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Toxic masculinity

What is a manlet? Here’s everything you need to know about the internet’s favourite trolling term

By Malavika Pradeep

Jul 18, 2021

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It’s 2021 and the internet stands more divided than ever. While one half tries their level best to normalise and redefine pejorative terms, the other half seems to be on a simultaneous quest to conjure up new ones. Trending across Reddit, YouTube and Twitter for the past 16 years is a controversial term rooted in the dating and fitness industry. From acceptable targeting to being dubbed “shrimp on steroids,” here’s everything you need to know about ‘manlets’.

A manlet (portmanteau of the terms ‘man’ and ‘midget’) is an internet slang referring to men of short stature. Now, there is no height set in stone to ‘qualify’ as a manlet. For some people, anyone under 6 feet is considered short whereas for others the bar may be at 5 feet 8 inches. This is one of the reasons why the term is opened up for wider interpretations.

Be it 5 or 6 feet, however, one factor makes the term concerningly unique: a manlet’s compulsion to ‘emphasise’ masculinity through weight lifting and bodybuilding. In this regard, the term first started appearing on fitness threads online—most notably on boards such as 4chan’s /fit/ (Health & Fitness) and other bodybuilding forums. According to Know Your Meme, the typical height for men to be labelled manlets is under 6 feet. Those who are 5 feet 11 inches tall are often called the “King of Manlets,” given the fact that it’s the highest achievable height before hitting the 6 feet cutoff.

“Considering the average height for a guy in America is about five nine this is idiotic,” commented a user on a Reddit post introducing manlets six years ago. In the Netherlands, the average height for males stands at 5 feet 11 inches. In this sense, would an average American man be considered a manlet on his holiday to the Netherlands? Height comparison memes further adds fuel to the fire as they intentionally over exaggerate two inch height differences—thereby depicting manlets much smaller than in reality.

An intriguing 2013 study by Dutch psychologists Gert Stulp, Abraham Buunk, Robert Kurzban and Simon Verhulst concluded how men are taller than women in 90 per cent of relationships—a greater percentage than randomly pairing up people. The study also found women caring more about their height preferences than men, with a little over half of men listing height as a requirement. About 94 per cent women also refused to date a man shorter than themselves.

However, not all short men are considered manlets on the internet. “If a short man is happy being short and doesn’t try to hide it, they are not a manlet,” Grammarhow writes. In contrast, if they are constantly rejected by their love interests over their height and hence dedicate hours to the gym, they could be considered a manlet. “The logic is that even though they’re short, they will stand a better chance with women if they go to the gym and get some muscle.”

When used by women, the term ‘manlet’ is a way of saying “I know you’re muscular, but because you’re short, I have no interest in pursuing anything with you.” The term is used similarly to ‘beta male’ in reference to reproductive success.

“This is due to sexual selection,” an entry on Incel Wiki reads. “Women want to pass on the ‘fittest’ genes to their offspring.” The Wiki highlighted how females are the ‘selectors’ by carefully choosing which men they mate with. “They guard which genes get passed onto the next generation and which don’t.” The entry also added how an extremely short man has an extremely small dating pool.

“For every inch that a man becomes shorter, his dating pool becomes exponentially smaller. An extremely short woman has more options, because short girls are considered feminine and cute—and men are generally much less selective in their choice of sexual partners.”

Manlets are yet another subset of trolling that is neither built on the foundation of reason nor rationale. In addition to the height comparison memes are a slew of advice prompting them to “increase their height.” The most notable hacks include drinking gallons of whole milk, including stretches in their workouts and wearing incognito shoe heels or boots. A popular phrase in reply to manlets trying to defend, cover up or ‘compensate’ for their height is “When will manlets learn?”

So why was manlet conjured up as a term and why is it still being used everywhere from real-life gyms to virtual forums? It all boils down to the concept of ‘acceptable targets’. With more and more terms being reclaimed out of their age-old pejorative connotations—be it beauty brands with words like ‘lightening’ and ‘normal’ or TikTok subcultures redefining ‘bimbos’—the internet is shifting its focus towards those who they can ‘afford’ to laugh at without any major backlash or cancellation.

“Surely they will rage (also known as ‘manlet rage’), but since no one pays them any attention and finds it fine to mock them, no one cares,” a reply to the same Reddit post reads.

Same goes with the concept of ‘simps’ which is still used as an insult on some major Discord servers. Even though some of these words hit mainstream usage with a positive purpose, they have been increasingly dehumanised to label a certain feature or preference. Maybe it’s time to yeet both manlet and ‘lanklet’ (a term similar to manlet but aimed at tall people) out of our dictionaries entirely, maybe it’s time to reclaim and wear it as a badge of honour. Either way, manlets are still out there on the internet’s vocabulary—sometimes going as far as extending the insult into “shrimps on steroids.”

Image by Tima Miroshnichenko from Unsplash

Toxic masculinity

Why do men troll? Unpacking the psychology of online trolling

By Jack Ramage

Jun 24, 2021

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The more beautiful and purer a thing is, the more satisfying it is to corrupt it. Rule 43 of the internet. It’s one of the many reasons why anonymous internet trolls, from the comfort of their own basement, hiding behind a dimly lit screen, engage in the act of trolling.

If you don’t know what trolling is yet, where have you been? Over the last decade, the term—once only surfacing on the backwaters of internet forums like 4chan—has seeped into mainstream culture. Mainstream media outlets caught on to the trend around the mid-2010s, producing reports which seemed humorously behind-the-times for younger internet dwellers. Jokes aside though, trolling—the internet slang term used to describe any internet user behaviour that is meant to intentionally anger or frustrate someone else—can have a significant tangible, and detrimental, impact on the lives of innocent people.

So what makes people troll? Who are the people carrying out acts of trolling? Are they men? Many would argue that the majority are, but if that’s the case, then why? That’s what we’ll be unpacking in this edition of the Why do men column, joined by Siân Brooke—a Gender and Data scientist at the University of Oxford.

Now, to be perfectly transparent I was a little misleading with the headline. Not all men are trolls. Brookes highlights how “part of the standard operating procedure for trolls is anonymity. However, they overwhelmingly target women and the behaviour of trolls are typically antisocial and masculine.” In other words, it’s difficult to pin down the gender of each troll online, since they tend to hide behind a veil of anonymity, but the majority display masculine traits. 

This shouldn’t really take anyone by surprise, gender differences in online—and offline—communication aren’t a new phenomenon. As Brooke highlights, “Studies suggest that women are more active in blogging and are more interested in the social aspects [of the internet], seeking to build communities constructively.”

Previous academic research has indicated that the perceptions of gendered behaviour lead individuals to subconsciously anticipate future gendered behaviour, as Brooke notes: “Individuals explain the same behaviours differently for men and women based on gendered implicit biases. It has been found that women trolls were perceived to have fewer motivations, malevolence and instigation were less often identified by others than for men or gender-neutral (completely anonymous) trolls. Overall, perpetrators who are women are characterised as mild whereas perpetrators who are male are responsible for more severe deviance.”

On the face of it—and to put it in simple terms—many would argue that if you actively troll, you’re just a bit of a dick. And to a degree, this is true. Psychologists have attempted to pindown internal and external behaviours which may make someone more prone to trolling. Looking at the data, you might actually feel sorry for them. For instance, a psychological study conducted by the Federation University Australia pinpointed which personality traits predicted trolling behaviour. These included “the role of gender, psychopathy, sadism, emotional empathy, communication ability, narcissism, and other negative traits in motivating Internet trolling. Their results showed that psychopathy, sadism, and enjoying the pain of others are personality traits that contribute to internet trolling,” Brooke added.

She continued, “Unsurprisingly, emotional empathy and anxiety meant that an individual was less likely to become a troll. Interestingly, they found that gender did not significantly predict internet trolling. However, these sorts of psychological studies do not hold all the answers. While gender is not found to be relevant in the model, the behaviour that is significant is typically masculine, such as a lack of emotional empathy is. My research argues that there is not an innate difference in the psychology of men and women, but rather gender differences are so heavily socialised that they appear natural.”

Alongside gender, the specific context and platforms used affect how trolls are perceived by others. Brooke argues how “trolls of Wikipedia are seen to be motivated by internal factors relating to their sense of self-worth, whereas on Yahoo! Answers trolls are more influenced by external factors—such as social capital and standing.”

So, the multifaceted and complex nature of trolling has come a long way since the ‘troll face’ meme, drawn on MS paint with a mischievous smile meant to represent the facial expression of an internet troll. If you were around in the days of the late 2000s Facebook or even Myspace (rest in peace) you may remember it was plastered all over your timeline—it was something I just couldn’t get rid of, like my student loan. But still, the premise behind trolling has remained untainted—to cause harm and unwanted distress to the victim, often with little to no repercussions for the perpetrator.

Rapid developments in the technological sphere is bringing trolling to worrying new lows. For instance, the use of deepfakes—manufacturing audio, images and video that appear real, or could be passed off as real, when they’re actually fake. Of course, most deepfakes have been used in lighthearted contexts, such as splicing the face of Nicolas Cage over pretty much everyone and anyone. However, combine the creepy technology with the act of trolling and it gets rather more sinister.

As Brooke explains, “Deepfake pornography is a particularly concerning trend—generating fake pornographic content of individuals and celebrities, and sharing them widely. Women and especially POC women are overwhelming the targets of such abuse. Even if these images are not shared, their creation is incredibly concerning and is an act of gendered violence and harassment.”

Brooke draws upon how trolling within recent years has taken a political turn—often masked in different forms. As a feminist woman working in academia, Brooke shared that she’s been subject to “concern-trolling: harmful and demeaning messages or comments masked as constructive feedback; as well as sealioning: endless demands for evidence or answers that maliciously aim to derail the conversation and exhaust the speaker.”

She added, “In recent years, the language surrounding trolling has changed too. It’s become more political and intertwined with conspiracy theories. A common construction of trolling is now used by the far-right to derail liberal conversations.” Whether you agree with their political orientations or not, trolls have taken to hacktivism—an internet form of activism—too. Brooke draws upon an instance in 2015, where the Anonymous affiliate GhostSec replaced a website that publicised and supported the militant group ISIS on the deep web with an advert for Viagra and a message to “calm down.”

Although I don’t condone internet trolling in the slightest, there is an element of humorous creativity that, I have to admit, a part of me does respect. That being said, the vast majority of trolling online lacks such creative energy and instead is used to derail healthy political discourse. There’s so much more to be said about the psychology of trolling, and in particular why masculine individuals tend to gravitate towards it. If trolling was a chest buried in the desert, I’d only have dug the hole and brushed the sand off its lid.

To open the chest would require writing a book—and there’s definitely more qualified people to write such a book, Brooke being one of them. Regardless, I hope this column has helped you gain a little bit of understanding of why, the next time you make a provocative tweet and you encounter an anonymous troll fishing for a reaction. Don’t feed them—feel sorry for them. As science shows, they’re either, quite simply, douchebags or have their own demons they’re trying to mask through trolling strangers online.