Podcasting Misogyny: The Production of Familiar Masculinities and Gendered Agency in Men’s Podcasts

• In Event: Sociology of Sex and Gender Section Open Call Paper Session-Gender, Media, and Power: Representation, Resistance, and Ideology

Abstract

Men’s podcasts are an emergent site of cultural and masculinist production. Drawing on a sample of over 60,000 turns of speech from podcasts published between 2020 and 2024, this paper applies computational text analysis to transcripts of 24 podcasts hosted by men. I find that high-ranking “core” podcasts rely on established and consistent scripts of masculinity, discussing men’s sports, leisure, and politics, as a means to construct familiar masculinities. Meanwhile, “fringe” podcasts employ dominating masculinities, which rely more heavily on patriarchal interpretations of religion and family. Discourse in both groups of podcasts is relatively consistent, though there are steep increases in U.S. political speech among core podcasts in 2024 and a similar increase in religious discourse in periphery podcasts. Across both groups, discussion is overwhelmingly homosocial, men are framed as agentic and violent, and women are framed as receptive. This project contributes to the study of patriarchal culture producing organizations, the evolution of the “neo-manosphere,” and applies established computational methodology to an original dataset of men’s podcasts.

Author

• Tobias Pydych, University of Notre Dame