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.
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.