R4 Woman's Hour: 'the manosphere', Incel, social media and misogyny..

[R0wantrees]

First item & very important conversation.
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007qlvb/broadcasts/2018/04

"This week Alek Minassian was arrested and accused of killing 10 people in Toronto when he drove his van into them. Just before the attack, he posted praise on social media for the 'incel rebellion' - an online community of men united by their inability to convince women to have sex with them. The incel rebellion is just one of a number of men's rights groups that have been accused of vulgar sexism, under the umbrella collective of the 'manosphere'. We hear from Mike Wendling an assistant editor at BBC Trending (team devoted to exploring the politics of global social media), and Ruby Lott-Lavigna an online journalist who's spent time undercover exploring the manosphere and the people behind it."

Just listened on catch up - very interesting. (And depressing).

Listened to this

Janice Turner article follows similar themes,

"The Toronto attacker was one of a growing number of ‘involuntary celibates’ whose misogyny is radicalised online
d expected “incel” websites to make me angry, but mainly they made me sad. These forums for “involuntarily celibate” men reek of self-pity, porn-addled frustration, incipient suicide. Of course incels hate women, want to punish, humiliate and rape the “femoids” who won’t deliver the sex they regard as their birthright. But not as much as they hate themselves....." continues

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/self-hating-incel-men-are-the-new-jihadis-5rz37h9s9?shareToken=2c241c337afb011e18d1d2cebf082548

Catherine Bennett
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/29/violent-misogyny-not-confined-to-internet-incels

article opens up discussion of Incel misogyny to that
of some identifying as TRAs.

"To agree to use the lads’ pet terminology, is, moreover, to suggest that something distinguishes them from legions of other threatening men expressing a similar wish to control, punish or just silence women and, critically, in similar language. Such as, to non-compliant sexual targets, “choke on my dick”. A glance at Twitter confirms how generously such abuse has been accommodated, even as the repetitive insults and threats indicate gendered hostility to women in general.

If sexism does not explain how rapidly the language employed against dissenting women (including some trans women) in the UK self-ID debate, degenerated, in some quarters, into generic-sounding obscenities (eg, to unco-operative lesbians, “choke on my ladydick”), perhaps it’s because social media has for so long facilitated the delusion that hate speech, as applied to women, is simply part of the landscape.

The very odiousness of the misogynist language that has become, according (pre-Rodger) to one academic, Emma Alice Jane, “a lingua franca in many sectors of the cybersphere”, may help explain, she argues, why the “ethical and material implications” of this form of hate speech have been so under-studied. Hate speech that persists unchallenged, by both – for their different reasons – reactionaries and progressives, is unlikely, anyway, to be corrected."