How self-optimisation can reinforce misogyny, ableism and the far right

The recent rise in self-optimisation culture, from morning routine podcasts to wellness influencers to body-hacking forums, places personal transformation at the centre of identity. 

It’s a world obsessed with control, mastery and the promise that a better, cleaner, more disciplined version of yourself is just a few lifestyle tweaks away. On the surface, these movements seem empowering. Who wouldn’t want to feel more confident, healthier, stronger or more in command of their life? But beneath the surface lies something far more troubling. 

The same language of purity, discipline and self-control that fuels personal optimisation can easily become a gateway into far-right and fascist thinking. These ideologies thrive on hierarchy, purity and exclusion. When self-improvement turns into a moral ranking system where some bodies are considered better, more disciplined or more deserving than others, the slide can be subtle and frighteningly easy.

The path from optimisation culture to far-right thinking looks different for men and women.

For men, the entry point is often podcasts and online influencers who present themselves as self-help mentors. They speak of discipline, mastery, leadership, dominance and financial ascendancy. This advice is framed as the antidote to modern malaise, but these spaces rarely stay with basic self-help. Slowly, the message shifts. A stronger body means a stronger man; a stronger man deserves authority; male authority is natural, even moral. Success comes from willpower, which means failure is a result of weakness. And weakness, in this worldview, is contemptible.

This rhetoric easily slides into toxic masculinity. Behavioural researchers have noted how fitness and self-improvement spaces for men can blend seamlessly into misogynistic and extremist spaces due to their shared emphasis on hierarchy, self-command and the moralisation of strength. If you spend enough time listening, the language becomes clearer.

Women become distractions or tests; other men become competition; vulnerability becomes failure; and the world becomes a battlefield where only the strong deserve to win. And soon, conversations about physical discipline turn into conversations about racial superiority, national decline and the need to defend a culture under threat. Self-optimisation is used as a recruitment strategy for the far-right.

Take Jordan Peterson. His early work resonated with men who felt lost or dismissed, offering advice framed around self-improvement and responsibility. The advice was simple: Make your bed. Stand up straight. Speak clearly. On their own, these suggestions sound harmless and even helpful. But slowly, the rhetoric shifted. Personal responsibility became a gateway to critiques of feminism. Emotional struggle became a justification for resentment. Hierarchies were not just acknowledged but defended as natural, moral and necessary. A journey that began with a man simply wanting to feel more confident and to get some life hacks on how to feel competent rapidly morphed into a worldview that painted women, marginalised communities, and anyone advocating for equality as threats to stability and order.

Andrew Tate represents a more accelerated version of the same pipeline. Now widely acknowledged as a damaging, abusive misogynist, currently facing charges for rape, bodily harm and human trafficking, Tate nevertheless has been hugely influential for so many young men, and his messaging often lures men in in a similar way to Jordan Peterson. Tate starts with the idea of discipline, success and strength, emphasising fitness and financial success – but these entry points quickly move toward dominance, ownership and contempt, where women become property and empathy becomes failure.

Tate frames himself as a solution to male dissatisfaction, but his solution is a rigid, punitive form of masculinity that encourages men to see the world as a competition they are owed victory in, and women who are subjects to be controlled, owned and abused. That logic lays fertile ground for misogyny, racism and authoritarian thinking because it teaches men that superiority is not just desired, but deserved.

Figures like Joe Rogan, whose influence lies in creating a seemingly casual, conversational atmosphere, also hugely contribute to this slippery slope. His platform often blends self-improvement talk, fitness and wellness content and male-focused optimisation discourse with a distrust of institutions, science and expertise.

Within this environment, guests promoting conspiracy theories, ethnonationalism or pseudoscience are simultaneously welcomed, platformed, but also treated as ‘simply offering another perspective’, while female experts, feminists, and anyone who can challenge Rogan and his Trump and Elon Musk-loving audience somehow never appear in his line-up. The conversational tone and claim to ‘just be asking questions’ is part of the mechanism. If everything is just a conversation, then dangerous ideas are never named as dangerous. They are framed as interesting, edgy or worth considering. The shift is subtle, but the effect is profound. Many cultural and political commentators in America have acknowledged Rogan’s podcast as pushing men towards conservative politics and contributing to Trump being elected in 2024.

For women, the pathway to far-right thinking often looks softer, more subtle, and more aesthetically pleasing, but the logic is strikingly similar. Wellness culture promises purity, ease and femininity through the control of one’s body. It focuses on being clean, glowing, natural and light. It promises that, through ritual, consumption, and discipline, a woman can not only feel well but also become her best, most pure self, which is always slim and white – a form of Eurocentric femininity held up by wellness culture as the ideal. The aesthetics are gentle, but the pressure is immense. And like the men’s version, the wellness pipeline makes morality into a bodily project where so-called ‘clean’ eating isn’t just a diet, it’s moral goodness. The message is that a worthy woman is a controlled woman, and a controlled woman is a good woman.

The danger lies not just in the aesthetic ideal but in the moral logic that underpins it. If a well, clean, disciplined body is virtuous, then a body that is larger, disabled, chronically ill or unable to perform purity rituals becomes a failure. And once bodies are ranked morally, the leap to thinking of certain people – people with disabilities, fat people, people of colour – as lesser, is terrifyingly easy.

Wellness coaches on Instagram and TikTok, yoga lifestyle entrepreneurs and anti-inflammatory diet bloggers frequently share rhetoric that starts with self-improvement but evolves into moralisation. Clean eating becomes a moral identity, and ‘toxin-free’ living becomes an ideological stance. And increasingly, wellness spaces intersect with conspiracy communities. During the pandemic, researchers documented the rise of the so-called ‘conspirituality’ movement, where wellness influencers began promoting anti-vaccine and anti-government messages. The focus on bodily purity and distrust of medical authority became intertwined with political extremism and New Age spirituality, all packaged in an image of pretty white femininity with a dash of yoga and sprinkling of chia seeds.

Research into women’s wellness communities has found strong patterns of distrust toward institutions, especially medicine. Women, who are more likely to have their pain dismissed by doctors, often search elsewhere for validation and care. Their desire for validation is understandable, but this vulnerability can be exploited. Suspicion of medicine and science becomes a suspicion of expertise generally, and in a climate of anti-intellectualism where misinformation is profitable and outrage spreads faster than caution, this suspicion can turn political, quickly transforming into anti-vaccine rhetoric, anti-government rhetoric, and conspiracy communities that emphasise purity and danger. These worlds overlap, share followers and reinforce each other.

This is where women’s involvement in the “Make America Healthy Again” movement fits with eerie precision. The Make America Healthy Again movement, with its acronym ‘MAHA’ showing its Trumpian political leanings, is heavily supported by networks of white suburban and upper-middle-class mothers, and blends wellness culture with populist distrust of medicine.

It speaks directly to women’s fears about their children’s health and safety, often stoking fear by evoking the rise in chronic disease, allergies and developmental diagnoses, knowing that many mothers are fearful and searching for easy, controllable answers. MAHA offers them one: the problem, apparently, is toxins. And toxins – a deliberately vague, unscientific yet fear-mongering term – are apparently everywhere.

There are toxins in food, in medicine, in the water, in the vaccines. The rhetoric of protecting yourself and your children from toxins sounds caring and maternal, but the logic it rests on is purity politics. If children are getting sick, the message suggests, it is not because of systemic failures in healthcare, nutrition access or environmental regulation – issues that would require systemic overhaul and maybe even leftist solutions – no. It is because mothers are not vigilant, pure or self-disciplined enough, and because experts are apparently all lying.

And this emphasis on hypervigilance, control, suspicion of experts, and a belief in some lifestyle being more pure, moral and worthy than others can lead directly to ableism, racism, xenophobia and extremism.

The movement first spread through online wellness and “natural parenting” spaces, where concerns about food additives, screen time, gut health and sensory development already circulate widely. But as MAHA has grown in influence, the tone has sharpened. What begins as “just wanting to keep your kids healthy” becomes pressure to eliminate everyday foods, medicines and vaccines. Personal choice becomes moral judgment. And mothers, already performing the majority of childcare labour, are tasked with an impossible standard: control everything their children touch, consume or encounter, or risk being blamed for their illness.

This maternal pressure is the hinge where wellness slips into far-right ideology. When health is framed as a matter of purity, it becomes easy to pathologise difference. Disability becomes a failure of maternal vigilance. Illness becomes contamination. Children who are neurodivergent, disabled or chronically ill are framed not as diverse or deserving of care, but as preventable outcomes that a “good” mother should have avoided. These are deeply ableist ideas, rooted in eugenic thinking, but are packaged to women in the language of good, responsible motherhood.

The recent push in the United States to add warning labels to acetaminophen, aka Tylenol, during pregnancy is one example of how this rhetoric gains institutional traction. Despite the lack of evidence linking Tylenol use to autism, the conversation was celebrated within MAHA spaces as proof that mothers should have been suspicious all along and seen as confirmation that medical science can’t be trusted.

The underlying message of this unproven theory exposes the movement’s deeper ideological roots. By implying that autism is a preventable condition caused by maternal behaviour, MAHA frames neurodivergence as something that should be avoided, corrected or eradicated. The result is not health advocacy but a worldview in which disabled and neurodivergent people are seen as mistakes rather than full members of society – ableist and eugenicist thinking. This is optimisation and wellness culture descending into conspiracy theories, eugenics and extremism, introduced via the language of maternal care and individual control.

There is research documenting this pipeline from wellness and optimisation culture into far-right ideology.  In 2022, cultural sociologist Stephanie Alice Baker analysed how wellness influencers leveraged trust, intimacy and the promise of bodily purity to draw followers toward anti-vaccine sentiment and far-right conspiracy narratives, often under the guise of personal empowerment.

Meanwhile, research by Manoel Horta Ribeiro and colleagues on the ‘manosphere’ has shown that male self-improvement forums centred on building self-confidence (especially around women) increasingly overlap with nationalist and misogynistic messaging. These findings align with work by researchers such as Vivian Gerrand and Francesca Scrinzi, who argue that wellness spaces have become fertile ground for white supremacist and anti-feminist ideology, particularly when health is framed as purity and strength is framed as moral virtue.

Journalism has also traced this movement outside academia: investigations, including one by Al Jazeera in 2025, show how far-right groups deliberately target wellness and parenting communities as recruitment networks, recognising that these spaces are already primed by mistrust of institutions, anxieties about bodily control and a desire to protect the vulnerable.

Among this research, a gendered path from wellness and optimisation culture to far-right extremism clearly emerges. Men’s communities emphasise dominance. Women’s communities emphasise purity. But both are teaching the same lesson: the self is a battlefield and the body is proof of whether you deserve power, belonging or respect.

The slide toward far-right ideology often happens quietly. A podcast recommends a book with extremist roots. A wellness influencer posts about rejecting mainstream medicine. A fitness coach starts talking about cultural decay. None of it looks political at first. It looks like motivation, empowerment, even care. But hierarchies formed in the mirror are still hierarchies. Someone is always below. Someone is always failing. Someone is always impure. And once morality attaches to the body, politics follows.

The real question is why we ever learned to locate our value in our bodies at all? Who benefits when discipline is framed as virtue, and vulnerability as failure? And when some bodies are seen as superior to others, whose ideology does that serve? 

The danger is not wanting to feel well or strong. The danger is when self-improvement becomes a ranking system; when care becomes competition; when discipline becomes superiority; where bodies are viewed as more worthy or moral than others.

This pipeline works not because it shouts, but because it whispers.

It begins with the body. It ends with who we believe is worthy of being treated as fully human.