What is the Wall? Negotiating boundaries of women’s desirability in and around the manosphere

In this paper, we explore how the metaphoric concept of The Wall is constructed in both the Reddit manosphere as a whole and in r/PurplePillDebate, a Reddit community purporting to facilitate open discussion of so-called ‘red pill’ (anti-feminist) and ‘blue pill’ (non-manosphere) approaches to gender dynamics. The Wall is based on the belief that a woman’s attractiveness begins to decline after a particular age. Using a mixed-methods approach, we first establish how ‘the wall’ is discussed in a 10.9 million word corpus of Reddit manosphere posts from r/MensRights, r/MGTOW, r/seduction, r/TheRedPill and r/braincels, to establish how the term is used by the manosphere in-group. We then consider how The Wall is discussed in r/PurplePillDebate. By examining how the phrase ‘the wall’ is used in these different contexts, our goal is to understand how the concept is defined within the manosphere but also, exacerbating ageist and sexist mainstream ideas, and then filtered into communities where those interested in the manosphere could be persuaded to join. The ways in which this happens have implications for understanding whether and to what extent manosphere concepts become more widespread.