Moral panic and the manosphere

A discussion of Netflix's Adolescence by author and researcher, Simon Copland

My recent piece about the Netflix’s show, Adolescence, generated a lot of interesting discussion and I’ve been wanting to follow up on the broader topic. Fortunately, contributor Simon Copland has offered this article, drawing on his research into online misogyny. Simon has a new book coming out in May called The Male Complaint: The Manosphere and Misogyny Online, which I am looking forward to reading. In the meantime, I am pleased to publish his discussion about the show everyone is still talking about.

—Tim Dunlop

Michalina Janoszanka, Wiosna (Spring), ca. 1920s – Source

After the release of Adolescence, discussion of the Manosphere launched into the stratosphere.

The show has been an absolute phenomenon, and despite the Manosphere playing a relatively minor role within the actual series, it has dominated post-release analysis. As Celina Ribeiro says “The portrait of adolescent boys as angry, under-socialised and vulnerable to deeply misogynistic messages and influencers has unnerved and horrified Adolescence’s audience.”

Ribeiro points out that some have called Adolescence “a wake-up call for all of us”. But, as she asks, “have the alarm bells turned alarmist? When does a wake-up call become a moral panic, and how concerned should we be?” I want to ask similar questions to those Ribeiro considers in her excellent article, reflecting on responses to the show, but my aim here is to provide a different perspective on these questions.

What is a moral panic?

A moral panic is a widespread feeling of intense fear and concern in society about a particular group or activity that is perceived as a threat to social values or interests. This feeling is often exaggerated or disproportionate to the actual risk. In many instances, the risk doesn’t even exist at all, with fear spreading over a completely manufactured threat. This can be driven by media coverage, and in the twenty-first century, by social media as well.

Stanley Cohen describes it best in his book, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, in a quote worth repeating in full:

Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible.

Sometimes the object of the panic is quite novel and at other times it is something which has been in existence long enough, but suddenly appears in the limelight.

Sometimes the panic passes over and is forgotten, except in folklore and collective memory; at other times it has more serious and long-lasting repercussions and might produce such changes … in legal and social policy or even in the way the society conceives itself.

The ‘Satanic Panic’ is probably the best example to help us understand the concept.

This centred on completely unsubstantiated allegations of satanic ritual abuse, with entire towns being swept up with fear that children were the victims of widespread satanic networks. Allegations were targeted at parents and daycare centres, with children often coerced into giving evidence against their carers. The panic was fuelled by sensational media coverage and conspiracy theories, leading to a range of false accusations, long trials and wrongful convictions against many.

It's hard to tell how bad things are

Asking the question, are responses to the Manosphere a version of a moral panic? is a difficult question for me to ask. I’ve seen studying the Manosphere for seven years now and have written a PhD and a book about the community. Asking this question really makes me wonder, have I wasted all these years? But I think it is a useful way to really examine how we respond to this community; in particular, how seriously we need to take it.

So, let’s ask the question: is the Manosphere that bad?

As a researcher on this phenomenon, journalists often ask me, “do you have any statistics on how widespread the Manosphere is?”

While some research shows that the Manosphere is having some influence on the views of young men, in general I have to answer no—we have no real data on how many boys engage in these channels, what groups they may align to, or even good data on the spread of misogynistic ideas, particularly compared to other time frames.

There are a couple of things worth looking at, however, which can help point to the scale and impact of the community.

First is the obvious huge following it has online.

When I was researching the Manosphere, I was studying relatively niche subreddits on Reddit, the largest of which had over 300,000 followers. That was before Andrew Tate became a megastar in the community, expanding its reach and making it much more of a household term. Nonetheless, this reach comes with a caveat. I also found that while subreddits had huge followings, only a tiny percentage of people actively participate in them. Subscribe rates, as with viewing rates on Tate videos, is not a clear indicator of belief in the community.

Still, the Manosphere is clearly having an impact.

The most worrying of these has been a spate of violent, misogynistic, attacks, with the self-described incel, Eliot Rodger, leading the charge with the Isla Vista killings in 2014 in California. Manosphere men have also led campaigns of online harassment, such as the #thotaudit, in which men reported sex workers to the IRS. Pick Up Artists are also teaching men manipulative and coercive techniques to “pick up” women, with some artists even videoing themselves doing it. Even if the impact of these tactics is not widespread (and it’s increasingly difficult to argue they are), in and of themselves they are worth worrying about.

The moral panic comes from elsewhere

So, are we dealing with a moral panic or not?

To answer this, let’s go back to the definition from Stanley Cohen, who says that a moral panic occurs when a “person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.”

This part of the definition has made me reflect on the most interesting part of the responses to the rise of the Manosphere. It has been fascinating watching people talk about the Manosphere as if it was something new, an explosion of misogyny unlike anything society has ever seen before. This is often written in the context of the role of social media. Donna Zuckerberg, the sister of Meta founder Mark, for example, wrote in her book about the Manosphere:

Social media has led to an unprecedented democratisation of information, but it has also created the opportunity for men with antifeminist ideas to broadcast their views to more people than ever before — and to spread conspiracy theories, lies, and misinformation. Social media has elevated misogyny to entirely new levels of violence and virulence.

The quote is written as if this is just common sense: that social media has created a new wave of misogyny that is a threat to our other non-misogynistic social values.

Take a step back, however, and you’ll realise how laughable that statement is.

Violent misogyny has, sadly, existed and spread well before the rise of social media and the Manosphere, and, given our current social circumstances, would likely continue to exist if these platforms collapsed tomorrow. Zuckerberg’s claim seems to forget the witch trials, when women were literally burned at the stake in campaigns of misogynist violence. It forgets the fact that in living memory women were still fighting for rape to be illegal in marriage, and not long before that were battling for the vote. Each of these campaigns faced significant backlash, much of which was violent. So, while the Manosphere may be presenting misogyny in a new way, misogyny is not new at all.

This is where I think we can point more clearly to this being a moral panic. The moral panic comes not from the fear of misogyny, but from the belief that this is out-of-sorts, or different from mainstream society.

This is important as making it seem like the Manosphere is an aberration created by social media allows us—and particularly political and social leaders—to ignore the very real and underlying social and economic factors that have given rise to it.

While the violence of Jamie, the main character in Adolescence, is, rightfully, put under the microscope, the other violence throughout the show goes largely unexamined, or is assumed to be normal. In the first episode Jamie’s family home is torn apart by police officers who conduct a raid at dawn. In the third episode, a creepy security guard, letches on Jamie’s psychologist during her shift. But this violence and behaviour is not questioned, I think deliberately by show producers. It is assumed, and normalised, with only Jamie’s violence treated as aberrant and worthy of the panic of the community.

Let’s put it another way—if what the Manosphere was promoting was state violence, or even domestic violence, the panic would not be there. This is because that violence is just assumed to be normal, and therefore not worth panicking about. Taking this one step further, I would then argue the Manosphere is just a manifestation of such violence: without such assumed misogyny and violence, Manosphere leaders would not have a basis under which to grow. The only reason they’ve caused such a panic is that they’ve taken this violence into new realms, ones that are outside the assumptions of where violence can and should happen.

This leads us to the second problem with the ‘Manosphere is new’ attitude.

In positioning the Manosphere this way, commentators have successfully been able to make it a problem about someone else, a group over there and away from society—primarily teenage boys. All talk about the Manosphere is focused on teenage boys, and of course it is not surprise that Adolescence focused on a young boy as well.

But it is worth noting that the Manosphere is not just made up of young men, or even just men. One of the most prominent groups in the community, for example, Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), is primarily comprised of 40 or 50-something divorced men, who have left (or been left from) bad relationships and have decided that their turmoil is representative of a horribleness of women in their entirety. Some of the most famous Manosphere advocates are women, such as Australia’s own Bettina Arndt.

While some studies have shown that young boys are now more conservative compared to their elder counterparts on questions of feminism, much of this is still very relative. Take a group of 50- or 60-year-old men, and I can guarantee that they would have been far more sexist as teens compared to most teens now. As Michael Salter argues: “The idea that young men today are more misogynistic than they were 20 or 30 years ago, I don’t see any evidence for this.”

In blaming teenage boys, we also risk absolving ourselves of responsibility. If young boys are becoming more conservative, we only have ourselves to blame. We adults are the ones who have created this society, and we are therefore the ones who should be held responsible for the views these young men are holding. Michael Salter, I think explains this best. He says:

Fundamentally, we need to approach children as children. We need to take responsibility as adults for the social context in which we force our children to grow up in. If there’s a problem with their behaviour, it’s because of us – because we’re the adults in the room, they’re children. They don’t take responsibility for massive social problems like violence against women.

But in the moral panic of the Manosphere this is not what is happening.

Instead, we’re scapegoating young boys for expressing the misogynistic views that we have taught them through our violent and sexist systems, media and politics. And scapegoating is dangerous. As Stuart Hall argues in his book Policing The Crisis:

The moral panic appears to us to be one of the principal forms of ideological consciousness by means of which a “silent minority” is won over to the support of increasingly coercive measures on the part of the state, and lends its legitimacy to a “more than usual” exercise of control.

By creating a scapegoat, the moral panic allows powerful actors in society to actually increase violence, not reduce it. It creates moments in which the population will suddenly accept new forms of surveillance, control and violence as long as it is targeted toward the group who is apparently behind this sudden attack on social values.

While we’re not necessarily at that level of coercion and violence just yet, we can already see the seeds of it in response to the Manosphere. Instead of tackling the social and economic foundations of this movement, politicians and social commentators alike are talking about new school programs for boys, and even more policing and surveillance. Most worrying is the talk of cracking down on misogyny through anti-terrorism legislation—the very same legislation that has rightfully been criticised for significantly undermining people’s civil rights and furthering racist violence in Western countries.

At this happens, the misogynistic violence that underpins our society goes on unchecked. Police continue to perpetuate high levels of domestic violence, countries continue to support evil wars, and politicians get away with making openly misogynistic statements. All of this will be accepted, while the very same people will shake their heads concerningly at their roundtables where they talk about the very serious threat of teenage misogyny.

Yes, this is a moral panic

So yes, this is a moral panic. But the moral panic is not about the misogyny. The misogyny is real, it is scary, and it must be dealt with. The moral panic instead comes through the ridiculous, but strangely common view, that this misogyny is new, some sort of manifestation of the internet that has made things bad for women out of the blue. The moral panic comes from the scapegoating of teenage boys, who are increasingly being blamed for all of society’s ills.

In making this a moral panic, we’re not just excusing ourselves for our role in creating this problem. We’re also making it impossible to deal with. Which is to say, we can’t deal with the Manosphere unless we tackle those underlying problems. But that means recognising that this community is not an aberration—it is us.

Recognising that may, sadly, be a bridge too far for some.

The book can be preordered now.

"This is a rich and compelling account of the connective tissue — emotional, cultural, economic and technical – which holds these communities of aggrieved masculinity together."
Debbie Ging, Dublin City University