The manosphere is a loosely connected group of anti-feminist Internet communities comprised of phenomena as diverse as #gamergate, the alt-right, men’s rights activism, and pickup artist forums (Ging 2017; Schmitz & Kazyak 2016).
Andrew Tate is a name that has been echoing across Instagram and various other social media sites. Apart from smoking a cigar and talking about how men must treat women, Tate is a figure who rose to fame because he was in the right place at the right time. Formerly a Reality TV Actor, and later engaged in boxing, Tate now resides in Romania, admittedly because of how lenient the laws with regard to sexual violence are. Most of his podcast episodes comprise of snide and snarky remarks about women and typifying an entire sex and gender into a series of stereotypes. Adding onto the overt sexism and misogyny is the appeal of wealth. Tate often boasts of his various cars, his signature phrase being, “what color is your Bugatti?” , a rhetorical question meant to elicit in the listener a drive to work hard and attain a certain type of wealth and status, which is socially desirable and, according to Tate, guaranteeing female attention.
However, it is never simply what people say that effects social movements worldwide, but how big groups react to them. Andrew Tate’s podcast clips are often edited, chopped up and posted across various social media cites, often by accounts dedicated solely to posting his content. Initially, Tate was not as popular, however the sudden surge of such clips from his podcast, and their wide circulation by accounts that seem to appear out of nowhere, is making it seem like many real people are sharing his content.
The larger issue at hand isn’t necessarily one misogynistic man, but rather an echo chamber created which enables his functioning. This echo chamber has a name, the manosphere: with varied but synonymous ideas and gaining popularity fast. The spectrum is broad, from a simple whatsapp joke about disliking one’s wife’s shopping habits, or a mass shooter mentioning seething resentment towards women before committing his crime.
The variety in the nature of the misogyny and sexism suggests that different people are fed different kinds of ideas in order to express misogyny in different ways. What does this mean? A simple joke about women being too emotional can be just that, but it can also be stretched to the point where legislators and law makers mention that as a reason for the lack of representation of female public workers and politicians, while both are the same statement, the effects are different. What is the source? The mainstream usage of watered down misogyny borrowed from people within the manosphere can be one such source, take for example a meme one finds on one’s instagram ‘explore’, or a podcast on spotify directed towards having a conversation about controversial topics.
The way a person engages with their content on social media affects the content they will be consuming as time passes by. So if the content in question is is jokes about the promiscuity of women being in the same explore as blatant statements about women not deserving abortion rights, the path is laying itself down.
Various researchers (Valkenburgh, S. P. ,2021) and people on the internet have pointed out that the concerning rise of content such as this should be curbed, suggesting that the way people consume content impacts us so much that one must censor content, opens up new conversations about what content should and shouldn’t be censored. Where must one draw the line? Who is responsible for making sure that social media is a harmless place which is simply made to keep upto date with your friends? The answer to those questions is as vague as the questions themselves. As has been observed, with the #MeToo movement and others, more often than not people take up responsibility in their own hands, perhaps becuase social media creates a space where every individual has a voice. It is what is done with such a voice that makes or break it.
References
Van Valkenburgh, S. P. (2021). Digesting the red pill: Masculinity and neoliberalism in the manosphere. Men and Masculinities, 24(1), 84-103.
Farrell, T., Fernandez, M., Novotny, J., & Alani, H. (2019, June). Exploring misogyny across the manosphere in reddit. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Web Science (pp. 87-96).