Toxic Mediated Masculinity and Post-Truth Antifeminism in Schools

• In Event: 79.011 - Gender and Post-Truth Politics in Education: Shifting Masculinities

Abstract

Objectives/Purpose: This paper explores the rise of ‘disinformation’ (Marwick and Lewis, 2017) in and what is termed a “post-truth anti-feminist terrain” (Author 1, 2018) characterized by legitimizations of misogyny, abuse, homo and transphobia, zenophobia, racism and other intensified dividing practices of otherisation seeping into educational contexts (Strom and Martin, 2017). Specifically, shifts in the form and expression of antifeminism in secondary schools in the context of increasing uses of social media as a source of news and facts are discussed.
Sara Banet-Weiser (2018) suggests we are in a period of both “Popular feminisms and popular misogyny”. Scholars have looked at how sexism is taking new shape through via digital technology enabling new forms of “mediating misogyny”(Vickery and Everbach, 2018). Ging (2017) has mapped the growth of what she terms the Manosphere comprised in part of Man’s Rights Activist (MRA) groups; a connected online subculture of blogs, forums, and alternative media publications ‘centred around hatred, anger and resentment of feminism specifically, and women more broadly’ (Wilkinson 2016). MRA sites and discussion of feminism resist arguments about women and girl’s rights and the need for gender equality creating new platforms for gender ‘expertise’that dispute statistics on the gender wage gap. promoting pseudoscientific claims about male dominance and denying claims of sexual violence by promoting high rates of false rape allegations. These have been called new forms of toxic geek masculinity (Salter and Blodgett, 2017), which present reasoned rationales justifying misogyny, male dominance and sexism. To date, however, there has been minimal research that explores the spread and uptake of MRA ideology in school settings.
Findings, Data and Results: This paper draws on the combined findings from a decade of research on young people’s digital gender and sexual cultures as well as seven years of specifically studying teen feminism in over 20 research schools. The methodologies include focus group and in-depth individual interviewing with young people at school on the topic of feminism, gender and sexual equity. We explore discursive shifts in the form and nature of antifeminism from a predominance of lad banter and (Phipps et al., 2018) to the proliferation of new forms of online abusive anti-feminism they experience on social media. We examine how online discourses move offline inside the school, documenting in depth one teen boys’ antifeminist arguments which show evidence of MRA discourses of denying sexual violence against women and girls, which emerged in a ‘mixed gender’ focus group on gender and sexual equity in schools.

Significance: The paper evidences shifts in the form and expression of anti-feminism through the rise and spread of MRA discourses in educational environments. It calls for educators to be better prepared to deal with MRA discourses and new formations of toxic masculinity taking hold amongst young people in and around schools.

Authors

• Jessica Lenore Ringrose, University College London

• Kaitlynn Mendes, University of Leicester