Six years ago, while researching ideas Roxanne Gay explores in Bad Feminist, I stumbled upon the manosphere. As someone who loves definitions, I found it strange that the manosphere could mean so many different things and encompass so many different groups (mostly male).
To help describe this phenomenon, I started describing the manosphere as a bunch of loosely connected online forums that were formed mostly by men as a response to the excesses and sometimes, misunderstood parts of feminist ideas and discourses. There were definitely extreme points of view present but the majority of the manosphere seemed to function as spaces for men who felt lost in this changing world, especially when it came to gender relations.
Many of the problems being discussed within the manosphere are global. Increasingly there has been coverage of the manosphere, mostly negative, in India too. So I was not surprised, when I received a paper titled, Reproducing Misogyny: The Indian and Malayali Manosphere by Dr. Chinchu C.
Just like my experience with Bad Feminist, I found this paper to be a stretch. The author makes so many assertions that seem to skip intermediate reasoning. For example: the implication that participation in manosphere forums constitutes an early step toward extreme violence. In the author's defense, he does provide many citations. Since I am yet to do the work of reading all the papers that the author cites, I will refrain from critiquing the paper now. But I do want to highlight two definitions of the Manosphere that might illustrate why I am skeptical of the assertions in the paper.
The author says that while the term manosphere first appears on the internet in 2009, it became popular after Ian Ironwood, in a book by the same name, defined it as,
"a collection of internet blogs, cultural discussion groups, interpersonal interactions and digital clubhouses whose focus revolves around issues and interests common to men and masculinity."
A couple of paragraphs later, however, the author, citing historical evolution and the current nature of the constituent communities, defines the manosphere as,
"a heterogeneous group of online communities commonly characterized by their opposition to feminism, promotion of masculinity, and misogynistic and sexist beliefs which are reinforced and escalated within echo chambers. It includes constituents such as men's rights activists (MRAs), Incels (involuntary celibates), Red Pill groups, Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), pick-up artists (PUAs), fathers' rights groups among others. These communities have developed their distinctive jargon and internal tensions and are often associated with online harassment, radicalization, and violence, including mass shootings, motivated by misogyny."
Definitions like these don’t just describe phenomena; they quietly constrain the kinds of questions that can be asked about them. The second definition doesn’t merely describe the manosphere; it evaluates it. In doing so, it collapses a wide range of male-oriented spaces into a single moral category, anchored to its most extreme manifestations. Is it just me, or does the shift from a descriptive to a morally loaded definition fundamentally change what is being analyzed?