Inside the Manosphere
Madison Avenue has never been shy about selling to children, and the current generation of kids is not the first constantly being told to wear this, collect those, and eat that. But while cartoons, entertainers, and athletes have long been pitching the purported virtues of consumption to young people, most of us never had to lock horns with an influencer while we were growing up.
A new Netflix documentary, Inside the Manosphere, examines the online entrepreneurs who have built enormous followings of young men seeking guidance about their appearance, their relationships, their finances, and so forth. While not all “masculine influencers” are the same, and though some may be genuine in their calls for improved male health and personal accountability, it has been widely documented that under the auspices of “male empowerment,” many platforms often express deep misogyny and sexism, reduce masculinity to physical strength and appearance, and traffic in suspect financial and relationship schemes. I imagine that all of us who care for boys are aware of the existence of such malign manipulation.
What I have been pondering lately is just how distorting the manosphere has the potential to be—and how we who love boys may recognize the power of its negative substance, yet not fully see the corrupting irresistibility of its spectacle. It’s not simply that the values expressed by so many masculinity influencers are often retrograde, nihilistic, and incompatible with Browning’s community principles—it’s that they exist in a fantasy world, a world which insists that through the “right” physical features, workouts, language, and attitude, young men can move beyond the good and evil of social norms. With enough protein, enough time in the gym, enough looksmaxxing, enough mogging, enough aggression, lies the promise that boys can become men who luxuriate in a self-referential existence of expensive toys, beautiful women, and unrestrained freedom.
This intentional blurring of fantasy and reality is a sales job algorithmically targeted at lonely, disconnected, and unfinished boys. These boys—with genuine, enduring, and legitimate worries about their vocational viability and relational capacity—are desperate for belonging, for social esteem, and for emotional validation. And this blurring accelerates through social media and AI tools which attempt to normalize not only superficiality, materialism, and reductive amoral narratives, but also manufactured images and ideals which are, quite literally, unreal.
Now imagine what school is like for an uncertain and unhappy boy committed to the excesses of the manosphere? What would he make of Browning? Of its values of dignity and purpose, its calls for compassion? At best these principles would become flattened expressions (i.e. ”purpose,” “dignity,” and “compassion” reserved for the self alone), and more likely exist as irrelevant distractions. If a boy embraces manosphere norms and practices, the daily life of school—where kids have to share space and control, follow rules, and sometimes delay gratification--would surely seem absurd, if not downright alienating.
Here, two points again bear emphasis: First, self-improvement can obviously be a wonderful thing, a way of finding greater health, greater relationships, and greater fulfillment. Second, today’s boys are not the first to have impossible standards for happiness and attractiveness imposed upon them. (Corsets, anyone?) What's new is that social media encourages the vulnerable to find “authenticity” through parasocial relationships with self-annointed online gurus whose messages "go viral" through an army of disembodied internet followers.
When boys and young men are wrestling with real problems, with legitimate frustrations, with feeling lost, they may go looking for themselves in the wrong places. There are no easy fixes--in caregiving, there never are—but if boys are searching for community and belonging, families and schools are the best and most ready sources of the connection that our guys absolutely need. Their sense of mattering is surely enhanced by the degree to which we are present for them, no matter their adolescent posturing or insecurity. While neither foolproof nor novel, these fundamentals remain important, effective, and the best ways for us to exercise our vigilance and care: When we reserve regular moments for shared activities and authentic check-ins, when we stay curious and prioritize listening over lecturing, when we show them that we love them in ways that also demonstrate that we understand them—then, we do the needed work of crowding out the manosphere. suggest: then, we present an attractive alternative to the siren song of online entrepreneurs who seek to influence our boys in harmful ways.