Available via license: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Content may be subject to copyright.
Półrocznik Językoznawczy Tertium. Tertium Linguistic Journal 9 (2) (2024)
www.journal.tertium.edu.pl
https://doi.org/10.7592/Tertium.2024.9.2.312
“I’m not going back to the plantation”: Metaphorical
Language Use in an Antifeminist Community
Sid Campé
Masaryk University, Czech Republic/Université de Haute-Alsace, France
sid.campe@uha.fr
Abstract
This paper explores the use and function of the sub-cultural keyword (Wierzbicka, 1996)
“plantation” in the antifeminist subreddit r/MGTOW. From a Conceptual Metaphor Theory
(Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Lakoff, 1992) starting point, this paper combines discourse analysis
and corpus-linguistics methods informed with a textual approach drawn from cultural studies
to demonstrate that members of r/MGTOW engage with plantation metaphorically to i)
discursively construct a narrative of perceived masculine oppression and ii) underline in- and
out-group divisions. Furthermore, collocational analysis of verb use shows that members
consider the plantation a physical location that one can enter or exit from; however, rather than
celebrating those “leaving”, members primarily select verbs that indicate the possibility of
returning to the plantation, thereby emphasizing threats to individual members to ensure
cohesion. This paper contributes to the developing scholarly investigations of manosphere
communities by exploring a little-studied group from a previously unexplored, metaphorical-
language use perspective.
Keywords: manosphere, MGTOW, discourse analysis, Conceptual Metaphor Theory.
Streszczenie
„Nie wracam na plantację”. Metaforyczne użycie języka w społeczności antyfeministycznej.
W tym artykule zbadano użycie i funkcję subkulturowego słowa kluczowego (Wierzbicka, 1996)
„plantacja” w antyfeministycznej grupie subreddit r/MGTOW. Wychodząc od teorii metafory
pojęciowej (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Lakoff, 1992), artykuł ten łączy analizę dyskursu i metody
językoznawstwa korpusowego uzupełnione o podejście tekstowe oparte o studia kulturowe, aby
wykazać, że członkowie r/MGTOW w sposób metaforyczny angażują się w „plantację,” aby i)
dyskursywnie konstruować narrację o męskiej opresji i ii) podkreślać podziały wewnątrz i na
zewnątrz grupy. Ponadto analiza frazeologiczna użycia czasowników pokazuje, że członkowie
uważają „plantację” za fizyczną lokalizację, do której można wejść lub z której można wyjść;
jednak zamiast cieszyć się z czyjegoś „odchodzenia” z niej, członkowie wybierają przede
wszystkim takie czasowniki, które wskazują na możliwość powrotu na plantację, podkreślając
w ten sposób zagrożenia dla poszczególnych członków, aby zapewnić grupie spójność. Niniejszy
artykuł stanowi wkład w rozwój badań naukowych nad społecznościami manosfery poprzez
Półrocznik Językoznawczy Tertium. Tertium Linguistic Journal 9 (2) (2024) 158
www.journal.tertium.edu.pl
analizę metaforycznego użycia języka słabo zbadanej grupy z dotychczas niezbadanej
perspektywy.
Słowa kluczowe: manosfera, MGTOW, analiza dyskursu, teoria metafory pojęciowej.
1. Introduction
This paper examines how the sub-cultural keyword plantation is used by the male separatist
group Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) on content aggregator and discussion site Reddit.
Due to the technological affordances of the platform and the nature of geek masculinity (see
Massanari, 2015; 2019), Reddit has been identified as an important nexus for manosphere
communities. Though initially developing in a North American context (Bates, 2020), MGTOW
has now spread outside of purely Anglophone communication spaces. Localized groups
communicate in their own native languages while still utilizing the idiosyncratic anglophone
terminology first developed on initial MGTOW platforms, developing a global type of “popular
misogyny” that reinforces hegemonic masculinity in online spaces; as discussed by Górska et
al. (2023), close study of manosphere platforms such as MGTOW is necessary in understanding
how online spaces affect offline political, social, and power relations in order to fully address
online male supremacism (Fugardi, 2023).
1.1. The online manosphere, MGTOW, and the offline world
The ‘manosphere’ is a loosely connected polycentric network of antifeminist forums, groups,
and platforms that broadly discuss men and masculinities, generally positioning themselves in
opposition to feminism. One of the most popular platforms that manosphere groups gathered on
was Reddit; these groups include Pick Up Artists (PUAs), who share tips and tricks to seduce
women through ‘game’; Involuntary Celibates (Incels) who believe they are genetically unfit
for sexual and emotional relationships with women, and Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) who
discuss political issues faced by men. Another of these groups is Men Going Their Own Way
(MGTOW). Though MGTOW has been identified as one of the fastest growing manosphere
groups overall and had the largest membership of any manosphere-related group on Reddit, it
remains relatively understudied in comparison to PUAs or Incels. A brief overview of MGTOW
ideology and history follows.
MGTOW members fundamentally advocate for a complete separation of men from western
society, deeming any interaction with women (or men outside of MGTOW) as hazardous (Lin,
Półrocznik Językoznawczy Tertium. Tertium Linguistic Journal 9 (2) (2024) 159
www.journal.tertium.edu.pl
2017). This notably extends to long-term relationships (often abbreviated as “LTR”), which are
seen as leading to marriage and, inevitably, divorce, at which point a complicit judicial system
drains men financially to the benefit of women (Aiston, 2023). This view of societal structures
inverts the patriarchal structure that feminist scholars argue for, instead describing a historic
“gynocracy” (Ging, 2017) where it is men that are exploited by women. To protect themselves
from this perceived exploitation, MGTOW members are encouraged to slowly isolate
themselves and to only interact with other “brothers” on MGTOW-labeled platforms.
The MGTOW network has been active since at least 2006, when the earliest traces of its
logo and moniker can be found. Community folklore attests for an earlier founding in a Men’s
Rights Activist-associated chat group, an argument attested to by Solaris, one of the group’s
first main figureheads (AVFM, 2012); there therefore exists a strong link between MGTOW
and the older MRA movement. As a network, MGTOW is a dispersed, polycentric discourse
community spread over many different platforms and forums, one of the most popular of which
was r/MGTOW, the group’s subreddit on Reddit. Reddit is an unusually active hotbed for
manosphere discourse, mainly due to the interplay between the site’s affordances and the
particular type of “geek masculinity” that the site’s culture valorizes (Massanari, 2015, 128-
129). Though the MGTOW subreddit, r/MGTOW, was not popular at first, it quickly grew and
by 2016 was the primary site of member interactions within the MGTOW network. From 2016
on, r/MGTOW’s membership increased exponentially (Wright, et. al, 2020), purportedly
exerting influence outside of the virtual platforms it resided on. Laura Bates, for instance, asserts
that the prevalence of the “Mike Pence Rule” following the rise of #MeToo on X (formerly
Twitter) was indicative of the application of a core MGTOW tenet to American society (2020,
113-114), therefore reflecting a growing influence of online discourse in the real world. The
group was first quarantined
1
in 2018, before being ultimately shut down entirely by Reddit site
moderators in 2021 in reaction to the arrest of a Coast Guard lieutenant; seized chat and search
history demonstrated that the individual, described as a “dangerous domestic terrorist”, visited
r/MGTOW tens of thousands of times over a two-year period (Owen, 2020). This points to the
increasing possibility of offline violence due to activity in online MGTOW-affiliated spaces.
This “popular”, digital misogyny has extended outside of its initial context in anglophone
North American spaces with many MGTOW-affiliated virtual spaces existing all over Europe
where MGTOW concepts and terms are recontextualized into local languages for use in
1
Within Reddit, a “quarantined” subreddit is one whose content is deemed to be extremely offensive or
upsetting to the average Reddit user. Such a subreddit is no longer visible during searches, and its content will no
longer appear on the Reddit frontpage or be otherwise accessible unless a user specifically searches for it.
Półrocznik Językoznawczy Tertium. Tertium Linguistic Journal 9 (2) (2024) 160
www.journal.tertium.edu.pl
exchanges. These occurrences of MGTOW lexis do not appear to undergo any semantic change
when recontextualized for local diffusion; instead, lexemes and their associated meanings are
integrated into local discourse with no change to either. This may illustrate a type of cultural
transfer (Espagne & Werner, 1988), where shared terminology is used to create new connections
between two cultural and linguistic groups. This shared terminology then vehiculates the
ideology underpinning those terms, thereby structuring a universal order of discourse (along
Fairclough, 2003) said to apply to all men regardless of geography, culture, or time. The
possibility of offline violence related to the spread of this antifeminist discourse have not gone
unnoticed by European administrations; see, for instance, the 2023 report by the French
government’s Haut conseil à l’égalité entre les femmes et les hommes [High Counsel on the
equality of women and men] identifying the significant need for policing of virtual spaces to
combat the growing normalization of antifeminist stances in young men (HCE, 2023), or the
links identified by the UK government between the manosphere and right-wing extremism in
relation to civil unrest (Syal, 2025).
1.2. Plantation lexeme and MGTOW
The impetus for this paper was inductive, drawn from an observed prevalence of the lexeme
plantation in both American and French MGTOW platforms. This is intriguing because
plantation, within an American context, functions as a sub-cultural keyword; keywords are
“conceptual tools that reflect a society’s past experience of doing and thinking about things in
certain ways…” (Wierzbicka, 1997, p. 5). The use of the lexeme plantation may therefore be
reflective of the country’s complicated relationship with the economic system of slavery, which
is then used by r/MGTOW members to discursively construct in- and out-group identities; this
is not the case with the French context, yet the lexeme is still used within French MGTOW
groups. This points to a possible idiosyncratic use of the term specific to the MGTOW network.
This inductive reasoning was verified by McGlashan & Krendel (2024), who
demonstrated that plantation was the third most important complement keyword used within
r/MGTOW, underlining the importance of the term’s idiosyncratic use within the subreddit in
comparison to other major manosphere subreddits. Close study of the statistically significant
lexeme plantation in its primary site of development, r/MGTOW, should allow for a better
understanding of how the lexeme is used in that primary site, thereby allowing for a later
comparative study of European MGTOW platforms. Though exploration of the prevalence of
the plantation lexeme and concurrent metaphor within European MGTOW groups is outside the
Półrocznik Językoznawczy Tertium. Tertium Linguistic Journal 9 (2) (2024) 161
www.journal.tertium.edu.pl
bounds of this present article, the links between manosphere groups of differing linguistic
backgrounds has not yet been explored within the literature and is sure to be a fruitful area of
inquiry.
1.3. Scholarly work on the manosphere
Much productive work has been done on the variety of discourses within the manosphere, from
studies that analyze broader tendencies by incorporating multiple groups (Krendel, 2020;
McGlashan & Krendel, 2024) or by focusing on one specific group (Dayter & Rüdiger, 2016 on
PUAs; Wright, Trott & Jones, 2020 and Aiston, 2023 on MGTOW; Koller, 2022 on incels).
This work has been of critical importance in identifying and understand prevailing discourses at
play within the manosphere.
These articles have also underlined the importance of the lexis used by the various groups,
as well as how lexemes are both shared and yet set these groups apart. Though lexis is identified
as a point of particular importance by manosphere scholars, there has so far been little focus on
individual lexemes by themselves and what functions these lexemes fulfill within various
manosphere communities. Furthermore, there is broad agreement that certain lexemes are used
metaphorically; one oft-mentioned example is that of the “red pill”, drawn from the Matrix films
and often positioned in contrast to the “blue pill”
2
. This is a popular recurring metaphor within
the manosphere community that serves to discursively construct an in- (a “red piller”) and out-
group (“blue-pilled”)
3
.
Beyond this broad agreement, there has been little specific work on the metaphorical nature
of the lexemes used within said communities or how specific lexemes within various
manosphere communities are metaphorically used to discursively construct both social practices
and representations of social actors. Two notable exceptions are Koller’s (2022) study of how
members of r/braincels used metaphorical expressions to dehumanize potential sexual partners
and Farrell et. al (2020) on jargon and word embedding in various manosphere communities.
Koller demonstrated that incels draw on conventional source domains of animals, machines,
commodities, and violence in articulating metaphors when discussing sexual relations; this
2
Much like within the film, an individual who has integrated manosphere ideology is described as having
“taken the red pill”, whereas those who are perceived as continuing to blindly accept reality as described as having
“taken the blue pill”.
3
This is applied in multiple ways; for instance, the entirety of writings considered as “canonical” are called
“RP knowledge”; a member who has accepted these writings has “taken the RP” or is a “RPer”. The perlocutionary
effects of using such a metaphor function here function as an identity marker, broadcasting to interlocutors’
information on the speakers’ stance towards women; the use of other metaphors may fulfill similar as well as other
functions, producing different effects both on author and interlocutor.
Półrocznik Językoznawczy Tertium. Tertium Linguistic Journal 9 (2) (2024) 162
www.journal.tertium.edu.pl
points to a tendency to draw on conventional metaphors when constructing community-specific
lexemes. Farrel et al. showed that it is necessary to extract and understand the specialized
vocabulary of manosphere groups to comprehensively study the manosphere as well as the
positioning of manosphere actors in relation to each other. This paper therefore aims to address
a perceived gap in the literature by focusing on one community-specific lexeme and the
functions its metaphorical use may fulfill within it.
To do so, this article asks the following research questions:
RQ1 What is specific about the MGTOW community’s use of “plantation” and other
connected metaphors?
RQ2 Do any patterns emerge around the use of the plantation metaphor?
RQ3 What functions does using this term fulfill within the community?
Data indicates that members can discursively construct a narrative of systemic masculine
oppression by engaging with the lexeme plantation, metaphorically building an imagined space
that constricts the possibility of freedom for men as “slaves”, exploited by societal structures for
the benefit of women. This contributes to the MGTOW community’s meta-narrative and
provides justification for its central argument of the necessity of complete separation of
individual men from society.
The article will begin with a section outlining methodology, namely the application of
Conceptual Metaphor Theory, with brief discussion of relevant scholarly works. This will be
followed by a paragraph discussing other possible directions for fruitful analysis of manosphere
language production. Then, a section outlining the data collection process as well as ethical
considerations, before an extensive discussion based on the three research questions.
2. Methodology
2.1. Theoretical perspective
As outlined by Koller (2022), the dominant paradigm for the study of metaphor within
linguistics has been Conceptual Metaphor Theory or CMT (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Lakoff,
1987). Lakoff and Johnson’s theory focuses on metaphor as a unique cognitive process, rejecting
classical theories of language that see metaphor only as a feature of language. Metaphor is, they
argue, a cross-domain mapping in the conceptual system, with the metaphorical expression (a
word, phrase, or sentence) being the surface level realization of that cross-domain mapping
Półrocznik Językoznawczy Tertium. Tertium Linguistic Journal 9 (2) (2024) 163
www.journal.tertium.edu.pl
(Lakoff, 1992). This cross-domain mapping then provides structure for higher-level concepts,
permitting for the comprehension of abstract notions through systematic mapping on
experiential, real-world imageable ideas; furthermore, they can also fulfill a number of
pragmatic functions, such as extending the meaning of words via cross-domain similarity to
express novel notions (Forgács, 2022). Other scholars have taken this CMT approach further,
focusing on the relation between power, metaphor, and ideology, namely those involved in
critical metaphor analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004; Koller, 2004; Mussolf, 2004). This has been
a fruitful area of investigation that has underlined how metaphor can communicate and maintain
ideologies to reify power asymmetries. In this article, a CMT foundation is applied to analyze
the cross-domain mappings of the lexeme plantation as a surface-level realization; furthermore,
the inclusion of further, pragmatics-focused work will serve to examine the functions that the
plantation lexeme fulfills within the community
4
.
There are several different possible analytical perspectives to take up when discussing
manosphere language use. One of notable interest is to consider MGTOW discourse within the
context of broader manosphere antisociety, functioning therefore as a specific dialect of an
antilanguage (Halliday, 1978). From this view, social agents within the manosphere create an
antilanguage by giving new meanings to old worlds, creating a different vocabulary closely
linked to the activities of the manosphere’s subculture – in other words, discussions around
women and feminism. The social exchange of meaning between members therefore displays
active hostility to feminism as well as society in general. Furthermore, it is also important to
consider this manospherian antilanguage as a social practice that controls the selection of
structural possibilities, along Fairclough (2003), surrounding the discussion of women and
excluding the possibility of any equitable relationship between a man and a woman. These two
perspectives, though outside the scope of this article, are sure to be productive directions for
further inquiry.
2.2. Data & methods
This paper’s corpus consists entirely of comments drawn from r/MGTOW. Though the
subreddit was shut down and all data wiped from the site in 2021, an independent, open archive
of all posts and comments is accessible
5
. For a time, the subreddit was the most significant
manosphere group on Reddit, and by far the most active MGTOW group overall; there is
4
In alignment with conventional metaphor study methodology, from here forward, PLANTATION refers to
the metaphorical domain and plantation will refer to the surface-level lexical realization of said domain.
5
See https://theredarchive.com.
Półrocznik Językoznawczy Tertium. Tertium Linguistic Journal 9 (2) (2024) 164
www.journal.tertium.edu.pl
therefore a significant amount of naturally occurring discourse data to draw from (326,000 posts
with over 6 million comments).
However, there are several technological and pragmatic limitations that hinder full access
to data, as well as restrict our corpus to a specific date range. First, there is such a large amount
of data that the archive’s coder was obliged to establish a hard limit of 5000 viewable posts or
comments to prevent web browsers from crashing. While this may seem to be a sufficient
viewable amount, r/MGTOW after 2017 was a veritable hotbed of member discussion, and it
becomes impossible to fully access all posts and comments that were being exchanged daily.
Secondly, there was a flood of new members from r/incels after that subreddit was banned in
January 2017; these agents held different ideological stances than MGTOW members, creating
an adjustment period where local r/MGTOW moderators banned non-aligning individuals
6
. To
establish a relatively clear understanding of the initial r/MGTOW definition and use of the
plantation lexeme, the date range was limited to January through December of 2016 to take into
account the growth of membership, number of posts (with a noted 242% growth rate over
previous years), and to prevent any latent incel-oriented discourse from being present in the
data.
Within this date range, a search function was performed for all comments that contained
the plantation lexeme. This produced a total of 625 total comments, an amount too large for
qualitative analysis. The data was therefore downsampled, with 15% of each month’s comments
randomly selected for a total of 102 comments which were collated into both an excel and raw
txt document for qualitative and quantitative analysis (respectively) in three stages along the
RQs. AntConc was then used to establish general collocational patterns. Examples drawn from
the analytical process will be used to illustrate findings.
A note on demographics: Reddit users generally utilize pseudonyms, effectively masking
their true identities. It is therefore impossible to consistently ascertain geographical origin or
other demographic data, besides what users decide to actively share about themselves in their
posts and comments. It has been demonstrated, however, that the Reddit’s demographics skew
heavily towards the United States, male, white, and between the ages of 18 to 29 (Pew Research
Center, 2016; Duarte, 2024; Sattelberg, 2021). Considering both the North American origins of
MGTOW, as well as the wider demographics of Reddit and, by extension, r/MGTOW, we can
therefore consider the use of plantation within the subreddit as reflective of a culturally
6
For a wider discussion on platform migration and content moderation, see Horta Ribeiro et. al (2021).
Półrocznik Językoznawczy Tertium. Tertium Linguistic Journal 9 (2) (2024) 165
www.journal.tertium.edu.pl
motivated selection of a salient concept (i.e. slavery and its concomitant exploitative economic
structures) by North American members to structure in-group discourse.
To address any ethical issues, any examples used within this article have been anonymized
by replacing user pseudonyms with a numerical tag; additionally, any examples featuring
biographical data or references have been explicitly avoided. The wider considerations of
engaging with manosphere communities have been discussed by Rüdiger and Dayter (2017),
which has informed my approach here.
3. Findings
3.1. General metaphorical framing of the plantation lexeme
Prior to discussing the findings, it is necessary to examine the metaphorical frames concomitant
to the plantation lexeme. Firstly, at a lexical level, a “plantation” is some bound of space with
many plants, generally of one type with the purpose of cultivation. It is intrinsically tied to the
notion of the plantation system, i.e. the socioeconomic system of cash-crop agriculture that relies
on slave or forced labor (Clukey and Wells, 2016). In American English, it is conventional to
metonymically refer to the system by way of the physical space; the PLANTATION domain
can also be metaphorically drawn upon to activate notions of constraint, forced work, or control,
closely connected to the domain of SLAVERY discussed below.
The notion of forced labor, here the domain of SLAVERY, is also a relatively conventional
metaphorical domain. At a lexical level, a “slave” is someone captured, born, or sold and made
to work for little to no pay. This therefore presents multiple components: i) a loss of bodily
autonomy ii) a loss of free will and iii) unpaid extraction of labor. This in turn impacts the
metaphorical domain; SLAVERY has two primary frames, WORK and POWER with several
sub-frames, including MASTER, SLAVE, OPPRESSION, FREEDOM. It is conventional, if
not acceptable, to draw upon the domain of SLAVERY when metaphorically expressing certain
notions related to WORK, such as workload, length of work, or lack of desire to work; cases
such as “I’ve been slaving away for hours” or “My boss is a real slavedriver”. In the case of
POWER, when discussing an unequal power distribution, one can draw upon the MASTER and
SLAVE target domains; for instance, someone with a drug addiction may be “a slave to it”,
metaphorically underlining the referenced individual’s lack of resistance to a substance and
emphasizing the hold it has on them. It is therefore neither idiosyncratic nor unconventional to
Półrocznik Językoznawczy Tertium. Tertium Linguistic Journal 9 (2) (2024) 166
www.journal.tertium.edu.pl
draw upon SLAVERY (i.e. X IS A SLAVE or X IS SLAVERY) for cross-domain mapping when
attempting to apply the characteristics of the SLAVERY target domain to a source.
To fully analyze the utilization of plantation in MGTOW discourse, we must therefore take
into consideration both PLANTATION and SLAVE(RY) as they are intrinsically linked as
conventional metaphorical domains.
3.2. Local meaning of the plantation lexeme
Before discussing examples of metaphorical use, an exploration of the local meaning of
plantation as a sub-cultural keyword is necessary. McGlashan & Krendel rightly point out that
the plantation lexeme is used by members when “… men are compared to slaves on a
metaphorical plantation who are subjugated by women and institutions that are perceived as
being biased towards women (and detrimental to men; VII)” (97). However, this description
may be further developed by examining the community’s use of the term in situ and how they
can use it to position themselves in relation to others both within and without the manosphere.
For instance:
[1.1] This is why I say it's not actually women / feminism that is the plantation - they're just
[1.2] the minders on the grounds. It's the police, courts, national borders, economics that is
[1.3] the entire red pill notion of slavery / freedom. [007]
This was a reply to a post on a single father’s retelling of his negative experience with the
family court system (a frequent discussion topic in manosphere communities). Lines [1.1] and
[1.2] demonstrate the subtle differentiation made between the institutions that enact the
perceived subjugation and the women that are said to benefit from it. It is therefore not
necessarily women that are subjugating men, but rather the institutions that establish the
exploitative structures that women are purported to benefit from. This notion is consistently
expressed across the corpora, as in the following example comment, drawn from the post of a
member detailing the motivations of members in detaching from society:
[2.1] the house (society, country, govt, state, courts) is stacked against you… they run the
[2.2] plantation and they want worker bees for-fucking-ever. [054]
When other members expressed discomfort at the number of initiatives (including changing
one’s last name, not speaking with family, changing phone numbers every year, not having any
photos available online, and so on) needed to separate from society and the reasoning for these
actions, the above comment was posted as justification. Notice the metaphorical language use
in [2.1] when referencing “the house”, gambling slang for the casino or dealer, which is
Półrocznik Językoznawczy Tertium. Tertium Linguistic Journal 9 (2) (2024) 167
www.journal.tertium.edu.pl
stereotypically described as always winning; this gambling imagery is further intensified by the
idiomatic phrase “stacked against you”, which is generally applied to playing cards but here
applied to the house, which is the social system that keeps men, or “worker bees” to extract
labor from them. Of note here is the metaphorical image of “bees”; it is common knowledge
that bee hives are hierarchically organized, with a singular queen bee at the topic and many
workers below. Yet, the local definition of plantation and concomitant metaphor precludes this
type of hierarchical organization; this is a case of mixed metaphor. This will be discussed further
in the wider metaphor discussion.
Though women are denied agency in this supposed subjugation (see [1.1]), they are
discussed as somehow being aware of and actively benefiting from it through social practices
and within individual relationships (see [2.2] and corresponding discussion). For instance, in a
discussion on the impact that a mother can have on male children:
[3.1] They (n.b. women) propagate the delusion (n.b.: of marriage and family life) and keep
[3.2] them on the plantation so that the male offspring will take care of them as a backup
[3.3] plan. [091]
This indicates, as has been discussed by other scholars, the ideological volatility of
MGTOW; the seeming cognitive dissonance between discussing women as both incapable of
agency and somehow said to be actively contributing, as in [3.3], to these social structures is
present throughout the data. What this might indicate is philosophical difficulty in resolving this
point, as suggesting that women are actively oppressing men ascribes an amount of power that
an antifeminist community might deem unacceptable but suggesting that women only passively
benefit from this system is equally unacceptable. This may be indicative of the tensions
generated by hybrid masculinity discussed by Ging (2017), where notions of victimhood
uneasily share space with notions of hegemonic masculinity (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005).
In summary, though the definition discussed by McGlashan & Krendell is largely correct,
it must be further nuanced by moving the onus of purported subjugation to the institutions, as
well as further widening the net of “institutions” by including social practices betters reflects
how plantation is used within the corpus. The following definition is proposed: “the plantation
is an imagined space, a metonymy that can be metaphorically used to refer to the in-community
notion of systemic masculine oppression through institutions and social practices purported to
benefit women at the expense of men.” The notion of plantation as an imagined space, as well
as evidence from collocational data, will be further discussed below.
Półrocznik Językoznawczy Tertium. Tertium Linguistic Journal 9 (2) (2024) 168
www.journal.tertium.edu.pl
3.3. R/MGTOW’s metaphorical use of plantation
We have, to this point, used several examples drawn from our corpus to illustrate the theoretical
approach and qualitative analysis that informs our conclusions. We now turn to the most
prevalent collocations with plantation within our corpus, regardless of type, utilizing a window
span of 5L and 5R with a minimum frequency and range of 1:
Table 1. Most frequent collocations appearing in selected corpus
Collocate
FreqLR
FreqL
FreqR
Likelihood
The
165
132
33
132.490
Back
42
39
3
92.313
On
28
25
3
21.536
Leave
9
9
0
21.032
To
71
58
13
19.039
This collocational data reveals the primary understanding of plantation within r/MGTOW.
Notice first the overwhelming presence of the definite article the. Though the presence of the,
one of the most frequent nouns in the English language, is not generally noteworthy, it does here
indicate that plantation is used almost exclusively in conjunction with the definite article (i.e.
the plantation), therefore structuring it as an external system and a definite object. Back was
used purely as a verb, often in combination with to, in, or on (i.e. back to the plantation), whereas
leave was only used in combination with the noun phrase the plantation. Notice the significant
presence as well of the prepositional on and to, indicating the prevalence of spatial deixis when
using the plantation lexeme. This data indicates that plantation is more than a metaphor that can
be drawn upon when discussing abstract notions such as perceived systemic subjugation, it is
also serves as a type of imagined space that one can enter, exit, or be in, generally in connection
with the concomitant identity marker, slave (appearing 18 times in the corpus). In this sense,
PLANTATION functions as an ontological metaphor, along Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980)
definition. An ontological metaphor allows for the mapping of an abstract concept onto a more
concrete one, such as a sensorimotor experience or vivid image (Forgacs, 2022); it may also
manifest as a container metaphor, with imagined boundaries that reflect the physical boundaries
we perceive in our vision. Collocational and quantitative analysis of collected comments points
Półrocznik Językoznawczy Tertium. Tertium Linguistic Journal 9 (2) (2024) 169
www.journal.tertium.edu.pl
to the PLANTATION domain being drawn upon as a container metaphor, mainly to establish a
boundary between the in- and out-group.
It was hypothesized that members were largely using the plantation lexeme in a
metaphorical sense to draw upon the target domain PLANTATION within their discourse; this
hypothesis was confirmed, as 99 of the selected 102 comments used plantation in this sense. As
plantation is a noun, as most MGTOW members write in the first-person, and that they primarily
write in English, the most frequent collocates with plantation were expected to be verbs. Though
Table 1 demonstrates the overall tendency to reference spatial deixis through prepositional
usage, our qualitative analysis also demonstrated a significant tendency to utilize verbs
indicating movement towards (return, back) or movement from (escape, run, leave), both
frequently collocated with go and from. The two most frequently occurring verbs were go back
(to) (# = 20) and leave (# = 12); we interpret the former as underlining the threat of returning to
the plantation, and the latter as underlining the necessity of exiting the plantation.
To fully analyze the discursive tendencies at play within the comments, verb usage in the
corpus was divided into four categories in relation to spatial deixis: To (indicating movement
towards the plantation), From (indicating movement outwards the plantation), Mixed (for
occurrences where verbs that would generally indicate movement towards or outwards the
plantation were used to indicate the opposite, through negation for instance, such as in “I’m not
going back to the plantation), and None (for those uses where there was no movement in relation
to the plantation). The three comments that were not metaphorical were not taken into
consideration. This revealed the following quantities:
Table 2. Division of plantation metaphor occurrences along verbal categories in relation
to spatial deixis
Type
Quantity
Percentage
To
38
38.4
From
18
18.1-
Mixed
22
22.3
None
21
21.2-
Total
99
100%
Półrocznik Językoznawczy Tertium. Tertium Linguistic Journal 9 (2) (2024) 170
www.journal.tertium.edu.pl
Keeping in mind the container nature of PLANTATION then, members perceive it as a
fixed place from which there is movement both in and out; this movement allows for general
orientation of those who are “out” in relation to those who are “in”, with a corresponding value
judgement which also extends to syntax through the use of prepositions to underline the deictic
point that PLANTATION represents. Two examples follow:
[4.1] Few men return to the plantation once they see it for what it is. [102, italics mine]
[5.1] I think it's because we're essentially the escaped slaves, the only ones who finally got
[5.2] away from the plantation. [011, italics mine]
[5] directly attributes a type of “slave” identity to men; individuals interacting in r/MGTOW
are the “escaped slaves” who “finally got away from the plantation”, which implies that those
who have not escaped remain slaves. This is indicative of cross-domain mapping, where
MGTOW men are metaphorically framed as NOT SLAVES and non-MGTOW men as
SLAVES. Most importantly, notice the past tense verb construction got away, implying
movement outward from PLANTATION. This use of movement in or out is a reoccurring
tendency within the data, generally in conjunction with an identity statement of the type
exemplified in [5.1].
If we consider PLANTATION as a container metaphor, as the data indicates, then there is
a binary divide between those in and out of the plantation; As previously mentioned, in the data
women are perceived as benefiting from societal structures and MGTOW men position
themselves outside of said structures. There remains, however, a third group: non-MGTOW
men, which includes both other manosphere groups and men outside of the manosphere. The
data reflected a particular focus on “TradCons”
7
and PUAs, such as in the following comments:
[6.1] Exactly. As I said in the other thread, and as TFM points out at the end of this video,
[6.2] these "traditionalists" (whatever the fuck that label means) people are, in essence,
[6.3] shills for the system. Just a bunch of deployed agents trying to keep one from straying
[6.4] from the plantation. [022]
[6] is in reaction to a video posted by a popular MGTOW YouTube influencer, Turd
Flinging Monkey (still active with eighty-two thousand subscribers) on Prager U, a conservative
nonprofit that promotes perceived “traditional values” through its extensive online media
presence. Those representing the platform are described in [6.2] and [6.3] as “shills”; this term
has extensive negative prosody, portraying traditionalists as aware of the negative repercussions
7
For “Traditional Conservative”, who espouse a traditional, nuclear family based organization of society.
This is generally a pejorative term within the MGTOW network.
Półrocznik Językoznawczy Tertium. Tertium Linguistic Journal 9 (2) (2024) 171
www.journal.tertium.edu.pl
of the system yet attempting to draw men in. This is further underlined in [6.3], where military
lingo (“deployed”, “agents”) emphasizes the threat to men as well as the perceived active effort
to maintain perceived oppressive structures (“keep one from straying from the plantation”). The
inclusion of the plural noun agents may be indicative of metaphorical blending. Considering the
prevalence of the red pill metaphor drawn from The Matrix series, “agents” likely refers to the
Agents, sentient computer programs who are designed to guard against those who would reveal
the false reality portrayed in the film; the author is therefore attempting to draw parallels
between these imaginary characters and the conservative influencer through cross-domain
mapping, tightly linking plantation to widely-used The Matrix metaphor.
These previous examples were drawn from the From category; one might assume that, as a
community dedicated to each man going his own way, the majority of comments would be
functionally oriented towards this category so as to celebrate those individuals having left the
plantation. However, as indicated in Table 2, a significant number of comments are in the To
category, such as the following comments:
[7.1] The majority of women are passive supporters of feminism. And make no mistake that
[7.2] most of these anti-feminist women are just tradcons who want you to return to the
[7.3] plantation. [012, italics mine]
[8.1] Very true, in a timeline long enough Chad eventually becomes Al Bundy.
[8.2] He fucks around, eventually finds his "unicorn", gets betaized/back in the plantation
[8.3] and ends up bitter and hating his life. [098, italics mine]
[7] discusses the prevalence of anti-feminist women influencers within the manosphere,
describing them as “tradcons” who seek to surreptitiously return men by pretending to espouse
the antifeminist ideals of the manosphere; this is a further extension of the view discussed in [6]
that traditional conservatives are “shills” and “agents” that seek to drawn men back to the
plantation. [7] is reflective of the belief within the MGTOW community that any relationship
with a woman will inevitably lead to negative consequences; even a “Chad” (a label applied to
men with stereotypical masculine characteristics and who are sexually successful; more
common in incel discourse) will end up going “Al Bundy”, in other words, becoming like the
unfortunate misanthropic father figure from American sitcom Married… With Children.
[6] and [7] exemplify Table 2’s data and are reflective of the wider community tendency to
emphasize threats to the group. Our previous work on self-presentation in a set genre known as
the member introduction on another MGTOW platform revealed a tendency towards the
development of a victimization narrative [Campé, 2024 [to appear]). It was expected that this
tendency to portray oneself as a victim would continue here through an emphasis on the use of
Półrocznik Językoznawczy Tertium. Tertium Linguistic Journal 9 (2) (2024) 172
www.journal.tertium.edu.pl
verbs that indicate movement from, especially those such as fleeing which have negative
semantic prosody. The results of Table 2 indicate, however, the opposite: that there is a greater
preponderance towards the use of verbs that indicate movement to rather than from. Closer
examination reveals, however, that this movement to is coupled with verbs that underline the
risk of returning to rather than glorifying the escape from the plantation; this verb selection
suggests that MGTOW members prefer to discursively emphasize the threat of the plantation
rather than to celebrate leaving it, contributing to an intra-MGTOW network tendency to portray
themselves as victims, thereby underlining the need for social isolation.
4. Conclusion
Data and analysis have demonstrated that the sub-cultural keyword plantation is a potent
metaphor that fulfills several functions. Firstly, it separates the world into an “in-” and “out”-
group. Individuals engaging with r/MGTOW are “in” by virtue of being out of the plantation,
in counterpoint to women and other men both in and out of the manosphere. Secondly, by
engaging with PLANTATION, members portray themselves as “slaves” or “victims”. In turn,
by describing the “plantation” first as an economic system that exploits men and second as a
state of being, members can discursively construct the image of a “policed” point from which
one must extricate themselves. The space between the “in” and “out” points are populated with
opponents: women are portrayed as attempting to pull men back through societal pressures,
including relationships, marriage, and childbirth; other men, such as traditional conservative
influencers, who try to “shame” men back; and even other manosphere groups that, due to their
ideological stances, are unwitting participants in this system. MGTOW members draw upon
PLANTATION in their discourse to reflect these beliefs; in turn, when the plantation lexeme
and its connected metaphor appears in non-anglophone MGTOW groups, such as in
Francophone areas, this signals that this idea has spread beyond its original North American
through a process of cultural transfer.
By describing themselves as “slaves” that are either “trapped” or “freed” from a plantation,
members can collaboratively create the image of a hegemonic societal structure built on the
economic exploitation of men from which women benefit from and are responsible, in part, for
maintaining; this is notably applied to marriage, which is seen as a primary tool for the
subordination of men through the traditional “breadwinner” role. In doing so, MGTOW
members draw upon and recontextualize older Men’s Rights Activist discourse, establishing and
maintaining a social practice (along Fairclough, 2003, 23) that renders it structurally impossible
Półrocznik Językoznawczy Tertium. Tertium Linguistic Journal 9 (2) (2024) 173
www.journal.tertium.edu.pl
to discuss feminism and women from anything but a negative perspective. Through community-
specific lexemes like plantation which develop, through continued use, into sub-cultural
keywords, individuals can vehiculate MGTOW ideology at a global, rather than local level,
developing an international network of virtual misogyny. This virtual misogyny has, over the
past years, increasingly blurred the lines between the on- and off-line world, becoming tied to
cases of real-world violence.
Further study of individual lexemes is required in order to fully explore the granular
differences between manosphere communities. Prior works have extensively demonstrated the
importance of lexis to these communities but have largely remained higher discourse-level; this
article has attempted to demonstrate the applicability of a lower-level study by focusing on one
lexeme, plantation, and its metaphorical use. Further work studying the links between American
and European manosphere groups is necessary in order to address the growth of antifeminist
ideologies in virtual spaces.
Acknowledgements
My sincere thanks to my supervisor Prof. Jan Chovanec, who provided me with extensive,
constructive feedback that was critical to shaping this paper. I must also thank Dr. Sofia Rüdiger
for taking the precious time to discuss ethical considerations with me during the International
Society for English Linguistics’ Summer School in Freiburg in 2024.
References
Aiston, Jessica (2023) “‘Vicious, Vitriolic, Hateful And Hypocritical’: The Representation of
Feminism within the Manosphere.” Critical Discourse Studies, 21(6); 703-720.
https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2023.2257816
Bates, Laura (2020) Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists, The Truth About
Etreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All. London: Simon & Schuster.
Campé, Sid (2024) “Theorizing Genre, Narrative, and Identity in Antifeminist Forum
Introductions.” Conference proceedings of Identités et construction identitaire. Université
de Brest Occidental. Advance online publication.
Charteris-Black, Jonathan (2004) Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Półrocznik Językoznawczy Tertium. Tertium Linguistic Journal 9 (2) (2024) 174
www.journal.tertium.edu.pl
Clukey, Amy, Jeremy Wells (2016) “Plantation Modernity.” The Global South, 10(2); 1-10.
https://doi.org/10.2979/globalsouth.10.2.01
Connell, Raewyn, James W. Messerschmidt (2005) “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the
Concept.” Gender & Society, 19(6); 829-859.
Dayter, Daria, Sofia Rüdiger (2016) “Reporting from the Field: The Narrative Reconstruction
of Experience in Pick-up Artist Online Communities.” Open Linguistics, 2(1); 337-351.
https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2016-0016
Dilkes, Jane (2024) “Rule 1: Remember the Human. A Socio-Cognitive Discourse Study of a
Reddit Forum Banned for Promoting Hate Based on Identity.” Discourse & Society, 35(1);
48-65. https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265231190344
Duarte, Fabio (2024) “Reddit User Age, Gender, & Demographics (2024)”, Exploding Topics.
https://explodingtopics.com/blog/reddit-users
Espagne, Michel, Michael Werner (eds.) (1988) Transferts. Les relations interculturelles dans
l’espace franco-allemand (XVIIIe-XIXe siècles). Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les
Civilisations.
Fairclough, Norman (2003) Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research.
London: Routledge.
Farrell, Tracie, Jakub Novotny, Miriam Fernandez, Harith Alani (2019) “Exploring Misogyny
across the Manosphere in Reddit.” WebSci’ 19: Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference
on Web Science. Boston: WEBSCI.
Forgács, Bálint (2022) “The Pragmatic Functions of Metaphorical Language.” [In:] Judit
Gervain, Gergely Csibra, Kristóf Kovács (eds.), A Life in Cognition: Studies in Cognitive
Science in Honor of Csaba Pléh. Cham, Springer Cham; 41-57.
Fugardi, Rachael (2023) “Nine Years after Deadly ‘Incel’ Attack, Threat of Male Supremacy ss
Growing,” Southern Poverty Law Center.
https://www.splcenter.org/news/2023/05/23/after-incel-attack-male-supremacism-
growing.
Ging, Debbie (2017) “Alphas, Betas, and Incels: Theorizing the Masculinities of the
Manosphere.” Men and Masculinities, 22(4); 638-657.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X1770640
Górska, Anna Maria, Karolina Kulicka, Dariusz Jemielniak (2023) “Men Not Going Their Own
Way: A Thick Big Data Analysis of #MGTOW and #Feminism tweets.” Feminist Media
Studies, 23(8); 3774-3792. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2022.2137829
Półrocznik Językoznawczy Tertium. Tertium Linguistic Journal 9 (2) (2024) 175
www.journal.tertium.edu.pl
Halliday, Michael (1978) Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language
and Meaning. London: Edward Arnold.
Horta Ribeiro, Manoel, Shagun Jhaver, Savvas Zannettou, Jeremy Blackburn, Gianluca
Stringhini, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Robert West (2021) “Do Platform Migrations
Compromise Content Moderation? Evidence from r/The_Donald and r/Incels.”
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction. New York: ACM.
Haut conseil à l’Égalité entre les femmes et les hommes (2023) “Rapport 2023 sur l’état du
sexisme en France: Le sexisme perdure et ses manifestations les plus violentes s’aggravent
[2023 Report on the state of sexism in France: Sexism persists and its most violent
manifestations are getting worse].” HCE. https://www.haut-conseil-
egalite.gouv.fr/stereotypes-et-roles-sociaux/travaux-du-hce/article/rapport-2023-sur-l-etat-
du-sexisme-en-france-le-sexisme-perdure-et-ses
Koller, Veronika (2012). “How to Analyse Collective Identity in Discourse – Textual and
Contextual Parameters.” Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines,
5(2); 19-38.
Koller, Veronika (2004). Metaphor and Gender in Business Media Discourse: A Critical
Cognitive Study. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Koller, Veronika (2022) “Words and Worlds of Desire: The Power of Metaphor in Framing
Sexuality.” [In:] Shyam Wuppuluri and A. C. Grayling (eds.) Metaphors and Analogies in
Sciences and Humanities: Words and Worlds. Cham: Springer; 363-383.
Krendel, Aleandra (2020) “The Men and Women, Guys and Girls of the “Manosphere”: A
Corpus-Assisted Discourse Approach.” Discourse & Society, 31(6); 607-630.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926520939690
Lakoff, George (1987) Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the
Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, George (1992) “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor.” [In:] Andrew Ortony (ed.)
Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 202-251.
Lakoff, George, Mark Johnson (1980) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.
Lin, Jie Liang (2017) “Antifeminism Online: MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way).” [In:]
Urte Undine Frömming, Steffen Köhn, Samantha Fox, Mike Terry (eds.), Digital
Environments. Ethnographic Perspectives across Global Online and Offline Spaces.
Bielefeld: transcript Verlag; 77–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.25595/503
Półrocznik Językoznawczy Tertium. Tertium Linguistic Journal 9 (2) (2024) 176
www.journal.tertium.edu.pl
Marwick, Alice E., Robyn Caplan (2018) “Drinking Male Tears: Language, the Manosphere,
and Networked Harassment.” Feminist Media Studies, 18(4); 543-559.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1450568
Massanari, Adrienne L. (2015) Participatory Culture, Community, and Play: Learning from
Reddit. New York: Peter Lang.
Massanari, Adrienne L. (2017) “#Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit’s Algorithm,
Governance, and Culture Support Toxic Technocultures.” New Media & Society, 19(3);
329-346. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444815608807
McGlashan, Mark, Alexandra Krendel (2024). “Keywords of the Manosphere.” International
Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 29(1); 87-115. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.22053.mcg
Pew Research Center (2016, February 25). „Reddit News Users More Likely to be Male, Young
and Digital in Their News Preferences.” Pew Research Center.
https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2016/02/25/reddit-news-users-more-likely-to-
be-male-young-and-digital-in-their-news-preferences/
Musolff, Andreas (2004) Metaphor and Political Discourse: Analogical Reasoning in Debates
about Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Owen, Tess (2020, January 30) “US Coast Guard Officer Facing Gun Charges Researched ‘How
to Rid the U.S. of Jews,’ Court Docs Reveal.” VICE. https://www.vice.com/en/article/us-
coast-guard-officer-facing-gun-charges-researched-how-to-rid-us-of-the-jews-court-docs-
reveal/
Reddit Help (2025, January 13). “Quarantined Communities.” Reddit.
https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043069012-Quarantined-Communities
Rüdiger, Sofia, Daria Dayter (2017) “The Ethics of Researching Unlikeable Subjects: Language
in an Online Community.” Applied Linguistics Review, 8(2-3); 251-269.
https://doi.org/10.1515/applirev-2016-1038
Sattelberg, William (2021) “The Demographics of Reddit: Who Uses the Site?” Alphr.
https://www.alphr.com/demographics-reddit/
Syal, Rajeev (2025, January 27) “Misogyny Identified as Breeding Ground for Extremism in
UK, Says Leaked Report.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-
news/2025/jan/27/misogyny-identified-as-breeding-ground-for-extremism-in-leaked-
report
Wierzbicka, Anna (1997) Understanding Cultures Through their Key Words: English, Russian,
Polish, German, and Japanese. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Półrocznik Językoznawczy Tertium. Tertium Linguistic Journal 9 (2) (2024) 177
www.journal.tertium.edu.pl
Wright, Scott, Verity Trott, Callum Jones (2020) “‘The pussy ain’t worth it, bro’: Assessing the
Discourse and Structure of MGTOW.” Information, Communication & Society, 23(6); 908-
925. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2020.1751867
