Over the St Patrick’s weekend my grown-up kids talked me into watching Louis Theroux’s report on “Inside the Manosphere” – available on Netflix. It was unpleasant and uncomfortable viewing, not because of any failing on the part of Theroux, but because of the cruelty and unpleasantness displayed.
The “manosphere” is an umbrella term for a loose network of online influencers that focus on men’s issues (women, fitness, making money) and is often characterised by its attacks on women’s independence or equality.
Most of us will have heard of Andrew Tate, primarily because of Greta Thunberg’s masterful take down of Tate on Twitter and his later arrest, but there are many other male influencers in the ‘manosphere’ and five of them agreed to be interviewed by Theroux.
Problems with Boys
All secondary school teachers will be aware of the difficulties that young males experience going through during their teens and early twenties. Sometimes this is treated as something that cannot be modified, ‘boys will be boys’ and has been a feature of education for centuries.
In Rugby Boys’ School in 1797, troops were called in to quell rioting schoolboys at Rugby and in November 1818 the boys’ riotous behaviour at Eton was so bad it made the national press. However, there is a general agreement that difficulties for boys, including increased isolation and self-harm, have grown in recent years. What is going on?
Absent Males
Being an adolescent is not easy; boys are similar to girls in many ways, they can be loveable and caring, and are every bit as moody as girls but are more likely to respond to not getting what they want with aggression. Rebelling against authority is a natural part of growing up.
For males, part of the task of growing up, is to develop your own identity as a man. You want to become the hero of your own life story, but what does that involve? How should you behave? Where do you find your role models?
In some of the classes that I taught, roughly one quarter of the boys would have no adult male role model living in their home and this is probably typical across the country, (this did not mean that they had no contact at all with their fathers). Additionally, the number of male teachers has declined. Neither of my own children had a male teacher during primary school, and even in secondary school the number of male teachers is roughly one-third.
Consequently, some boys find themselves looking for guidance from older teens, or from role models online. If all the boys in your class are talking about the ideas from the ‘manosphere’ it is natural to look at this.
A quick bit of research on the influencers from the Theroux show reveal that they primarily attract male viewers from Gen Z (currently aged 13-28), with some attracting almost a quarter of their viewers from school children.
Gaining Influence in the Manosphere
If a prospective male influencer wants to grow their audience, they need to establish their credibility in the areas of wealth, fitness, and attracting women. They must display conspicuous wealth, sometimes renting very expensive apartments for filming and photoshoots, they need to be filmed working out and displaying their muscles and they must be filmed being successful and in control with attractive young women. It is this last requirement that sometimes involves very ugly and damaging behaviours.
For young males who first experience an attraction to women, the fear and experience of rejection is fairly constant in the early days, (or perhaps I was just unlucky?) Some of the male audience (or targets) of the manosphere talked of how a man has no initial value, but because they are attractive women initially have all the power. Male unease at this perceived power imbalance is used relentlessly by the influencers of the manosphere and in a very exploitative way.
I felt sympathy for some of the young men in the Theroux program but the ‘influencers’ are out to sell their products, to make money and the techniques for selling online bring out the worst in men.
To get attention online, you need to be controversial, you need to make people angry. Internal documents from Facebook, for instance, showed that as of 2017, an ‘angry’ reaction carried the weight of five “likes”. One of the manosphere men said “If I had just done good things, I wouldn’t be where I am now.” Another said, ‘A man who is not dangerous will never be seen as successful. You can’t be a little bitch’.
In a deeply unpleasant section, we see young female influencers lured by the promise of publicity onto a show where they are deliberately humiliated on screen. They are made to appear of low intelligence, criticised for their appearance and told that their hope of finding an attractive man to be faithful to them is unwarranted. The women are told that they ‘over inflate their own sense of worth, that they think they are better than they really are’. To some men, this ‘turning of the tables’ and taking the power away from women seems justified. The show then monetizes this jealousy of the women by allowing men to pay the show to have their comments (insults directed at some of the women) read out on the air.
Gamification
Those of you who have played computer games or who have children who gamed, may have heard of ‘cheats’. These are codes that allow you to break some of the rules in games to gain advantage and move up the scoreboard. Many of the men who absorb information on the manosphere will be familiar with gaming and respond well to being told that there are ‘cheats’ in real life that can guarantee you success.
The message of most of the influencers is that the world is not what we think it is, that like the Matrix, there are hidden powers, hidden rules and there are ‘cheats’ that allow you to win. Most of us ordinary ‘wage slaves’ are unaware of all this, but the influencers of the manosphere sell that secret knowledge offered by the ‘red pill’ which guarantees your success. They encourage you to view life like a computer game where breaking the rules is acceptable, no-one really get hurt and where your success is all that matters.
There seems to be an unrelenting and disturbing effort to destroy any empathy that young men might feel toward young women.
Behaviour Towards Women
One of the myths promoted on the manosphere is that there is a ‘war on men being strong’. Feminism has resulted in women taking power away from men and they call on men to ‘redefine what it means to be a man’. The influencers are therefore trapped, behaving in ways that show their dominance over women, even when such behaviour will clearly cause problems.
One influencer introduces his girlfriend on air as ‘my dishwasher’ and ‘my cleaner’ – try that with your wife at your next social event. More callously, they make it clear that they believe in one-way-monogamy. The women must be faithful, but the men can openly sleep around, sometimes bringing girlfriends home to have a threesome with their partners. Publicly boasting of this is another way of showing their dominance.
This type of hypocrisy is exposed by Theroux repeatedly. One influencer expresses disgust at the women who sell their nudity via Only Fans, despite owning a company that manages and makes a profit from women via Only Fans. Apparently, he would disown his daughter if she did anything like that, in the same way he would disown his son if he turned out to be gay. Image is everything to these men, because they are salesmen. When one of the influencer’s female partners points out that he behaves one way on camera but is very different off-camera, he is visibly irritated.
Religion
For some of the influencers, God and traditional values is another part of their message. They make money exploiting the bodies of young women, but they expect their children to behave differently. In their world view, they exploit the weak sinners while retaining their own purity.
They argue against ‘World Government’, claiming that Satanists are taking over the world. They do not allow the government to force them to take vaccines, and some believe that women should not be allowed to vote. Unsurprisingly, some of them support the religious right and Trump in America.
Talking to the Boys
We need to avoid demonising the boys who are the targets of these salesmen of poison. I understand why some use the phrase ‘toxic masculinity’ but it is counterproductive and it does not help in an exchange of views.
The role of school teachers will be important. In my 30 years of teaching there was never any training offered to male teachers on how to encourage boys to treat girls fairly. Hopefully this has changed.
In schools we need to listen to boys’ concerns about growing up and actively teach boys how to talk to girls. We need to encourage boys to see girls as primarily friends before they take a sexual interest, we need to teach them empathy. This will be derided as ‘woke’, or not the responsibility of schools by some, but a failure to counter the poison of the manosphere will result in misery for both males and females.
Most importantly, we must warn boys about the techniques and tricks used by malignant social influencers to persuade young males to sign up to their distorted view of the world; they need to see these people for who they truly are.
(Finally, we should also monitor how the Australian experiment of restricting social media to people over 16 works out and see if we can learn from it.)
Arnold is a retired teacher from Lisburn, now living in Belfast.
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