Drinking male tears: language, the manosphere, and networked harassment

Abstract

While popular discourse often frames online harassment as an issue of individuals engaged in abhorrent behavior, harassing behavior is often networked in that it is coordinated and organized. When feminists and female public figures experience harassment, it often originates from members of a loose online network known as the manosphere, a set of blogs, podcasts, and forums comprised of pickup artists, men’s rights activists, anti-feminists, and fringe groups. While the particular beliefs of these groups may differ, many participants have adopted a common language. This paper explores the discourse of the manosphere and its links to online misogyny and harassment. Using critical discourse analysis, we examine the term misandry, which originates in the manosphere; trace its infiltration into more mainstream circles; and analyze its ideological and community-building functions. We pay particular attention to how this vocabulary reinforces a misogynistic ontology which paints feminism as a man-hating movement which victimizes men and boys.

Keywords:

• Men’s Rights Movement
• masculinity
• harassment
• misandry
• discourse analysis

Notes

1. As Andre Brock writes, SJW is “ostensibly a term defining activist resistance to coercive regimes, [but] is instead more commonly understood as a pejorative definition of a particular type of internet inhabitant. Per Urban Dictionary, an SJW is typically a member of LiveJournal or Tumblr, narcissistic, emotional, a slacktivist, overly concerned with online reputation, and obsessed with being politically correct” (2015).

2. Rodger posted a series of YouTube videos and a 141-page manifesto online. In his manifesto, he writes, “The most beautiful of women choose to mate with the most brutal of men, instead of magnificent gentlemen like myself. Women should not have the right to choose who to mate and breed with. That decision should be made for them by rational men of intelligence.” This discourse is virtually identical to that found in the incels, or involuntary celibate, communities online (which were banned by Reddit in 2017).

3. While the contemporary MRM is overwhelmingly white, middle-class, and male (Christa Hodapp 2017), the pseudonymous and anonymous nature of many MRM-affiliated communities makes it difficult to tell whether participants share the same level of education as early Usenet posters. In a 2013 survey of the Men’s Rights subreddit (n = 600), however, 11% of participants had some high school, 12% a high school diploma, 27% a Bachelor’s degree, 29% some college, 9% MA or equivalent, and 6% PhD or MD, suggesting that they are slightly more educated than the population at large (MRASurvey 2013).

4. While Google owns the largest archive of Usenet on the internet (it is far larger than the archives posted by the Internet Archives), they do not provide sophisticated search functionality, nor does their archive include every Usenet post. This is a limitation to this method.

5. For example, see “a little misandry from some constitutional man-hater (“W. C. T. U. Notes. - By The Local W. C. T Um” Christian Standard (Cincinnati, Oh.), May 16, 1888, p. 8)”; “Such a being – the antipodes of the other, the sexless, the misandric kind of ‘new woman’ – has not yet succeeded in harmonizing her essential femininity with her claims to freedom.” (“Novels and Novelists; ‘The Clearer Vision,’” The Echo (London, England), Nov. 16, 1898, p. 1). Ironically, these examples are drawn from an anti-feminist webpage called “the Unknown History of Misandry,” which presents “FACTS which contradict what is taught in the universities and which even run counter to the assumptions made by critics of misandry” (St Estephe 2013).

6. For example, Dworkin and MacKinnon’s anti-porn position was strongly contested by pro-sex feminists and queer activists such as Gayle Rubin and Patrick Califa during the “sex wars” of the 1980s and 1990s (Elisa Glick 2000).

7. Note that Sommers is popular in MRA circles, which frequently cite her work as proof of discrimination against men and boys.