Does the manosphere actively recruit boys online to groom to perform violent acts?
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https://www.ft.com/content/60bc1866-2157-4d5d-9bef-5830dcf71a47
Mia Levitin SEPTEMBER 9 2020
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Since Donald Trump ascended to the Oval Office unimpeded by his crude “locker-room talk”, masculinity has been a hot topic. As three new books demonstrate, the causes and cons_equences of its more “toxic” manifestations are manifold.
Laura Bates, author of Men Who Hate Women, has visited British schools almost weekly since founding the Everyday Sexism Project in 2012. Of late, she has noticed a marked increase in the number of students who are “angry, resistant to the very idea of a convers_ation about sexism”.
Men are the real victims, these boys tell her, “in a society in which political correctness has gone mad, white men are persecuted, and so many women lie about rape”. After hearing the same ideas repeated across the UK, Bates decided to investigate their provenance, diving into online communities of incels, pick-up artists, Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) and Men’s Rights Activists. Bates takes issue with the cuteness of what is collectively referred to as the “manosphere”: “Like man cave, man flu and man bag . . . the manosphere is seen as a joke and, therefore, harmless.” It is anything but: “There is some illegal incitement to real-life violence [in these spaces] that is able to flourish with absolute impunity.”
The manosphere’s most sinister citizens are “incels” — an abbreviation of “involuntary celibates”. Enraged with women who “deny” them the sex that they feel is their due, incels propose controlling women’s sexual autonomy through rape, sexual slavery or sex redistribution. Incels registered on forums number in the tens of thousands, but their ideology has outsized influence among the alt-right. “A lot of the vocabulary that has been adopted by the reactionary right over the past couple of years has really come from the incel community,” Tim Squirrell, a researcher studying social interaction in online communities, told Bates.
Far more socially accepted than incels are so-called Men’s Rights Activists. According to Bates, MRAs are most interested in battling women — seeking to defund domestic violence shelters on the basis of discrimination, for example. By alluding to anodyne issues such as men’s health, they gain access to news platforms, through which they smuggle “some of the misogynistic ideas of the wider manosphere into the public eye, behind a false shield of credibility”. MRAs have been further emboldened by dog-whistled endorsement from politicians, she adds.
Bates believes that the manosphere actively recruits teenagers from places such as bodybuilding forums to groom them for violence. Misogynistic attacks should, she argues, be classified as terrorism rather than anomalous acts executed by mentally unstable lone wolves.
Other experts are more worried about the mainstreaming of radical ideas. Gary Barker, founder and chief executive of Promundo, an NGO promoting healthy masculinity, told Bates that he loses more sleep about the normalis_ation of the discourse of Jordan Peterson — who told the FT in 2018 that society should “stop teaching 19-year-old girls that their primary destiny is career”— than incels themselves._
https://www.ft.com/content/60bc1866-2157-4d5d-9bef-5830dcf71a47