This thesis asks how the discourse of 'alpha' podcasts constructs hegemonic masculinity and the gender order, and which rhetorical strategies it employs in doing so. My starting points are the concept of hegemonic masculinity, which is established through discursive practices, and misogyny understood as a regulatory force of the patriarchal order. I outline the manosphere as a loosely connected network of online communities and the Red Pill philosophy as its central ideology, and I treat the podcast as a medium that also shapes, in return, the relations of power in which it is embedded. In the empirical part, I use critical discourse analysis to examine the ten most popular episodes of the podcast Fresh & Fit on YouTube through three discursive categories: the market logic of the gender order, the regulation of femininity and the hierarchisation of masculinity. All three follow the same pattern of valuation, ranking and sanctioning, which operates first outward, against women, and then inward, among men themselves. The established alpha and beta typology barely appears in the material. The categories are permeated by rhetorical strategies through which the hosts silence alternative views and present their own positions as self-evident facts. The analysis shows that the hegemonic ideal does not require embodiment in practice in order to be reproduced, since discursive positioning above subordinated masculinities is enough, and that the format of the podcast itself contributes to this.
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