alt-masculinity:

investigating the internet meme as a method of (re/de)formattinghegemonic masculinity in 21st century America

by joshuamilton

supervisor: sebastian franklin

presented to the department of English at King’s College London 2017

table of contents:

abstract3

acknowledgments4

introduction5

man-up: understanding masculinity(-in-crisis) 10

/masc pol/: masculine politics as neo-reactionary movements 16

what do you meme? analysing digital discourse 27

subreddits and submasculinity: the memetics of the alt-right 32

conclusion 51

bibliography 57

appendix 70

abstract

This paper addresses the expanding inter-relationship between masculinity and internet memes. Its main task is to explain how and why the meme has been (re/de)formatted by the alt-right. The alt-right in this paper will be considered as a contemporary evolution of the Manosphere; a movement that focuses on the issues related to men and masculinity. As a response to identity politics, the alt-right can be studied as an attempt to form an alternative masculinity. Operating through memes, the movements’ focus on participatory media websites 4chan and reddit will be assessed as sites of knowledge-production, identity-renegotiation, and splinternet. The meme, in this context, emerges as a medium that proliferates an alt-masculinity.

keywords:

meme •masculinity • alt-right • participation media • alt-masculinity • splinternet

acknowledgments

To Seb Franklin and his beard, for guiding me away from the 90s and into the now.

To RoopBhinder, for always tagging me in memes on Facebook and introducing me as the guy “writing his disso on memes.”

To Amy Norris, for always sending me links to anything remotely concerning masculinity and reading posts on /r/seduction with me. It was a rough afternoon. @Men, do not take note from that thread.

To Serena Cooke, for being so on-it with her own dissertation it made me feel lazy as heck. Thank you for motivating me lols.

To Samridhi Aggarwal, for being there on-call during every stressed out and ugly-crying phone conversation.

To bell hooks. Each offering of her fiercely articulated thoughts is a momentous occasion. Her trademark candour can do so much to inspire men.

To the men of the world. Y’all are cool to write about. Never change (or maybe do, could be a good idea).

introduction

At the beginning of the twenty-first century it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that men are in serious trouble.[1] – Anthony Clare, On Men: Masculinity in Crisis

I rarely discussed what being a man was with my father. Our conversations were like the first rule of Fight Club, we don’t talk about being a man. Instead, I had one-sided conversations with my television set. Acting as an archive of masculinity; I knew what a man was from the images I saw on screen.

The 1999 film, Fight Club was my first encounter with visible masculinity. I was petrified by the thought of watching it (Brad Pitt’s abs can be intimidating). Finally, I found the courage to watch it. As Edward Norton’s character questioned a Gucci advertisement if ‘That’s what a man looks like?’[2], looking down at my own body, I couldn’t help but ask the same. What does a man look like?

I was anxious about watching Fight Club, and men were anxious about realising what they’re up against. The 90s tipped into deindustrialisation which eliminated many inner-city jobs. Male unemployment, premature mortality, and suicide rates spiked. No wonder Fight Club had an 18+ certificate. As the interiority of male lives was navigated by Palahniuk, it projected the paranoiac situation of masculinity. This fearful moment may provide men a historic juncture to negotiate narrow patriarchal scripts. Creating a more resolved manhood. But standing in the way is fear. Men don’t know what men look like anymore.

Recent academia on masculinity has used a method of gendering men – making maleness an identifiable position – to make critical analysis possible. Currently, as masculinity becomes visibly defined, we find the term “crisis-in-masculinity” thrown around in abandon. Walsh writes that, by thinking of “crisis” as a performance and “masculinity” as ‘an embodied, social, and political domain’[3], a crisis-in-masculinity is a shattering of agency. Within the theatrical dimension of masculinity, men’s call-backs are lessening. Men are produced as ‘troubled subjects’[4], dubbed the ‘redundant male’[5]. Concurrent with Palahniuk, men are the ‘all singing, all dancing crap of the world.’[6]

The conceived malaise of masculinity is sequela to the ongoing project of identity politics: a political approach based on the interests of social groups in which people identify. But those groups not focused-on have begun to react. Men’s movements (an umbrella term for certain examples of such groups) are situated along a continuum from anti-feminist to pro-feminist. Works discussing the movements frame the groups as either resisting or reproducing inequalities.

With this as a springboard, in this paper, I will be assessing how the internet meme has been plucked and deployed by the alt-right; one example of a men’s movement that is explicitly anti-feminist. As a unit of culture, the meme transmits cultural ideas and practises. Jettisoning the original context of Dawkins’ meme as a semantic form of Darwinian selection, the internet meme is a multimodal, symbolic artefact of online-collectives and public discourse. I will propose that the meme is extensively remixed by participants of the alt-right. The meme is (re/de)formatted to coalesce, compress, and circulate a type of masculinity unique to those involved in the alt-right. The meme emerges as a site of identity-production in which social-technologies, trolling warfare, and ironic humour are pronounced. This paper will chiefly treat the meme as a discourse that offers men an alternative to masculinity. A digital masculinity self-organised and self-diagnosed - an alt-masculinity.

Writing as someone who identifies as a left-leaning thinker, I wish to establish a precedent that my aim is not to necessarily empathise or endorse alt-right politics, nor do I wish to critique or dismiss altogether the political paradigms they advocate. Instead, my task is to understand and clarify why the alt-right is operating in the way it is. Ergo, little interest will be spent critiquing the alt-right, but rather, in illustrating the spirit of the alt-right and understanding how memes are laboured into their politics.

Such a project requires three preliminary considerations. First, it is necessary to understand what masculinity is; how it functions and how it is performed in this state of crisis. Secondly – considering recent studies in the past twenty years – I will sketch out the terrain of the Manosphere. Foregrounding the Red Pill and #GamerGate movements to understand how white, male, cisgendered, heterosexual, American masculinity is politically responding to its reorganisation, and how the alt-right is rooted in such attitudes. Thirdly, I will address, in brief, what the internet meme is and why I am linking it to identity through Baudrillard.

Following these preliminary considerations, I will analytically apply them to the alt-right. In this main body of analysis, I am concerned less with the historical narratives of the alt-right. Rather, I am going to concentrate on a selection of memes that, through my research, I have found were created or co-opted to manifest and proliferate a form of masculinity. Pepe the Frog, Moon Man, and Trash Dove will be the centre of my investigation.

In the concluding section, I seek to clarify my findings and outline the extent in which the alt-right is a men’s movement, and what kind of masculine tools of re-organisation they are offering men. Reconciling this with concepts of male hurt. If masculinity is a performance, and the current versions of represented social and cultural interpretation of masculinity are in crisis, then we can unpack that:

  • Masculinity itself is an unnatural socio-politico-cultural matrix.
  • The alt-right is a men’s movement.
  • They methodise and mobilise the meme as an effort to self-organise alternatives to masculinity across participatory media.

man-up: understanding masculinity(in-crisis)

figure 1[7]

Figure 1, an advice animal meme, serves as a depiction of the sociocultural discourses surrounding masculinity today. Featuring a shirtless man, arms broadly spread and bracketed with sweat wristbands, the meme’s caption of ‘Don’t Be Afraid / Of All This Masculinity’ articulates a masculinity that is violent, dominating, and physically active. Yet, as I researched other versions of this meme, the remixes were mocking. ‘I Dance / Like I’ve Just Shit Myself’ and ‘Stopped In The Middle Of Sex / She Didn’t Yell Out His Name Correctly’[8] were alternative captions. The meme is keyed ironically; it caricatures the man to say this masculinity-performance is not to be afraid of.

Consequently, what kind of masculinity should we be afraid of? Immediately, we move away from the plurality of masculinity and into its specificities. Figure 1 provides an insight into what attitudes inform the concept of a local hegemonic masculinity. That is, a masculinity privately inhabited by white, cisgendered, heterosexual, American males. I will use the term “hegemonic masculinity” as shorthand for this intersection. Masculinity as historically embodied is too complex to be captured in this paper. Subsequently, I will jettison origin in favour of a sociological outline of masculine performance.

MANnerisms:

Firstly, we must formulate a base definition of hegemonic masculinity. Masculinity is a matrix of behaviours, languages, and practises that exist in specific cultural and organisational locations. Itula-Abumere ascertains that masculinity cannot function as a system if it does not have an Other to defer non-masculinity into. This Other is “femininity”. Within this scope, Itula-Abumere discusses that though masculinity is not overtly repeatable cross-culturally, its modern, global North usage is consistent:

Masculine / Non-Masculine
Violent / Peaceable
Dominating / Conciliatory
Physically active / Inactive
Hyper-sexual / Covert-sexuality

Ergo, masculinity does not exist except in opposition to femininity[9]. In this binary-contract, it produces a monovalent identity. Itula-Abumere contextualises this notion of masculinity as informed by early-modern European attitudes, swollen by growth of colonial empires and capitalist economic relations.[10] Its self-sustaining measure is that masculinity defers everything that is not it into negative space. Space that can be subjugated, negated, and made verboten if and when masculinity requires.

Masculinity becomes a collective social identity through this binary because ‘Men, as a group, enjoy institutional privileges at the expense of women’. Men have access to opportunities that others are not structurally provided. Messner directs the reader to men receiving extra hours and increased pay than women as evidence of this privilege.[11] Mediated divisions of labour are shifting as the social structures that grant men opportunities to change. The International Labour Organisations reported that women’s participation in the U.S labour force was 46.7% in 2010[12]. By 2017 it was 57%[13]. Modes to articulate masculinity through labour are closing.

Segal describes how:

The closer we come to uncovering some form of exemplary masculinity, a masculinity which is solid and sure of itself, the clearer it becomes that masculinity is structured through contradiction: the more it asserts itself, the more it calls itself into question.[14]

Masculinity is in flux, provoked by the deflation of traditional labour. Corresponding with Segal is Bridges, who describes masculinity as ‘defined more by flexibility than in reference to older static models.’[15] In consideration of the two, contemporary masculinity enters as constituted in and through a discourse that is non-referential. To engage with it in abstraction, in other words, ‘if you think about being a man’[16], is to destabilise masculinity’s ability to be a congruent explanation of sameness across individuals.

The previous quote is from a man Bridges interviewed. ‘Richard’ (pseudonyms were used) elaborates on his notion of a muted masculinity. He notes:

If you ask men about being a man, basically anything they say is just a political explosion. Like, “Oh, being a man is awesome”... sexist. Or “Oh, being a man is tough”... pussy. Or “Being a man is so hard”... misogynist.

Two tenants of masculinity emerge: masculinity is non-referential and is destabilised when challenged. To the men of Bridges’ study, presenting masculinity is a ‘political explosion.’ Clatterbaugh elaborates this, noticing that as identity politics are diffused into the public sphere, this has evoked a re-fantasising of manhood within the male cultural consciousness. He notes that ‘Men…. inspired perhaps by feminist analysis, sometimes come to struggle with the idea of the kind of men they want to be. It is during this reflective process that they develop a perspective on masculinity’[17]. ‘Reflective’ stands out as it challenges masculinity being non-referential; can it be sturdy enough to stand and reflect? Supporting this is Messner, who is attentive to how masculine-identities are responding to and ‘at times initiating - changes in the personal and social relations of gender.’[18] Men are changing, just not in a linear way.

Gender studies problematise notions of masculinity as a mandatory, natural fact. As women actively organise their own emancipation, some pockets of men are viewing this as abetting their experiences of manhood. Social justice, as Connell suggests, is restructuring socio-political territory based on ‘reciprocity, not hierarchy.’[19] As we established at the beginning of this chapter, a pivotal aspect of hegemonic masculinity is that it exists in a hierarchical binary to what is non-masculine. When the binary is contested, masculinity’s precarious modes of operation and contingency are exposed. It has entered a crisis.

/masc pol/: masculine politics as neo-reactionary movements

figure 2[20]

Rally the men, masculinity is in crisis. In this chapter, I shall discuss the ways in which the crisis-in-masculinity has set-up the conditions for communities of men, the Manosphere, to answer the apparent transformations of masculinity.

In 1997, Waters wrote that men are going to:

…finally start to stand up for themselves […] to confront the sources of the propaganda which makes possible their marginalisation from home, family and society, to challenge the bully-boys and bully-girls, the misandrists and the feminazis.[21]

Waters was speaking in the 1990s when masculine codes were being transfigured by men into proto-victimhoods. This being how as gendered power relations are contested and collapse, this gives space to begin to consider how the male is victim of feminine-suppression. A “victim” of feminist, racial, and queer liberation, and the concomitant changes in labour orders. Walsh supports this by reasoning that the dysfunctional masculinity narrative is a product of ‘years of economic, social, and biological marginalisation.’[22] Mangan explains that, by the early 21st century, ‘Crisis [has become] a condition of masculinity itself.’[23] Likewise, Connell focuses on the deployment of “crisis” on a theoretical level. The term ‘presupposes a coherent system of some kind to be destroyed or resorted by the outcome of the crisis.’[24] Such a system relies on male-supremacy. As Messner assessed, masculinity is inflated with privilege, so the redistribution of such privilege can, to those privileged-groups, be experienced likesuppression.

Fascist Fantasies:

Suppression here can be considered as the restriction of the ‘freedom to hate’[25]. As masculine privileges are decoded, some men are yearning to idealise hyper-masculine violence again. We can contextualise this with Rorty, who argues that the political Left devoted itself to the ‘sprit of dethatched spectatorship.’[26] Writing in the late 1990s (the same time as Waters) Rorty launched his critique on a ‘Foucauldian academic Left’ devoted to theorising, rather than reforming society. A quote was circulated across many right-wing media outlets before the success of presidential candidate, Donald Trump in 2016:

The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, […] postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots […] Once the strongman takes office, no one can predict what will happen.[27]

Penned in 1998, Rorty was responding to the conditions of the late 20th-century. The quote was renewed as it prophesised a ‘strongman’ figure. Kimmel correspondingly writes that Donald Trump acts as this figure[28]. A masculine strongman that speaks to working-class men and whose mocking of the elites is congruent with how these men experience the world. This reaction is not anomalous in politics; Mosee posits that the rise of Fascism in 1920s Germany was partly the assertion of a militaristic masculinity in response to the nation’s humiliation in the Treaty of Versailles following the First World War[29]. Demonstrating that masculinity turns to militancy during crisis.

Therefore, Rorty, Kimmel, and Mosee communicate that masculinity is referring to fascist ideologies to re-stabilise and reassert itself. Exercised through a figure that is presented as a ‘specific form of counter-revolutionary dictatorship’[30]. One that, as Armistead writes, is committed to: hierarchy, traditional sex/gender roles, and rejectinglibertarianistspaces. Armistead focuses on the alt-right, but crucially, observes their discursive origins by tracking previous neo-reactionary movements. With an interest in ‘stability, order, efficiency, and good governance’[31], these neo-reactionary movements mobilised online and formed the Manosphere; a name given to a nascent network of websites focused on masculinity activity[32].

figure 3[33]

It is here that I will flag that the neo-reactions located by Arimistead is less a specific organisation or coherent political world-view, but rather a disparate network of political activity that finds its nexus within the triad of techno-commercialist[i], theonomist[ii], and ethno-nationalist[iii] ideologies. Whereby, the alt-right similarly operate as dispersed activity that locates the “alt-right” as a convenient linguistic site of intra-ideological discussion. Ergo, my own referral of activity by, and in relation to, the alt-right, may flatten and misidentify certain activity as “alt-right”. Primarily due to the term’s own linguistic ambiguity and how some activity can fall into the figurative background due to, as Figure 3 suggests, the sheer multiplicity of divided and connected strands of reaction. Still, seeing that these movements have ‘no agreed-upon shared goals beyond criticism’[34], I will cladistically categorise the alt-right as a development of the neo-reactionary subculture due to its common discursive origins and practises. But awareness of a one-dimensional attitude must be reflected.