Fantasies of White Genocide: Conspiracy Theory, Reproductive Anxiety, and Self-Help in the Online Manosphere.

Abstract

The Great Replacement is a far-right conspiracy theory that warns of a global scheme against the "White race"-one that seeks to replace "native" white populations in Europe with migrant populations from the Third World. This theory has gained traction among white nationalist movements across Europe and America and has been referenced by several far-right terrorists in the last decade, but in recent years, elements of the theory have entered the right-wing and center-right mainstream media. My article excavates the intersections between the Great Replacement Theory and genres of masculinist self-help that have grown popular across male-dominated digital communities (also known as "the manosphere") through influencers such as Jordan Peterson, Stefan Molyneux, and Marcus Follin, who hold diverse positions along the right-wing political spectrum. Using these as case studies, I trace the connections between demographic anxieties around migration and cultural anxieties around Western women's fertility, and I argue that reproduction serves as the greatest limit case to the manosphere's self-help genre. Women's increasing control over reproduction challenges these influencers' investment in self-help and control over their actualization of the masculine gender ideal, which in turn generates high levels of reproductive anxiety and leads to subsuming reproduction under the umbrella of men's concerns. Overlaps between ideas of racial replacement and projects that seek to conserve manhood, sperm count, and testosterone, such as no-fap, no-porn, body building, and nutritional supplements, likewise serve to repackage white nationalism itself as a genre of masculine self-help and self-betterment.