When I founded Cheer Up Luv eight years ago, I had a hopeful vision of the future. A vision that didn’t exactly look like this.

In 2016, I was in the US when Donald Trump won his first presidential term. I didn’t know it at the time, but the next year would see me dive headfirst into activism, educating myself on the issues I cared about and channelling my frustration with the state of the world into action. After a man told me to “cheer up” in the street, I soon began documenting my friends’ experiences of sexual harassment, which eight years later, turned into a community platform advocating for the rights of women and people of marginalised genders. In 2017 – by mere coincidence – my photo project got swept up in a cultural reckoning that began to tear up the very foundations of the landscape I was trying to influence.

The conversation around accepted sexism, rape culture and normalised harassment had long been had by writers, educators and scholars in the VAWG (violence against women and girls) sector decades before the #MeToo movement. Activist Tarana Burke founded the Me Too movement in 2006, and it was revived over a decade later by Alyssa Milano, who tweeted the phrase in solidarity with survivors over the Harvey Weinstein allegations in 2017. Writer and activist Laura Bates also paved the way for frank conversations around sexism in the UK with the Everyday Sexism Project in 2012 and her continual educational work in schools through research and writing about the terrifying impact of extreme misogyny. 

And while the tide did feel like it was turning for a while – with attitudes, long-held negative stereotypes and beliefs being publicly challenged – that momentum soon slowed, and then came to a thundering halt.

There were other huge social change movements around this time, with the Black Lives Matter movement gaining huge traction after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and grassroots initiatives like Everyone’s Invited sparking conversations around rape culture in the UK. We also witnessed an increased awareness around climate change and global solidarity movements for those fleeing war and conflicts. Yet alongside those movements, an undercurrent of intolerance was brewing. As soon as ‘woke’ became the word to describe left-leaning political beliefs, it also became a weapon for the right. And not just the right: it became a dirty word, a dog-whistle to groups who felt unrepresented by the movement, who didn’t share a passion for a more inclusive world and who were indifferent to liberal-leaning progression.

Couple that with a global pandemic, mass social isolation and an increased dependency on online communication fuelled by algorithms encouraging polarisation, and you have the perfect conditions for what happened next. 

We are now experiencing a global backlash to all of the above. One small step for feminism – or any progressive movement these days – followed by a gigantic leap backwards.

In 2025, we are now in a very different world. A world of Trump 2.0, welcomed in by tech bro-ligrarch Elon Musk. A world where borders are closed and DEI programmes are being rolled back across the US. A world where content moderation is being stripped away on one of the largest social media platforms. A cultural landscape where the world’s largest search engine has removed Women’s History Month, Black History Month and Pride Month from its calendar. An era in which progressive books have been banned, art shows celebrating LGBTQ+ and Black artists have been cancelled and where ‘masculine energy’ is officially back in. One especially frightening development has been the lifting of the Tate brothers’ travel ban: after being under house arrest in Romania for the past two years facing rape and human trafficking charges, they have now been allowed to travel to the US (although Florida has opened a criminal investigation into how this happened).

This plot twist is worrying for several reasons. Firstly, because it fits the general global trend we are seeing of an embracing of extreme right wing views and figures, but also because it signals the renormalisation and acceptance of dangerous misogyny. Sadly, you only need to scroll through the past few weeks of headlines depicting various horrifying incidents of male violence against women, medical misogyny and outright sexism to see a fraction of just how pervasive misogyny is worldwide.

Away from the headlines, we are seeing this trend in young people’s views too. In a recent study, just 32% of men in Gen Z said that they would define themselves as being a ‘feminist’. In research from 2024, one in five men aged 16–29-years-old reported having a ‘favourable’ view of Andrew Tate.

The shift away from progressive views about gender equality and the move towards manosphere figures like Tate is terrifying. Misogynistic views, casual sexism and negative stereotypes about women and minorities don’t exist in a vacuum. They are directly linked to the escalation of violence towards women, girls and people of marginalised genders. When we read about serious acts of violence in headlines, the violence doesn’t just materialise out of nowhere. It is nurtured by harmful attitudes and beliefs, such as the dangerous influence of misogynistic views like Tate, which, if left unchallenged, can easily develop into more extreme acts and behaviours. Often depicted in diagrams like the Pyramid Of Sexual Violence, there are many frameworks that exist to illustrate this phenomenon. A phenomenon that not only applies to sexual violence, but to all other forms of discrimination like ableism, homophobia, transphobia and racism.

When we think about how quickly women’s rights have already been rolled back over the past eight years, we can’t take a moment’s pause in our activism and outrage, as burnt out as we are from the uphill battle for equality so far.

From the overturning of Roe v Wade in the US and anti-abortion sentiments now beginning to infiltrate the UK to watching the Tate brothers being allowed to jet off on a private flight to the US, this backlash to women’s rights can’t be ignored. We know that when ‘milder’ forms of sexism or harassment become normalised and accepted by society, it creates the perfect environment for more ‘extreme’ forms to fester and grow. This new swing to platform influential and openly sexist men can only mean a halt in the progression of gender equality and women’s rights. When misogyny is downplayed, we all suffer. And if we don’t confront this backlash to equality head on, we face a real world threat of increased violence towards women, girls, LGBTQ+ folks and other marginalised communities.

Images: Eliza Hatch