Machosphere "is not a game for boys"

They choose women as their enemy, they are proudly misogynistic, they turn gender violence into an online spectacle, they indoctrinate children and profit from it — this is the machosphere, a “ticking time bomb that has already exploded”, warn experts.

“We have a pornified society, with unregulated digital platforms, where misogyny and violence against women are spectacularized, monetized, and commercialized. It is a time bomb, a social problem that has already exploded in our hands,” emphasizes Maria João Faustino, a specialist in sexual violence.

This “is not just a game for boys”, guarantees Inês Amaral, researcher at the Observatory of Masculinities at the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra.

According to the expert, misogyny “sells”, while propagating “sick and frightening” philosophies, in a universe where men share “non-consensual footage of encounters with women, or even videos without anything sexual about women, mothers, sisters, even daughters”.

“Reactionary and patriarchal digital cultures” are creating “new generations that promote distorted ideas about intimacy, consent, mutual pleasure and equality”, says Diana Pinto, from the Portuguese Platform for Women’s Rights.

The narratives mix “resentment, violence and nostalgia for a lost patriarchal order”, seeing female emancipation as a threat.

“In forums, on social media and on streaming platforms, misogynistic discourses proliferate, promoting a culture that sexualizes, dehumanizes and even holds girls and women responsible for the violence they suffer,” he says.

This “violent digital culture” is “enhanced by algorithms and the monetization of sexist content, which is highly profitable for some, particularly for the platforms,” he says.

The root problem is “very deep and is rooted in many centuries of inequality and male supremacy”, gaining “new avenues and dimensions of impunity” online, Maria João Faustino points out, warning that it is “very easy to entice, capture and radicalize young men” for these speeches.

The machosphere “has many echoes and many alliances” with “pornography or the extreme right” and “is not only in the catacombs of the internet”.

“Misogynists are men who share our lives in society, who live with us, in our homes, in our families. We need to painfully acknowledge that they are men like us, and often men we love, who are our children, our fathers, men we trust,” he stresses.

Maria João Faustino warns that the problem is structural and has gone “without a preventive response or a serious approach”.

The British Andrew Tate, a self-proclaimed misogynist, is for these men “a kind of hero” and propagates speeches “of atrocious violence and a promotion of very substantial hatred, consumed by hundreds of thousands of young people on a daily basis”, reports Inês Amaral.

“Children do not actively seek out this content, but they are the target of these people,” warns the researcher.

Then, “there is word of mouth and the consumption of certain platforms, namely games, full of these ideas”, he highlights, finding a “direct link” between the machosphere and the Alt-Right movements (alternative right focused on white supremacy) in the United States of America.

It is a “terrible problem”, fueled “by the conservative discourses of far-right groups and parties, which legitimize a harsher discourse, resorting to violence and belittling the role of women”, points out Sandra Cunha, from FEM — Feministas em Movimento.

Tiago Rolino, a lawyer, research manager and activist, sees machismo as a “manifestation of the patriarchal system”, the “top of the pyramid of privileges” that “is always present”, blocking “full equality of rights and opportunities”.

“The first victims of machismo are women. But men are also victims. They commit more suicides, suffer more from preventable diseases because they don’t go to the doctor, consume more drugs, commit more crimes and suffer more from depression,” he says.

Being “a provider, courageous, strong, physically well-built, hiding emotions, being a womanizer and successful” are the “pillars of masculinity that a real man tries to achieve”, but “no one achieves them all”, which “causes problems of frustration” and resorting to “violence to assert themselves”, he explains.