Anti-feminist Conspiracist Identities in the Manosphere: A Case Study on Men’s Rights Activists Reddit Threads.

The manosphere, a network of anti-feminist online communities, has raised concerns over its misogynist extremism and violence. Several manosphere-related communities feature conspiracist attitudes framing men as victims of feminist oppression. This paper presents a pilot analysis focused on conspiracist discourses in a small set of threads containing the word forms “feminism” and “feminist(s),” published within the r/MensRights Reddit community in early 2024. The study adopts a qualitative discourse-analytical approach to examine conspiracist content within the dataset. The findings characterize conspiracy theorizing in the dataset with respect to existing scholarship, highlighting its lack of systematization and specificity, along with a disregard for the provision of supporting evidence (common in contexts where conspiracy theorizing may not be central but still present). Feminists tend to be dehumanized or portrayed as a homogeneous group (in line with previous literature) additionally adopting typical conspirator traits, in partial contrast with the irrationality and hatred ascribed to them by users, in turn portrayed as clear-headed, if relatively powerless, judges of the social reality. Misleading argumentation strategies are employed to support misogynist conspiracist views. Stressing the convergence between conspiracy theory discourses and the discursive construction of anti-feminist identities, this analysis calls for a nuanced reflection on the functions of conspiracy theories in the development of manosphere narratives.