Abstract
This chapter shows how masculinist logics play out in contemporary antifeminist, father’s rights and men’s rights backlashes, in alt-right discourse and broader anti diversity and anti-‘political correctness’ in both overt and increasingly subtle ways. These contemporary backlashes naturalise essentialised gender hierarchies and their intersection with other naturalised hierarchies to claim that feminism has gone too far. Additionally, the chapter demonstrates how they invoke a crude libertarian understanding of choice and agency to claim ‘reverse discrimination’ against straight, white men and recuperate liberal equality discourses. This chapter then discusses online abuse or ‘e-bile’ as exemplary of antagonistic ethos that maintains the internet as a masculinised space that subordinates all that is feminised.
Keywords
- Masculinism
- Men’s rights
- Antifeminism
- Alt-right
- Backlash
- Online misogyny
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- 1.
Turtle Island is used here to what is now called the United States of America. Turtle Island is used by various First Nations people in USA and Canada which they state ‘are on and in Turtle Island, as North America is traditionally known to the Original Nations of Turtle Island’ (Newcomb 2011).
- 2.
#Notallmen came about as a response to the common argument against feminist gendered analyses that ‘not all men ’ engage in violence etc. For an overview see Zimmerman (2014).
- 3.
‘The movement known as #GamerGate has evolved out of a series of incidents following the publication of an online blog written by Eron Gjoni (posted 8 August 2014). In this blog, Gjoni accuses his former girlfriend, game developer Zoe Quinn, of sleeping with a game critic journalist in order to gain a favourable review for her game Depression Quest. Gjoni’s story was subsequently posted on several other forums where discussions were aimed at harassing Quinn and exposing details about her personal life. This saw Quinn’s private details (including home address and phone numbers) become public knowledge, and shortly afterwards she began receiving multiple rape and death threats on a daily basis’ (Todd 2015: 64).
- 4.
Doxing is ‘publicizing personal information to make someone a target of harassment’ (Blake in Lilly 2016).
- 5.
Realz before feelz is used online to denote the use of reason over emotion with the inverse considered to be a female trait and defined on a redpill reddit forum as follows: ‘feels before reals … specifically refers to how a woman will not act according to the reality of her situation, but rather will act according to her feelings. The two often go hand in hand’ (ASKRPR 2016).
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Nicholas, L., Agius, C. (2018). #Notallmen, #Menenism, Manospheres and Unsafe Spaces: Overt and Subtle Masculinism in Anti-“PC” Discourse. In: The Persistence of Global Masculinism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68360-7_2
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