Before the Manosphere: patriarchal sexual scripts in Spanish adolescent discourse and the failure of relationships and sexuality education

In 2016, the sexoaffective discourse of 149 Spanish secondary school students in Gran Canaria already contained the constitutive elements of what is now called the manosphere: the binary classification of women along patriarchal lines, pornography as the main pedagogy of sexuality, normalised violence within the male sexual script, and girls’ silence about desire. This corpus is presented as evidence of a pre-existing void: not the cause of the manosphere, but the discursive ground that made it possible. A sociosemantic variationist analysis, by gender and social class, of the nouns students produced in a narrative exercise identified ten semantic categories. Gender was the main organising factor: boys used up to 5.2 times as many distinct nouns as girls. Social class affected vocabulary size, but not its patriarchal logic. Pornography and alcohol were the only informal sources of sexual learning reported. Drawing on the missing discourse of desire, its digital extension and manosphere research, the paper argues that the manosphere found these scripts ready and waiting, and that relationships and sexuality education that ignores their biologicist roots risks treating the symptoms while leaving the cause intact.