Donna Zuckerberg: ‘Social media has elevated misogyny to new levels of violence’

Donna Zuckerberg didn’t expect to spend two years trawling through the corner of the internet
defined as “the manosphere”, unpicking the grim alliance between pick-up artists, men’s rights
activists, incels (involuntarily celibate men), the far right and the most ardent Make America
5 Great Again advocates.

A classicist with a PhD from Princeton, Zuckerberg edits the online journal Eidolon, publishing
scholarly essays on the Greco-Roman world from academics and students.

In the summer of 2015, she noticed an unprecedented level of traffic towards a piece entitled
“Why is stoicism having a cultural moment?” and went down a rabbit hole to determine why.
10 The results stunned her: men – or rather, misogynists – were using an armchair enthusiasm for
the classics to justify manifestos of hate against women. The results were spreading online under
a pseudo-intellectual guise, twisting ancient world philosophy to buttress a contemporary hatred
of feminism. And it wasn’t a one-off.

“So, there are online communities that exist under the umbrella of what we know as the Red Pill,
15 which are men connected by common resentments against women, immigrants, people of
colour,” she explains. “What I was surprised to find was the extent to which they are using
ancient Greek and Roman figures and texts to prop up an ideal of white masculinity.”

Red Pillers name themselves after a scene in The Matrix, in which Morpheus (Laurence
Fishburne) offers Neo (Keanu Reeves) the option of taking the red or blue pill and arriving at
20 either gritty, painful truth (red) or blissful ignorance (blue).

“The ancient world was deeply misogynistic – it was a time when there was no word for rape,
feminism did not exist and women’s actions were determined by male relatives,” says
Zuckerberg. But now the classical texts are being “distorted and stripped of context” online to
lend gravitas to campaigns of misogyny and white supremacy.

25 “It is without doubt that social media has allowed this to happen. It has created the opportunity
for men with anti-feminist ideas to broadcast their views to more people than ever before – and
to spread conspiracy theories, lies and misinformation. Social media has elevated misogyny to
entirely new levels of violence and virulence.”

Her husband as well as her siblings have, at one point or another, worked in social media. The
30 subject remains fraught for her.

“Facebook is the biggest of them all, but Red Pill members often sneer at social media, despite it
being essential to their modus operandi,” she says. To that end, in her book she writes that her
brother is “frequently mocked as ‘Mark Cuckerberg’ or ‘Zuck the Cuck’, epithets based on the
term cuck, a particularly significant form of insult within the Red Pill derived from the term
35 cuckold”.

This may be true, but it barely exonerates him or Facebook for the part it has played in allowing
angry men to fan the flames of one another’s rage online.

Has she ever taken her brother to task? “I can see why you have to ask,” says Zuckerberg with an
apologetic smile, “but I’m not going to answer that question.” 1

Adapted from The Guardian

Nosheen Iqbal, 11 November 2018
Analyse cohesion and coherence in the text above.

Translate the first 3 paragraphs into Spanish (Donna Zuckerberg … it wasn’t a one-off.).

Phonetically transcribe paragraph 7 (It is without doubt … violence and virulence.).

1. What does the word “gravitas” (line 24) mean?

2. Provide a synonym for the word “fraught” (line 30).
3. Define the term “epithet” (line 33) and give an example.
4. Define the word “cuckold” (line 35). What is the word formation process in the word “cuck” (line 33)?
5. What does the author mean by the expression “take someone to task” (line 38)?