Punitive Femininity: When Moral Concern Becomes License to Commit Violence
A new survey finds that women are more likely than men to endorse political violence.
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About the Author
Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biology PhD, Manhattan Institute Fellow, and CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, The Washington Examiner, and other major news outlets and scientific journals.
When we talk about political violence, we almost always assume that its perpetrators are young men. That makes sense: men are statistically more likely to engage in physical aggression and get arrested for violent crimes at higher rates. At the same time, many are dealing with rising unemployment, declining educational achievement, and growing social disengagement. Given all that, researchers may reasonably assume that young men are driving greater tolerance for political violence.
New data complicate that assumption. A recent survey by the Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers found that under certain conditions, women were more likely than men to express support for political violence. The findings were so counter to the prevailing narrative that they surprised even the researchers.
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It makes sense, though, when you start to recognize where these women’s impulses come from. The rise of what I call “punitive femininity” is downstream of the toxic political culture online, a culture that is transforming the sex long viewed as more restrained and less prone to violence.
To investigate toleration of political violence, NCRI use data from a survey of 1,055 respondents, weighted to be representative across sex, age, race/ethnicity, and education. The survey asked participants whether they saw any justification for the targeted murder of President Donald Trump and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. It recorded responses on a seven-point scale ranging from zero (“completely unjustified”) to six (“highly justified”).
Among left-of-center respondents, 67 percent expressed at least some justification for the murder of Trump, an 11-point increase over NCRI’s earlier 2025 study. Fifty-four percent of right-of-center respondents expressed some degree of justification for murdering Mamdani.
Strikingly, justification for killing Trump and justification for killing Mamdani were strongly correlated. This implies that support for political murder is not merely partisan but reflects a generalized tolerance for political violence.
The most unexpected result: women were significantly more likely than men to endorse such violence. Female respondents were approximately 21 percent more likely than males to express some justification for murdering Mamdani and nearly 15 percent more likely to justify murdering Trump.
Both differences were statistically significant. These effects persisted even after controlling for age and other variables.
This disparity isn’t obviously the result of biological sex differences or even political polarization. Rather, it reflects the rise of a distinct and disturbing mindset.
The strongest predictors of tolerance for violence in NCRI’s data were heavy social media use and a sense that America is in a state of terminal decline. The supporters of violence in the survey aren’t traditional extremists. Rather, they seem motivated by the despair, nihilism, and moral confusion online.
For whatever reason, women seem uniquely at risk for infection by this mindset. Over the past decade, women—especially younger women—have become more politically and affectively polarized in their political judgments. Political disagreement is increasingly treated as a serious moral offense rather than a simple difference of opinion. When you see the world that way, punishing someone for holding different views becomes a moral good.
I think of this mindset as “punitive femininity.” By punitive femininity, I do not mean to invoke notions of hostility, cruelty, or aggression in the conventional sense. I mean the transformation of moral concern into a license to act punitively. Adoption of this attitude is fueled by a combination of raw anger, emotional manipulation, and an exaggerated sense of moral certainty.
Social media plays a central role in this transformation. Modern platforms reward outrage, absolutism, and performative aggression. They flatten moral complexity, elevating and even glorifying condemnation.
This lens helps make sense of some of the strangest corners of the internet. Consider the online reaction to Luigi Mangione. After his arrest for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, some treated Mangione not as a killer, but as a celebrity. They even explicitly sexualized him, describing him as attractive, charismatic, and even romantic.
When violence is paired with attraction, it stops being judged on moral terms. Instead of asking whether an action is wrong, people start asking whether it feels meaningful, expressive, or somehow justified.
Women aren’t uniquely prone to this dynamic. But they do disproportionately occupy and get their news from the digital spaces where this kind of aestheticization spreads fastest.
Historically, women have played a stabilizing role in moral and civic life. Across cultures, they score higher on measures of empathy, care, and harm avoidance.
When women become less likely to demonstrate these virtues, it doesn’t mean they’ve suddenly transformed. It means the moral climate itself has deteriorated. Social media is breaking down basic norms of restraint, and that breakdown is showing up in groups once closely associated with moral caution and care.
If we care about social stability and the well-being of the next generation, we need to change course. We must stop rewarding moral outrage—especially when it means support for violence.
This essay was originally published in City Journal.
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Have appreciated your nuance generally and am very disappointed by this piece. There's a lot of discussion about "feminization" at the moment, which is usually interpreted as women being at fault, and now you seem to want to make "punitive femininity" happen. Why? As a reasonable critic of junk science, you might not want to rush to judgment on the results of a survey. And, as an evolutionary biologist, you should know that many of women's caring, defending instincts have always tended to kick in for their in group and can be turned viciously on out groups. That's part of the transmission of culture and protection of their families. The men are the ones who are more likely to act on the violence, which is still an enormous concern. The question now should be how to calm everyone down, get them off their phones, make the algorithms less rage-baity, and remind young men and women that we're all in this together. Coining new terms that will be taken out of context and used against women is not constructive.
Having an opinion, yet not actually committing any violence personally, is just words. As in the concept of words being actual violence - they are not. Sticks and stones, in this case. Until women are actually doing violence, these are just words. And if you hadn't noticed, Luigi IS pretty good-looking. I sincerely doubt somebody who looked like Gilbert Gottfried would be getting this much support. Let us recall how well the words "young and dumb" go together.