Masculinity, affect and the search for certainty in an age of precarity.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the affective dynamics of masculinity as a psychosocial process within a mediatised realm that includes parts of the informal cyberspace known as the Manosphere. Focusing on the relationship between masculinity and discourses of men’s rights, we explore the implications of the shifting psychosocial and political legacy of that relationship since the late 20th century for the shaping of masculinities today, where the psychosocial dynamics of victimisation and of being ‘done to’ are recurring themes. We ground our analysis of contemporary masculinity through a case study of the online media coverage of the controversial Canadian Professor of Psychology, Jordan Peterson, and discuss the nature of his appeal for his followers on Reddit and YouTube. Peterson has become a celebrity public intellectual and his pronouncements on issues such as free speech, education and gender politics resonate for those men who feel confused and persecuted by the forces of feminism and identity politics. We argue that Peterson’s affective appeal is linked more widely to a public mood underpinned by a defensive wish for certainty in an age of precarity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".