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17. Introduction to Pick-Mes ft. Danielle Procope Bell
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Sarah and Helen sit down with Danielle Procope Bell, an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, to discuss her recent paper “‘Pick-Me’ Black women: tactical patriarchal femininity in the Black manosphere” (https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2023.2262163 ).
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Episode art by @canis_kunst on Instagram.
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Transcript
Introduction to Odium Symposium
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, this is Helen. This is Sarah. And welcome to Odium Symposium, a podcast about the production of bigotry. Today we have an interview episode.
Guest Introduction: Daniel Prokope Bell
00:00:11
Speaker
We talked to Daniel Prokope Bell, an assistant professor of Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and an affiliate faculty in English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
00:00:23
Speaker
Her work is grounded in Black feminist thought, with a particular focus on gender identity, and interiority, and the right to care in the lives of Black women.
Tactical Patriarchal Femininity in the Black Manosphere
00:00:32
Speaker
We talked about her article, Pick Me Black Women, Tactical Patriarchal Femininity in the Black Manosphere, published in the journal Feminist Media Studies.
00:00:41
Speaker
It has come to much wider use now, but the term pick me originated on black Twitter as a critique of anti-feminist black women. It's been reclaimed by content creators in the black manosphere who use it to elevate themselves over other pass me women.
00:00:55
Speaker
We talked to Prokope Bell about all of this and about the material forces motivating what she argues is a strategic performance of gender. It was a super interesting conversation, and I hope you all enjoy it as much as we did.
00:01:06
Speaker
First, we want to thank our new odium connoisseurs.
Community Support and Promotion
00:01:10
Speaker
So thank you to Mulberry. Thank you, thank you, thank you and thank you to Benjamin. Thank you, Benjamin.
00:01:17
Speaker
Just a reminder, you can join our Patreon at patreon.com slash odiumsymposium for $5 a month. We'll read your message on the show if you leave one. You'll get early access to episodes. And we're going to continue to produce connoisseur-only episodes from time to time.
00:01:32
Speaker
But mostly, you're just being nice to us. Also, all listeners are welcome to join our Discord. And you can find a link in the description. There's really nothing real. There is no real.
00:01:43
Speaker
And that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. I don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live.
00:01:56
Speaker
Is Trump going to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader. Do it live! Now listen, you can write a loving name. Let's get... Let's stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
00:02:13
Speaker
some level of masochism. Hi, Danielle. We're so happy to have you here. and Thank you for inviting
Researching the Pick Me Phenomenon
00:02:20
Speaker
me. When we first started doing this podcast, I already had this like little kernel of an idea in my mind that I wanted to talk about pygmies as a topic. There's a lot of podcasts that examine different aspects of bigotry, but something I as a trans person experience online all the time is other trans people being kind of
00:02:45
Speaker
thrown at me in the media sphere or presented to me as aspirations in a way that like doesn't quite a align with my politics or like my sense of how i wanted to be trans. And so I went about looking for academic research on this kind of pick-me phenomenon.
00:03:05
Speaker
And I found a wonderful paper that you wrote. titled pick me black women tactical patriarchal femininity and the black manosphere yeah so i immediately knew that i wanted to interview you about it about it after reading the paper and so i'm really glad that we're going to get the opportunity to do so Yeah, I'm glad to be here to talk
Understanding the Black Manosphere
00:03:30
Speaker
about it. I think a good place to start is just with some basic terminology. So, you know, your article is about pick me's in the black manosphere. We could start with like defining our terms a little bit. So I guess we could start with what is the manosphere? or What is the black manosphere? Yeah, so the manosphere, the easiest way probably to define it. These are online spaces across many different sites, such as
00:03:53
Speaker
TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, that coalesce around an ideological center, which is hating women. And not only just hating women, but also hating gender non-normative people in general, or gender minorities. So highly bigoted spaces, definitely misogynistic, also transphobic.
00:04:14
Speaker
Also, in some cases, also classist. Yeah, I think the most famous person, the most recognizable name that would be in the Manosphere would be Andrew Tate, who everybody kind of knows, if they know anything about the Manosphere. They know about him. But there's also a lot of other content creators that are also part of these spaces that are also saying some troubling things. And so then the second question was, what is the Black Manosphere? And so the Black Manosphere is a subgroup within this larger
00:04:45
Speaker
manosphere And they have a lot of ideological similarities to the mainstream manosphere. However, they have a particular focus on censoring cisgender heterosexual Black men and their, I should say, patriarchal Black men. and their particular desires. Yeah, those that that's how I would define the black manosphere. Very misogynistic, just like the the general manosphere, but very focused on black men and by extension, also very focused on black women. controlling black women, giving rules and and dictating behavior, the behavior of black women and all of that. i want to indicate a little bit of separation from some people we've talked about before who also sort of fit into that description. So for example, we've had a Nick Fuentes episode and Fuentes identifies himself as part of the incel movement. which is very connected to all this Manosphere stuff. But on some level, like we are talking about a separate phenomenon where Manosphere content tends to resolve a lot more specifically around misogyny and the control of women than Fuentes' content, which covers all kinds of other bigotry.
00:06:05
Speaker
At the same time, like I don't want to pretend that these are these are like totally like separate things. The way I've come to understand it is that the incel movement is one part of the manosphere. And so the manosphere is this huge overlapping group. And sometimes the different groups within it don't even necessarily agree with each other on everything. But they do kind of center around this idea of male dominance and misogyny. And so in the way that I've looked at it, the incel movement would be one aspect of
Evolution and Reclamation of 'Pick Me'
00:06:34
Speaker
that.
00:06:34
Speaker
And what about these terms, pick me and the related term, pass me? Like, what is your understanding of those terms? Yeah, and pick me is an interesting term. When I wrote the paper, it had a very particular meaning.
00:06:48
Speaker
And now it's undergone a form of elite capture where it kind of means anything now. Now it just means i don't like that woman. But at the time when I wrote the article, pick me was a word that was more specific and used within Black online spaces to signal a Black woman who capitulated to patriarchy, who prioritized men's desires and wants above what works best for women and Black women in particular. And so the word was used in a very particular derogatory
00:07:23
Speaker
way by Black women who were critiquing women that joined groups like the Black Manosphere. So the second part was, what is a past me? But when I wrote the article, Pick Me had, as I said, this very particular definition and use. But then that definition was played around with by the women in the Manosphere.
00:07:44
Speaker
and they tried to make it into a positive term. And so they would often describe themselves in positive terms as a pick me, as somebody who is going to be picked by men.
00:07:55
Speaker
And everybody else, they are past me's. They're women that are going to be passed over by men. So i think it's really interesting how these terms can mean something originally. And then depending on who's using it, it can completely flip its meaning or eventually become meaningless when too many people use it in whatever or any context. Yeah, it's interesting. There's like already two almost completely different ways that it's reclaimed. One is people who are being called pick me is reclaiming it as like, no, this is a good thing. And and you're actually, you know, here's some other word past me that, you know, why would I want to be that and not a pick me? And then the reclaiming by people who realize, oh, this is something that I'm allowed to call a woman, right?
00:08:37
Speaker
in a vaguely derogatory sense. And so let me sort of erase whatever the actual criticism is. And you know, it's and like those are sort of almost unrelated tendencies. And it's interesting to see how this thing like grew into this much wider term. I've seen the word pick me now being used to critique feminist women. So you know, it kind of means whatever now, but it definitely had a specific origin.
00:08:59
Speaker
Even kind of our starting point, which is much closer to the term as used in your article than critiquing feminists by calling them pick-me's, is like a distortion of the term. like I think of pick-me as something that could be applied to, say, a trans woman who allies herself with patriarchy and gender normativity and that sort of thing.
00:09:25
Speaker
And that's kind of not where it comes from. So already the the idea I had in my head like is a mutated form. But I think the idea of a pick me is really like a subset from respectability politics more generally.
00:09:43
Speaker
And respectability politics, of course, relates to all kinds of ideological movements. And so even though it has a specific way that it was used originally,
00:09:54
Speaker
To me, it's very easy to see how it can be used, how it can be applied to other situations as well, just as the term respectability politics has been used pretty broadly since its original use, which was really focused on late 19th, early 20th century black women in the Baptist church. Yeah, i think it's interesting to say like, okay, you know, we have this term, it's been broadened in all these ways, but there are some ways in which, you know, we're talking about pick me getting distorted into meaning to something entirely different or being meaningless versus sort of broadening this understanding of, okay, we want to understand a, an analogous critique of somebody who is engaging in
00:10:30
Speaker
some kind of conservative cultural commitment in order to do something. Right. And so there, there sort of is an analogy I would say that is, you know, it may be, it, it, it is more interesting to talk about when we talk about, um you know, the examples you're talking about, Sarah, of like a trans woman who is trying to engage in sort of traditional gender politics or whatever, you know, is different than saying.
00:10:52
Speaker
Pick me is getting broadened into something meaningless because, you know, by calling a feminist woman to pick me, for example, But if we're going to focus specifically on, on this use you, so you write about the pick me, you write about the pick me in the black manosphere and you argue that people are engaging in this, um, as a form of something called tactical patriarchal femininity.
Strategic Gender Performance
00:11:10
Speaker
So do you want to unpack that a little bit for us? Like what is tactical patriarchal femininity?
00:11:15
Speaker
Yeah. And so as I followed the women, these content creators who were in the black manosphere and I followed them for probably about 18 months. maybe a little more, or a little less. And it dawned on me that there is a very strategic element to what they're doing. It's not, and I think I was also reacting in part to many people's view of quote unquote, pick me women as merely having low self-esteem or not really being apolitical, being not really knowing what's going on. It's kind of like mindlessly following men. And I saw something very different when I was following these content creators. I saw a strategy.
00:11:59
Speaker
i saw intentionality. i saw very curated, very curated images that they would post and create. And that those images were being used for particular purposes, such as making money as a content creator. And so the word tactical patriarchal femininity is really a recognition that they're performing, they're embodying patriarchal femininity and all of its expectations. But this is not mindless or random.
00:12:28
Speaker
It's something that they're being very tactical about, very strategic about. because they want the gains from that. And the gains that they think they will get from it are coalesced around economic opportunity, relational opportunity, as in entering into a traditional patriarchal marriage, being the the goal for many of the women that I followed was to eventually not have to be in the workforce to be like financially taken care of. And so I think the term is really important to me because I think it out
00:12:59
Speaker
it outlines how women are not mindless and they do things on purpose. Sometimes those things are not good things, but they're still doing it on purpose for a particular reason. And I wanted to highlight that about the women that I was studying in the Black Mad Sphere. I think that ties in really well with something that we've been trying to do with the podcast, even though we haven't always explicitly called it out in our episodes, which is when we examine a particular production of bigotry, we always try and ask, what is the person who is doing the producing getting out of this bigotry?
00:13:33
Speaker
instead of just assuming that you know being somebody who outputs this stuff is some sort of ah sliver in the core of your being, and then it affects the rest of you, and then it radiates out into things you do in the world.
00:13:47
Speaker
There are questions of how people try to get things out of other people. For example, they might want their writing to be more accepted in the literary circles they work in that are like particularly racist. Or they might be hoping to get some kind of like clear like economic or social advantage over a person.
00:14:15
Speaker
And so when I saw how much your are paper like focused on the maneuvers that these women are undergoing, i got really excited. You can't understand, well you really can't understand anything about Black women, but you also can't understand Black women who participate in regressive gender movements without also understanding the structural factors that lead to their involvement. And so just the amount of...
00:14:43
Speaker
indirect and direct content about basically the fear of poverty. That was a huge theme that I saw in the content that I would listen to. Content creators essentially threatening Black women with poverty unless they capitulated to patriarchy.
00:14:59
Speaker
So if you don't do what men want to do if you don't get on a man's program, and that's literally like how it was framed, then you are going to join the statistics of the not insignificant number of Black women who are living in poverty or near poverty. And that kind of messaging is very powerful because it is a reality that Black women are disproportionately in poverty or near poverty. What the Black Manosphere does is it takes reality and then says, if you want to avoid this reality, you need to become a traditional patriarchal woman.
00:15:30
Speaker
And you need to follow the dictates of I guess, all black men. And so it takes something real and then adds an ideological component that encourages women or teaches women that the best thing that they can do is make themselves subservient to men. Yeah, i mean, that's a very powerful, that's a very powerful argument. And it's a very convincing argument, especially for women who may not have much awareness or involvement with other ways of thinking about these structural issues, such as through black feminism. And so that's something that I was always extremely aware of as I was basically watching the content that these women were creating.
00:16:09
Speaker
There's also this aspect where there are parallel systems of oppression, racial oppression, for example, through misogynorous tropes that are used to abuse Black women like the mammy, the welfare mother, the Jezebel.
00:16:26
Speaker
And you describe engaging in this pick-me culture as also being presented as a way of escaping being the target of these methods of abuse.
00:16:38
Speaker
I mean, yeah, it's very paradoxical, but it makes sense to the women who are doing it. But essentially, what I found when I was watching these content creators, a huge motivation, so besides the the threat of poverty, another huge motivation was trying to avoid the stigma that's usually attached to Black womanhood and Black femininity. And exactly those controlling images, those tropes that you just named are some of what they are trying to avoid. But they're not trying to avoid it by saying this is not how Black women are, or these are misrepresentations of Black women. They're trying to avoid it' It's a very neoliberal strategy. And they're trying to avoid it by saying, yes, this is well how Black women are, but I'm different. That's not me. And so basically, speaking derogatorily about the majority of Black women to say I'm an anomaly, I'm different, and therefore I don't deserve the stigma, the disrespect,
00:17:38
Speaker
that usually comes to black women. And so paradoxical and I would argue not very successful as an argument, but that's the argument that's being made. You point to this paradox that these anti-feminist black women are in, but it it also in in the black manosphere itself, it it leads to, you point out like infighting and drama.
00:17:55
Speaker
Yeah.
Influencer Infighting in the Manosphere
00:17:56
Speaker
with Because, you know, they sort of have to be accusing each other of not being as good as them, right? They're sort of directly competing with each other. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about how that paradox plays out within the sphere itself.
00:18:07
Speaker
Yeah, and so that was something that was interesting to me that i witnessed while I was working on the article, just the amount of mean girl antics that content creators were directing towards each other.
00:18:21
Speaker
And so there was there's always a tension when you have when you have a a strategy that's built upon saying the majority is terrible, but I'm different.
00:18:34
Speaker
That means that you need to minimize the amount of people who can also claim that they are different too. And so there was a motivation to say, this person is not a genuine anti-feminist or a genuine fit pick me, but I am, and I'm going to prove it in, you know,
00:18:53
Speaker
X or Y way. And yeah, because the whole argument is that Black women and in general are any amount of negative stereotypes. And so any Black woman, even the Black women who inhabit these spaces are one mistake, one word or phrasing away from also being part of that general group that deserves to be degraded. And so they were always So not only were they motivated ah to fight amongst themselves because they wanted to be the the only one or the winner, but also because they know that if they break the script in any kind of way, that now they are going to be on the outside and part of the group that they are mocking.
00:19:35
Speaker
Maybe this is a good moment to introduce her dramatist persona a little bit. So you followed a few different influencers. So one of them is named Ebony Nikita. And I wonder if you could describe her and her whole deal a little bit. She was a softer content creation creator. And I i mean that in the sense of, I wouldn't say that she was firmly implanted in the in the Black manosphere, but she was making anti-feminist content centered around being a housewife. I guess now people like to use the word trad wife. I don't think that word was as popular when I published the article, but that's essentially what the kind of content that she was creating. And so she was really focused on aesthetics,
00:20:19
Speaker
So adopting kind of like a 1950s dress, for ah example, showing kind of like the softer, more palatable sides of of traditionalism, such as, and think these things don't really have to do with traditionalism, but it's all an aesthetic, such as flower arranging, baking, tidying up your your home,
00:20:40
Speaker
that kind of thing, going out for coffee, and also talking a lot about the privileges and the benefits of not working, not being in the workforce. And so her content was very interesting to me for many reasons. But one of the reasons was looking at the comments and looking at who was engaging with the content. A lot of very young Black women, some would say their age in the comments. They would say, I'm 16 or I'm Or at a very young age and saying, you know, this content, I really look up to it because it's encouraging me to pursue this lifestyle and to become a housewife. And so it's very aspirational content. And so I'm very interested in how aspirational content like that impacts the viewers, especially viewers as young, you know, as that. Yeah, I think definitely we've seen anytime we've looked at, you know, any kind of online personality, like these spaces do have a lot of very young people. And it's like a little scary to think about, you know, what what is the world that young people are being are seeing on the internet?
00:21:38
Speaker
I guess one point that you mentioned here is, you know, there's this notion of the trad wife and this sense of being sort of traditional or a traditional housewife or something, or or some tradition that's not necessarily actually clear where that tradition originates or what the actual source of that, you know, traditional image is actually coming from. And so I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about like, is there a sense of what the sort of ideal image of the traditional? Yeah, the ideal image of the Black trad wife. Yeah, the ideal image of the black trad wife and what cultural concepts are they drawing from or thinking about as they create this content? That's a good question. i have a hypothesis. I don't know that that can be definitively answered. But my hypothesis is, I think this is probably true for white trad wives as well.
00:22:24
Speaker
this image never actually existed. i think that it is a product of media culture. Leave it to Beaver. um If you've ever heard of that, like this media image that became popularized in the mid 20th century and the slightly later 20th century. And so I don't think that this image is based on anything actually real.
00:22:49
Speaker
And especially for black trad wives. I think part of it is it is a production of, or it's a reproduction of this media image. And another part of it is that it's perceived as being resistant to the way that white supremacy has forced black women into often degrading and all-encompassing work.
00:23:10
Speaker
And so they're very aware, black trad wives, that they're doing something that makes them an anoma an anomaly within the black community. They're very aware of the history of black women being forced to labor, not only during the period of enslavement, but also afterwards as domestic workers, as mammies. So they're very aware Most of the content creators I've seen are seems to be very aware of that history and perceive themselves as breaking the mold of that. And so in that way, they're kind of framing the what they're doing as li ah liberating, as radical. And so there's that component of it, too, when you look specifically at Black Tradwives. Yeah, that's really interesting. I think we see a lot of anti-feminist writers that we've looked at in the 20th century and talking about, you know, women in the workforce. But of course, they're often talking about white women in the workforce, because there's obviously this entire other history, as you were just discussing. And I think this actually, this is probably a good place for us to also ask about neoliberalism, because this is where I think you mentioned in the article a couple of times, content creators and you know people in the black manosphere are talking about and these anti-feminist black women talking about wanting to be or or seeming to seek shelter from
00:24:22
Speaker
the challenges of neoliberalism from the threat of poverty and from, you know, being forced into the workforce that it seems like neoliberalism is forcing.
Impact of Neoliberalism on Black Communities
00:24:30
Speaker
And I guess sort of two part question. So one, if we could talk a little bit for our listeners, like what is neoliberalism? Yeah. And two, how much is that word actually something they're using? Or is that something that sort of you were glossing based on the things they were discussing? So I can start off by saying they're not using that terminology. Okay. That's how I interpreted yeah how they're approaching things. But neoliberalism refers to ah political ideology that's really focused on individual responsibility versus collective responsibility. Or the idea that, for example, a government should be responsible for its citizens through welfare, for example, or through other kind of beneficial policies such as parental leave or things that we don't, health care, things that we don't really have broad access to here in the United States. that would be a neoliberal perspective to instead put that responsibility solely on the individual or on individual family units as being responsible for making those things happen and so when it comes to the black manosphere i saw neoliberal ideology all throughout and in fact many of the ah content creators are explicitly against welfare they blame welfare for example for destroying the black family So very like Moynihan Report. but Many of them actually know of the Moynihan Report, which is from the 1960s. And it's interesting to me that they're aware of this document and they really like the document. they
00:26:00
Speaker
They agree with it. Because essentially, for those who don't know, the Moynihan Report essentially said that Black families are in a tangle of pathology because Black women are heading the household. They're single mothers. And so the Black manosphere, in many cases, are aware of the Moynihan Report. They're aware Or they have this idea of welfare as something that's being destructive to the Black community and destructive to Black men's ability to be patriarchal leaders or head of households. And so they're like very much like directly neoliberal in that sense, even though they may not use the word. Some of them do use the word conservative, though. They may identify politically as conservative. Some of them are identify openly as Trump supporters, for example. So you do see that like directness. And as for the women, they're also not using the word neoliberal. But any strategy that says that your ability to be cared for, to not be in poverty, to be loved is dependent on your individual behavior and how you relate to and approach to men. I mean, that's inherently a neoliberal approach.
00:27:05
Speaker
Yeah, and it's interesting that, like again, we see this kind of paradoxical tension because you know we talk about what are the things that are that are motivating this this strategy, the very real threat of poverty, right? Like the the actual complete lack of social safety net that we have in the US, which is also a result of the sort of American neoliberal politics.
Deconstructing the Manosphere
00:27:24
Speaker
So yeah it's interesting to see this like commitment to this ideology, which is both sort of the source of and then also part of the strategy of how they are dealing with Yeah, whenever anyone asks me about de-escalation, like how do you de-radicalize people?
00:27:39
Speaker
i mean, my answer is always improving the social safety net, improving structural support for individuals and families. I really think that these ideologies that I'm studying would have far less attractiveness and power if the threat of poverty was not as real as it is in the lives of Black people.
00:28:00
Speaker
Yeah, unfortunately, people really don't want to hear that. They want the answer to be something about like opening a dialogue. They don't to spend money. Yeah, you see care, parents will leave, universal health care in general, living wage. These are all things that would completely, think, deconstruct the Manosphere and the Black Manosphere in particular, because it absolutely is a response to just how hard it is to live and to survive.
00:28:32
Speaker
There was a content creator very popular in the Black Manosphere named Kevin Samuels, and He would always make content talking about, and this is, we're talking about the height of COVID, 2020, 2021. And he was always making content about just the number of Black women who were being evicted from their homes. And he's not making up these numbers. This is real, that Black women were one of the most likely demographics to be evicted during the height of COVID.
00:28:59
Speaker
And now he's blaming it on the lack of patriarchy, but he is using real statistics, ah real things that were happening to black women. And so like, whenever i i I think about how powerful arguments like that can be, especially when you yourself are actively living in poverty.
00:29:19
Speaker
or under threat, a real threat. Like if I lose my job today and people are losing their jobs all the time during COVID. And so I know that if I lose my job, which is not unlikely,
00:29:31
Speaker
that I don't know where I'm going to live. So I think you know those kinds of realities, lived realities, cannot be ignored when thinking about these movements. This could be a good moment for us to bring in another influencer.
00:29:44
Speaker
You watched Courtney Michelle, whereas Ebony Nikita really aimed her content at young Black women, Courtney Michelle had a very different audience and a different vibe. and Maybe you could describe that. she was She was firmly in the Black Manosphere for the time that I was observing the content. And the content was very much based on denigrating Black women and chastising Black women for not being appropriately submissive to Black men. And it was a very it was very interesting following her.
00:30:21
Speaker
Just because of how tenuous her position was in the black manosphere the entire time. And I mean, that's just the nature of being a black woman in a heavily misogynistic online space. Even if people are accepting you for a time, you know, that's not going to last forever. I don't know she realized that wasn't the last forever, but coming from a black feminist perspective, was obvious to me that it's not going to last forever because your acceptance is based on a show of deference that ultimately is not going to be possible to live up to on a long term basis.
00:30:56
Speaker
She also did a bunch of emotional labor for her audience. Yeah. Which I found pretty interesting. So there would be a lot of like black men who would be sending in comments or questions and she would kind of reassure them about the nature of their manhood, about yeah security of their manhood within black culture and in relation to women.
00:31:24
Speaker
Yeah, emotion work is a huge part of it, part of all of this, where you can't just say, i believe in submitting to black men, you have to actually enact it as a content creator. And so how do you do that? You do it through an active performance of deference, of kissing up to your Black male followers. And there's a direct benefit in doing so in the form of Super Chats, money, being sent to the content creator. So you could literally watch a live stream and see money come in based on how she was interacting with her followers.
00:31:59
Speaker
followers. We noticed reading it, there's this interesting tension between what it seems like the Black women influencers in this space who are doing emotion work for their male audiences or that you know the male followers are in some kind of almost direct economic and competition with the male influencers who it seems like want to be monetizing the male anxiety in a different way, right? They want to be saying you need to man up or you need to be, you know, you need to And so it seems like there's potential for a real conflict there. And I'm curious, like how that played out or if you saw that play out while you were following these creators or what that tension was like. I didn't see that directly from not to say it didn't happen, but I didn't see that directly when I was following
00:32:43
Speaker
these content creators, what I did see were that ultimately men are in charge of this community. They're in charge of who gets to be seen as genuine, who gets to be seen as like a real pick me, so to speak. And so what I did see were that when women stepped out of line, when they said something that some male content creator who had some kind of influence didn't like you know, that didn't work out well ah for that woman. And so the men really controlled what women were able to be in that space in a way that had some kind of veneer of respectability. And that could be taken away very quickly.
Conflicts and Gender Expectations in the Manosphere
00:33:23
Speaker
It's interesting, too, talking about the infighting that the competition for pick me status promotes, that also kind of is a tool of male domination. So for example, Courtney Michelle ended up on the wrong side of Hannah Pearl Davis. It was a huge, I mean, probably one of, at that time, probably the most well-known anti-feminist woman.
00:33:51
Speaker
I would say. Yeah. And kind of her whole shtick is to behave a little bit like an assassin bug. Like she just launches herself out of the darkness at like random other women influencers and just starts like stabbing at them. She's sometimes described as like the the female Andrew Tate. And she's all about like, she's the most submissive to men. And she picks on other women for not being submissive enough. She also went viral initially for saying women shouldn't have the right to vote.
00:34:19
Speaker
That's also tactical, right? To say something that most people, even some people who believe in patriarchy, would find a little outlandish and launch yourself into the spotlight in that way. Yeah, and I think we can see in her role that even this like intro women bullying is like framed as the women acting as tools of men to oppress other women. What was interesting about the Just Pearly things...
00:34:49
Speaker
situation that I talked about in the article was that she so you you just talked about Nick Fuentes earlier does she brought on and he's a known white supremacist and brought him on to her show and Courtney was rightfully critiquing that saying you know we shouldn't support her because she's literally a white supremacist and you would think We should maybe clarify for the audience that Hannah Pearl Davis is not black, despite coming up in our narrative here. yeah Yeah. Yeah. So she's a white supremacist and she platforms white supremacists. And so Courtney was saying, hey. Yeah, we agree with her about the patriarchy stuff, but she's a white supremacist. Oh, this is going a little too far, right? Yeah, this is too far. She's a white supremacist. We shouldn't support that as Black people. And, you know, what's fascinating to me as an outsider that's just kind of watching all this go down, I think...
00:35:46
Speaker
some of the people, i mean, this caused a huge fracture in the black manosphere at that time between the people were like, we're not accepting white supremacy. That's going too far. And the people were saying, eh, you know, isn't really that isn't really that big of a deal. And so Courtney fell on the side of white supremacy is bad and got excommunicated for it, which is really shows you a lot about how you cannot separate Patriarchy, no matter how much people try to separate, you can't separate it from white supremacy, even when it's enacted by black men. There is always an element of it that is imbricated with white supremacist ideologies, and that plays out in very devastating ways for black women. Even black women who say directly, I'm on your side, I believe in black patriarchy. It's not going to play out well for them either. One interesting point that raises to me is these anti-feminist black women
00:36:44
Speaker
if they align themselves with white supremacy, are participating in this project of disciplining Black people as a whole, and also the Black men that are like supposedly superior to them.
00:37:01
Speaker
But also, just you know even if they don't ally themselves with white supremacy, they're still kind of engaging in a project of disciplining Black men by asserting that there is a right way to be a Black man, and that way to be a Black man is to be dominant over women, to exercise authority over them, to recognize that higher position in the hierarchy. And I'm just wondering, like do you see that as... like a contradiction? Do you see that as something that they like have to negotiate or wrestle with? I didn't interpret it as them disciplining Black men because Black men are disciplining themselves.
00:37:40
Speaker
They are setting the rules for what it means to be a an alpha, that's a word that was used all the time, an alpha man versus a beta man, which is you know a man that's that's a derogatory term in the manosphere. And so they're really the ones that are setting the rules. And I think what's the interesting contradiction to me is that the rules that Black men are setting for themselves in these communities are ultimately, in many cases, harmful to them.
00:38:10
Speaker
as well. And so, for example, all of the time you can you can find male content creators who are complaining about being valued for money only being viewed as a pocketbook at the same time they define their own worth based on how much money they have or how much potential they have to make money the for example kevin samuels he always talked about this term high value man which was literally defined by making ten thousand dollars a month at a minimum
00:38:41
Speaker
That's literally like in the definition. And so i don't I don't see it as Black women in these spaces disciplining Black men at all. i I see it as them disciplining themselves. And Black women's job is to not mention if a Black man is not living up to the ideal of the alpha that they are propagating.
00:39:01
Speaker
So even if a black man, the great example, when you're talking about emotion work, for example, and someone saying, I don't feel like a leader, your job as a black woman to say you are a leader, whether or not he's making $10,000 a month or whatever other qualifications for being a high value man, according to someone like Kevin Samuels, regardless of that, your job as a black woman, as a pick me black woman is to affirm all black men of their superiority over you as a black woman. So that's how think.
00:39:30
Speaker
I interpreted what was going on. Okay, that's so interesting. i haven't spent a lot of time looking at how women in manosphere and adjacent spaces talk about the men in those spaces, and I just kind of assumed that they were like pointing their finger and saying beta all the time, like like the men are constantly doing.
00:39:52
Speaker
But I see that that's that's not how the division of labor goes at all. No, no, the men might say, okay, this is a beta male, but the women, they're not saying that. And in fact, that would fracture the performance of tactical patriarchal femininity that I was following in the article. Yeah, that's really interesting. Cause I think that was part of what I was trying to get at with the earlier question also about the sense of competition, right? Like you have, if you have someone in the super chats who's saying, I really don't feel like a leader, I feel bad, right? It's sort of the black men influencers job to say like,
00:40:24
Speaker
you're a beta, you need to take care it, you need to get a hold of yourself, you need to, you know, live up to these ideals. And the black women have this just completely different strategy. So it's interesting to see how split that is in this dynamic. Yeah.
00:40:36
Speaker
Yeah. One more question on this is, you know, you talk a bit about one of the goals here, the goal of this tactical patriarchal femininity is becoming sheltered from the dehumanization of like racial patriarchal capitalism, right? Like there is this very real threat and they want to be sheltered from it.
00:40:54
Speaker
One pattern we've noticed, it seems like in a lot of sort of culturally conservative spaces is like wanting a certain kind of enjoyment. And I think this is something people have talked a lot about in the context of like Trump voters or, you know, we talked about it when we talked, we had we had an episode about Nick Fuentes that there's like, you know, a part of what the project is, is to just be able to have a politics that lets you enjoy yourself and like get some kind of enjoyment out of turning the dehumanization that you are being faced with on other people. And I'm curious if you saw that as a dynamic in this space.
00:41:27
Speaker
If, um, within the, you know, the, the influencers like Courtney, Michelle, who are spending a lot of their time pointing to other women in the space and saying, they're not, you know, they're not really, they're not really pick me's. They're not really pick me's if that had that kind of like that sense of like wanting to enjoy doing that, or if that was something that was absent in this, in this dynamic.
00:41:49
Speaker
i i don't want to say that it was absent. At the same time, i don't think that it's as it's apparent enough where I can definitively say there was like a sadistic element to it. Most of what I saw seemed so based on survival and based on immediate monetary gain more so than...
00:42:15
Speaker
enjoyment per se from putting down other groups, but I'm not going to say that that's not something that happens. I mean, there are what I can say, though, I did see a lot of joy in in mocking black women from male content creators, especially there's a lot of I mean, literally, Kevin Samuels catapulted to fame, internet fame, because he has a he had his podcast had a recurring structure.
00:42:44
Speaker
where he would literally have black women call into the show to mock them and people found it entertaining and that's how he became so well known and famous he was actually a content creator for some time before be catapulted like this he was making a lot of content that was really just speaking directly to black men but once he incorporated black women and specifically incorporated black women in a way that mocked black women. That's really when he became very popular. People always say that Kevin Samuels was entertaining. He was fun to listen to So I definitely see it in that respect and less so with the black women that I was following. Yeah, that's super interesting because that was, I think, something we both noticed reading it. Like when we look at a lot of right wing online spaces or, you know, historical right wing or, you know, bigoted figures, like there is this motivation coming from this like sense of joy or enjoyment of the bigotry. And I think this actually strengthens what you were saying before, that like one of the big pieces of a solution here has to just be
00:43:46
Speaker
Improving people's material conditions, right? They're not doing this just for fun like there's real actual material threats that people are in a pretty direct way seeking protection from yeah And then the other content creator I was looking at where joy comes up is that the content was made to evoke joy. Like if you follow patriarchy, you can feel joyful like I am by being a kept traditional housewife. So I do see joy in in that sense of you do, you follow this ideology and you will experience joy. You will experience, she used the term a storybook life. So like,
00:44:23
Speaker
you know referencing a fairy tale so i do see joy come up in that respect actually something i was curious about was these women present themselves as body in this escape from capitalism and work but as you say they're doing this influencer work for money like that is that is very much like an out of the household, literally, because they're projecting their image into all these other people's lives, like, job. And I'm just wondering, like, did you see anything about how they square that contradiction? Yeah, I think the way that they, i don't think they saw it as a contradiction. The ones that I was watching, I think they saw it as a public service to shed the truth on...
00:45:08
Speaker
how Black families should be structured and how they should function. Oftentimes, the content creators would say like they want more Black women to be aware of the dangers of feminism, for example, or you know how feminism has failed Black women. And that's also a very convincing argument because feminism has failed Black women in many ways, particularly mainstream feminism. And so i don't so they posit their presence online as...
00:45:37
Speaker
a way of raising consciousness about how Black women should ideally behave and comport themselves. You also have an upcoming book. Yeah, and there's a little overlap with the paper, but it goes in a little bit of a different direction. And so the book is called Distinctly Different, Audigendering as a Black Feminist Practice. And it is forthcoming with University of Illinois Press and should hopefully come out in 2027.
00:46:06
Speaker
And the book is really thinking about the interconnection between Black feminist theory and critical autism studies. The product didn't start out that way. I've written about two and a half books to get to the book that is now going to be published and had to throw out a lot of stuff along the way. But the book really started off with me...
00:46:27
Speaker
being very curious about how people understand the the process of coming to gender and really thinking about gender identity and, you know, what that means, particularly in a racialized context. And I'm really interested in using the trans studies angle and a queer studies angle to approach that issue. And as I was working along on on this stuff, it also dawned on me that really what I'm really the missing analytic is really thinking through the lens of autism.
00:46:57
Speaker
Because autism is, and I'm autistic researcher and autistic scholar, autism is really a way of experiencing the world that often...
00:47:08
Speaker
makes somebody privilege their internal sense of themselves in ways that's very unexpected or not accepted by quote-unquote normal social world. And so autistic people, for example, are far more likely to be trans, non-binary,
00:47:26
Speaker
lesbian, gay than holistic, non-autistic population. And many people have offered very pathologizing explanations for that, especially thinking of Robert Kennedy's for its recent report, literally recommending that if somebody is both autistic and trans, that they should have delayed delayed access to gender affirming care. And so the fact that autistic people are more likely to be gender non-normative has been used as a a way to justify exclusion and to justify stigma. And instead, what the book does is think about it as an asset, as evidence that autistic people have a way of relating to social concepts, to social norms. in ways that can blow apart are the assumed neutrality of these social norms, and especially when it comes to gender. And so then also thinking about that in relation to Black feminism, which is a field that's always been very interested in difference and how do we think about difference
00:48:27
Speaker
in ways that are not pathologizing. How do we think about, i thinking about someone like Audre Lorde, for instance, who thinks a lot about difference as a strength, as a way of making us better when we don't ignore or minimize difference, but we actually accept it. And so thinking about that as ah as a waypoint into a neuroaffirming approach to autism and gender. And so that's what the book project is essentially trying to do. And where it relates to the the paper, there is a chapter where I talk about these regressive, I call them black, a regressive black gender ideologies or groups as a form of like hyper neuronormativity.
00:49:09
Speaker
And so for those who don't know, neuronormativity is like this idea of of there's one way that you should differently. dress, act, and that's the correct way. And anything outside of that, there's something pathological about it or wrong. And so when I look at these movements, I see what I would call a form of hyperneuronormativity, where there's a very rigid insistence on this is the one way that you can be a proper woman or a proper man. And anything outside of that should be assiduously rejected. And so it it goes beyond, i mean, even in just general culture, obviously there's a lot of social norms around masculinity and femininity, but these groups take it to another level, I would argue.
00:49:53
Speaker
And yeah. And so that's really where the two to me collide is thinking about how having a more affirming approach to autism or to neurodiversity more generally might also help us to rethink how we think about gender in these very rigid binary ways.
00:50:12
Speaker
Yeah, I often hear being trans and being autistic referred to as comorbid, which, um you know, maybe accepted medical terminology. But I think the pejorative subtext there is like pretty clear. Yeah, one thing we also wanted to ask, because, you know, for the for the listener, like we had a little short call when we were starting to plan this interview, and you were telling us a little bit about the book, and you mentioned that, you you were like investigating this idea of like femininity movements as almost a kind of gender dysphoria. Yeah. I'm wondering if, you know, how that idea evolved dur if you could tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, I think ah i was i was very interested in kind of the the basis of the term gender dysphoria and really the term itself is
00:51:02
Speaker
cannot be separated from pathologizing transness and gender non-normativity more generally. And so the idea is ah gender dysphoria is literally something you can be diagnosed with as somebody, and I believe it's been formally defined as somebody who feels negatively about not being the gender they think they are. I mean, i may not be saying exactly how it's phrased, but essentially that's what gender dysphoria is defined as. And always thought that was a really like weird way of limiting the idea of gender dysphoria. And it seems to me pretty obvious that cis people also experience dissatisfaction with gender. And so when I look at some of these regressive gender movements and how rigidly they're defining masculinity and femininity and just the i mean, part of these movements are driven by shame and driven by an obsessive desire to somehow reach the pinnacle of masculinity.
00:52:09
Speaker
or femininity. And to me, that's a form of gender dysphoria because it denotes a dissatisfaction with who they are and how their gender currently presents or how their gender is currently taken up by those around them. And so to me, it's helpful to think of gender dysphoria as being a phenomenon that exists beyond transness. And it also can impact cisgender people too, who then may turn to these regressive movements in order to try to alleviate that sense of dysphoria. And in the book, I talk about like so many things that many people think
00:52:44
Speaker
are things that people do to medically transition to a different gender are actually things that cis people do all the time, like hormones, different like types of cosmetic surgeries.
00:52:55
Speaker
I mean, these are things that cisgender people do all the time as well. ah Recently in the news, we've seen a lot of from in in the manosphere, we've seen the rise of like looks maxing and all these different techniques to try to change your facial structure or to try to get the right sort of body shape to, you know, be.
00:53:14
Speaker
and and And it's, you know, highly gendered, right? Like these men want to like, I mean, they're literally... bone smashing, they're hitting themselves in the face to try to make their bone structure the most masculine it can be, right? And it seems sort of pretty clear that if gender dysphoria points to something, right, if being dissatisfied with your, you know, the gendered presentation of your body is something we can talk about, then that's a form of that as well. So I think that's a really interesting thing to look at. I think it's a product of transphobia that we don't automatically see things like that as also being gender dysphoria.
00:53:44
Speaker
I think there's also a lot of resistance to seeing something like that as gender dysphoria, even from trans people. And part of that is that There's a lot of moralizing around what are good versus bad ways to treat that kind of dissatisfaction with one's body.
00:54:08
Speaker
So I think we can pretty clearly say that hitting yourself in the face with a golf ball a bunch is... It's self-harm. it's not ah It's not a great way of of treating your gender dysphoria.
00:54:23
Speaker
And so trans people who like critically need access to things like medications and surgery for quality of life and often survival, I think have a strong incentive to distance themselves.
00:54:42
Speaker
from behaviors that are regarded as silly or just disgusting.
00:54:53
Speaker
And I'm referring to the golf ball smashing thing, but I'm also referring to sort of performances of masculinity that are easy to mock, like you know buying the bag of tactical diapers or whatever, because you're a man who can't handle vine the buying the package with the pink coloring on it.
00:55:14
Speaker
One part of the book that i guess is important is that it's really rethinking the idea of gender being solely a social construct and instead thinking about it also as an internal felt-based reality. And I think when you when you think about these instances of looks maxing and other forms of gender dysphoria, it's often driven by a belief that gender is what is perceivable on the body and how that gender is taken up by other people, which then can easily lead to dissatisfaction if you have these very rigid ideas of, for example, what masculinity looks like or behaves like and having this need to live up to it. And so the project is really looking at autogendering as a methodology for coming to gender that centers internal realization over public legibility with the idea that thinking about gender as an internal realization really weakens this impetus towards gender dysphoria because there is less of a requirement
00:56:24
Speaker
to perform gender in ways that are legible to other people. And in the book, I argue that this has a lot of racial, there's a lot of racial implications with this because Black people are not regularly taken up ah in the ways, the gendered ways that they may perceive themselves or want to be viewed as.
00:56:42
Speaker
That's all we have time for. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. Yeah, this was super interesting. Thank you so much for inviting me. I enjoyed the conversation. And we're looking forward to reading your book as well.
00:56:53
Speaker
Thank you so much. There's really nothing real. There is no real. And that's that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live. Is Trump going to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader.
00:57:15
Speaker
Do it live! listen, you. I'll suck you in your goddamn face. Let's stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
00:57:28
Speaker
some level of masochism.