Gender Hate Online

Understanding the New Anti-Feminism

Debbie Ging, Eugenia Siapera, Debbie Ging, Eugenia Siapera

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783319962252
• eBook ISBN: 9783319962269
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Gender Hate Online addresses the dynamic nature of misogyny: how it travels, what technological and cultural affordances support or obstruct this and what impact reappropriated expressions of misogyny have in other cultures. It adds significantly to an emergent body of scholarship on this topic by bringing together a variety of theoretical approaches, while also including reflections on the past, present, and future of feminism and its interconnections with technologies and media. It also addresses the fact that most work on this area has been focused on the Global North, by including perspectives from Pakistan, India and Russia as well as intersectional and transcultural analyses. Finally, it addresses ways in which women fight back and reclaim online spaces, offering practical applications as well as critical analyses.

This edited collection therefore addresses a substantial gap in scholarship by bringing together a body of work exclusively devoted to this topic. With perspectives from a variety of disciplines and geographic bases, the volume will be of major interest to scholars and students in the fields of gender, new media and hate speech.

© The Author(s) 2019

Debbie Ging and Eugenia Siapera (eds.)Gender Hate Onlinehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96226-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Debbie Ging¹ and Eugenia Siapera²

(1)

Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland

(2)

University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

Debbie Ging (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Eugenia Siapera

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

In recent years, the scale and intensity of anti-feminist sentiment online has become a cause for serious concern, not only among feminist activists but also for any woman expressing opinions or exerting influence in digital spaces. Women have been verbally abused, doxed, and sent rape and death threats. They have been cyberstalked, photoshopped into pornography and have had intimate images of themselves shared. Their websites have been hacked and, in many cases, their livelihoods have been sabotaged (Jane 2018). An Amnesty report published in 2017 showed that almost a quarter (23%) of the women surveyed across eight countries said they had experienced online abuse or harassment at least once, ranging from 16% in Italy to 33% in the US. Across all eight countries, just under half (46%) of women responding to the survey who had experienced online abuse or harassment said it was misogynistic or sexist in nature.

This book project grew out of a previous collection on online misogyny, published as a special issue in Feminist Media Studies (Ging and Siapera 2018). Clearly there are important distinctions to be made between misogyny and anti-feminism, the former usually understood as a more general set of attitudes and behaviours towards women; the latter implying a response to a distinct set of gender-political values that are not espoused exclusively by women. Despite this, what has become clear in our ongoing research in this area is an increasing blurring of the boundaries between misogyny and anti-feminism. As Ging’s (2017) study of the new men’s rights politics revealed, online anti-feminism differs from its offline predecessors precisely by virtue of its extreme misogyny and proclivity towards personalized, and often sexualized, attacks on individual women. While pre-internet anti-feminism tended to mobilize men around issues such as divorce, child custody and the feminization of education, using conventional political methods such as public demonstrations and petitions, the new anti-feminists have adopted a highly personalized style of politics that often fails to distinguish between feminists and women. This is largely due to their espousal of certain essentialist and universalizing beliefs, for example, that all women are biologically destined to seek out alpha males but will exploit beta males for money, and—paradoxically—that most Western women, often referred to as “Ameriskanks”, have been infected by feminism and must either be subdued or abandoned.

These developments, juxtaposed against an older men’s rights movement that largely adhered to the “rationally based deliberative protocols of public spheres” (Papacharissi 2015), would appear to signal a new and uniquely toxic turn in gender politics. Certainly, their reliance on the affordances on social media—anonymity, echo chambers, brigading and the “disinhibition effect”—coupled with their overlapping “alt-right” sympathies, points to unchartered territory in the history of contemporary social movements. However, as Siapera argues in this collection, using the work of Silvia Federici on the witch hunts of the Middle Ages, misogyny has been used historically as a conscious political strategy to domesticate women, to control female sexuality and to break female solidarity. Indeed, Siapera puts forward a compelling argument for an urgent rethinking of misogyny not merely as a feeling, attitude or type of behaviour towards women but rather as a method or set of methods that are used—whether deliberately or subconsciously—to keep women “in their place”. This collection does not set out to collapse the distinction between misogyny and anti-feminism but rather to invite critical reflection on their mutual interplay as well as to discuss emerging practices addressing these.

Feminisms and Anti-feminisms: A Brief History

Every large-scale, organized attempt by women to advance their status in society has been met with resistance. It is an explicit aim of this collection to move the discussion out of the confines of Western feminism and anti-feminism. However, because the feminist and anti-feminist movements originated and were most prolific in the English-speaking world, it is necessary to consider how these histories have shaped the current conjecture, as well as why they might be inadequate to understand the evolution of feminism and anti-feminism in the global south and other non-Western contexts. In the late nineteenth century, conservative anti-suffrage movements in Britain, the UK and Australia sought to oppose women’s incursion into public life on the grounds that it would threaten the family unit and religious values. In Britain, the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League was founded in 1908 and, two years later, amalgamated with the Men’s League for Opposing Woman Suffrage (Bush 2018) to form the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage. Early anti-suffrage posters reveal very graphically the desire to silence, restrain and punish women (Fig. 1.1). These anti-suffragists did not perceive voting as a right but rather as a duty that would be imposed on women in addition to their gender-specific domestic roles.

Fig. 1.1

(a, b) Early anti-suffrage posters

The 1980s witnessed a more subtle, culturally embedded set of reactions to the very significant gains made by second-wave feminism in the 1970s. According to Susan Faludi, author of the bestselling book Backlash (1992), this manifested itself in a range of cautionary narratives and images about the threats that sexually autonomous women posed to masculinity and the nuclear family, as well as in the emergence of the macho action hero. Films such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Nashville and The Marathon Man, in which less hegemonic versions of American masculinity were tentatively explored, gave way to the iconic “American movie macho” (Neibaur 1989) of the 1980s and 1990s, exemplified in the characters played by Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis, as well as to a number of films—often starring Michael Douglas—in which white masculinity was perceived to be under threat, including Fatal Attraction, Disclosure and Basic Instinct. The success of these films signalled the arrival of the “white man in crisis” trope, further developed in Falling Down, which bemoaned the declining hegemony of the white American male due to feminism and a host of other “minority” groups.

At around the same time, panics about “masculinity in crisis” and the obsolescence of the “male species” became common in the mainstream media. In the 1990s, the British press ran numerous feature articles about “The Obsolete Male”¹ and the “Redundant Male”,² and a revitalized men’s movement began to shape in both the US and the UK. In the US, the National Coalition of Free Men and various Christian and pro-male mythopoetic groups adopted a range of pro-male and anti-feminist positions. The mythopoetic tradition, made famous in the early 1990s by Robert Bly’s Iron John (1992), was based on Jungian psychology and was concerned more with individual male identities than with the formation of a political movement, while the Promise Keepers,³ a Christian movement founded by Bill McCartney, an opponent of women’s reproductive rights and gay liberation, encouraged men to become the masters of their homes, guided by Saint Paul’s famed domestic stricture “Wives, submit to your husbands”. The Promise Keepers use sports stadia for their rallies, with a view to creating an environment of “godly masculinity” (Coward 2000, p. 129).

As in the US, the anti-feminist strands of the men’s movement in Britain claimed that men’s rights had been institutionally eroded by feminism. The most high-profile group within this strand was the UK Men’s Movement,⁴ which was primarily concerned with family law, child contact and maintenance arrangements, inferior social security provisions, and men’s exclusion from education, training and healthcare. Adherents to this strand argued that governments and legal systems had become biased in favour of women, and they lobbied for legal reform and a Minister for Men in British Parliament. The Manhood Project,⁵ in particular, was concerned that the decline of traditional work, as well as organizations such as the Scouts and the Armed Forces Cadet organizations denied young men traditional rites of passage. Linking this lack of masculine socialization to increasing levels of crime and delinquency, the Manhood Project called for the introduction of formal initiatives in education to ensure that young men were socially initiated into manhood. Such agendas were widely criticized for failing to acknowledge the relationship between institutionalized male violence and crime (Connell 2002; Faludi 1999). Other reactionary websites such as Angry Harry⁶ (“A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Theorizing the New Anti-Feminism(s)
• Part II. Manifestations of Online Misogyny: Case Studies of Different Platforms and Cultural Contexts
• Part III. Responses/Resistance/Experiences
• Back Matter