An expansive, urgent conversation on naming male supremacy, refusing its grip on our lives, and reclaiming feminist imagination as a blueprint for collective liberation.
Award-winning writer Soraya Chemaly’s latest book, All We Want Is Everything: How We Dismantle Male Supremacy, is the manifesto we need for this current moment—a fascinating and infuriating exploration of the ways in which systems of male supremacy are hurting all of us, and how we can collectively chart courses to liberation.
Many moons ago, I interviewed Chemaly at the Ms. offices about her book Rage Becomes Her. It feels very fitting that we came back together to talk again in a moment when our righteous rage is needed more than ever, this time as part of my new Substack, excerpts from everything. (Subscribe at any level for more conversations to come!)
Together, Chemaly and I took a deep dive into how male supremacy is shaping our lives—and how we can all refuse it.
This interview has been edited and re-organized for clarity and length.
Carmen Rios: The last time we spoke, you had put out Rage Becomes Her, your book about women’s anger and the power that we could harness with it. You’ve also written a book about resilience, and written for varyious platforms about everything from gender norms to free speech to gender-based violence and technology.
What leads you to this manifesto? What was your journey to this book?
Chemaly: I think my manifesto moment was that, no matter who won the election in 2024, there would be this very deep and very violent backlash against progressivism, against women, against diversity, and that the one thing that maybe wouldn’t get as much attention as was due was this through-line of male supremacy, the way it cuts across all forms of oppression. It gives them a kind of thread that can be pulled through different forms of power.
If Harris had won, that backlash was definitely going to happen, and if Trump won, the backlash was going to be institutionalized.
I thought: Well, maybe just this small kind of dense primer on what to look for, how to recognize it, how it works in our intimate lives and our work lives and our political lives—and that’s what this is.
The climate movement, the movement for Indigenous rights, for Palestine—at the forefront of almost all of them, you’re going to find diverse groups of women, often who are queer …
Soraya Chemaly
Rios: You open the book with an open letter of sorts on sort of the phrase at its crux—male supremacy. A lot of us have heard about sexism, about gender equality, about patriarchy, but we don’t often hear the phrase male supremacy. You give us a new vocabulary in this book, and it really starts with that phrase. Why is it that you build the book around male supremacy—not patriarchy, not sexism?
Chemaly: You and I have been doing this for a long time, and the language that I certainly grew up with was of “patriarchy” and “gender equality,” and those words are important, and they convey a lot of information, and they mean important things.
“Patriarchy” really describes the institutions of male dominance, and that ranges from heterosexuality, heterosexual marriage and norms, to the education system, to the legal system, to the religions that we mainly practice. Those are institutions. “Gender equality” is really a way that we measure what’s happening around us—is there equality? What I try and explain in the book is that it is male supremacist, for the most part, in that most people felt that gender equality meant women should have what men had. If men had jobs and got X amount of dollars, that’s what women should have.
Neither particularly lends itself to understanding the complex intersections of everything—race, sexuality, gender identity, whether you have disabilities or not. They don’t capture that complexity. Male supremacy does that. I’m actually going to take the book, and I want to read it, because I was struggling. I was like, how am I going to define this? And I thought, why reinvent the wheel, because the Institute for the Research on Male Supremacism has done such a great job.
This is their definition: “The belief in cisgender men’s superiority and right to dominate, control, or erase, ‘others,’ and that means women, trans, and non-binary people, and those with Indigenous, fluid, gender social roles.” I think that’s a good start for the problem we have, and I think, too, that what’s important about male supremacy is it goes to the heart of the others, in that it’s a belief system. You have to talk about the beliefs that maintain white supremacy, that maintain patriarchy, that maintain gender inequality.
Rios: You actually call male supremacy a connective tissue that binds and reinforces those other things—white supremacy, xenophobia, homophobia. You also call it “the superstructure of racial capitalism, imperialistic war, and environmental collapse.” Where there are so many interconnected and overlapping crises and structures and systems at play, what makes you think that male supremacy is really that driving force in there, an undergirding force that connects all of them?
Chemaly: The first thing I would say is that I don’t want to confuse male supremacy with notions of masculinity. What makes a man in Beijing is very different from what makes a man in Dallas. Let’s admit to the masculinities as this broad and ever-changing thing—but male supremacy, in terms of a belief system, is pretty consistent, in that it is that men and maleness and masculinity, regardless of its manifestation, is actually superior to femininity, women, femaleness.
We can see that in many places around the world, and what I try to explain in the book is that that structure, that binary structure, that oppositional structure, is a structure of thought. In western thought, we inherited binary, dualistic, oppositional ideals about men and women, but we see them similarly operating in whiteness and blackness, culture and nature and all of these other pairings, and even though we are told that those are complementary, like men and women are complementary, our experience clearly shows that there’s a hierarchy.
In fact, for many people, the fundamental juxtaposition is between oppressor and oppressed. The minute you have that structure of thought, you’re going to have people who exploit and people who are exploited—and in that structure of thought, women, Black people, Indigenous people, the land that we stand on, the water that we drink, the air that we breathe all fall on the dominated, subordinated class. Male supremacy is one of those things, but it is the mechanism by which all of the others are managed.
Rios: Something that struck me from the get-go about the phrase male supremacy is that reading it, speaking it, seeing you really insert it into familiar stories,—to insert the phrase in there is a revelation, and it feels, also, like an act of refusal. Naming it, acknowledging it, that’s how we can begin to see it, to call it out, to divest from it, and once we see it, we can’t unsee it.
Chemaly: Exactly. It creates understanding. We have been dealing with this deliberately cultivated void, hermeneutic void, where you’re not supposed to say it. In 2013, if I wrote “white supremacy” and “if I wrote “white male supremacy” in an article, it was taken out. It was considered too aggressive or an attack or not a fact. We’ve come maybe to feel a little more comfort in certain parts of the world with the words white supremacy, but we still don’t think of male supremacy—so it gets erased over and over and over again. When you look at certain incidents of violence, and they’re clearly being perpetrated over and over and over again by men—they might be white supremacists, but they’re always male supremacists also, and yet, you don’t see those words. The masculinity and the gender part of the violence are taken out.
Rios: When I was doing my podcast for Ms., Looking Back, Moving Forward, particularly in the episode about gender-based violence—it’s eye-opening to think that sexual violence, domestic violence, these things are not new, and yet, we did not have language for them until the ‘70s. It just used to be called life.
When we don’t reveal the system—like you said in the book, when we say “sexism” or “inequality,” it feels like an accident. Oh, it’s benign. Oops, we only hire men? That’s so weird. Oops, we teach boys these things growing up? We totally didn’t even realize that.
Chemaly: Right. Oh, let’s get more data.
Rios: It pulls that cover off, with a phrase like “male supremacy.” It’s not benign. It is on purpose. It is a system. People are making conscious choices, even if they’re making their choices in a system, and you give us so much new language in the book. You raise our “emotional labor” and “mental load” with phrases like “emotional servitude” and “submissive generosity” and “obligatory compliance,” and all of these words are eye-opening. They make us think about the real intentionality behind it, the systematic advancement of male supremacy, the oppression of women and nonbinary folks and everyone on that spectrum.
What changes about the story that we tell about our lives, about the world we live in when we name male supremacy and stop pretending that this systematic diminishment of our lives is a series of happy accidents?
Chemaly: When you were just talking right now, my brain immediately went to my own childhood as a young Catholic girl, and I was a prototypical first-born good girl, Catholic, and I wanted to be a priest, and I didn’t know I couldn’t be a priest, and that happened when I was about 11, and no one could give me a really clear good idea why not—and I thought, surely, it can’t just be sexism. I spent the next 10, 15 years—including through college at Georgetown, which is a Catholic university university—and I concluded that, in fact, it is misogyny, and it is sexism, and that’s just what it is.
The reason I say that is because so much of my own childhood socialization required teasing out what is good from what is very harmful and self-harming—how to be a kind and good person without erasing myself in the model of femininity that the women in my family embodied, which was totally sacrificial, totally at the service of the people around them, and I think that’s how we learn.
What I would want is that we stop thinking about what is happening or how it’s happening, and really hone in on why it’s happening. It’s happening for a very complex reason, but, when you keep peeling away the layers of the onion, it’s happening because we fundamentally socialize children to think that men are smarter, more capable leaders, more capable of genius, stronger—which is a whole other thing, my entire second book on resilience was basically a book about how we define strength in our culture, which is to adulate masculine virtue.
If we can focus in on the why, I think that it’s much more arresting to people, because most people don’t want to do it deliberately. They don’t want to teach children that men are smarter, but by the time children are six, they all believe men are smarter—and we don’t say that that’s because they’ve been based in male supremacist culture, but that is why they believe this. Children have to learn these things. They are not born thinking these things. I like people to kind of forget about the numbers. We produced more numbers than any human being could possibly absorb. We’ve analyzed the numbers. We know what the numbers look like. The numbers are actually getting worse right now. Why don’t we focus on why and talk about why?
For many people, the fundamental juxtaposition is between oppressor and oppressed… people who exploit and people who are exploited—and in that structure of thought, women, Black people, Indigenous people, the land that we stand on, the water that we drink, the air that we breathe all fall on the dominated, subordinated class.
Soraya Chemaly
Rios: Hate this for us, but when I was 13, I just so vividly remember being like, ‘Mom, I’ve got it. I want to be the Pope.’ And my mom was like, ‘I’m so sorry to tell you this, but you can’t be the Pope, because girls can’t be Pope.’
Chemaly: I think many, many feminists I know are just aggrieved Pope-desiring girls. I think many of us were like, wait, what?
Rios: So much would be different if they would open those doors for us.
Chemaly: It’s so silly, but I think a lot of us have that moment. I was tied at the hip to my brother, who was two years younger. We were really best friends, and that moment really the first break for me from him—because when he learned I couldn’t be a priest, he cackled. And that moment was just a moment of, wait a minute, you’re supposed to be on my side. I’m always on your side. And we were no longer on the same side.
Rios: I think it speaks a lot, too, to what you talk about in the book—about how we can make male supremacy and privilege invisible, partially to make boys feel like, ‘oh, you didn’t do anything wrong,’ but even in this frame of, well, ‘girls just aren’t allowed to do that.’ The other half of that sentence is, ‘girls aren’t allowed to do that ‘because we live in this fundamentally unfair system that says, for no reason, that boys are better than girls.’ At the end of the day, we don’t want to allow this to happen, because we simply don’t feel that women deserve this. And it goes unnoticed because you just internalize it—’that’s just the way it is.’ That’s the natural order of things.
Chemaly: And it’s not only that women don’t deserve it. It’s that women will taint it. Women are going to sully it. It’s going to cause shame. And that’s important, I think, because if you think, for example, of the “boy crisis in education,” this happens cyclically and essentially, they are the same arguments, and among those arguments is this idea that only men can teach boys how to be adults.
We don’t talk about male flight from spaces where women are, because to be like women is shameful. It’s a degradation. Boys right now are detaching from education, but we don’t talk enough about the fact that before they did that, men left teaching because women started teaching. If you think of digital territories, the manosphere is male flight—and I would argue that, in the last election, we saw male flight from democracy. We saw young men actively voting against a democratic future and for a more regressive, authoritarian future, because the Democratic Party appeared to be dominated by women. The stigma of women cuts across lots of different phenomenon, and it’s not just that we don’t deserve it. It’s that we are actually a poison to the space.
Rios: There is this rising tide of anti-feminist backlash happening among young boys and men, and you really hit that nail on the head. You say that Donald Trump “is not paradoxical if you understand his administration’s dedication to preserving a global system that privileges hegemonic masculinity and its outcomes at all costs,” and that at all costs or above all else, it makes me think, too, of even Peter Thiel, who was literally unable, in an interview, to just say: Yes, I believe humanity should continue. “Drain the swamp,” “burn it all down.” It becomes very obvious that what they want to burn down is the progress. They would rather flatten the entire political system than watch everyone else get a piece of it.
Chemaly: If they can’t have that dominance, then they will burn it down.
Who cooks in your house? Who takes out the garbage? Who volunteers or doesn’t volunteer? Every one of these decisions adds up into a much bigger picture, and we don’t really think about it… There’s so many things you can do that will have a butterfly effect. You don’t really know what the effects of your small changes are, but there will be effects of those small changes.
Soraya Chemaly
Rios: It makes me question if talking about male supremacy, if using these phrases, this new vocabulary that really, actually, points out what’s happening—not the effects of it, but the system that underlies it—if it changes how we think about our lives, about gender inequality, how does it also necessitate, in a moment like this, that we change our feminism? What do you think needs to change about the way we organize?
Chemaly: Sometimes I wish I could come back in 500 years and be an historian and just look and see what happened. It’s just a very interesting time, if it weren’t so dangerous. We’re going through one of these massive transitions in human civilization. But having said that, I think that the way that feminism has worked to date is super aligned to the way media has worked.
We are all creatures of media in so many ways, and I don’t think we’ve given nearly enough credit to the work that feminists—feminisms and feminists, because there is no one feminism—in the last 20 years, around the world, have used technology very effectively. A networked feminism, a global feminism, a digitized feminism is transformational.
I cite a study in the book that showed sometime between 2000 and 2005—Facebook hadn’t even started, but there was enough of an internet—a very interesting thing happened. It wasn’t caused by one particular action or a group of feminists, but women all over the world. This was after, of course, the Beijing conference. Women all over the world began to reject, in their personal lives, the normalcy of violence in their homes. They started to understand it as not normal and as wrong. That moment was a tipping point moment for feminism—because these weren’t academic people, these weren’t women sitting around in small huddles in San Francisco, these were women all over the world having this moment of consciousness, rejecting centuries of cultural practices in their own countries.
If you think of that as the basis for a change, and then you see social media’s use—women are using every form of media to promote feminist ideals, and there’s no gatekeeping it anymore. There’s no sense that you can control it. It was never really controllable, but it was still, prior to the internet, quite top-down in many ways. But now, they’re all networked—and I think that’s probably really transformational intergenerationally. We just can’t see it.
We’re seeing really dynamic feminist practice in action all the time. It’s just that because of social and technical acceleration, there’s not really a moment to stop and say, what is happening to feminism right now? because by the time you do that, it’s something else.
Rios: Feminism is absolutely evolving in real time, adapting and confronting what’s happening. It just also strikes me as almost revolutionary to think, if feminism were to shift from the popular frame of gender equality to, no, we’re here to dismantle male supremacy, that intentionality would necessitate a massive watershed movement moment—that it’s not about elevating all of us to a place of privilege, it’s about dismantling structures of privilege entirely.
Chemaly: Towards the end of the book, I really focus on refusal, and the fact that young women, in particular, are choosing lives that completely ignore heteropatriarchal norms. 30 percent of Gen Z is no longer identifying as heterosexual and straight—more than twice the Gen Z men, and a larger percentage than any other generation. They are living feminist lives that de-center men, disrupt heteropatriarchy, refuse to conform, and they’re doing it quietly, in their own ways. Forty percent of Gen Z women want to leave the country, and would if they could. That’s a big number.
It’s not like they’re waving flags and building barricades. They just are trying to feed themselves and lead lives of mutual care. I think that expecting feminism to look like the revolutions of ye olde days is just not what we’re talking about.
Rios: At the same time, you talk about, in the book, overhearing this conversation between a few men, and they were progressive, and they were talking about surveillance and their shock and outrage at the idea of the surveillance state—and you point out that, for women across the country, especially in the last few years, but for many years, there’s been a surveillance state for women’s bodies. Your local government might be trying to make it illegal for you to leave state lines if you are pregnant and you want to end a pregnancy. You can be criminalized for the outcome of your pregnancy.
Chemaly: The standards for what counts as real oppression, real surveillance, real authoritarianism, real fascism are largely calibrated to what happens to men—so we don’t think of compulsory pregnancy in that way; and we don’t think of the micro fascism of patriarchy operating within families, the high rates of violence, the high rates of coercion and control.
The thing that’s really disturbing to me about Gen Z is that more than 50 percent of young men believe they have the right to know where their woman is at all times, and that men have final decision-making in relationships. They are holding very retrograde gender ideals—their gender beliefs are much more like a 75-year-old man than a 55- or a 35-year-old man’s—and that should really tell people something.
But by the same token, right up front in the book, I explain that male supremacy is predatory towards men. It’s bad for boys and men. It forces them into precarity, in terms of their own identities and relationships. It forces them into an unhinged model of competition for life. Men have got to compete with other men to win, and that’s how I think a lot, if not most, boys and men understand manhood. Thinking about male supremacy, as opposed to men oppressing women, the mechanism for oppressing people is to feminize them. You put Black men in jail. You make it impossible for them to have jobs and support their families. You deny them the guns that white men can have. If you look at the history of the oppression of Black people in the United States, the feminization of Black men, also the feminization of Asian men, if you think about the history of Asian immigrants, feminization is how you oppress those men. In fact, you put them in positions in incarceration where they might be penetrated, where they might be raped, and so, even that mechanism of rape, which we think of dominantly men raping women and children, is used against men by other men to subjugate them as a gender issue.
Rios: That comes back, too, to this idea when we talk about fascism and how it’s been operating for many people, that it is this idea that it’s new right now to some people, but it is definitely not new to people of color, to women who have been dealing with these attacks on their bodily autonomy—and also the flip side to that, is that, in this moment, the people that we should be listening to and hearing from are people who come from communities and groups that have been dealing with this historically.
Chemaly: They know. They know.
Rios: As you were writing this book, as you were thinking about this big picture of where we’re at and how we got here and how we get ourselves out of this, what were the lessons from legacies of anti-fascist dreaming, of anti-supremacist dreaming that so many people before us have done, that really inspired you?
Chemaly: This notion of having imagination, a feminist imagination. If you think about Afrofuturism or if you think of Black surrealism, if you think about the way marginalized people everywhere have to not just maintain hope, but create hope, they have to project themselves into a future in white supremacist systems that maintain that the future and progress is a property of whiteness.
If you think particularly of white men, you think of Silicon Valley. That notion of the future, who it belongs to, who defines it is very clear—and yet, at the same time, even though that has been true for centuries, we have this explosion of creativity and beauty and music and hope and mutual care, and you have to appreciate that the ontologies of oppressed peoples everywhere are very different from the one that we inherited as an imperial western power.
That’s hard—because if you grow up in a culture, if you grow up educated, the way most of us were educated, you’re going to inherit that, and you’re going to inherit the white supremacy and the male supremacy and the cis supremacy, and it’s very hard to think there’s something else, because it just feels so naturalized. That idea of having the imagination, and understanding that each of us has the right to the future, to define the future, is just really important.
Rios: I love that so much. We’re all so entangled in these systems, and we can be self-aware and know about them and learn about them and still be pulling ourselves out of them, because it’s all around us.
Chemaly: And it’s capitalism—like, you have to eat.
Rios: One of the things I love about the book is that it’s not all doom and gloom. It’s full of inspiration, of these stories of how resistance works and how resistance can work—and you lay out some of these ways that, on these small personal levels, we can start refusing male supremacy. You call them “micro-defiances” at some point. What are the small things that all of us can do, even if we don’t feel like we have power, or even if we feel outnumbered and we’re very overwhelmed in this moment?
Chemaly: First of all, I think it’s important to acknowledge that everyone has different capacities and that there’s a great privilege in being able to have health insurance and to feed your family and just have the basic necessities of life, which fewer and fewer people have. It’s important to do what you can do, not have a feeling that you must do—because that’s impossible in the circumstances that most people live in. But I do think that there can be a lot of humor and joy and glee in the realization that everything is up for grabs.
The minute you really start asking why—like, I was 8, and I remember thinking, ‘wait, why do I have to clear the dishes and my brother doesn’t have to clear the dishes? Who’s making that rule?’ That press for why, that’s where my feminism came from. And when you start asking why, you really quickly can often come to, because that’s the way it’s always been—and once you hit that, you’re like, well, I don’t want it to be like that anymore. What can I do?
A lot of us fall into traditional gender norms, heterosexual gender norms because they’re easy and because they’re rewarded institutionally—so we need to be able to recognize that and disrupt it whenever we can. The books you read to children. Who cooks in your house? Who takes out the garbage? Who volunteers or doesn’t volunteer? Every one of these decisions adds up into a much bigger picture, and we don’t really think about it.
Right now, a lot of women in the world are actively de-centering men. That is a movement around the world, and what’s interesting about that is de-centering men is interpreted by so many people as hurting men, as opposed to just saying: I’m not going to make you the center of my attention, my brain space, my emotions, my life course; I’m just going to lead a healthy, happy life and be self-contained and self-sufficient. That’s very hard for a lot of people to accept, but it’s not hate of men. It’s literally just independence. To interpret independence as the hatred of men can only come from centering men and male supremacy.
There’s so many things you can do that will have a butterfly effect. You don’t really know what the effects of your small changes are, but there will be effects of those small changes.
Young women … are living feminist lives that de-center men, disrupt heteropatriarchy, refuse to conform, and they’re doing it quietly, in their own ways. It’s not like they’re waving flags and building barricades. They just are trying to feed themselves and lead lives of mutual care.
Soraya Chemaly
Rios: You assert in the book that male supremacy’s logical conclusion is social collapse, environmental collapse, complete political collapse—which we are witnessing. You write that “where male supremacy reaches a dead end, the feminist imagination begins.” You write, this, too, is “a new world order.” What do you think or hope that that new world order looks like?
Chemaly: I was just talking to someone who mentioned the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once, because all of the terrible things are happening, and it’s almost like a shadow world in which the non-terrible things are happening—because there are dedicated good people who are building caring families and communities and neighborhoods, and they’re just doing the work on the ground, and they don’t have the megaphones and they don’t have the money they need. They need resources, but the fact that they don’t have them isn’t stopping them.
In fact, when you look, for example, at Gen Z, we focus a lot on the men’s rightward turn, but we don’t focus enough on the fact that it is the world’s young women that are the most dedicated to progressivism and saving the climate and diversity and pluralism. We should be celebrating that. Somehow, that cohort, across all of these countries, ended up with deeply intersectional feminist values—and it’s not because they were taught in school. Something happened. These young women got to this place through necessity and experience—their entire childhood actually has been Trump and on.
But also, they did it in the face of backlash. Every generation has had backlash. And yet, it continues to evolve in this direction. A lot of people think, well, feminism’s fizzled, it’s died, and I chuckle because every single social justice movement that I can name—the climate movement, the movement for Indigenous rights, for Palestine—at the forefront of almost all of them, you’re going to find diverse groups of women, often who are queer, and they are leaders of these movements. And yet, we don’t want to acknowledge the diffusion of feminism across the planet. We’re still looking for the feminism that comes in a cute little box.
There are a lot of white women right now talking about domestic inequality, and they’re talking about it in the language of early ‘70’s Marxist feminists. That took 50 years, but it happened. The thing that’s dangerous about that, to white Christian patriarchy in America, is that they understand how important it is to have domestic inequality. They don’t call it domestic inequality. They call it complementarianism But if you have women refusing to do that, and you have daughters who won’t transfer white male supremacist values to the next generation, you go into the panic that we’re seeing right now.
Rios: Thank you so much for giving us a guidebook for how to refuse it, how to defy it, how to name it and see it and tell everyone else that we know about it once we do.
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