‘Vicious, vitriolic, hateful and hypocritical’: the representation of feminism within the manosphere

Abstract

This paper examines the legitimation of antifeminist ideology within the manosphere, based on qualitative analysis of posts from an antifeminist Reddit community. Taking a discourse-historical approach to CDS, I analyse the nomination and predication strategies used to represent feminists in addition to the argumentation strategies used to convince others of the illegitimacy of feminism. Overall, I find that users typically did not distinguish between ‘good’ feminists and ‘bad’ feminists, instead making negative generalisations about feminists as an entire group. Arguments against feminism typically relied on the topos of justice in order to portray feminism as an illegitimate movement for equality given that it supposedly does not treat men and women in the same way. Alternatively, feminism was argued to be a threat to the ‘natural’ social order and men and women’s historical gender roles.