The Manosphere
“The ‘manosphere’ is a group of loosely incorporated websites and social media communities where men’s perspectives, needs, gripes, frustrations and desires are explicitly explored. Women and feminism are typically targets of hostility.”
Farrell, T.; Fernandez, M.; Novotny, J. and Alani, H. (2019)
This week I’ve been reading and researching the phenomenon known as the Manosphere, which has been linked repeatedly to violent misogynistic crimes that target women, which the perpetrators consider as having been rejected and betrayed by, past academic researchers have drawn parallels with these groups beliefs and ancient Hellenistic philosophy, that is deeply misogynistic and allows them to frame themselves as victim, reframing history to justify and promote violence against women.
In Exploring Misogyny across the Manosphere in Reddit (2019) Farrell et al look into the common terms used in misogyny categories using data captured from Hatebase (as seen in Figure 1), the highest use is the inclusion of racist terms with hostile terms coming a close second. The communities themselves seem to follow a pattern of increasing in levels of abuse over time becoming as Massanari hypothesizes a “toxic technoculture”. The data captured by Hatebase mirrors the outcomes found by Sady Doyle’s #MenCallMeThings (2011) twitter movement, which encouraged women to self-report sexist words said to them, with Doyle then collating the responses into 7 key stereotypical themes of: the weaker sex; the ‘unf*ckable wh*re’; the crazy woman; the ‘feminazi’; the stupid little girl (or bimbo) ; the unwoman & the assertive b*tch.
This is further asserted by research done since into sexist slurs online with Felmlee et al stating that they located: “…over 2.9 million tweets in one week that contain instances of gendered insults (e.g., “bitch,” “cunt,” “slut,” or “whore”)—averaging 419,000 sexist slurs per day. The vast majority of these tweets are negative in sentiment.” (Felmlee, D., Inara Rodis, P. & Zhang, A. 2019) Ultimately these slurs are driven by the collective sense of the manosphere online identity, where anonymity allows the userbase to say extreme views with little to no punishment, giving less consideration to the recipient of the content.
As I have mentioned in the last module, during both my research and the subsequent outcome of e-maGen, the internet allows it users to easily invent, re-invent, explore and re-explore a multitude of limitless identities including identities not possible to enact in real life, an infinite future of self, through the early internet claim of ‘anonymity’. Of course this could not be further from the truth as both Jurgenson and Ravetto-Biagioli comment that Web 2.0 makes it hard to be anything, but what you input into the system, even if that is not what you consider to be your authentic self.
E-bile
“…gendered vitriol is proliferating in the cyberspace; so much so that issuuing graphic rape and death threats has become a standard discursive move online, particularly when Internet users wish to register their disagreement with and/or disapproval of women.”
Jane, E.A (2014; 558)
Emma A. Jane’s research into online misogyny, which she dubs as being part of a wider discourse of e-bile, highlights that whilst women have only just begun to speak out about it, in the past decade during the rise of Web 2.0. The phenomenon itself, pre-dates Web 2.0 with Jane herself being on the receiving end even pre-internet as a journalist in the 1980s, however it was only in the 1990s when they could contact via e-mail that the tone changed as readers could contact her anonymously or via pseudonyms.
However it is only in this past decade that e-bile has entered the mainstream discourse, with the rise of social media it has diversified by targetting more women, but also the content has become more venomous and threatening in content often referencing to sexual violence through the lens of misogyny. Jane writes that e-bile directed at women: “…commonly includes charges of unintelligence, hysteria, and ugliness; these are then combined with threats and/or fantasies of violent sex acts which are often framed as “correctives”. Constructions along the lines of “what you need is a good [insert graphic sexual act] to put you right” appear with such astounding regularity, they constitute an e-bile meme. Female targets are dismissed as both unacceptably unattractive man haters and hypersexual sluts who are inviting sexual attention or sexual attacks.” (Jane, E.A. 2014)
This normalization of e-bile in the public discourse of Web 2.0’s social media sites has Jane predicting that left unchecked it will not only pose damage to the individual on the receiving end, but also has the potential to revert inclusivity and civility on cultures both offline and online. This can be seen by the TikTok trend #OKWallet, which was intended to make men using misogynist slurs such as ‘dishwasher‘ or ‘get back to the kitchen‘ to re-think their usage, however it appears to have only fueled the flames of abuse with the men in question persisting in their vitriol or furthering the language to references of women being sex toys.
References
Figures
Figure 1 Farrell, T.; Fernandez, M.; Novotny, J. and Alani, H. (2019) Exploring Misogyny across theManosphere in Reddit. In: WebSci ’19 Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Web Science, pp. 87–96 [Online] Available from: http://oro.open.ac.uk/61128/1/WebScience139.pdf[Accessed 12/10/2020]
Bibliography
Doyle, S. (2011) Tigerbeatdown: But How Do You Know It’s Sexist? The #MenCallMeThings Round-Up. [Online] Available from: http://tigerbeatdown.com/2011/11/10/but-how-do-you-know-its-sexist-the-mencallmethings-round-up/ [Accessed 14/10/2020]
Farrell, T.; Fernandez, M.; Novotny, J. and Alani, H. (2019) Exploring Misogyny across theManosphere in Reddit. [IN] WebSci ’19 Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Web Science, pg 87–96 [Online] Available from: http://oro.open.ac.uk/61128/1/WebScience139.pdf [Accessed 12/10/2020]
Felmlee, D., Inara Rodis, P. & Zhang, A. (2019) Sexist Slurs: Reinforcing Feminine Stereotypes Online. [IN] Sex Roles 83 (2020), pg 16–28 . [Online] Available from: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-019-01095-z [Accessed 13/10/2020]
Fileborn, B. (2018) The Conversation: How misogyny, narcissism and a desperate need for power make men abuse women online. [Online] Available from: https://theconversation.com/how-misogyny-narcissism-and-a-desperate-need-for-power-make-men-abuse-women-online-95054 [Accessed 13/10/2020]
Hardaker, C. & McGlashan, M. (2016). “Real men don’t hate women”: Twitter rape threats and group identity. Journal of Pragmatics. 91. pg 80-93. [Online] Available from: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2015.11.005. [Accessed 14/10/2020]
Hatebase (2015-) [Online] Available from: https://hatebase.org [Accessed 13/10/2020]
Jane, E.A. (2014) “Your a Ugly, Whorish, Slut”. [IN] Feminist Media Studies, 14:4, pg 531-546. [Online] Available from: https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2012.741073 [Accessed 12/10/2020]
Jane, E.A. (2014) ‘Back to the kitchen, cunt’: speaking the unspeakable about online misogyny. [IN] Continuum, 28:4, pg 558-570. [Online] Available from: https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2014.924479 [Accessed 12/10/2020]
Jurgenson, N. (2019) The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media, pg 87. London; Verso
Massanari, A. (2017) #Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit’salgorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures. [IN] New Media &Society19, 3 (2017), pg 329–346
Ravetto-Biagioli, K. (2019) Digital Uncanny. pg 52. New York; Oxford University Press.
Rosenblett, K. (2020) NBC News: ‘OK wallet’: Young women fire back at misogynistic name-calling on TikTok. [Online] Available from: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ok-wallet-young-women-fire-back-misogynistic-name-calling-tiktok-n1211536 [Accessed 14/10/2020]
Jasmine Murray Photography 
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