Feminist activism has always promoted informal learning opportunities for men and women. Internet, along with ICTs have expanded these opportunities by affording large-scale feminist mobilising and connection. Yet the digital environment is not only enhancing feminist campaigning but also facilitating the contexts to abusive behaviours flourish. Departing from the concept of social movement learning, in this article, we examine the significance to adult education of the large-scale reinvigoration of feminist activism in tandem with the surge of anti-feminist and misogynist ideas in the digital environment. We argue that just as online social media brought unprecedented opportunities to provide social movement learning, it offered the same tools to misogynists groups, mostly led by a toxic understanding of masculinity. By co-opting the same online opportunities, the feminist movement enjoys, individualised and collective toxic masculinity agency is a potential foe to match, reinventing the same struggle, demanding an ongoing battle towards deconstructing patriarchy.

This paper uses critical thematic analysis to explore the news media coverage of a rape allegation case against the football player Cristiano Ronaldo. After providing the context of the case, we examine the literature on how rape cases are represented by the news media. We then proceed to a critical thematic analysis of a purposive sample of Portuguese national newspapers, first identifying ten sub-themes in a total of 140 news stories and opinion columns and then considering the patterns of three critical themes that tended to dismiss the allegations, highlight the seriousness of the allegations and neutralize sexual victimization. Each of these considers prevailing ideologies, news values and journalistic practices.

In recent decades, marked by the supposedly universal access to different types of social media, we have seen the emergence of forms of popular feminism embedded in complex dynamics. Often cohabiting in these dynamics are ambivalent ideas and imaginaries that both reject and express feminist issues. Particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of digital technologies increased exponentially to overcome mobility constraints, popularizing connective action around feminism and, at the same time, reinforcing normative views of society. This article explores these ambivalences by focusing on TikTok discourses, whose popularity grew intensely during the pandemic. Departing from a feminist constructionist perspective and using content analysis, we examine the 100 most prominent videos on the Portuguese hashtags #feminismo (#feminism) and #antifeminismo (#antifeminism) in the period corresponding to general containment measures in the second phase of the public health crisis. The results are less than encouraging. Over half of the analysed videos contain discursive dynamics conforming to social hierarchization (53%), often reaffirming gender stereotypes. By allowing forms of popular feminism and antifeminism to permeate the shared discourses, the results suggest that the platform gives rise to ideas and discourses that reify unbalanced power relations.

A large body of research has documented gender bias in the news coverage of women. Despite small gains in recent years, namely on television, and the growing percentage of females in the workforce, substantial underrepresentation of women in the news has remained. To explore journalists’ social and professional world as a milieu of the lived professional and culturally grounded understandings of gender, we conducted participant observation of a television newsroom. Drawing on symbolic interactionism, our study explored daily interactions and communicative performances, focusing on how gender is built in everyday work encounters in ways that may be connected to potential changes in the practices of gender representations. The study identified three primary themes: newsroom environment, gender assumptions, and issues of language. Our findings support that gender is not given but performed mostly according to institutionalised common practices following gender expectations and presuppositions, making change more difficult and slower than necessary. Future research should complement the limitations of the cultural generalizability of our study. Recommendations include the study of gender construction in relation to other components of gender as a social institution and gender in television journalism practice.

Better theories and practices are constructed through a deep understanding of the subjects involved. In Portugal, young adults aged 18 to 30 are a group sometimes left out because the Portuguese official statistical data does not treat this as an age category by itself, dividing it either into young people or the general idea of adults. Through a social constructivist quantitative approach, this article seeks to construct a profile of young adulthood in Portugal, both in socio-demographic terms and in terms of their relationship with media. An online survey was conducted on a representative sample of young Portuguese adults (18–30 years), guaranteeing a margin of error of ±2.53% at the 95% confidence level. Results reveal that 83.5% of young adults identify themselves as heterosexual, and 83.5% do not have children. The average age of respondents with children is 26 years old. Most young adults (63.5%) live with their parents or other adult relatives, and the vast majority (82.2%) of these parents or relatives with whom they live are employed and have primary or secondary education. Mobile phones (92.8%), laptop computers (84.1%), and TV with a box (78.5%) are the primary media to which the young people in the sample have access. The mobile phone stands out in particular, as 90.2% of those inquired revealed that they use it every day. Social media are identified as the most frequently consumed type of media content (81.1% every day). These findings strengthen the idea of the centrality of the mobile phone in daily lives, especially among young adults, as well as social media platforms. This research helps to understand that the young adult profile in Portugal presents themselves as heterosexual, has no children, lives with parents or other adult relatives, and uses a mobile phone daily, despite having other media available for its use.