From Pajama Boy to Pepe the Frog: Power, Essentialism, and the Nation-State in the Manosphere

Critical watchers of the manosphere-that digital space devoted to "men's issues"have observed its evolution with alarm.Over the last couple of decades, it has morphed from an array of online forums promoting (for instance) father's rights and gross pickup techniques, to sites touting a far more aggressive and sometimes downright fascistic stance (Ribeiro et al. 2021).The toxic shift has accompanied the growing alienation of US men, especially White men, as their education outcomes, health, and longevity have plummeted. 1It has also coincided with the rise of Tea Party politics, Donald Trump, and the normalization of the radical right in halls of power.As the articles in this special issue attest, the manosphere has established itself as a global force through a semi-ingenious array of semiotic techniques that often yoke ideal manhood to misogyny and White supremacy.In their introductory remarks, Cat Tebaldi and Scott Burnett summarize a key part of the cultural logic as follows: "They [men] yearn to be main characters: they could be heroes."Piggybacking on and stoking anxieties about racial replacement is indeed a rewarding way to make (White) masculinity, connected to White reproductive prospects, seem existentially critical and heroic.The calculus is filled out by retrotopian dreams that reach into a mythic pastpopulated by Vikings, Celts, and other tough guys-for inspiration. 2I recognize that 1Ben Rich and Eva Bujalka, "The Draw of the 'Manosphere': Understanding Andrew Tate's Appeal to Lost Men," The Conversation, February 12, 2023, https://theconversation.com/the-draw-of-the-manosphere-understanding-andrew-tates-appeal-to-lost-men-199179#:~:text=The%20manosphere%20appeals %20to%20its,dim%20vision%20of%20the%20future. 2I cannot resist mentioning too the recent internet trend of (mostly White) women asking their male partners, "How often do you think about the Roman Empire?"The question began to circulate in 2022 through a Swedish influencer, and rapidly went global.The joke is that many men, including liberal men, think about the Roman Empire surprisingly often-presumably because it inspires fantasies of masculine strength, order, and martial power.This trend has an affectionate cast, but it also stimulated the suggestion that the concept of the Roman Empire taps into a collective male unconscious that longs for power and badassery.See, for instance, "How Often Do You Think about the Roman Empire?," Knowyo-the manosphere's politics are a product, in part, of feeling shamed and marginalized (however unreasonably: see, for instance, Kimmel 2013;Rosenthal et al. 2023; Schafer 2020).But its misogyny, queer phobia, and racism have deadly potential.Reading this collection of essays on the semiotics of fascistic digital masculinity gave me a strange cluster of contrasting feelings.Some of the images and statements the authors analyze are so over the top they brought me to laughter, yet I recoil at the cruelties they imply.The pairing of entertainment with menace is no accident, of course.The drama, puffery, and wit on these websites are part of the appeal, just as they have been part of Donald Trump's arsenal of semiotic techniques (Goldstein, Hall, and Ingram 2020; McIntosh and Mendoza-Denton 2020).Besides, as Tebaldi and Burnett further explain in their introduction, heroic masculinity is what makes being a White supremacist fun.The authors in this collection draw on a wide array of tools from semiotic and language studies to make their case.Several offer keen readings of the way language parses the social world or borrows rhetorical moves from other domains for authority.Maureen Kosse, for instance, offers an incisive take on the "referentialist ideology" shared by the alt-right and trans-exclusionary radical feminists, as they presume a neat mapping between lexemes ("man" and "woman") and categories in the natural world.Such appeals to "some immutable Platonic essence," Kosse suggests, offer satisfying cognitive closure while treating deviations from a binary model as "counterfeit."Dominika Baran examines the "anti-genderism register" of an ultraconservative Polish NGO, scrutinizing how it manipulates lexical and grammatical details (such as using quotation marks to trivialize LGBTQ+-preferred terms) and spins terms to impugn progressive policies and practices: "comprehensive sex education" becomes "the sexualization of children," for instance, while "promotion of LGBTQ+ rights and inclusion" becomes "grooming."And Scott Burnett, Rodrigo Borba, and Mie Hiramoto's piece on the global digital sphere of "NoFappers"-men who vow to abstain from masturbation-lays bare the assumptions within their "self-fashioning" talk.One of their rhetorical moves is to borrow from scientific and philosophical registers for credibility, building their case that abstaining will reboot their brains and bodies while revivifying their primal masculinity.Some of the other articles analyze both language and visual semiotics.Gustav Westberg and Henning rman, for instance, offer a tantalizing close reading of imagery and rhetoric from the Swedish "Nordic Resistance Movement."They observe a sly recruiting tactic: the movement takes seemingly benign images (a woman's pregnant belly, a man holding a young child aloft), and surrounds them with affectively charged word clusters that evoke fascist aspirations.The pregnant belly that might simply imply urmeme (website), accessed January 10, 2025, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-often-do-you -think-about-the-roman-empire.A comical elaboration on these themes is the Saturday Night Live skit "Rome Song," November 19, 2023, YouTube video, 3:49, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2nWlXlcO5I.