Mariam recently disabled Facebook Messenger. As the administrator of a Facebook group for women in the United Arab Emirates with close to 400,000 members, she’d become accustomed to receiving messages from strangers. But then came a shift in the volume—and nature—of those messages until they were impossible to ignore.

“Being the admin of this group has subjected me to all kinds of harassment,” says Miriam, who asked to be identified only by her first name because she fears online retaliation. They “either want to advise you to be holy and cover up, or they want to sexually harass you—or both.”

Mariam has run the group for more than a year. And even though intended for women, the group’s size and visibility has meant that Miriam also gets a lot of messages from men. She has received a deluge of unsolicited messages telling her how to dress, not to raise her voice or wear makeup, and to cover her hands with gloves so that no skin is visible.

“I couldn’t take it any longer. It was starting to affect my mental well-being,” Miriam says.

Many women who are conspicuous on the internet have been harassed online. That comes in countless forms, even if the same misogyny underlies it. The particular variety Miriam was subjected to stems from a section of the “manosphere” dressed in the clothes of religion—the Muslim manosphere.

At its core, the manosphere is built around male grievance and antifeminist ideology—though whether that’s entirely organic or engineered to sell supplements and other products is up for debate.

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