The Manosphere

The rise of far-right parties in many parts of the world threatens the work of human rights and social justice NGOs. That far-right messaging and movements are polarizing political debates is clear; there is less clarity about the affective appeals and cognitive frames deployed to engineer this polarization. This report was commissioned to examine the ways in which varying narratives and tropes of masculinity and femininity have both shaped and been used by the far-right in its mobilization of support and polarization of debate. It follows the academic literature in identifying ethnonationalism as the unifying ideology of a heterogeneous political tendency that can be collectively referred to as the “far- right”. The use of the descriptor “far-right” also serves to designate those parties and formations which have engineered the entry of extremism into the mainstream, by rejecting both the traditional center-right establishment in politics and the violent extremism of openly anti-democratic groups and individuals. The nativism and authoritarianism of the far-right should be regarded as a “pathological normalcy” and a “radicalisation of mainstream values.” The analyses and recommendations presented in this report are based on a review of the available a​n​g​l​o​p​h​o​n​e literature on the far-right, as referred to above. This was supplemented with a review of recent documentation of Oxfam’s work on gender justice and its programming with men and boys in particular, and key informant interviews with Oxfam staff involved with gender programming to identify their concerns about the rise of the far-right, and what this might mean for Oxfam’s work on issues of masculinities.

On 13 January 2019, Gillette launched a short film on YouTube entitled We Believe as part of a campaign addressing negative behaviour among men that perpetuates toxic masculinity. However, the video was subject to a large backlash with over one million downvotes on YouTube and thousands of critical comments accusing Gillette of playing into the 'feminist agenda'. This paper examines the configuration of the backlash, specifically examining the networked properties, structure and key actors of the backlash represented in the comments below the YouTube video to understand how masculinities are (co)produced and reproduced in a post-#MeToo digital sphere. The analysis incorporates social network and thematic analyses of the comments posted under the Gillette YouTube video. The study contributes insight into the structure and configuration of a digitally networked backlash public and identifies how digital tactics are employed by a masculine public to achieve digital hegemony in the networked sphere.

This research provides a preliminary evidence base to understand the extent to which violent extremist narratives have a wider resonance with men in Victoria, Australia. It identifies key sites and points at which the construction of masculinity in men intersect with, and challenge, extremist conceptions. It consequently provides an insight into where the potential appeal of extremist narratives can be challenged most effectively.

This book presents the first in-depth study of online misogyny and the manosphere from a psychoanalytic perspective.

The author argues that the men of the manosphere present contradictory thoughts, desires and fantasies about women which include but also go beyond misogyny. They are in a state of dis/inhibition: torn between (un)conscious forces and fantasies which erupt and are defended against. Dis/inhibition shows itself in self-victimization and defensive apathy as well as toxic agency and symbolic power and expresses itself in desire for and hatred of other bodies. The text draws on the psychoanalytic thinkers Klaus Theweleit, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Jessica Benjamin and Wilhelm Reich to present detailed analyses of the communities within the so-called manosphere, including incels, Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), alt-right YouTubers and NoFap users. Drawing on wider discussions about the status of sexuality in contemporary neoliberal technoculture since the sexual revolution of the late 1960s, it illuminates how sexuality, racism and images of the white male body shape the fantasies and affects of many men on the internet and beyond.

Integrating a unique theoretical framework to help understand how today’s increase in online misogyny relates to the alt-right and fascism, Online Misogyny and the Manosphere is an important resource for academics in a variety of fields including psychoanalysis, media and communication studies, internet studies, masculinity research and more.

In the era of networked affordances, misogynistic men’s groups have been rapidly growing and have contributed to several physical fatal attacks along with the propagation of gendered online harassment and e-bile. It is thus important to study the organisational structures and communication dynamics of these groups to provide insight into why they have been successful in recruiting members and how they further spread and normalise misogynistic beliefs. One such misogynistic group is MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way). This study seeks to understand the structure and content of discussion within the forum of the official MGTOW website. To do so, it undertakes a content analysis of comments (n=1012) inspired by Freelon’s (2010, 2015) multi- norm approach to studying online communication, which draws on the liberal individual, communitarian and deliberative models. It also assesses the broader patterns of commenting (n = 628,745) participation amongst users (n = 33,863). The results suggest that debates on the forum combine elements of each communicative approach and that this reflects a contradiction in their underlying ideology of separation and individualism. In addition, it was found that topics of conversation primarily focused on two topics: women (the majority of which unfold in a misogynistic way) and defining MGTOW – both as a collective identity and a personal journey.

There is no question that traditional gender roles are dead and that sex has become merely a physical function, no longer associated with intimacy. Both men and women feel disoriented and overlooked in this maelstrom of gender vertigo.

It is also true that women are empowered and, having been only recently emancipated, are imitating the traits and behaviors of antisocial men. It is a veritably post-apocalyptic age for relationships and dating.

But the solution is not avoidance or manipulation. We need a new social contract between the bearers of disparate genitalia. And we need with our heads rather than with our nether organs.

The Red Pill (r/theredpill) (TRP) subreddit lies at the heart of an interconnected network of misogynistic blogs and websites known as the manosphere. It disseminates radical anti-feminist and discriminatory content across Reddit and the broader internet. Acknowledging the community’s staggering size - with membership that numbers in the hundreds of thousands - this research fills a gap in standalone investigations into the toxic subreddit. Using mixed-methods critical discourse analysis (CDA), qualitative and quantitative research methods identify how misogynistic ideologies are constructed, consumed, and exchanged by RedPills on their virtual platform, Reddit. This study does not seek to define their discursive strategies as uniquely RedPill. Instead, it situates them in the context of a growing community based in gendered rage and the validation of violence. As result, it reveals the complex affordances Reddit provides, to create, engage, and disseminate RedPill discourses online.

In this paper, I argue that Robert King Merton’s Strain theory combined with Edwin Sutherland’s Differential Association theory are necessary for explaining why the manosphere is used by some men because of the use of adaptations to anomie, and how the deviant subcultures form through learned behaviour / radicalization. In finding support for their toxic masculinity, some men find themselves in the manosphere where they share their anti-feminist narratives, anger towards women, and lament on how social structures affect their hegemony.

Reddit's men's rights community (/r/MensRights) has been criticized for the promotion of misogynistic language, toxic masculinity and discourses that reinforce alt-right ideologies. Conversely, the men's liberation (/r/MensLib) community integrates inclusive politics, intersectionality and masculinity within a broad umbrella of self-reflection that suggests toxic masculinity harms men as well as women. We use machine learning text classifiers, keyword frequencies , and qualitative approaches first to distinguish these two subreddits, and second to interpret the differences ideologically rather than topically. We further integrate platform metadata (referred to as 'platform signals') to distinguish the subreddits. These signals help us understand how similar terms can be used to arrive at different interpretations of gender and discrimination. Where /r/MensLib tends to see masculinity as an adjective and women as peers, /r/MensRights views being a man as an essential quality, men as the target of discrimination, and women as sources of personalized grievances.

NoFap is a growing online community of mostly heterosexual men seeking to abstain from masturbation. Rereading scholarship on the history of men's masturbation, I undertake a critical discourse analysis of NoFap-videos on YouTube to investigate NoFap's interpellative matrix. NoFap offers a specific mode of becoming a man by advocating a particular form of self-relation. To become a man, one needs to reconcile one's self-government with one's organismic existence as a body "naturally" built for meritocratic heterosexuality. Reflecting on NoFap as a community connected to the manosphere, I conclude by suggesting that we thoroughly analyze manospherian modes of self-relation.

In recent years, we have witnessed an online backlash against feminism (Menzies 2008). This backlash is mobilizing a loose confederacy of interconnected communities from more traditional men’s rights activists (MRAs) to the new misogynistic techno-cultures of the Manosphere (Nagle 2015). Despite their differences, in all of these groups, feminism is reconfigured as intrinsically prejudicial and threatening towards men (Blais, Dupuis-Déri 2012) and labelled as nothing more than misandry (Marwick, Caplan 2018). The use of misandry as synonym for «man-hating» serves both misogynist subcultures and more moderate men’s rights interests, in that it allows these groups to appropriate the language of identity politics in order to place men as the silenced victims of a reverse discrimination in every political, economic, and social arena (Savran 1992; Farrell 1993) and reinforce their sense of aggrieved entitlement (Kimmel 2015). Situating their belief system in a social vacuum that fails to consider intersecting social dynamics, MRAs construct an over-simplified cultural model of the social world that isolates practices and phenomena that they believe are uniquely harmful to men (Schmitz, Kazyak 2016). In this way, their anti-feminist rhetoric takes the form of a neoliberal and seemingly neutral strategy that avoids any analysis of structural inequalities in favour of a commonsense celebration of individual choice for women and men (Nicholas, Agius 2018). This «pro-male» anti-feminism (Ging 2017) is indicative of a wider complex backlash (McRobbie 2004) that both accepts some of the precepts of feminism such as the principle of liberal equality, alongside a strong rejection of feminism as a label and political project.

Given the theoretical framework outlined above, the general aim of this study is to explore the Italian MRA and Manosphere online network to take stock of the current situation and the risk it represents for feminism. More precisely, the study aims to unveil some of the key drivers of anti-feminist ideologies and will be guided by the following questions: which representations of feminism and feminists emerge in Italian online communities and how they spark criticism of feminism? Is neoliberal feminism a specific target of this criticism? Are MRA and manosphere communities both represented online and, if so, how are they bound together? How does the Italian situation differ from the international one?

Misogyny online in forms such as explicit rape threats has become so prevalent and rhetorically distinctive it resembles a new dialect or language. Much of this 'Rapeglish' is produced by members of an informal alliance of men's groups online dubbed the 'Manosphere'. As both a cyberhate researcher and cyberhate target, I have studied as well as contributed to feminist responses to Rapeglish. In 2016, for instance, I helped build a Random Rape Threat Generator (RRTG) – a computer program that splices, shuffles around, and re-stitches in novel combinations fragments of real-life Rapeglish to illustrate the formulaic, machine-like, and impersonal nature of misogynist discourse online. This article uses Yuri Lotman's ideas about intra-and inter-cultural conflict involving something akin to the translation of a foreign language to frame the RRTG as one example of the way women are 'talking back' both to and with Rapeglish (the latter involving appropriations and subversions of the original discourse).

The Incel milieu is known for its high level of misogyny, self-hate, and hate towards society. In recent years, it has received more and more scholarly attention and one topic which is often mentioned but rarely deeply discussed is if there is such a thing as an Incel ideology. This thesis argues that such an ideology exists, the ideology of Incelism, and this thesis strives to answer the question of how Incelism is constructed, and what relationships it has to other ideologies, particularly far-right ones. To answer this question the thesis has through a qualitative content analysis employed Michael Freeden’s morphology of ideologies which states that an ideology is constructed similar to a semantic field. Freeden’s approach, together with the theoretical frameworks of Eva Illouz’s research on how love and relationships have changed since the dawn of modernity, and the field of collective victimhood, has been used to analyze discussion threads pulled from the website www.Incels.co, the at the time largest Incel-exclusive online community. The results show that the ideology of Incelism contains five core concepts labeled “Hierarchy”, “Misogyny”, “The natural”, “Alienation”, and “Direct action”, eleven adjacent concepts could also be found as well as one peripheral. What was also found was that Incelism constitutes a thin ideology, meaning that it lacks certain aspects which needs to be borrowed from other ideologies, or that it needs to be hosted within a larger ideological construct. Through comparing Incelism to other ideologies it was found that it views macro-Liberalism, -Socialism and -Conservatism as ideological foes. It is instead within the milieus of the far-right Incelism finds ideological allies, potential host ideologies, and from where it has borrowed the concepts itself lacks. The results of this thesis show that Incelism is an ideology that is vast enough to support its own ideological field of core, adjacent and peripheral concepts, but that it still lacks certain concepts. An issue which is resolved by finding support from ideologies found within far-right milieus.

In the last few years, incel violence has been the subject of many excellent journalistic accounts, but — with few notable exceptions, whose insights will be acknowledged and valued throughout this research paper — there has not been much scholarly output addressing the phenomenon. Individuals who self-identify as involuntary celibates are being radicalised into believing that the world is dominated by women and attractive men, and their marginalisation depends on this domination within what incels often term the mating market. After a number of violent attacks in which the perpetrators were linked in various ways to the inceldom — the status of involuntary celibacy — researchers have started to debate whether incel violence should be considered terrorism or not.

This paper examines the pillars of incel ideology through an analysis of incels’ own vocabulary and narratives. Based on this analysis, it introduces two distinct research hypotheses. First, it argues that, while consensus is being gradually reached on considering incel violence as terrorism, scholars do not possess an effective analytical framework for studying the broader incel communities and, in order to partly fill this gap, a proper notion is that of a radical milieu, i.e. a community where radicalisation occurs. The second research hypothesis suggests that the radicalisation power of this milieu lies in the external locus of control that most incels adopt and take to the extreme in their perception of themselves and of inter-sex relations.

Men's victimisation is a central topic in online discussions, particularly in the manosphere, where its emphasis is often combined with a strong anti-feminist stance. This article examines the interplay of affects and discourse in meaningmaking around men's victimisation both in online discussions and among social and crisis workers asked to comment upon meanings circulating online. By using the concept of affective-discursive practice, the analysis shows how this meaning-making reiterates socially shared interpretative repertoires and positionings that mobilise affects based on sympathy, anger and hate. Furthermore, the article demonstrates how the practitioners respond to these affective meanings by adopting positions of responsibility, while also redirecting and neutralising online affect. The article contributes to knowledge on the interaction between online and offline meaningmaking around men's victimisation, and to building an understanding of affects and discourse in seemingly moderate meaning-making around this topic that however resonates and links with the more extreme anti-feminism of the manosphere.

Chapter four (open access) of my just released book 'The New Demagogues: Religion, Masculinity and the Populist Epoch' (Routledge). The chapter explores the spectrum of male supremacist activity, how it ties into the new populism and how it constitutes, at its worst, a new form of violent extremism targeting women on the basis of their gender.

Misogyny online in forms such as explicit rape threats has become so prevalent and rhetorically distinctive it resembles a new dialect or language. Much of this ‘Rapeglish’ is produced by members of an informal alliance of men’s groups online dubbed the ‘Manosphere’. As both a cyberhate researcher and cyberhate target, I have studied as well as contributed to feminist responses to Rapeglish. In 2016, for instance, I helped build a Random Rape Threat Generator (RRTG) – a computer program that splices, shuffles around, and re-stitches in novel combinations fragments of real-life Rapeglish to illustrate the formulaic, machine-like, and impersonal nature of misogynist discourse online. This article uses Yuri Lotman’s ideas about intra- and inter-cultural conflict involving something akin to the translation of a foreign language to frame the RRTG as one example of the way women are ‘talking back’ both to and with Rapeglish (the latter involving appropriations and subversions of the origi...

El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar el fenómeno de la violencia online contra mujeres con presencia explícitamente feminista en el ciberespacio. Para dar cuenta de las estrategias de disciplinamiento sexual a las que están sometidas las mujeres, relacionamos la caza de brujas de los siglos XVI y XVII, con el ciberacoso, un creciente tipo de ciberviolencia. Abordamos nuestro objeto de estudio desde una estrategia metodológica cualitativa, a través de un estudio etnográfico de la manosfera-un conjunto de plataformas web antifeministas-de sus integrantes, y de sus técnicas de acoso; así como de los casos de ciberacoso contra Zoë Quinn y Anita Sarkeesian, ambos enmarcados en el movimiento Gamergate. Nuestros resultados finales muestran que los mecanismos digitales de disciplinamiento-amenazas de violencia física y/o sexual, y la apropiación sin consentimiento del cuerpo femenino-tienen como consecuencia la sumersión de las feministas en un estado de hipervigilancia, autocontrol y autocensura.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the phenomenon of online violence against women who display an explicitly feminist presence in the virtual space. In order to report the strategies of sexual discipline to which women are subjected, we relate the witch hunt of the 16 th and 17 th centuries, with the phenomenon of cyberharassment, a rising form of cyberviolence. We approach our object of study from a qualitative research method, through an nethnographic study of the manosphere-a set of antifeminist websites-, of its members, and their harassment techniques; as well as the cases of cyberharassment against Zoë Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian, both framed in the Gamergate movement. Our final results show that digital mechanisms of discipline-threats of physical and/or sexual violence, and the appropriation without consent of the female body-have as a consequence the submersion of feminists in a state of hypervigilance, self-control and self-censorship.

Whether intimate partner violence (IPV) is a gendered phenomenon or not is a question that continuously arouses debate both among scholars and the general public. This article analyses meaning-making around IPV and gender in online discussions that focus on IPV committed by women. The analysis draws upon critical discursive psychology, and identifies ideological dilemmas, interpretative repertoires and subject positions related in the discussions to the relevance of gender, on the one hand, and gender equality, on the other. The ideological dilemmas focused on the relevance of gender revolve around a gender-neutral repertoire and a gendered difference repertoire, while those focused on gender equality centre on the opposing repertoires of gender equality as a commonplace value and gender equality gone wrong. A more detailed examination of how these repertoires are constructed, negotiated, and used in the discussions reveals a pattern where discursive devices such as factualisation techniques are employed in combination with an affectively emphatic style of expression in ways that, for the most part, work to discredit the value of feminist understandings of links between IPV, gender, and power, while, instead, valorising seeming gender neutrality.

Men’s victimisation is a central topic in online discussions, particularly in the manosphere, where its emphasis is often combined with a strong anti-feminist stance. This article examines the interplay of affects and discourse in meaning-making around men’s victimisation both in online discussions and among social and crisis workers asked to comment upon meanings circulating online. By using the concept of affective-discursive practice, the analysis shows how this meaning-making reiterates socially shared interpretative repertoires and positionings that mobilise affects based on sympathy, anger and hate. Furthermore, the article demonstrates how the practitioners respond to these affective meanings by adopting positions of responsibility, while also redirecting and neutralising online affect. The article contributes to knowledge on the interaction between online and offline meaning-making around men’s victimisation, and to building an understanding of affects and discourse in seemi...