The Guardian runs interference for a shoddy, terrible UK government report on the Manosphere

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Last week, the Guardian ran a surprisingly uncritical article on a new UK government report on the manosphere, which was itself surprisingly uncritical. The report, put forth by the UK’s official communications regulator Ofcom, claims, among other things, that its new research “challenge[s] the assumptions about the experiences and perceptions of individuals consuming manosphere content” and that many of these poor maligned fellows actually have “a strong commitment to equal treatment and fairness,” which is a sentiment I’ve never encountered in the manosphere after 15 years of immersing myself in its shit.

Sure, most manospherians delude themselves into thinking that men are the truly oppressed class, and they think that they deserve some sort of reparations or perhaps an award for this, and that this would only be fair, but that’s not the same as actually having a commitment to reality based “equal treatment and fairness.” 

The report was written by a self-described “specialist in marketing, design & communication” named Damon De Ionno. He’s the managing director of Revealing Reality, “A MULTIDISCIPLINARY AGENCY, HELPING OUR CLIENTS DELIVER CHANGE” (sorry, their web page has it in all-caps) that actually did the research for Ofcom. De Ionno told the Guardian that manosphere dudes are (I guess secretly?) “pretty discriminating and value-driven” and that “our research suggests society has overestimated the risk of the manosphere to women.”

Oh, and apparently only a “a minority [of manospherians have] encountered ‘extremely misogynistic content,’” as the Guardian summarizes one of the report’s claims. Really? That’s like saying that only a minority of fish have encountered water in the ocean. 

The Guardian basically just repeats what De Ionno’s report says with no pushback on any of its specific claims beyond a single paragraph mentioning that “separate expert studies have found some evidence that the language of the manosphere can escalate into physical violence.”

Setting aside The Guardian’s inability to do basic journalism in this piece, one might wonder: how exactly did De Ionno and his researchers come to their, ah, unique conclusions? The Guardian gives us a little hint, noting in passing that

The Ofcam study involved 38 men, and more misogynistic men may have declined to take part. Some potential recruits refused to take part, considering the government-appointed regulator to be part of the “mainstream”. Perhaps the most impressionable group, boys under 16, were also not included.

Huh. So this is a small, thoroughly unscientific, thoroughly unrepresentative survey of the only manosphere dudes they could find who were unradicalized enough to agree to talk to someone representing an official government body. (There was also one pro-manosphere woman, god help us all, making the total number of subjects 39. A fortieth dropped out.) Oh, and as I learned from reading the report itself, none of the researchers seem to have made much of an attempt to find out if any of the things these guys told them were, you know, true. 

In short, this study doesn’t tell us much if anything about the manosphere itself. It tells us what 38 men and one woman associated with the manosphere think the government and the public should think about it. And the, er, researchers basically accepted this PR job as reality. And seemed oblivious when their interviewees still went ahead and said rancidly misogynistic things. 

Let’s go through the report and you can see what a mess it was. 

First, it was scientifically shoddy. The report admits plainly that the researchers did no “systematic literature review” of previous studies of the manosphere and that the dudes (and one lady) they interviewed were a “self-selecting” bunch that just might exclude “those with more extreme views.” They accepted a dictionary definition of the manosphere as a “loose agglomeration of blogs, websites and forums dedicated to men’s issues,” which is like describing Trump administration ghoul Stephen Miller as “a government official interested in the issue of immigration.” I mean, it’s technically correct, but boy does it miss the fucking point.

The researchers seem to think that only the most extreme expressions of misogyny–like “posts explicitly calling for violence against women and using dehumanizing language”–really count as misogyny. But the researchers suggested that many other comments that you or I would consider misogynistic were actually ambiguous at best, like “self-improvement advice … directed at men with the goal of improving their romantic or sexual success with women, based on assumptions about women’s nature and their romantic and sexual preferences.” 

Uh, yeah, but what if these “assumptions about women’s nature” are, you know, misogynistic as hell? I mean, the standard belief among manospherians is that essentially all women are cock-hungry slatterns (not that there’s anything wrong with that, I would say, but they wouldn’t) who fuck hundreds of different Chads a year, ignoring all the nice fellows. And this sort of woman (i.e. every woman) will desert any man she’s with in a heartbeat if she catches a whiff of the superior genes of any slightly Chaddier Chad in sniffing distance. 

Oh, the researchers also think it’s ambiguous when manospherians start going on about the “immutable differences between men and women but without asserting the dominance or superiority of one over the other.” Which is weird, because when have you ever seen manospherians talking about alleged gender, ah, “differences” without implicitly or explicitly making clear that they think men are superior?

They say that defining content in the manosphere as “misogynistic or otherwise is challenging” and I can only say, to you, maybe. Most of us can see it for what it is. The report goes on to declare that “a wide range” of manosphere content they found in their unsystematic review of previous studies “does not appear at face value to contain misogyny,” which makes me wonder if the researchers can actually read. 

Then they get to the interviews, reporting breathlessly that

Most of the men we spoke to reported positive views of women. Most mentioned that they had women in “their lives – both personal and professional – that they loved and respected.”

Hey, even Archie Bunker had a black friend! I mean, sort of. 

Most, in line with their stated commitment to equal treatment and fairness, emphasised that women should be able to exercise individual choice in their lives.

Mighty generous of them–though this isn’t a particularly popular belief among manospherians, who tend to talk endlessly about the need to crack down on women and their inexcusable freedoms.

Also, the interviewees themselves would go on to say things like:

They want to be equal to be like men, but for what, because when I go on a date, I still got to pay.

And then there was another interviewee’s remarkable half-way defense of misogynistic Muslims who beat their wives:

It sounds horrible yeh, but like, a lot of relationships are like, when you argue, and the woman gets battered, if the woman wasn’t allowed to argue back with you that wouldn’t happen. So, they kind of get that bit right. The woman doesn’t confront, or doesn’t argue back with you, because they’re going to get a slap.

But I don’t think that the slap bit is right. …  I don’t think the hitting each other is right, but I think how they are getting women to act is.

So the “slap bit” is wrong but it’s kind of the fault of the women for, you know, speaking.

Big sections of the report consist of completely uncritical regurgitations of what the interviewees said about themselves without any attempt to actually evaluate if these things were true. Here’s the MGTOW movement, seen through the eyes of (some of) its participants, and apparently the researchers as well:

The men engaged with MGTOW content described it as supportive, enlightening, and sometimes irreverent or funny. … 

These men felt strongly that the majority of MGTOW communities were not focused on misogyny, as the content they saw did not, in their view, promote hatred of women, but rather a view that life was better without relationships with them.

As for incels, well, despite them sometimes posting “extreme fantasies of sexual violence,” the report noted helpfully that some of the “participants said they had read studies showing that the vast majority of Incels are not violent.” Just like the vast majority of Americans in 1865 did not assassinate Abraham Lincoln. There was just that one guy. That’s a mere 0.000003% of the population! 

It’s such a strange and terrible, and profoundly lazy, report. I can only hope that the UK government didn’t pay Revealing Reality much money for it, but somehow I suspect they did. But hey, it will probably convince the government to spend less on monitoring misogynistic hate online, so really, it probably saved them some money in the end. A pence saved is a pence earned. 

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