‘Vicious, vitriolic, hateful and hypocritical’: the representation of feminism within the manosphere

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the legitimation of antifeminist ideology within the manosphere, based on qualitative analysis of posts from an antifeminist Reddit community. Taking a discourse-historical approach to CDS, I analyse the nomination and predication strategies used to represent feminists in addition to the argumentation strategies used to convince others of the illegitimacy of feminism. Overall, I find that users typically did not distinguish between ‘good’ feminists and ‘bad’ feminists, instead making negative generalisations about feminists as an entire group. Arguments against feminism typically relied on the topos of justice in order to portray feminism as an illegitimate movement for equality given that it supposedly does not treat men and women in the same way. Alternatively, feminism was argued to be a threat to the ‘natural’ social order and men and women’s historical gender roles.

KEYWORDS:

• Manosphere
• antifeminism
• social media
• argumentation
• discourse-historical approach
• online misogyny

1. Introduction

Despite the increasing visibility of feminist activism, antifeminist sentiment is on the rise – particularly among young men. For example, the British charity Hope Not Hate found that 50% of male respondents aged 18–24 agreed that ‘feminism has gone too far and makes it harder for young men to succeed’ (Carter, 2020, p. 41), while the Southern Poverty Law Centre in the US found that 46% of Democratic men under 50 agreed that ‘feminism has done more harm than good’ (Miller, 2022). In the UK, an increasing number of school-age boys are being referred to the counter-extremism programme ‘Prevent’ due to fears of radicalisation by antifeminist, masculinist influencers such as Andrew Tate (Quinn, 2023). Therefore, the impact of antifeminist social media must be taken seriously.

This paper investigates the representation of feminism and feminists within an online community known as ‘Men Going Their Own Way’ or ‘MGTOW’ for short. MGTOW argue that heterosexual relationships are oppressive towards men and consequently advocate separation from women to varying degrees (Wright et al., 2020). This group is part of the loose network of antifeminist men’s social media communities known as the ‘manosphere’ (Marwick & Caplan, 2018), which also includes groups such as men’s rights advocates (see de Coning, 2020), pick-up artists who share seduction strategies for attracting women (see Dayter & Rüdiger, 2022), and involuntary celibates (incels) who perceive themselves as unable to attract a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one (see Heritage & Koller, 2020). Despite different stances towards relationships with women, these groups are united by an antifeminist ideology and to some extent, common linguistic and discursive features (Krendel et al., 2022; Marwick & Caplan, 2018). For example, common to all manosphere communities is a broader ‘red pill’ philosophy (Ging, 2019) – an intertextual reference to science fiction film The Matrix (1999). In the original film, taking the red pill entailed becoming aware of the truth that humanity had been long enslaved by machines and the human world was a simulation. Conversely, within the manosphere it has been recontextualised to mean learning the ‘truth’ that feminism has brainwashed men and women into believing that society is misogynistic and patriarchal, when it is men who are oppressed (Ging, 2019, p. 640). Furthermore, society is often described as gynocentric, meaning that women are favoured over men (Wright et al., 2020), while the term misandry is used to describe a system of discrimination against men (Marwick & Caplan, 2018).

Although it is acknowledged that the manosphere is staunchly antifeminist, there is relatively little linguistic or discursive research into the representation of feminism within this network (Krendel et al., 2022). Previous work has attempted to critically evaluate the accuracy of manosphere discourse on feminism, for example by reviewing the evidence that men are oppressed (Hodapp, 2017). However, even if manosphere arguments about feminism and gender politics are not based in empirical evidence, the increasing prevalence of antifeminist beliefs and popularity of masculinist social media influencers suggests that these arguments are nonetheless still persuasive. It is therefore important to examine the linguistic form and structure of manosphere argumentation and consider how an antifeminist ideology is made legitimate and attractive to young men.

Taking a discourse-historical approach to critical discourse studies (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016), in this paper I qualitatively examine how antifeminist ideology is legitimated within one particular manosphere community (MGTOW). MGTOW were selected as a specific case study due to the fact that this community is relatively under-researched compared to other groups in the manosphere and in order to examine how antifeminism influences and informs their separatist ideology. Specifically, I will analyse the nomination and predication strategies used to represent feminism and feminists, in addition to the argumentation strategies used to persuade members of the illegitimacy of feminism. The paper is structured as follows: section two reviews previous literature on the manosphere and antifeminist discourse more broadly; section three explains the methods of data collection and analysis, including ethical considerations; section four presents the results of my analysis, discussing the nomination, predication, and argumentation strategies used within r/MGTOW to represent feminists and feminism; finally, section five considers the broader implications of these findings and reflects on the limitations and avenues for future research.

2. The manosphere and antifeminist backlash

There is, to date, little research into the representation of feminism and feminists within the manosphere. One exception is Jones et al. (2020), who studied 1688 tweets by MGTOW Twitter accounts and found that 29% could be classified as harassing (p. 1909). Of these harassing tweets, 13% were coded as antifeminist, meaning that feminism was represented as a ‘dangerous and managing ideology’ while feminists were represented as fascists (e.g. feminazi) or mentally disabled (e.g. femtard) (p. 1910). Meanwhile, other studies have examined the representation of gendered social actors within the manosphere more broadly. For example, Krendel et al. (2022) built a 10.9-million-word corpus of manosphere data from Reddit and found that female social actors were referred to via derogatory gendered and sexualised labels. Furthermore, discussions of gender often relied on biological essentialism, as male and female social actors were constructed as ‘homogenous, dichotomous groups’ (p. 22). Similar patterns were found in Krendel’s earlier work (Krendel, 2020), where her appraisal analysis found that female social actors were negatively appraised in terms of morality, propriety, capacity, and veracity, while male social actors were constructed as the unhappy, insecure victims of female social actors. In addition, Wright et al. (2020) found that 61% of mentions of women on a self-hosted MGTOW forum were misogynistic, in contrast to the 8% of posts which were derogatory towards men (p. 920). Considering that women are more likely to identify as feminists than men (Carter, 2020), it is plausible that there will be similarities in the representation of women and the representation of feminists, for example in the prevalence of homogeneity or misogyny.

Furthermore, Schmitz and Kazyak (2016) conducted a content analysis of twelve manosphere websites and divided them into two categories: ‘Cyber Lads in Search of Masculinity’ and ‘Virtual Victims in Search of Equality’. ‘Cyber Lads’ websites were characterised by policing of masculinity, demonisation of feminism, and explicit aggression or objectification towards women. On the other hand, ‘Virtual Victims in Search of Equality’ websites presented men as ‘in crisis’ and focussed on providing evidence of misandry, while simultaneously delegitimising women’s issues (p. 6). The authors argued that although the Cyber Lads’ rhetoric was ‘much more extreme’ than that of Virtual Victims, the latter had the potential to become ‘much stronger’ as it may be more likely to be viewed as publicly acceptable or credible. Furthermore, LaViolette and Hogan (2019) combined machine learning with critical discourse analysis to distinguish the vocabulary of a men’s rights subreddit (r/MensRight) from a men’s liberationist subreddit (r/MensLib), finding that r/MensRights was characterised by language relating to the justice system, body politics, and persecution (e.g. accusation, vagina, misandry) (p. 329). Another relevant finding related to the frequency of gender-specific terms per 10,000 words: compared to r/MensLib, r/MensRights used terms such as men and masculinity less frequently, but she and her more frequently. In addition, the unique key words for r/MensRights included misogynistic slurs such as cunt and bitch. The authors suggested that this reveals ‘an us-versus-them mentality’ and that men’s rights advocates are better characterised as ‘anti-feminist’ than ‘pro-men’ (p. 331).

Resistance to feminism, of course, did not originate within the manosphere. As Messner (1998) explained, contemporary men’s rights activism has its roots in the men’s liberation movement, which itself had roots in second-wave feminism. In the 1970s, men’s liberationists aimed to attract men to feminism by emphasising the ways in which men were harmed by patriarchy and the ‘male sex role’ and consequently the benefits men could gain from feminist activism. However, some activists began to argue that men were equally oppressed by sexism – if not more so – leading to a schism: on one side, a pro-feminist men’s liberation movement; on the other, an antifeminist men’s rights movement who either ‘downplayed or angrily disputed’ feminists’ claims that women were oppressed and exploited by men (p. 256). Contemporary men’s rights advocates tend to focus on areas such as father’s rights, including custody arrangements and alimony payments; higher rates of suicide, workplace injury, and incarceration among men; male victims of sexual violence and abuse; and false allegations of rape and abuse (de Coning, 2020, pp. 3–4). Some even go so far as to allege a ‘feminist conspiracy’ aiming to ‘cover up’ the evidence of male oppression (Flood, 2004, p. 262).

Negative stereotypes of feminism are also reproduced outside of the manosphere. Although research suggests that feminist women are more likely to report negative attitudes towards men than non-feminist women (Anderson et al., 2009), a particularly prominent and long-standing stereotype is that feminists hate men. Male college students interviewed by Gough and Peace (2000) ‘almost universally’ presented feminism as ‘dangerous and alienating to men’ (p. 391). More recently, García-Favaro and Gill (2016) found that online comments responding to an article about a feminist campaign not only portrayed feminists as man-haters, but also as extremists and fascists. Meanwhile, Lopez et al. (2019) found that the majority of tweets in the feminism hashtag on Twitter made ‘blanket negative statements about their [feminists’] appearance, sexual behaviours, and alignments with misandry’ (p. 210). For example, feminists were predicated as ugly, bitter, and foul-mouthed, while feminism was characterised as a ‘hate movement’ (p. 211). The fact that similar representations of feminists have been reported in studies nearly two decades apart speaks to the pervasiveness of this stereotype.

Edley and Wetherell (2001) suggested that feminists are divided into a ‘Jekyll-and-Hyde’ binary, where a distinction is made between reasonable liberal feminists who ‘just’ want equality and unreasonable, man-hating radical feminists (p. 543). Similarly, Mendes (2011) found that newspapers between 1968 and 1982 expressed some support for liberal feminist goals such as equal pay but constructed ‘militant feminism’ or radical feminism as a ‘threat to the social order’ (p. 78). Distinguishing between feminists in such a manner allows a speaker or writer to present themselves as pro-feminist, while simultaneously emptying feminism of ‘any radical potential’ (Edley & Wetherell, 2001, p. 453). In the present context, research suggests that feminists continue to be dichotomised, though the exact nature of the dichotomy may differ. For example, Huang (2022) studied the delegitimisation of feminism on Weibo and found that users distinguished between ‘real feminists’ who ‘actually’ contribute to women’s progress (such as female entrepreneurs) and ‘fake feminists’ who seek advantages over men or engage in Internet ‘slacktivism’ (p. 13). Calder-Dawe and Gavey (2016) found that teenagers in New Zealand continued to reproduce a binary between ‘fair’ feminists and ‘unreasonable’ feminists, though most of their participants tended to speak as ‘informers’ about the latter group (p. 493), describing how others created pejorative accounts of feminists without personally endorsing those views.

Having discussed previous research into antifeminist backlash in both the manosphere and in broader culture, I will now discuss the methodology for my own study into the representation of feminism within a particular manosphere community.

3. Methodology

3.1. Data selection and ethical considerations

The data for this paper come from a larger research project concerning the discursive legitimation of ‘male separatist’ ideology on Reddit, a popular social news and content aggregation platform which attracts over 52 million daily users. Reddit was selected as the source of data in order to provide a contrast with previous research into MGTOW, which has used data from a forum (Wright et al., 2020) and Twitter (Jones et al., 2020). Furthermore, Reddit has been identified as a main source of manosphere activity and several linguistic studies of the manosphere have taken data from this site (e.g. Heritage & Koller, 2020; Krendel, 2020; Krendel et al., 2022). Overall, the entire dataset comprises 50 threads (i.e. an initial post and subsequent replies from other users) from r/MGTOW collected between May and August 2020, totalling approximately 46,000 words. Due to the small sample and qualitative methodology, the analysis within this paper is intended to be illustrative and exploratory, refraining from making statistical conclusions.

It should be noted that at the time of data collection, r/MGTOW had been placed within a quarantine by Reddit administrators. This meant that the subreddit was unavailable to users without a verified email address and its contents did not appear in internal or external search engine results. Furthermore, readers are greeted with a warning of ‘potentially offensive content’ when visiting a quarantined subreddit. Although many guidelines for ethical research would suggest the higher privacy levels of the subreddit should require stricter ethical decision such as informed consent or paraphrasing quotes (e.g. McKee & Porter, 2009), I would argue that this is not necessarily appropriate for research into hostile online community. Given my identity as a female, feminist researcher, I had concerns that the community would react negatively towards me and consequently did not seek informed consent from the users (see, Fuchs, 2018, for further discussion). Other scholars studying gender and sexism online have discussed experiencing harassment as a result of their research topic or methods (e.g. Parson, 2019). Critical research in the social sciences, such as CDS, may be more likely to evoke such hostile responses as the community and their discourse will not be presented in a neutral, objective light (Herring, 1996; Rüdiger & Dayter, 2017). To compensate for this lack of consent, all usernames were replaced with labels indicating their role in the thread: either ‘OP’ (original poster, i.e. the user who initiated a particular thread) or ‘Commenter[Number]’ where the number referred to their position in the thread (i.e. Commenter1 refers to the first commenter within a particular thread, Commenter2 refers to the second, and so forth). Because Reddit has a culture of pseudonymity (Massanari, 2015), removing the already pseudonymous usernames should provide an extra level of protection.

Despite the quarantine, I received approval for this research from my institution’s ethical review board to carry out this research. It should also be noted that r/MGTOW was banned from Reddit a year after data collection (August 2021) for breaking site rules regarding promoting hate, meaning that the content is no longer available on Reddit and consequently users would be even harder to find. Finally, all examples included within this paper are presented as they were originally published on r/MGTOW, with all spelling or formatting inconsistencies and offensive language remaining intact.

3.2. Analytical framework: the discourse-historical approach

The analytical framework employed within this research draws on the discourse-historical approach to CDS (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001, 2016). Context, particularly historical context, is especially important in this framework, as the research aims to ‘integrate much available knowledge about the historical sources and background’ (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001, p. 35). To this end, the DHA considers four levels of context. First, the immediate language or text-internal co-text and co-discourse includes the language and images within the threads collected from r/MGTOW. The second level includes intertextual and interdiscursive relationships between texts, such as hyperlinks to external media and recontextualisation of feminist arguments. The third level refers to the social variables and institutional frames, which for this data includes the affordances, features, and interactions enabled by the Reddit platform such as pseudonymity and upvoting/downvoting mechanisms. Finally, the fourth level entails consideration of the broader socio-political and historical context. In online spaces such as the manosphere, users have the opportunity to interact with like-minded others from across the globe and thus mobilise around and combine local grievances with global grievances (Rothermel, 2020).

Analysis within the DHA is three-dimensional, where the first dimension involves identifying the specific content or topics of a specific discourse (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016, p. 32). To do so, I uploaded each individual thread into ATLAS.Ti and coded each comment within the thread according to topic. Within this paper, I focus on comments relating to the topics of feminism, female privilege, and misandry. Next, the second dimension involves identification of discursive strategies, while the third dimension involves examination of the linguistic means and realisations of these strategies (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016, p. 32). A discursive strategy refers to a ‘more or less intentional plan of practice (including discursive practices) adopted to achieve a particular social, political, psychological or linguistic goal’ (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016, p. 33). These five strategies are:

• Nomination: How are persons, objects and phenomena named and referred to linguistically?

• Predication: What characteristics or qualities are attributed to these persons, objects, or phenomena?

• Argumentation: What arguments are employed in the discourse?

• Perspectivization: From what perspective or point of view are these nominations, predications, arguments expressed?

• Mitigation and intensification: Are the respective utterances articulated overtly or covertly? (Adapted from Reisigl & Wodak, 2016, pp. 32–33)

In the larger research project, I predominantly focussed on the analysis of argumentation strategies. Within the DHA, analysis of argumentation strategies typically entails identification and analysis of topoi. Topoi function similarly to a warrant or conclusion rule in that they justify the transition from the supporting evidence (also known as data, grounds, or argument within argumentation literature) to the controversial statement in need of justification (also known as a claim or standpoint). They are typically realised as causal or conditional paraphrases such as ‘if x, then y’ (Reisigl, 2014, p. 75). For example, the topos of justice can be paraphrased as ‘if persons/action/situations are equal in specific respects, then they should be treated/dealt with in the same way’ (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001, p. 78). The analysis of topoi allows for ‘ideological analysis’ and the unveiling of ‘world-views and ways of reasoning typical of a given period and place’ (Amossy, 2017, p. 267). I sought to investigate argumentation strategies and topoi used in MGTOW discussions of feminism, though I also considered the other four strategies and how they were used to bolster argumentation, for example if an argument against feminism involved derogatory labelling of feminists (nomination) or assignment of negative traits to them (predication). Overall, this study contributes to existing studies into the manosphere by focussing specifically on the representation on feminism/feminists and examining strategies of argumentation.

4. Analysis

Previous research has characterised MGTOW as antifeminist (Jones et al., 2020; Wright et al., 2020). Thus, it came as no surprise that the general representation of feminism and feminists wasnegative. Within this section, I will present the results of my analysis. First, I discuss some of the ways in which feminists were named and referred to. Next, I discuss the traits and attributes which were assigned to feminists and feminism, before discussing the arguments that were used to convince other users of the illegitimacy of feminism.

4.1. Nomination and predication

First, I sought to examine the extent to which users distinguished between different types of feminists or whether the representation was more homogenous. Previous research has suggested that dichotomies tend to be constructed between liberal feminists and radical feminists (Edley & Wetherell, 2001; Mendes, 2011) where the former is seen as more legitimate than the latter. Within the dataset, the only theoretical branches of feminism that were singled out as problematic were the ‘gender critical’ subreddit r/pinkpillfeminism (now banned due to transphobia) and radical feminists. For example, Commenter8 in thread 25 (shown in Example 1) reported direct speech attributed to ‘m*le feminists’ [sic] and ‘female radical fems’ on the topic of rape and sexual assault.

Example 1:

Commenter8 (5)¹: “they freeze up and can’t speak/act”

“a non answer is an answer of no, even if she assists in removing her clothes, and you fuck her”

“sometimes it’s not recognized as rape until later”

Actual things I’ve seen some of these m*le feminists and female radical fems say. [thread 25]

The use of direct speech and predication ‘actual’ presents the quotes as a faithful representation of radical feminist discourse. First, the censoring of ‘male’ could suggest that the notion of male feminists is offensive, or perhaps that male feminists cannot truly be considered men. In their study of a MGTOW forum, Wright et al. (2020, p. 920) found that 8% of posts denigrated men, while other research into manosphere discourse discusses how feminist men are referred to via emasculating pejoratives such as ‘soyboy’ ‘mangina’ or ‘beta’ (Burnett, 2022; Jones et al., 2020). Second, Commenter8 specified ‘radical fems’, corroborating previous research suggesting that radical feminists tend to be negatively represented (Edley & Wetherell, 2001; Mendes, 2011). However, it is also possible that ‘radical’ was used to connote extremity or aggression, rather than to refer to the theoretical branch of radical feminism.

Commenter8 also employed a quantifier ‘some’ to pre-modify the social actors. However, it was more typical for users to refer to feminists or feminism without such premodification and therefore make bare assertions about feminists. For example, in Example 2 the predication ‘vicious, vitriolic, hateful and hypocritical’ was applied to ‘feminists’ as a whole group. This reinforces stereotypes of feminists as being antagonistic and promoting misandry rather than equality and liberation. Feminists’ supposed aggression towards men was also represented as the root cause of male separatism, suggesting that perhaps men would not join the manosphere or avoid women if feminists acted in a more amicable manner towards them.

Example 2:

Commenter14 (5): Feminists recruit for us by being so vicious, vitriolic, hateful, and hypocritical that men search for alternatives and find us. [thread 37]

Example 3:

Commenter9 (1): Feminists would just as soon hang all men that walk away from the stupid games women torment us with. Feminists are the extremists. We just want to be left alone. [thread 37]

Similarly, Commenter9 in thread 37 (shown in Example 3) predicated feminists as ‘the extremists’. The use of the definite article here may function to contrast feminists against MGTOW or other antifeminists: some may consider MGTOW’s separatist philosophy to be extreme, but it is feminists who are the actual extremists. Furthermore, the label ‘extremists’ allows an association with other ‘extremist’ groups and thus legitimises the exclusion and rejection of feminism on the basis that the movement is against humanitarian values.

Now, I will discuss some of the predications applied to feminists and feminism. Unsurprisingly, these predications again were overwhelmingly negative. For example, the OP of thread 36 posted a photograph from a recent vacation to Corsica. Although feminism was never mentioned within the original post, it was advanced as a topic by Commenter7 (shown in Example 4) who predicated the feminist movement as a ‘piece of shit’ and used an imperative to urge readers to prevent feminism from growing and thus corrupting ‘one of the most beautiful place[s] on earth’. This creates a dichotomy between feminism and beauty: a society can either be beautiful, or it can be feminist, but not both at the same time. Overall, feminism is represented as a negative influence that should be stamped out.

Example 4:

Commenter7 (2): […] corsica one of the most beautiful place on earth

dont let the piece of shit movement of feminist there grow. [thread 36]

Furthermore, feminism was compared to life-threatening diseases such as cancer, as seen in Example 5. Cancer metaphors may signal that a problem is ‘disturbing, growing and life-threatening’ (Meisenberg & Meisenberg, 2015, p. 398) or that an ideological group embodying undesirable traits need to be ‘eradicated’ (Massanari & Chess, 2018, p. 536). A cancerous tumour which starts in one part of the body may spread and cause deterioration to other parts of the body, meaning that early detection is vital. Therefore, the cancer metaphor may suggest that feminism is dangerous, corrupting and must be eradicated before it can spread and take over other institutions in society.

Example 5:

Commenter73 (2): Feminism is cancer. [thread 40]

Finally, feminism was also compared to a religion or a cult. For example, Commenter9 in thread 32 (shown in Example 6) referred to feminism as ‘the prevailing feminist religion of man hate’. Kelly (2020) drew links between the manosphere and ‘New Atheism’ and so comparing feminism to a ‘religion’ could be delegitimising in its own right, given that religion tends to be associated with irrationality and dogmatism in parts of the manosphere. Feminist terms such as ‘the patriarchy’ are presented in scare quotes, allowing Commenter13 to distance himself from this term and suggest that patriarchy does not actually exist but is something fabricated by feminists. In addition, according to Commenter13, feminists do not accept criticism but instead regard it as ‘heresy’ furthering the comparison between feminism and religion. Overall, this could suggest that feminists do not think for themselves or engage in critical thinking, but instead repeat dogma.

Example 6:

Commenter13 (5): […] Women are perpetual victims of ‘the patriarchy’, because that is how women make their money; through legally and financially enslaving men through marriage. Any criticism will be deemed heresy under the prevailing feminist religion of man hate. [thread 32]

Interestingly, as well as reinforcing stereotypes of feminists promoting misandry, this comment also parallels historical feminist critiques of marriage. For instance, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill compared marriage to slavery, claiming that that ‘the wife is the actual bond-servant of the husband’ (1869/2009, pp. 54–55), while Dworkin (1981/1989) argued that marriage entailed ‘lifelong possession of, or ownership’ of women (pp. 19–20). However, within this comment the power dynamic is markedly different. Marriage is reframed as a way for women to make money and hold power over men, while men’s traditional role as the breadwinner or chief earner is reframed as subordinance or enslavement to women.

With the exception of Example 1, the negative nomination and predication strategies in the above examples applied to the entirety of ‘feminism’ or ‘feminists’ as opposed to a subset. This diverges from previous research which suggested that feminists tend to be dichotomised as either ‘reasonable’ or ‘unreasonable’ (Calder-Dawe & Gavey, 2016; Edley & Wetherell, 2001; Mendes, 2011). Instead, this reflects previous research which finds that manosphere users tend to represent women negatively and homogenously (Krendel, 2020; Krendel et al., 2022). The fact that feminists instead tended to be portrayed as a homogenous group suggests that MGTOW do not consider feminism to be a diverse movement, nor do they allow the possibility of ‘reasonable’ feminism. Instead, it is all of feminism which must be rejected.

4.2. Argumentation strategies

This section will examine the topoi used in MGTOW argumentation against feminism. First, users could attempt to undermine feminist goals regarding gender equality by asserting that feminism is about actually about female superiority and gaining special privileges for women. Typically, this was done using a topos of justice and accusing feminists of purposefully ignoring avenues in society where men are ostensibly disadvantaged. An example of such an argument is shown in Example 7, in which Commenter1 in thread 2 argued that feminism is a ‘joke’ because of its limited understanding and application of equality and provided some specific areas where men are said to be at a disadvantage compared to women as backing for the argument. This argument relied on a topos of justice: if feminists cared about gender equality, then they should campaign on behalf of men who are marginalised and for equality in areas where women dominate or in less glamorous occupations. Notably, in writing ‘until I see demands’, this presupposes that feminists have not campaigned for equal representation in these industries, or if they have then it has not received much mainstream attention and perhaps is therefore regarded as unimportant or unimpactful.

Example 7:

Commenter1 (87): Yep, men occupy the very top and bottom of society, and yet everyone (particularly women, it seems) focuses on that top one percent. Then, they demand equality with *them* but conveniently forget the massive amounts of men who crowd the bottom of the societal totem pole.

Commenter2 (16): The best part is when women start talking about men and women’s oppression and they always go straight to money. Greedy bitches wouldn’t be able to define qualify of life even if you slapped them with it. If they really wanted to talk quality of life let’s talk suicide rate and work related death and injury rate. They call bringing those things up “disrupting the conversation” or “trolling”

Until I see demands for equal representation in trade jobs, as garbage men, and in divorce courts feminism will always be a joke to me. [thread 2]

Furthermore, Commenter1 used aggregation and collectivisation strategies to refer to privileged men as representing the ‘top one percent’ of all men. This stands in stark contrast to the ‘massive amounts of men’ at the bottom of society, while the verb choice ‘crowd’ further emphasises their huge numbers. Therefore, it is even more illegitimate for feminists to focus on the most privileged men considering that they are not representative. This purported focus on privileged men is attributed to ‘everyone’ as opposed to just feminists, although women are singled out as being ‘particularly’ likely to do so. This may suggest that MGTOW believe that bias against lower-class men is widespread in society, so that even men are likely to ignore it. Alternatively, this may function as a face-saving strategy to avoid appearing overtly biased against women. Finally, the adverb ‘conveniently’ may convey a sarcastic tone, suggesting that it is not just coincidental or convenient that women forget about lower-class men but is an intentional, strategic move.

This argument was extended by Commenter2 in a direct reply (shown in Example 7), who also utilised a topos of justice. While Commenter1 claimed that feminists don’t care about men at the bottom of society specifically, Commenter2 depicts feminists as not caring about men in general. While issues of suicide rates and work-related injuries were not explicitly labelled as men’s problems, these are considered key issues within men’s rights and manosphere communities (de Coning, 2020) and so readers would likely recognise these as examples of misandry. Not only do feminists avoid talking about men’s issues according to Commenter2, but they also actively attempt to shut down conversations about these topics. This again draws on the topos of justice: if women and men are equal, then feminists should care equally about issues affecting women and men. Consequently, Commenter2 could portray feminism as a flawed and limited movement for equality and hence persuade other users to not identify as feminists. Furthermore, Commenter2 referred to women as ‘greedy bitches’. In addition to the misogynistic pejorative ‘bitches’, the predication ‘greedy’ implies that women cannot have a true conversation about wealth inequality because they have a vested interest in acquiring wealth. Commenter2 also insinuated that issues of wealth are not legitimate quality of life issues or that they are at least less important than issues of suicide or workplace death.

On the other hand, some commenters argued against feminism on the basis that men should be superior to women. Consequently, feminist goals were argued to detrimental for a functioning society. Example 8 shows an instance of such an argument. Commenter26 in thread 40 used a topos of definition (if a person or group is named as X, then they should carry the qualities implied within the meaning of X) to argue that women are incapable of working certain difficult occupations, because their categorisation as women means they necessarily lack qualities such as ‘the tenacity’ and ‘the endurance’ to perform those jobs effectively. The comment made interdiscursive connections with evolutionary psychology in referring to women’s genetic ‘programming’ and naturalising the patriarchal division of labour as the result of biology and ‘evolution’. Consequently, feminism could be delegitimised as a denial of basic scientific facts.

Example 8:

Commenter26 (43): Women are not genetically programmed to have the tenacity, the endurance, or frankly the desire, to do hard jobs, especially if those jobs have a physical component. It’s the result of 100,000+ years of evolution. Their mission is to stay home in the cave and raise the babies and cook the dinner. That’s biological programming, not sexism.

This twat can prattle all she wants about the jobs women deserve, but 50 years of feminism ain’t gonna overcome 100,000 years of evolution. Right now is a brief moment in evolutionary history and will be forgotten soon enough (probably after China overruns our culture which has grown week by indulging this kind of bullshit). [thread 40]

Second, feminism was historicised as being a mere ‘50 years’ old and therefore miniscule in comparison to ‘100,000+’ years of evolution. Even though the numbers were off by several orders of magnitude, this topos of numbers (if the numbers prove a certain topos, the action should be carried out) allows feminism to be easily dismissed as a temporary aberration. In addition, the reference to ‘the cave’ suggests that prehistoric times ought to be heralded as the appropriate model for gendered behaviour. Feminism’s irrelevance and ephemerality was further emphasised through its predication as a ‘brief moment’ that ‘will be forgotten soon enough’. Through this topos of history (because history teaches that actions have consequences, we should learn the lessons from the historical example referred to), Commenter26 could argue that feminism is irrelevant and that we should look to the past as a visionary model for society.

Finally, evoking a topos of threat (if an action brings dangerous consequences, it should not be carried out), feminism was argued to be directly responsible for making the nation ‘weak’ and ripe for invasion. In addition to the women-vs-men distinction, another us-vs-them distinction was created between ‘our culture’ (presumably the United States, or the West more generally) versus ‘China’. Within White supremacist ideology, feminism’s critique and destabilisation of traditional gender roles and the nuclear family is argued to have made men weak and consequently unable to protect their family or their nation from racial threats (Ferber, 2000; Kelly, 2017). While this threat is often attributed to Muslims (Kelly, 2017), Jewish and/or Black men (Ferber, 2000), here the racial threat is posited to be ‘China’. This comment was posted during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, in which there was a marked increase in racist attitudes, hate speech, and even hate crime towards Chinese people (Gover et al., 2020 2020), though China has long been represented in the media as an ideological, economic, or military threat to US national security (Yang & Liu, 2012).

Through these discursive moves, Commenter26 was able to delegitimise feminism in three respects: first, as contravening established evolutionary facts; second, as a temporary aberration; and third, as posing a threat to the security of the nation. However, this comment exhibited notable tensions and contradictions. Although feminism was represented as temporary and irrelevant, it was also positioned as powerful enough to genuinely threaten the nation. Gender was also presented as both biologically predetermined and as having been weakened. According to Kelly (2017, pp. 73–74), to reconcile such a contradiction, it has to be asserted that society has been ‘actively and deliberately derailed’ by manipulative actors such as leftists, Jewish people, and in this case feminists.

A particularly explicit instantiation of a male supremacist ideology was presented by Commenter2 in thread 39, shown in Example 9. First, the comment began with a combination of topos of authority (if an authority figure says that an action is correct, then it should be carried out) and a topos of history in claiming that ‘wise men of the past’ shared the opinion that women’s emancipation is dangerous. In highlighting the intelligence of these men, Commenter2 thus conferred intelligence on this opinion and increased its persuasive potential. Commenter2 nostalgically harkened back to a vague, undetermined ‘past’ where women had no rights and acknowledged the wisdom of these former patriarchs for recognising the potential danger of women’s emancipation.

Example 9:

Commenter2 (12): Men of the past were wise. They knew how damaging women could be to the society, if given the chance. We should take away women’s rights, and all SJWs should be arrested. Sadly, we all know that this can never happen. […] I don’t know why females are treated better than men, when the opposite is what should be reality. For example, I am currently am in a city in India, and the pubs here let couples enter, or single females, but not single males. WTF?. After a long day of work, my friends and I want to go to the pub, and they have a few drinks while I drink some juice and we listen to some music, and relax in the pub, but we cannot enter, but single women can. [thread 39]

Next, through a topos of threat, Commenter2 advocated the removal of women’s rights and the arrest of ‘SJWs’ [social justice warriors] because they are so ‘damaging’ to society. This was intensified through deontic modality (‘we should’) and an extreme case formulation (‘all SJWs’). However, this suggestion was mitigated as an impossibility through another extreme case formulation (‘this can never happen’). Therefore, the removal of women’s rights was perhaps more of a representation of fantasy than a genuine call to action. This corroborates previous findings by Wright et al. (2020), who also noted a lack of calls to action within MGTOW.

Notably, the anti-equality stance was visible through a topos of definition. Commenter2 asserted that women are ‘treated better than men’ but this purported state of affairs is undesirable not because men and women ought to be treated equally, but because men ought to be treated better than women. Commenter2 simply stated that ‘the opposite should be reality’ without offering any reasons. Instead, readers may infer that men should be treated more favourably because men, by definition and by virtue of being men, are superior to women.

After having stated that women occupy a privileged position in society, Commenter2 then demonstrated this through narrating personal experience. Through a topos of justice, he highlighted a double standard in India wherein single women, but not single men, can enter pubs. This was framed as unjust and illogical through an expletive ‘WTF’ [what the fuck] and a justification of why men should be allowed to use pubs. The rationale behind this no-single-men rule was not explained, meaning that readers would likely rely on a formal understanding of equality and conclude that it constitutes discrimination. Several pubs in India do have rules restricting ‘stag entries’ in an effort to protect female customers from sexual harassment (Dhankhar, 2012), though some pubs also deny entry to single women (Arora, 2018). Commenter2 may have omitted this information strategically or due to a genuine lack of knowledge, though this lack of context background nevertheless helps to bolster claims of discrimination. Furthermore, Commenter2 represented himself and his friends as unthreatening; they simply want to ‘relax’ and ‘drink juice’. Therefore, readers may agree that bouncers should not assume men are inherently dangerous and deny them entry. While Commenter2 appealed to notions of equality in highlighting a gendered double standard, ultimately equality was not taken as an important principle given that in the same comment, he argued that men should be treated better than women and fantasised about women having no rights. Instead, equality functioned more as a rhetorical concept invoked in order to criticise women’s increased rights and social status.

5. Discussion and conclusion

The prevailing attitude towards feminism in the threads analysed was that of an antifeminist backlash. Contrary to previous research in representations of feminism (Edley & Wetherell, 2001; Mendes, 2011), there was generally no distinction between legitimate, equality-seeking feminists and illegitimate, superiority-seeking feminists; instead, negative predications were applied to feminism and feminists as a whole. In the threads analysed, feminists were portrayed as seeking superiority over men, as promoting hatred of men, and selectively ignoring areas in society where men are disadvantaged in order to maintain their false narrative that men are privileged over women. Furthermore, feminism was portrayed as a method for women to accumulate wealth, as opposed to a genuine movement for liberation. MGTOW users distanced themselves from feminism and positioned these problems as inherent to feminism itself, as opposed to a vocal minority or to specific branches of feminism. Therefore, there can be no acceptable or legitimate feminism.

To delegitimise feminism, users could employ a topos of justice and argue that feminism is illegitimate because it does not treat men and women in the same manner. However, this topos was reliant on a formal understanding of equality rather than substantive. In this understanding, any differential treatment between men and women could be framed as unjust, even when the differential treatment is aimed to resolve gender inequality. On the other hand, some users promoted a conservative, separate-but-equal version of equality wherein men and women ought to belong to separate spheres. Through a topos of history, some users argued that society ought to replicate historical models of gendered behaviour where women were encouraged to stay at home and take on a domestic role rather than enter the public sphere. For these users, feminism was illegitimate not because it fails to promote equality, but because equality is not a suitable goal in the first place. The topos of definition could be used to argue that men ought to dominate women because they are men, while a topos of threat could be used to argue that feminism destabilised the natural order and posed a danger to national security. In such cases, equality was mobilised as a rhetorical strategy to criticise and undermine feminism, rather than to genuinely promote gender justice.

Many arguments against feminism exhibited similarity and continuity with much older antifeminist arguments. Appeals to men and women’s natural, biological roles have historically been used to deny women the right to an education (Kimmel, 1987). Feminist critiques of gender roles have been portrayed as a ‘war against nature’ and threat to the social order in both the nineteenth century (Kimmel, 1987, p. 268), the twentieth century (Mendes, 2011) and in the twenty-first century. This suggests that the antifeminism and misogyny of the manosphere should not be considered as a unique or exclusively online phenomenon, but a continuation of long-standing patriarchal gender ideologies.

This paper has built on previous knowledge which has examined the representation of gendered social actors by investigating the representation of feminist social actors specifically. Furthermore, this paper has examined the argumentative and discursive strategies used to delegitimise feminism and considered how argumentation may draw on both seemingly pro-equality and explicitly anti-equality discourses. However, there are of course several limitations to this work. First, the data for this project was from a single subreddit and so future research could consider the representation of feminists within other manosphere communities, such as incels or men’s rights advocate communities, or collect data from other social media platforms. Self-hosted manosphere forums warrant further investigation as these sites can enable closer control over membership and do not need to appeal to external administrators and rules, meaning that analysis of such websites could reveal a greater degree of hostile sexism (see Wright et al., 2020), while analysis of audio-visual sites such as TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube would allow investigation of the multimodal representations of feminists. Moreover, following Rothermel (2020), future research could examine data from MGTOW communities outside of the US and Western Europe. This would allow more detailed investigation of the different local–global dynamics and comparisons of argumentation patterns in different cultural or political contexts.

As the analysis presented here was based on a qualitative analysis of a small sample, future research could employ more quantitative or corpus linguistic methodologies. This would be particularly useful for further investigation of the nomination and predication strategies used to represent feminists, for example by investigating the frequency of certain lexical items or the collocates of terms such as feminist. Quantitative methods could also examine the frequency of certain topoi. Moreover, the extent to which an argument will be effective at encouraging other users to change their behaviour is difficult to determine through discourse analysis alone. It is of course possible that readers could visit a MGTOW website and read arguments against feminism and not conclude that feminism should be rejected. Thus, the actual persuasive or perlocutionary effects of this discourse could be an interesting avenue for future research, for example through interviews with former or current MGTOW or through experimental procedures. Finally, following trends in feminist critical discourse analysis (e.g. Jones et al., 2022), further research could also examine counterdiscourse within the manosphere and strategies used to resist negative representations of women or feminism within these spaces.

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jessica Aiston

Jessica Aiston is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film at Queen Mary University of London. Her research interests include digitally mediated discourse analysis and language, gender, and sexuality.

Notes

1 The number in brackets next to the username responds to the ‘karma’ score of the comment at the time of data collection. This score roughly corresponds to the number of upvotes minus the number of downvotes the comment received.