Newsletter March 2025
Leaving the manosphere behind
In the deluge of horrific U.S. news these past few weeks, you might have missed this choice item: on February 28, Andrew and Tristan Tate arrived in Florida on a private jet. The Tate brothers, who are dual UK-U.S. citizens, were under house arrest in Romania and awaiting trial for rape, human trafficking and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women when they were released—after the Trump administration apparently intervened with the Romanian prosecutor.
A former kickboxer, Andrew Tate has become the best known of a slew of hyper-misogynist and homophobic online personalities. The Tate brothers are so despicable that even Republican Florida governor Ron DeSantis publicly stated that they were “not welcome [in Florida] with that kind of conduct.” The Tates are now said to be holed up in New York City.
Since their return to the U.S., the Tates have been seen in Trumpist circles, notably at a Power Slap event (if you haven’t heard about ‘slap fighting,’ don’t bother) in Las Vegas where Dana White, the CEO of U.F.C. (Ultimate Fighting Championship, a mixed martial arts organization) warmly welcomed them. White has been a staunch Trump ally since 2016, and he officially introduced Trump at the Republican National Convention in 2024. The message is clear: "alpha men" rapists and sex traffickers are welcome and celebrated under Trump 2.0.
Trump himself has diligently courted the masculinist space, most recently by appearing on misogynist Joe Rogan’s widely-viewed online show during the 2024 U.S. electoral campaign, and by featuring the likes of Hulk Hogan at the 2024 Republican National Convention. But the strategy of stoking the grievances of “rootless white males” goes all the way back to Steve Bannon, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager. Through that relentless process, Trump has become “the Man” in the eyes of growing cohorts of men and boys, even though he's as far away from the supposed attributes of masculinity—courage, honor, self-control, sense of duty, stoic demeanor, physical prowess—as one can be. It paid off: young, mostly white, men gravitated to the Republican party in significant numbers in 2024, opening a wide gender divide with their female peers.
The COVID pandemic made Andrew Tate a global internet star, as young men began to consume his online videos glorifying wealth and violent sexism. A Guardian review of his videos found Tate claiming women belong in the home, are a man’s property and bear responsibility for being raped. Tate only wants to “date women aged 18–19 because he can ‘make an imprint’ on them.” In other clips, Tate—who often poses shirtless with guns while chomping on Cuban cigars—talks loudly about hitting, grabbing and choking women, trashing their belongings and controlling their movement. It’s graphic and absolutely horrifying.
Tate is so bad he was banned in 2022 from most mainstream social media sites, although he continues to operate on Elon Musk’s X (@cobratate @educationTRW), where he has over ten million followers. Tate’s videos had been viewed 11.6 billion times on TikTok before he was kicked off the platform. Educators in Britain were first to sound the alarm about Tate’s harmful messaging, which they say is reaching young boys who are wrestling with their identity and masculinity, but Tate has now become a malign influence on thousands of boys and young men well beyond the UK, across the English-speaking world and beyond.
Hating women and blaming them for society’s ills is hardly a novel idea (cf. witch trials). But it underpins a powerful and profitable corner of the Internet. Tate isn’t the only voice in the extreme sexist and homophobic online space dubbed the “manosphere.” In a 2023 report, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights found a wide variety of groups operating online to promote male supremacy, the “unfounded idea that men are naturally dominant and that restrictive gender norms are natural.” As the manosphere has seen increased traffic, it has also become more extreme, reports the Museum, and manfluencers increasingly promote outright gender-based violence and harassment against women and girls and trans and nonbinary people (whose fatal mistake is rejecting or questioning male privilege).
Researchers have found that most men and boys don’t come upon the manosphere because they hate women, but because they are dissatisfied with their relationships, schools or jobs, have few or no community ties or friendships, and seek connections and answers. But they quickly find hateful content. According to a 2023 Dublin City University study, it only takes 23 to 26 minutes of video watching for TikTok and YouTube to recommend misogynistic, manfluencer content to 16-18 year old boys.
A common manosphere meme refers to the “red pill,” the choice that Morpheus offers Neo in the movie The Matrix to learn the disturbing but previously concealed truth about the world. In the manosphere version, the red pill of male supremacist ideas wakes up young men to the dangerous feminist forces secretly oppressing them. Figures like Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and “strong man” fitness coach Elliott Hulse have built their entire careers by sounding the alarm about the downfall of men caused by changing gender roles. Watch Hulse explain how “men lose their masculine identity when they spend too much time around women.” Oh goodness. Hulse basically argues that masculinity is such a fragile thing that men have to constantly guard against “regression” to girlhood.
Similarly, Jordan Peterson has developed a lucrative lecturing career by harping on the idea that “men have long been stifled by a world that is set up for women to succeed at their expense,” and that feminism is a “murderous equity doctrine.” All of these manfluencers trade on ideas rooted in biological essentialism: that men are born to lead and dominate, and that women naturally like to submit to strong, virile male providers.
It can get downright scary. Incels (“involuntary celibates”), a sub-group of the manosphere, harbor particularly dehumanizing and violent ideas about women. Incels are straight men who have been unsuccessful at sexual relationships with women. Incel culture considers women as sexual objects whose bodies men are entitled to use without their consent. Basically, these sexless men believe women “owe them” sex.
Incel forums can be very cruel places, with members of the forum viciously attacking and insulting one another online for their appearance, or even suggesting that members should end their life by suicide. A small minority of incels have acted out this culture of violence: “self-identified incels have killed more than 50 people—most of them women—in Canada and the U.S. since 2014,” according to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.
Incel violence first made the news in 2014, when 22-year old Elliott Rodger of California killed his two male roommates and their male friend before shooting three UC Santa Barbara sorority women and going on a drive-by shooting spree that killed a man and injured 14 other people. While on his rampage, Rodger uploaded a video and manifesto that outlined his plans for retribution against the “females of the human species [who] were incapable of seeing the value in [him].” Amia Srinivasan, the Oxford professor and author of The Right to Sex (see January 2022 FMUS Newsletter), noted in the London Review of Books that Rodger’s manifesto “reveal[ed] that it was overwhelmingly boys, not girls, who bullied him: who pushed him into lockers, called him a loser, made fun of him for his virginity. But it was the girls who deprived him of sex, and the girls, therefore, who had to be destroyed.”
In the new UK Netflix series Adolescence, Jamie, the 13-year old boy who murders a female classmate who has rebuffed him, believes incel theories such as: “80% of women are attracted to 20% of men” and acts on them. Jamie, like many young men his age, is awash in this content.
Two aspects of the manosphere explain its particular grip. First is the extremely intricate, and often bizarre, set of rules boys and men are told they have to follow to protect and enhance their masculinity. These rules are layered on top of those young boys have heard all their lives: “boys don’t cry,” “be tough, don’t show your emotions, man up,” “don’t run/throw/act/dress like a girl,” but take them to a whole other level.
Tate regularly proclaims these kinds of outlandish, counterintuitive (and often disgusting) rules: for example, that real men don’t wash their genitals—only women and gay men do. Yeah, you read that right! This is obviously absolutely gross, but it’s a power move in the Tate canon. Women, those notorious hygiene freaks, have to submit to sex no matter how disgusting the man.
And the goalposts are constantly moving. Jesse Watters, the cartoonish Fox News anchor, recently issued his own five rules for men: “you don't eat soup in public. You don't cross your legs. And you don't drink from a straw. And one of the reasons you don’t drink from a straw is the way your lips purse. It’s very effeminate.” Real men also don’t drink milkshakes, and don’t wave simultaneously with both hands. Very girly. It brings to mind the far-right social media stink when President Biden ate an ice cream cone in public, or when President Obama wore a tan-colored suit. That was also “beta.”
If you are a young boy trying to figure out how to gain the respect of other boys and men, following manosphere influencers becomes an all-consuming task, because ordinary daily life is apparently full of manhood-killing traps. Commentator Kara Perez argues, in a recent article, that manosphere influencers have, to keep boys coming back to their content, to ensure that young men can never quite master the rules.
Which bring up the second point: the manosphere uses its hold on young men to extract money from them. All kinds of courses and products are offered: how to make easy money, how to become fit and strong, how to attract and dominate women. For example, Tate runs a series of courses on how to become rich on his (very tacky) site The Real World, where for $49/month or $479.88/year, 200,000 students are allegedly taught skills such as crypto investing and stock trading. On the home page, Tate anchors a promotional video that denounces university education as “brainwashing” that leaves you broke and “doesn’t teach you how to make money,” while claiming that The Real World is “the only university on the planet that teaches you how to escape The Matrix, as opposed to preparing your mind for slavery inside the Matrix.” Oooh boy. Of course, what Tate says does contain a kernel of truth: university education in the U.S. will often leave you with crushing student debt. But I’m quite sure Tate University isn’t the solution. Tate is said to be worth more than $300 million.
For his part, Hulse explains to young men that “a female’s sexual strategy is determined by the shape of her genitals.” And guess what, you have to pay Hulse $997/hour online or $10,000 for a half day in-person (say what?!) for one-on-one coaching sessions to find out what this could possibly mean.
From there, it’s an easy slide into QAnon political conspiracies and the alternative far-right “news” environment of OANN, Newsmax, Breitbart, InfoWars, CNews (France), the Daily Mail (UK) and others, all of which peddle misogyny, racism, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia. The Dublin City University study mentioned above suggests there is a link between manfluencer videos and right-wing conspiracy content: 13 per cent of all recommended content on TikTok and five per cent on YouTube for these accounts included these concepts, and the more you watch, the more is directed at you. “This monetisation of male insecurity not only serves to mainstream anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQ ideology, but may also function as a gateway to fringe Far-Right and other extreme worldviews,” their report states.
As young men, most of them white, gravitate to far-right politics via the manosphere, U.S. and European commentators have lately deluged us with articles and op-eds about this crisis. Here is a sample from the last few weeks: How Do Young Men See the World? We Asked Them; Are men OK? Our modern masculinity problem, explained; Sir Gareth Southgate on the ‘crisis’ facing young men and what to do about it; The plight of boys and men, once sidelined by Democrats, is now a priority.
But have men actually been neglected or sidelined to benefit women? It’s true that in many societies today, women are outpacing men in university education, and that women have made gains over the last decades in most spheres of employment and in political life. Yet in the U.S., women still earn only 85% of men’s income no matter the occupation (even in occupations commonly held by women!), only 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women and deaths in pregnancy and childbirth are up. Worldwide, only 18 countries have a woman head of state, and only 16 countries have a woman head of government. And around the world, 30% of women and girls experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence in their lifetime. Claiming that men are losing out because women have made progress isn’t backed by evidence.
In fact, none of the manfluencers, nor many of the outside commentators, ever seem to point out the more likely sources of men’s problems: extractive, unregulated capitalism that has suppressed real wages and made work precarious, skyrocketing income inequality, disinvestment in community services and social support, the decline of organized labor, and patriarchal norms that isolate and wound boys and men and drive them to self-harm and violence. And of course, the very social media algorithms that whip up male supremacist and far-right extremism.
So it behooves us to devise solutions for young men that don’t come at the expense of young women or LGBTQ persons, and certainly not solutions that expose women and LGBTQ persons to more gender-based violence. Reinforcing masculinity or bolstering ‘alpha’ manhood isn’t the way. Instead, the evidence points to political programs that uphold the humanity and dignity of all persons. It points to the need to re-think gender norms and instill values of respect, non-violence, conflict resolution, consent and bodily autonomy in young children using the tools provided by comprehensive sexuality education. Mental health services and support for all young people are also key. Social media moderation and regulation are urgently needed. And reforming our exploitative economic systems to support affordable, quality education and decent, fairly paid work for everyone, is essential.
And also—men have to step up. Author Lyz Lenz, in a recent piece of the crisis of male loneliness, noted that “…fewer men have intimate friends: ‘Only 30% of men reported having a private conversation with a friend during which they shared a personal feeling in the last week, according to a 2021 survey by the Survey Center on American Life. For women, this number was 48%.’ There is evidence, as well, that men rely on their romantic female partners to make up this gap in friendships and social connections.”
Lenz argues that it’s not on women—wives, partners, mothers, sisters, friends—to fix men and boys. I totally agree. Women cannot cure men and boys of their loneliness, anxiety and depression. They cannot be their therapists. They cannot extract them from the manosphere. Women are also dealing with their own issues, their own stress and anxiety, and they are underpaid, overworked and overextended.
Men have to take responsibility for this. They have to talk to other men and boys about their own mental health journeys and spiritual growth, about renouncing violence, about being kind and loving partners, about meaningful personal relationships and mutually enjoyable sexuality. They have to urge other men to seek professional help and to reach out to friends and networks of support. They have to monitor their sons’ online activity and guide them through social media. They have to organize and join activities that bring men or boys together in supportive rather than cruel environments. It's particularly important that men do this, because ultimately, men listen to other men.
As American philosopher and radical lesbian feminist Marilyn Frye bluntly argued in her 1983 collection The Politics of Reality:
“To say that straight men are heterosexual is only to say that they engage in sex (fucking exclusively) with the other sex, i.e., women. All or almost all of that which pertains to love, most straight men reserve exclusively for other men. The people whom they admire, respect, adore, revere, honor, whom they imitate, idolize, and form profound attachments to, whom they are willing to teach and from whom they are willing to learn, and whose respect, admiration, recognition, honor, reverence and love they desire… those are, overwhelmingly, other men.”
So it’s time to step up, men! In an upcoming Newsletter and podcast series, I’ll be talking to male leaders who are doing just that in their communities.
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You might remember that Andrew Tate was taken down in 2022 by teenage Swedish environmentalist Greta Thunberg after he tweeted at her about “the enormous emissions” of his gas-guzzling cars. Her response to him was one of the greatest tweets of all time.
Twenty-four hours later, after he inadvertently disclosed his location in his response to Thunberg, Tate was arrested by Romanian police and his fancy cars seized. That was an all-too-brief brief moment of schadenfreude, but the memory is satisfying.
In feminist, non-manospheric solidarity,
FG