level | Like so many online communities, the Black Manosphere is rife with internal divisions and disputes, each more ridiculous than the last; what unites it is its founding principles of anti-feminism. Most of these are cribbed from the larger “manosphere,” an umbrella term for a collection of subreddits and “men’s rights” forums claiming that women and a feminist-leaning society have robbed men of their power, and then tailored to Black women specifically. Black women lack femininity, says Black Manosphere dogma; they refuse to be submissive; they are the ones responsible for Black family dysfunction.
As with the manosphere at large, the Black Manosphere traffics in jargon that makes them sound like Matrix superfans whose experience with actual women doesn’t extend beyond fantasy. “Red pill” ideology casts followers as visionaries who dare to see through the illusion; they divide other men into “alpha” and “beta” categories to denote their power and status (“betabux,” for example, is a term used for weak men whose only value to women is as sugar daddies). Sexually empowered women are denigrated as riding the “cock carousel” until they hit “the wall” in their mid-twenties and their “sexual market value” drops; the 80/20 rule dictates that women find only one out of every five men attractive enough to have sex without added incentives like money (at which their “hypergamy,” or drive to marry up a class, kicks in).
As with the manosphere at large, the Black Manosphere traffics in jargon that makes them sound like “Matrix” superfans whose experience with actual women doesn’t extend beyond fantasy.
Unlike the larger, ostensibly White manosphere, the Black Manosphere isn’t a pathway into the alt-right. It reserves its ire solely for its own community: Black women and men who violate its expectations. Black women in particular are its targets, with men referring to them as “scraggle daggles,” “demons,” and “the most filthy and disease-ridden women on the planet.” It’s a codified system of misogynoir — misogyny toward Black women in particular — that gives stark form to an attitude Black women have been noticing and discussing for well over a decade.
Before the Black Manosphere, there was the men’s rights movement, and lo, it was bad. It was also predominantly White, or at least non-Black. A Philadelphia-based man who calls himself Mumia Obsidian Ali sought to change that. After coming across men’s rights activists online in the mid-2010s, he began to contribute pieces to blogs like A Voice for Men and Return of Kings, and eventually launched a radio show where he holds forth on his favorite topic: Black women. (The seeds of his own anti-feminism were sown in childhood, he suggested in one article, when he saw his grandmother and mother being verbally abusive toward his grandfather and father, respectively.) “Black women [in America], as a group, suck,” he tells me in an email exchange.
As the Black Manosphere proliferated, so did a deluge of content. Men — mostly from North America and Western Europe — write ceaseless articles referencing other articles, and upload videos as long as 12 hours blaming Black women for every societal ill plaguing Black communities in Western societies. Literally, every one: crime rates, single motherhood, STD rates, killing sprees, lagging school performance, out-of-wedlock births; abortions, incarceration rates. To bypass YouTube’s content moderation policies, some make their videos age-restricted. Others post their content on BitChute or Free Speech Avenger, both of which can feature profane or even pornographic content, as well as their own websites, blogs, podcasts, private Facebook pages, and Telegram chat groups. Some self-publish books. Revenue builds through donations during livestreams, one-on-one consultation fees, book sales, merchandise, and Patreon subscriptions. A nearly two-hour video can generate more than $200 in donations.
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