How the internet amplifies misogyny among young people – 09/03/2023 – Education

The news that an actress was threatened with death by a “coach” whose videos have misogynistic content was widespread in recent weeks, making headlines on portals and special reports on programs such as Fantástico and vehicles such as the Marie Claire website. “You have 24 hours to remove your content about me. After that, process or bullet. You choose,” said the message to the comedian, who had made a parody of the videos in which he disqualifies female behavior.

Days before the threat, the content produced by the influencer had gone viral on several digital platforms, which spurred comments condemning the sexist content of his speech and satire like those of the actress who had been intimidated by him. However, the “coach” profile, which has more than 300,000 followers on Instagram alone, is just one of the parts of the masculinist ecosystem present on the internet, named in different ways (such as manosphere, whose translation would be “machosfera”) and composed by specific groups around the world. The objective, however, is always the same: to spread the objectification and submission of women and reinforce virility and male dominance, varying between lesser and greater degrees of misogyny and distorting the concept of freedom of expression to use it as a shield.

The key point is precisely this: hardly one of these profiles will make explicit campaigns of aggression against women, with posts encouraging domestic violence, for example – even because this type of message violates the rules of most social networks. The tone used does not necessarily contain scatological and obscene expressions, but takes advantage of conservative narratives that focus, for example, on a kind of male “rescue of self-esteem” in a world that would be “collapsing” due to the advance of the feminist movement.

Many men do not interpret all this as hate speech, especially younger men, and engage in such content as if it were not extremely harmful. And it is precisely the teenage public that is the easiest bait for these influencers – not by chance, the so-called “incels” (short for “involuntary celibates”, involuntary celibates in English) assiduously interact with the posts of figures such as the “coach” who opens this text and flood discussion forums with memes and misogynistic texts.

Solving a problem of this size and complexity necessarily involves educating boys and adolescents in terms of gender literacy inside and outside the family environment. That said, it is the school, a space of diversity by definition, that holds the potential for boys to have contact with concepts and discourses that deconstruct these structural differences so that, in the future, they do not reproduce these iniquities. And this is a path that, despite being appropriate and fair, faces resistance from various segments of society that, since the debate on the National Common Curricular Base (BNCC), have embarked on a conservative endeavor against any and all expressions that carry the word “gender” “.

Therefore, there must be a commitment from the teaching networks and their respective managers so that the schools’ pedagogical teams develop interdisciplinary activities and projects to discuss female representation and representation, highlighting the role of women in various historical struggles, artistic and literary works and scientific discoveries, without forgetting the fight against misinformation about the feminist movement and its guidelines and achievements.

Without realizing how the masculinist discourse of these digital profiles recreates and feeds back gender inequalities and violence, and without deepening this debate towards a media education focused on the defense of diversity, we will have very little change in the next generations of adult men – and we will continue to be shocked by the lines of sexist “coaches” that go viral from time to time, making us raise the same guidelines every March 8th.