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This is how men responded to a viral hashtag about changing gender roles

Apparently, masculinity is so fragile that we panic when people tweet about it.

Photo of Mary Emily O'Hara

Mary Emily O'Hara

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Twitter is frequently a platform for discussions about feminism and changing gender roles for women. Less common, though, are discussions solely focused on men.

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This week the hashtag #MasculinitySoFragile exploded. Although it has been around since 2013, it ramped up into a heated online battleground this week when some users began reacting to the tag with a fragile, unironic, lack of self-awareness that played right into the joke.

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To be clear, the bio of Twitter user @MechofJusticeWZ reveals an interest in “Fighting corruption in game journalism.” It seems that the famed Gamergate community stumbled across the hashtag after a couple years of its existence and became outraged. Several self-professed Gamergate supporters and men’s rights types chimed in with cries of “hate speech” and “social justice warriors!” (or SWJ, a denigrating term for activists who speak out about causes online).

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https://twitter.com/ItalyGG/status/646668802864902144

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https://twitter.com/scrowder/status/646664405124521984

As the hashtag began to fill with outraged reactions from feminism-haters, other people chimed in to explain that the tag referred to the concept of masculinity, not about men as a population. More than a few of those tweets pointed out the irony of getting so upset over a tag referring to fragility and an unstable sense of one’s own gender that leads to things like “broga” being marketed to men as a yoga alternative or men worrying that wanting to buy a new iPhone in rose gold is “gay.”

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https://twitter.com/rodimusprime/status/646656493815758848

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https://twitter.com/Luvvie/status/646700310514135040

But the original point of #MasculinitySoFragile, which is also the title of a Tumblr, was to call out the way that companies market products to men separately by “manning them up.” The broga/yoga example is just one of many things that have to be overtly masculinized in order to sell the same products to men that are used by everyone else: from chocolate to Kleenex to throat lozenges, there’s an unnecessarily duded-up version of  everything.

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https://twitter.com/THECAROLDANVERS/status/646585159748333568

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https://twitter.com/femsidenote/status/646662720864059392

Many of the products on the Tumblr are identical to the ones that are sold as gender neutral; there’s not much you can do besides change the packaging to “mannify” laundry detergent. The use of the word “fragility” is a direct barb at how some guys fear being mocked for drinking a diet soda, using lip balm, or eating yogurt, since somehow those actions became feminized in the culture at large.

What may be surprising about the #MasculinitySoFragile hashtag, though, is that it appears to have been initiated by men—like writer Eliel Cruz, who runs the Tumblr. Despite the fact it these critiques of masculinity originated from a man, angry tweets have consistently stated that “feminists” and “emasculation” are the true forces behind the tag. 

You mad, bro?

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

 
The Daily Dot