42 The Manosphere: How online misogynistic forums are dedicated to upholding hierarchy

Within the not so deep depths of the contemporary internet lives a thriving and growing group of communities that explicitly and relentlessly hate women. It is a loose collective of different online cultures that overlap in their hatred of women and their longing to return to a state of male supremacy in society; it is known collectively as the manosphere. To understand the manosphere and the prevailing ideology within it we must first understand that it does not contain just one social group of misogynists, but instead includes a multitude of misogynistic cultures that overlap in membership and thought (Van Valkenburgh, 2021). [The manosphere is] united in their adherence to Red Pill “philosophy,” which purports to liberate men from a life of feminist delusion (Ging, 2019, abstract para 1). The term “red pill” being in reference to the film series The Matrix, where the character Neo is given the choice between a red pill that will set him free and a blue pill that will leave him in the simulation (Ging, 2019). The red pill metaphor can be seen as the definitive moment where a member of the manosphere chooses to accept the false premise that society systemically oppresses men and thus direct action is required to address this perceived oppression (Ging,2019). This false conception of current gender relations found throughout the manosphere reflects a malevolent attempt to hold onto male supremacy within our society. It is this attempt to hold onto male supremacy that creates an ideologically consistent through line within the manosphere. It is through this through line that we can better understand the overlapping interests of male supremacist cultures online. This article will utilize two distinct case studies of male supremacist cultures within the manosphere to showcase this through line and create a better understanding of how online male supremacy is maintained and perpetuated. Specifically, the online groups of the pickup artist and incel communities.

This article will show that, within the manosphere, a consistent and constant theme exists that transcends each and every misogynistic cultural group within the manosphere, that of a dedicated upholding of hierarchies in our contemporary society. The manosphere perpetuates an ideal masculinity that has never existed in an attempt to hold onto the social oppression of countless marginalized groups It is through this backing of hierarchy that we can better understand the manosphere and its ever-increasing presence in our contemporary society. This article hopes to investigate these online cultural groupings in a broader sense without focusing on thought leaders within said communities. This article will instead investigate the larger cultural trends within these misogynistic associations with the hope of better understanding a common framework within these two communities.

For our first case study let us look at the online and real world community of pickup artists. The history of “pickup artists” predates the modern internet and can draw its modern incarnation back to the book The Game written by Neil Strauss (King, 2018). The Game is full of misogynistic tropes as well as aggressive disregard of consent (King, 2018). Within the pickup artist community, concepts of heteronormative sexual harassment and perpetuation of rape culture are regularly taught and repeated as being viable ways of learning how to develop “game” (Van Valkenburgh, 2021). Inside the community of pick-up artists there exists an aggressive entitlement over female bodies. So those within the community are socialized into the idea that success with women depends solely on their capability to fallow a particular structure of misogynistic tropes and a disregard for principals of consent (King,2018).

In his work Digesting the Red Pill American sociologist Shawn Van Valkenburgh shares this impactful insight (2021). An important facet to developing game is learning to distinguish between genuine and superficial forms of rejection. For example, the sidebar asserts that women challenge would-be seducers with “rapport breaks,” defined as expressions of displeasure, refusal, or negativity that may seem like discouraging signs, but are really just “faux indicator[s] of disinterest” (XI) (p.10).

It is through this blatant disregard for female consent that we can see how the pickup artist community perpetuates male supremacy through violence and harassment against women and the perpetuation of ideals of rape culture.

Within the pickup artist community, the development of meaningful and profound relationships is scorned and criticized due to the overwhelming misogyny within the community (Van Valkenburgh, 2021). Instead of creating ways to develop meaningful relationships with partners, the pickup artist community focuses on vapid sexual success, thus creating a feedback loop of loneliness. This loneliness drives members deeper into the manosphere, cutting out “any phenomenological experience of a potential partner’s emotional displays (Van Valkenburgh, 2021:14)”.

Another dynamic of the manosphere’s growth comes from the capability for any group in our digital world to create a profitable circle of consumerism within the community. Consumerism lives in the manosphere and is a fundamental aspect to how it is perpetuated (Das, 2022; Van Valkenburgh, 2021). By having misogynistic cultural items for sale, as well as many other industries such as hyper masculine advertisement (e.g., male sex drive pills, or emergency survivalist paraphernalia) to selling ads for other media members within the manosphere community (Barker, Scheele, 2019). This constant consumerism that is able to exist within the manosphere allows for the manosphere to perpetuate itself over the long term and allows for it to emphasize a mixing of cultural groupings to boost profits (Das, 2022) This corporatization helps to perpetuate ideological growth of many areas of reactionary thought of supporting current hierarchies within our communities as a way to maintain and preserve one’s status (Van Valkenburgh, 2021).

Like many internet rabbit holes there are countless levels to the manosphere that allow for entry levels that slowly pull individuals into deeper and more radical aspects of intense misogyny that includes male supremacy rape culture, and deplorable thought patterns (Das, 2022; King, 2018). Our second case study the incel community could certainly be seen as one of the darkest corners of the broader manosphere culture. Within the incel community we can see how they are the opposite side of the same misogynistic coin from the pickup artist community. Instead of leaning into attempting to gain some form of “game” incels retreat into their own loneliness and feast on their own self-pity (Ging, 2019).

There is a serious lack of theoretical frameworks and understanding on how gender extremism is a growing phenomenon as compared to other forms of violent extremism (O’Malley, Holt, Holt, 2022). This is why it is so important to grow a deeper understanding of how incels continue to grow their community in affiliation with other groups within the broader manosphere (King, 2018; O’Malley et al., 2022) As noted by O’Malley et al. (2022) the correlative reason for the age demographic that the incel community inhabits (and the manosphere overall) comes from the fact that the age group in question (18-29) are dealing with newly formed socially based stressors of attempting to make it through the fog of early adulthood. As described in their work Gender Barker and Scheele (2019) express this same idea in understanding toxic masculinity: “We might also have heard the common idea that masculinity is in crisis. This describes a double bind in which men try to meet old standards of masculinity in a world which is going through changes” (Barker & Scheele, 2019, :58). If masculinity is to move past these communities of hatred, we are going to need to accept a world where people can live their authentic selves as well as focus on socializing in less toxic environments while continuing to build a community that shows supportive masculinity.

It is here within the Incel community that we can see the obvious through line of male supremacist direct action that is the manosphere. The incel community has regularly been noted as an extremist movement, that has perpetuated terrorist action in countries all around the globe, spreading violence directed specifically at women (O’malley, et al. 2022). As noted by O’malley, et al. (2022) in their work An Exploration of the Involuntary Celibate (Incel) Subculture Online “Research on violent extremists and terror groups illustrates that members frequently operate within online spaces that resemble traditional criminal or delinquent subcultures” (p.5). This attribute of extremism can be directly related back to the manosphere where any particular individual may exist within multiple misogynistic communities at once or transfer from one to another over time. A particular area that drastically requires more study is how members of the manosphere may fall down the proverbial rabbit hole into more extreme communities such as incels (Górska, Kulicka, Jemielniak., 2022).

The consistent violence that has come from the incel community in recent years is purely based on the subjugation and proliferation of violence against women (Hoffman, Ware, Shapiro,2020). “[I]ncel violence arguably conforms to an emergent trend in terrorism with a more salient hate crime dimension (Hoffman et al., 2020:1)”. Although this community of gender-based terrorists may seem to be a modern phenomenon, Hoffman, et al. (2020) notes that it is rooted in the past with examples such as the École Polytechnique de Montréal terrorist attack of 1989 which explicitly targeted female college students.

Within these two distinct communities of pickup artists and of incels many differences exist, the largest and most glaring being the fact that they see women through different frameworks. Through the framework of a pickup artist-based lens, women are placed at the highest levels of objectification, having their humanity fully removed to the point of being seen as a market-based commodity (Van Valkenburgh, 2021). For the incel community, women are seen as existing outside of humanity “taking on a ‘them’ perspective (Górska et al., 2022: 12)”. In actuality all of these communities have a simple function, that of policing women be it through seeing them as property (for pickup artists) or to police them through extreme acts of violence (as we see in the incel community) (Górska et al., 2022). At the end of the day this enforcement of a male (white supremacist, cis and heteronormative, ableist) dominated society is the end goal of the ideological framework of the manosphere (Górska et al., 2022). Both case studies show that these communities within the Manosphere fail to see women as human and both seek to enact power over women in an attempt to hold onto societal hierarchies.

Within these separate cultures of the manosphere a consistent thread of ideology can be seen, that of a false concept of deserved privilege leading into hierarchies that support said privilege. For both of our case studies that of the pickup artist and the incel community’s other supremacist thought patterns such as white supremacy and ableism exist in tandem with male supremacy, both reinforcing and perpetuating these concepts of supremacist hierarchy that make up the manosphere (Trott, Beckett, Paech, 2022). We can see how both the manosphere and white supremacy can work to create a sense of community around a shared sense of beliefs that create a shared locality of ideas within a community (Trott et al, 2022). It is through this shared belief of red pill thought that the manosphere is able to grow, by exporting itself to other communities that share a similar idea on upholding contemporary hierarchies such as the aforementioned white supremacist community (Trott et al, 2022). Men still have to deal with the hellscape of modern capitalism and may live seriously unhappy and unfulfilled lives and suffer from inadequate societal help (Barker & Scheele, 2019; Van Valkenburgh, 2021). Men also grow up in a society that has continually perpetuated ideas of male and white supremacy to them from birth, leading to the growth of the communities that make up the manosphere (Barker & Scheele, 2019; Van Valkenburgh, 2021). This of course does not excuse men from supporting supremacist hierarchical systems instead it shows us that diverse communities can and do combat the affects of echo chamber fueled hatred by showing men the reality that exists outside of these echo chambers (Ging, 2019)

Given the ways in which these echo chambers function, most notably to exclude, intimidate, and spectacularly punish some women with a view to warning off all women (Siapera 2015), the issue is not whether there is a direct or meaningful correlation between the manosphere’s articulations of antifeminism and the actual people who produce them. Rather it is in understanding the manosphere as a discursive system or network of systems and in seeking to determine the extent of the ideological, psychological, and material power it exerts (Ging, 2019:16).

This power is specifically a power to uphold and perpetuate hierarchies within our current sociological status quo (Ging, 2019). It is the ideological belief of believing in male supremacy and directly ties together the manosphere with the need to impose male supremacy.
There is a reason why the pickup artist community sees heterosexual relations through a lens of market capitalism. Both hierarchical structures of capitalism and misogynistic heteronormativity reinforce one another. (Van Valkenburgh, 2021). “If [pickup artist culture] denies any needs for emotional connection, it encourages the pursuit of sexual relationships that resemble commodity relations (Van Valkenburgh, 2021: 16)”. It is through this conception of sexual encounters as commodity exchange that best showcases this sharing of hierarchical uniformity within the manosphere; be it heteronormativity, male domination, capitalism or white supremacy the manosphere is dedicated to tying hierarchies within our contemporary society together. (Ging,2019; King, 2018; Valkenburgh, 2021).

The manosphere is an aggregate of diverse communities brought together by a common language that orients them in opposition to the discourse and rhetoric of feminism. While the concerns of, say, young men interested in seducing women, libertarian Bitcoin farmers, and fathers caught up in contentious custody hearings are quite different, vocabulary contributes to a sense of common identity. Misandry, which until recently was used almost exclusively within the manosphere, functions as part of a common linguistic practice. This creates a sense of community across divergent subgroups, builds ties between individuals, and helps to solidify the ideological commitment of [men’s rights organizations]to oppose feminism (Marwick & Capla, 2018, Conclusion para 1).

It is through this opposition to feminism that the manosphere becomes a clear vessel of hierarchy’s that wish to maintaining and reincorporating privileges within our contemporary society (Marwick & Capla, 2018). Within the confines of the broader incel community, there exists a broad expression and explicit conceptualization of utilizing violence against women for ideological and political purposes (Górska et al., 2022). Specifically, within the confines of rejection, men within these incel communities can be seen in their most violent form.

As our society progresses to accepting all people to live within their diverse real selves, the slow and dying gasps of traditional hatred-based power structures will continue to attempt to reinforce and bolster said power structures and maintain the preexisting hierarchy. “The threat that Manosphere’s communities pose to women and minority groups and its documented power to incite violence should not be underestimated (Górska et al., 2022:16)”. If we are to combat the growing violence of the manosphere and prevent future men from following down the online rabbit hole into extremism, then we must first recognize the underlying ideology of this extremism. Clearly, denoting how the manosphere works to entrench and recreate male domination and heteronormativity is one necessary and poignant way of combating the growth of misogyny in our contemporary society

Bibliography

Barker, Meg-John, and Jules Scheele. 2019. “Gender: A graphic guide”. Icon Books, Limited.

Das, Shanti. 2022. August 6. “Inside the violent, misogynistic world of Tiktok’s new star, Andrew Tate.” The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/06/andrew-tate-violent-misogynistic-world-of-tiktok-new-star

Ging, Debbie. 2019. “Alphas, Betas, and Incels: Theorizing the Masculinities of the Manosphere.” Men and Masculinities, 22(4), 638-657. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X17706401

Górska, Anna M, Karolina Kulicka, and Dariuz Jemielniak. 2022. “Men Not going their own way: A Thick Big Data Analysis of #MGTOW and #Feminism Tweets.” Feminist Media Studies, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2022.2137829

Hoffman, Bruce, Jacob Ware, and Ezra Shapiro. 2020. “Assessing the Threat of Incel Violence.” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 43(7), 565-587. https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2020.1751459

King, Andrew S. 2018. “Feminism’s Flip Side: A Cultural History of the Pickup Artist.” Sexuality & Culture, 22(1), 299-315.

Marwick, Alice E, and Robyn Caplan. 2018. “Drinking Male Tears: Language, the Manosphere, and Networked Harassment.” Feminist Media Studies, 18(4), 543-559. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1450568

O’Malley, Roberta L, Karen Holt, and Thomas J Holt. 2022. “An Exploration of the Involuntary Celibate (incel) Subculture Online.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 37(7-8), NP4981-NP5008. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260520959625

Trott, Verity, Jennifer Beckett, and Venessa Paech. 2022. “Operationalising ‘Toxicity’ in the Manosphere: Automation, Platform Governance and Community Health.” Convergence (London, England), 28(6), 1754-1769. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565221111075

Van Valkenburgh, Shawn P. 2021. “Digesting the Red Pill: Masculinity and Neoliberalism in the Manosphere.” Men and Masculinities, 24(1), 84-103. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X18816118