Contemporary and “New” Fatherhoods: an Attempt of Redefinition Looking at the Case of Parental Leave

In this paper, I will use 35 interviews with heterosexual Italian fathers, among whom 25 used parental leave, to redefine “new” fatherhood. First, I will show that in all the interviews there are some elements that constitute a sort of common ground upon which contemporary fatherhood relies. Then, since masculinity and fatherhood are enacted in the daily life, I will focus on the actual practices performed by father. In order to better define the concept of new fatherhood, I will show the existence of different fatherhoods, combining two dimensions: the discursive self-positioning of men in respect to fatherhood and the actual practices of care performed with their children. To label a man as a new father, it is not sufficient his self-definition as “present”, but it is also necessary that he is also involved in innovative care practices and parental leave is not necessarily one of them.Keywords

The Rules of Attraction: An Empirical Critique of Pseudoscientific Theories about Sex in the Manosphere

Academic research is dedicating growing attention to the phenomenon known as the manosphere, where genders and (hetero)sexual relations are explained according to the so-called Red Pill philosophy and LMS theory. In this article, we critically analyze these theories and their pseudoscientific assumptions using a Bourdieusian framework, and we analyze the empirical effects they have in the Incel and Red Pill Italian communities through the example of the “Aranzulla case”. By exploring the “Redpiller” blog and two Incel forums (“Forum of the uglies” and “Forum of the Incel”), we found that, on one hand, the Red Pill and LMS theories are strongly contradictory in themselves because, even if they combine socio-economic and biological theories to explain sexual relations, they assume a fixed vision of gender based on (supposedly) natural inclinations. On the other hand, our results show that these theories promote misogynistic content blaming women for men’s unsatisfaction, but they actually unveil intragender dynamics. Indeed, they produce tensions inside the manosphere, by creating hierarchies of masculinities, and around the possibility of escaping the biological destiny linked to the Incel condition