Findings

Qualitative Analysis

Incel Forum (incel.is)

The content of incels.is primarily concerned the following themes and topics: sex, appearance, status, loneliness, neurodivergence, and biological essentialism with regards to women.
The first three themes constitute the pillars of incel ideology which pertains to the modern social order. According to ‘incels’, the status of males in society is determined by their appearance and as a result, the ease with which they can have sex. Inversely, the female social order is based on appearance and the status of the men with which they have sex. Men who are conventionally attractive are referred to as Chads and can have sex with any woman they wish. Women who are conventionally attractive are referred to as Stacies and have sex with Chads only. Women who are not-conventionally attractive are referred to as Beckies, however due to the greater and indiscriminate sexual needs of men, Beckies can also have sex with men above their “looksmatch” (Appendix A: 3) this means that Beckies have more sex than Stacies, but Stacies have sex with higher status mates. In contrast, unattractive men are at the bottom of the social hierarchy and have no sex because women select partners based on status and appearance. The incel community is composed of men who are aware of this social order, wherein their appearance dooms them to a life of loneliness, rejection and mockery (See notes from Appendix A : 2).
As a complement to this theory, discussion threads frequently portrayed women as fundamentally different to men based on biological qualities. Extensive research was presented in one thread on the brain chemistry of women and the way it could explain their many unpleasant qualities (Appendix A : 2). Thus incels resent women, but often don’t perceive them as malicious agents such that this would award them too great a degree of autonomy. Instead, hatred is directed towards Chads– who monopolize the sexual market– and against the incorporation of women into the workforce as this provided them financial independence and thus the ability to choose a mate based not on necessity, but attraction.
In tandem with this detailed social theory, the incel community has developed an elaborate lexicon. Jargon features prominently in every thread that was analyzed on the incels.is forum (Appendix A : 3).
Regarding the themes of loneliness and neurodivergence, many users on incels.is are diagnosed with personality disorders, especially autism. Some users recognized this as the fundamental cause of their sexual and social failure, and discussions around mental health involved less jargon or mentions of women (Appendix A: 2).

MGTOW Forum (goingyourownway.com)

Although MGTOW have different conclusions, they show similarities with incels. According to MGTOW, feminism, modern culture, and governments have given women stringent expectations, moulding society to their needs. Thus empowered, women have regressed to a ‘primitive mentality’ in their relationships, becoming ‘hypergamous’ opportunistic ‘princesses’ unable to form relationships without abuse, cheating or duplicity. They can subjugate and oppress men, who must submit to feminist dictates while being demonized for their masculinity. Women were portrayed as entitled, malicious, primitive and opportunistic. Animalistic imagery sometimes described their behaviour (‘jungle mentality’ or ‘vine-swinging’).
Consequently, MGTOW believe men should renounce relationships, withdrawing validation from women and protecting themselves from abuse and submission. MGTOW are ‘redpilled’, while other men remain pathetic ‘simps’. This thesis varies between users, although solutions always lie in renouncing relationships.

Posts describing MGTOW ideology are pinned in message boards for easy access. A section is dedicated to defining key terms, including jargon (see Appendix B:3). This section contains an entry dedicated to PUA vocabulary. However, this is produced by few senior members and forum administrators. Thus, use of jargon is not equally distributed. Senior members use jargon more prevalently, while recent users tend to use no jargon or demonstrate some overlap with other communities, mostly incels (chad, cuck, beta) and PUAs (sexual market value). The forum has robust moderation. Intervention in message boards to check user ideology is frequent, asking for precise descriptions of how users have renounced relationships. Moderators react to deviations, redirecting users to different communities (generally incels or PUAs) , often banning them.
Although self-improvement seems central to MGTOW ideology, it is not a prominent topic. Most discussions center on relationships and marriage, through personal experiences or critiquing a third party. Users also discuss feminism and women’s advantages. Conversely, they highlight men’s struggles. Here, concerns can overlap with MRAs. However, they remain highly critical of non-MGTOW men, demonstrating contempt for those seeking relationships with women. Lastly, they engage in social commentary, extrapolating views on women to current political affairs.

Pick-Up Artists Forum (MPUA Forum)

PUAs have weaker conceptions of ideology. Indeed, instead of gathering around key central ideas, like incels, MGTOW, and MRAs, they instead connect through the practice, or the game . Thus, the men on MPUA tend to ask for advice on how to improve their game, rather than create content about women. Nevertheless, some common points in terms of language, percetions of gender and of society link the community together. In terms of language, pick-up artist forums use some specialized vocabulary. Some terms and acronyms, proper to the community (kino, neg, AA) come up often. However, this specialized vocabulary is often used out of concern for simplicity. Indeed, appendix C:3 shows a full lexicon of these terms, thus rendering them more accessible to newcomers, and emphasizing the inclusionary aspect of the community. Furthermore, many users refer to vocabulary centered around economics, talking about “Demonstrations of high value”, “low value”, “scarcity”, “abundance”, “investing”, and one especially notable analogy of women as “business”. This vocabulary demonstrates an attempt to turn pickup into a “scientific practice”, one of the core tenets of the PUA community. Some incel vocabulary still seeps through, however, with terms like “Alphas” and “Betas” present in threads.
Regarding gender, PUAs ted to make broad generalizations of what a man should be able to “get” women – this “alpha” is confident and best version of himself. The men on the forum encourage each other to improve, by practicing their game and becoming more confident. They therefore perpetuate a view of men as catalysts of relationships with women, with women as “passive” agents. Women are generalized to inevitably fall for men that take the lead charge.
Lastly, PUAs are not particularly engaged with current events. However, in the few times they do, individuals’ outbursts are generally violent, cursing, for instance at the “consent at every stage garbage” that “beta millennials” in “liberal societies” perpetuate.

Men's Rights Activists Forum (r/MensRights)

Men's Rights Activists are, interestingly, the sub-community within the manosphere that has not been banned from Reddit for violating hate-speech rules. Their ability to maintain a presence on Reddit is administered by a number of community rules explicitly barring hate speech, racism, and any unsubstantiated over-generalizations of another community (although the soundness of such a rule is subject to question when regarding women. On the subreddit rules it reads “"all women are whores" is unacceptable, but "women who marry men only for money are whores" is acceptable”). For the most part, these rules are enforced by moderators and community members who report or flag inappropriate violations. This censorship on language that deviates from culturally accepted norms of speech are one of the most defining qualities of the Men's Rights linguistic patterns. Unlike other manosphere communities, which are often more insular, the Men's Rights movement is oriented to an external audience, explicitly seeking visibility and support for what is fundamentally an activist movement. The vocabulary utilized by its members is therefore very accessible for any reader outside the Manosphere — there is rarely any slang or jargon used; when it is, it is moreso a reflection of the individual’s speaking patterns rather than a representation of a community specific language. Topics of conversation primarily center around systems that disadvantage men, including divorce proceedings, child custody, men's mental health, forced conscription, circumcision as a violation of male bodily autonomy (among other titles). Feminism also pervades discussion boards as a common talking point, although the language attached to feminists and feminism vary from user to user. Generally, community members describe feminism as an evil ideology that ignores or shuts down the space for discussing mens issues. Other users would further that feminism is inherently female supremacy and that its implications on society are “cancerous”. Though there is still mention of specific women, the discussion around women generally regards women — specifically feminists — as a collective ideological force rather than as a set of individuals with whom men interact with (in contrast to the discussion in incel and PUA forums). Interestingly, a small segment of the community acknowledges the benefits on feminism, with some members self identifying as feminists or recognizing the merits of an equality movement, even if they believe its current form has deviated from its initial goals.

Overall, the Men's Rights activists is one of the more difficult communities to characterize, arguably because the nature of the movement lends itself to an inclusive community defined not by identity or ideology, but rather by an activism to pursue common goals not necessarily common values. This lack of ideological cohesion is visible from the onset; house rules encourage discussion and debate, which is oftentimes a norm in the comments sections of popular threads. Though outside the scope of this project, another possible explanation for the range in language is the demographics of the community. As revealed in various interactions, community members of different genders, ages, and races engage with one another, oftentimes with different ideologies or perspectives. In one notable thread about the struggle of black boys in American education, several commentators declared the post irrelevant or a racial co-optation of the men's movement while others claimed that the struggles of black men are integral to men's rights activism.

Comparative Chart

Through our assessment of these four forums, we were able to compare and categorize their respective contents in the following chart:

Notably, our Qualitative results highlight the divergence of subcommunities in the manosphere with regards to their position on relationships, their general worldview, and the nature of their movements.

Quantitative Analysis

After our qualitative analysis, we compiled the text from the ten threads assessed from each forum and entered the respective data into Tropes. This produced the following:

Frequent Words

fig.2: Most frequent substantives, incel forum

fig.3: Most frequent subtantives, MGTOW forum

fig.2: Most frequent substantives, PUA forum

fig.3: Most frequent substantives, MRA forum

Reference Fields

fig.6: Reference field for the word "woman" from the incel dataset

fig.7: Reference field for the word "woman" from the MGTOW dataset

fig.8: Reference field for the word "woman" from the PUA dataset

fig.9: Reference field for the word "woman" from the MRA dataset

Analysis & Conclusions

Our results somewhat confirm our hypothesis: though similarities in ideology exist across the manosphere– especially with regards to the decay of traditional gender roles and the rise of feminism– the subcommunities present fundamentally different systems of belief.

Whereas the incels are self-loathing and see their sexual rejection as pathetic, MGTOW believe that empowerment and emancipation are achieved by isolating themselves from women. In contrast again, Pick up artists actively seek out relations with women, while men’s rights activists are not overly concerned with relationships as a principle. Instead men’s rights activists focus on systems of structural male oppression, differing starkly from incels for example, who feel affected by informal systems of social oppression.
Moreover, on each forum, intolerance was displayed when users expressed views from other sub-communities of the Manosphere. On the MGTOW forum, proclamations of desire for sex or relationships were met with harsh critique and sometimes moderation. Notably, other users would identify this rhetoric as ‘incel’ and advise the responsible individual to discuss such matters on a different forum. This shows that sub-communities of the Manosphere are not only aware of each other, but make concerted efforts to distinguish themselves from each other.
However, our results also show that subcommunities of the Manosphere beyond incels do not use unique vocabularies. Though Incel jargon appears across the Manosphere as a whole, its frequency was only high enough in incels.is to register in the tropes software. Thus a significant presence of incel jargon remains effective in distinguishing the incel community from the rest of the Manosphere. When considering the most frequently referenced words in each sub-community, the overlap is significant, with most terms describing either men or women. Nonetheless, the most referenced words which are relational between men and women differ vastly across the four subcommunities.
In the incel community, the most referenced word– not pertaining to men or women– is sex, in the MGTOW forum it is life, in the PUA forum it is boyfriend and in the MRA forum it is equality. Each of these terms is deeply reflective of the unique discursive contents of these forums. Thus word frequency, when overlapping terms are discounted, can demonstrate ideological differences across the manosphere.
Nonetheless, commonly occurring terms can still distinguish between communities of the Manosphere by considering the reference field in which they occur. Through tropes, the reference fields around the terms “man,” “woman,” “girl,” and “guy” were calculated. This demonstrated the most frequent precursor and successor words to these terms. In comparing the results, it is clear that common terms across the manosphere are used in vastly different contexts. While the word ‘women’ on incel.is is succeeded by terms such as date, alpha, sex, receiving and rape, on r/MensRights it is succeeded by right, prerogative, thing, issue and divorce. In so forth, it is clear that the reference field around commonly used terms provides insight into the ideological differences between subcommunities of the Manosphere.
Consideration for vocabulary alone is not effective in distinguishing between sections of the Manosphere. Only Incel’s display significant use of unique jargon, and other communities have a tendency to borrow terms from this lexicon. Similarly, there is a great degree of overlap pertaining to most frequently used words such that discussion on these forums is almost universally concerned with men and women. Though discounting overlapping terms can shed some insight on ideological divergence among communities, considering the reference field of common terms proves most effective in making an ideological distinction between Incels, MGTOW, PUAs and MRAs.
Therefore, linguistic analysis can be an effective tool in characterizing sub-communities of the manosphere by highlighting differences in their systems of belief.

Limitations

Though our study produced adequate data to confirm our hypothesis, we faced a number of limitations pertaining to our methodology. Firstly, our sample size was relatively small considering the scale of content available within each of the communities of the manosphere. We attempted to ensure that the threads analyzed were representative of the communities in which they emerged, by first surveying a larger sample of 200 thread topics. Nonetheless, even this constitutes a minute portion of total content and contains posts from quite a limited time frame.
Additionally, the results of this study were limited such that it involved data from different types of platforms with different moderation practices. While the Men Going their own way forum and Men's Rights subreddit were subject to heavy moderation, the incel and PUA forums were much less moderated. On account of this, there is a degree of uncertainty about the extent to which our characterizations of these communities were based purely on the input of users, or rather, were shaped by the standards of the moderator. In truth, it is likely that far more radical ideological content would have been found on the MGTOW forum if not for the censorship of the moderator.
Finally, for each sub-community, we chose to assess content from only one forum. It is likely that content, ideology and vocabulary differs across forums within subcommunities as differing moderation practices have a significant impact on the overall ‘culture’ of a forum. Thus, it is impossible to confirm that our results truly represent the subcommunities of the manosphere. We can only confirm their applicability to the four forums we assessed.
In summary, an ideal study on this topic would consider a larger sample of content– spanning multiple forums– over a longer period of time. This would ensure the production of more comprehensive and accurate results.

Extensions

Our study demonstrates that the presence of certain vocabulary alone cannot be used to identify the ideology of digital communities. A paper from computer scientists at the University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon University and the Allen Institute corroborates these findings by concluding that AI models were more likely to flag tweets from Black people as hate speech due to the connotations associated with the vocabulary of African-American English. The paper analyzed Perspective APU, a machine learning software used by twitter to flag abusive content, and found that the tool mistakenly classified 46% of tweets crafted in the style of AAE as inflammatory. The paper cites a comparison between two tweets, one which reads “I saw him yesterday” and the other which states “I saw his ass yesterday.” The latter tweet was flagged as offensive content while the former was not, demonstrating how inaccurate hate speech software can be without an effective mechanism to assess the context of word use. This paper reveals a more relevant danger of identifying dangerous ideology based on the presence of vocabulary, such that it can lead to the silencing of certain online communities due to their particular sociolect. In the case of our study, we noted that the presence of incel jargon across communities of the manosphere did not reflect a common ideology. Instead, we found that an analysis of the reference field around common words was the most effective linguistic tool to identify belief. Though the risk of wrongly silencing certain communities in the manosphere is a less worrying possibility than the targeting of certain culturally and racially specific dialects, the conclusions drawn in both studies are relevant to the construction of more accurate hate speech flagging software.
Hence, for AI to determine the presence of dangerous ideology, it must not only have the capacity to identify words with violent connotations but also assess the field of reference in which words occur to determine the contextual nature of discourse within an online platform.