Wounded men of feminism: Exploring regimes of male victimhood in the Spanish manosphere

Abstract

The manosphere has become a popular digital social object of research and a growing academic corpus aims to make sense of online masculinist subcultures and the rise in misogynistic discourses in digital environments. In this article, we focus on the idea of male victimhood and the ways it is articulated and reworked to serve specific masculinist interests. We believe the narrative of male victimhood is being used to justify misogynistic claims and to ground a specific antifeminist strategy oriented towards a political dismantling of feminism. Our findings are the result of a multiplatform digital ethnography conducted in the Spanish manosphere including participant observation of a variety of subcultures in diverse platforms, blogs and websites. We conclude that within the Spanish manosphere, there is a regime of male victimhood. Building on Fazili’s categorisation of victimhood claims as experience, stance and self-presentation, we operationalize them as a conceptual framework in this article to analyse how they are taken up in the manospheric context in a way that works to configure the regimes of male victimhood which, in turn, helps disseminate pain in the platform. Finally, following Chouliaraki, we present an analysis of the four main argumentative mechanisms we have identified through which victimhood is claimed in the Spanish manosphere: (1) separation of victimhood from structural reality; (2) separation of victimhood from its context; (3) inversion of the roles of victim and perpetrator and (4) dismantling of the binary sufferer/perpetrator.

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European Journal of Cultural Studies
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european journal o f
Wounded men of feminism:
Exploring regimes of male
victimhood in the Spanish
manosphere
Elisa García Mingo
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
Silvia Díaz Fernández
Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain
Abstract
The manosphere has become a popular digital social object of research and a
growing academic corpus aims to make sense of online masculinist subcultures and
the rise in misogynistic discourses in digital environments. In this article, we focus on
the idea of male victimhood and the ways it is articulated and reworked to serve
specific masculinist interests. We believe the narrative of male victimhood is being
used to justify misogynistic claims and to ground a specific antifeminist strategy
oriented towards a political dismantling of feminism. Our findings are the result of
a multiplatform digital ethnography conducted in the Spanish manosphere including
participant observation of a variety of subcultures in diverse platforms, blogs and
websites. We conclude that within the Spanish manosphere, there is a regime of male
victimhood. Building on Fazili’s categorisation of victimhood claims as experience,
stance and self-presentation, we operationalize them as a conceptual framework in
this article to analyse how they are taken up in the manospheric context in a way that
works to configure the regimes of male victimhood which, in turn, helps disseminate
pain in the platform. Finally, following Chouliaraki, we present an analysis of the
four main argumentative mechanisms we have identified through which victimhood
is claimed in the Spanish manosphere: (1) separation of victimhood from structural
reality; (2) separation of victimhood from its context; (3) inversion of the roles of victim
and perpetrator and (4) dismantling of the binary sufferer/perpetrator.
Keywords
Affect, anti-feminism, manosphere, online misogyny, Spain, victimhood
Corresponding author:
Silvia Díaz Fernández, Department of Communication, Faculty of Humanities, Communication
and Library Science, Carlos III University of Madrid, Calle Madrid 126, Getafe, 28903, Spain.
Email: silviadiaz93@gmail.com
1140586ECS0010.1177/13675494221140586European Journal of Cultural StudiesGarcía Mingo and Díaz Fernández
research-article2022
Article

2 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)
Introduction: contextualising the Spanish manosphere
Recent work on the manosphere has tried to make sense of the growing online masculinist
subcultures in digital environments, interrogating the different communities that integrate the
manosphere, from Men Who Go Their Own Way (Jones et al., 2020), Men’s Rights Activists
(Cockerill, 2019; Farci and Righetti, 2019), Incels (Hofmann et al., 2020; Papadamou et al.,
2021; Sugiura, 2021) and Pick Up Artists (Bratich and Banet-Weiser, 2019; Rüdiger and
Dayter, 2020). The existing literature on the manosphere has been predominantly conducted
in Anglo-Saxon contexts, even though there are some efforts by European scholars in France
(Morin, 2021), Germany (Becksmann, 2021), Italy (Cannito and Mercuri, 2021; Scarcelli,
2021), Portugal (Simões et al., 2021) and Denmark (Ellermann and Pedersen, 2021).
However, research on the Spanish manosphere is scarce.
Our decision to focus on the Spanish manosphere is motivated by our position as femi-
nist Spanish researchers whose main work is developed on the socio-cultural context of
Spain. In this work, we approach the Spanish manosphere as a vernacular articulation of
anti-feminist communities that resonate with other socio-cultural manospheric articula-
tions in the international context of a widespread politicisation of men’s victimisation
(Venäläinen, 2021a).
To understand our context, we have to bear in mind that since 2019, the presidency of
Spain has been assumed by a coalition between two left-wing political parties who have
supported progressive political reforms and legislation, such as the gender self-identifica-
tion bill, commonly known as the ‘trans law’ (Ley Trans) and the sexual liberties law,
mediatised as the ‘only yes is yes law’ (Ley de sólo sí es sí). This has happened in the con-
text of the rise of a ‘fourth wave’ of feminism in Spain, characterised by a resurgence of
feminist protests (García-Mingo and Prieto-Blanco, 2021; Núñez-Puente and Romero,
2020). However, this feminist reawakening is being met with major resistance from the
more conservative section of Spanish society, which sees this as an attack on the traditional
societal values (Guinot 2021). In fact, in recent years, the Spanish far-right political party
Vox has popularised the concept of gender ideology and turned the battle against gender
ideology part of its political backbone (Álvarez-Benavides and Jiménez-Aguilar, 2021).
The Spanish manosphere is a relatively new phenomenon and is becoming an emer-
gent field of research. A central characteristic that has been studied in previous research
on the issue has been the mobilisation of a reactionary anti-feminism (Gutiérrez et al.,
2020; Hanash, 2018; Núñez-Puente et al., 2021; Pibernat Vila, 2021; Remón and Medina-
Bravo, 2019), and the local use of gendertrolling (Varela-Aguilés and Pecourt, 2021). In
our previous work, we have studied the Spanish manosphere paying attention to affective
interactions and the emotional echo chambers (Eslen-Ziya et al, 2019) created within
these digital spaces, and conceptualised the idea of an affective fabric of the manosphere.
The affective pull of manospheric environments, we argue, allows a (re)configuration of,
first, a masculine identity based on anger, violence and hatred; and second, a curation of
masculinity as being wounded by contemporary feminist advances through a variety of
digital practices that centre men as rightful victims of current contemporary societies
(Rothermel, 2020).
In this work, we are paying attention to how male victimhood regimes are articulated
within the Spanish manosphere, drawing from previous literature that has highlighted how
men engage in the co-optation of discourses of oppression and construct a narrative of male

García Mingo and Díaz Fernández 3
victimhood, which justifies their disavowal of feminism (Hopton and Langer, 2021;
Johannsen, 2021; Krendel, 2020; Marwick and Caplan, 2018; Rothermel, 2020; Venäläinen,
2021b). We argue, men who partake in the manosphere articulate a narrative of victimhood
via specific mediated argumentative mechanisms through which they enact claims to vul-
nerability that enable them to restore their masculine rational authority. In addition, we sug-
gest that male victimism serves a specific political purpose of undoing feminist gains and
disavowing feminism in general in contemporary societies. It is thus a politicisation of vic-
timhood through which gender(ed) antifeminist politics are unfolded. To explore this, we
pose the following questions: (1) What regime of male victimhood is being produced by the
men in the manosphere? (2) Through what mechanisms is victimhood claimed by men in
the manosphere? (3) How does the platformisation of pain associated with male victimhood
work in the Spanish manosphere? and (4) What role does male victimhood play in the strug-
gle for moral value of antifeminist men in pro-feminist environments? To answer these
questions, we are drawing on ethnographic data collected as part of a larger project which
looks at the pollinating power of the manosphere regarding its perception of gender-based
sexual violence.
Theorising about regimes of male victimhood
Victimhood culture
In their seminal work on victimhood, Fassin and Rechtman (2009) declare that the condi-
tion of victimhood has become an ‘unassailable moral category’ of the contemporary era.
Campbell and Manning (2014, 2018) have, in turn, described the shift to a ‘victimhood
culture’ in Western cultures, based on the acknowledgement of ‘victimhood as virtue’
where the distinction between offender and victim always has moral significance: the
offender’s moral status is lowered, while the moral status of the victims is raised
(Campbell and Manning, 2014: 692). Campbell and Manning, along with Andrighetto
et al. (2012) and Black (1998), refer to the existence of a ‘competitive victimhood’, a
‘kind of moral polarisation that increases with the social distance between the disputants
and partisanship’ (Campbell and Manning, 2014: 708).
In the same light, Chouliaraki (2021: 20) argues the premises upon which victimhood
is claimed nowadays are being transformed in digital culture through ‘the platformiza-
tion of pain’, which is reorganising the terms of how and who can claim to be suffering.
These narratives of pain shared through online means, Chouliaraki (2021) argues, are
further detached from its conditions of existence due to its anonymity and asynchronic-
ity, which leads to further dismantling of the binary sufferer/perpetrator.
This latter point has also been explored by Fazili (2016), who has coined his concept of
regimes of victimhood to refer to the way power is exercised by the ruling class by present-
ing themselves as victims in the present, but also as having been victims in the past, through
their ancestors. This, Fazili (2016) argues, promotes a ‘culture of victimhood’ that benefits
those in power through which the status quo is maintained and inequalities amplified.
Consequently, the regime of victimhood that Fazili explains is articulated by the majoritar-
ian and thus privileged (in different degrees) part of society, such as Hindu nationalists in
India or white men in the United States. Regimes of victimhood appear hence as serving
political purposes, being contextually bound and evolving historically.

4 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)
In this article, we build on these conceptualisations about victimhood to understand
how claims to victimhood made by antifeminist men can contribute to political disman-
tling of feminism. In particular, we find the idea of regimes of victimhood useful inas-
much as it enables us to comprehend how the articulation of victimhood in the manosphere
can serve political intents. However, to understand the production of moral virtue associ-
ated with victimhood and its implications in antifeminist politics, we believe a reconcep-
tualisation is needed, thus we propose the idea of regime of male victimhood instead,
drawing on the existing literature exploring male suffering and victimhood.
White male victimhood
The claim to victimhood by certain white men in the public sphere has been emphasised
by many scholars exploring the fascist alt-right (Bebout, 2020; Boehme and Scott, 2020;
Crociani-Windland and Yates, 2020) and the manosphere (Hopton and Langer, 2021;
Krendel, 2020; Marwick and Caplan, 2018). The casting of men as victims is the result of
contemporary debates of the so-called ‘crisis of masculinity’. This alleged crisis is
prompted by an ever-changing environment where traditional masculine industrial labour
is being eroded, also accentuated by the feminisation of the labour market as a result of
globalisation (McDowell, 2009). Discourses of the crisis of masculinity hence position
feminism and progressive gender and social politics as threatening the traditional organi-
sation of society that secures male hegemony (Wojnicka, 2021).
The issue of white male victimisation has been intensified as a consequence of the
#MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter movements, which seek to denounce how structural
misogyny and racism shape nowadays social relations. As more women and ethnic minori-
ties share their indignation against systematic discrimination, an increasing number of
threatened men, have started to enact their own response which consists on an appropria-
tion of discourses of oppression to assert their own victimhood as the only real one (Hopton
and Langer, 2021; Rothermel, 2020). In her work, Banet-Weiser (2021) explores how the
self-victimisation that men accused of sexual harassment engage in works to position them
as figures of authority who tell the factual truth about what really happened, therefore ren-
dering all other accounts inadmissible and untruthful. This, consequently, feeds the belief
shared across subcultures in the manosphere of false allegations of abuse by women.
Enquiring about the power relations that shape claims to victimhood, Chouliaraki
describes the affective politics of vulnerability. In her work, she conceptualises victimhood
as ‘a structure of affective communication that renders our public conversations a terrain of
struggle over competing claims to suffering and their communities of recognition’
(Chouliaraki, 2021: 12). In this regard, being able to claim victimhood grants the claimant
the moral value given to the vulnerable and social esteem, shaping the person ‘as a public
figure of suffering that produces political effects of recognition’ (p. 12). This recognition is
conferred to men in the manosphere by other inhabitants of these spaces, as they share
beliefs and support each other through their process of enlightenment to the dark truths of
reality as a result of swallowing the Red Pill.
Redpilled awakening: victims in the manosphere. Despite the diversity of the
manosphere, the starting point that threads the different masculinist communities, their vic-
timhood and anti-feminism is the ideology of the Red Pill. The Red Pill ideology is an

García Mingo and Díaz Fernández 5
analogy from the 1999 film The Matrix, where the protagonist Neo is given the choice
between taking a Blue Pill, meaning living a deluded life, and a Red Pill, meaning becoming
aware of reality. This reality is described in the manosphere as gynocentrism, which refers
to a society that privileges women in a structural and systematic way and relegates men to a
position of subordination and socio-economic submission. This fuels the feeling across
manospheric spaces of being hard done by society, but particularly by women who, know-
ing the alleged power they possess in gynocentric societies, exploit it to subjugate men.
Consequently, the Red Pill is presented as a revealing process in masculine thought
that aims to awaken men from the feminist misandric nightmare and its brainwashing
(Ging, 2019). In this regard, the act of redpilling awakening functions as an argumenta-
tive mechanism that serves the purpose to claim victimhood from the political stand-
point of vulnerability in the face of feminist oppression. The Red Pill, hence, emerges
as an adhesive element, creating a cohesion between communities and a common belief
system that produces feelings of belonging and support from which claims to victim-
hood are articulated, resulting in the (re)production of a misogyny network (Banet-
Weiser and Miltner, 2016; Bratich and Banet-Weiser, 2019; Ging, 2019).
Affective victimhood in the manosphere
While feminism in Spain has become an institutionalised organisation with a large
budget and capacity to promote feminist laws,1 mobilise thousands of people and become
an identitary core for many Spanish women, antifeminism remains a disorganised, vola-
tile and amorphous movement that has found an optimal sphere to (re)emerge within
digital spaces, proclaiming itself as countercultural and subversive.
Despite the homogeneity of the Spanish manosphere, all its communities share the
desire to reaffirm a particular vision of masculinity that is in conflict with feminist ideals
and the changes that have occurred in the traditional gender system (Kimmel, 2018;
Messner, 1998). Throughout our ethnographic work within the Spanish manosphere, its
affective dimension became evident, as we were able to identify it as the glue that bonded
the men and subcultures therein (authors, forthcoming). We believe that the affective
dimension of the manosphere affords the possibility of finding comfort, creating bonds
and weaving affective tissues between men. This is pivotal as this affectivity provides the
bridge for turning the personal into political, therefore gaining real potential for political
transformation. In this sense, Papacharissi (2015: 95) argues ‘[i]t is in these affective
gestures of performativity that the casual, everyday political resides’. Hence, the claims
to victimhood and the performance of wounded identities are what fuel the latent politi-
cal inclinations and organisation among the men in the manosphere.
In this work, we approach the concept of affect through a feminist lens. This entails
recognising that affect is embroiled in the reproduction of gender relations of power,
therefore understanding its socio-cultural and contextual characteristics (Ahmed, 2014
[2004]). We therefore conceptualise affect as overlapping with social discourses, struc-
tures and political hierarchies. Following this, we argue affect is not only deeply political,
but it is also underpinned by specific political purposes. Ahmed (2014 (2004)) states that
pain as affect can have a marked political dimension. Hence, stories of pain and suffering,
of victimhood, can be commodified, more or less successfully, depending on which sto-
ries are told, as not all have equal value. This, Ahmed (2014 (2004): 32) argues, is what

6 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)
makes them ‘crucial mechanisms for the distribution of power’. Furthering her theorisa-
tion, Ahmed (2014 (2004) explains her idea of ‘wound fetishism’, to describe how pain is
transformed into a quantifiable commodity, assuming that all forms of injury are equiva-
lent. She argues that it is the production of this equivalence, which enables injury to
become an entitlement, particularly of those privileged normative subjects. In this regard,
injury is transformed into an entitlement that works to secure privilege and to construct
ideologically structured claims to victimhood. Men in the manosphere therefore adopt a
victim identity, which motivates their fantasies of revenge and violence against those
considered responsible for making them victims: women (Blommaert, 2018). Regarding
this, the manosphere can be understood as an already affective environment where men
first arrive to look for answers and validation for their misogynistic ideas, and second,
eventually stay and become regulars, as they find in manospheric spaces a shelter to vent
their frustration on issues related to gender equality and feminism.
Data and methods
Our study was conducted through a digital ethnography focussed on the Spanish mano-
sphere and the variety of subcultures that inhabit it: Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW),
incels, pick-up artist, YouTubers and Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs). We kicked off our
ethnography targeting these groups across a multiplicity of social platforms, conducting
thus a multi platform digital ethnography, defined by Udovicich and Zanotti (2017: 1) as a
type of digital ethnography that focusses on online exchanges and observes multi-platform
interactions.
Our multi-platform digital ethnography was conducted by five local digital ethnographers dur-
ing 6 months in 2021 in many online environments of the manosphere, including forums, websites,
imageboards, Facebook groups, as well as Telegram, YouTube and Twitch channels and Instagram
and Twitter accounts. We conducted our digital ethnography under the logic of the EMIC approach,
as we do participant observation as participants do: we follow the accounts, connect to Twitch con-
nections, watch the videos in YouTube and so on. We have collected digital field notes in a collec-
tive field book and downloaded digital artefacts produced by the members or content producers,
including hashtags, memes, GIFs, posts, account profiles, videos, photos and so on.
Due to our ethnographic approach, we aimed to explore not only the different groups that
form the Spanish manosphere, but also their interrelatedness, social dynamics and network-
ing engagement (Noy, 2008). In doing this, our sample for ethnographic work indirectly
informed us of other manospheric groups and profiles that we could incorporate into our
focus. This proved to be beneficial for the purpose of the work as it allowed us to access dif-
ficult to find groups (Pelto, 2013) and observe the relations between different actors and the
ways they created a manospheric community based on claims to victimhood.
We selected the observation contexts following three criteria: (1) their impact and public
influence (e.g. number of followers); (2) their commitment with the production of mano-
spheric contents (e.g. their frequency of posting – multiple posts on a daily/weekly basis) and
(3) their capacity for community building within the manosphere, referring to their engage-
ment with other manospheric groups (e.g. through direct responses, likes, retweets, linked
content, features in websites or videos). All the accounts, groups and channels are central in
the Spanish manosphere in terms of number of members or followers, posting of content and
engagement in debates in relation to feminism and antifeminism.

García Mingo and Díaz Fernández 7
We conducted our observation on six platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram,
Telegram, YouTube and Twitch), four websites and one web forum, and we collected all
sorts of digital data, depending on the nature and affordances of the platforms, including
digital visual data (videos, streamings, photos, memes), textual data (posts, tweets, threads,
web entries, messages) and comments in platforms where interaction is in the vernacular
(Facebook, YouTube and Twitter). We include a detailed revision of the observation con-
texts and the type of data we collected (Figure 1):
Manosphere
Subculture
Platforms Observation context Type of data collected
Spanish
MGTOWs
Twitter,
Facebook
Twitter accounts:
@ElVarónSalvaje
@CaraBMGTOW3.0
@PatriciaMGTOW3.0
@MGTowHI
Telegram: MGTOW ESPAIN
Instagram: @mgtowspain
Twitter: tweets and threads
Facebook: posts,
comments and photos
Instagram: posts and
comments
Spanish
INCELs
Web forum Webforum: Blackpill.es Forum entries
Spanish
PUAs
Youtube,
personal
websites,
Telegram
YouTube channels: Alvaro
Reyes, Mario Luna
Telegram Channel: Academia
del Sexo
Websites: www.
comunidadredpill.com
Youtube: videos and
comments
Telegram: messages
Websites: posts
Spanish
MRAs
Twitter,
Facebook,
websites
Twitter accounts: @grisa
@danieljimenez @jemahuja
Websites:
www.
hombresgeneroydebatecritico.
wordpress.com
www.malostratofalsos.com
www.papamaravilla.com
Facebook groups: Stop
Feminazis and Movimientos
por los Derechos del Hombre
Twitter: tweets, thread and
pinned tweets
Websites: entries, ads,
claims and memes
Facebook: posts,
comments and memes
Spanish
Youtubers
Youtube,
Twitter, Twitch
Youtubers / Twitchers: Roma
Gallardo, Libertad y lo que
Surja, Roberto Vaquero, Un
tío Blanco Hetero
Youtube: videos and
comments
Figure 1. Contexts and data collected during multi-platform digital ethnography.
Source: Elaborated by the authors.

8 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)
Although we consider digital ethnography to be the best social research method to
answer our research questions, we acknowledge that it has limitations. Some of these
limitations are the volatility, ephemerality and vastness of digital data (Airoldi, 2019;
Rotman et al., 2012). Some of the accounts that we follow during our fieldwork at any
point can become private, banned or deleted, therefore hindering its access, and the ever-
changing hashtag landscape, which transforms and multiplies to more accurately repre-
sent the ideas and identities of those who inhabit it. We also ran into the problem of
vastness of data while doing what Rotman et al. (2012) have coined ‘extreme ethnogra-
phy’; however, we managed to organise the data following the logic of manospheric
subcultures and assigning one researcher for each subculture.
We would also like to acknowledge three ethical dilemmas we endured while con-
ducting ethnographic research in misogynistic environments: (1) the dilemma of digital
data privacy; (2) the dilemma of toxicity for researchers and (3) the dilemma of analyti-
cal honesty. To address these, we have taken into account the orientations of the Code of
Ethics of the International Sociological Association and the Ethical Guidelines 3.0
Association of Internet Researchers.
To solve the dilemma of digital data privacy, we decided to use only data that are
publicly accessible, thus not contemplating data that were private, for example, in closed
Facebook groups or protected social media accounts.
With regard to the dilemma of toxicity for researchers of Internet environments and
the e-bile of the manosphere, we decided to integrate self-care practices, such as debrief-
ing exercises and establishing clear boundaries concerning our right to switch off.
Finally, to address the dilemma of analytical honesty we incorporated a theoretical and
empirical triangulation with other researchers, sharing results with our male colleagues to
explore different viewpoints and avoid tunnel vision (Pitre and Kushner, 2015).
Articulating male victimhood in the Spanish manosphere
We find Fazili’s (2016) idea of regimes of victimhood useful as it enables us to explore
how claims to victimhood are made. In his conceptualisation, Fazili (2016: 20) divides
victimhood into three possible states: (1) the experience of having been victimised; (2) a
stance adopted seeking restitution based on the claim of having been victimised or
deprived of status that the claimants feel entitled to and (3) the presentation of the self to
the wider society so as to bolster the moral image of the claimants and to discredit the
group against which the claims are made.
Within the Spanish manosphere, we find examples of these three ways to claim victim-
hood, which, altogether, create a vernacular regime of male victimhood that is articulated
through argumentative mechanisms. To develop this regime of male victimhood, we have
worked with an analytical proposal based on a holistic approach that considers first, the com-
plexity of what victimhood entails; second, the philosophical ideas that underpin claims to it
and, third, the roles that the different actors have in the manosphere and the diverse mediated
forms through which male victimhood is performed. Following this proposal, we find a
regime of male victimhood that is composed of an approach to victimhood as an experience,
as a stance and as an antifeminist self-presentation in the manosphere. These approaches are
complementary to each other and are underpinned by narratives of pain that are mobilised

García Mingo and Díaz Fernández 9
thanks to specific argumentative mechanisms that allow for the politicisation of victimhood
claims. Victimhood as an experience: abused men and wounded fathers
Some key actors of the Spanish manosphere, such as the Fathers’ Rights Activists,
men victims and battered men, claim victimhood from their own experience as victims.
It is the case of the association Silenciados in Spain, a group of men activists that have
produced a documentary about male victims of partner abuse from women in Spain
called ‘Silenced, when the abused are them (the men)’. The film has received more than
180,000 times and has been reviewed by a renowned Spanish antifeminist YouTuber
called Un Tío Blanco Hetero (A White Hetero Guy) who has more than 400,000 sub-
scribers (Figure 2). Another pertinent example is the Spanish national association of
fathers’ rights called Asociación de Hombres Maltratados (Association of Battered
Men), which helps men fight against false accusations and loss of child custody after
divorce through their web, Twitter account and public contact number.
Men of the Asociación de Hombres Maltratados have the highest symbolic capital
in the regime of male victimhood of the Spanish manosphere. Due to this, they also do
important legitimising work therein, as they act as a synecdoche of male suffering and
real victims of an unfair system that is allegedly rigged against men. Some of these
actors, such as salient Fathers’ Rights Activists, also play a crucial role as ideologues
of the manosphere and have a very high capacity to articulate the manospheric affec-
tive mesh.
We identify two main philosophical principles underpinning this approach to victim-
hood: first, the idea of male disposability and, second, the conception of a ruling misan-
dry in contemporary Spanish society. Male disposability refers to society’s tendency to
have less concern for the safety and well-being of men. Originally proposed by Warren
Farrell (1993) in the 1990s, it is often found in blogs where Spanish MRAs lecture on the
basis of contemporary men’s discrimination. It is also common to find in these digital
sites accusations that portray feminist women of being man-hating and biased interpreta-
tions of public policies addressed to eradicate gender-based violence as an authoritative
ruling that is institutionalising misandry.
Figure 2. Poster of the documentary film ‘Silenced, when the abused are them (the
men)’ available on YouTube and caption of a video made by the Spanish YouTuber
Un Tío Blanco Hetero recommending and discussing the film.

10 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)
Fathers’ Rights Activists and mobilised male victims use specific mediated forms to
pose their claims in the digital web which, according to their high following, are rather
successful. Consequently, their symbolic capital and political potential both within and
outside of the manospheric realms is growing. In fact, their role is very often described
as content creators, opinion leaders and ‘wise men’ of the manosphere.
Their prominence in these spaces is the reason why they use professional-looking
personal websites and have YouTube, Twitch and Twitter channels and accounts where
they use their real names and their own personal experiences to reach out to men and
spread their ‘expertise’. A notable example in the Spanish manosphere is Papa Maravilla
(Wonder Dad), a Spanish man who lost the right to custody after divorcing his ex-wife.
This motivated him to become an activist against the national regulations against gender-
based violence since, in his view, they are designed to discriminate against men. Papa
Maravilla has a high profile in the manosphere: he has published two books about his life
story, owns his own personal website and produces regular content for his YouTube
channel, where he interviews other wounded fathers, right-wing politicians and MRAs to
share their experiences of wound and articulate their male victimhood.
Taking this into account, we can argue that victimhood as an experience is construed
through personal accounts, where the men deem themselves real victims of discrimina-
tory practices due to a perceived social misandry. This differs, although complements,
the claims to victimhood as a stance to which we turn below.
Victimhood as a stance: redpillers and blackpillers
Spanish Incels, MGTOWs and other Red Pill communities also articulate claims to vic-
timhood, but in their case, it is a rather a stance towards all issues related to men and
masculinity. They adopt a victim identity based on two shared ideas: (1) the existence of
a female ‘hypergamy’ – a concept that describes women’s ‘natural’ desire to only seek a
sexual partner of a higher social status and (2) the ‘socio-sexual hierarchy’, a concept
coined by the writer Vox Day, which consists of separating men into archetypal catego-
ries and is used to describe how men and women interact (Zuckerberg, 2019). According
to this logic, there is a pyramidal stratifying system where certain men who remain at the
base are the ultimate victims of modern gynocentric societies (Rothermel, 2020). Thus,
men who share these beliefs have a very negative and misogynistic perception of women,
seeing them as manipulative beings who only seek to take advantage of men for their
own personal benefits. As part of our digital ethnographic work, we have found these
ideas on two Spanish Black Pill and Red Pill communities: esBlackpill and Comunidad
Red Pill.
These groups do not enjoy a prominence within the manosphere, as they remain rather
peripheral within these spaces. Instead, men who inhabit these spaces are focussed on the
creation of affective male communities on the basis of ‘aggrieved manhood’ (Ging,
2019: 1). At the foundation of their exchange of antifeminist content is the shared notion
that feminism and its public policies persecute and criminalise men. This key idea is
accompanied by a narrative of male suffering associated with a feeling of loss of rights
and nostalgia for the bygone times governed by the traditional gender system where men
ruled and women were seen and treated as masculine property.

García Mingo and Díaz Fernández 11
These online communities rely on anonymity, slogans and platform vernaculars, and are
most often hosted in huge online forums and imageboards, such as Forocoches and
Hispachan, the two biggest communities of the Spanish-speaking manosphere. Forocoches
is an online discussion platform and the second largest Spanish-speaking forum in the
world with an estimated 310,000 active accounts and is known to be a macho chauvinist
digital place. Hispachan is an imageboard for Spanish speakers modelled after 2chan and
4chan created by an anonymous leader called Zeta.
In these digital spaces, we find claims to victimhood that are an articulated defence
strategy against the challenge posed by feminism and women. Considering this, vic-
timhood as a stance can be understood as not only enabling the construction of victim-
hood based on personal narratives, but also fostering vengeance-seeking attitudes
against women by engaging in heavily misogynistic behaviour (e.g. sexist name-call-
ing, deeming of women as inherent manipulators and hypergamists) and performing a
disinhibited masculinity. In this regard, Johannsen (2021: 73) explains male victim-
hood in the manosphere is not constructed through powerlessness, but rather, through
dis/inhibition and ‘fantasies of strength and agency’. This explains the recurring
homosocial surveillance practices of masculinity that take place in the manosphere and
which are aimed at monitoring men’s ascription to specific masculine patterns and
performance of misogynistic conducts. For example, in Forocoches it is common to
use the term TDS_PTS (All Whores) to refer to women in general or the insult mangina
(man with a vagina) and allies to revile men who identify as feminists or in favour of
gender equality. Through this specific terminology, men supervise each other and keep
their performance of masculine wounded identities aligned with their stance against
feminism and women which ultimately they aim to dismantle through their anti-femi-
nist presentation of self, culminating in their goal of restoring masculine authority.
Victimhood as a presentation of self: antifeminist
YouTubers, Twitters and Twitchers
In our work we identified a third approach to male victimhood, where the claim to victim-
hood is not grounded in the experience of suffering or built on their anti-feminist stance,
but rather, on a presentation of the self that aims to discredit the group against which the
claims are made. In this case, we state these groups engage in an articulation of victimhood
that has the specific goal of dismantling feminist claims and rendering them meaningless.
The latent motivation of these actors is to unveil to the wider public the existence of gyno-
centric societies dominated by an authoritarian feminism. The underpinning philosophy of
this approach to victimhood is the juxtaposition of the awakening to the existence of a gyno-
centric system that oppresses men in Western societies – the ‘Red Pill’ philosophy – with the
pride of fighting a cultural war against ‘social justice warriors’ and other forms of ‘political
correctness’ that they perceive as threats to freedom of expression (Ging, 2019: 15).
This is the case of many Twitter, Telegram and Instagram users who create accounts
to expose and spread facts about male suffering, denounce feminist ‘atrocities’ and create
and disseminate anti-feminist memes. These groups are mainly interested in creating
digital noise, engaging in memetic wars and contributing to gendertrolling actions

12 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)
through the creation of Twitter threads, the commitment in memetic wars and the self-
dedication to ‘shitposting’.
Examples of these strategies can be found in three Spanish accounts dedicated to
creating and compiling antifeminist memes that we explored in our ethnographic work:
the @AntiFemiMemes account on Twitter, the @fakeminismo account on Instagram and
the Feminismo es Cáncer (Feminism is Cancer) collaborative channel on Telegram. In
our research, we analysed more than 800 posts on these accounts to identify the recurring
themes disseminated in the manosphere and the role that memetic wars play in the ideo-
logical work of the culture war against feminism (authors, forthcoming). We recognise
memes, due to their simplicity and a comical appropriation of institutional feminist lan-
guage, are able to condense the postulates of the manosphere through the use of humour,
the disappearance of authorship and the decontextualisation of the claims. In doing this,
claims to victimhood adopt a more playful look, which is pivotal in their spreading of
entertaining content. Despite this humorous tone, victimhood is claimed and narratives
of suffering mediated and disseminated.
Through our ethnographic work, we have identified three specific ways through which
victimhood is articulated in the manosphere: first, as experience through personal stories,
second, as a stance through vindictive behaviour and, third, as a presentation of the self,
through engagement in feminist dismantling techniques. The complementarity of these
techniques helps configure the regimes of male victimhood which, in turn, contribute to
disseminating pain in the platform.
Pain in the platform: argumentative mechanisms of male
victimisation
Through our exploration of the different approaches to victimhood within our local mano-
sphere, we identified specific argumentative mechanisms through which victimhood is
claimed and politicised. To develop our thinking further, we draw on what Chouliaraki
(2021) calls the ‘platformization of pain’, meaning, the claim to victimhood through nar-
ratives of pain that are shared online through platform affordances such as threads, meme
creation or news posting. We argue pain in the platform is articulated through argumenta-
tive mechanisms that enable men to ground their victim stance in a politicised way and
reassert their masculine authority. From our analysis, and building on Chouliaraki’s
(2021) work, we conclude that four argumentative mechanisms of male victimisation can
be found within the Spanish manosphere: (1) the separation of victimhood from structural
reality; (2) the severing of victimhood from its context; (3) the inversion of the roles of
victim and perpetrator and (4) the dismantling of the binary of sufferer/perpetrator.
An example of the first mechanism, consisting of the separation of claims to victim-
hood from their structural reality, are the memes created and commented on by the author
of the blog Hombres, género y debate crítico – La otra perspectiva de género (Men,
gender and critical debate – The other gender perspective), a Spanish MRA known as a
polymath of the situation of men around the world. In his website, he harbours a collec-
tion of 51 of his own memes that denounce the invisibility of male discrimination and
male suffering ‘providing the necessary sources for those who want to delve deeper into
the matter’ (Figure 3).2 This collection of memes, which includes examples of atrocities

García Mingo and Díaz Fernández 13
committed against men all over the world (e.g. male forced militia recruitment in
Colombia, executions of homosexual men in Iran and male rape victims in DRCongo)
are disseminated under the rubric ‘But it is not a gender problem’.
Although it could be argued that his work does give an account of male problems, it
also creates a fallacy, inasmuch as the gender approach consists precisely of being aware
of the specific impact of social phenomena across genders. Presenting men as the ulti-
mate victims, whose experience of victimisation has been suppressed by feminism, shad-
ows the fact that, first, men are victimised mainly by male perpetrators, and second, this
abuse against men occurs as a result of patriarchal societies, which exert pressure on men
to perform acceptable masculine identities based on hegemonic notions of stoicism,
strength and resilience, a point that has been stressed ad nauseam by feminists.
The second mechanism, which consists of separating the claims to victimhood from
their contextual reality, is present across different subcultures of the manosphere. A perti-
nent example is the case of Twitter user @grisasexual, an anonymous Spanish MRA who
uses his Twitter and TikTok accounts, YouTube channel and a personal blog to create what
he calls the ‘almost definitive library against the arguments of feminism’ (Figure 4). This
entails a compilation of articles, videos and scientific studies that allegedly dismantle
feminist ideas. Mostly active in Twitter, he daily shares scientific articles and figures that
help to dismantle feminist arguments using the Twitter affordance of threads to make
points and share valuable data.
The most problematic mechanism of claiming victimhood we have identified is the third,
referring to the inversion of the roles of victim and perpetrator, introduced by Chouliaraki
(2021). While doing participant observation in Red Pill and MRA communities hosted in
Facebook groups, we observed that in these spaces, women are often portrayed as perpetra-
tors of sexual violence and partner abuse, while men are recurringly depicted as innocent. In
the Facebook group called Movimiento Por Los Derechos Del Hombre (Movement for
Man’s Rights), followed by more than 44,904 people, we found the third mechanism to be
most prominent (Figure 5). The way the ‘role reversal’ between victims and perpetrators in
Figure 3. Two memes from the collection of 51 memes created by the Spanish MRA
Daniel Jimenez denouncing that feminism does not consider men’s suffering and
experience of discrimination to be a gender problem.

14 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)
this Facebook group is carried out is through the constant publication of digital newspaper
news of acquittals of male perpetrators of violence and news about violence (kidnapping,
murder, battering) in which the culprit is a woman. The appalling flow of news and figures
about female perpetrators produces a very effective distortion, supported by the depiction of
women as murderers hiding behind the appearance of ‘beings of light’, with feminist women
portrayed through tropes of insane and incapable women, using manospheric insults such as
‘feminazi’ and ‘mysandric’.
Building on the third mechanism, a fourth was recognised, whose main objective is to
present men as victims: the complete dismantlement of the binary sufferer/perpetrator.
We believe this to be a more sophisticated mechanism, because in a system in which
there are no victims, there is no need for victim-oriented public policies. This mechanism
becomes evident in their defence of the mantra that ‘violence has no gender’. By remov-
ing the gender dimension of gender violence, they depoliticise the question of violence
from a feminist standpoint. The idea that ‘violence has no gender’ – repeated in posts,
tweets, memes, websites – is the main line of the rationale of many actors of the Spanish
manosphere and constitutes an example of the political appropriation of the ideas of the
manosphere in our political scenario.
Conclusion
In this work, we have tried to elucidate the existing regime of male victimhood in the
Spanish manosphere, which takes place in the context of ‘competitive victimhood’
(Campbell and Manning, 2014) and a social polarisation, where there is no middle ground.
In the last few years, ideological dichotomisation in Spanish society has increased consid-
erably, with the upsurge of the Fourth Wave of feminism and the emergence of new right-
wing political parties grounded on traditional gender and family values.
Figure 4. Fixed Tweet by @grisa where he depicts his Twitter account as the ‘almost
definitive library against the arguments of feminism’ updated in 2022 and where
he invites users to follow to his personal blog ‘Los Mundos de Grisa’, where he
claims to do: ‘A brutal and fun critic to feminism. Feminism is cancer and olé!’.3

García Mingo and Díaz Fernández 15
In this context, polarised feminist and antifeminist positions are growing between the
Spanish youth, and victimhood occupies a central position in the digital social debate on
what has become a struggle for moral value (Venäläinen and Virkki, 2019: 1377). We
have explained how victimhood, mobilised through thick affective digital mediated prac-
tices, is highly functional for men in the manosphere, as victimhood positions enable
them to restore their masculine rational authority, inasmuch as they have the cognitive
capacity – which women do not have – to see through feminist lies and gynocentrism
thanks to the Red Pill ideology. This provides the grounds for validation of their newly
victim(ised) selves and male suffering, and legitimises in its entirety their antifeminist
and misogynistic stance.
In this conclusion, we would like to highlight a salient point of the research. We have
observed that the articulation of a regime of male victimhood in the manosphere, in addi-
tion to covering an emotional void and satisfying the need for care of men, also has an
immense potential for the politicisation of gender(ed) antifeminism. The narratives of
pain mobilised through specific argumentative mechanisms function to ground a politi-
cal stance that legitimises antifeminist sentiments across society. We argue politicised
victimhood is an effective tactic, as the argumentative mechanisms employed are seen as
‘politically correct’ and have high moral virtue associated with victimhood. Regarding
this, the emerging of mediated male victimhood in manospheric settings is accruing
moral value in an antagonistic and pro-feminist Spanish society. This is precisely what is
Figure 5. Two posts extracted from the FB Group Movimiento por los Derechos
de los Hombres (Mouvement for Men’s Rights) with news about men acquitted of
charges of gender violence.

16 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)
facilitating the echoing of antifeminist and misogynistic views among political spheres.
In turn, these ideas have found easy access to mainstream media and society in general,
which is resulting in a worryingly increasing number of people aligning with this stance.
In fact, it is surprising that a great number of women who declare themselves to have
been redpilled access antifeminism through the gate of recognising male victimhood and
male suffering (García-Mingo, Díaz Fernández and Fuentes, forthcoming).
We believe that there is an imperative need to understand how specific platformised
techniques of communication are enabling the political potential of argumentative mech-
anisms and claims to victimhood that are based on misogyny. Thus, intensifying the
analytical efforts to understand how male victimhood is claimed can be crucial in the
path to understanding how to not only undo digital misogyny, but also formulate feminist
strategies that can help us fight the politicisation of masculine victimhood mobilised
through narratives of ‘wounded men of feminism’.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/
or publication of this article: This research was conducted as a part of the project ‘Young men in
the Manosphere. Influence of masculinist digital cultures on young Spanish men’s perception of
GBSV’ funded by the Spanish non-profit Fundación de Ayuda contra la Drogadicción.
ORCID iD
Silvia Díaz Fernández https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9118-8090
Notes
1. See the aforementioned laws that are now in process of being ratified.
2. See more at: https://hombresgeneroydebatecritico.wordpress.com/2015/05/16/la-discriminacion
-masculina-en-51-memes-con-fuentes/
3. See more at: https://losmundosdegrisa.blogspot.com/2022/01/biblioteca-anti-feminista.html
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Biographical notes
Elisa García Mingo is lecturer at the Department of Sociology: Methods and Theory at
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. Her research focusses on rape culture, digital toxic
cultures and feminist cyberactivism. She is also interested in qualitative enquiry and digital social
research. She has published work in ‘Comparative Sociology’, ‘Feminist Media Studies’ and
‘Gender, Work and Organizations’. She leads a research project about online masculinities, sexual
violence and the local Spanish manosphere. She is a member of the network Postdigital Intimacies
at Coventry University.
Silvia Díaz Fernández is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellow at Carlos III University
of Madrid. In her past work, she has developed different approaches to feminist methodologies to
explore the politics of misrecognition and the affective circuits of misogyny within the context of
lad culture. Her current research interests lie on the reproduction of online masculinist subcultures
and the rise of popular anti-feminism online campaigns. She is a member of the network Postdigital
Intimacies at Coventry University. She has published work in ‘Gender, Place and Culture’,
‘Qualitative Inquiry’ and ‘Gender and Education’.