The media, feminist influencers and politicians are constantly talking about them: violent incels, far-right extremists, toxic men who work out and practise martial arts – oh dear! oh dear! – young men who hit themselves in the face with a hammer to achieve angular features.
But they don’t actually exist, and as for the latter, no one has presented any Danish examples. Apparently, there’s just one single, crazy man somewhere in the US who’s known for doing that. Nevertheless, the ministers sounded the alarm when a new, much-discussed report on the ‘mannosphere’ from the Centre for Digital Pedagogy was published last week.
Danish online culture is rife with misogyny, it is claimed. But on closer inspection, the report’s own conclusion is that a Danish ‘mannosphere’ largely does not exist.
So we are left with 700,000 kroner’s worth of superfluous and shoddy research.
The figures show that 29 young men watch around 114,000 videos, and on average there are 290 views linked to the ‘mannosphere’ per person. That is, a quarter of a per cent. What sounded like an algorithmic storm on the minister’s website is, on closer inspection, a ‘per mille’ panic: 2.5 per mille of the videos.
As Professor Martin Vinæs Larsen states: The data points to a limited phenomenon, and the sample cannot possibly form the basis for general conclusions.
Furthermore, the definition of the ‘mannosphere’ lacks a source reference in the report. That is hardly surprising. It was written by one of the report’s own consultants, who, according to the Manderådet’s deputy chair Thomas Martin Nielsen , edited the entry on lex.dk two days before publication. In other words, one defines the phenomenon oneself and then finds it afterwards, so that the assumption can be confirmed.
The ‘economy of concern’
In fact, the whole concept of the ‘manosphere’ is a good example of the ‘economy of anxiety’ on which the feminist movement thrives. NGOs and consultants – Cybernautene being a notable example here – thrive on digital threats to masculinity, which they blow out of proportion. They create a theatrical bogeyman that they can easily shoot down again.
The hefty grants from the ‘economy of anxiety’ go to a network of organisations that are thus tasked with both identifying the problem and offering the solution.
The reason the ‘manosphere’ can become feminism’s theatrical bogeyman is due to what is known as ‘concept creep’ – namely, the fact that concepts are stretched until they encompass everyday experiences. With extremism’s elastic measuring tape, almost everything young men do – weight training, martial arts, the desire to provide for a family – can be labelled as toxic.
The result is conceptual inflation, where the word ‘extremism’ means so much that it ultimately means nothing, and where genuine extremism disappears into the crowd.
The radicalisation that nobody is mapping
This real radicalisation is, in fact, rarely discussed and never mapped. It is as follows:
The gender divide amongst young people is real and growing. But politically speaking, men remain roughly where previous generations stood. Women, on the other hand, have shifted significantly to the left, including in Denmark.
A British survey in *New Statesman* earlier this year showed that 72 per cent of young men view young women positively. However, the corresponding figure drops noticeably amongst young women, and amongst the youngest age group under 25, only 35 per cent of women view men positively.
The hostility between the sexes therefore runs overwhelmingly in one direction.
This is the very essence of the ‘femisphere’: influencers who mix political activism – such as pro-Palestinian content – with messages about toxic masculinity and the oppression of men.
The British study was carried out by two young women, Scarlett Maguire and Emily Lawford. According to the study, feminism and left-wing ideology make young women significantly more pessimistic, angry and distrustful than young men. Young women, for example, also regard communism as markedly better than capitalism.
Lawford believes that feminism in her own generation was curious and open-minded. Today’s young women are more closed-minded, angry and nihilistic.
Nor is it working-class women, but rather the highly educated and affluent middle-class women who are the most pessimistic and the most misandric.
However, no government department has commissioned a study of the ‘manosphere’.
Instead, feminist NGOs are creating a theatrical bogeyman they call the ‘mannosphere’, which they drag onto the stage, shoot down – and make a good profit from.
