Language Matters | After Netflix’s Adolescence, incels, the manosphere, negging and the 80/20 rule explained

Few who watched the recent four-part crime drama Adolescence on Netflix would have remained unmoved – whether by the powerful acting, the one-shot episodes, the tragedy of a teen murder, or the disturbing attitudes embodied in language.

“Manosphere” combines “man-” with “-sphere” to refer to a particular area of interest and the people associated with it, the word modelled after the coinage “blogosphere”.

While the term emerged online in 2009, the manosphere’s broader ideology has deep roots in 1970s movements advocating men’s rights, a backlash to feminism. Major manosphere communities include:

• “Men’s Rights Activists” (MRAs), who advocate political changes to benefit men; their activism, however, consists of harassment and abuse of feminists and other female public figures.

• “Men Going Their Own Way” (MGTOW), whose members hold that society is rigged against men and a system it is impossible to change, hence they advocate abstaining from relationships with women.

• “Incels” – a portmanteau of “involuntary celibate” and a word originally popularised in the 1990s by a woman’s website – now encompasses the online subculture of young men who are frustrated by their lack of sexual experience, for which they blame women.

• “Pick-Up Artists” (PUAs) are built around “game” – that is, techniques, strategies and mindsets that help men be more successful in attracting women. Many of these involve objectifying women and promoting harassment techniques, most notably “negging”.

“Negging” – from “to neg”, itself formed from clipping “negative” or “negation” – is the practice of ignoring, undermining or insulting a person, especially a woman, who one finds attractive in the belief that lowering their self-confidence will make them more interested in and receptive to the “negger”.