Speaker 1: Colson Media.
Speaker 2: I'm not stop, surn up, starts going, club, moment times start, stay, get.
Speaker 3: The excuse me mom.
Speaker 1: Siste six.
Speaker 4: Six character.
Speaker 1: Welcome to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where, for most episodes
Speaker 1: we talk to a main character of the Internet and
Speaker 1: talk to them about how their moment affected them and
Speaker 1: what it says about us and the Internet. I am
Speaker 1: your host, Jamie Loftus and feminism is a part of
Speaker 1: my whole thing, like it or not, which is why
Speaker 1: for the next three weeks we are going to be
Speaker 1: taking a look at one of the greatest churners of
Speaker 1: main characters in the Internet's history. Bear with me. The Manisphere,
Speaker 1: I know, and I'm not sure what troubles me more
Speaker 1: the fact that some people listening like me have known
Speaker 1: this term for years, or that people remain blissfully unaware
Speaker 1: have to know what it is now. The manisphere, in short,
Speaker 1: is a loosely connected media environment that consists of podcasts,
Speaker 1: YouTube channels, TikTok accounts, and a shitload of intersection therein
Speaker 1: that promote at bare minimum misogynistic but often transphobic, homophobic,
Speaker 1: and racist ideals as well. It's white supremacy leading with misogyny,
Speaker 1: but it's not that simple. Many of the shows and
Speaker 1: personalities we'll be talking about in this series began that way,
Speaker 1: and others became that way, And even so this is
Speaker 1: to varying degrees. There are believe it or not podcasts
Speaker 1: very successfully marketed to young men that will casually drop
Speaker 1: that women shouldn't be able to vote. This is a
Speaker 1: tweet from the Fresh and Fit podcast.
Speaker 3: A woman's vote should be fifty percent of a man's vote.
Speaker 3: Women aren't in selective service and don't work in infrastructure
Speaker 3: by choice, so they shouldn't have as much of a
Speaker 3: say in the elective process.
Speaker 1: Sure thing fellas they are should not. But then there
Speaker 1: are personalities that have been getting a lot of airtime
Speaker 1: since the election, like Joe Rogan and Theo Vaughn, who
Speaker 1: weren't necessarily always so outwardly open to promote a fascist
Speaker 1: that they would be considered a part of the manisphere,
Speaker 1: but they are very open to platforming any number of misogynist,
Speaker 1: white supremacist, boldly fascistic people on their platforms. Joe Rogan,
Speaker 1: as many have pointed out, hosted and endorsed My boy
Speaker 1: Bernard Sanders back in twenty twenty, but just a few
Speaker 1: weeks ago, he was shouted out by the founder of
Speaker 1: UFC Ultimate Fighting Championship, Dana White, during a Trump acceptance speech.
Speaker 5: I want to thank some people real quick. I want
Speaker 5: to thank the No Boys, Aiden Ross, Theo, Vaughan Bosto
Speaker 5: with the Boys, and last but not least, the mighty
Speaker 5: and powerful Joe Rogan.
Speaker 1: So everyone Dana White is mentioning. Here are Manisphere influencers
Speaker 1: who hosted Trump or explicitly endorsed him in the weeks
Speaker 1: leading up to the election, and they are all very
Speaker 1: successful among young men and have garnered millions upon millions
Speaker 1: of impressions on Trump's behalf in the weeks leading up
Speaker 1: to the election. It's not the reason he won. I
Speaker 1: really don't believe that. To say that is to miss
Speaker 1: the force for the trees, but it certainly seems to
Speaker 1: have helped. Podcasts are a very parasocial medium where it's
Speaker 1: easy to sell people ideology over time, after establishing a
Speaker 1: trusted relationship with your listeners. Please buy my book Raw Dog.
Speaker 1: The conversation here is not a simple one, and I
Speaker 1: am probably not going to get everything right because this
Speaker 1: requires taking a look at the history of American misogynist spaces,
Speaker 1: and while women and transfolks have never reached parody, this
Speaker 1: is sliding backwards significantly even in the last few years.
Speaker 1: In the month since the twenty twenty four election, young
Speaker 1: women on college campuses are already reporting higher rates of
Speaker 1: emboldened comments from men their age, inspired by comments like
Speaker 1: Nick fuent as, is your body my choice? In the
Speaker 1: same token, I don't want to participate in a moral
Speaker 1: panic by implying that all young men are under this umbrella.
Speaker 1: That's not true. But the fact that you young men
Speaker 1: are feeling more comfortable and are being more actively encouraged
Speaker 1: to be openly misogynistic is pretty undeniable. But recently I
Speaker 1: have seen overwhelmingly unproductive conversations that scapegoat this space as
Speaker 1: the problem and not what it is, in my opinion,
Speaker 1: which is a symptom of a larger issue. So in
Speaker 1: our first installment, I'm going to give you a short
Speaker 1: overview of what we're even talking about when we say
Speaker 1: man is is fear mainly because my mom listens to
Speaker 1: this show and she drives to work, and I'm aiming
Speaker 1: to have her and you have a better understanding of it.
Speaker 1: It's vast. It's hard to categorize. It's overrun with deflective,
Speaker 1: ironic humor that distances the salesman of this ideology from
Speaker 1: what they're actually saying. And today I'll tell you a
Speaker 1: little about it and speak to a journalist who's been
Speaker 1: studying it much longer than I have. But before we start,
Speaker 1: I want to share where I am feeling at the
Speaker 1: top of this series, because I think that a lot
Speaker 1: of what is lacking from what I've seen in these conversations,
Speaker 1: mostly those led by men, is a lack of personal experience.
Speaker 1: And I'll cite my sources here. I get why the
Speaker 1: manisphere is a simple target here, but I want to
Speaker 1: start by saying that understanding and if possible, working to
Speaker 1: dismantle this space would not solve the larger issue. It's
Speaker 1: not a bad instinct, and I don't want anyone to
Speaker 1: feel silly, because I get why the question is asked.
Speaker 1: But if there's anything I've learned from having participated in
Speaker 1: and carefully observed the last decade of feminist action, identifying
Speaker 1: the problem and pushing people out of our spaces is
Speaker 1: a step in a much larger, more complicated process. If
Speaker 1: you want to get to the meat of this episode,
Speaker 1: skip ahead about ten minutes, but I want to start
Speaker 1: by kind of couching how I'm going to approach this
Speaker 1: topic using my own experience first, So if you'd like
Speaker 1: to stay, be warned that I will brief discussing sexual
Speaker 1: abuse here. Three two be in play, A little fart
Speaker 1: noise one great where postfart. It's the trigger zone as
Speaker 1: it pertains to the manisphere. The more I dug into
Speaker 1: this world and its increasing influence, the more I genuinely
Speaker 1: fear that, on top of the policies that this space encourages,
Speaker 1: rolling back already insufficient and hateful policies towards trans people,
Speaker 1: fucking row being gone. The list goes on, I worry
Speaker 1: about how these conversations are still centering on men. So
Speaker 1: the first thing is I worry about the targets of
Speaker 1: these men, once again not being asked to interrogate the
Speaker 1: way that they're perceived and treated, because that was my experience.
Speaker 1: I was in college in the early twenty tens when
Speaker 1: I was repeatedly sexually assaulted, and while that was a
Speaker 1: million years ago in internet terms, it is quite historically recent.
Speaker 1: And I do think that with the sheer density of
Speaker 1: the last decade and the discombobulation of COVID lockdown era.
Speaker 1: A lot of us sometimes failed to see how much
Speaker 1: has changed in Western culture in the last decade, which
Speaker 1: is why it sometimes confuses people when I tell them
Speaker 1: that when a partner repeatedly assaulted me just a little
Speaker 1: over a decade ago, I didn't have the tools to
Speaker 1: understand what was happening and internalized all of it as
Speaker 1: my fault. Tale as old as time, and the reasons
Speaker 1: why are more complicated than I realized at the time.
Speaker 1: Keeping as simple, the city I grew up in did
Speaker 1: not have a lot of sex education, basically none. In
Speaker 1: my case. It wasn't because the state I lived in
Speaker 1: was draconian about abstinence only education. I'm from a firmly
Speaker 1: blue state, but rather because where I'm from was lower
Speaker 1: middle class to poor and was generally underfunded, whose status
Speaker 1: as a majority non white city in the Great State
Speaker 1: of mack Wahlberg often led to to our schools getting
Speaker 1: fucked over big time. When I got to my fancy
Speaker 1: little arts college, I knew very little about sex and
Speaker 1: specifically consent. Really just my own experience and what I'd
Speaker 1: learned from watching TV and movies I'd been with my
Speaker 1: high school boyfriend for years who was very respectful and loving,
Speaker 1: and part way through college, I joined a comedy group.
Speaker 1: I had pretty intense social anxiety then and now and
Speaker 1: didn't want to go to the welcome party for the
Speaker 1: group when I got in, but a guy in the
Speaker 1: group told me that I had to in order to join,
Speaker 1: so I went. I was one of three girls in
Speaker 1: a group of around twelve. I didn't make my drinks
Speaker 1: that whole night, and then hours later I woke up
Speaker 1: on a couch being assaulted by whoever was behind me.
Speaker 1: I didn't even know who I was scared. I had
Speaker 1: just woken up, and I just let it happen, because
Speaker 1: once I realized I was being violated, my first thought
Speaker 1: was how could I let this happen? And as it
Speaker 1: was happening, I tried to focus and think of one
Speaker 1: of four men that it could have been behind me
Speaker 1: and what to do when I turned around and saw
Speaker 1: who it was, and I clearly remember thinking who would
Speaker 1: I be least upset to learn was doing this to me?
Speaker 1: And I feel comfortable sharing that I have a therapist.
Speaker 1: The point is this was twenty twelve, and I did
Speaker 1: not know that this was assault. I spent that whole
Speaker 1: weekend placating my assaulter once I learned who it was,
Speaker 1: thinking I was this horrible slut who had cheated on
Speaker 1: my high school boyfriend, and I ended the relationship of
Speaker 1: over three years out of shame. And to his credit,
Speaker 1: he was the only person in my life to tell
Speaker 1: me that he didn't think that I had done anything wrong,
Speaker 1: but I was so convinced that I had. I had
Speaker 1: no anecdotal proof that I hadn't, including conversations with friends
Speaker 1: and family. So when my assaulter got in touch and
Speaker 1: asked if I wanted to start dating him, I thought
Speaker 1: I had to because I had made this horrific transgression
Speaker 1: and I had to make it right. And I was
Speaker 1: afraid that if I didn't agree to date him, I
Speaker 1: would be sort of ostracized within this comedy group, something
Speaker 1: I had worked to be a part of for years,
Speaker 1: and I really didn't want to lose that. So hopefully
Speaker 1: this dynamic sounds fucking nuts now, but I want to
Speaker 1: repeat at this time, I had a support system. I
Speaker 1: had peers and adults I could and did go to
Speaker 1: about this issue, most of whom were other women. And
Speaker 1: what was scary was that most of them, particularly older
Speaker 1: figures at the school and in my family, also did
Speaker 1: not understand that this was assault and that I hadn't
Speaker 1: done anything wrong. And to this day I don't know
Speaker 1: to what degree my assaulter had been educated or conditioned
Speaker 1: to blow past a no, whether it was a case
Speaker 1: of he knew better and didn't care, or that he
Speaker 1: was operating on what he had seen and observed in media,
Speaker 1: I might never know. So again, this is in the
Speaker 1: twenty tens, and I would end up in this relationship
Speaker 1: that had begun with sexual assault for about three years.
Speaker 1: You will probably not be surprised to hear this was
Speaker 1: not the last assault that took place, and that the
Speaker 1: instance of assault that finally made me realize what was
Speaker 1: happening would come months later and was far more straightforward.
Speaker 1: I said no, and it happened anyways. And while it
Speaker 1: took a long time to extract myself from this relationship fully,
Speaker 1: hopefully you know it often takes people in abusive relationships
Speaker 1: a lot of time to leave for all these different reasons.
Speaker 1: I can tell you the exact moment I began to
Speaker 1: realize that what was happening to me wasn't right. This
Speaker 1: was within a few months of my first assault, when
Speaker 1: a fellow student at my college, which began to speak
Speaker 1: out against the school's failure to address her own campus's assault.
Speaker 1: The mid twenty tens had become this inflection point for
Speaker 1: discussing the widespread rape culture on college campuses. Big examples
Speaker 1: were a Yale fraternity that both George Bush's had previously
Speaker 1: been members of, was suspended for five years because of
Speaker 1: the rampant allegations of rape, and the brock Turner case
Speaker 1: caused a lot of debate and clarification that campus rape
Speaker 1: was not less of an offense than any other. And
Speaker 1: even today it still feels a little embarrassing to admit.
Speaker 1: But it wasn't until I read stories and accounts that
Speaker 1: were similar to mine that it was a wake up
Speaker 1: call that this had happened to me too. I didn't
Speaker 1: think of myself as someone who had experienced assault because
Speaker 1: I hadn't seen anything that had happened to me characterized
Speaker 1: as that. My understanding of rape was that it couldn't
Speaker 1: happen by someone you knew, and that it couldn't happen
Speaker 1: while you were drunk. I really just did not know
Speaker 1: and not to be callous, but I couldn't have been
Speaker 1: assaulted at a more annoying time. I think twenty thirteen
Speaker 1: was a year that people were really waking up to
Speaker 1: this issue, specifically with college students, and you know, if
Speaker 1: this guy had waited another year to do one of
Speaker 1: the worst things that's ever happened to me, I think
Speaker 1: that the conversation and my experience might be a little different.
Speaker 1: But he didn't, so it wasn't. I went to a
Speaker 1: school counselor at Emerson College and they said, sorry, if
Speaker 1: it happn'ed off campus, they can't help me. And besides,
Speaker 1: I had been drinking at this party. I went to
Speaker 1: people in our comedy group, people my age, and everyone,
Speaker 1: including other young women, nodded and said they were sorry,
Speaker 1: but either no one believed me or no one knew
Speaker 1: what to do. And so by the end of that year,
Speaker 1: I wasn't just feeling out of my fucking mind and
Speaker 1: self harming, but I felt like, oh, I guess I
Speaker 1: was wrong and I need to stay with this person
Speaker 1: and make things okay. This is just my experience, but like,
Speaker 1: being assaulted was horrible, but being surrounded by people I
Speaker 1: trusted who felt the same way my assaulter did was
Speaker 1: more painful than anything in retrospect, I don't really know
Speaker 1: who in my life felt that this was a problem
Speaker 1: that was worth taking seriously. And while I held anger
Speaker 1: about it, particularly towards other women, for a long time,
Speaker 1: I don't know that any of them knew any more
Speaker 1: than I did about consent or assault, or what we
Speaker 1: should expect in terms of autonomy and respect. And if
Speaker 1: I hadn't encountered stories like that other student on my
Speaker 1: campus and later seeing Amma sulkowit this mattress performance in
Speaker 1: twenty fourteen, where they carried the mattress they'd been assaulted
Speaker 1: on to protest Columbia University's unwillingness to address the assault.
Speaker 1: I genuinely don't know how long it would have taken
Speaker 1: me to understand that I wasn't crazy and that what
Speaker 1: happened wasn't okay. But again, I was coming from a
Speaker 1: pretty privileged place, and I still had no information, And
Speaker 1: the less information you have, the more danger there is
Speaker 1: in a culture where discussion around rape culture and gender
Speaker 1: discrimination and subjugating other people's bodies is run by men.
Speaker 1: I say all this because while I think centering the
Speaker 1: manisphere as the problem is a mistake. I know that
Speaker 1: it is a problem. My big fear here is that
Speaker 1: while the progress feminists have made in the last decade
Speaker 1: is characteristically flawed in intersectionality, as it always is, that
Speaker 1: there could be a teenager right now or in the
Speaker 1: near future who does not have the information to understand
Speaker 1: that they have been violated and will internalize it as
Speaker 1: a personal failure. I worry about seeing the progress I
Speaker 1: have seen be replaced with Manisphere grifters who will always
Speaker 1: get algorithmic preference and be far better funded than their opposition.
Speaker 1: As things are now, it feels like twenty thirteen all
Speaker 1: over again, but worse because back then my assault could
Speaker 1: at least claim to not understand how consent worked and
Speaker 1: never be educated on it. But now there's people saying,
Speaker 1: your body, my choice. They understand consent, they just don't
Speaker 1: care about it. And I want to do everything in
Speaker 1: my power to prevent anyone from going through what I did,
Speaker 1: or even less. What the manisphere in its current state
Speaker 1: is is a lot of highly monetized, regressive rhetoric that
Speaker 1: is aiming for young people specifically. I believe that then
Speaker 1: and now it's the people who have suffered tremendously under
Speaker 1: patriarchy and white supremacy who are always asked to do
Speaker 1: the most difficult work in deradicalizing and preventing its spread.
Speaker 1: There's many other reasons I want to discuss the manispherer
Speaker 1: but I share this example to make two points. Points
Speaker 1: first and foremost that what happened to me was a
Speaker 1: pretty decisive systemic failure. Neither me nor most of my
Speaker 1: support system were equipped with information, and every institution from
Speaker 1: the college to the Boston fucking Police did nothing. However,
Speaker 1: the manisphere does come in here and amplified the problem
Speaker 1: because in the middle of this relationship came gamer Gate,
Speaker 1: a targeted harassment campaign of women in gaming that the
Speaker 1: men I was surrounded by, including my assaulter, were decidedly
Speaker 1: on the wrong side of, and came up a lot.
Speaker 1: The way that the manisphere affects people and exacerbates existing
Speaker 1: problems has only gotten worse in the last decade, and
Speaker 1: I do feel a certain amount of responsibility to try
Speaker 1: and have a coherent conversation about it. Because, to get
Speaker 1: back to the point of this, show boy has this
Speaker 1: space generated a lot of main character misogynists. And here
Speaker 1: we are in a space where our technology increasingly makes
Speaker 1: it difficult not just to understand where the people who
Speaker 1: hate us are coming from, but what they're even fucking seeing.
Speaker 1: So if you're in a similar headspace right now and
Speaker 1: not sure how to have these conversations, or if you're
Speaker 1: shaking out of a manisphere fog, that's where I am
Speaker 1: coming from. That is why I would like to interrogate
Speaker 1: and understand these spaces. I do believe that it's important
Speaker 1: to understand a space in order to protect yourself from it. Okay,
Speaker 1: so to my listeners who are not men, I can
Speaker 1: only speak for myself, but I have found it unbelievably
Speaker 1: frustrating to hear centrist men behind laptops pontificating about actually
Speaker 1: we had a Joe Rogan on the left, it was
Speaker 1: Joe Rogan and then call it a day, right. It's
Speaker 1: so obnoxious, and the churn of like I get it
Speaker 1: content just feels like clocking in. My feeling is that
Speaker 1: men will encourage the target of this abuse, to show
Speaker 1: these young men bending towards fascism, empathy and grace in
Speaker 1: order to deradicalize them. And while I do think that
Speaker 1: would help. It makes me fucking furious. So let's get
Speaker 1: into how and why the Manisphere exists as it does
Speaker 1: a little history lesson when we come back. Welcome back
Speaker 1: to sixteenth minute. You thought I was over sharing when
Speaker 1: my dad died, baby, And without further ado, here is
Speaker 1: a brief history of the Manisphere, sort of. And I'll
Speaker 1: make a quick note here. So much of how this
Speaker 1: space is written and talked about is in very gender
Speaker 1: binary language, so I'm going to do my best to
Speaker 1: keep the language inclusive, but note that this is often
Speaker 1: a feature of this line of study. I've asked everyone
Speaker 1: I've interviewed so far what they consider to be the
Speaker 1: origins of this space, and I tend to get one
Speaker 1: of three answers. Was it backlash to the Me Too
Speaker 1: movement in twenty seventeen, was it gamer Gate in twenty thirteen,
Speaker 1: or was it all the way back in the nineteen
Speaker 1: seventies before the Internet even existed. Sorry with regret, the
Speaker 1: Manisphere as we know it today, which ranges from the
Speaker 1: podcast that Dana White shouted out the night of the
Speaker 1: election all the way up to really extremist content that
Speaker 1: says women belong in the home and should no Longer
Speaker 1: be Allowed to Vote can be traced all the way
Speaker 1: back to the nineteen seventies, during the second wave feminist
Speaker 1: movement in the US. I've actually covered this period of
Speaker 1: history pretty extensively in a past podcast series of mine
Speaker 1: called act Cast, where I took a look at how
Speaker 1: Kathy Guy Swyd's Kathy Comics commented on second and third
Speaker 1: wave feminist movements through the lens of a middle class,
Speaker 1: chocolate loving, working white woman. The second wave feminism ran
Speaker 1: approximately from the sixties during the Civil rights boom until
Speaker 1: the early nineteen eighties, when Ronald Reagan halted all social
Speaker 1: progress and replaced it with wham singles. This period of
Speaker 1: feminist action was very flawed, but did accomplish quite a bit.
Speaker 1: While first wave feminism's big win was suffrage, second wave
Speaker 1: feminism focused on reproductive rights and equity in the workplace,
Speaker 1: a time that encouraged women to push back on the
Speaker 1: domestic goddess image of the post war era and to
Speaker 1: begin their own careers. The Equal Pay Act was introduced
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty three.
Speaker 2: Roe v.
Speaker 1: Wade was passed in nineteen seventy two, giving anyone with
Speaker 1: a uterus the right to a safe abortion, rape crisis
Speaker 1: centers were opened, the Feminine Mystique was published I Am
Speaker 1: Aware it is flawed, and a number of specific organizations
Speaker 1: pushed back on specific issues. The National Organization for Women
Speaker 1: and Eramerica focused on passing the Equal Rights Amendment, which
Speaker 1: we were never able to do, by the way, and
Speaker 1: the National Women's Political Caucus, whose ranks included Shirley Chisholm,
Speaker 1: focused on getting pro women candidates in office across political parties.
Speaker 1: And wouldn't you know it, there were a number of
Speaker 1: men marching alongside second wave feminists or men's rights. Stay
Speaker 1: with me, this was actually a pretty good thing at
Speaker 1: the time. The original men's liberation movement was not a
Speaker 1: crusade against women, but rather a challenge of what the
Speaker 1: expectations of masculinity under capitalism were. They argued something that
Speaker 1: is categorically true that men suffer under patriarchy, and that
Speaker 1: with the shifting politics of the time, a hyper masculine
Speaker 1: John Wayne persona wasn't a realistic expectation of a man,
Speaker 1: not that it ever was. If women were being confined
Speaker 1: to the home, they argued, than men were being exiled
Speaker 1: from the home, and this movement had these same intersectional
Speaker 1: failings as the feminist movement, but were positioned alongside them,
Speaker 1: not in opposition to them, as we think of the
Speaker 1: term men's rights now. Something called the California Men's Gathering
Speaker 1: began in nineteen seventy eight where men could convene and
Speaker 1: discuss how patriarchy affected them. And these continue to this day.
Speaker 1: And I know it sounds weird, but the men's liberation
Speaker 1: movement was embraced by feminists of the time. By nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety two, there was an entire book on the subject that,
Speaker 1: while critical, was generally supportive, called Women Respond to the
Speaker 1: Men's Movement, a feminist collection. It featured a foreword from
Speaker 1: Glorious steynem and featured writing from Bell Hooks and Ursula
Speaker 1: Kay Legwin S.
Speaker 4: Dynam writes, make no mistake about it, women want a
Speaker 4: men's movement. We're literally dying for it. If you doubt that,
Speaker 4: just listen to women's desperate testimonies of hope that the
Speaker 4: men in our lives will be more nurturing toward children,
Speaker 4: more about to talk about emotions, less hooked on a
Speaker 4: spectrum of control that extends from not listening through to violences,
Speaker 4: and less oppressive of their own human qualities that are
Speaker 4: called feminine and thus suppressed by cultures which men dominate.
Speaker 1: And if you know anything about what the men's rights
Speaker 1: movement looks like now, this is obviously not the movement
Speaker 1: that Steinem is describing here. And that's because by the
Speaker 1: mid seventies a schism had formed within this men's movement
Speaker 1: between pro feminist and anti feminist men, and by the
Speaker 1: end of the decade the two were distinctly different groups.
Speaker 1: And guess which group was better at accruing power and attention.
Speaker 1: And from here on out, with all due respect, I'm
Speaker 1: going to leave the pro feminist men in the rare view,
Speaker 1: although I love you guys, and I would love to
Speaker 1: cover the California Men's gathering fellows, please hit me up.
Speaker 1: The anti feminist men's movement built power throughout the seventies
Speaker 1: into the early eighties, citing texts like the Inevitability of Patriarchy,
Speaker 1: Why the biological difference between men and women always produces
Speaker 1: male domination by writer Stephen Goldberg sounds like a page turner.
Speaker 1: And while the anti feminist movement was growing, the feminist
Speaker 1: movement itself was experiencing setbacks. There is a whole terrific
Speaker 1: book about the pattern of progressive feminist movements being pushed
Speaker 1: back in the decade following gains, called Backlash, originally published
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety one by Susan Foludi, which illustrates how
Speaker 1: the first, second, and third waves of feminism were all
Speaker 1: followed by legislative and cultural backlash. Sound familiar, because that's
Speaker 1: what's happening to fourth wave feminism right now. Throughout the eighties,
Speaker 1: the anti feminist men's movement was empowered by the notion
Speaker 1: that the cause of men's oppression was not patriarchy but feminism,
Speaker 1: or to their discontent, was not redefining what masculinity looked like,
Speaker 1: but rolling back progress to ostensibly put women back in
Speaker 1: their places again. Most writing about this defines quote unquote
Speaker 1: a woman's place as a middle class, straight, white woman's place,
Speaker 1: but it's important to note that men's rights movements have
Speaker 1: been popular across racial and economic lines for decades. This
Speaker 1: mentality was expanded on by characterizing women as entitled, castrating liars,
Speaker 1: citing figures like Glorius Dynam, Lorena Bobbitt, and Anita Hill
Speaker 1: as women who wanted nothing more than to destroy and
Speaker 1: oppress men without any acknowledgment of their oppression. Here we
Speaker 1: see the start of a repeating pattern. Instead of men's
Speaker 1: oppression stemming from the same systems that oppress everyone, we
Speaker 1: actually live in a matriarchy where women seek attention and
Speaker 1: power by punishing men, acting as nature programmed them. What
Speaker 1: becomes clear in the Men's Right space is that there's
Speaker 1: no way that women can win with their ideology. If
Speaker 1: women return to the home as suggested, they are freeloaders,
Speaker 1: ripping off their husbands, wasting money shopping and going out.
Speaker 1: If women go to work, they're taking jobs from men
Speaker 1: and are outside of their own lane. It's impossible to
Speaker 1: be the right kind of woman for a men's rights activist,
Speaker 1: it appears, without not just being subservient, but to openly
Speaker 1: and actively agree with these misogynist views. There is no
Speaker 1: call to action other than to roll back progress. To
Speaker 1: quote a twenty thirteen dissertation from Bethany Coston and Michael
Speaker 1: Kimmel called white men as the new victims.
Speaker 3: The real trouble is that men's rights guys don't know
Speaker 3: if they want to be restored patriarchs or liberated men.
Speaker 3: That is, they don't know if they would prefer to
Speaker 3: live in nineteen fifty or twenty fifty. As a result,
Speaker 3: men's rights websites and pamphlets are clogged with howls of anguish, confusion,
Speaker 3: and pain. And this anguish, confusion and pain, we believe
Speaker 3: is real and well grounded. Real here is not to
Speaker 3: be confused with true. These men do feel a lot,
Speaker 3: but their analysis of the cause of those feelings is
Speaker 3: decidedly off, especially when we see that the howls of
Speaker 3: pain have been transformed into rage, and the men's rights
Speaker 3: movement has become a movement of reappropriating power at all costs,
Speaker 3: no matter who gets in the way.
Speaker 1: This paper goes on to trace a handful of cases
Speaker 1: that seek to illustrate that point. How the solution to
Speaker 1: this is that women are bitches and therefore should not
Speaker 1: be allowed to divorce me in the first place. Is
Speaker 1: anyone's guests. By the time the Internet comes into the picture,
Speaker 1: though the men's rights communities went along with it. No
Speaker 1: coincidence that white collar white men are still most likely
Speaker 1: to have Internet access, and once men's rite activists hit
Speaker 1: the Internet, they splinter over time into a number of
Speaker 1: different factions. These spaces are covered extensively in Laura Bates's
Speaker 1: twenty twenty book Men Who Hate Women, a difficult but
Speaker 1: worthy read, and she identifies the following groups as prominent
Speaker 1: and empowered throughout the twenty tens, particularly during Trump's first administration.
Speaker 1: So we're not quite at the heyday of Joe Rogan
Speaker 1: that is making the rounds in the media outlets right now.
Speaker 1: This is more of the online forum era. These groups
Speaker 1: were not small, but they also weren't really talked about
Speaker 1: in a mainstream way until closer to the mid twenty tens.
Speaker 1: In Cells Involuntary Celibates, this is a community that believes
Speaker 1: that women's rights have rendered them virgins and also a
Speaker 1: place where pill ideology comes from. Taking the red pill
Speaker 1: means that seeing feminism has taken everything from you, which
Speaker 1: either leads to looksmaxing, which is a subt community where
Speaker 1: men try to make themselves look like a chad or
Speaker 1: traditionally desirable man, or the other direction, which is more
Speaker 1: common is black pilling, which is essentially a death cult
Speaker 1: that states that women will never like or be attracted
Speaker 1: to you, and therefore your life should be dedicated to
Speaker 1: bitterness and vengeance. More in them next week pickup artists.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, these guys pre date the Internet significantly, but
Speaker 1: we're certainly very empowered by it. The vibe is very
Speaker 1: milady with an undertone of violence. These are the oft
Speaker 1: dunked on men in Fedoras, sure, but they do more
Speaker 1: than advise nagging women or insulting them to make them
Speaker 1: feel insecure and quote unquote more likely to sleep with you,
Speaker 1: although that's never been my experience. However, on the more
Speaker 1: extreme end, pickup artists also have a history of explicitly
Speaker 1: advocating for and perpetuating sexual violence in or one of
Speaker 1: the many Manisphere groups that are pretty obsessed with how
Speaker 1: fake they think the rate of sexual assault against women is,
Speaker 1: framing it more as a way for women to exert
Speaker 1: power over and punish men with these accusations with PUA's
Speaker 1: no means yes is the norm. Plow through resistance is
Speaker 1: a common phrase that was used in these forums, and,
Speaker 1: as with most of these groups, the way they talk
Speaker 1: about women also leans heavily into cruel, racial and cultural stereotypes.
Speaker 1: Their seminal texts include the TV show The Pickup Artist,
Speaker 1: starring now prolifically accused of user Mystery and his protege
Speaker 1: Neil Strauss, who published the very successful book The Game,
Speaker 1: claiming to be a journalist who had infiltrated the space
Speaker 1: while he had demonstrably been a part of it for
Speaker 1: some time. Because all pickup artists they're cowards, he backpedaled
Speaker 1: on this ideology over time after profiting from it to
Speaker 1: the tune of millions of dollars. The Neil Straus journey
Speaker 1: is a deeply frustrating one. I'm talking about starting here.
Speaker 1: This is a clip where he's attempting to seduce Jessica
Speaker 1: Alba on Jimmy Kimmel.
Speaker 6: The whole that's awesome and the whole thing about that,
Speaker 6: and those are great qualities. The whole thing is guys
Speaker 6: are always trying to sell themselves to women. They're always
Speaker 6: trying to say brag about themselves and say what they
Speaker 6: do for a living. And instead you kind of got
Speaker 6: to flip the script and make someone that's absolutely no
Speaker 6: interest in you start selling himself to you.
Speaker 7: And that's like one of the pieces.
Speaker 6: Wow, and thanks for playing well wow, Yeah that you
Speaker 6: feel like that was effective?
Speaker 1: And I felt like.
Speaker 8: That's just what intelligent people that I don't know that
Speaker 8: talk to me do. They don't care so much about
Speaker 8: the physical and they do actually look for more than that,
Speaker 8: and so well they tell you.
Speaker 7: To here.
Speaker 1: Just a few years later, I learned from the Big
Speaker 1: Bang Theory.
Speaker 9: May have learned a few tricks from author Neil Strauss.
Speaker 9: He taught what he calls average frustrated chumps to manipulate
Speaker 9: the women they want, and he is controversial bestseller The Game.
Speaker 9: Rause infiltrated a group of pickup artists revealing the secrets
Speaker 9: of seduction. One technique is called neegging. He writes, quote,
Speaker 9: the purpose of a nig is to lower a woman's
Speaker 9: self esteem while actively displaying a lack of interest in her,
Speaker 9: by telling her she has lipstick on her teeth, for example,
Speaker 9: or offering her a piece of gum after she speaks.
Speaker 9: Ten years later, Strauss is out with the Truth and
Speaker 9: Uncomfortable book about relationships. He opens up about cheating Monogaby
Speaker 9: and how he changed. Good morning, Neil Strauss.
Speaker 10: And he's speaking of Uncomfortable after that.
Speaker 9: But you've done basically a complete reversal in this book.
Speaker 10: Yes and The Game, I was reporting on a culture
Speaker 10: that was there and not kind of coining these techniques
Speaker 10: that already existed and not kind of popularized ideas. Though
Speaker 10: it's kind of sad that your contribution to the culture
Speaker 10: is people wearing ridiculous clothes.
Speaker 9: So you've had a change of heart.
Speaker 10: I'm bigger than that, a complete transformation as to kind
Speaker 10: of who I was and what I thought was important.
Speaker 1: And the pickup artists they pretend this didn't happen, or
Speaker 1: that Strauss was corrupted by women. Then there's men going
Speaker 1: their own way or Migtao. These guys are qualified by
Speaker 1: the Southern Poverty Law Center as a male supremacist heat
Speaker 1: group who frequently align with racist and homophobic alright sentiments
Speaker 1: and ultimately want men to separate themselves from society and
Speaker 1: women altogether. Migtao also subscribes to their own pill ideology,
Speaker 1: ranging from rejecting long term relationships with women to dropping
Speaker 1: out of society altogether. At their most extreme, their community
Speaker 1: is driven by a fear of women, often being convinced
Speaker 1: that women are hoping and trying to accuse you of
Speaker 1: rape in order to ruin your life. This group actually
Speaker 1: can be traced back to the eighties, with their predecessors
Speaker 1: primarily identifying as the Deep Masculine movement. Sounds pretty straight
Speaker 1: to me. And finally there's MRAs men's rights advocates, And
Speaker 1: in the ultimate example of taking a real life problem
Speaker 1: that deserves examination and turning it into a campaign against women,
Speaker 1: there is a faction of men's rights activists that call
Speaker 1: themselves Father's rights activists, another community that predates the Internet
Speaker 1: that calls attention to the systemic tendency to give mother's
Speaker 1: custody of children over fathers, regardless of if it's in
Speaker 1: the children's best interest, which is a valid concern, but
Speaker 1: this group believes this can only be addressed by removing
Speaker 1: the rights of mothers, and that these tendencies are proof
Speaker 1: positive that we live in a matriarchy, and MRAs have
Speaker 1: generally had the best luck breaking through to the mainstream
Speaker 1: because of their ostensibly more political mission, But make no mistake,
Speaker 1: the underlying beliefs are the same, be serious, and there
Speaker 1: are more subcommunities where that came from. As this continued
Speaker 1: to grow online, we get a whole crop of media influencers,
Speaker 1: either appearing organically or pivoting from other areas like academia
Speaker 1: and right wing radio to create subcommunities like sigmas, and
Speaker 1: we'll be talking about them in the next episode. But
Speaker 1: as far as the first run of Online Misogynists, these
Speaker 1: were your guys Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Julian Blanc, who
Speaker 1: gave way to today's Andrew Tates, and the Fresh and
Speaker 1: Fit podcast hosts. The tricky thing here is that within
Speaker 1: these communities there isn't much unity, in spite of the
Speaker 1: fact that they have a common interest in taking women
Speaker 1: down a peg. Pickup artists aim to have transactional sex
Speaker 1: with women and find in cells pathetic black pilled guys,
Speaker 1: resent hypersexual men and looks maaxers, particularly if they have
Speaker 1: had sex with women before. I'm not encouraging these communities
Speaker 1: to unionize. I fear the power they could accrue. But
Speaker 1: as a passive observer, it's pretty fucking reds to watch
Speaker 1: all these men who agree on one scary thing continued
Speaker 1: to bully each other in order to define a sense
Speaker 1: of community. And for a long time these communities were
Speaker 1: considered to be a niche until they weren't. I and
Speaker 1: a lot of people first became aware of this space
Speaker 1: around twenty fourteen. This is around the time of My
Speaker 1: personal Ordeal, the stretch of years that brought in an
Speaker 1: intense culture war over campus assault, the brock Turner case,
Speaker 1: the Amisolkowitz performance, and on and on. The first reason
Speaker 1: for this, as I mentioned earlier, was gamer Gate, the
Speaker 1: biggest public feminist backlash in years, which grew to a
Speaker 1: year long fear mongering and harassment campaign that targeted women
Speaker 1: in the gaming community of how women were presented in games,
Speaker 1: which was and is a very male dominated space. The
Speaker 1: primary targets of this hate were women who developed video
Speaker 1: games or prominent feminist media critic and past guest of
Speaker 1: my other show, The Bechel Cast, that same creator who
Speaker 1: my college boyfriend so despised, Anita Sarkisian. During these campaigns,
Speaker 1: anonymous users organized on right wing sites like four chan
Speaker 1: and Reddit, before these spaces were more carefully regulated. The
Speaker 1: second example that empowered and made these communities more well
Speaker 1: known was the mass murder at Ala Vista by twenty
Speaker 1: two year old Elliott Roger in twenty fourteen. You probably
Speaker 1: know this story, at least in the abstract. Roger murdered
Speaker 1: six people and injured fourteen, including two young women, at
Speaker 1: a sorority house. But as Laura Bates points out in
Speaker 1: Men Who Hate Women, while Roger's crime was widely reported,
Speaker 1: it mainly accomplished, starting yet another mental illness discourse, largely
Speaker 1: ignoring the misogynist manifesto that Roger left behind, leaving it
Speaker 1: as a footnote. The media didn't seem to know what
Speaker 1: to do with it, and certainly did and seemed to
Speaker 1: understand who he had left this manifesto behind. For Roger
Speaker 1: was an active member of in cell groups he'd left
Speaker 1: it behind. For Inceelts, what Roger's manifesto, which would be
Speaker 1: cited by many other mass shooters in the years to come,
Speaker 1: should have been treated as was a harbinger that misogynists
Speaker 1: online spaces had become quite literally lethal. But if you
Speaker 1: recall this time, that conversation didn't really happen in spite
Speaker 1: of a trending Twitter hashtag hashtag yes all women and
Speaker 1: a few articles. We are socially trained and the media
Speaker 1: reflects more empathy for white and white passing men, and
Speaker 1: so the conversation shifted to this young man needed mental
Speaker 1: health care as opposed to focusing on why he had
Speaker 1: committed the crime in the first place. Again, we are
Speaker 1: always centering white men in these conversations, bringing my blood
Speaker 1: pressure down. Laura Bay's tracks Roger's legacy carefully in her book,
Speaker 1: noting that at every turn mainstream media outlets would mention
Speaker 1: the misogynist's creed that Roger had left behind, but never
Speaker 1: went so far as to prescribe it as a problem
Speaker 1: that extended beyond one mentally ill young man. It was
Speaker 1: treated as an isolated incident, a bad apple, certainly not
Speaker 1: the kind of thing that would inspire future crimes. As
Speaker 1: we now know, this was not true and was a
Speaker 1: call to action for many, while not acknowledged in most
Speaker 1: media outlets, to take a closer look at what spaces
Speaker 1: Roger's violent, hateful beliefs had calcified inside of. And all
Speaker 1: this happened over ten years ago. Now, there's a lot
Speaker 1: to talk about in terms of how this space has
Speaker 1: developed in the last decade. First, I wanted to talk
Speaker 1: to a woman. Please let me talk to a woman.
Speaker 1: When we come back, I speak with an expert on
Speaker 1: the ever expanding manisphere, researcher Becca Lewis. Welcome back to
Speaker 1: sixteenth Minute. My blood pressure is skyrocketing, and my first
Speaker 1: interview in this series comes to me by way of
Speaker 1: fellow Cool Zone media host Molly Konger of Weird Little Guys.
Speaker 1: Becca Lewis is a Stanford postdoc who researches the politics
Speaker 1: of Silicon Valley and the tech world, and she's been
Speaker 1: looking at the development of the manisphere for nearly a decade.
Speaker 1: So as a point of entry, I think it's important
Speaker 1: to not just here an expert on the subject, but
Speaker 1: you know, not a guy. Here's our talk.
Speaker 7: I'm Becca Lewis.
Speaker 2: I'm an academic researcher at Stanford University and I study
Speaker 2: far right movements and how they use digital media.
Speaker 1: What a You'll never be out of a job again.
Speaker 1: I don't think.
Speaker 2: The goal is to eventually make the job irrelevant, but
Speaker 2: you're telling that seems far away.
Speaker 1: We're recording the three days after the election, and it's
Speaker 1: unavoidable any Internet space right now to see the manosphere
Speaker 1: brought up by people I would not even have guessed
Speaker 1: would know what this is in this moment because you're
Speaker 1: an expert. Does it feel kojent the way people are
Speaker 1: talking about it. Does it feel like the threat is
Speaker 1: being under or overstated?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a little bit surreal, and in some ways
Speaker 2: it's reminding me of the follow up to the twenty
Speaker 2: sixteen election, where you know, people are searching for answers,
Speaker 2: and at the time in twenty sixteen, the first answer
Speaker 2: that came up was fake news, and that was a
Speaker 2: really big thing, and that kind of spawned a whole
Speaker 2: like sub field of journalism and academics and everything around
Speaker 2: disinformation and fake news and all of that. And now,
Speaker 2: I you know, it seems clear that the manosphere and
Speaker 2: podcasts in particular are going to.
Speaker 7: Be one of the big areas of focus.
Speaker 2: And I think that, you know, as with fake news,
Speaker 2: there's some truth to it, there's some oversimplification, and I
Speaker 2: think there's a lot of like decontextualization. Because the manisphere
Speaker 2: has been around, podcasts have been around, and so you know,
Speaker 2: why is our attention turning.
Speaker 8: To it now?
Speaker 2: I think is worth exploring. And also like what we
Speaker 2: think of as the manisphere has changed too. I think
Speaker 2: that that people are pointing to this series of podcasts
Speaker 2: that Donald Trump went on in recent weeks, but that's
Speaker 2: actually kind of different than what the manisphere has been
Speaker 2: over the years. So there's a lot of searching for
Speaker 2: explanations and maybe not quite understanding the dynamics behind it yet.
Speaker 1: Something that I've seen a wide birth of opinions on
Speaker 1: so I want to know what you think. Where does
Speaker 1: the story of the manisphere start?
Speaker 2: In my opinion, it did start in the seventies as
Speaker 2: a direct maybe not the Manosphere, but the men's rights
Speaker 2: movement as a reaction against minism certainly started in the seventies.
Speaker 1: How did you fall into this line of work? It's
Speaker 1: very specific and very important.
Speaker 2: I actually was one of the people that got drawn
Speaker 2: into it following the twenty sixteen election. But I've been
Speaker 2: researching the Internet and politics for a long time and
Speaker 2: have always been interested in digital media and you know,
Speaker 2: the political impacts of digital media. And then after the
Speaker 2: twenty sixteen election, I joined a think tank called Data
Speaker 2: and Society that was specifically bringing together this project to
Speaker 2: look at media manipulation.
Speaker 7: They called it. So the ways that you know, the
Speaker 7: alt right.
Speaker 2: At the time and the Manosphere and other groups were
Speaker 2: becoming really effective at manipulating mainstream media outlets into accidentally
Speaker 2: publishing disinformation or amplifying some of their.
Speaker 7: Talking points without even realizing it.
Speaker 2: You know, someone like Richard Spencer was so good for
Speaker 2: a while at like getting people to give him softball interviews.
Speaker 2: We were looking at all of that, and then it
Speaker 2: kind of lit a fire, you know in me, and
Speaker 2: I haven't looked back. I have an academic mentor who
Speaker 2: says people are either drawn to their research subjects out
Speaker 2: of an abiding law or an abiding hate.
Speaker 7: And I learned that I'm a hater.
Speaker 1: I guess you are academically a hater. And when you
Speaker 1: started doing this research towards the beginning of the first
Speaker 1: trend presidency into now, what are some of the bigger
Speaker 1: changes you've seen in this space in the last eight years.
Speaker 2: It was already there to an extent, but I think
Speaker 2: we have seen, like any illusions that this is somehow a.
Speaker 7: Fringe phenomenon have kind of fully broken down.
Speaker 2: If you look at the top ten podcasters, solid third
Speaker 2: two half of them are people that you know, could
Speaker 2: reasonably be understood as somehow being in the manisphere or
Speaker 2: somehow devoting a lot of their energies to countering what
Speaker 2: they see as the ills of feminism and social justice.
Speaker 2: You know, that was the case to a certain extent
Speaker 2: even when I started looking at this. I mean, in
Speaker 2: the late twenty tens, Paudiepie was like the biggest YouTuber
Speaker 2: and there were all of these things about it, I mean,
Speaker 2: particularly with race and anti semitism, but with gender too.
Speaker 2: I don't want to suggest like it was completely fringe before,
Speaker 2: but I think as you've had kind of like the
Speaker 2: influencer ification of everything, that you really have had this
Speaker 2: particular style of misogyny and antifeminism just becoming ubiquitous. I've
Speaker 2: been thinking a lot about Gamergaate because it was ten
Speaker 2: years ago this August, I think is when it started.
Speaker 2: It was, I think, like such a breakthrough moment when
Speaker 2: online misogyny did kind of, you know, spill through into YouTube,
Speaker 2: into all of these different spaces and gained legitimacy and
Speaker 2: popularity and visibility in ways it didn't have before. You know,
Speaker 2: it's very strange to me that for the longest time,
Speaker 2: when I would talk to like very online young people,
Speaker 2: gamer Gate would be like the reference point, and now
Speaker 2: when I bring it up to my students, they've never
Speaker 2: heard of it.
Speaker 7: In history.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what are the patterns of how young people and
Speaker 1: specifically young men are kind of drawn into this space
Speaker 1: and have those tactics changed at all over time?
Speaker 7: Yes?
Speaker 8: And no.
Speaker 2: I mean if we think back to like the general
Speaker 2: contours of gamer Gate, it was a lot of video
Speaker 2: game players who started to feel like this was first
Speaker 2: of all, that this was their outlet of like space
Speaker 2: where they didn't have to think about politics or you know,
Speaker 2: from for them, it seemed free from politics. And then
Speaker 2: also it was a lot of men or you know,
Speaker 2: teenage boys who didn't feel like they fit into normative
Speaker 2: like concepts of masculinity. They weren't the alpha men, and
Speaker 2: so they already had this sense of like aggrievement that
Speaker 2: they weren't getting like the respect around masculinity that maybe
Speaker 2: they deserved. And so then to have these feminist commentators
Speaker 2: come in and start to critique the politics the gender
Speaker 2: politics of their video games, that kind.
Speaker 7: Of set off this fuse.
Speaker 2: And I think you still see that being this fuse
Speaker 2: so much that you know they there is this sense,
Speaker 2: you know, whether it's by not being a brownie guy
Speaker 2: or for any number of reasons, guys who feel aggrieved
Speaker 2: for some reason, or it can be a genuine reason.
Speaker 2: It could be that you know, they're struggling financially or
Speaker 2: any of these other things. But it's really easy then
Speaker 2: to point the finger at feminists as here's why you
Speaker 2: are facing these problems, and you know, here's an explanation
Speaker 2: for what you're experiencing. And then in terms of the tactics,
Speaker 2: I mean a lot of it is just like good
Speaker 2: old fashioned social networking that you know, gamer Gate started
Speaker 2: as the gamer driven thing, but then you had these
Speaker 2: these men's rights activists who were ideologues. They were explicitly
Speaker 2: in communities devoted to countering feminism and you know, trying
Speaker 2: to change legal structures and stuff. And they swept in
Speaker 2: and saw this as an opportunity to spread their ideas
Speaker 2: and so they began doing social networking with gamers and
Speaker 2: so you had these kind of loose alliances getting formed.
Speaker 7: And you still see a lot of that too. At
Speaker 7: the same time, a lot of the format has changed.
Speaker 2: You know, now we're in like much more algorithmic driven systems,
Speaker 2: and you know, the platforms have changed and some of
Speaker 2: the issues have changed, but some of those core things
Speaker 2: have stayed the same.
Speaker 1: Has this space grown? Can you sort of take me
Speaker 1: through this going from ten years ago as a fringe
Speaker 1: thing into now, you know, you have five podcasters shouted
Speaker 1: out during a presidential victory speech, like.
Speaker 7: Take right there. There's a few different things.
Speaker 2: You know, when you had these groups form, they they
Speaker 2: were pretty fringe, you know, they started to build up
Speaker 2: some political capital, but for the most part they were
Speaker 2: pretty fringe, and they went online and they would operate
Speaker 2: in forums, but they would kind of stay in their
Speaker 2: own space.
Speaker 7: As you have more and more.
Speaker 2: Systems, you know, YouTube, Reddit, different platforms that are specifically
Speaker 2: designed to bring people together, you start to have these
Speaker 2: groups getting access to and networking with other people.
Speaker 7: So that's what you had with gamer Gate, right as.
Speaker 2: They saw this kind of like misogynist like bark of
Speaker 2: a fire, and they leapt in and started building these alliances.
Speaker 7: So that's a piece of it.
Speaker 2: You also have, like all throughout all of this, the
Speaker 2: collapse of traditional news and information sources. Yes, and so
Speaker 2: when you think about Silicon Valley building platforms like YouTube
Speaker 2: and Twitter and so on, a lot of it was
Speaker 2: specifically kind of targeting traditional news sources, and news sources
Speaker 2: were struggling to go online. They were also struggling because
Speaker 2: they were getting like bought up by major conglomerates and gutted.
Speaker 3: More and more.
Speaker 2: You start to have traditional news struggling, and you have
Speaker 2: a lot of different people from a lot of different
Speaker 2: political viewpoints pointing to the news media and saying, look,
Speaker 2: you can't trust them anymore. And there were a lot
Speaker 2: of valid reasons to say that, and a lot of
Speaker 2: things that I think are less valid. And one of
Speaker 2: the less valid claims was, well, it's all just a
Speaker 2: bunch of political correctness, you know, as they called it
Speaker 2: then in the news media.
Speaker 7: So as you have that getting attacked.
Speaker 2: You have kind of this whole new information ecosystem getting
Speaker 2: built online, like both attacking the media and attempting to
Speaker 2: take its place. And then I think you can't discount
Speaker 2: the role of Donald Trump in all of this, even
Speaker 2: back in twenty sixteen, that he became a major force
Speaker 2: in terms of like taking things that were on like
Speaker 2: fringe forums and then tweeting them out and suddenly they
Speaker 2: became national news stories. And so you can see the
Speaker 2: role of like influence and fame also playing a role,
Speaker 2: because instantly certain things with skyrocket to visibility that just
Speaker 2: wouldn't have before. You have all of these different genres
Speaker 2: of online content, you know, gaming, comedy, any number of things,
Speaker 2: and these are genres where it's like politics isn't necessarily
Speaker 2: the first and foremost thing that people are focused on, but.
Speaker 7: It seeps in in all of these ways. And so
Speaker 7: if you have a space where there's kind of like
Speaker 7: some latent misogyny.
Speaker 2: Then one thing that a lot of the manosphere has
Speaker 2: done is it like it gives you certain like facts
Speaker 2: and figures that become instantly available that you can draw in, right,
Speaker 2: like maybe talking points like claiming to debunk certain feminist ideas,
Speaker 2: and so suddenly if you like already have some of
Speaker 2: those latent tendencies, then you can start to feel like
Speaker 2: bolstered and say like, oh no, actually this is justified,
Speaker 2: and it can become actually a bigger and more legitimized
Speaker 2: piece of what you're doing.
Speaker 7: And again this goes back to the seventies too, which
Speaker 7: like not coincidentally.
Speaker 2: At a moment when way more women and people of
Speaker 2: color and like generally marginalized groups started to enter into
Speaker 2: universities at higher levels, the workforce at higher levels, the
Speaker 2: public sphere at higher levels, then you had at the
Speaker 2: same time this like attack on traditional forms of expertise
Speaker 2: and saying, actually, no, we should be turning to entrepreneurs,
Speaker 2: stand up comedians, celebrities, all of these different things that
Speaker 2: surprise suppritoriously.
Speaker 1: Strong people like famously the ass people. Has there been
Speaker 1: an increase in saying the quiet, heart loud. Has that
Speaker 1: always been a facet of this space? Does it vary?
Speaker 7: It ebbs and flows?
Speaker 2: And I do think a lot of that comes from
Speaker 2: like how well Trump is doing at any moment right,
Speaker 2: And you know, he very much helps legitimize saying the
Speaker 2: quiet parts out loud. So you know, last time around,
Speaker 2: around the twenty sixteen election, this was a big question
Speaker 2: within the manisphere and the alt right of kind of
Speaker 2: how overt how open can you be with your politics.
Speaker 2: And there were a lot of YouTubers who were like
Speaker 2: open white and male supremacists at the time, and then
Speaker 2: there were a lot of people who would collaborate with
Speaker 2: them and who would dabble in those ideas, but they
Speaker 2: would never outright align themselves that way. And ultimately that
Speaker 2: proved to be the smarter strategy because the open white
Speaker 2: supremacists and male supremacists mostly got kicked off of the platform.
Speaker 7: Someone like you know, I spent many years watching the
Speaker 7: content of a creator named Tim Poole, who.
Speaker 1: Yes, who's now a proven up is that yes, that's right.
Speaker 7: He was always so strategic.
Speaker 2: He would ask questions, he would maybe drop a suggestion
Speaker 2: or a hint that something was happening. But then he
Speaker 2: would say, I don't know, I don't know, and he
Speaker 2: would never claim to be a white supremacist or a
Speaker 2: white nationalist, or a male supremacist any of these things.
Speaker 7: And I think that from the perspective of staying.
Speaker 2: On platforms, people have gotten really savvy about where to
Speaker 2: draw a line. And I guess it doesn't hurt that
Speaker 2: now on Twitter or x you know, Elon Musk is
Speaker 2: in their corner. Anyways, they know where the winds are blowing,
Speaker 2: and they're you know, people will dip a toe in
Speaker 2: and see how open they can be.
Speaker 7: And see, you know, what the reaction is like.
Speaker 2: And if they're getting a positive reaction, they'll they'll maybe
Speaker 2: you know, dip another toe in and go on from there.
Speaker 7: But one thing I've found in my research is that
Speaker 7: these figures are like very very very conscious of audience.
Speaker 2: Response, and in fact, some of them will get pushed
Speaker 2: to you know, there's all this discourse about like influencers
Speaker 2: are radicalizing audiences, but a lot of times the audiences
Speaker 2: will kind of demand more extreme content from creators, and
Speaker 2: so creators will just kind of be kind of responding
Speaker 2: to what their audience wants. When you look at our
Speaker 2: current media ecosystem, like the boundaries between these things have
Speaker 2: kind of collapse, but it becomes this easy way to
Speaker 2: kind of not think about potential harms that happen. And
Speaker 2: you know, like, at what point are you interrogating someone's views?
Speaker 2: At what points are you just giving a megaphone for them?
Speaker 2: You know, draw the boundaries between that, and that I
Speaker 2: think is not something that Rogan or some of the
Speaker 2: other guys like him have any incentive to think about.
Speaker 1: I'm curious for you, how Slash when algorithms became an
Speaker 1: important part of building and preserving this space, how does
Speaker 1: that factor in?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I think it was really throughout the twenty
Speaker 2: tens that like we went from social networking sites to
Speaker 2: these algorithmically driven media spaces. It has certainly complicated and
Speaker 2: changed dynamic. As a researcher, it has frustrated me a
Speaker 2: bit because I think it's really easy as researchers and
Speaker 2: journalists and people working in the space for us to
Speaker 2: just kind of point the finger at like this technology
Speaker 2: and say like it is the fault of the algorithm.
Speaker 7: And you know, that's partly why I like.
Speaker 2: To stress that these things have been going on since
Speaker 2: the seventies, because I think it can give us false
Speaker 2: hope in some ways that like, oh, if we tweak
Speaker 2: the YouTube algorithm in just the right way, these problems
Speaker 2: are going to go away. Like I do think that
Speaker 2: that's one thing that's maybe like when we look at
Speaker 2: the reaction to the election and everyone being like, oh
Speaker 2: my god, there's this whole world of podcasts, Like I
Speaker 2: do think that might be part of the reason there's
Speaker 2: this sense of like donning horror around it because podcasts
Speaker 2: are not always driven by algorithm. For a really long time,
Speaker 2: there was this sense of like, the algorithms are the problem.
Speaker 2: They are radicalizing young men on YouTube in particular, and
Speaker 2: they are drawing them down into rabbit holes of far
Speaker 2: right content.
Speaker 7: And the thing that.
Speaker 2: Always frustrated me about that was I was seeing how much,
Speaker 2: you know, influencer culture and dynamics we're playing a role
Speaker 2: in this. So it's like, you know, if you start
Speaker 2: to listen to Joe Rogan and become a fan of his,
Speaker 2: you don't need an algorithm to recommend new.
Speaker 7: Content of his right.
Speaker 2: I mean, you may still defer to it in terms
Speaker 2: of like what you choose to watch next, but you're
Speaker 2: watching it next because you've already watched a piece of
Speaker 2: content from him and enjoyed it.
Speaker 7: So there's that piece of it.
Speaker 2: And then I do think also like this whole idea
Speaker 2: of getting drawn down into like the deep dark corners
Speaker 2: and the rabbit holes and stuff does give this false
Speaker 2: sense of it being you know, staying fringe content, when
Speaker 2: in fact we were seeing that this massive ecosystem of
Speaker 2: some of the most popular creators was.
Speaker 1: Have been thinking this since you mentioned you know how
Speaker 1: you know, the people saying the quiet power part loud
Speaker 1: from the beginning, you know, they tended to get deplatformed.
Speaker 1: I feel like that's part of why podcasts have been
Speaker 1: so successful. It's like that's where you go when you're
Speaker 1: kicked out of somewhere.
Speaker 2: Else totally that it's it's a way of creating the
Speaker 2: you know, digital media brands and producing content that where
Speaker 2: you're not dependent on a single platform.
Speaker 7: Cool.
Speaker 1: Okay, So I want to go back to there not
Speaker 1: being a lot of incentive for these manisphere podcasts slash
Speaker 1: just influencers in general. What do you mean when you
Speaker 1: say that, I know it's related to I mean, this
Speaker 1: seems like a tremendously profitable space.
Speaker 7: It certainly has gotten way more profit driven over time.
Speaker 2: I mean, this is why it's easy to go back
Speaker 2: and look at early YouTube and get really nostalgic, even
Speaker 2: though there were you know, awful things going on then,
Speaker 2: sure of harassment and stuff, but like, I think the
Speaker 2: beauty of something like early YouTube was that people weren't
Speaker 2: making careers off of it yet for the most part,
Speaker 2: that people were just kind of like making weird things
Speaker 2: and posting them online and some of them would go viral.
Speaker 2: You know, that very quickly changed. But what we think
Speaker 2: of now is this like influencer economy. You know, that's
Speaker 2: been like the past fifteen years. It has grown from
Speaker 2: essentially nothing into like this massive, massive entertainment ecosystem, and
Speaker 2: so the profit incentive is there. There's a certain genre
Speaker 2: of creator who has marketed themselves as like a provocateur,
Speaker 2: and so for them, certainly like saying the quiet part
Speaker 2: out loud is the whole shtick and kind of like
Speaker 2: I will go there when other people won't. You know,
Speaker 2: I would say that that's like Andrew Tait, right, Like
Speaker 2: he he thrives on open misogyny and like saying the
Speaker 2: things that are like as shocking as possible, and he
Speaker 2: has made a massive career out of that.
Speaker 7: That's a big piece of it. There are other people
Speaker 7: who have found like other niches.
Speaker 2: I mean, I would say that not to keep going
Speaker 2: back to Rogan, but he's just such a bmth in
Speaker 2: this space. He's very much the like, I'm just asking
Speaker 2: questions guy, right, So he's not out there looking to shock.
Speaker 2: You end up hearing similarly misogynist ideas on his platform
Speaker 2: because he invites on misogynists and asks them questions.
Speaker 1: I don't know, yeah, totally, he just walked in the room.
Speaker 7: Let's think, like when it was like just radio and television,
Speaker 7: broadcasters had to make.
Speaker 2: Sure that they were inviting on like multiple different perspectives
Speaker 2: and points of view around controversial issues. Not to say
Speaker 2: that that was necessarily a great system, I mean there
Speaker 2: were a lot of issues with that too, but people
Speaker 2: legally had to do that, and they legally had to
Speaker 2: ensure that they were somehow providing content that like was
Speaker 2: beneficial to the public interest aka like for creating an
Speaker 2: informed citizenry.
Speaker 1: So another media narrative I've been seeing a lot in
Speaker 1: the last several days that has given me pause. Specifically,
Speaker 1: the focus around, Oh my gosh, gen z men are
Speaker 1: becoming increasingly misogynist. What do you make of that?
Speaker 7: Yeah, I also have a lot of issues with it.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, I don't firsthand research like the
Speaker 2: media consumers. I look at the producers, so I don't
Speaker 2: know precisely how these things are are impacting gen z men.
Speaker 2: But I think there is a strange fixation on youth
Speaker 2: and the Internet, and like, yes, that the internet is
Speaker 2: destroying our youth, that is very pervasive. I've been doing
Speaker 2: a lot of research looking at the nineteen nineties recently.
Speaker 7: And like everyone was freaking out about cyber porn at
Speaker 7: the time. That was like the big thing, and it.
Speaker 2: Was like cyberporn is going to ruin our youth. And
Speaker 2: it feels like every few years there's a new panic,
Speaker 2: and like, obviously we want to be critical of what
Speaker 2: media is getting consumed. First of all, it can end
Speaker 2: up making it seem like somehow older generations have not
Speaker 2: also been dealing with misogyny, right, And then also I think, yeah,
Speaker 2: it can really create these kind of moral panics that
Speaker 2: ironically end up reinforcing certain like conservative ideals of like
Speaker 2: we must keep the children safe and the way that
Speaker 2: you do that is kind of by like reinscribing traditional
Speaker 2: family norms and.
Speaker 1: Stuff, things like algorithmic bubbles, things like infinite content that
Speaker 1: will you know, sort of reinforce your your worst instincts.
Speaker 1: Like that certainly plays a big role in it, But
Speaker 1: I worry that it just feels like another sort of
Speaker 1: churning on a generation in a way that is ultimately
Speaker 1: like really unproductive, and if it's perpetuated enough, could really
Speaker 1: you know, cause people like cause young people to double
Speaker 1: down on it. But it's also like you're saying everyone
Speaker 1: got more conservative? Why are we? I mean, and I
Speaker 1: think it is alarming us when it's young people, because
Speaker 1: you're like, is this going to be forever? But everybody
Speaker 1: got more conservative? And specifically white people got more conservative.
Speaker 2: I was like, and yeah, I think it also is
Speaker 2: like once you're pointing the blame at like an algorithm
Speaker 2: or like a few specific podcasters. Again not to not
Speaker 2: to say that these these forces are like not worthy
Speaker 2: of critique. They absolutely are. And it's a lot of
Speaker 2: what I do, but these these are all downstream of
Speaker 2: other like systematic failures, you know, Like I I do
Speaker 2: point a lot to this fact of like local there
Speaker 2: has been a massive collapse of local news. Local news
Speaker 2: used to be one of the primary sources that people
Speaker 2: got like information for their voting habits, like their vivic needs,
Speaker 2: all of these things. And you know, within the past
Speaker 2: couple of decades you have had these massive conglomerates coming
Speaker 2: in buying up local news, gutting the newsrooms and selling
Speaker 2: them off. When you don't have those actual kind of
Speaker 2: public interest informed news sources, people I think very reasonably
Speaker 2: start to distrust a media that's focused on kind of
Speaker 2: horse race celebrity based coverage that often is driven by sensationalism.
Speaker 7: All of these things.
Speaker 2: People are hungry, People are hungry for answers, and so
Speaker 2: you then have this new ecosystem of people cropping up
Speaker 2: that provides that echoes your concerns with the mainstream media
Speaker 2: and provides an alternative set of answers. And so there
Speaker 2: would be no Joe Rogan without some of these other factors.
Speaker 1: You know, do you think that this space is going
Speaker 1: to change again because of sort of this newfound attention?
Speaker 1: Where do you see it going.
Speaker 2: It's important to tweak algorithms, It's important to you know,
Speaker 2: understand individual creators these issues are also not going to
Speaker 2: get solved by by just doing that.
Speaker 7: And as you mentioned earlier, you know.
Speaker 2: By trying to create a left wing Joe Rogan like
Speaker 2: that is not going to succeed or solve anything. I
Speaker 2: think there is this misconception that, like, if you simply
Speaker 2: present people with the correct facts, they will come to
Speaker 2: the logical conclusion that what they believe is wrong. And
Speaker 2: in fact, what so much of this is about is identity,
Speaker 2: sense of belonging, you know, ideas about how the world
Speaker 2: should work and who should be in power, and the
Speaker 2: facts are kind of downstream from that. Like I've seen
Speaker 2: I've seen a genre of like tweet a response in
Speaker 2: the later weeks of this election of like, well, we
Speaker 2: really have to be paying more attention to men and
Speaker 2: the male loneliness epidemic and all these things, and it
Speaker 2: can be easy for it to like fall into like
Speaker 2: we need to be coddling men more. Essentially, this isn't
Speaker 2: going to be solved just by taking like individual action
Speaker 2: against like bad eggs or whatever. Like, we need to
Speaker 2: think about what are like how do you institutions or
Speaker 2: like education systems or information systems start to create this
Speaker 2: set like belief that men can and should be doing
Speaker 2: this in the first place.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much to Becca for lending her time and expertise,
Speaker 1: and you can follow more of her work on Twitter
Speaker 1: at Becca lou lw Okay. I release you for the week,
Speaker 1: but we have a lot more ground to cover, first
Speaker 1: by those who study this space, and then by those
Speaker 1: who have experienced it. Next week we take a look
Speaker 1: at the expansion of the Manisphere, growing from the seeds
Speaker 1: of public recognition and gamer Gate and expanding now into
Speaker 1: the highest levels of American government. And for your moment
Speaker 1: of fun, here's pickup artists. Cringe all right, see you
Speaker 1: next week.
Speaker 4: Every heart girl that you see at some point was
Speaker 4: a little baby wearing diapers.
Speaker 7: And at some point will be an elder woman. Our
Speaker 7: assignment is to shift our mindset when right here, right now.
Speaker 1: Sixteenth Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: It is written, posted, and produced by me Jamie Loftus.
Speaker 1: Our executive producers are Sophie Liick Derman and Robert Evans.
Speaker 1: Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.
Speaker 1: Our theme song is by Sad thirteen. Voice acting is
Speaker 1: from Grant Crater and Pet shout outs to our dog
Speaker 1: producer Anderson my Katz, Flee and Casper, and by pet Rockberg,
Speaker 1: who will outlive us all Bye.