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Published online: 22 November 2022
© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2022
One of the very few contemporary scholars in media studies to engage with psychoanalytic theory prolifically and unapologetically, Jacob Johanssen centers his new book, Fantasy, Online Misogyny and the Manosphere: Male Bodies of Dis/inhibition, on the ways masculinity tries to not just survive the vicissitudes brought to bear by the digital, but benefit from them. Fantasy and violence drive this most masculine of feats. They take the shape of extremist online communities and political configurations built around anti-feminine and anti-feminist discourse, right-wing kinship, sexual disavowal, homoerotic modes of paranoia, and a panoply of vindictive responses to rejection (i.e. incels, or involuntarily celibate men).
Johanssen illuminates how the very subjects who spent centuries relegating objects on screens—painted, photographed, filmed, or otherwise—to the domain of otherness for the sake of political and erotic enjoyment, have quickly managed to respond to the demands of digital networks—for the on-screen appearance and ad nauseam circulation of even male bodies—in a way that rigs such systems into a manosphere. Although the occupation of digital networks by an army of viciously infantile soldiers is, by now, a palpable given, Johanssen uses psychoanalysis to do what psychoanalysis does best: providing a language to a malaise that would be even more malignant if left unarticulated, or articulated without the unconscious at its center. The manosphere appears in the book as a domain where the most poisonous brands of subjectivity and nationhood meet. And where the ecstatic encounter between reality-building fantasies—walls, enemies and one’s many brothers (“a machine-like totality”)—can be staged (p. 42).
We know that man’s way of losing more generally, and losing power specifically, often comes in the form of compensation from which he emerges having actually mad