The word is in Chapter two of Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me (have to read this for a class).
It seems to be a new word that was coined by Hamida Ghafour, but I can't find anything about it.
“Women in the online gaming community have been harassed, threatened,
and driven out. Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist media critic who
documented such incidents, received support for her work, but also, in
the words of a journalist, 'another wave of really aggressive, you
know, violent personal threats, her accounts attempted to be hacked.
And one man in Ontario took the step of making an online video game
where you could punch Anita's image on the screen. And if you punched
it multiple times, bruises and cuts would appear on her image.' The
difference between these online gamers and the Taliban men who, last
October tried to murder fourteen-year-old Malala Yousafzai for
speaking out about the right of Pakistani women to education is one of
degree. Both are trying to silence and punish women for claiming
voice, power, and the right to participate. Welcome to Manistan.”
I've looked up different dictionaries but can't find the meaning anywhere, please provide me with a definition.
Best Answer
In the context, I think it is just a portmanteau of man and Pakistan: Pakistan is "the land of the Pure", and the writer may mean "the land of Men", in the sense that it is a "land" where the culture and institutions are set up oppressively to protect men against all possible threats.
The ending -istan is sometimes used in an somewhat different sense, especially by right-wing organisations (I'm not going to link to it, but search for "Bradfordistan" to get a sense of their bile) but I don't think that's the intention here.