“She Thinks of Him as a Machine”: On the Entanglements of Neoliberal Ideology and Misogynist Cybercrime

Abstract

The “manosphere” is a constellation of masculinist social media communities loosely unified by an anti-feminist worldview. Although extant journalism and social media scholarship successfully delineate the manosphere as a significant social problem by associating it with misogynist cybercrime and cyberhate, the resulting narrative simplistically pathologizes manosphere discourse while leaving its misogyny undertheorized. In this article, I complicate this emerging narrative by demonstrating how a certain central manosphere discourse qualitatively overlaps with a broader neoliberal ideology. I do so by further developing a critical discourse analysis of quasi-representative manosphere documents drawn from “The Red Pill,” a sub-forum of Reddit.com. Although this forum is explicitly devoted to discussing heterosexual seduction strategies, I find that it also produces a discursive means for fiscally conservative men to reconcile their pro-capitalist economic beliefs with apparent evidence of capitalism’s destructive tendencies and contradictions. This forum’s anti-feminist discourse implicitly parallels Marxian theory while explicitly supporting free market capitalism and denigrating women, thereby providing men with a linguistic and conceptual framework to scapegoat women for economic problems while leaving neoliberal ideas and assumptions unchallenged.

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“…These men are, by and large, resigned to their singledom (although some hold the more extreme view that they are owed sex by women), and come to manosphere forums to complain and bond about their lack of relationships with women, as well as to complain about women in general. Both subreddits have been identified in literature to contain high levels of misogynistic and other hateful language (e.g., Farrell et al, 2019;Van Valkenburgh, 2019).…”

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“…The manosphere can be described as online communities “loosely unified by an anti-feminist worldview” (Van Valkenburgh, 2019, p. 1). Predominantly male, its members have enthusiastically embraced online antifeminist activism (Ging, 2019).…”

“…While underlying ideologies of antifeminism and the victimisation of men at the hands of women are common throughout the manosphere, the explicitly stated aims of communities within the manosphere differ. Popular “pick-up artist” (PUA) forums, such as The Red Pill subreddit (r/TRP), help its members “seduce” or “game” women and “can be provisionally treated as representative of broader manosphere ideologies” (Van Valkenburgh, 2019, p. 4). 1 In contrast, Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) reject PUA aims to manipulate women to serve their own interests, calling instead for men to eschew completely women and “protect [their] own sovereignty” (MGTOW, 2020).…”

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“…As women’s roles in society are changing more rapidly than men’s (Ging, 2019), it is otherwise likely that men will feel “left behind,” something that will only strengthen the backlash against feminism. This has been further elaborated on by Van Valkenburgh (2019) who recommends that future theorizing on online aggression against feminists consider the wider societal conditions—in particular neoliberalism—that create the foundations for the feminist backlash.…”