Systemic misogyny exposed: Translating Rapeglish from the Manosphere with a Random Rape Threat Generator

Abstract

Misogyny online in forms such as explicit rape threats has become so prevalent and rhetorically distinctive it resembles a new dialect or language. Much of this ‘Rapeglish’ is produced by members of an informal alliance of men’s groups online dubbed the ‘Manosphere’. As both a cyberhate researcher and cyberhate target, I have studied as well as contributed to feminist responses to Rapeglish. In 2016, for instance, I helped build a Random Rape Threat Generator (RRTG) – a computer program that splices, shuffles around, and re-stitches in novel combinations fragments of real-life Rapeglish to illustrate the formulaic, machine-like, and impersonal nature of misogynist discourse online. This article uses Yuri Lotman’s ideas about intra- and inter-cultural conflict involving something akin to the translation of a foreign language to frame the RRTG as one example of the way women are ‘talking back’ both to and with Rapeglish (the latter involving appropriations and subversions of the original discourse).