Masculinities in Cyberspace: An Analysis of Portrayals of Manhood in Men's Rights Activist Websites (original) (raw)

Doing masculinities online: defining and studying the manosphere

2021

The last decade has seen the expansion of a network of online spaces and communities accessed mostly by men who discuss issues concerning gender relations, sexuality, masculinity and its meanings. This phenomenon, which takes shape within a heteronormative framework, has been called the "manosphere". This term originates from a 2009 Blogspot entry entitled The Manosphere 1 , and became popular through Ian Ironwood's 2013 self-published book The Manosphere: a New Hope for Masculinity. The manosphere has become the subject of an expanding and diverse body of scholarship 2 which we make sense of and classify around various criteria throughout this Editorial. Some studies focus on specific empirical manosphere cases 3. For example, Men's Rights Activism (MRA) and the Mythopoetic Men's Movement, both longing for a long-lost ideal of masculinity and a social status they wish to revive (Coston and Kimmel 2013; Schmitz and Kazyak 2016; Gotell and Dutton 2016); Pick Up Artists, Red Pill and Incel (involuntary celibates) communities, whose rhetoric centers on the crisis of masculinity and who advocate breaking free from a supposedly feminized society

Manosphere and Manconomy: Divergent Masculinities in the Digital Space

2021

Gender is a fragile construction that evolves constantly, through social acceptance and affirmation. A major space for this exchange is the digital sphere where gender is perpetually in the process of redefinition and negotiation. In this context, two online forces with opposing agendas currently put a claim on the future of masculinity: the Manosphere and the Manconomy. The former is devoted to men's rights, sustaining a traditional view of masculinity, based on misogyny. The latter focuses on the efforts of Manconomy, whose goal is to help men adapt to the changing gender balance in contemporary society. These opposed legions approach male identity from different perspectives, the traditional versus the modernized, each envisioning a different future for the role of men. This paper examines the manifestations of masculinity through the narratives that each side offers in the digital public spaces they occupy (e.g. blogs, social media, and forums) in their effort to reshape the...

Expressions of Masculinism in Extreme Political Groups Online

Content analysis of Australian extreme right/left wing political groups for evidence of masculinist ideology, in overt and less obvious forms. Examines the role of traditional masculinity in influencing political ideologies and demographics within those ideologies.

Framing Processes, Collective Identity, and Emotion in the Men's Rights Subreddit

Contention, 2017

Framing processes concern how movements communicate with members and the public, defining what they stand for and articulating grievances and solutions. I extend the literature on framing processes to include an online-only movement of the Right with no formal movement organization. I performed a content analysis of 435 memes posted on the Men's Rights subreddit, concluding that three main frames appear in their discourse: men as victims, antifeminism, and denial of gender inequality. Men's rights activists (MRAs) accomplish a global transformation of the feminist frame using rhetorical strategies to deny gender inequality exists, simultaneously asserting men are victims of inequality and sexism. "Attack frames" provide MRAs with a common definition of feminism. This understanding contributes to building a collective movement identity centered on a narrative of men as victims. The attack frames can be deployed to sustain affective processes such as anger, which motivate a countermovement against feminism.

Sluts and soyboys: MGTOW and the production of misogynistic online harassment

New Media & Society, 2019

Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) are a separatist Manosphere group (digital manifestation of the Men's Liberation Movement) who focus on individualistic, self-empowering actions as opposed to traditional collective actions typical of Men's Rights Activists and Incels. This study investigates how the ideology and rhetoric of MGTOW propagates and normalises misogynistic beliefs through online harassment, using a multi-phased content and thematic analysis of 10,280 tweets from three of the most active MGTOW users on Twitter. The findings document a link between the MGTOW ideology and toxic masculinity, showing that the online harassment generated is deeply misogynistic and polices the boundaries of a heterosexual, hegemonic masculinity. The analysis demonstrates that while the misogyny and violence produced by MGTOW is not extreme in nature, their appeals to rational thinking make it seem like common sense. The article develops new knowledge about the heterogeneous nature of the Manosphere and its constructions of masculinity.

"Victims of Feminism": Exploring networked misogyny and #MeToo in the manosphere

Feminist Media Studies

The manosphere is a detached set of websites and social media groups united by the belief that men are oppressed victims of feminism. Even though the manosphere has existed since the early 2000s, its activities have been arguably influenced and increased by the perceived need for counterbalancing the growth of online feminist discourses, such as those conveyed by #MeToo. By applying the theoretical lens of networked misogyny (Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kate M. Miltner 2016), this article explores the following research question: How is the #MeToo debate framed and discussed in the manosphere? The question is addressed through a qualitative thematic analysis of 12 articles and 641 comments about #MeToo written on the websites Return of Kings and A Voice for Men, which are part of the groups PickUp Artists and Men's Right Movement respectively. The analysis highlights some dominant themes: first, criticism and verbal abuse against women; second, dismissal of rape and description of #MeToo as a feminist conspiracy; third, perceived victimization of men and a desire to reestablish patriarchal values. This suggests that the manosphere is not a homogeneous network, but a cluster of misogynist networks characterized by different viewpoints and degrees of violence, and entangled with racist, homophobic, and far-right ideologies.

Looking at Men and Masculinities through Information and Communication Technologies, and Vice Versa

The lecture series that led to this paper, "Gender-Effects: How Women create Technology of Tomorrow", has an explicit focus on women. However, in this article in keeping with a relational approach to gender, we focus on men and masculinities, seen within the context of and gender power relations, and the diverse interrelations of men and masculinities with information and communication technologies (ICTs). This includes addressing to some of the shortcomings of contemporary studies of men and masculinities that neglect ICTs; the different kinds of social relations of men and masculinities to ICTS, in work, organizations, and social change more generally; and the implications of ICTs for sexualities and sexual violences, ending with the current case of online revenge pornography. As such, we seek to bring two areas of scholarship, critical studies on men and masculinities (CSMM) and studies of ICTs, into closer dialogue. We begin with a brief overview of academic debates in studies on men and masculinities without ICTs, followed by an examination of some aspects of the relations of men, masculinities and ICTs, with a final short discussion of the case of ICTs, sexualities, sexual violences and revenge pornography.

Misogynistic Men Online: How The Red Pill Helped Elect Donald Trump (Forthcoming Signs)

Donald Trump's 2016 electoral victory was a shock for feminist scholars, yet it was no surprise to his legion of supporters in Alt-Right digital spaces. In this essay, we analyze one of the online forums that helped propel Donald Trump to electoral victory. Drawing on social movement concepts and an analysis of 1,762 posts, we show how leaders of the forum " The Red Pill " were able to move a community of adherents from understanding men's rights as a " personal philosophy " to political action. This transition was no small endeavor. The Red Pill forum was explicitly apolitical until the summer before the 2016 election. During the election, forum leaders linked the forum's neoliberal, misogynistic collective identity of " alpha masculinity " to Donald Trump's public persona, and framed his political ascendance as an opportunity to effectively push back against feminism and get a " real " man into the White House. We argue that while previous research shows the importance of Alt-Right virtual spaces in creating and maintaining racist collective identities, we know very little about how men conceptualize gender in ways that inform their personal and political action-and this is to our detriment. We conclude the essay by arguing that feminists need to understand how men cultivate extreme personal and political identities in online forums so that they can better understand how new technologies are used to move individuals from the armchair to the streets.

Digital Observation: An Analysis of Patriarchal Comments in the Web

International Journal forInnovation Education and Research

Through the journey of the plurality of feminisms, we find ourselves today in the fourth wave, in which cyberactivism predominates, with feminist articulations going through the street/network axis. Thus, we sought to consolidate the arguments in defense of feminism from the analysis of the opposite reactions found online. The locus was the cyberspace itself, where comments were found in web news posts that contained controversial contents linked to themes worked out by feminism in their plurality. The qualitative approach was defined based on non-participant systematic observation and content analysis. Nine categories were extracted, including blaming the victim of violence, discrediting female accusations of violence, stigma of prostitution, social concept of Marianism, objectification of the female body, myth of female hysteria, myth of maternal love, sexual and reproductive rights, demerit the relevance of female representativeness, among other subjects. It has been found that chauvinism and misogyny are social reproductions engendered regardless of gender; whereas the demands on female behavior are mostly associated with an accusatory tone, with responsibilities reversed; that there is still the view that women do not have emancipatory capacity to achieve their successes and that, thus, they must take hold of what man has achieved from his privileges; that sexist attitudes are detrimental to society as a whole and not only to women and; Thus, most of society still does not understand the relevance of female representativeness in the various spaces. ABSTRACT Through the journey of the plurality of feminisms, we find ourselves today in the fourth wave, in which cyberactivism predominates, with feminist articulations going through the street/network axis. Thus, we sought to consolidate the arguments in defense of feminism from the analysis of the opposite reactions found online. The locus was the cyberspace itself, where comments were found in web news posts that contained controversial contents linked to themes worked out by feminism in their plurality. The qualitative approach was defined based on non-participant systematic observation and content analysis. Nine categories were extracted, including blaming the victim of violence, discrediting female accusations of violence, stigma of prostitution, social concept of Marianism, objectification of the female body, myth of female hysteria, myth of maternal love, sexual and reproductive rights, demerit the relevance of female representativeness, among other subjects. It has been found that chauvinism and misogyny are social reproductions engendered regardless of gender; whereas the demands on female behavior are mostly associated with an accusatory tone, with responsibilities reversed; that there is still the view that women do not have emancipatory capacity to achieve their successes and that, thus, they must take hold of what man has achieved from his privileges; that sexist attitudes are detrimental to society as a whole and not only to women and; Thus, most of society still does not understand the relevance of female representativeness in the various spaces.