Manosphere? We need to do better than name calling

There is clearly a problem with the radicalisation of some young men on the internet, but the picture is much more complex and nuanced than the shouty headlines suggest. The left needs to start engaging with young men with respect and not on the basis of stereotypes.

*See note at bottom

The team were discussing the new Louis Theroux documentary about the 'manosphere'. I've not had time to watch it yet, but for a number of years now, I have been following this phenomenon very closely. There is a lot of academic and policy research being done on both the production and audience for 'the manosphere'. I have read I don't know how much of it. (Please note, most has been done in the US, so most of the data here is US-based.)

So I want to talk over the issues in a more nuanced way than a lot of people do, but let me summarise: young men do not buy into the manosphere narrative anything like as much as people fear, but it does shape other aspects of their views. And the fact that the political misogynistic right has failed to capture them very much doesn't mean that they are sympathetic to the 'progressive narrative'.

The failure of the left is not its positioning on the economy or public services, or public infrastructure; it is a massive empathy deficit, which has alienated an audience that too many progressives frankly were always contemptuous about. Reversing this needs the left to address culture in a way we have not done.

OK, if that's the very short version, what is the more thoughtful analysis behind it? Well, we're talking about half of an entire age cohort here (men under 35), so the first thing to be clear on is that attitudes vary greatly and not always in the ways you think. For example, about four out of five young men have heard of Andrew Tate, but only one in four likes or trusts him.

What I found even more interesting is what you see when you move away from the extremes. Andrew Tate is fundamentally a misogynist; Joe Rogan isn't, but is also seen as part of the manosphere. So how big is this influence really? If you want to read one thing about the manosphere, I recommend this.

It is simply numbers, and it reveals a lot that the left doesn’t get. On the left, we behave as if the manosphere is dominant, but it absolutely is not. Right-wing politics do dominate podcasts, but with a caveat – they dominate political podcasts, but for young men, consumption of political podcasts is absolutely dwarfed by non-political podcasts. Most men are watching sports or gaming or 'instructables', not politics.

And even when they watch podcasts with a political slant, they treat it largely as background noise. Take Joe Rogan, for example; he does alien conspiracy theories, discusses marijuana and endorses Trump. Young men roll their eyes at most of this. They like to dip in and out, but it is not shaping their lives as much as we think.

This is the problem the left has; we understand this cohort poorly. We emphasise 'minorities' and frankly are often contemptuous about people who do not have the cultural leanings of someone who went to university. So we imagine these young men either as 'bad-uns' or as having been tricked or duped. Those are both very poor explanations.

In fact, never mind not consuming political podcasts, podcasts of any sort come very low down the list of how young men spend their spare time. They spend 13 or 14 times as much time playing games, watching films or scrolling through social media as they do listening to podcasts. This image of armies of young men being radicalised for hours on end every day is a largely imaginary progressive delusion.

But that in turn does not mean that the manosphere does not influence the wider culture. For example, gender roles and stereotypes are becoming more traditional, and this is being influenced by online content. Then again, the actual agents of this change are as likely to be conservative female influencers as male ones. This isn't just a male problem.

We lack sophistication in our debate of this issue. The left lumps together some very different groupings. Take the people who actually like and trust someone like Andrew Tate – they are not the dispossessed. Actually, you find that Tate-trusters skew significantly wealthier, more self-confident and more entitled than Tate-sceptics (see link above).

Which is to say this is a group who in American politics could have been expected to skew right anyway, and the US right has been radicalising since the 1990s. Is Tate converting them, shaping them or simply pandering to them? It isn't entirely clear. And it disguises a number of other things.

For example, there is quite a big difference between 'being a misogynist' and 'hating cancel culture'. This analysis here is complex and takes time to consider properly because it looks at how certain core views relate to other secondary propositions. But what you can see is clear clustering – it is young men more likely to hold right-wing, anti-feminist views already who cluster around support for manosphere figures and positions.

In terms of the whole cohort, the only propositions which have majority support are 'transmen aren't really men' and 'guys can have their reputation destroyed just for speaking their minds these days'. ('Feminism is about favouring women over men' and 'these days society looks down on men who are more masculine' come close).

What this is telling you is that the thing that genuinely narks young men across a wide spectrum is 'cancel culture'. If you look at another proposition ('gay men aren't real men'), you see the issue – only that hardcore of 30 per cent of committed right-wingers believe this. Seven out of ten men reject this – but also hate cancel culture. This isn't about politics or ideology, but about how you go about things and the general dislike of punitive puritans.

The picture is totally different for the economy. Here, young men swing way to the left. There are almost double the number of young men who support trade unions as oppose them. This is where we find the famed 'economically precarious Trump voter' – but it is a bit of an illusion. Because there is another third who is not pro-union, and they are the core Trump voters.

Yes, some economically precarious men turned to Trump in desperation about their economic position, but those form a minority of Trump voters. That is not an accurate description of where young men are, but the corollary isn't true either. They're not rushing towards the progressive left. Trump also won because young men who would otherwise vote Democrat were alienated by the messaging.

“Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”

A much better explanation is provided by a seemingly minor example of research: what are liberal, Harris-voting attitudes to male loneliness? This is measured by a large data analysis of liberal messages on BlueSky. It looks at statements from young men saying they are lonely or are struggling to find a partner.

The research broke the responses down into a series of categories – like sympathy, mocking and blame. Here's the long and short of it: liberals managed a whopping eight per cent of their responses being in any way mistakable for empathy or sympathy. Mocking and blaming dominated.

Liberals are contemptuous of young men, and particularly young men without a university degree. Tell me that isn't so? Tell me your experience of liberal and progressive narratives on young men doesn't revolve around blaming them or another man.

This is complicated. Young men are becoming slightly more feminist, but the gap with women is opening. And at the same time, they feel more besieged, more marginalised. There clearly is a problem of a post-Me Too backlash, but it is more towards a certain form of political narrative than it is to 'women'.

So is this resentment justified? You tell me. Can you imagine progressive voices being drawn into a discussion of 'female loneliness' or 'gay loneliness' or 'black loneliness' and 92 per cent of their responses being unsympathetic? You can't, can you?

Or pick language sets. The dominant new phrase the liberal left uses towards men is 'bros'. Tech Bros, Bernie Bros, Crypto Bros and so on. Now, let's try to reverse the gender implications of the language here. What would a comparative group from the other side use as a disparaging nickname for a group of women? It would be 'bitches', wouldn't it?

So now, every time you hear a liberal talking about the 'bros', say the word 'bitches' in your head and imagine how this is being received by the men concerned. Again, can you see how it feeds into a sense of being under siege in a society which no longer values them economically or culturally?

But where does that siege leave them? Looking for an alternative narrative of themselves. To get a sense of what that looks like, this bit of research here is invaluable. It takes a broadly misogynistic statement from a nominal political representative. It then matches it up against two different alternative framings.

The original framing is a standard 'this society hates men' kind of thing. There are two counter-statements. One goes 'that is just said by rich people to distract ordinary men from the way the rich stole the economy from them'. The other goes 'a real man shows compassion and care, not this hate-filled crap'.

The first reassuring thing is that both these counterpropositions hammer the original proposition in a head-to-head, but the former wins by only a ratio of four-to-three, while the latter wins by two-to-one. Very substantially, men are responding better to a moral case than an instrumental one. This is about culture, not calculation.

It comes back again and again and again. These men are not unrealistic, particularly avaricious and certainly not largely racist or women-hating. They keep saying the same thing, that they want what they were told they should want – a family, a home and a job that lets them support both these things in a community where they feel respected. It isn't that big an ask.

But the left won't hear it. It seems convinced that this is all a personal failure, that if men could only 'fix' their 'masculinity', they would stop being 'a problem'. Worse, it's often women who write articles explaining how men must change – in precisely the way men were told to stop telling women how to live their lives or express their gender identity.

And what it shows is that many liberal progressives manage exactly to miss the point about what is going on. This is not a fight for 'the soul of masculinity', this is about young men's sense of how they should fit into society and a deep sadness and loneliness that their traditional roles and social structures have evaporated (Robert Putnam's 'Bowling Alone').

It is economic, but it is also cultural, and it isn't particularly ideological. And while it is cultural, it is about society, not the individual. They feel an unhappiness that simply being male as they are is seen as bad (the sense that masculinity is frowned on by progressives), but not because they want to be aggressive; instead, because they want to be respected.

It is their integration into their community that they want, with a degree of respect which they identify as coming from economic security. They measure that as 'being able to look after a family'. They see masculinity as under attack, but they see compassion as a fundamental part of masculinity. But all they hear from progressives is contempt, insults and mocking.

The path through this for the left is clear. In fact, this particular analysis puts it very well – if you profile the average young man in America, he is basically Bernie Sanders. He leans heavily left on the economy and largely rejects racism, homophobia and misogyny, but feels no affinity whatsoever with the obscure identity politics of the university-educated liberal left.

They want to belong because we all do, and they want to feel moral and compassionate because we all want to believe we are these things. The left needs to hold onto this and make it mean something in policy terms.

God, this has got so long, and I feel like I'm barely scratching the surface of this. What is important is that young men are absolutely not 'lost to the left' and they're not a 'lost generation. In the words of The Prodigy, they're the Jilted Generation. They feel the left has broken up with them, but that does not mean the right isn't where they want to be.

Just for once, I wish progressives could look inwards and pay attention to something other than their own virtue signalling. They would find a lot of common cause with their 'enemy'.

*After I wrote this, I tried to find an image for the post. We use Adobe Stock. I did a search for ‘young men’. I could barely find an image of four young men at all. So out of interest, I searched ‘young women’. There were loads of them. Then I searched for ‘masculinity’, and almost every relevant image was negative or aggressive. I ended up using ‘man crying’. These images will largely be produced by college-educated Americans. It seems to me to say something about how they see the world.