The Infinite Manosphere

We need a positive vision of masculinity ASAP

In response to the election, many pointed their finger at the young, male swing to the right to explain Trump’s victory. In 2016 we had ‘fake news’; in 2024 we have ‘the manosphere’. Both are a plausible but surface level explanation that focused our attention in all the wrong places. Let’s dig in.

Following the 2016 election of Donald Trump, we searched for answers in the supply of ‘fake news.’ We focused on the information itself, the people spreading it, and the algorithmic systems that enabled its scale. But we focused less on the demand: why people were losing trust in traditional information sources and institutions; why the ideologies and beliefs of those spreading false information were so resonant; how specific narratives rooted in resentment and loss of status tapped into shifts in cultural identities; how racism and anti-semitism often amplified the spread of disinformation, etc — I could go on forever.

But if we managed to de-platform and content moderate all of the ‘fake news’ away — which is as easy as defying gravity — we would have still been left with a hollowed out news media ecosystem, and a populace primed to believe in information that aligned with their identity, regardless of its veracity. Demand-side problems have thicker roots, and longer staying power.

Following the 2024 election, we turned our collective attention to ‘the manosphere’ to answer the question, ‘uh, what in the world is going on with young men and why did they shift so far to the right?’ Public discourse on the modern day manosphere singles out podcasters like Theo Von, the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Andrew Shulz, and Joe Rogan. It’s a mix of crude bro comedy, men’s health, pranks, and testing the boundaries of what’s socially acceptable to say. But this is only a small sliver of the manosphere, and ignores its much uglier underbelly. Take extreme misogynist and social media personality Andrew Tate (who was recently charged with rape and sex trafficking in a Romanian court), who regularly reminds his 10M followers on X that rape victims “bear responsibility” for their attacks and women shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

Tate’s views are extreme, but they are a closer proxy for the loose network of mens rights activists, pick up artists, incels, and MGOW (men go their own way) who compose the manosphere, and are connected through the shared, deeply rooted belief of masculism, which scholars Blais and Dupuis-Deri describe this way: “Since men are in crisis and suffering because of women in general and feminists in particular, the solution to their problems involves curbing the influence of feminism and revalorizing masculinity.” The podcast bros are just the mainstream manifestation of a deeper and darker network with thick roots.

But the manosphere didn’t just fall out of the coconut tree. There’s a long history that dates back to the 1970s, when a group called the California Men’s Gathering started meeting in response to the women’s liberation movement. The Men’s group were meeting to discuss how patriarchy affected them, and as Stanford University researcher Becca Lewis explained on the podcast Sixteenth Minute (of Fame), a fracture formed within it. The group became divided amongst pro-feminist and anti-feminist men. As the anti-feminist contingent grew over time, it entered the mainstream. It’s not hard to connect the dots from these (at one point) fringe groups to the shock jocks from the 1990s like Howard Stern and Tom Leykis who purported to say what men thought, but couldn’t say, to Joe Rogan and much of the modern day manosphere.

The manosphere isn’t a monolith. But, as Alice Marwick and Robyn Caplan explain in Drinking male tears: language, the manosphere, and networked harassment, those within it share “a central belief that feminine values dominate society, that this fact is suppressed by feminists and ‘political correctness,’ and that men must fight back against an overreaching, misandrist culture to protect their very existence.” In short, it’s a large networked group that is bonded against feminism as much as it is for men’s rights.

Michael Vallerga and Eileen Zurbriggen recently analyzed hundreds of posts from manosphere messaging boards to dig into the beliefs supporting this overarching identity. For example, they found that women are seen as a homogenous group with the same motivations: “to be deceptive, promiscuous, and to trade sex for power.” Men, by contrast, are considered either “alphas” or “betas,” where the former “embody hegemonic masculine ideals of dominating women and sexual success” and the latter are seen as “weak men who rely upon trading money, power, or (worse) emotional intimacy for sex.” Importantly, these beliefs are perceived as biologically rooted, and justified through appeals to gender essentialism and evolutionary psychology. Here’s one poster summing up their beliefs: “Your male genes are programed [sic] to want women just for sex cause your male superiority doesn't need anything better from them.” In short, the manosphere offers an identity, a set of (false) justifications, and an entire group to blame. But so far I’ve mostly focused on the supply side of the equation — so where does demand come from?

Boys and young men don’t start out wanting to become misogynists. But they often discover manosphere groups and discussion boards online because they’re looking for help, community, or a sense of belonging. Or they start listening to the Nelk Boys because they find the pranks funny, and then get served an episode with Andrew Tate. In either case, it’s unsurprising that boys and young men are looking for help because, well, they need it. In Of Boys And Men: Why The Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What To Do About It, Richard V. Reeves breaks down the problem with a set of jarring statistics.

• Education: When the U.S. government passed title IX in 1972 to promote gender equality in higher education, men were 13 percentage points ahead of women in attaining a bachelors degree. By 2019, women were 15 points ahead of men. Girls are also more likely to graduate high school (88%) than boys (82%).

• Employment: There has been a 7 percentage point decrease in labor participation among men over the last fifty years. In 2020, for example, there were 9 million men of working age not employed. This fall in male employment is concentrated among those 25-34.

• Loneliness & isolation: In 2021, the Survey Center on American Life found that 15% of men reported having “no close friends,” which represented a five-fold increase from 1990.

• Suicide: Men are three times more likely than women to commit suicide, which is now the leading killer of British men under the of 45.

Reeves offers a compelling case that boys and young men are not okay, and argues convincingly that it would be a mistake to individualize the problem and attempt to fix men one at a time. He writes:

“This individualist approach is wrong. Boys are falling behind at school and college because the educational system is structured in ways that put them at a disadvantage. Men are struggling in the labor market because of an economic shift away from traditionally male jobs, and fathers are dislocated because the cultural role of family provider has been hollowed out. The male malaise is not the result of a mass psychological breakdown but of deep structural challenges.”

Some of that may be hard to swallow, but Reeves explains that boys aren’t disadvantaged in education because of some feminist conspiracy theory (sorry manosphere bros!). Rather, it’s because of the timing of brain development. For example, the prefrontal cortex (which is associated with planning, moderating social behavior and impulse control, decision-making, future orientation, etc.) matures 2 years later in boys than in girls. Or take the cerebellum, which has a “modulating effect on emotional, cognitive, and regulatory capacities,” according to neuroscientist Gokcen Akyurek — in girls, it reaches its full size by age 11. For boys? 15! Indeed, as Reeves explains, the gap in brain development is widest when academic success matters the most — GPAs, test-taking, staying out of trouble etc. In short, the structural challenge in education is a neurological one.

This distinction — between individualizing the problem and looking at the structures that contribute to it — is an important one, because it suggests that the pipeline of disaffected men searching for help and community will only continue. Young boys and men are given a story to explain their struggles, an entire group to blame, and a community to affirm these ideas, and block out hard truths. The manosphere grows by exploiting a structural problem, and we’re all left worse off.

Yes, all of us. Empathy isn’t zero-sum, and prioritizing young boys doesn’t mean abandoning feminism. Quite the contrary, according to Reeves, who writes:

“Doing more for boys and men does not require an abandonment of the ideal of gender equality. In fact, it is a natural extension of it. The problem with feminism, as a liberation movement, is not that it has ‘gone too far.’ It is that it has not gone far enough. Women’s lives have been recast. Men’s lives have not.

If we can collectively construct a positive vision of masculinity, we can start breaking the pipeline of young boys to hateful misogynists. The good news is that what it means to be a man is more easily socially constructed. Feminist anthropologist Sherry Ortner argues that femininity is more resilient an identity because “a greater percentage of her lifetime … is taken up with the natural processes surrounding the reproduction of the species.” As Reeves asks and answers: “When was the last ‘crisis of femininity’? That’s right: never.”

Right now, masculinity is characterized by a power-over aggression. It’s about acting upon others, control, exerting power, etc. I don’t know exactly what a positive vision of masculinity looks like but it starts by shifting away from this ‘power over’ mentality, and towards a ‘power with’ and ‘power to’ one. From individual strength and acting upon to interdependence and relational empowerment. It’s only when we create a positive vision of masculinity that we will offer alternative pathways for young men searching for help in all the wrong places.