Gender-Based Extremism, The Manosphere Battlefield and The Masculinist Movement

Abstract

Any feminist initiative is automatically followed by an anti-feminist action, which is called the backlash (S. Faludi, 1993). This backlash can take many forms, ranging from the reduction of women's sexual and reproductive rights, to the hindering of their economic emancipation by threatening their working conditions or even, by questioning their social benefits and most seriously, by using direct violence against women. This violence, justified by a kind of war, is declared by the movement of masculinism which, at this very moment, is gaining followers and acting to structure and organize actions against women. Masculinism designates all those men organized in "communities" online (Manosphere) or in life leading a real "campaign" against women and around the defence of the men's cause. This movement, which began with the cause of fathers (divorced men), is far from it today since it has a new face that has chosen opposition and conflict, even violence. Also, masculinism expresses the fear of men in front of a feminism seen as triumphant (M. Gourarier,2017). It is not only an anti-feminist ideology, although sometimes they are used interchangeably. Indeed, antifeminism refers to a counter-movement that reacts to feminism, while the term masculinism refers to a discourse that relies on the crisis of masculinity and the idea that women harm men (M-E. Surprenant, 2015). Masculinism takes place in the Manosphere (the men's web) where an anti-feminist rhetoric is at the heart of their discourse, women seem to them to represent a threat to their own privileges. They base their action on two ideological principles, that of a caricatural anti-feminism (there would be only one feminism which would be reduced to hatred of men and their submission) and that of the construction of men as victims of a "femocracy", i.e. a reign of women and feminism. The manosphere allows for the sharing of the collective murderous fantasy, the ideas of "incel rebellion" and "revolt of the beta males". Whether via social networks, the 18-25 forum of the jeuxvideo.com website, or on Reddit, Internet users exchange with each other but also coordinate raids, virtual attacks against feminist Youtubers, bloggers or journalists, against what they call "feminazis." (J.Bergé, 2018). Radical incels aim to punish women and inflict psychological damage on them," so at different stages of their involvement, they will try to find ways to do this. They will begin to propose sexually assaulting women on crowded buses, harassing them on social media, and tricking them on dating sites into obtaining nude photos for blackmail purposes, among other things (Cook, 2018). The aim of this article is to provide knowledge of this new gender-based extremism, which propose new methods, new spaces of struggle, new weapons and new stakes, in order to raise awareness of its danger for women on the one hand and to draw attention to its growing scale on the other, especially in Europe.