Grim word manosphere uses to shut down women
Experts warn masculinity influencers are using specific language tactics to dehumanise women, as their content increasingly reaches Australians.
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The limiting, depressing — and frankly, simple — way masculinity influencers are using to dehumanise women has been exposed.
Masculinity influencers often post on social media about how to be an Alpha male — also known as “don’t show emotion and be the least empathetic human being alive” — and that women should exist only to serve their partner.
There have been many who disagree with this very Andrew Tate style of thinking and have, rightly, called it out.
However those who oppose this way of thinking are often ridiculed and dehumanised, and labelled as “female” or “girls” instead of “women” as part of this.
“It’s essentially a way to reduce women to their biology,” Kate Scott, a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney, told news.com.au.
“There’s this idea that they’re not women, they’re females. They’re wombs, they’re vaginas, they’re breasts. This erases any type of woman who may have had a hysterectomy or a mastectomy or is trans or is infertile.
“It just reduces women into their biology to reaffirm that men — whether that's incels or red pillers — that they’re separate and women are only visible or functional as sex objects or ‘reproducers’.”
She said the word female isn’t the only word these groups use to belittle women, with words such as “femoids” — essentially calling them sex robots — or “holes” also often used for the same impact.
She said it reaffirms a lot of the hostility and anger these men have towards women, with even the term “incel” blaming women for “withholding sex” these men feel they’re entitled. It also creates a divide that panders to their belief that they are hard done by.
“Creating that separation and dehumanisation almost allows that cognition of, ‘Well, if they’re not human, we can treat them in such a way’,” Ms Scott said.
Ms Scott said the word female wasn’t inherently a bad phrase and no one should be outlawing its use. However she added that humans are good at “picking up a vibe” when it comes to language and the context it was being used in.
Ms Scott said a lot of young men enter the manosphere disillusioned with how life is at the moment, feeling downtrodden thanks to the state of the world when it comes to homebuying prices or world politics.
She said the language greases the wheel for allowing hateful acts directed at women and that separation of “us and them” makes it all easier to commit them.
“I think for some people it’s easier to look for somewhere to blame — or someone to blame,” she said.
“And you see a lot of young men who see a lot of stuff online talking about how masculinity is measured by these goalposts — one of which being sex. And if you reach a certain age without having sex, even though that’s completely normal, because it’s so visible online there is this sense of frustration, there is this sense of disillusionment.
“And having someone to blame — like women won’t have sex with me because they ‘only want the top 20 per cent of men’ or they want ‘six-pack, blonde hair Chads’ — whatever that means — but having that anger and somewhere to channel it. Using that language makes it easier.”
She also called out a way that Australian culture specifically helps amplify this issue.
“I think Australia has this habit of deflecting hateful language with, ‘Oh, it’s just a joke. She’s a b***, she can’t take a joke, have a sense of humour’,” she said.
“And it’s very easy to see language referring to women as — female is fine. And then, ‘femoids is fine — it’s funny’.
“And then ‘holes — oh it’s just a joke’. But in doing so, we hide this unsettling and dehumanising behaviour under ‘playful, funny language’.
“But is it just a joke when you have a nine-year-old telling his teacher that he doesn’t respect her and to f*** off out of the classroom and make her a sandwich?”
No, it isn’t, Ms Scott said. If anything, it’s concerning.
Laura Henshaw, who co-founded health and wellness business Kic with Steph Claire Smith, realised how prevalent manosphere content was when she called out one creator for saying he didn’t want his girlfriend to work.
“We know the manosphere is becoming more and more mainstream, which is really scary because it’s coming out of these Reddit corners of the internet,” Ms Henshaw said told news.com.au.
She pointed to the Movember Young Men’s Health in a Digital World report that stated two in three men had been exposed to this kind of content after interviewing 3000 men in Australia, the UK and US between the ages of 16 and 25.
She said something “interesting” that she had discovered in manosphere content was that in all the material she’d seen no one used the word “woman”.
“They would use the word ‘girl’ or ‘female’ — except it doesn’t mean in that same podcast or piece of content they call themselves a ‘boy’ or ‘male’,” she said.
“They call themselves a man. So, obviously that’s misogynistic and it proves their limiting views of women.”
The 32-year-old said a lot of the masculinity influencers who sit in this space are probably 10 years her junior and often call her “girl” or “that girl” — and it’s just one way they go about trying to “discredit” her.
She said one of their other tactics is saying things such as “she’s lost the plot” or “she’s crazy” and “hysterical”. She said it’s no different to women being labelled witches in the past if they spoke out or didn’t fit in with societal expectations.
She said men in this space often make a joke about everything. claim everyone agrees with them or that things are “just their opinion” as there is no data to back them up. Instead, they focus on discrediting people who push back on them — and phrases like “female” or “girl” are examples of this.
Ms Henshaw found herself heavily targeted by these tactics following her public calling out of Chris Griffin for his views.
Ms Henshaw argued that it was “misogynistic”, that women didn’t exist just for men’s enjoyment and spoke about how important it was to have financial independence in a relationship. The Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed between 2021 and 2022 16 per cent of women and 7.8 per cent of men have experienced partner economic abuse from the age of 15.
“It’s really hard because the more you speak up about it, the louder they get and the more intense their technique and manipulation and the strategy to discredit you becomes,” she said.
“And they’ll say, ‘Everyone agrees with me’ when that’s absolutely not the case at all but they use all this language to try and make you feel [like you’re in the wrong].
“And it comes back to language that we often use around women like ‘aren’t you overthinking it’ and ‘is it really this deep’ to get in your head and make you question if you’re doing the right thing, am I saying the right thing and if you are overthinking it.”
She said while it 100 per cent impacts her she knows the research of how damaging it is and so it helps her stand tall in her beliefs and actions. She said these conversations — and calling out these views — is important as she’s spoken with so many women who didn’t realise they were dating a man like this and informative content has opened their eyes to it.
She said a lot of her messages are from teachers with students as young as primary school age following these masculinity influencers — often starting with workout and fitness content before being exposed to the more sinister sentiments.
Teachers are seeing the real time impact in schools, which not only motivates Ms Henshaw to keep speaking out but makes her think about the people who fight against this vile narrative masculinity influencers push and the trolling they received.
“The stuff I’ve been sent in the last month — especially around being pregnant — has been just vile. But it’s the way that they try to take their power back,” she said.
She said the thing that she has to remind herself is that these men believe feminism is toxic, that it’s about trying to have more power than men, and cruelty is how these men take that power back.
Originally published as Grim word manosphere uses to shut down women
