engage the public. This is what we're trying to do today.
>> An undercurrent in American society went mainstream as
President Donald Trump won back the white House, an online
movement of men who hold misogynistic views burst onto
the scene during the campaign. In social media and podcasts.
It's called the manosphere, and a UW-Madison assistant professor
at the La Follette School of Public Affairs conducted a
research study of how and why this ideology took political
hold. We sat down with Mariel Barnes to talk about it. What is
the manosphere? >> In our paper, we talk about
the manosphere as a collection of kind of websites, blogs that
look or put forward a particular perspective that advocate hatred
for women and advocate anti-feminist ideologies and
advocate against gender equality and view kind of men as victims
in modern day society. So we started with the Southern
Poverty Law Center. They have a list of websites that they
classified as anti-feminist, manosphere websites. And so we
went through and we read all of these websites, and then each of
these websites often has like recommendations for other people
that, you know, their, their readers should read. And so we
went through those websites as well and kind of read all of
those websites and collected over a hundred different
websites that could be classified as being in the
manosphere. And so we have data for all of those websites for
every year that they were in existence.
>> Looking at it over time, how has the manosphere changed?
>> We see the manosphere really not being a thing until about
2008, 2009. So before then, you'd really had a couple of
websites, a couple of people who were involved in it. A lot of
time they were really involved in like fathers rights and
custody issues. There was some allegations about like reverse
discrimination and court cases around reverse discrimination,
but there wasn't a lot. And then you get to 2008 and all of a
sudden you see this like uptick in like the number of websites
and the number of blogs going the other way. I think it's
changed over time is just the sheer number of people who are
reading these blogs. So the growth of the internet and the
growth of high speed internet, the growth of personal blogging
allowed these people to reach a wider audience. And it allowed
people to find or it allowed men to find other men who shared
their perspectives and so they could all talk together and
network together, which before kind of the internet, you really
didn't have. They've joined kind of the alt right. They've joined
white supremacist groups, they've joined anti LGBT groups,
they've joined more populist politics. So what we see under
Trump and so the need for a specific blog that looks at, you
know, men's rights is less necessary because it's now been
incorporated into this bigger phenomenon. And this bigger
movement. >> How does the manosphere
intersect with violence? >> What we see is that the more
isolated these groups are, the more likely they are to engage.
We hypothesize, the more likely they are to engage in very
public acts of violence against people. And so one of the most
isolated groups, both from women and from other men themselves,
are incel groups. And that's why we see a lot of mass shootings
and massacres emerging from those groups. But then there's
other kinds of violence that emerge. So that's the very
public version. Then you have groups like Pickup Artists,
which want to sleep with as many women as possible, and they have
a whole range of techniques for doing that and picking up women.
But we hypothesize that because they need to interact with women
in that way, they're actually more inclined to commit kind of
private violence and sexual assault and rape against women.
Having done this research, what would you like to see come of
it? >> I think I would like more
people to know about the manosphere, and that this is a
insidious movement that has suddenly, like taken on kind of
a life of its own and has become mainstream. I think for a long
time it was ignored by a lot of parts of society, and that was
has not helped us. I don't think we can ignore extreme views. I
think we need to confront them. And I think when they move into
the mainstream, we need to acknowledge, like where they
have come from. So a lot of the thing I have, a lot of, I
struggle a lot with people like Joe Rogan. Right. Because I
think that he has and other people like him have seen washed
these more extreme views. So they become more palatable to a
wider audience and a wider audience thinks, oh, that's not
unreasonable. And yet, at its heart, like the very heart of
the issue, is, it is unreasonable. And it is
anti-women and it is anti gender equality, and it's just not
recognized as such. So paying attention, I think, to the
movements like the manosphere that are extreme is important.
And I hope that's kind of what And I hope that's kind of what