Wounded men of feminism: Exploring regimes of male victimhood in the Spanish manosphere

Abstract

The manosphere has become a popular digital social object of research and a growing academic corpus aims to make sense of online masculinist subcultures and the rise in misogynistic discourses in digital environments. In this article, we focus on the idea of male victimhood and the ways it is articulated and reworked to serve specific masculinist interests. We believe the narrative of male victimhood is being used to justify misogynistic claims and to ground a specific antifeminist strategy oriented towards a political dismantling of feminism. Our findings are the result of a multiplatform digital ethnography conducted in the Spanish manosphere including participant observation of a variety of subcultures in diverse platforms, blogs and websites. We conclude that within the Spanish manosphere, there is a regime of male victimhood. Building on Fazili’s categorisation of victimhood claims as experience, stance and self-presentation, we operationalize them as a conceptual framework in this article to analyse how they are taken up in the manospheric context in a way that works to configure the regimes of male victimhood which, in turn, helps disseminate pain in the platform. Finally, following Chouliaraki, we present an analysis of the four main argumentative mechanisms we have identified through which victimhood is claimed in the Spanish manosphere: (1) separation of victimhood from structural reality; (2) separation of victimhood from its context; (3) inversion of the roles of victim and perpetrator and (4) dismantling of the binary sufferer/perpetrator.