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

Alexandra Krendel

doi:10.1177/0957926520939690

Abstract

This study investigates how the lemmas woman, girl, man and guy are used to discursively represent and construct gender identities in an anti-feminist forum on the discussion website Reddit. The lemmas were analysed using corpus-assisted social actor analysis and appraisal theory. Similarities and differences within three sub-communities of the TRP subreddit were considered: Men’s Rights (activists who believe that men are systemically disadvantaged in society), Men Going Their Own Way (who abstain from relationships with women), and Red Pill Theory (primarily pick-up artists). The corpus was characterised by bare assertions about gendered behaviour, although the masculine gender role was less well-defined than the feminine one. Women and girls were dehumanised and sexually objectified, negatively judged for morality and veracity, and constructed as desiring hostile behaviour from male social actors. Conversely, men were constructed as victims of female social actors and external institutions and, as a result, as unhappy and insecure.

Highlights

This study explores how men’s rights activists, male separatists and pick-up artists represent and construct male and female social actors in relation to each other, what actions and attitudes these actors are ascribed, and how they are evaluated
Paying particular attention to scientific rationalisation based on evolutionary psychology and economics, Van Valkenburgh (2018) conducted an inductive content analysis of the 26 readings that would-be members are required to be familiar with before participating on the TRP forum, according to the rules of the subreddit
Fetterolf and Rudman (2017) found that endorsing Sexual Economics Theory coincides with high scores on two scales: the 15-item Adversarial Heterosexual Beliefs Scale (Lonsway and Fitzgerald, 1995), which includes items such as ‘it is natural for one spouse to be in the control of the other’; and Glick and Fiske’s (1996) Ambivalent Sexism Inventory, which distinguishes between hostile sexism and benevolent sexism

Summary

Introduction

This study explores how men’s rights activists, male separatists and pick-up artists represent and construct male and female social actors in relation to each other, what actions and attitudes these actors are ascribed, and how they are evaluated. The ‘manosphere’ community of interest for this study, the TRP subreddit, referred to as such to maintain its anonymity, describes itself as encouraging ‘discussion of sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men’ (Van Valkenburgh, 2018: 2) and includes three sub-groups: Men’s Rights, Men Going Their Own Way, and Red Pill Theory (primarily pick-up artists). As well as observing that women were dehumanised by the community, the authors found that members were encouraged to pursue individual acts of self-improvement, and discouraged from political involvement, supporting Donald Trump was encouraged for the 2016 US presidential election These studies provide a window into the beliefs of TRP, the community has not yet been analysed using a systematic linguistic framework. This is true for the past literature which considers the content of the three subcommunities, which is summarised below

Methods

Results

Conclusion