Manosphere | EPFL Graph Search

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The manosphere is a collection of websites, blogs, and online forums promoting masculinity, misogyny, and opposition to feminism. Communities within the manosphere include men's rights activists, incels (involuntary celibates), Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), pick-up artists (PUA), and fathers' rights groups. The manosphere overlaps with the far-right and alt-right communities. It has also been associated with online harassment and has been implicated in radicalizing men into misogynist beliefs and the glorification of violence against women. Some sources have associated manosphere-based radicalization with mass shootings motivated by misogyny. The manosphere grew out of social movements such as the men's liberation movement of the 1970s and 80s. Groups now considered to be a part of the manosphere, such as the men's rights movement, predate the term "manosphere". The term, a play on the word "blogosphere", is believed to have first appeared on Blogspot in 2009. It was subsequently popularized by Ian Ironwood, a pornography marketer who collected a variety of blogs and forums in book form as The Manosphere: A New Hope For Masculinity. The term entered the popular lexicon when news media began to use it in stories about men who had committed acts of misogynist violence, sexual assault, and online harassment. Emma A. Jane identifies the late 2000s–early 2010s as a "tipping point" when manosphere communities moved from the fringes of the Internet towards the mainstream. She hypothesizes this was related to the advent of Web 2.0 and the rise of social media, in combination with ongoing systemic misogyny within a patriarchal culture. Jane writes that the manosphere was well established by the time of the GamerGate controversy in 2014, and misogynistic language such as graphic rape threats against women had entered mainstream discourse, being deployed by men not necessarily identified with any specific manosphere group.

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Masculism or masculinism may variously refer to ideologies and socio-political movements that seek to eliminate sexism against men, equalize their rights with women, and increase adherence to or promotion of attributes regarded as typical of males. The terms may also refer to the men's rights movement or men's movement, as well as a type of antifeminism. According to the historian Judith Allen, Charlotte Perkins Gilman invented the term masculism in 1914, when she gave a public lecture series in New York entitled "Studies in Masculism".

The men's rights movement (MRM) is a branch of the men's movement. The MRM in particular consists of a variety of groups and individuals (men's rights activists or MRAs) who focus on general social issues and specific government services which they say adversely impact—or in some cases structurally discriminate against—men and boys. Common topics discussed within the men's rights movement include family law (such as child custody, alimony and marital property distribution), reproduction, suicides, domestic violence against men, circumcision, education, conscription, social safety nets, and health policies.

Some communities on the social news site Reddit (known as "subreddits") are devoted to explicit, violent, or hateful material, and have been the topic of controversy. Controversial Reddit communities sometimes receive significant media coverage. When Reddit was founded in 2005, there was only one shared space for all links, and subreddits did not exist. Subreddits were created later, but could only initially be created by Reddit administrators. In 2008, subreddit creation was opened to all users.