**3. Gender Parity: advance or regression?**

Therefore, do we speak of progress or regression? Isabel Menéndez [15] underlines the prevalence of a "regressive metadiscourse" that, promoted by the culture industry, has a strong resonance with the new/information media, cyberspace, and popular culture. A deceptive discourse that pretends to be liberating and feminist, makes use of feminist symbols and narratives to distort, confuse, and in this way creates an anti-feminist and hateful discourse against women which requires the agreement and consent of, and is received and reproduced with pleasure by, broad sectors of the population. Such that, by means of an intentional misrepresentation of feminism, that which at one point was understood to be oppressive has now acquired a character of liberation.

But this regression and reactionary organization goes beyond the symbolic plane and is not confined to the media, materializing itself in the form of an increase in violence against women as well as acts of terrorism. Over the last number of years, as a reactionary response to feminism and and the "crisis of masculinity"5 , we have witnessed the emergence of groups referring to themselves as "ultra-chauvinist"6 as

<sup>5</sup> Since the early 2000s the "crisis of masculinity" has positioned itself as a hot topic with as strong resonance within academia as within social media. For researchers like Ángels Caribí [22], this "crisis" manifested itself as much in men's need to remedy physical deficiencies, as with the use of Viagra and esthetic plastic surgery, as in the increase in instances of domestic violence. For the author, domestic violence is intimately connected with employment insecurity and material loss that men experience; but, in addition, with their inability to deal with their emotions in a self-confident manner, without harming others. Given this, exercising violence allows those perpetrators to "feel like men" and experience the feelings of power and control that they consider having been lost.

<sup>6</sup> An emblematic case is that of Roosh Valisadeh, a US blogger and activist who is known for his openly misogynist statements, for creating guides that help tourists have sex with women from various countries and for opting in favor of legalizing rape "if it takes place on private property". Through his statements on social media, books, and conferences, Roosh has promoted ideas about "neo-masculinity", an ideology, founded upon masculine superiority, which emphasizes discussions that make appeals to biology, that urge the importance of maintaining traditional gender roles as regards sex, and that promote the idea of the ineffectiveness of feminism. In this way, in 2016, the blogger called upon men from 44 countries to combat "feminist oppression", exhorting them to form "tribes of men" to fight for their rights. Considering the fact of his being a dangerous individual legitimizing gender violence, his events and his influence were able to be halted by local governments in several cities thanks to pressure from feminist organizations.

#### *New Masculinities, Are They Truly New? DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.105162*

well as terrorist trends embodied by the "incel community"<sup>7</sup> or separatist antifeminist groups like the " Men Going Their Own Way" (MGTOW)<sup>8</sup> movement, which aims to counteract the social pressure and questioning of their privileges by feminism. Thus, at the same time there sprout groups of men who seek to critically reflect upon and deconstruct their masculinity, other movements like that of the mythopoetics9 and those of neomasculinity or antifeminism seek to recover the supposed "essence" of masculinity and strengthen the traditional model based on the gender hierarchy, inequality and masculine supremacy.

Within the context of advanced capitalism, the theory of markets together with the emergence of prosumers is useful for analyzing gender politics as a strategy that gets us closer to an analysis of the models of masculinity that men and women produce, consume, update, and renew [13]. By these means it becomes possible to analyze the repositioning, the masks, the camouflage, and maneuvers via which is articulated a gender paradigm that, boasting of being "new", solidifies the masculine herteropatriarchal hegemony, violence, and gender inequality. Additionally, it is crucial to insist that hipster sexism, neo-chauvinsim and retrosexism as reactionary trends masked by pseudo-intellectualism, culture, and humor, far from justifiable by claims that they are "simply memes", opinions, cartoons, jokes or simple publicity campaigns promoting some product, have social effects that materialize in daily life with severe consequences for the lives and well-being of women.
