“There are No Girls on The Internet” – The Gender-Exclusionary Digital Public of The Incelosphere

From the early days of digitally mediated communication via Usenet, over Multi-Player-Videogames and large social media platforms – digital communication and digital publics have been and remain highly gendered (e.g. Schwartz, Neff 2019; Semenzin, Bainotti 2020; Norocel 2022). A digital public that is built on gendered exclusion is the manosphere. Despite the fact that the formerly (self)isolated conglomerate of blogs, forums and websites has long made its way onto mainstream social media (Gerrand et al. 2025), the online forums still thrive as spaces of community-building. I investigate, what makes this seemingly anachronistic digital public attractive to its community. I focus on the most popular incel forum, relying on qualitative content analysis, combined with the walk-through-method (Light et al. 2018). I analyse the sociotechnical and vernacular affordances of the forum. I find that the explicitly political nature of the forum, the interplay between users and moderators, and the resulting community-tailored set of affordances contribute to the public’s appeal. I conceptualise the forum as a defensive public (Jackson, Kreiss 2023), which stylises itself as a place of counterculture and resistance, while being aligned with axis of political and social power. I situate the incel forum and the manosphere in a broader debate of gendered digital publics, where the performance of crisis masculinities (Norocel 2022) enables groups and individuals to recast personal and societal crises in alignment with far-right and manosphere meta-politics.