Male-supremacy as a violent political ideology

Last Saturday, a man armed with a large knife entered the Westfield shopping centre at Bondi Junction in Sydney. He proceeded to attack over a dozen people before being killed by a policewoman. Video footage appears to show the attacker avoiding men and targeting women. Five of the six people killed in the attack were women, and most of those wounded were also female. Police have confirmed that a gender may have been a potential motive. At the same time, they said that this attack does not appear to be ideologically motivated. While it is still too early to determine the Sydney attackers’ motivations – it is worth pausing to examine why misogyny, or a hatred of women, has been so swiftly dismissed as an ideology.