Political Socialization in the Manosphere

• In Event: Masculinity as a Political Force

Abstract

How do political actors attract adolescent boys and young men to the “manosphere,” the decentralized but increasingly influential online world that promotes anti-feminist and male supremacist politics and ideology? What role do these tactics play in the political socialization of youth and adolescent boys and young men? To ground my argument, I propose a conceptual framework for political socialization that illustrates the process of encountering, internalizing, and executing world views like those advocated by manosphere actors. I then examine an increasingly prominent site of manosphere content – YouTube videos – to describe the manosphere’s role in producing encounter, a critical part of political socialization. Using an original dataset of titles and metadata from more than 40,000 manosphere YouTube videos, I conduct a series of large-scale text analyses to identify common rhetorical tactics used to generate encounter with the manosphere and their variation over time. To build descriptive leverage for my argument, I carry out an in-depth qualitative analysis of manosphere YouTube appeals for a small number of the most popular manosphere videos in my dataset. Ultimately, I will argue that manosphere actors produce online encounter with misogyny and male supremacy and, given particular structural conditions and generational patterns in technological use, can play critical roles in the political socialization of those boys and young men who encounter them. I conclude by commenting on the potential consequences of these dynamics in youth and adolescent political socialization for the diffusion and uptake of far-right ideologies more generally.

Author

• Isabelle Mireille Aboaf, Yale University