A young man is struggling to ask out a woman he likes and searches online for “how to get a girl to like you.” This is fairly typical behavior for a young man excited to ask out his first girlfriend.
Within minutes, an algorithm serves him a charismatic influencer who seems to understand his pain. The content starts with fitness tips and financial motivation.
Within weeks, that same young man is using words like “alpha” and “beta” to categorize every man he meets and “hypergamy” to explain why women use men for financial gain. He doesn’t ask the woman he likes out and is now disgusted that he ever considered her a friend.
He did not join a cult.
Or did he?
I have spent decades studying how authoritarian groups radicalize, and the more I examine the manosphere, the more I recognize the same patterns as those I encounter in the cults I’ve helped survivors recover from.
A Shared Conviction
The manosphere is not a single group but, rather, an interconnected ecosystem of communities that includes men’s rights activists, pickup artists, and incels (involuntary celibates), among others.
What unites them is a shared conviction that feminism has rigged society against men and that “waking up” to this reality requires adopting a new way of seeing every relationship between men and women.
Research has documented a radicalization pipeline across these communities. Men will typically migrate from relatively moderate spaces toward increasingly extreme ones, each more hostile toward women than the last.
What Cult Studies Teach Us About the Manosphere
I developed a model to identify the specific methods authoritarian groups use to control people through Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotional control. When I apply this framework, the BITE model, to the manosphere, there is a striking overlap.
Behavior control appears through financial exploitation and rigid lifestyle prescriptions. Figures like Andrew Tate often promote subscription=only communities in which members pay monthly fees, with an affiliate structure that rewards recruiting others. This is a dynamic common to commercial cults, many of which we recognize as multi-level marketing schemes, or MLMs.
The manosphere also instructs members to modify their appearance and tells them how to conduct their relationships, creating behavioral dependency on the group’s authority.
Information control is exceedingly visible within this community. The manosphere systematically discredits mainstream media, academia, and feminism as “the Matrix,” a conspiracy framing that positions all of mainstream society as the enemy.
Once someone accepts this premise, every contradicting source becomes further proof of the conspiracy. This circular thinking creates a closed information loop identical to many traditional cults, in which members are instructed never to read critical material.
Thought control operates through what cult researchers know as “loaded language.” Loaded language is specialized vocabulary that compresses complex ideas into emotionally charged phrases, making it harder to think critically. The manosphere is saturated with it.
It’s easy to dismiss the vocabulary as popular slang, but the words serve a very real purpose within the community. The acronym AWALT, for All Women Are Like That, shuts down any nuance about individual women and reduces them to less than human beings.
“Simp” and “beta” are terms that shame men who show empathy or deviate from the group “doctrine” or who show any sympathetic or positive views toward a woman. The terms function as thought-stopping techniques, the same way chanting or repetitive prayer works in traditional cults.
In short, such terms short-circuit critical thinking at the moment it is most needed and reduce complex ideas to small, easily digestible phrases that instill thinking completely detached from reality.
Emotional control exploits genuine pain. Manosphere communities initially offer extreme communal validation and brotherhood in the form of love bombing. But the welcome soon turns into insults about the man’s masculinity and eventually leads him to develop irrational fears about leaving or questioning the group. Men learn to fear being seen as “beta,” or returning to “blue pill” ignorance, as the manosphere treats departure as a true betrayal.
Pitting Men Against Women
The manosphere’s adversarial framing of gender serves a specific cult functio: In keeping men away from women, and “red-pilled” men away from “betas”, the manosphere isolates members from anyone who might challenge the ideology.
When the manosphere reduces women to biological drives and when relationships are recast as a zero-sum “sexual marketplace,” half the population becomes the enemy, by definition.
Then, if this us-versus-them way of thinking becomes ingrained, it is very hard to listen to someone else who might offer another perspective, never mind a woman who has emerged as the group’s simultaneous enemy and sexual conquest.
Such isolation does not just damage relationships with women; it severs the connections that could help a man find his way out.
Is There a “Healthy” Manosphere?
It is important to point out that not all masculinity spaces are harmful, and we can distinguish ethical influence from undue influence.
On the healthy end of what I see as an influence continuum are organizations and communities that encourage emotional vulnerability and support a man’s autonomy. Such environments are spaces where men can come together and unlearn unfair masculine pressures, like suppressing emotions such as sadness through tears or vulnerability. They are critical for dismantling gender-based pressures that lead to both rigid gender stereotypes and male shame.
On the destructive end are systems that demand conformity and suppress critical thinking. The manosphere’s most extreme communities occupy the destructive end of that continuum, and the pipeline between them means a young man who enters through a fitness video can end up in spaces that glorify violence.
The men enveloped in destructive masculine environments deserve better spaces, because the frameworks the manosphere offers are not self-improvement but systems of authoritarian control.
Not only do such systems perpetuate gender-based violence and push men further into a box that denies them meaningful relationships with women, but ultimately, they deny men the right to be themselves without shame or pressure.