A Virtual Ethnography On Toxic Masculinities During The Covid-19 Pandemic. Italian Incel And Red Pill Communities' Hate Speeches And Violence Against Women

Today, online groups sharing violent language and hate speech are spreading and multiplying. The Incel and Red Pill groups are part of an active and growing manosphere, in Italy as well as in other countries. The aim of the study is to analyze gender representations and symbolic discourses related to gender identities and models of masculinities, proposed and co-produced in the Italian Incel and Red Pill virtual communities. After a long virtual ethnography, carried out covertly in closed online groups on social media from January 2020 to February 2021, we identified three intertwined dimensions: male aesthetics and self-narratives; reification and dehumanization of women; violence against women. The results show that violence is immanent and integrated into the lexicon and imagery of this virtual community. Violence is justified by a self-victimization narrative, which calls into question the economic crisis and the lack of work, as well as aesthetics: these boys and men declare themselves lonely, ugly, precarious or unemployed. Instead of questioning a rigid and extremely normative binary view that traps them in unattainable patterns, and instead of reconsidering the extent to which their legitimate anxieties and fears are caused by economic policies that increase inequality, precariousness and unemployment (Kimmel 2013) - above all during the Covid-19 pandemic -, members of this groups implement a backlash (Faludi 1991) against women who, in their view, do not respect traditional roles and models (Köttig et al. 2017). Moreover, these online groups are a relational context which could act as a justifying ground as well as a trigger for transitions to violent practices offline, as emerges from the various episodes of terrorism that the authorities have linked to online Incel groups.