From ‘villains’ to ‘idols’: exploring teenage boys’ conflicting attachments to manospheric masculinities
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Andrew Tate is emblematic of a new iteration of male supremacist influencers, often referred to as ‘manfluencers’ or ‘misogyny influencers’. Research on the relationship between boys’ consumption of and support for these influencers, and their circulation of regressive gender ideologies, is in its formative stages. This paper explores these issues using focus groups and follow-up interviews with young people (aged 12–17) in four schools in London, England. While many boys ‘othered’ Andrew Tate and condemned his misogyny, several boys simultaneously demonstrated a continuum of support for manospheric content promoting sexist gender roles and exaggerated masculine ideals. We discuss how boys affectively responded to these digital discourses and the role of humour in normalizing the gendered power hierarchies at play. The findings highlight the need for interventions that go beyond condemning single influencers, situating manospheric masculine archetypes within the systemic and increasingly networked subordination of women, femininity, and Queer identities on mainstream platforms.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it