Overall, the common creed of the manosphere is a return to “traditional” masculinity, Caulfield explains, even though there has never really been a common definition of masculinity. The type that manosphere influencers urge is founded on strength, dominance, and stoicism. This is where harm can be done.
“Evidence tells us that embracing traditional masculinity is associated with a host of physical and mental health risks, including higher rates of depression, loneliness, and anxiety. It’s associated with poor relationships, even erectile dysfunction,” Caulfield said in an interview with Speakers Spotlight.
In many ways, Caulfield says, the manosphere is simply capitalizing on rampant male insecurity in a social media-altered world.
“It’s important to recognize that a lot of this is about making money,” he said. “The manosphere is about marketing products, marketing ideology, and marketing brands.”
Andrew Tate, for example, sells two pricey services that ostensibly teach subscribers how to build wealth and success, often through trading crypto or online influencing. He also hawks a supplement called Fireblood for $71 plus shipping. Tate’s misogyny is closer to the norm for the manosphere too, as women are singled out by it.
“Within these online spaces, women are often derogated as innately illogical, selfish, materialistic and scheming,” a team of psychologists from the University of York wrote in an editorial published January to the journal Child and Adolescent Mental Health. “Men are presented as the primary victims of contemporary society. Negative attributions about women, combined with a narrative of male victimhood, are used to justify harassment, coercive control and discriminatory behaviour.”
In a study published last October, researchers surveyed 2,857 Swedish men. They found that young men who follow more “manfluencers” are more likely to dehumanize women. In two follow-up experiments to see if this link was actually causal or merely correlational, they presented content from a fictitious manfluencer to a group of participants, finding that young men exposed to this content grew more distrustful of women and misogynistic, especially if they felt like they had been previously rejected by women.
The University of York psychologists note that young men are the manosphere’s target audience, and may be particularly susceptible to its bile as they enter the dating pool. “These boys are often about to experience the disappointment, embarrassment and rejection that almost inevitably accompany dating for the first time. The manosphere… thus engages teenage boys with a deeply discriminatory world view at a point in development when they are likely to be particularly vulnerable to it,” they write.
The manosphere’s meteoric rise over the last few years comes at a time when young women are increasingly more educated than their male peers and have almost entirely closed the infamous gender pay gap. In 2024, 47 percent of American women aged 25-34 had a bachelor’s degree, according to the Pew Research Center, compared with just 37 percent of men. In short, women’s collective success may be fueling a resentful backlash on men’s part. The manosphere is simultaneously a symptom and a source of the problem.
The manosphere almost universally supported Trump over Kamala Harris, and a majority of men under 30 backed the Republican candidate for the first time since 2000. Donald Trump seems to know it, as reports suggest the Trump White House may have been instrumental in getting Romanian officials to lift Andrew Tate’s travel ban so that he could return to the U.S.
“I’m starting to feel American again,” Tate said in a recent video. “We’re back to 2016.”
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