“Are there any other male friendly subs on here?” - online men’s rights groups as simultaneous communities of care and hate, inclusion and exclusion

ABSTRACT

Online communities provide spaces and places where (almost) anyone can find like-minded others. This is true of many digital leisure spaces and is especially true for men’s rights and other masculinist groups. In these groups, while they are engaged with acts of misogyny and supremacist discourses, some men meet the fundamental need ‘for meaningful social connection, to be part of a group, and to belong’ as well as to ‘“heal” modern alientation.’ More than simple gatherings, when these groups for men form around a perceived alienation from the mainstream they become spaces ‘to which [people] belong’ and believe that they ‘can act together to create change;’ Southern’s definition of a community of care. This paper establishes these groups as communities of care where care exists under Derridian erasure. This makes them important avenues for anti-feminist and misogynistic ideologies, exclusion, and violence, but through cultures of leisure inclusion and belonging.

RÉSUMÉ

Les communautés en ligne offrent des espaces et des lieux où (presque) tout le monde peut trouver d’autres personnes partageant les mêmes idées. Cela est vrai pour de nombreux espaces de loisirs numériques et particulièrement pour les droits des hommes et d’autres groupes masculinistes. Dans ces groupes, alors qu'ils se livrent à des actes de misogynie et à des discours suprémacistes, certains hommes répondent au besoin fondamental « d'établir un lien social significatif, de faire partie d'un groupe et d'y appartenir » ainsi que de « « guérir » l'aliénation moderne. ” Plus que de simples rassemblements, lorsque ces groupes d'hommes se forment autour d'une aliénation perçue du courant dominant, ils deviennent des espaces ” auxquels [les gens] appartiennent ” et croient qu'ils ” peuvent agir ensemble pour créer le changement”; la définition de Southern d'une communauté de soins. Cet article établit ces groupes comme des communautés de soins où les soins existent sous l'effacement derridien. Cela en fait des voies importantes pour les idéologies antiféministes et misogynes, l’exclusion et la violence, mais à travers des cultures de loisirs, d’inclusion et d’appartenance.

KEYWORDS:

• Communities of care
• men’s rights
• reddit
• erasure

MOTS-CLÉS:

• communautés d’entraide
• droits des hommes
• Reddit
• effacement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/14927713.2023.2252812

Notes

1. Reddit.com uses the designations/u/and/r/to differentiate between individual user pages (for example www.reddit.com/u/Here_Comes_The_King is the page for rapper Snoop Dogg) and communities (www.reddit.com/r/MensRights is the Men’s Rights community page).

2. For posts and comments that I quote in this paper (aside from the epigraph) I have excluded author attribution. While this contrasts with my approach in previous expository work on/r/MensRights and other reddit communities (see Cousineau, 2023), in this case providing author names adds little to the argument. All quotes are presented verbatim as they were posted online.

3. For further discussion on the challenges and nuances of these dualities, see the works of Nicholas (2017) and Dhananjaya (2022), among others.

4. Throughout this paper I will use the word ‘care’, as well as “Care” with a strikethrough, to differentiate the more broadly understood concept of care (plain text) and the concept of care under erasure (strikethrough text) explained above.

5. The subjects Fielding discusses in his 1990 paper are police.

6. This ideological acceptance goes both ways, where I find their ideological positionings deeply problematic, and they likewise find mine unacceptable.

7. Given the timeframe discussed here (1970s) I chose to use the language men and women rather than more contemporary reference to identities (e.g. man-identified person).

8. See, for example, Marc Fasteau’s The Male Machine (Fasteau, 1974).

9. Some of the most prominent examples being the works of authors like Warren Farrell (1975) and Herb Goldberg (1976).

10. For longer and more thorough explorations of the genealogy of men’s rights and other men’s groups within the manosphere see Ging (2019), Gotell and Dutton (2016), Marwick and Caplan (2018), and especially Hodapp (2017).

11. Wright does not use the language of ‘Manosphere’ to make his point for second wave men’s rights.

12. I no longer name perpetrators of misogynist violence in my writing, as naming them supports what Zach Bratich (2022) calls the culture of inspo-violence that supports and perpetuates these actions. For more on this relative to misogynist incel violence see (Cousineau, 2022).

13. Quotes below are taken from different threads on different dates in December 2022. Here and later in the paper I present multiple example quotes as single block quotes for easier reading. Examples are separated by short dash lines.

14. For context, the use of anti-woke here is meant to reflect both the intrinsic ties to black consciousness and anti-racist struggles, and the expansion of the term to include oppression and discrimination based on sexuality and gender (Cammaerts, 2022). Anti-woke has been used as a way of weaponizing socially progressive struggle into an ‘insult used against anyone who fights fascism, racism and other forms of injustices and discrimination as well as to signify a supposed progressive over-reaction’ (p. 735).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Luc S. Cousineau

Luc S. Cousineau is an instructor and internship coordinator at Dalhousie University. his research focuses on the entrance into and impacts of men’s participation in mysogynist and masculinist communities as leisure practice.