Rethinking Online Misogyny: The Role of Female Creators in Spreading Antifeminist Ideologies

We are currently witnessing a troubling trend in the digital normalization of misogyny and antifeminism, with pervasive content that promotes, trivializes, or glorifies violent and discriminatory attitudes against women. In the last decade, these behaviors have proliferated within the manosphere. Users within this space engage in harmful practices through memes, hashtags, and audiovisual content, leading to a frequent association of online misogyny with masculinist digital environments. However, this focus overlooks the significant role women play in perpetuating ideas that normalize sexism and violence against women.

This study aims to illuminate this issue by analyzing online content created by women that disseminates antifeminist and misogynistic ideas, framing it within the context of postfeminist conceptions of society and the social dynamics of the digital realm. To achieve this, we explore the communicative strategies employed by female content creators, identifying the elements of these strategies that effectively engage other women. Our research involves a digital ethnography of online misogyny and antifeminism on TikTok, specifically focusing on the Spanish context.

A selected corpus of micro-videos created by 10 female content creators was analyzed through a critical technocultural discourse analysis lens (Brock, 2018), focusing on both the content and the platform’s affordances that facilitate the dissemination and impact of these ideas. Preliminary results suggest that female content creators present friendlier and more relatable versions of anti-feminist ideas, contributing to the perpetuation of sexist and misogynistic attitudes while often escaping immediate classification as problematic.

This research not only provides insights into the effectiveness of the communicative strategies used by these content creators but also develops a categorization of these strategies, enhancing our understanding of digitally mediated gender-based violence and highlighting the role of digital platforms in perpetuating antifeminist ideologies.