“MEN ARE VICTIMS TOO”: DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTIONS OF MALE VICTIMHOOD IN PAKISTANI AND BRITISH X DISCOURSE

Abstract

Digital platforms have become important sites for negotiating gender identities, inequalities, and claims to victimhood. Within these spaces, male suffering is articulated through concerns such as emotional distress, domestic abuse, suicide, family conflict, economic pressure, legal disadvantage, and restrictive masculine expectations. This study examines how male victimhood is discursively constituted and legitimised in Pakistani and British male users’ discourse on X, and how these constructions differ in relation to responsibility attribution, gender relations, institutional recognition, and masculinity. Drawing on a comparative corpus-assisted critical discourse design, the study analyses 3,000 unique tweets, comprising 1,500 Pakistani and 1,500 British posts collected between January 2020 and December 2024. Quantitative keyword and collocation analyses are integrated with qualitative concordance analysis. For qualitative analysis Socio-Cognitive Approach (van Dijk, 2008, 2016) is employed for interpretation. The findings revealed distinct but overlapping constructions of male victimhood. Pakistani discourse was predominantly event-centred, relational, and moral, foregrounding false allegations, reputational harm, marital relations, family responsibility, and the sacrificial provider. British discourse was more strongly institutionalised and therapeutic, emphasising mental health, domestic-abuse services, suicide prevention, equality, and restrictive masculinity. Across both corpora, male victimhood ranges from reformative and rights-based claims for recognition to competitive and antifeminist constructions that frame women’s gains or feminist politics as sources of male disadvantage. The study demonstrates that male victimhood is not a unified discourse but a contested field of meanings shaped by differing causal attributions and ideological orientations. It contributes to digital gender discourse research by distinguishing inclusive recognition of male vulnerability from adversarial constructions that legitimise male suffering through gender opposition.