Canal do Búfalo[1] was a prominent Brazilian online community in the 2010s, composed almost entirely of men.
In this forum, members symbolically identify themselves as “buffaloes,” drawing inspiration from a story popularized by figures such as the American motivational speaker and entrepreneur Rory Vaden (2020).
This metaphor concerns how buffaloes and cows respond to storms. While cows tend to move away from the storm, prolonging their suffering, buffaloes move toward it, crossing through more quickly.
In the context of this community, this image embodies an attitude toward adversity: confronting problems head-on, with resistance, courage, and a willingness to endure difficult situations rather than avoid them.
A small herd of buffalo moves across a dry, open grassland with scattered shrubs. Five adult bison and one calf are visible. Source: PublicDomainPictures.net (Image by Jean Beaufort).
By web scraping and building a database of content associated with this community, this study investigates how this segment of the manosphere was organized geospatially. With content published between 2010 and 2012, the data collected therefore corresponds to a period when the manosphere was still incipient, confined to the margins of the internet.
This forum’s value to its users is evident in the fact that, even though it is no longer active, former members have organized to keep it online, preserving key dialogues that grounded the development of Brazilian masculinism.
Accordingly, I propose an exploratory and analytical visualization of the ways in which subjects associated with the Brazilian manosphere located, named, and spatially distributed themselves.
The Digital Formation of Brazilian Masculinism
The Brazilian manosphere has been taking shape for decades.
It began in the far reaches of the internet, but over time, it has steadily moved closer to the surface of mainstream discourse.
It now stands as a major national concern, as femicides are reported with increasing frequency, and high-profile digital content creators endorse masculinist agendas.
“Masculinism” is understood in this text as an ideological line within the manosphere — at times associated with the men’s rights movement, the red pill, and related groups — that organizes itself in opposition to feminism, by interpreting the gender relations of the “modern world” as structurally harmful to men (Castella, 2012).
Though composed mostly of heterosexual cisgender men, this online space hosts a diverse membership whose demands are not always aligned and whose conclusions about how to face life sometimes diverge. They nevertheless converge on a single subject: women.
One of the most unifying and mobilizing themes among them is their relation to women, which for many produces anguish, anxiety, anger, frustration, or resentment (Kehl, 2020). Despite their diverse ways of confronting the role of women in society, they unite around certain conventions, constituting this “ideal type” (Weber, 2004) now publicly known as the manosphere.
They believe the world revolves around women. These men claim that we live in a gynocentric world (as if phallocentrism and patriarchy did not exist), in which social relations are organized by the subordination of men to female interests. Social life, in this view, orbits around women, who are perceived as holding greater power — whether through institutional support (codified in laws) or through moral norms that supposedly favor them. The discussions, then, focus on the most adequate ways of addressing this “problem.”
Determined to confront the problems that afflict them, these men organize themselves and discuss strategies for facing this difficult world. Here, I focus on how a masculinist group collectively constructs forms of belonging through situated interaction, thereby giving form and substance to the manosphere. To that end, the cartography I propose seeks, through a multimodal approach, to reveal how these subjects negotiate symbolic boundaries and frame the world.
Given this interest, I find Erving Goffman’s concept of the self as performance to be a valuable framework for analyzing this case. In this view, the self is constructed to sustain interaction and manage public image before an audience. It is not an essence that exists prior to social interaction, but something continuously constituted through symbolic exchanges and performances monitored before real or imagined others.
Through the platform’s digital affordances, traces, interactions, and monitoring mechanisms, a technoself is constructed (boyd, 2010; Ribeiro, 2013). What might otherwise remain merely tacit becomes visible once the data is carefully organized. Thus, the interactive maps represent the first steps toward a critical cartography. By honoring the textual field of self-presentation and rendering it material, I undertake a methodological and critical experimentation with conventional cartography — one that shows how subjects differently situate themselves and frame their lives across places, without forcing their narratives into a single territorial framework (Crampton; Krygier, 2005).
How Were the Data Collected?
I produced this empirical database as a “lurker” (observing without participating) and chose this technique to avoid disrupting observed behaviors, as well as to reduce risks to myself as a researcher[2].
A total of 20,189 posts were collected from 441 authors. Of these, 8,138 contained location data, posted by 129 distinct users across 93 distinct locations. Among the available metadata, this self-reported variable was essential for composing the cartographic experimentation in the R programming environment. All scripts developed for the research are available in a Zenodo repository.
Mapping the Corpus
To contextualize what follows, note that significant differences exist in Brazil between the South/Southeast and the North/Northeast. These differences stem from distinct processes of cultural formation and from divergent formative imaginaries across these territories.
Building on narratives that position the South/Southeast as Brazil’s political-cultural “center,” certain groups located in these regions claim that this area should serve as the source of a supposedly national “good culture.” Recent separatist discourses have also been mobilized from these regions (Senra, 2023).
The following map presents, for Brazil, the distribution of posts by Federative Unit, based on the number of posts published by users who associated themselves with each locality. This mapping makes it clear that, in this corpus, the most active segment of the Brazilian manosphere identifies with the South and Southeast regions of Brazil, with a strong presence in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Minas Gerais.
However, claiming that any region is overrepresented relative to Brazil at large would require more data and a comparison of these records with other factors, such as population distribution, demographic density, regional internet access, and patterns of forum and digital platform use. Therefore, this map should be understood as an exploratory indicator, aimed at presenting the footings produced within this forum.
Below is a visualization of the intensity of postings by federative unit: the darker the region, the greater the volume of posts. On the same map, the “Switch to users” button (lower right corner), allows visualization of authors by state, following the same color scheme.
This second visualization reveals that Ceará, even without concentrating so many posts over time, appears with a high number of authors relative to the total author count in the corpus.
Positioning and Narrating Elusive Territories
To ensure locational precision, I first matched formal names of municipalities and states to standardized administrative geometries. Subsequently, I applied a conservative textual matching procedure aimed at imprecise spellings and abbreviations for entries not identified in the first pass.
After separating automatically located entries from those requiring qualitative analysis, I arrived at the critical dimension of the cartographic work: some of the locations in this corpus do not correspond to regular administrative toponyms, but to vernacular forms of naming space. I call these “toponymic aliases”. They include ironic expressions, categories of vague meaning, and forms of symbolic spatialization. I argue that aliases such as Interior – São Paulo [São Paulo countryside], cidade maravilhosa [wonderful city], Onipresente, Inconscientemente Falando [Omnipresent, Unconsciously Speaking], or Fora Da Matrix Social [Outside the Social Matrix] should be preserved as distinct categories, rather than discarded as errors. These formulations can be read as traces of a moral and imaginary geography of the manosphere — ways of condensing belonging, antagonism, prestige, resentment, or irony into spatial forms.
Precisely because of the elusive and diffuse character of this population, this qualitative stage is necessary. Instead of assuming that every spatial term automatically corresponds to an officially recognized place, the analytical script establishes varying confidence levels and separates the cases that require subsequent interpretive treatment.
How Does the Map Work?
The map below displays the aliases in a box in the upper-right corner. Clicking on a name visualizes its associated metadata. I assigned approximate latitude and longitude to some aliases where location could be inferred — for example, cidade maravilhosa [wonderful city], a well-known epithet for Rio de Janeiro.
This map resolves different descriptions of location across territorial scales, classifying them as municipality, federative unit, country, or “toponymic alias”.
This map offers a more precise visualization of spatial self-identification. It is not concerned with answering where the forum users are, but rather how they locate themselves, how they narrate space, and in what ways these elusive internet spaces take shape. In research interested in the symbolic interactions of the manosphere, this difference is decisive: location is also an interactional practice through which users take up a footing, positioning themselves in relation to places, ideas, and others (Goffman, 1981).
This methodological artifact transforms a dispersed mass of self-descriptions into a device for sociological reading. It visualizes how the Brazilian manosphere constructs self-recognition and world intelligibility. Self-declared locations appear to function as operators of identity, articulating impression management and territoriality (Ribeiro, 2013).
This is especially relevant in the case of toponymic aliases. Although they cannot always be translated into latitude and longitude, they still operate as forms of localization. They situate themselves in relation to the group, and to broader imaginaries of origin and belonging. When a user situates, for instance, that he comes from barro [clay], the expression does not simply fail as geographic information. Rather, it offers a clue to a self symbolically related to the biblical narrative of Genesis, often paraphrased as God forming man from dust of the ground [3]. He thus emphasizes his place of speech as a subject whose self-presentation may be read as religiously inflected, and who should therefore be situated and interpreted through that symbolic frame.
By choosing — or refusing — to describe their position on the map, these subjects produce a public definition of the situation: when someone locates themself as “Outside the Social Matrix”, he is adopting a particular footing toward the audience, not preoccupied with an official toponym, but rather with another type of placement. It situates his knowledge about an alleged matrix, and designates how he wishes to be socially embedded in relation to it.
This digitally constructed self, once made spatially visible, reveals the ways in which users manage, situate, and perform representational schemas constitutive of the technoself.
Notes
[1] Available at: http://forumantigo.forumeiros.com. Accessed on: Apr. 20, 2026.
[2] The Lola Aronovich case has become emblematic of online misogynistic persecution in Brazil (Aguiar, 2023). A university professor, blogger, and feminist activist, Aronovich was the target of defamation campaigns, threats of rape and death, and organized digital persecution. In the forum analyzed, she is mocked and publicly ridiculed by its members.
[3] Although in Brazil it is common for Christians to refer to this biblical scene as involving clay, in other countries it is more often described in terms of dust.
This post was curated by Multimodal Contributing Editor Kayah Nicholas and reviewed by Contributing Editor Jackie Ashkin.
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