A young man is struggling to ask out a woman he likes and searches online for \u201chow to get a girl to like you.\u201d This is fairly typical behavior for a young man excited to ask out his first girlfriend.<\/p>\n
Within minutes, an algorithm serves him a charismatic<\/a> influencer who seems to understand his pain. The content starts with fitness tips and financial motivation<\/a>. <\/p>\n Within weeks, that same young man is using words like \u201calpha\u201d and \u201cbeta\u201d to categorize every man he meets and \u201chypergamy\u201d to explain why women use men for financial gain. He doesn\u2019t ask the woman he likes out and is now disgusted that he ever considered her a friend.<\/p>\n He did not join a cult. <\/p>\n Or did he?<\/p>\n 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\u2019ve helped survivors recover from.<\/p>\n A Shared Conviction <\/p>\n The manosphere is not a single group but, rather, an interconnected ecosystem of communities that includes men\u2019s rights activists, pickup artists, and incels (involuntary celibates), among others. <\/p>\n What unites them is a shared conviction that feminism has rigged society against men and that \u201cwaking up\u201d to this reality requires adopting a new way of seeing every relationship between men and women.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n What Cult Studies Teach Us About the Manosphere<\/p>\n I developed a model to identify the specific methods authoritarian groups use to control people through Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotional control<\/a>. When I apply this framework, the BITE model, to the manosphere, there is a striking overlap.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> schemes, or MLMs. <\/p>\n The manosphere also instructs members to modify their appearance and tells them how to conduct their relationships, creating behavioral dependency on the group\u2019s authority.<\/p>\n Information control is exceedingly visible within this community. The manosphere systematically discredits mainstream media, academia, and feminism as \u201cthe Matrix,” a conspiracy framing that positions all of mainstream society as the enemy. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Thought control operates through what cult researchers know as \u201cloaded language.\u201d 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. <\/p>\n It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cSimp\u201d and \u201cbeta\u201d are terms that shame<\/a> men who show empathy or deviate from the group \u201cdoctrine\u201d 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. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Emotional control exploits genuine pain. Manosphere communities initially offer extreme communal validation and brotherhood in the form of love bombing<\/a>. But the welcome soon turns into insults about the man\u2019s masculinity and eventually leads him to develop irrational fears about leaving or questioning the group. Men learn to fear<\/a> being seen as \u201cbeta,\u201d or returning to \u201cblue pill\u201d ignorance, as the manosphere treats departure as a true betrayal.<\/p>\n Pitting Men Against Women<\/p>\n The manosphere\u2019s adversarial framing of gender serves a specific cult functio: In keeping men away from women, and \u201cred-pilled\u201d men away from \u201cbetas\u201d, the manosphere isolates members from anyone who might challenge the ideology. <\/p>\n