The website

The Anti·Feminist Manifesto was born as part of the Final Synthesis Lab final project at Politecnico di Milano. The Lab, held by Density Design research department, aims to analyze and engage the public about complex and controversial social issues through the analysis of data contents. The contents are absurd but, at the same time unique, so their job is to take the user through the path defined by the five statements and create a sense of alienation and astonishment.

Each statement summarizes the best of the comments online and it is proposed with the same repeated formula to represents a sort of collection of commandments, the statements represent the main arguments used by anti-feminist public.

A note on language: we recognize and respect that many words are offensive without just context. Those words are just reported to increase the power of the project and sensitize the users, without any other intent.

The concept

Analyzing the web is easy to find well-organized communities and groups of users against women. The aim of this project is to bring to the attention the opinion of small communities and their vision of female’s activism, using The Anti·Feminist Manifesto as a flagship worth to be followed. The website’s strenght is focused on the textual part; the fact that this kind of content, hyperbolic and without any logic, is really made by some people, create a sense of dissociation and at the same time gives an unseen perspective on what anti-feminists means. A tree-map visualization can help to better understand where the content come from, for each website the treemap visualize the number of characters selected for the text. We used 3185 characters for the whole website.

The website speaks mainly to users that don’t know much about feminism or even to the ones that identify themselves as anti-feminist, not understanding the cultural background they are associating themselves to. We also think is important to reach those people who think that equality has been achieved, not considering the importance of feminism and its principles.

The website gradually shows the power and the gravity of hate speech, going from the normalized forms of sexism to the most serious and brutal words used to discredit women. Indeed, the project aim to bring awareness on this topic and sensitize the visitors, underlining the importance of being feminist in an era where is easy to share harmful and offensive contents.

The problem

Hate speech is one of the most important topics in anti-oppression politics today; a great deal of energy and political will is devoted to identifying, characterizing, contesting, and (sometimes) penalizing it. Too often sexism is seen as a “second-class” offence, somehow less dangerous than racism or religious hatred. But it is not.

The outbreak of social media provided a new and free-access platform for people to incite violence and to spread patriarchy-enforcing mindset. Though even men can experience this kind of hate, women are more severely attacked and often insulted. With the online proliferation of hate speech, there is an urgent need to talk about whether someone is using any kind of harmful content that could generate more hate.

The campaign

The launching campaign of the project consists in a series of provocative posters in which the pillars of the anti-feminist’s believe are postulated. No further clues are given the reaction should be astonishment and disdain; the provocative effect should be maximized by the absence of an explicative payoff and push the reader to follow the link to The Anti·Feminist Manifesto. Eventually the user discovers the real aim of the project and shares the message through a post on different social media.