For many years now, a dark question has haunted parents, teachers, the internet, and media institutions: What’s wrong with young men?
Why, people ask, are boys so politically extreme, spouting misogynist rhetoric, and increasingly drawn into risky crypto schemes and online gambling? How did they become so lonely, with their depression symptoms often overlooked? The male youth vote broke for Trump in the 2024 election following a GOP campaign built on naked appeals to meathead machismo. Yet there are signs that his second term in office has done little to stem the anger of Gen Z men, whose support for the president is now plummeting.
The most common explanation of these interrelated phenomena is that younger men have banded together online under the umbrella of something known as the “manosphere,” usually conceived as an organic right-wing rebellion driving the culture wars. A new study, however, suggests that this is entirely backward: The digital ecosystem that produces red-pilled men is less of a movement than it is a pyramid scheme.
Yes, you should have and it’s good that you did.
It’s the first step to being heard and we can’t improve this for anyone without it.
Everyone involved has to speak, listen, think, and act, and do those things in proper proportion and direction in order for us as a species to address the problems that make the manosphere look appealing to anyone.
Individual work is important, but there’s group work, too.
Part of the problem is that it’s more difficult to do the latter part when so many if us are barely keeping our daily lives in order due to the rising cost of everything necessitating more work and fewer outings, and the elimination of third spaces for most, but we still need to:
1: Try
And
2: Keep hope alive
I think there is value in knowing when to walk away from something that clearly isn’t working.
I wasted a lot of time and energy in my teens and twenties trying to find or form that group. That’s when, in retrospect, I was most susceptible to manosphere content. It was much less interactive back then, which I think is one of the reasons I was able to get myself out. It didn’t yet have the discord servers, and what communities they formed had not yet coalesced into single-subject forums. I imagine it’s a lot harder to get out of that.