A couple of months ago I made quite possibly the most innocuous video of my career: a reel explaining that you didn’t need to lift your arm to knock on a door. I never could’ve fathomed what would come next.
I’ve worked as a digital content creator for eight years, regularly posting (and podcasting) about the importance of self-love, body acceptance and exposing the trickery of filters, all of which has culminated in me being a part of a wonderful community – of mostly women – online. At first, all the comments in response to my door-knocking video came from these kinds of people, whose minds were blown at the fact they’d been unnecessarily raising their arms all these years. Then, this week, months after it was initially posted, it started to go viral… after somehow hitting the wrong algorithm (an occupational hazard and horrible when it happens).
Initially, I noticed a few comments coming in about my “phat ass” and some weird DMs along the same vein, which caused an eyebrow raise but little more, until throughout the day, the comments became increasingly misogynistic in their tone. Men telling me that I “knew exactly what I was doing” when I made the reel, that I had deliberately lifted my jumper above my waist to show off my bum, with one proclaiming how “these hoes desperately want us to see their ass so bad smh”.
Laura Bates, the author of Men Who Hate Women, has subsequently explained to me that once a couple of comments like this have been made, Instagram will then push the content out to similarly like-minded people, hence how comment sections can spiral. I've also heard that videos like this end up on incel Facebook groups, where members are encouraged to join in on a pile on, tearing women down and pushing their misogynistic agenda.
By Sunday evening, I was somewhere between horrified and fascinated as anonymous men continued to claim that I was ‘attention-seeking’ and that my outfit was a thinly veiled ploy to attract their attention. I was – in one man’s words – contributing to the ‘HOEDEMIC’ of Instagram.
This sequence of events is a really clear example of how mainstream the manosphere, defined as being a collection of websites, blogs, and online forums promoting masculinity, misogyny, and opposition to feminism, has become. And how this subsequent hatred of women is manifesting itself. The ‘hoedemic’ that this man describes, I think at least, refers to the sexual liberation of women; the empowerment that so many now feel after years of oppression, given them the freedom to show up and show off their bodies in whichever way they would like. In my eyes, that is something to be celebrated and I’ll cheer for any person who wants to go viral for content based on their body.
But, if we put that to one side for just a moment, it’s also important to point out that that’s not what this video was doing. At all. In fact, as far as my body was concerned, all I was really doing in this video was existing. I’m literally just standing there, wearing leggings and an oversized sweatshirt. Meanwhile, these men have chosen to sexualise me, off of their own backs, and then hate me for it.
I am not alone in falling victim to this either, talking to fellow creator Liv Humby, she told me how she receives countless comments like this under every single video from men who’ve landed upon her fashion content, clearly meant for women, sexualised it and then abused her – based on their own twisted interpretation of her intentions.
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It doesn’t matter how thick my skin gets, an onslaught of this nature is horrible and I’ve felt anxious since it happened. Whilst I can laugh at the individual comments, to know that there are hoards of men out there who are so comfortable talking about my body in this way is disgusting.
The rise of the manosphere, propped up by Andrew Tate (who just yesterday was charged with rape and human trafficking) and his ilk, and the culture of absolutely hating women that it breeds, is the thing that scares me most about the internet right now. Go see for yourself, since news outlets began reporting on Tate the comment sections are enough to turn your stomach. A man charged with rape is still a hero in their eyes. I had a DM last night from a man who said “can’t wait til they get found not guilty because there’s no proof of these allegations and it’ll be a good day for men who want to improve themselves everywhere :)” A good day for men, maybe. A terrifying one for women.
Although I am able, for the most part, to brush off the individual comments, and laugh at the idiocy of most of them, it is chilling, really, to know that you’re spoken about in such a dehumanising way and that these men walk among us. They’re behind us on the bus, at our schools, in our offices. It's actually wild that hundreds of DMs and comments, trying to tear me (and other women) down simply for daring to be visible, have all stemmed from something as innocent as me NOT RAISING MY ARM TO KNOCK ON A DOOR. But these comments spawned by a jokey video are anything but funny, as they make you realise how dangerous these men make existing as a woman – because there is nothing I could’ve done to avoid this, short of hiding myself (and by default, my body) from view.
I replied to one commenter who told me that I ‘didn’t need to show my arse in order to make this video’ by telling him that the only alternative I could think of would be to wear a cloak. It was only after I said it that I realised the unnerving parallels my suggestion bore to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and its ‘dystopian’ reality, that feels like it’s edging ever closer by the day.
The problem here – and it’s a very big problem – boils down to the overtly sexualised, hate-filled thoughts that these men are being conditioned to have about women, that they are then taking and projecting onto us. This gnarled and cruel cynicism, this dehumanisation, this hatred, is terrifying to be on the receiving end of. Not for how it affects me today, but how it might affect my daughter tomorrow.
This is the manosphere. This is dangerous. And this, terrifyingly, is just a tiny drop in the sea of hate that women seem to be at risk of drowning in right now.
Em Clarkson is a podcaster, influencer and social media activist. You can follow her on Instagram and TikTok.
