Blue-haired, misandriche, rabiata: Tracing the Connotation of ‘Feminist(s)’ Across Time, Languages and Domains (2025)

Abstract: Understanding how words shift in meaning is crucial for analyzing societal attitudes.In this study, we investigate the contextual variations of the terms feminist, feminists along three axes: time, language, and domain.To this aim, we collect and release FEMME, a dataset comprising the occurrences of such terms from 2014 to 2023 in English, Italian and Swedish in Twitter, Reddit and Incel domains.Our methodology leverages frame analysis, as well as fine-tuning and LLMs. We find that the connotation of the plural form feminists is consistently more negative than feminist, indicating more hostility towards feminists as a collective, which often triggers greater societal pushback, reflecting broader patterns of group-based hostility and stigma. Across languages, we observe similar stereotypes towards feminists that often include body shaming, as well as accusations of hypocrisy and irrational behavior. In terms of time, we identify events that trigger a peak in terms of negative or positive connotation.As expected, the Incel spheres show predominantly negative connotations, while the general domains show mixed connotations.

## introduction while misogyny is understood as hatred or contempt towards women @xcite , anti-feminist hostility is frequently dismissed as a mere neutral political or ideological stance. the way anti-feminist rhetoric is framed can influence how the discourse around feminism evolves, ultimately shaping its connotations and affecting public opinion and social movements. 1 examples have been obfuscated with a python package for obfuscating profanities: prof by @xcite . over time, feminism has been reclaimed as a symbol of empowerment but also weaponized to discredit gender equality efforts, often shifting between praise and stigma. analyzing these changes helps reveal resistance to feminist goals, the impact of media framing, and the persistence of misogynistic narratives. in media and popular culture, references to feminist movements and their supporters have often been framed in negative or mocking terms, reinforcing long-standing stereotypes about feminist women @xcite , which were assigned labels such as "femin*zis," "man-haters," and "bra-burning crazies" (swirsky and angelone, 2014). the persistence of such stereotypes about anyone identifying with the term may contribute to the reluctance of many women to self-identify as feminists @xcite . on the other hand, the complexity of feminist movements, both in terms of their diverse schools of thought and their evolution over time (the so-called waves), has resulted in a wide and heterogeneous set of values associated with the term. this complexity is reflected in the perception of the term, leading to the different connotations it acquires in media usage and online communication. despite the fact that fourth-wave feminists rely heavily on social media as their primary channel for communication and activism, online spaces continue to exhibit many of the stereotypes that emerged fifty years ago. these stereotypes, often renewed and adapted to the contemporary context, remain tied to the use of the term. as @xcite pointed out, the term feminist itself can be used as a pejorative epithet: to call someone a feminist can be perceived as an insult, or more generally, can carry negative connotations. from a computational perspective, @xcite show that the terms femminista, femministe are used pejoratively, as a slur, in italian tweets. however, to the best of our knowledge, no prior work in nlp has explored the extent of this phe-nomenon. this study is the first to systematically investigate how frequently the terms feminist(s) are used with negative connotations across different languages, time periods, and domains. specifically, we focus on the period from 2014 to 2023, considering three languages: italian, english and swedish. for the general domain, we consider twitter for the italian and reddit for the english and swedish languages, a choice based on platform usage and available data. for the hate domain, we consider incel forums. incels, short for involuntary celibates, pertain to the so-called manosphere @xcite and mainly comprise men who struggle to find a sexual partner or significant other, and blame this on women and feminists. some members of this community tend to engage in the spread of various forms of hate speech, in particular misogyny. we address two research questions: rq1 what are the stereotypes associated with feminist(s) across time, languages and domains? rq2 are there events that trigger a shift in the connotation of the target terms feminist, feminists across time, for each language and domain? ## the femme dataset we collect femme, feminist across multilingual and multidomain eras, a multilingual dataset comprising occurrences of the terms feminist and feminists extracted from different online spaces: the hate domain includes posts from incel communities, while the general domain comprises data from twitter and reddit. such dataset ensure temporal coverage, allowing us to track the evolution of the terms across different periods, from 2014 to category description insult feminist(s) refers to a person and is characterized by adjectives or expressions with negative connotations, or it occurs with slurs. subframes: intellect, physical aspect, or sexuality. inanimate feminist(s) refers to an inanimate concept and is used as an adjective to modify nouns or concepts with negative connotations. distance «i am not a feminist, but...»: the users distance themselves from the movement or its values and ideas. list feminist(s) is part of a list of elements perceived as negative. double standard feminist(s) is associated with the concept of hypocrisy, often related to their behavior with men. stereotype feminist(s) is associated with stereotypical features, without direct insult. subframes: intellect, physical aspect, or sexuality. sarcasm the sentence conveys negativity through irony or sarcastic phrasing, often mocking feminism. misandry feminist(s) are characterized as hating men. darvo "deny, attack, reverse victim and offender". feminists are portrayed as evil, violent, power-hungry, and destroying society. the user is framing feminists as real oppressors, flipping the narratives. ## frame analysis we use frame analysis @xcite to identify how certain aspects in negative connotations of the terms feminist(s) are emphasized and to characterize evolving societal attitudes. this study has been performed on the annotated dataset. we follow a multi-step approach. ## societal attitudes towards feminists at scale in this section, we interrogate contemporary attitudes toward feminists by combining classification tools with event-driven textual analysis. we structure the experiments and the analysis around two core components: (i) connotation tracking of the ## conclusion using a combination of frame analysis and classification models, we examined large-scale online discourse to detect the connotation of feminist(s) across time, languages and domains. our analysis reveals that the connotation of feminists is consistently more negative than its singular form over the years, except for swedish. the main driver for this difference in swedish is the feminist initiative party, which has drawn ire online since 2014. as expected, our data shows that the hate domain exhibits considerably higher levels of negativity toward feminists than the general domain in all languages. indeed, feminist(s) is frequently used as a slur, often appearing in contexts associated with the insult frame. this contrasts with the general domain, where negative stances toward feminists are less overtly expressed, in the form of stereotypes, dismissal of feminism, and misandry. we also found that event-driven shifts were more easily detectable in the general domain and are linked to socio-political issues. italian displays greater linguistic inventiveness, often incorporating politically charged epithets such as centrosocialina (squat girl), sinistroide (leftoid), and zecca (tick/communist). in contrast, english discourse tends to represent feminists as overprivileged and power-driven, framing them in terms of their supposed higher socioeconomic status, using descriptors like white and rich. discourse in swedish tends to describe feminists as political manipulators, claiming that they destroy sweden. these findings highlight that feminists are framed differently across the three languages. to further enhance the coverage and representativeness of our analysis, future work could benefit from a participatory design approach that incorporates knowledge contributed by those who are directly engaged in gender advocacy and discourse.