In a basement conference room in the Ronald Reagan Center in Washington, D.C., on November 19, 2016, following one of the first alt-right press conferences after the 2016 election, F. Roger Devlin (the “F” stands for Francis) took to the stage with a curious tale about Norwegian women. Their “lizard brains,” he said, were causing them to abandon Norwegian men for Pakistani immigrants, causing a crisis in heterosexual relations among Norwegian whites.

It was familiar territory for Devlin. Devlin is not a household name the way other white nationalist leaders like Richard Spencer are, and he certainly lacks the pomp of some of the far-right’s bombastic hangers-on, such as Milo Yiannopoulos. Yet the self-described “independent scholar” is a major voice on the alt-right, and has been critical in shaping the movement’s understanding of gender, marriage, and the place of white women among its ranks. He is a longtime contributor to far-right publications including The Occidental Quarterly, VDARE, and Counter-Currents. Like many on the intellectual wing of the alt-right, he has mainstream credentials, namely a doctorate in political philosophy from Tulane. But as his work veered right, he began to fancy himself a dissident. In light of the rise in mainstream media attention toward the alt-right movement and women’s role in it, Devlin’s work sheds a great deal of light on a question of what today’s white nationalists think of women’s place in society.

As Seyward Darby explained in her September cover story for Harper’s on women in the alt-right, there are those within the movement who are consciously pushing for increased female involvement—through YouTube channels, blogging, social media, and even presentations at movement conferences. It’s a big shift, given the oft-noted lack of female leadership in the alt-right. Some white nationalist authors have been quick to acknowledge the need for change. “There aren’t enough women who publicly align with the Alt Right at present in order for the newly awoken to find that new community,” the female white nationalist writer Wolfie James wrote in Counter-Currents. “A man can thrive as a lone wolf, but a woman will wither from loneliness.” Women’s inclusion, in other words, is crucial to the movement’s recruitment strategy going forward. But the far right’s gender politics are being shaped by Devlin and his ilk, and their vision for an ethnically cleansed future is hostile to female power. The result is that a conflict is brewing between what the alt-right knows it needs to do—recruit more white women—and the way it envisions the world it wants to build.

Devlin calls on men to abandon the “chivalrous pretense” underlying marriage and shake off their traditional economic responsibilities.

Although Devlin has been a presence in white nationalist circles for some time, it was his 2006 essay for The Occidental Quarterly, “Sexual Utopia in Power,” that garnered him fame in both the “manosphere” (the loose network of blogs, chatrooms, and forums run by MRAs) and the white nationalist community. He is credited with coining the term “hypergamy”—the practice of women “marrying up” in terms of class, sexual prowess, or societal status, which Devlin asserts is a foundational part of the feminist vision of sexual liberation. Charlotte Allen, a writer and fellow at the conservative Independent Women’s Forum, wrote in a 2010 Weekly Standard article that Devlin “deftly uses theories of evolutionary psychology” in his work, but that his “writing about the feminist and sexual revolutions frequently shades from the refreshingly politically incorrect into the disturbingly punitive.”

Devlin may have been “deft” and “refreshing” to Allen, but his theories are mostly regurgitations of the claims men’s rights advocates have made for decades. Like those who decry “gynocentrism”—a world in which women’s rights are at the fore—Devlin argues that the sexual revolution has transformed women into the dominant sex. The death of monogamy and the modern woman’s freedom to have multiple partners throughout her lifetime has left the majority of men behind, he says, creating a situation of “loneliness for the majority” of men while ensuring a “double standard [that] favors women.” Indeed, “in the feminist formulation, [it’s] freedom for women, responsibility for men.” These responsibilities, as Devlin outlines them, are manifold: It’s men, not women, who have traditionally died in wars. It’s men, not women, Devlin claims, who are the economic benefactors for their children—even if those men aren’t granted custody rights, as Devlin is quick to decry. And it’s men, not women, he says, who “have been the builders, sustainers, and defenders of civilization.”