Sexism and Male Self-Cognitive Crisis: Sentiment and Discourse Analysis of an Internet Event

Gender controversies and stigmatization on the internet occur from time to time. This research analyzes the “Yang Li Event” by crawling 10,507 posts on Weibo and sampling 184 reviews on the Zhihu website. Sentiment analysis verifies male-female netizens’ attitudes are polarized and reveals that negative emotion is dominant on the Internet. Male netizens’ posts use various rhetoric to construct the images of radical and pseudo-feminists, which is in turn placed in the contemporary China socio-cultural context for interpretation. This article argues that the contemporary masculine crisis is a kind of self-cognition crisis caused by a misperception of gender inequality.