’s an operating system

One of the clearest things Ging and Siapera argue is that what we’re seeing online isn’t just “people being mean on the internet.” It’s a structured, organized, and often strategic form of anti-feminism that blurs into full-on misogyny. Women who speak publicly get verbally abused, doxed, threatened with rape or death; intimate images are shared without consent; livelihoods are sabotaged.

What distinguishes this “new” anti-feminism from earlier men’s rights politics, they point out, is its highly personalized, often sexualized style of attack. Pre-internet anti-feminists loved a good petition or letter-writing campaign about divorce or custody law. Today’s guys go straight for “I hope someone rapes you” in the comments because it’s faster, more visible, and algorithm-friendly.

They also show how online anti-feminism frequently collapses any distinction between “women” and “feminists.” The target isn’t just a particular ideology; it’s the fact of female speech itself. Anyone who looks like a woman, or is read that way, is fair game.

In other words, misogyny online isn’t a bunch of random dudes having a bad day. It’s functioning as a disciplinary system: punishing women who step into public, who speak with authority, who challenge the “natural order” of who gets to explain the world and who is supposed to quietly absorb it.

That’s exactly where Federici comes in.

The witch hunt was the original “pile-on”

Caliban and the Witch is one of those books that rewires your brain. Federici examines the transition from feudalism to capitalism and asks what happens when we center women, the body, and social reproduction rather than just waged male labor. When you do that, the infamous witch hunts stop looking like random superstition and start looking like a massive, coordinated political project.

Listen to this episode of my podcast for some more related information to what happens when women gain influence and economic independence.

Federici argues that the witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were crucial to building capitalism: they destroyed forms of female knowledge and autonomy (especially around reproduction and healing), broke communal bonds between women, and helped install a new patriarchal order in which women’s bodies and labor could be more tightly controlled.

This wasn’t just about “beliefs” or “fears” in some abstract sense. It was about the state, the Church, and emerging economic elites deciding that certain kinds of women (midwives, healers, widows, poor women who refused to be appropriately deferential) were politically inconvenient. Branding them witches and subjecting them to spectacular violence sent a message: this is what happens when women try to live outside the script.

Federici is very pointed about the fact that this violence wasn’t a one-time horror we left behind with pointy shoes and plagues. She describes the “continuous expulsion of farmers from the land, war and plunder on a world scale, and the degradation of women” as ongoing conditions of capitalist development, not a grim prequel we’ve moved beyond.

So we have this historical scene: accusations spread through pamphlets and gossip, authorities step in, and the entire community is invited to watch a woman be punished in public. People learn what lines not to cross. Fear does the rest.

Tell me that doesn’t feel familiar when you watch a dog-piled woman on Twitter become the main character for 24 hours.

Same script, new media

Once you start looking for it, you can trace this pattern all the way through modern history. Ging and Siapera walk through the early anti-suffrage movement in Britain, where groups like the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League churned out posters that mocked women who wanted the vote as ugly, shrill, neglectful of their children, or dangerously masculine.

The posters didn’t just argue that women shouldn’t vote because of Reasoned Constitutional Concerns. They ridiculed these women’s bodies and moral worth. They showed husbands burdened with babies while frivolous wives marched off to politics. The message was clear: step outside your “proper” role and you become laughable, grotesque, unlovable.

Fast-forward to the 1980s, and you get the Hollywood backlash. Susan Faludi called it out in Backlash, and Ging and Siapera note how films like Fatal Attraction, Disclosure, and Basic Instinct presented powerful or sexually autonomous women as existential threats to decent, beleaguered men. Michael Douglas spends a whole decade being tormented by women who either want to kill him, ruin his career, or literally boil his rabbit.

Around the same time, the media is full of panicky pieces about the “obsolete male” and “masculinity in crisis.” In other words: every major breakthrough in women’s rights gets followed by a cultural binge of stories insisting that things have gone too far, that men are under attack, that women’s ambition or pleasure or independence is dangerous and must be contained.

That’s the pattern. The platform upgrades. The underlying message reloads.

The algorithm as the new Witchfinder General

What’s changed in the age of social media isn’t misogyny’s basic function. What’s changed is speed, scale, and the business model.

This guy would have definitely have had a manosphere podcast

Ging and Siapera talk about how digital platforms provide a perfect environment for this new wave of anti-feminism: anonymity lowers the social cost of saying the quiet part out loud; echo chambers intensify the most extreme views; the “disinhibition effect” means people will type things they’d never say to your face; and the architecture of likes, shares, and virality rewards outrage, not nuance.

If witch hunts needed a town square and a willing priest, online harassment needs a Wi-Fi connection and an algorithm trained to maximize “engagement.” The more intense the reaction (anger, disgust, fear) the better the content performs. Misogyny is incredibly efficient at provoking strong emotions, which makes it very, very profitable.

Instead of a handful of local accusers, you get thousands of strangers who can jump into your mentions in seconds. Instead of one public execution to make an example of a “bad woman,” you get waves of dogpiling, doxxing, and threats that can stretch on for months. The spectacle is bigger. The audience is global. The receipts are permanent.

And because the internet collapses context, one quote from a 45-minute podcast episode or one sentence from a long article can be ripped out, misrepresented, and circulated as “proof” that you are a monster who must be punished. There is something chillingly familiar about watching the crowd gather in real time, each person adding their own fragment to the accusation.

The witch trial logic hasn’t gone away. It’s just automated.

Why it feels medieval when a guy in a gaming chair calls you a witch

When I look at my own experience as a woman who talks about gender and history online, this is what clicks for me: it’s not about whether my argument is good or bad. The point of a lot of these responses isn’t to debate; it’s to reassert where I’m supposed to be.

Federici reminds us that the witch hunts weren’t mainly about supernatural beliefs. They were about disciplining a labor force and reshaping social relations so that women’s bodies and time could be more easily exploited. Midwives who had knowledge of contraception and abortion, women who lived without husbands, women who didn’t produce children on schedule, these were threats to a system that needed obedient wives and an ever-renewing supply of workers.

Similarly, Ging and Siapera point out that the new online anti-feminism isn’t just a “critique of feminism.” It’s a worldview that imagines women as gold-digging, manipulative, biologically destined to chase “alpha males” while exploiting “beta males” for money, and simultaneously “infected by feminism” and in need of being subdued. There’s no good way to be a woman in that schema. Existing is the offense.

So when some guy in my comments tells me I’m undermining the family, or that women like me are the reason society is collapsing, of course it feels medieval. It’s the same moral panic: women who won’t stay where they’re put are bringing on social chaos.

The fact that it arrives via an iPhone rather than a pulpit doesn’t make it any less ancient. If anything, reading Federici has made it impossible not to hear the echo of the stake and the gallows behind the subtweets.

The view from the trenches of a Gender Studies MA

Doing this degree while also making public-facing content about gender has been the most surreal side-by-side learning experience. In seminar, we sit with thick theoretical texts, unpacking how misogyny functions as an institution, as policy, as culture, as what Federici calls a “foundational process” of capitalist development.

Then I go home, post a podcast about abortion access or birth control history, and immediately get a live-action demonstration in my notifications.

In class, we talk about how every major push for women’s rights has been met with backlash that tries to shove women back into “their place.” We look at anti-suffrage cartoons, at 1980s media, at the rise of the alt-right. On my phone, I see the same anxieties repackaged as memes and “debate me bro” thumbnails.

There’s something oddly grounding about naming it. When you understand that misogyny is a centuries-old operating system, not a glitch, your own little corner of harassment feels less like a personal failure and more like evidence that you’ve tripped one of the system’s tripwires. You spoke with authority. You critiqued patriarchy. You suggested that women’s bodies might belong to women. The script kicked in.

That doesn’t make it pleasant. But it makes it understandable.

We’ve seen this movie before, which means we know where to push

The reason I find Federici and Ging & Siapera so helpful is not that they tell a story of pure doom. It’s that they show us both the brutality of these systems and the cracks in them.

Federici insists that society has never fully succeeded in taming people’s lives to its needs—that there have always been rebellions, refusals, communities that refuse to play along, and that women have been central to those struggles. Ging and Siapera, for their part, don’t just catalog gender hate online; they also point to emerging practices of resistance, from feminist counter-speech to platform accountability campaigns.

If witch hunts were about isolating women and destroying solidarity, then one of the most radical things we can do in digital spaces is the opposite: build networks that make it harder to pick us off one by one. Share resources. Boost each other’s work. Call out harassment when we see it happening to someone else. Push platforms to take misogynistic abuse seriously, not as “drama,” but as a workplace safety issue for anyone whose job involves being online.

And yes, sometimes the most quietly revolutionary thing is refusing to disappear. Not because we’re obligated to be endlessly brave content machines (we’re not), but because every woman, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming person who stays visible in spite of the pile-ons chips away at the assumption that public space is naturally masculine.

So no, the misogyny in our comments isn’t new. It is not a fresh, exciting intellectual challenge. It is a very old story that has learned to use push notifications and monetized ad space.

But the other old story, the one about women organizing, learning from each other, laughing at the absurdity of it all while building something better, that’s still here too. And if misogyny insists on upgrading itself every few decades, we’re more than capable of doing the same.

We’ve survived witch hunts. We’ve survived anti-suffrage leagues and Hollywood shaming of career women and message board trolls. We can survive the comments section and the podcast bros.

1. Don’t threaten me with a good time.