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Master Thesis Women Redpilling Women: Relatability, Alternative RUNNING HEAD: Women RedPilling women: Anti-feminism on YouTube Bianca Ferrari 12367613 Graduate School of Communication Erasmus Mundus Master Journalism, Media and Globalisation Women RedPilling Women: Relatability, Alternative Facts and Anti-Feminist Radicalization on YouTube Master thesis SUPERVISOR: Dr. Linda Bos MSc Amsterdam, June 3, 2019 Women RedPilling Women: Anti-feminist Radicalization on YouTube 2 Note to the second reader: As per what agreed with the thesis supervisor, Dr. Linda Bos, the total word count of this dissertation was extended to 8000, in order to allow for extra space for the text fragments presented in the result section Wordcount: 7855. Women RedPilling Women: Anti-feminist Radicalization on YouTube 3 AKNOWLEDGEMENT Foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Prof. Linda Bos, for the continuous support of my Master thesis project. Her patience, motivation and guidance provided much needed focus and clarity to this study and greatly helped me both in the research and writing phases. Besides my supervisor, I would like to thank my fellow classmates Pia Yvonne Behme, Tanja Kunesh, Julia Rignot and Daniel Avelar Guimarães for their encouragement, stimulating discussions and emotional support. Without their help, their challenging questions and insightful comments, this thesis and this year would have been a much less successful, gratifying and fun experience. Women RedPilling Women: Anti-feminist Radicalization on YouTube 4 Abstract Anti-feminist groups on the Web 2.0 have originated and propagated through online spaces new digital native forms of opposition to the gender equality movement. Despite their many differences, fringe subcultures are united in their support of the philosophy of the Red Pill, a shared belief in the oppressed state of men in society at the hands of the matriarchy and its feminist agents. Following a growing body of literature examining the phenomenon from the perspective of male engagement with the ideology, this study explores the ways in which right- wing women operating on the video broadcasting and social media site YouTube negotiate new and old forms of anti-feminism in their commentary. As a hub for far-right pundits, YouTube has created a platform for conservative women to rise to fame by articulating anti-feminist viewpoints and promoting traditional gender roles. Grounded in the Alternative Influence Network or AIN (Lewis, 2018) as a framework for sampling, the paper conducts a qualitative thematic Content Analysis (CA) of thirty videos issued from seven YouTube channels led by anti-feminist women. The findings show that female right-wing YouTubers draw from conservative arguments and from Red Pill ideology to discredit traditional sources of information, while lending legitimacy to the claim that masculinity is under threat by the feminist movement. These results are then recontextualized within current debates on the role played by YouTube in far-right radicalization. Women RedPilling Women: Anti-feminist Radicalization on YouTube 5 Introduction: YouTube as a privileged site to study anti-feminist women Within the past few years, the United States has experienced a new wave of pushback against civil rights considered fundamental for gender equality by the feminist movement. These include restrictions to abortion (North, 2019) and access to contraception, later blocked by court proceedings (Pear, 2019), as well as legal redefinitions of sexual and domestic violence (Oppenheim, 2019). These recent developments raise questions about the resurgence of anti- feminist movements. More specifically, a growing scholarship has begun to examine the interactions between internet subcultures, native to a variety of online platforms, and opposition to feminism (Easter, 2018; Ging, 2017; Jane, 2018; Marwick & Caplan, 2018; Massanari, 2017; Moloney & Love, 2018). This “particularly toxic brand of anti-feminism” (Ging, 2017, p. 1) has its roots in the Men’s Rights movements of the 1980s, which essentially see men as the oppressed gender in society. Despite its constitution as an extremely loose network, plagued by contradictions and internal dissent, this diverse mix of interest groups is united by their belief in “Red Pill ideology”, or a revelation that is supposed to free men from the misandrist and gynocentric nature of society (Ganesh, 2018; Ging, 2017). More specifically, studies have addressed anti-feminism on the web 2.0 from the perspective of gendered cyberhate (Jane, 2018; Moloney & Love, 2018), mapping the relationship between platform politics and new anti- feminist ideologies (Easter, 2018; Massanari, 2017), understanding the discursive connections between different networks and movements (Ganesh, 2018; Ging, 2017; Marwick & Caplan, 2018) and how masculine identities are constructed within them (Ging, 2017; Massanari, 2017). However, the participation of women in new forms of anti-feminist discourses has yet to be addressed. In particular, a few successful female content-creators have risen to fame within the so- called “YouTube Right” by promoting anti-feminist viewpoints and espousing traditional gender roles (Darby, 2017). The phenomenon of the rise of right-wing pundits on YouTube (Haynes, Women RedPilling Women: Anti-feminist Radicalization on YouTube 6 2018; Herrman, 2017; Klein, 2018; Van Zuylen-Wood et al., 2017; Whyman, 2017;), and its radicalizing potential (Weill, 2018; Tufekci, 2018; Feldman, 2019) has attracted media attention, but has not yet been fully examined in academia. A small body of evidence points to connections between online “toxic technoculture”, where Red Pill ideology originated (Massanari, 2017), and YouTube (Ganesh, 2018; Hine et al., 2017). Moreover, Hall (2018) finds that YouTube’s ability to propel “ordinary people” to fame (García-Rapp & Roca-Cuberes, 2017), combined with low barriers to entry and lax policies towards censorship, have made it easier for amateur political commentators on the right to share extremist content with large audiences (Hall, 2018). Anchored in these considerations, this paper sets out to study the anti-feminist rhetoric articulated by female right-wing political commentators on YouTube. Using the Alternative Influence Network (AIN) (Lewis, 2018) as a framework for sampling channels within the YouTube Right, this paper will attempt to answer the question: How do women1 in the Alternative Influence Network construct anti-feminist discourses on YouTube? As the dominant video broadcasting service online, YouTube has become one of the “primary keepers of the cultural discussion as it moves to the internet” (Gillespie, 2010, p. 348). This is why the platform can serve as a tool to explore far-right groups and their belief system from an “internalist” perspective, something that has been difficult to achieve in the past due to access barriers on the part of researchers (Blee, 2007, p. 121). Besides this contribution, the paper aims at elucidating how the anti-feminist discourses of female YouTubers interact with new and old forms of opposition to gender equality, with a particular focus on Red Pill ideology. 1 t is important to note here that the designations “woman” and “female” will be used throughout the paper for simplification purposes to refer to all female-identifying individuals in the AIN. As such, these terms are not meant to provide commentary on transgender and non-binary identities. Women RedPilling Women: Anti-feminist Radicalization on YouTube 7 YouTube: algorithms, microcelebrity and the far-right YouTube is a digital platform integrating media production, distribution and consumption with characteristics typical of social media networks; this unique combination of features fosters a participatory culture among its members, who often engage in commenting, reacting to video content and subscribing to channels (Chau, 2010; Burgess & Green, 2008). Despite its status as the most widely used social network on mobile in the United States (Perrin & Anderson, 2019), the website is academically understudied in comparison to other social media (Crick, 2012), generating large gaps in the literature of political communication. In particular, studies concerned with YouTube and politics have focused on how electoral candidates have used the platform as a low-cost way to distribute political messages (Gueorguieva, 2007), on how young people evaluated different appeals used to frame political issues in homemade videos (English, Sweetser & Ancu, 2011) and on how activist circles make use of the website (Askanius & Uldam, 2011). However, the phenomenon of distribution of radical right ideologies on the platforms is still poorly understood, with a few notable exceptions. Studying hate speech on two YouTube channels, one based in America and the other in Japan, Hall (2018) found that the absence of accountability practices typical of mainstream media platforms, combined with a free-speech-oriented approach towards political commentary and censorship, have allowed far-right channels to reach vast viewership. By avoiding language that would be considered as hate speech by YouTube guidelines and exploring alternative monetization techniques like crowdfunding, these channels have managed to build loyal audiences and thrive. Moreover, a small body of studies has found that the URLs posted in online subcultures known for their virulent hate speech (Ludeman, 2017), and for originating and propagating Red Pill ideology (Massanari, 2017), prevalently linked to YouTube. This was the case for 4chan’s
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