The men and women, guys and girls of the ‘manosphere’: A corpus-assisted discourse approach

Krendel, Alexandra

doi:10.1177/0957926520939690

Cited by 43 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…A recent corpus linguistic study (Krendel 2020) found that denizens of the manosphere construct themselves as victims, insecure and unhappy. The sense of social isolation, anhedonia, and anxiety about "real world" connections is similarly pervasive in the NoFap corpus.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Battle for “NoFap”: Myths, Masculinity, and the Meaning of Masturbation Abstention

Burnett

2021

Men and Masculinities

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Critical masculinities scholarship has identified a number of ways in which abstention from sex, pornography, and masturbation works to repair and reproduce hybrid and hegemonic masculinities. Though the mercurial and plural nature of contemporary online masculinities is investigated on a number of fronts, analysis to date has often pinned down abstention to a particular subject position, often understood predominantly in its gendered dimensions. In this article, I argue that the anti-pornography, anti-masturbation movement NoFap should be understood as a site of political contestation for the meaning potential of abstention and that these subject positions should be read intersectionally. Through analysis of a large corpus of tweets (6,569) scraped from the micro-blogging site Twitter, I present evidence for seven distinct subject positions linked to discrete myths, which include extreme anti-feminist and anti-Semitic articulations. I argue that this bird’s-eye view of NoFap uniquely lays out competing myths in their specificity, facilitating a nuanced understanding of “morbid” identities.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Battle for “NoFap”: Myths, Masculinity, and the Meaning of Masturbation Abstention

Burnett

2021

Men and Masculinities

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“…Cosma and Gurevich (2020) conducted a discourse analysis with PUA media and found that women's bodies were constructed as commodities and used to bolster men's masculinity. In another study, members of the manosphere construed men as active and women as passive and discussed women through misogynistic lenses including objectification, gendered scrutiny, and the assumption that women are immoral and untrustworthy (Krendel, 2020).…”

Section: The Manospherementioning

confidence: 99%

Hegemonic masculinities in the ‘Manosphere’: A thematic analysis of beliefs about men and women on The Red Pill and Incel

Vallerga

Zurbriggen

2022

Anal Soc Iss & Public Policy

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Websites, blogs, and message boards of the “manosphere” are dedicated to a worldview that celebrates hegemonic masculinity and decries feminism. In a reflexive thematic analysis of 227 posts (389,189 words) from two manosphere message boards (The Red Pill and Incel), we analyzed how posters viewed women and men. We found that beliefs about women and men formed an ideology comprised of (a) evolution‐based views of gender essentialism, (b) an informal psychology of women's motivations, and (c) a typology of men. Women were seen as having three primary motives: to deceive and manipulate men, to promiscuously satisfy their own sexual needs, and to trade sex for power. Men were seen as falling into two (The Red Pill) or three (Incel) types: alpha men who are attractive, powerful, and sexually successful, beta men who give to women as their only route to sexual interactions, and incel (involuntarily celibate) men who are too unattractive to achieve sexual success. Posters acted on these beliefs either to improve themselves (The Red Pill) or give up on life and endorse suicide and/or violence (Incel). We discuss these beliefs and actions in relation to theories of sexual aggression, the psychology of radicalization, and the American Psychological Association's Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men.

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“…All our threat assessment toolkits include hate rhetoric as a warning behavior used to identify extremists [51]. Notably, research on the Manosphere and its communities has been repeatedly noted the dehumanization and objectification of women by the means of toxic language [61].…”

Section: Measured Warning Behaviors and Traitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Making a Radical Misogynist: How online social engagement with the Manosphere influences traits of radicalization

Habib¹,

Srinivasan²,

Nithyanand³

2022

Preprint

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The algorithms and the interactions facilitated by online platforms have been used by radical groups to recruit vulnerable individuals to their cause. This has resulted in the sharp growth of violent events and deteriorating online discourse. The Manosphere, a collection of radical anti-feminist communities, is one such group which has attracted attention due to their rapid growth and increasingly violent real world outbursts. In this paper, we examine the social engagements between Reddit users who have participated in feminist discourse and the Manosphere communities on Reddit to understand the process of development of traits associated with the adoption of extremist ideologies. By using existing research on the psychology of radicalization we track how specific types of social engagement with the Manosphere influence the development of traits associated with radicalization. Our findings show that: (1) participation, even by the simple act of joining the Manosphere, has a significant influence on the language and outlook traits of a user, (2) Manosphere elites are extremely effective propagators of radical traits and cause their increase even outside the Manosphere, and (3) community perception can heavily influence a user's behavior. Finally, we examine how our findings can help draft community and platform moderation policies to help mitigate the problem of online radicalization.

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The men and women, guys and girls of the ‘manosphere’: A corpus-assisted discourse approach

Cited by 43 publications

References 22 publications

The Battle for “NoFap”: Myths, Masculinity, and the Meaning of Masturbation Abstention

The Battle for “NoFap”: Myths, Masculinity, and the Meaning of Masturbation Abstention

Hegemonic masculinities in the ‘Manosphere’: A thematic analysis of beliefs about men and women on The Red Pill and Incel

Making a Radical Misogynist: How online social engagement with the Manosphere influences traits of radicalization

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