Bianca Ferrari
12367613
Graduate School of Communication
Erasmus Mundus Master Journalism, Media and Globalisation
Master thesis
SUPERVISOR: Dr. Linda Bos MSc
Amsterdam, June 3, 2019
Women RedPilling Women: Relatability, Alternative Facts and
Anti-Feminist Radicalization on YouTube
Note to the second reader:
As per what agreed with the thesis supervisor, Dr. Linda Bos, the total word count of this dissertation was extended to 8000, in order to allow for extra space for the text fragments presented in the result section
AKNOWLEDGEMENT
Foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Prof. Linda Bos, for the continuous support of my Master thesis project. Her patience, motivation and guidance provided much needed focus and clarity to this study and greatly helped me both in the research and writing phases.
Besides my supervisor, I would like to thank my fellow classmates Pia Yvonne Behme, Tanja Kunesh, Julia Rignot and Daniel Avelar Guimarães for their encouragement, stimulating discussions and emotional support. Without their help, their challenging questions and insightful comments, this thesis and this year would have been a much less successful, gratifying and fun experience.
Abstract
Anti-feminist groups on the Web 2.0 have originated and propagated through online spaces new digital native forms of opposition to the gender equality movement. Despite their many
differences, fringe subcultures are united in their support of the philosophy of the Red Pill, a shared belief in the oppressed state of men in society at the hands of the matriarchy and its feminist agents. Following a growing body of literature examining the phenomenon from the perspective of male engagement with the ideology, this study explores the ways in which right-wing women operating on the video broadcasting and social media site YouTube negotiate new and old forms of anti-feminism in their commentary. As a hub for far-right pundits, YouTube has created a platform for conservative women to rise to fame by articulating anti-feminist
viewpoints and promoting traditional gender roles. Grounded in the Alternative Influence Network or AIN (Lewis, 2018) as a framework for sampling, the paper conducts a qualitative thematic Content Analysis (CA) of thirty videos issued from seven YouTube channels led by anti-feminist women. The findings show that female right-wing YouTubers draw from
conservative arguments and from Red Pill ideology to discredit traditional sources of
information, while lending legitimacy to the claim that masculinity is under threat by the feminist movement. These results are then recontextualized within current debates on the role played by YouTube in far-right radicalization.
Introduction: YouTube as a privileged site to study anti-feminist women
Within the past few years, the United States has experienced a new wave of pushback against civil rights considered fundamental for gender equality by the feminist movement. These include restrictions to abortion (North, 2019) and access to contraception, later blocked by court proceedings (Pear, 2019), as well as legal redefinitions of sexual and domestic violence
(Oppenheim, 2019). These recent developments raise questions about the resurgence of anti-feminist movements. More specifically, a growing scholarship has begun to examine the
interactions between internet subcultures, native to a variety of online platforms, and opposition to feminism (Easter, 2018; Ging, 2017; Jane, 2018; Marwick & Caplan, 2018; Massanari, 2017; Moloney & Love, 2018). This “particularly toxic brand of anti-feminism” (Ging, 2017, p. 1) has its roots in the Men’s Rights movements of the 1980s, which essentially see men as the oppressed gender in society. Despite its constitution as an extremely loose network, plagued by
contradictions and internal dissent, this diverse mix of interest groups is united by their belief in “Red Pill ideology”, or a revelation that is supposed to free men from the misandrist and
gynocentric nature of society (Ganesh, 2018; Ging, 2017). More specifically, studies have addressed anti-feminism on the web 2.0 from the perspective of gendered cyberhate (Jane, 2018; Moloney & Love, 2018), mapping the relationship between platform politics and new anti-feminist ideologies (Easter, 2018; Massanari, 2017), understanding the discursive connections between different networks and movements (Ganesh, 2018; Ging, 2017; Marwick & Caplan, 2018) and how masculine identities are constructed within them (Ging, 2017; Massanari, 2017). However, the participation of women in new forms of anti-feminist discourses has yet to be addressed.
In particular, a few successful female content-creators have risen to fame within the so-called “YouTube Right” by promoting anti-feminist viewpoints and espousing traditional gender roles (Darby, 2017). The phenomenon of the rise of right-wing pundits on YouTube (Haynes,
2018; Herrman, 2017; Klein, 2018; Van Zuylen-Wood et al., 2017; Whyman, 2017;), and its radicalizing potential (Weill, 2018; Tufekci, 2018; Feldman, 2019) has attracted media attention, but has not yet been fully examined in academia. A small body of evidence points to
connections between online “toxic technoculture”, where Red Pill ideology originated
(Massanari, 2017), and YouTube (Ganesh, 2018; Hine et al., 2017). Moreover, Hall (2018) finds that YouTube’s ability to propel “ordinary people” to fame (García-Rapp & Roca-Cuberes, 2017), combined with low barriers to entry and lax policies towards censorship, have made it easier for amateur political commentators on the right to share extremist content with large audiences (Hall, 2018).
Anchored in these considerations, this paper sets out to study the anti-feminist rhetoric articulated by female right-wing political commentators on YouTube. Using the Alternative Influence Network (AIN) (Lewis, 2018) as a framework for sampling channels within the YouTube Right, this paper will attempt to answer the question: How do women1 in the
Alternative Influence Network construct anti-feminist discourses on YouTube? As the dominant video broadcasting service online, YouTube has become one of the “primary keepers of the cultural discussion as it moves to the internet” (Gillespie, 2010, p. 348). This is why the platform can serve as a tool to explore far-right groups and their belief system from an “internalist” perspective, something that has been difficult to achieve in the past due to access barriers on the part of researchers (Blee, 2007, p. 121). Besides this contribution, the paper aims at elucidating how the anti-feminist discourses of female YouTubers interact with new and old forms of opposition to gender equality, with a particular focus on Red Pill ideology.
1 t is important to note here that the designations “woman” and “female” will be used throughout the paper for
simplification purposes to refer to all female-identifying individuals in the AIN. As such, these terms are not meant to provide commentary on transgender and non-binary identities.
YouTube: algorithms, microcelebrity and the far-right
YouTube is a digital platform integrating media production, distribution and consumption with characteristics typical of social media networks; this unique combination of features fosters a participatory culture among its members, who often engage in commenting, reacting to video content and subscribing to channels (Chau, 2010; Burgess & Green, 2008). Despite its status as the most widely used social network on mobile in the United States (Perrin & Anderson, 2019), the website is academically understudied in comparison to other social media (Crick, 2012), generating large gaps in the literature of political communication.
In particular, studies concerned with YouTube and politics have focused on how electoral candidates have used the platform as a low-cost way to distribute political messages (Gueorguieva, 2007), on how young people evaluated different appeals used to frame political issues in homemade videos (English, Sweetser & Ancu, 2011) and on how activist circles make use of the website (Askanius & Uldam, 2011). However, the phenomenon of distribution of radical right ideologies on the platforms is still poorly understood, with a few notable exceptions. Studying hate speech on two YouTube channels, one based in America and the other in Japan, Hall (2018) found that the absence of accountability practices typical of mainstream media platforms, combined with a free-speech-oriented approach towards political commentary and censorship, have allowed far-right channels to reach vast viewership. By avoiding language that would be considered as hate speech by YouTube guidelines and exploring alternative
monetization techniques like crowdfunding, these channels have managed to build loyal audiences and thrive. Moreover, a small body of studies has found that the URLs posted in online subcultures known for their virulent hate speech (Ludeman, 2017), and for originating and propagating Red Pill ideology (Massanari, 2017), prevalently linked to YouTube. This was the case for 4chan’s /pol/ or politically incorrect board (Hine et al., 2017) and Gab or the “alternative Twitter” for far-right groups (Zannettou et al., 2018).
Particularly inscrutable is the role that the YouTube’s recommendations feature plays in radicalization. The platform’s algorithm suggests content to users based on their watching patterns, constituting one of the main sources of a video’s total views and largely determining its popularity (Zhou, Khemmarat & Gao, 2010). This algorithm can be tweaked to promote specific channels to specific audiences, as well as emphasize certain videos over others, mainly for commercialization purposes (Bishop, 2018). However, YouTube’s actual algorithmic functioning is completely obscure and under constant modification. What is clear is that the ambiguity around YouTube’s technical parameters, combined with the website’s strategic positioning as a platform that is open and neutral to everyone - ranging from newcomers to big-budget
advertisers - has helped the site avoid questions about its responsibilities (Gillespie, 2010). On the other hand, a number of studies has examined YouTube as a platform for female identity construction, negotiation and performance (Banet-Weiser, 2011; Rossie, 2015; Wotanis & MacMillan, 2014), finding that women on YouTube operate in a “hostile environment”
(Wotanis & MacMillan, 2014, p. 912) created by particularly negative commenter feedback, which often encourages them to “fit normative standards of femininity” (Banet-Weiser, 2011, p. 288). In order to be successful, content-creators of all genders need to monetize sustained attention from their audiences (García-Rapp & Roca-Cuberes, 2017). As a result, video-makers cultivate an “edited self” persona, blending relatability with aspirational qualities in order to create a sense of connection with viewers, which in turn motivates them to like, comment and follow the author’s work (García-Rapp & Roca-Cuberes, 2017)). In this culture, “professional amateurs” must signal relatability, accessibility and authenticity “all of which presuppose and rely on some form of intimacy” (Raun, 2018, p. 100). This explicit self-commodification is
embedded in YouTube’s culture, as signaled by the platform’s own tagline “Broadcast Yourself” (YouTube, 2010).
Feminism and anti-feminist women
The study of feminist discourses, and consequently also of anti-feminist rhetoric, poses a fundamental problem: feminist scholarship is grounded in subjectivist critical theory (Moon & Blackman, 2014) and is therefore by its nature up to a multiplicity of interpretations. Following Jordan (2016), feminism is here defined based on two premises: that (1) significant gender inequalities exist in contemporary society, generally disadvantaging women in comparison to men and (2) that feminist theory and activism are necessary to establish the equality of genders (p. 31). On the basis of these considerations, three normative assumptions follow: that (1) gender equality is socially and morally desirable; (2) feminism is a necessary and positive force for social change; and (3) gender is a sociopolitical structure rather than a biological difference, therefore inequalities need to be addressed by collective politics (p. 31).
Anti-feminist women are often framed by gender scholars as merely the result of reactionary brainwashing (Jordan, 2016), but this characterization would contradict the fundamental principle of feminist studies: that women should define their own experiences (Andrews, 2002). In fact, even though women are often less visible or even excluded from conservative centers of power, those who actively engage with right-wing politics feel
empowered by their role (Blee, 1991; Dubslaff, 2017, Félix, 2017; Mulinari & Neergaard, 2017; Ylä-Anttila & Luhtakallio, 2017 ). Borrowing from Bacchetta and Power (2002) and Köttingen, Bitzan and Petö (2017), conservative women reject the feminist movement for two main
reasons. Firstly, because they oppose the idea of gender as a social construct, they believe that feminism poses a challenge to traditional gender roles and norms, which they identify as their own “natural” pathway to happiness. More specifically, they view gender relations in
“essentialist-differentialist-complementary” terms (Bacchetta & Power, 2002 p. 7), meaning that men and women are essentially different, and that these natural differences should be the basis for complementary gender roles. These tasks are defined around the institution of the
woman’s “greatest honour” (Alvanou, 2017, p. 148) in its function as both biological and cultural reproducer of the idealized nation (Félix, 2017). This is true even of female activists who have adopted a different lifestyle in their personal life, which creates a double standard that many of them live with. In parallel, most conservative women see their male counterparts as the primary agents in their communities and support their access to a higher degree of power. Secondly, because the feminist movement, especially in its intersectional variant, has extended alliances to minority communities, which are mostly excluded from who women on the right understand as part of their in-group. Right-wing ideologies produce self/Other distinctions to reify
hierarchical differences based on gender, class, ethnicity and other factors. For this reason, despite their endorsement of traditional roles, conservative women often instrumentalize discourses on gender equality to indicate the inferiority and incompatibility of Othered cultures, such as black communities (Anderson, 2018) and immigrants (Kantola & Lombardo, 2019).
Overall, the existing literature conveys a good understanding of the ideological
perspectives that bring right-wing women to opposite feminism. However, what has not yet been addressed by academic studies is their articulation of anti-feminist discourses in online
communities like YouTube, be it in conventional interpretations (Faludi, 1992; McRobbie, 2009) or in digital native ones (Ganesh, 2018; Ging, 2017; Massanari, 2017).
Conceptualizing anti-feminism: Backlash, Postfeminism and digital anti-feminism
As it is the case for feminism, anti-feminist discourse is also composed of several currents. For the purposes of conciseness, only three interpretations will be reviewed: Backlash (Faludi, 1992), Postfeminism (Mcrobbie, 2009) and anti-feminism in online subcultures (Ganesh, 2018; Ging, 2017; Massanari, 2017;). Backlash was first conceptualized by Faludi (1992) in an analysis of how messages generated by mainstream media in the 1980s blamed feminism for problems encountered by modern women. Since the feminist fight was presented as already
won, yet happiness rates among females were at an all-time low, modern women were targeted with suggestions for self-betterment rooted in the idea of submission of to men, contrary to the basic premise of feminist therapy that sees both social and personal growth as important for a woman’s mental health. The author concluded that the phenomenon of Backlash represented a social and political reaction of hegemonic masculinity against perceived threats to its privileged position posed by feminist gains in society. Faludi’s analysis, however, was critiqued by
postfeminist scholars, who contended that her perspectives on femininity were too narrow, underestimated women’s agency and unfairly painted different understandings of feminism as complicit to Backlash (Jordan, 2016).
Contrary to Backlash, Postfeminism is a force that is much more ambivalent towards gender equality. Instead of explicit hostility, Postfeminism as conceptualized by McRobbie (2009) presents feminist demands as already achieved and therefore anachronistic. Entrapped in a “double entanglement”, modern young girls are encouraged to look at feminism as both valid and therefore “taken into account” by society, but also disavow it as not necessary anymore. In her analysis of pop culture, which she believes is the main tool used by women to make sense of their gender identity and roles, McRobbie explained how the rise of neoliberalism depoliticized gender, agency and empowerment, and shifted the discursive focus from collective action to personal responsibility. Since the neoliberal subject has no gender and the neoliberal society is based on meritocracy, women can access full employment and become successful, as long as they accept merely “symbolic equality” without fundamentally changing the structures of the patriarchy. In turn, mainstream culture generates a number of “Post-feminist gender anxieties” that contemporary women should be concerned with - such as delayed marriage and motherhood, and desires to have both a career and family - and that are effectively used to control of female bodies and decisions.
With the rise of internet technologies, a new wave of scholarship analyzing the interplay between anti-feminism and the web 2.0 has emerged, establishing significant discontinuities
with previous strands of the movement (Ging, 2017). Congregating on a variety of internet platforms, such as 4chan, 8chan, Reddit (Jane, 2018; Massanari, 2017) and most recently Discord (Morgan, 2018), subcultural communities have been articulating a “particularly toxic brand of antifeminism” (Ging, 2017 p. 1), enabled by the affordances of internet technologies. Blais and Depuis-Déry (2012) trace this ideology back to the Men’s Rights Movements of 1980s, and define it as the belief that men are suffering an “identity crisis”, generated by women’s efforts to replace patriarchal structures with a matriarchy. This is accompanied by a concerted effort to curb feminist influence on society and reinstate traditional understandings of
masculinity.
Massanari’s (2017) analysis of Reddit’s platform politics, intended as the combination of “design, policies, and norms that encourage certain kinds of cultures and behaviors to coalesce on platforms while implicitly discouraging others” (p. 336), determined that the website is
organized around the idea of white male centrality, particularly in its “geek masculinity” iteration. This new masculine identity both embraces certain aspect of hypermasculinity, such as the elevation of intellect above emotions, while rejecting others, such as physical and sexual prowess (Ging, 2017). Because of their identity as individuals marginalized from society, men active in “toxic technocultures” (Massanari, 2017) are less likely to acknowledge their privileged status in society. Using pro-free-speech and anti-political-correctness arguments, they construct extremely inflammatory language that is misogynistic, racist and homophobic (Ludeman, 2017). Similar communities and discursive practices were also identified by Ging (2017), Jane (2018), Moloney & Love (2018) and Marwick & Caplan (2018).
According to Jane (2018), what unites them is precisely this shared language of hate, together with strong attachments to an “underdog outsider” identity (p. 666). However, these increasingly prevalent tropes of White male victimhood (Kimmel, 2013) merely serve to
“reinstate the normalcy of white male privilege through the articulation of its loss” (Ging, 2017, p. 11). Therefore, Ging (2017) concludes that geek masculinity’s expressions of cyberhate, both in
terms of discursive practices and networked harassment, are evidence of their attempt to establish male hegemony in online spaces. In fact, “toxic technocultures” not only discourage women and minorities from participating, but have a high propensity to propagate through the internet thanks to the loose connections that exist between different platforms and to a presumably largely shared user-base (Ging, 2017; Massanari, 2017).
Digital Hate Culture and Red Pill ideology
Contrary to Jane (2018), Ganesh (2018), contends that toxic online communities belong to a wider movement, which she names “Digital Hate Culture”, centered on a shared belief in “Red Pill ideology”. Red Pill philosophy takes its name from the 1999 Blockbuster “The Matrix”, where Neo, a hero evoking various tropes of hegemonic White maleness, including the “Chosen One” paradigm (Allen, 2002), makes the daring decision to awake to the harsh reality of the world and see the patterns beyond the social structures that common people are not allowed to notice, based on knowledge obtained from internet characters (Wachowski et al., 1999). First introduced in Men’s Rights circles, Red Pill ideology was initially used to refer to the revelation that society is actually dominated by women, not men, and that feminist indoctrination prevents people from seeing its true gynocentric character (Ging, 2017; Marwick & Caplan, 2018). Red Pill ideology relies heavily on pseudoscientific notions of evolutionary psychology to explain female and male sexual and romantic behavior, often measured in terms of their Sexual Market Value (Dayter & Rüdiger, 2018; Ging, 2017). Women are described as hypergamous, always aiming for sexual relations with a domineering Alpha man of high status and looks, but settling for a Beta male for the purpose of financial exploitation (Ging, 2017). Moreover, women who had sexual relations before marriage are frequently blamed for conjugal failures and divorce, based on the idea that their fantasies about previous alpha lovers makes it impossible for their Beta husbands to sexually satisfy them (Ging, 2017).
As argued by Ganesh (2018), Red Pill ideology is used today not only to qualify feminism in conspiratorial terms, but to discredit all leftist political ideologies as efforts to mislead the general public. She maintains that contemporary Red Pilling refers to the idea that Western civilization and its people face an existential threat posed by non-whites, based on the belief that the ultimate truth that needs to be accepted by those who wish to see it, is that human races are not actually equal. Consequently, leftist political ideologies - including feminism, Marxism, globalism and others - are actually degrading Western society by pushing for racial equality, in a process of “White Genocide”. As such, RedPilling is merely a rebranded version of White male supremacy, being distributed in new ways through “alternative media” channels to convert internet users to its totalizing world view. As one of the most distinctive features uniting different online anti-feminist communities, Red Pill ideology will be the
conceptual focus of this analysis for understanding the influence of digital anti-feminism on the narratives presented by female YouTube Right pundits.
Methodology
In the first study mapping right-wing presence on YouTube, Lewis (2018) found that an assortment of influencers, with views ranging from mainstream conservatism to White
supremacy, are interlinked into a discursive system that appears coherent despite “the seeming variety and independence of its members” (p. 8). This “Alternative Influence Network” (AIN), comprising 65 YouTubers across 81 channels, was named after its contributor’s claims of providing alternative media sources for news and political commentary to audiences on the right. Through algorithmic connections and guest appearances between these channels, the paper claims, viewers can quickly transition from watching moderately conservative videos to extreme content, following patterns of right-wing radicalization congruous with what has been observed in other online communities ( Alfano, Carter & Cheong, 2018; Johnson 2018; Lyons, 2017; Marwick & Lewis, 2017).
Drawing from the AIN, this study will analyze anti-feminist videos published by some of the most popular female-identifying YouTubers mapped in the network. Before detailing the methodology, however, several issues concerning Lewis’s framework need to be addressed. Firstly, the network was not specifically developed to map anti-feminism on YouTube, therefore some of the most popular anti-feminist influencers on the platform could not be considered. Secondly, as stated by Lewis herself, the AIN has “loose and constantly changing” boundaries (p. 6); for instance, some of its channels had already been deleted during the duration of her study. Lastly and most importantly, the study has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal. As a result, its main hypothesis and conclusions can only serve as background information for the study, and will not be tested in this research. Despite its many imperfections, the Alternative Influence Network remains a first-of-its-kind analysis of the YouTube Right and will therefore be adopted for sampling purposes.
More specifically, seven channels were selected from the AIN following three criteria: a. they primarily featured female-identifying YouTubers; b. they had more than 100.000
subscribers as of March 31, 2019; c. they were active within three months prior to this date. Using the platform’s filtering system, the videos published by each of the content-makers were sorted by popularity. The most viewed three to seven videos mentioning gender identities (e.g., female, women, feminism) or gender relations (e.g., dating, marriage, sexual assault) in the title, video thumbnail or in the description box were selected for each channel. The videos were then watched once and some were excluded from the selection based on the following criteria: a. The tone of the video was mostly satirical or parodical; b. The discussion verged exclusively on non-binary gender identities and/or on transgender issues. In order to maximise a diversification of themes and achieve saturation, each time a video was excluded, a new one was considered and either included or left out of the sample based on the same criteria, for a total of thirty items. The videos were then transcribed verbatim and their content analyzed using qualitative
Thumbnail, b. a description of the images, video clips and other graphics edited into the video, c. a transcription of the text in the information box underneath the video.
As discussed by Creswell (1998), qualitative research lends itself to exploring topics that have yet to be addressed by more systematic investigations, and it is useful in analyzing how members of a community give meaning to a human or social issue. Grounded in an ontological position that views reality and interpersonal interactions as socially constructed, researchers using qualitative methods interpret language and behavior to understand how the subjects of their enquiry create meaning while situated in their specific context (Bryman, 2012). At the same time, this study supplements a general interpretive approach with a commitment to critical inquiry. Following the tradition of feminist scholarship, the paper situates the discourses
produced, sustained, negotiated and challenged by the YouTubers analyzed within the broader context of social, economic and historical hegemonic gender relations (Lazar, 2007).
The data analysis process was centered on a thematic Content Analysis (CA) organized in three principal coding stages. In the first part, open codes were formulated combining
inductive and deductive approaches. More specifically, segments of text associated to relevant theoretical conceptualizations were assigned deductive codes; however, the bulk of this first phase was coded in vivo to allow for a closer relation to the text and for the subjects of the analysis to be heard in their own formulations (Given, 2008). As argued by Andrews (2002), scholars analyzing anti-feminist viewpoints through the lens of feminism must maintain a
commitment to representing the lived experience of the subjects as they see it; therefore, the in-vivo approach was deemed most suitable. In the second part of the process, the data was re-grouped into about 200 axial codes combining similar ideas conveyed at different points in the sample. Finally, in the last coding stage nine groups of codes were formed based on dominant themes emerging from the text (appendix B). Initial codes that could be associated to more than one axial group were assigned to both. These “shared” or “co-occurring” codes (appendix C.) were then used to map discursive links among the larger groups for the last stage of coding,
aided by theoretical notions drawn from the literature. For instance, the code “white women: pure, angelic” was assigned both to “conservative gender norms and roles” because it reflected ideas of traditional femininity, and to “white supremacy” because of the historical implications of associating Whiteness with purity. This in turn demonstrated discursive connections between the two ideologies through the evocation of Western beauty standards. The theoretical insights resulting from the analysis are presented in the following section, aided by a combination of textual and visual data issued from the videos.
Following Lincoln and Guba in Bryman (2012), concepts of validity and reliability cannot be applied to qualitative methods because of the underlying premise adopted in constructivist scholarship that reality cannot be understood in absolutist terms. Therefore, qualitative research should be assessed through the criteria of credibility and authenticity. Since the widely accepted techniques of triangulation and respondent validation were not compatible with this project, the study implemented other methods to minimize researcher’s bias, including initial in vivo-coding and integrating a “thick description” (Geertz in Bryman, 2012, p. 392) in the video transcription, including voice tone, gestures, video setting and other elements.
Results
The women in the AIN are placed on different points of the political spectrum, but they all explicitly identify as anti-feminist (Chen, 2016; Hargraves, 2016; Lokteff, 2018b; Owens, 2017b; Pettibone, 2018a; Southern, 2017a; White, 2015). They conform to Bacchetta and Power’s (2002) “essentialist-differentialist-complementary” conceptualization of gender norms and roles, referring to gender as being mainly determined by nature rather than socialization, so that men and women possess innate qualities that are the basis for their gender roles. In particular, motherhood is presented both as a pathway to personal happiness and as something that women should be celebrated for in society. The institutions of the heteronormative marriage and family are also described as morally, socially and personally desirable. These traditional
understandings are often framed as best for women’s happiness (Chen, 2016, 2017b;
Hargraves 2017a, 2017b, 2018a; Pettibone, 2018b; Southern 2017a, 2017d) and naturalized through notions of evolutionary psychology (Hargraves 2018b, 2018c; Pettibone 2018a, 2018c; Southern, 2017a; 2017b; White 2016b). Women are characterized as inherently more nurturing and caring, but also as emotional beings who cannot handle power (Lokteff, 2018a) and should embrace their innate femininity instead of “usurping” the male role (Hargraves, 2016; Pettibone 2018a). For example, Hargraves (2018b) explains:
One of the greatest problems with egalitarianism is that it presupposes that traits in men and women have evolved identically. But it wasn’t until the last 60 years or so that female roles have changed drastically. It is statistically impossible that men and women have arrived at identical places along their evolutionary lines.
Similar evolutionary psychology claims are cited to dispense relationship advice. For instance, in a video collaboration between Southern and Pettibone (Southern, 2017b), the two discourage young women from “trading up” to men of higher status or looks and instead quickly settle with a partner.
If you… uh… trade up all throughout your 20s, and you hit 30 and you're still trying to trade up, and then 35 and you're still trying to trade up, you're going to find that… these guys aren't wanting 35 year old women who have been around the carousel.
Besides making a direct reference to female hypergamy, this statement serves to legitimize the idea that men are naturally attracted to younger women because of their fertility and chastity, hence girls need to get married at an early age and not engage in sexual intercourse before the nuptials. These ideas, known as Sexual Market Value (Dayter & Rüdiger, 2018; Ging, 2017), are reiterated and expanded in Southern’s (2017a) “What every girl needs to hear” video, where she explains how:
A man’s wealth is measured in accomplishments, strength and resources and men are born ignorant, weak and destitute. A woman’s wealth is measured in youth, fertility and
chastity and women are born young, fertile and chaste. A man can accumulate wealth and power overtime, but a woman cannot become younger or more chaste.
To support these claims, she mentions a series of statistics that upon closer inspection relate to misguided interpretations relayed by partisan blogs. This selective skepticism towards scientific notions is present throughout the videos: on the one hand, high levels of scrutiny are applied to legitimate scientific reports and news outlets (Hargraves 2018b; Southern, 2017c). On the other, while the information presented to support conservative claims often invokes scientific
language, it is more of a composite of opinions, anecdotal evidence and common sense statements presented as facts (Owens, 2017b; Pettibone 2018a, 2018b; White 2016a, 2016b), statistics without a clear reference (Lokteff, 2018a), and legitimate scientific findings that either contradict or do not prove the point made by the YouTuber (Hargraves 2018b, 2018c; Lokteff, 2018a).
In videos that do not explicitly draw on evolutionary psychology, a systematic validation of men’s needs and experiences over women’s is evident, together with discourses presenting men as the real victims in society, especially in terms of sexual assault (Pettibone 2018c; White 2017), domestic violence (White, 2015), and divorce proceedings (Hargraves, 2018a, 2018b; Pettibone, 2017; Southern, 2017a). In parallel, women are portrayed as having advantages in education (Hargraves, 2018a, 2018b), child custody and divorce (Pettibone, 2017). More specifically, in a striking subversion of the feminist anti-rape agenda, Pettibone describes
women as “being believed at face value” (Pettibone, 2018c) when retelling their stories of sexual assault, while men suffer the judgement of public opinion without being convicted in a court of law. Furthermore, White (2017) decides to talk about this issue in a very intimate manner by sharing her own personal story of sexual abuse in a video. After addressing other life lessons she learned from the experience, she describes how she “actively fought against developing any sort of prejudice against men, despite being violated in such an animalistic way by a man”, thereby framing sexual violence as a personal rather than a systemic problem. She continues:
Probably the most important thing I learned is that victimhood is a choice (...). Telling yourself that you're not going to let a traumatic event, or something that's bad that's happened to you hold you back in life and that you're not gonna carry around that baggage like a concrete brick on your back forever, is really powerful.
A strong rhetoric of personal responsibility and self-improvement is also a common thread present throughout the sample (Chen 2017a, 2019; Owens, 2017b; Pettibone, 2017a, 2017b; Southern, 2017a, 2017b, 2017d; White, 2016, 2017). However, these narratives are by and large directed towards increasing desirability for future partners rather than to empower women in a general sense.
Surprisingly, the most discussed topic across the network is beauty, which is mentioned in 20 out of the 30 videos analyzed. More specifically, body weight and the body positivity movement are extensively discussed. All of the women in the AIN present in very feminine ways, as evidenced by their narratives, their appearance and their graphic identities (figure 1), but Lauren Chen addresses ideals of beauty more than any other YouTuber, namely in all four of the videos sampled. Despite claiming that beauty should not be valued over character and presenting her opposition to the body positive movement on the grounds of health concerns, similarly to White (2016a), Chen recurrently evokes images of women that conform to ideals of Western beauty in a positive way, while depicting other bodies negatively. In her video
“Feminism Hates Femininity”, Chen (2017b) discusses how feminism is trying to dismantle gender by turning women into men and attacking masculinity (also in Hargraves, 2016, 2018a, 2018b; Pettibone, 2018a). However, as evidence of this attack, she does not address
personality qualities, but rather shows a series of images depicting black and plus-sized women in bikinis, as well as gender non-conforming individuals. Similarly, Lana Lokteff repeatedly juxtaposes images of young, fair-skinned girls depicted in angelic ways, to dark-skinned bodies characterized as over-sexual and aggressive. This aversion to women not conforming to traditional Western beauty standards is also evident from depictions of feminists are as angry,
aggressive, overweight and overall undesirable. This image is evoked in very similar ways by different YouTubers (figure 2), who often describe women supporting feminism as having blue or shaved hair, piercings and tattoos (Chen 2016, 2019; Hargraves, 2017a, 2018a; White, 2016b).
Figure 1
Screenshots from the introduction sequences playing before selected videos
Figure 2
Images of Feminist women presented in the sample2
When it comes to formats, all videos besides a few exceptions (Chen, 2019; Lokteff 2018a, 2018b, 2018c) adopted a very informal tone, employing humor (Southern, 2017c, 2017d;
Owens, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c), as well as a homemade, amateurish filming style. As is the case for other YouTubers, all women in the AIN depend on sustained audience engagement for their livelihoods, so their social media accounts and ways to financially support their work are always mentioned in their content. However, this monetization relationship is articulated differently from other video-makers on the platform, as exemplified by Owens (2017a):
If you guys like these videos please consider donating to my Patreon.com account. As you know YouTube is cracking down on conservative voices and we are unable to monetize these videos. You guys can follow me on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter at Red Pill Black. Thank you guys so much for watching!
In this example, Owens is referring to YouTube’s decision to demonetize some political content (Hess, 2017; Maza, 2017), which lead many commentators both on the right and on the left to opt for alternative funding sources, including the crowdfunding platform Patreon and direct donations on Paypal and through Bitcoin. However, in this case audience engagement is not simply invoked to secure funding, but also to convey the idea that conservatives are being persecuted for their thoughts. This characterization is repeated in various videos in the network, presenting the AIN pundits in the study as individuals daring to tell the truth, and their
audiences, as brave enough to receive it (Hargraves, 2017a, 2017b, 2018a; Owens, 2017b; Southern, 2017a, 2017b, 2017e; White, 2015, 2017).
Besides by two of the YouTubers, Red Pill ideology is not directly addressed by the videos in the sample. The two notable exceptions refer to Owens, formerly known with the screen name Red Pill Black, and Hargraves, who details her stance towards Red Pill ideology in two videos. Firstly, in “My Red Pill Journey” (2017b), Hargraves explains how experiences in her educational and professional career discouraged her from embracing feminism and the concept of racial equality. Sharing intimate details from her past, Hargraves describes how corporate and city life made her feel unfulfilled and miserable, bringing her to the realization that she was being “indoctrinated” by society and that it was her responsibility to learn wifely duties in order to
have a family before it was too late (Hargraves, 2017b, 2018a). The other video, titled “How To Redpill Women” (2017a), is a guide meant to be used by men to introduce women to the ideology. Interestingly, she suggests that:
YouTube has been the most instrumental way for me, with minimal effort, to illuminate truths to others that may be resistant. It takes the burden off of you to make the case and provide something of an intermediary in case there's friction.
She then proceeds to recommend five channels that are “responsible for a lot of my [sic] RedPilling”, four of which are also featured in the AIN. Even though most YouTubers do not overtly mention Red Pill ideology, their discourses on evolutionary psychology, Sexual Market Value and “trading up” make references to aspects of it. Southern, Lokteff and Hargraves all openly refer to Western patriarchal society as a structure that gives women freedom, rights and protection (Hargraves, 2018a, 2018c; Lokteff, 2018a, 2018b; Southern, 2017d), but the radical views of the latter two particularly stand out. Hargraves takes the idea of female hypergamy to the extreme in her “Do Women Secretly Want the Patriarchy?” video (2018c), where she argues that feminism has allied with Islam because women, repulsed by their feminized Western male companions, are unconsciously sexually attracted to strong men from patriarchal societies. Connections between feminism and Islam are also made by Southern (2017e), White (2017) and Lokteff (2018a) to distinguish Western society from “true” rape cultures in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world. Finally, Lokteff directly talks about the idea of “White Genocide” in two videos. In the first one, called “Why interracial relations are pushed on Western women” (2018c), she argues that the media, leftist governments and feminists are encouraging a process of erasure of “unique European traits”, considered most desirable by the rest of the world.
Well between the promotion of interracial relationships, mixed-race babies, open borders, promoting non-white as most beautiful and exotic and white pride as wicked
(...), the sinister agenda is obvious. Destroy European people and replace them with the new Europeans!
In the other (2018b), she describes how open border policies in Europe have generated a rape epidemic that is being covered up by European governments willing to “sacrificing them [white
women] to the altar of multiculturalism”.
Overall, even though most channels do not contain white supremacist rhetoric, the idea of a mediatic, educational, political and social effort to indoctrinate people and push feminist, “Marxist”, and “globalist” agendas, is widespread across all channels (Chen, 2017a; Hargraves 2017b, 2018a; Lokteff 2018a, 2018c; Owens, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c; Southern, 2017a, 2017c; White 2015).
Discussion and conclusion
The perspectives articulated by the women in the AIN are varied, but the the common thread that ties them together is their presentation of feminism as a hateful ideology that attacks both feminine women and masculine men in an effort to abolish gender. In particular, male identity is presented as under threat, deserving compassion, respect and restoration to a lost social position.This rehabilitation of hegemonic masculinity is articulated in three core
discourses.
Firstly, all channels emphasized physical appearance in their narratives, elevating women conforming to standards of Western beauty and associating negative commentary to non-white, non gender-conforming and plus size bodies. Moreover, a fairly coherent depiction of feminist women as aggressive, mannish and unattractive was identified. Ingrained in Western culture by sheer repetition, the trope of the angry feminist (Tomlinson, 2010) frames women making demands against the status quo as aggressive, intolerant and undesirable in order to invalidate their voices even before they are heard. In the meantime, the power structures behind the origins of the trope are never acknowledged. Similarly, the concept of misandry, or hate of
men, (Marwick & Caplan, 2018) is used by men’s rights circles online and offline to discredit feminism as a inherently intolerant project. Specifically, by equating feminism to misandry and misandry to misogyny, these groups are able to reverse progressive discourses of oppression and claim victimized status. As a result, women who “do not hate” men are pitted against feminists and encouraged to disavow the movement altogether. Of course, this is a false
equivalence, since the feminist project does not advocate for violence against men, as opposed to the vitriol present in many of the groups where these discourses are articulated (Jane, 2018; Massanari, 2017). However, the AIN women repeat this idea both in visual and discursive terms, pointing to its effectiveness in supporting the core objectives of the anti-feminist
movement: sustaining hierarchical and binary gender systems while discrediting gender equality politics.
In parallel, both Postfeminist and Backlash narratives were reflected in the videos. More specifically, AIN women keep on referring to an idealized period situated between the First and Third wave of feminism, where some of women’s rights were realized in society but motherhood and the figure of the domestic woman were still glorified. However, instead of criticizing the structures of neoliberal capitalism that prevent women from having both a public and private life, these issues are internalized and interpreted as personal struggles following postfeminist logics (McRobbie, 2009). As a result, the women in the AIN rely heavily on narratives of
self-betterment and personal responsibility to respond to the challenges of modern life, such as finding long term companionship and having a family. Much like what was suggested by the self-help guides theorized in Backlash (Faludi, 1992), they believe that the only way women have to overcome these adversities is to make “traditionalist” choices, ranging from dating as few men as possible and improving oneself for future partners (Pettibone, 2018b; Southern, 2017b) to becoming submissive and providing value to men (Hargraves, 2018a). Drawing on Mulinari and Niegaard’s (2017) research on extremist groups in Sweden, a key question emerges in this context: why do women participate in movements that at best oppose their
freedoms and choices on some level, and at worst are organized around a simmering core of misogyny? Their analysis describes how extremist women in Sweden find it difficult to create their ideal life within the context of the country’s neoliberal transformations, because they believe that modern society undermines their future as mothers and overvalues professional careers they do not desire. This same narrative is echoed in many of the videos studied, and attributed to feminist gains rather than socioeconomic transformations (Chen, 2016; 2017b; Hargraves, 2017a, 2017b, 2018a; Pettibone, 2018a; Southern, 2017a, 2017b, 2017d). As argued by the researchers, participating in the nationalistic discourse thus “creates new opportunities for agency” (Mulinari & Niegaard, 2017, p. 17), decreasing feelings of
disempowerment and embedding Swedish conservative women within the social structures of the far right. Analyzed through this lens, women’s participation in anti-feminist discourses can help them not only cope with “postfeminist anxieties” (McRobbie, 2009), but also allow them to cultivate a sense of alternative empowerment, also found in other studies on gender and the far right (Blee, 1991; Dubslaff, 2017; Félix, 2017; Ylä-Anttila & Luhtakallio, 2017). This is especially evident in videos where the YouTubers share life and relationship advice claimed to be in the interest of the happiness and fulfillment of female audience members (Hargraves, 2017a, 2018a; Pettibone, 2018b; Southern, 2017a, 2017b, 2017d), but that in reality limits them to domestic life and functions to reproduce patriarchal structures (Faludi, 1992).
Thirdly, despite finding few overt references to Red Pill ideology and White Genocide (Ganesh, 2018), the paper identified discursive links between the channels of the AIN that provide insights into how anti-feminist narratives are coupled with other agendas. Particularly important is the conspiratorial depiction of the media, science, universities and other institutions as sources of information pushing to indoctrinate women and society into feminist (Chen, 2016; Hargraves, 2017a, 2018a, 2018c; Lokteff, 2018b; Pettibone, 2018a, 2018c; Southern, 2017a, 2017d; White, 2015), globalist (Hargraves 2017a, 2017b; Lokteff 2018a; Owens 2017c) and Marxist (Southern, 2017a, 2017d; Hargraves, 2018b) ideologies. Even more troubling, these
allegedly manipulative influences are often lumped together to mean the same thing, a
discourse which Ganesh (2018) identifies as key to delegitimize the entire “leftist” egalitarianism project and as a steppingstone into the belief of other “natural” inequalities, most notably among races. In parallel, this paper finds that the YouTubers in the sample actively engage in what Lewis (2018) calls “alternative credibility” (p. 16) mechanisms. Firstly, adopting the logic of “commodification of intimacy” (Raun, 2018), the women in the AIN establish bonds of trust with their audiences by presenting personal anecdotes, talking about their struggles and most importantly sharing very intimate stories about their lives that rationalize some of their most extremist political views (e.g., Hargraves, 2018a; White, 2017). In parallel, a selective
skepticism towards scientific evidence and established news sources is cultivated and applied throughout the videos, whereby mainstream information is systemically critiqued and
undermined, whereas “alternative” information is cited without confirming its truthfulness. Following Kelly’s (2017) argumentation on the role of lite platforms orbiting the alt-right, this paper suggests that whether or not the female YouTubers in the AIN fully embrace Red Pill ideology, their discourses achieve two goals; firstly, they lend legitimacy to the idea that male identity is under threat, either by internal enemies like feminists, or by Othered cultures such as Muslim and immigrants - or by their combination. Secondly, by developing an
alternative sense of credibility within their followership, they generate a discursive space where hard-won truths about the equality of the genders, and in some cases of the races, are once again up for debate (Daniels, 2009). As such, the success of the most extreme versions of the anti-feminist rhetoric articulated by the YouTubers in the study does not depend on traditional concepts of recruitment, but on destabilizing their audience’s sense of truth in order to introduce reactionary ideas into mainstream public spheres like YouTube (Kelly, 2018; Lyons, 2017; Marwick & Lewis, 2017). As evidence of that, one can consider how radical speech such as measuring women’s worth in terms of their Sexual Market Value (Southern, 2017b) is
more indirect forms of persuasion, as exemplified by Hargraves (2017a) in “How to Redpill Women”, this paper finds evidence that YouTube in general, and other channels of the AIN in particular, are being used as tools of right-wing radicalization against feminism.
Before drawing this study’s conclusions, some of its limitations must be discussed. Firstly, as previously addressed, Lewis’ framework (2018) presents many flaws, including its temporal nature and the fact that it was not created to map anti-feminism. However, because research on the YouTube Right is so scarce, it was still considered the best way to approach sampling. A few tools for academic research on YouTube have been developed (Rieder, 2015), but this paper advocates for a more robust and political communication oriented methodology to be established in order to better understand how ideologies circulate on the platform. In
particular, future studies should focus on YouTube’s recommendation algorithm and its impacts on suggesting extremist content. Secondly, due to resource constraints, the choice was made early in the research design to focus solely on anti-feminist discourses produced by women in the AIN. In the future, research should examine Red Pill ideology on YouTube on a macro-level using quantitative methods, as well as address similarities and differences between the genders in reproducing these discourses, and possible strands of the movement outside the Anglophone world. Despite its limitations, the study successfully demonstrated how women on YouTube participate in digitally native forms of anti-feminism, while still negotiating narratives
conceptualized in the past. Moreover, some of its findings help elucidate the mechanisms that enable the circulation of extremist content on the platform.
After examining 30 videos published by seven anti-feminist channels, this paper concludes that YouTube’s potential for radicalization cannot be underestimated. Some of the videos included in the study contain extremely toxic and hateful rhetoric, and have accumulated hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of views, reaching levels of circulations for far-right messages that would have been unthinkable before the advent of home broadcasting.
UK due to their Islamophobic rhetoric (Hosenball, 2018) and Candace Owens was recently mentioned by the Christchurch attacker as one of his principal sources of radicalization (Feldman, 2019). Despite this, YouTube does not believe their speech infringes its guidelines and still allows them to post videos on the platform under the only penalty of demonetization. In light of recent examples of right-wing terrorism powered by hateful propaganda partially
distributed through the website, such as Christchurch (Feldman, 2019), Pizzagate (Robb, 2017; Hernandez, 2019), and smaller incidents (Mettler, 2019), this paper closes with the suggestion that the dissemination of extreme right materials on YouTube deserves urgent scholarly attention.
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