Evidence shows the ideas expressed in the manosphere are not harmless causing pain in real lives.
Image: The Conversation
Stephanie Wescott and Steven Roberts
There’s a lot of debate around the extent to which the manosphere is playing out in young people’s lives and relationships.
Some suggest claims about its malevolence are misplaced. Others think just because something happens on the internet doesn’t mean it affects lives offline.
But this is in spite of a significant body of international evidence demonstrating otherwise.
In this post-digital world, there is little or no delineation between what’s viewed and experienced online and what’s lived in the “real world”. This means we have to consider the potential harms of the manosphere not as remote or abstract, but as very real, and not to be underestimated or dismissed.
Broadly, the manosphere is centred on anti-feminist, misogynistic and anti-gender equity ideas and beliefs.
Content can initially appear harmless. It presents information and insights on health, fitness and financial and career success.
But these are generally founded on rigid gendered ideas, extreme and isolating pursuits of self-optimisation and unhealthy ideas about relationships with girls and women.
New research has identified a shift in the manosphere towards monetisation and entrepreneurialism, pseudoscientific wellness and alignment with extremist ideologies.
Users may encounter content documenting extensive morning routines, beginning at 4am. These videos can involve multiple wellness-related rituals, recommendations for preserving testosterone and diatribes on men’s “natural” roles as providers in families.
The manosphere-adjacent content generated by tradwives and stay-at-home girlfriends glamorises an aesthetic (and unrealistically curated) life. A woman performs a caring role in the home, eschewing feminist ideas and advocating for women’s return to the domestic sphere. It’s often connected to white supremacy and far-right conservatism.
There’s evidence boys can find manosphere content helpful and positive. Some seek validation and belonging in these spaces. This makes the need for them to engage with it critically even more prescient.
Research widely shows manosphere content causes harm both to the boys and men who consume it and to other people in their lives.
Viewing manosphere content is known to contribute to unhealthy body image.
It’s also correlated with beliefs about violence being permissable. Manosphere sentiments have been identified among men who use violence.
Our own research into the influence of manosphere content on boys’ behaviour in schools has shown a shift in boys’ attitudes towards women and girls. Teachers report a discernible uptick in incidents of gendered violence in their schools.
There is also emerging concern that manosphere content is contributing to a growing ideological shift among young men and young women. Across multiple countries, young men are voting more conservatively than they used to.
Further, there is abundant evidence that misogyny – a central theme in manosphere content – is a predictor of all forms of violence. This includes gendered and extremist violence.
There are growing calls to place misogyny at the centre our efforts to counter and prevent extremist violence. This means acknowledging the role of the manosphere in the process of radicalisation.
Racist and misogynistic attitudes have also been identified as an urgent concern for national security, given they are significant contributors to violent extremism.
Alongside the established evidence, we’re seeing signs of where manosphere beliefs might manifest next, if they’re not already.
In relationships and dating, advice circulating in manosphere spaces will continue to frame intimacy in transactional and manipulative terms. This will erode trust and mutual respect, while normalising male entitlement in relationships.
Over time, such messages risk reshaping, or regressing, expectations around dating, partnership and consent.
The manosphere frames work and study as competitive arenas. Discourses around “high-value men” and “grindset” culture blame feminism or “soft” values for perceived failures or inefficiencies.
This narrative positions career success as a masculine duty while dismissing collaboration and diversity, with long-term consequences for equity in schools and workplaces.
Finally, manosphere narratives of crisis and decline dovetail with populist politics. In the United States, aggrieved male voters have been central to Donald Trump’s rise, attracted to his performance of strongman masculinity.
Similar dynamics may surface elsewhere as leaders draw on themes of protection, grievance and a return to “traditional” order.
The danger with manosphere content is that it exaggerates and exploits real (and perceived) problems, issues and grievances among boys and men.
This means it’s becoming increasingly confusing to distinguish what are legitimate and reasonable concerns among young men, what has been manufactured and how victimhood can be constructed by manosphere ideologies.
Explicitly honing young people’s critical digital literacy is an approach committed to empowering young people to become more discerning: to question not only what they are viewing, but its ideologies, how it makes them feel, and how platforms are designed to provoke particular responses.
These skills promote the development of critical dispositions: essential lifelong skills that will help them to consume information in a more informed, less reactive way. Critical literacy in kids helps them to become adults who are informed and discerning, and therefore, empowered.
Stephanie Wescott is Lecturer in Humanities and Social Sciences, Monash University and Steven Roberts is Professor of Sociology, School of Social Sciences, Monash University