“Honestly I wouldn't like to be born a male today”. The Marco Crepaldi case

Abstract

Marco Crepaldi is a social psychologist who runs channels on YouTube and Twitch, where he talks about male issues, such as body shaming, violence against men, social isolation, and feminism. In June 2020 he made some controversial statements on the social difficulties experienced by straight white males, which caused a large, polarized debate on social media. This article reconstructs the main lines of Crepaldi’s argument and proposes a discourse analysis of the interactions related to the case in a particularly active Facebook group, called IMDI, Il Meglio Di Internet (‘The Best of the Internet’). The aim of this article is to investigate the discursive constructions of masculinity presented by Crepaldi and those that emerged in the Facebook group conversations, in order to understand the interpretative repertoires at play within these discourses, how they are structured around particular ideological dilemmas and what different subject positions the participants take up.

Keywords: manosphere, frame analysis, Marco Crepaldi, masculinities, gender, digital media.