A man’s world can change the second he opens his phone or laptop. “Women want to be raped by a high value man” is a thesis they might find explored on the popular Red Pill Reddit thread. Another post is titled “The mistake of needing permission to approach” and details how men should coerce women into being with them without their consent.
It could also change if he listens to the right podcast, like Fresh and Fit, hosted by Myron Gaines and Walter Weekes, which has shared YouTube clips titled “Why this generation of women makes terrible wives” and “Why women who have IG while having a man are bad GFs!”. It also once tweeted from its official account: “Why do women deserve less? Because simps, the government, and society as a whole pedastalizes women for having a vagina. Give them less so they respect you and give you more. Everyone else gives them more so you don’t have to.”
These are the meandering roads that lead to the manosphere. By now, you’re probably familiar with the term. This might be thanks to Andrew Tate, the self-described misogynist currently facing charges for human trafficking who once argued that women who’ve been raped should “bear responsibility”. Perhaps it’s down to Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist with more than 8 million subscribers on YouTube, who staunchly opposes gender equality. Or it’s courtesy of Adolescence, Netflix’s viral hit about a 13-year-old boy accused of murdering a schoolgirl.
But unless you’re immersed in these corners of the internet yourself, chances are that those references are where most of your knowledge starts and ends. For most of us, we’re aware of the impacts of the manosphere without knowing what it is: we know that school teachers are worried about Tate’s impact; one YouGov study from 2023 found that one in six boys aged six to 16 had a positive view of him, while according to recent research carried out by the charity Everyone’s Invited, abuse and rape claims are rife in primary schools.
For us, the manosphere is nothing more than a synonym for angry men. Or “toxic masculinity”, a much-maligned phrase among manosphere academics given its overuse and subsequent simplification. The reality is somewhat different: the manosphere is a network of blogs, forums, and social media channels dedicated to championing so-called men’s interests. Content ranges from self-help and strategies for success in life to dangerous, misogynistic rhetoric that breeds real-life violence, like the Isla Vista shooting by Elliot Rodger and the van attack in Toronto by Alek Minassian. All of it is underpinned by one clear belief: that feminism, and women more widely, have ruined society by subjugating men. The manosphere is, for all intents and purposes, a revolt against that core tenet.
Our misconceptions around the manosphere remain rife and, according to researchers, they’re holding us back in the vital fight against it. “A lot of people talk about the manosphere as a completely new phenomenon, driven primarily by social media, where participants are as spoken about as individual ‘bad men’, or some sort of aberration that is different to the rest of society,” says Simon Copland, a researcher at the Australian National University and author of The Male Complaint: The Manosphere and Misogyny Online, who argues that these ideologies have been around for centuries.
“The manosphere has just repackaged them for a new (and sometimes old) audience,” he adds. “The participants, in turn, are not ‘bad men’; rather, they are people who are just existing in and elevating ideas that have been around for a very long time.” According to Copland, the manosphere is divided into several factions that centralise different, albeit sometimes overlapping, belief systems. These include men’s rights activists (MRAs) who argue that men are discriminated against in society, pick-up artists (PUAs) who teach men how to manipulate women into dating them, incels who believe their appearance means they’re unable to have romantic or sexual relationships with women, and men going their own way (MGTOW) who have decided to avoid relationships with women entirely out of sheer misogynistic rage.
“I think the most dangerous element is that, for most of the groups, they claim that the behaviours they complain about with women are due to the evolutionary biology of the ‘two sexes’,” says Copland. “For example, they argue that women are inherently ‘hypergamous’ and will only date men with good looks or lots of money.” Most of the time, bogus science is used to justify these theories. Take the pseudoscientific 80/20 rule, which refers to the idea that 80 per cent of women want to have sex with only the top 20 per cent of men. Despite being adopted by incels, the theory is derived from economics and is based on the Pareto principle, which, named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, suggests that 80 per cent of consequences come from 20 per cent of causes. It was originally used to refer to land ownership in Italy.
This way of thinking “others” women, says Copland, allowing men to see them as inherently different, and in turn, lesser. “I think it also helps men justify their violent behaviours as they see themselves as just doing it to someone lesser than them,” he adds. It feeds into the narrative bolstered by Tate and his ilk, too, that women are naturally subordinate to men and through feminism, have acquired too much agency that must be oppressed or taken away entirely. Perhaps some of the most troubling manosphere pseudoscience revolves around rape, with the idea that women frequently make false reports of sexual violence proving particularly popular among MGTOW, who use it as justification for avoiding women altogether.
This is despite research that has found false rape accusations are extremely rare. A CPS report from 2013 showed that over a 17-month period, there were 5,651 prosecutions for rape and, during the same period, there were 35 prosecutions for making false allegations of rape. And yet, according to one study from 2024 published in the journal Sex Roles, a prominent MRA voice claimed the range of false rape allegations is as high as between 20–60 per cent without justification. “They included a link to a Wikipedia page, ostensibly as evidence of their mathematical arguments,” the study states. “However, a careful reading of this page reveals a review and critique of research on false allegations – with no endorsement of a 20–60 per cent range.”
As one Reddit user in the Men’s Rights group puts it, he is “deathly afraid of ever asking a woman out” because he’s heard there’s a “one in 11 chance that she may launch a life-ruining accusation against you.”
Not all boys and men will become incels or turn to violence but there is still a wider normalisation of misogyny which can translate into boys and men seeing and treating girls and women differently
Even if men and boys are not immersed within the manosphere themselves, the risks posed by it still affect them. “Not all boys and men will become incels or turn to violence but there is still a wider normalisation of misogyny which can translate into boys and men seeing and treating girls and women differently,” says Dr Craig Haslop, senior lecturer at the University of Liverpool who has led research into Tate’s “mainstreaming” of misogynistic manosphere discourse. “While Adolescence tells us about the potentially extreme consequences of a boy being indoctrinated into incel culture, ideas from the manosphere are being mainstreamed through a range of influencers across the fitness and lifestyle, which legitimises anti-feminist views,” he adds.
Part of the problem is that many manosphere participants are drawn in through seemingly innocuous channels, such as gaming, which some researchers have discovered are now a hotbed for the radicalisation of young men. One report published in 2023 by the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights explores how extremist ideologies have become deeply rooted in some video game chat rooms; even on Discord, a messaging service popular among young people and video game players, there are private discussion groups dedicated to promoting misogynistic views. According to The New York Times, one forum, Unloved, has roughly 150 members operating around a single rule: “Do not respect women.”
These problems have been around for a while – in 2014, the campaign GamerGate, which was ostensibly about a lack of objectivity in gaming journalism, was, in fact, a right-wing harassment campaign in response to the proliferation of diversity and feminism in video game culture. “Many members of manosphere communities regularly play video games, particularly games that have problematic representations of gender,” says Dr Frazer Heritage, senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University and author of Language, Gender and Videogames. “Playing video games alone, even violent ones, isn’t going to convince people to join manosphere communities. But misogyny and interconnected prejudices within games, which often tend to be quite prominent, can normalise such attitudes.”
It can also be seen as a gateway to extremism, which prominent manosphere voices and groups seem to have cottoned onto. “What I often see is that while a lot of videogames have less extreme forms of misogyny within them, many alt-right influencers use gaming as a way to encourage people to watch their content, so while videogames are not faultless, they are often used as a tool to entice people in to engage with the more extreme ideologies,” explains Heritage.
This widespread normalisation of misogyny taps into what Copland refers to as the “banality” of the manosphere, an idea he borrows from philosopher Hannah Arendt, who coined the concept in her 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, in which she examined the war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi operative who transported millions of people to concentration camps during the Second World War. Expecting to find a monster at the centre of the trial, Arendt was surprised when she was met with an ordinary man who was “neither perverted nor sadistic” but “terrifyingly normal”.
To Copland, this is what makes the manosphere so concerning. “If the manosphere isn’t just a group of inherently ‘bad men’, then it shows that anyone can be caught up in this movement (man or woman), and in turn that the ideas could become even more prominent if not checked,” he explains. “It also shows us how deeply embedded it is within our society, which means we have to do a lot more work to address the community. We can’t just shun a group of outsiders, we have to fundamentally change our society to address the misogyny of this community.”
We also need to understand where these ideas have come from and why they’ve spread so rapidly. The blame is usually placed on social media – and quite rightly, in some cases. A 2024 report by Global Action Plan found that 59 per cent of teenage boys have been served misogynistic content online without searching for it, while research conducted by UCL found that social media algorithms amplify extreme content, including misogynistic posts. But the problem runs much deeper than this.
“Late-term capitalism has significantly increased economic and social insecurity, leaving many people feeling socially and economically alienated, as well as deeply pessimistic about the future of the world,” says Copland. “What history shows you is that it is in these sorts of moments that extremist movements are often able to flourish.” The manosphere taps into this, providing validation and community amid this kind of loneliness. “It also offers a simple story for some men to understand what is going on in the world,” says Copland. “They tell men that it is all women’s fault, and give them personal solutions on how to respond to this. This gives men a way to survive in this very insecure world.”
All this really is just the tip of the iceberg. There are emerging concerns about how manosphere content is becoming more extreme, as well as more visible and accessible. Then there’s the issue of whose responsibility it is to ameliorate these threats, a subject Adolescence astutely highlighted: is it the parents? Teachers? The boys and men within these communities? Or Silicon Valley executives? Perhaps not knowing the answer to this is part of the problem.
“No one is taking responsibility,” says Copland. “While security agencies around the world have claimed they are taking misogynistic violence more seriously, it is still largely an afterthought. Meanwhile, social media companies have recently declared that they have no responsibility at all, as this would go against free speech.”
Perhaps it’s important to remember there’s a lot we can do on a purely individual level. “We need to start calling out misogyny and interconnected prejudices when we see them,” says Dr Heritage, who is sceptical of showing Adolescence in schools as has been proposed by the government. “I don’t think that is going to do much – it wasn’t designed as a teaching tool,” he adds. “I would also warn of knee-jerk reactions to these kinds of TV shows; they highlight something that needs to change, but the problems are much deeper-seated than just showing that a problem exists.”
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