“Kick the XX out of your life”: An analysis of the manosphere’s discursive constructions of gender on Twitter

Sample

Two different strategies were used to sample data: 1) Dataset A consists of 157 abusive tweets received between 20 January 2015 and 26 January 2015 by Anita Sarkeesian (2015) and represents the operationalised misogyny of Gamergate. 2) All tweets published between 07 March 2019 and 13 March 2019 using the following hashtags: #mgtow #feminazis #mra #feminismiscancer. Hashtags were selected in order to capture a range of MRA and antifeminist voices. More than half (n=444) of the 847 tweets collected for dataset B featured the hashtag #mgtow (men going their own way), justifying our focus on this particular manosphere community.

Dataset B was collected after #MeToo challenged codes of sexual conduct and represents the creation and perpetuation of manosphere ideology through routine talk. Dataset A is over five years old and directed at a single individual. The two datasets are complementary and can be located along a continuum of sexual violence where “‘typical’ and ‘aberrant’ male behaviour shade into one another” (Kelly, 1988, p. 75). The violent and explicitly sexualised attacks against Sarkeesian are extreme, while the more moderate seeming MGTOW tweets purport to share widely held, normative values. They claim “ordinary positions” (Wetherell & Edley, 1999), presenting themselves as the “typical”. However, they operate in concert with the “aberrant” to construct masculinities which are preoccupied with achieving hegemony in online spaces through the complete subordination of women. As the “typical” often goes unremarked, its harm may hide in plain sight. Further, as they shade into each other, the demarcation between typical and aberrant is constantly shifted, rendering the aberrant increasingly normative. That this continuum is performed in disembodied spaces further serves to limit women’s ability to name their experiences.

Twitter content is in the public domain and consent was not sought from account owners, but all tweets were anonymised prior to data analysis in line with professional guidance (British Psychological Society, 2017). The discussion below uses ‘P’ to represent participants, while recognising the inaccuracy of this term given the lack of consent or knowledge of the research on the part of Twitter account holders. Ethical approval was gained from the authors’ university’s Department of Psychology Research Ethics Committee prior to data collection, and collection and analysis were undertaken in line with the approved research protocol. This included attending to the researchers’ own well-being and protection from psychological harm caused by reading and re-reading abusive and violent material (Social Research Association, 2016).

Data collection and analysis

Content from Twitter was automatically collected by Twitter Archiver. Twitter Archiver exports to Google Sheets, and data was moved into a locally stored Microsoft Excel spreadsheet for analysis. Where tweets in dataset B were part of a thread, other tweets within that thread were manually collected and transcribed. Content from Sarkeesian’s blog was then transcribed into a separate spreadsheet in the same Excel file.

Data were coded with specific attention to representations of gender and power, and how texts positioned the writer. Following initial coding, extracts were transcribed onto sticky notes in order to explore and map discursive patterns and strategies. Data was further reviewed and recoded in light of these patterns, and maps were refined based on recoding. Analysis continued throughout the writing process as contradictions within manosphere discourses became apparent, necessitating further review, coding and mapping of the data. Throughout the analysis, original texts, where available, were revisited so that tweets could be reviewed contextually.

Extracts within our analysis are quoted verbatim. Non-standard spelling and punctuation are original, and offensive and abusive language has been left uncensored.

Co-opting discourses of oppression

The appropriation of discourses of oppression was a constant theme in our data. Although primarily used to construct a narrative of male victimisation, the discursive strategy adopted in pursuit of claiming victimhood, also worked to declare new ideologies of masculine identity. Male victimisation was framed as a consequence of women’s actions, yet the masculine identities they wrote were threatened by this framing: in order to victimise men, women must hold some power. Redress was attempted through talk of women as a singular entity aligned with familiar powers, such as the state. To defend their position of victimhood, the manosphere developed a misogynist rhetoric in which female victimisation was denied and rendered meaningless at every turn.

Central to co-opting discourses of oppression was a message of victimhood and resistance:

#MGTOW is the answer from staying free and not being disposable sl^ves to western w0men and their big daddy government. (P151, l.b8)

Carroll (2011) shows how white masculinity co-opts the representational meaning secured by oppressed groups as a reaction to having lost “normative” status. He argues that non-hegemonic identities, such as geeks or slaves, are frequently used to assert hegemonic masculinity. For #MGTOW to liken themselves to slaves meant claiming an oppressed yet naturalised masculinity.

The frequency of tweets claiming victimisation by #MeToo established women as the manosphere’s perceived oppressors. Men – even those accused of sexual harassment – have been found to emphasise their “victim” role (Kitzinger & Thomas, 1995). In our data, claims to victimhood occurred through a combination of rape myths (Burt, 1980), where women “just lie and make things up […] #falserape” (P476, l.b525), and the foregrounding of men. #MeToo was positioned as a vindictive enemy of men remorselessly attacking everything constitutive of modern masculine identity (Barrett, 1996) – their “careers and life” and “reputation” (P476, l.b525; P347, l.b460):

Acrimonious & unverified accusations serve to destroy a targeted enemy! #MeToo does not get play the part of rule maker & the selection process to determine males thrive & which are eliminated! MeToo is not for everyone! #HimToo #Notmetoo #Mentoo #MGTOW #DueProcess (P409, l.b418)

The same discursive strategy was applied to create an entirely new male rape victim, one who has suffered “divorce rape”:

#toxicfemininity Let me start. Women force men into common law, fatherhood and #divorceRape and use the state to kidnap as children and take away his rights as a father. #MGTOW (P202, l.b96)

The appropriation and redefinition of feminist discourse could also be seen in the use of terms such as “victim blame” (P566, l.b711) and “shaming”:

Any sentence containing the words “real man” uttered by a woman is a shaming attempt. Women are always trying to say what a real man is. Their best attempt at assertiveness is aggression. A real man would (insert whatever benefits us here) and not want anything in return. #MGTOW (P347, l.b468)

Manosphere activists discredit women’s claims by ascribing masculine qualities to them and bolster claims to their own oppression by appropriating feminine qualities:

It took Western men’s sober recognition that women can do it all themselves, for men to finally start thinking about our basic rights as human beings. It’s no wonder #MGTOW has only now started to wake men up. This clearly shows which gender is the most caring and compassionate (P202, l.b88).

The manosphere merges compassion and discourses of oppression to construct a wise and enlightened male hero who is “saving men and boys” (P259, l.b326). They manufacture victimhood as a legitimate, angry and attention-demanding response to the erosion of their “rights”, masking a deep-seated fear of becoming feminised by passivity (Allan, 2016). Victim identities do not sit comfortably with claims to hegemonic masculinity (Javaid, 2017). As the manosphere appropriates feminine characteristics and language in order to fully embody their constructions of victimhood, their ideal masculinity is rendered increasingly fragile. The following sections consider the strategies they adopt to scaffold their new masculinities.

Naming power

Throughout the data, names were used to construct a gendered hierarchy and to deny women a presence within it. Famous men accused of rape and sexual assault were presented as victims or survivors of misandry while male allies of women were “traitors” (P431, l.b448). Those named as victims of feminism are a racially diverse group of powerful and successful men: Brett Kavanaugh, Bill Cosby, R Kelly, Michael Jackson (P480, l.b531; P463, l.b508; P347, l.b640). Accusations against them were understood as threats to the alpha-male. In naming them as victims, the manosphere returned to their appropriation of discourses of black male oppression. In 1991, then Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas discredited allegations of sexual harassment as “high-tech lynching” (Rosenwald, 2018), constructing himself as a victim of racism rather than as a perpetrator of harassment. The phrase has since gained discursive currency (Gotell & Dutton, 2016), and is alluded to when the manosphere singles out black men as victims of “false allegations”.

Although the manosphere sympathised with high-profile alpha-males, they reserved that name for themselves (P281, l.b636). While they were “lions” (P546, l.b183), other men were denigrated as “blue pill simps” (P580, l.b741) and “soyboys” (P170, l.b260). A “simp” “allows himself to be treated like a wallet” by women (MGTOW.com, 2019), while “soy boys” suffer from raised oestrogen levels due to a diet of soy products (Ebner & Davey, 2019) fed to them by “single moms” (P170). The men at the bottom of the hierarchy were seen to be the product of women, under their control or, worse still in the eyes of the manosphere, their enablers:

Simps really peaking the bravery in bitches with moose knuckles and strong chins (P521, l.b615) ²

The act of naming has long been recognised as a violating act of power (Butler, 1993). The subject must recognise herself being named and so acknowledge her subjecthood. Thus, she must occupy the name she is given; her identity is produced through interpellating moments, including those aiming to relocate her within an oppressive regulatory framework of gender (Butler, 1993). The manosphere demands not only that women are interpellated into this regulatory framework, but that they also recognise their power as “evil” and their bodies as monstrous.

Just as Butler (2004) allows space for resistance within interpellating moments, so does she state the necessity of the recognition that comes with a sexed identity. A striking feature of the data were the repeated refusals to name women.

#MGTOW #IWD Celebrate the silence – kick the XX out of your life (P236, l.b136.1)

The idealised woman is the unreal, unattainable figure the manosphere places within its regulatory gender binary because she presents no threat to gender hierarchies. Their non-naming of other women is the active and intentional construction of a third other. Just as their bodies are monstrous yet timid, so are “wahmen” and “weemins” phonaesthetically named as whining and snivelling. These women are not simply cast out of a fantasy gender binary, they are denied the category of woman. As the power within the collective “women” becomes apparent, the manosphere understands that the name alone is no longer enough to ensure women’s subjugation.

Through the act of naming, the manosphere constructed and located themselves at the top of a hierarchy of masculinity. While their attempts to erase female identity through the unnaming of women placed women outside of a gender hierarchy, these efforts were undermined by the primacy of masculinity in their own identities. Their very definition of naturalised masculinity presupposes a binary opposite. Although they wished an invisible idealised woman to perform that role, every masculinity they wrote was defined in relation to women as they exist in the world – women who raise sons, are victims of male violence, or challenge male power – perhaps to the extent that, for all their efforts to construct her as the monstrous other, their discourse rendered woman the normative gender. Their response to this inherent and inescapable discursive conundrum was the construction of gender as a natural category signified by the body’s biology.

Disavowal by disaggregation

The denial of women’s identity was amplified by the manosphere’s objectification of the female body. It was striking how often women were reduced to an assemblage of mere body parts, in particular their genitalia:

you can qriticue the games … With your slut cunt #rekt (P33, l.a34)

The female body of the manosphere was at once powerful and dumb, hated and desired, but consistently deserving of violence. Despite their discursive efforts to strip meaning from rape, it remained their tool of choice to control and silence women. This was most evident in the rape threats sent to Sarkeesian:

If you ever come to Europe I will rape you into oblivion (P54, l.a61)

This disavowal was continued in the conspicuous absence of most of the male body from rape threats. Only the penis was evident and was explicitly and repeatedly weaponised, to the extent that it acted almost independently of the man:

I don’t advocate violence against women at all but this bitch I’ll make an exception for (WITH MY DICK) (P93, l.a103)

Their denial of responsibility for acts of violence extended beyond the (dis)embodied “dick” into the discursive realm through the use of capitalisation and emojis that placed threats into a space where their meaning could be denied:

kill yourself oh wait sorry did I hurt your tits with my keyboard (P8, l.a9)

While P93 and P61, whose tweets were discussed previously with regard to threats of graphic sexual violence, used capitalisation to emphasise aggression, the absence of capital letters and grammatical pauses in P8’s tweet creates ambiguity of meaning. Violence and rape threats were presented as a joke, and when Sarkeesian named them as threats of sexual violence those making the threats undermined and belittled her response, ensnaring her in their discursive strategies. This is a common strategy which intentionally silences a victim by denying her the right to challenge her attackers (Jane, 2014). It is doubly confounding because it frames the victim as active and motivated in misunderstanding the tweets’ meaning. This allows the aggressor to construct himself as a victim of her wilful misunderstanding, while reducing her to her sex, her “tits”, and the relentless accusations of emotional lability and hysteria (Ussher, 2013). By writing threats that can be dismissed as “a joke”, the manosphere constructs a discourse in which they can hold both aggressor and victim identities at once while taking responsibility for neither.

The manosphere’s sexual harassment of Sarkeesian exemplified the community’s practice of simultaneously performing and concealing power. The imagery conjured by the manosphere to attack her was a fantasy of masculinity in which the idealised man violently denigrated the female body. While Sarkeesian was its primary target, the images’ endless repetition can reify identities and thereby create repercussions that reach far beyond Gamergate (Chowdhury et al., 2020).