Masculinity Experts “Map the Manosphere” and Find Nothing Good

Or, Why we can’t hate gender studies enough

Nothing beats a threat narrative for a gender studies academic in search of relevance, and what more urgent than the dark corners of the internet where men (and the women who love them) allegedly spread misogyny and male supremacism.

Many academics now claim expertise in this area of gender studies, probing the volatile fragility and violent anxieties of manosphere men, and calling to repentance all who resist the feminist future. Many of these academics are women, making a sweet living warning about male “hate,” but there are plenty of male feminists as well, crusaders against others’ toxicity .

In “Mapping the Neo-Manosphere(s): New Directions for Research,” four scholars of masculinity survey the latest research on digital media and violent extremism. Vivian Gerrand, Debbie Ging, Joshua Roose, and Michael Flood claim to have read hundreds of studies of the manosphere, which they call an “online ecosystem of anti-women actors.”

According to them, the manosphere is brimming over with grievance-mongering, grift, and gynocidal fantasy. Nothing in it is good or sincere or well-intentioned. Various sub-genres of online content, including fitness advice, stoicism, and the tradwife lifestyle, are presented as outgrowths of misogynistic extremism from which millions of men and boys require rescue, by force if necessary.

A Roll Call of Buzzwords

The researchers make no distinction between manosphere content generally and what they call male supremacy—or, indeed, between those terms and a host of others, all pejorative. Their introductory paragraph alone provides a roll call of buzzwords that link any dissent from Marxist-feminist orthodoxy to misogynistic violence.

The manosphere, we’re told, is “bound by the belief that mainstream society is a misandrist conspiracy that disadvantages men.” Manosphere groups “frame contemporary gender politics as a ‘war against men.’” These groups also “frequently engage in misogynistic abuse as well as inciting violence against women,” thus creating an “online environment of accelerating harms.”

None of these statements is ever supported with evidence, but it is likely too much to expect evidence: the direct equation between male-positive advocacy and murderous misogyny is no longer a subject of academic debate, if it ever was. It is an axiom.

In one short paragraph, then, we move from non-feminist perspectives to “misandrist conspiracies,” and from belief in a “war against men” to “inciting violence” and “accelerating harms.” Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with anti-feminist content will recognize the definitional sleights of hand. Are any of these academics genuinely familiar with the subject they are writing about? It seems more likely that they have taken a shortcut to a politically-approved position.

What about the mass of anti-feminist and male-positive content creators—Rick Bradford at The Illustrated Empathy Gap, Tom Golden at Men Are Good, Alison Tieman and company at Honey Badger Radio, Bettina Arndt at Bettina Arndt, Hannah Spier at Psychobabble, just to name a few—who come nowhere near “inciting violence against women”? On the contrary, they pursue a vision of mutual cooperation and accountability between the sexes by rejecting female privilege and paranoia. Is this manosphere content, or not?

Many men’s rights advocates—researchers like Stephen Baskerville, Paul Nathanson, James Nuzzo, David Shackleton, Gerard Casey, Helen Smith, and Grant Brown, just to name those I’ve been consulting most recently—simply document male disadvantage with evidence. They do not assert conspiracies or stoke grievance.

As for the “war against men,” have our researchers read any of the voluminous feminist writings that celebrate male death and openly advocate a world without them? When feminist leaders—many of them university professors—are not only allowed but actually celebrated for declaring their anti-male hatred and calling for a “decontamination of the earth,” what are sensible people to conclude about anti-male animus?

A PUA, a MGTOW, and a Christian conservative walk into a bar …

But sensible investigation is not at issue here, as is evident from the following howler about the alleged origins of the manosphere:

“The early manosphere was a conglomeration of communities, including men’s rights activists, involuntary celibates (or incels, who are men unable to access sex with women), dating coaches known as Pick Up Artists, male separatists and Christian conservatives.”

There were also a significant number of anti-feminist women (Karen Straughan, Judgy Bitch, Shoe On Head, Diana Davison, and Hannah Wallen, to name a few) who were shocked by the viciousness and dishonesty of the feminist project—not that women’s participation matters to the researchers, who dole out equal-opportunity excoriation. But the point is that these “communities” that allegedly “conglomerated” at the dawn of the manosphere had nothing in common, whether in their general worldview or in their specific action plans, and it is ridiculous to pretend that they were united in misogyny.

Christian conservatives tend to counsel men to abstain from sex before marriage and to pursue marriage as a sacrament. Dating coaches counsel men to pursue sex, period. Incels counsel men to despair over their lack of sex. Male separatists, or MGTOW, counsel men to abstain from marriage and from any woman-centered entanglements, sometimes including sex.

Their ideologies—if they can even be called that—could hardly be more different. Their attitudes toward women range from worshipful idealization and friendly interest through wary indifference and active dislike. A few manosphere denizens do hate women, though with nowhere near the single-minded fervor one finds in much of the received feminist literature that these academics fail to criticize.

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“Mapping the Neo-Manosphere(s)” makes dozens more tone-deaf claims in prose of extraordinary banality. The authors are so frequently unable to communicate a precise meaning that one can only conclude that precise meaning was not their object.

For example, the authors inform readers that “This identification of the manosphere as grift is an important new development in the scholarship, which demonstrates how many facets of the neo-manosphere exploit existing vulnerabilities and monetize them in a cycle of ‘ontological racketeering,’ which consists of ‘threat proliferation,’ affirming and extending in viewers a sense of crisis, and alternately promising to deliver solutions to such threats.”

!!!

Having waded through the turgid academese, the reader is to conclude, presumably, that online entrepreneurs are wrong to identify a problem and offer solutions that men and women are interested in enough to pay for.

How is this a “grift”? One could just as easily, and with more cause, identify many gender studies researchers as grifters who, at enormous taxpayer expense and with far less factual basis, persuasive power, wit, or ingenuity, hype an alleged crisis of female victimhood and male brutality that the rest of us are forced to endorse or at least (unwillingly) fund.

“Unqualified but Highly Influential Entrepreneurs”

Content creators who monetize their work are a major target in this study, repeatedly portrayed as predatory hustlers, “digital evangelists,” who exploit the gullible.

The fact that no one is forced to pay them seems only to increase the researchers’ ire. A few of the alleged swindlers are singled out by name. Ryan Holiday, Jordan Peterson, Lex Fridman, David Goggins and Jocko Willink are condemned for their “simplistic, extreme, and polarizing content.” Also in the research team’s crosshairs are Myron Gaines and Walter Weekes, the Tate brothers, Sneako, Pearl Davies, Estee Williams, Hannah Neeleman, and Nara Smith.

Others are more generally excoriated. Tradwives are disparaged because they “uphold hierarchical essentialist understandings of gender seen elsewhere in the manosphere.” Black “Pick-Me” women are wrong to encourage other women “to find an apparent refuge […] in serving their husbands.” Black men come in for condemnation if they espouse the traditional family and are “homophobic and transphobic, believing too that welfare policies disrupt their patriarchal roles as leaders within Black families.” Muslim content-creators allegedly “draw on stereotypes about Islam as patriarchal, stoic and intolerant of progressive agendas.”

Even those who offer relatively apolitical content concerned with wellness, fitness, weight loss, strength training, self-help, stoicism, or wealth-building are viewed negatively and linked to “anti-feminism/misogyny” because they promote self-reliance and individualism, “self-help hacks” under guise of “an ostensible concern for men’s wellbeing.”

Here the authors’ authoritarian elitism is particularly evident. They criticize content-creators for a host of ideological errors, including “promulgating the myth that anyone can get rich if they work hard enough” and “encouraging boys to stop taking medication and turn to diet and fitness instead.” Men of all races are castigated for choosing “individualized solutions” to life’s problems. Some manosphere content-creators promote the apparently blasphemous idea “that taking care of one’s body and mind is the best strategy for navigating crisis conditions.”

For any readers who might not see why some or all of the above are wrong, the researchers fall back on the gateway thesis: once you’ve watched a couple of videos about positive thinking or financial management, you may develop an aversion to the 19^th Amendment or a preference for a barefoot woman in your kitchen. Some women may even get into the kitchen of their own accord.

“The shift towards health, wellness and stoic paradigms is a significant new development in the neo-manosphere and calls for deeper scholarly investigation, in particular regarding its efficacy as a strategy for drawing men into male supremacist spaces.” If it’s not male supremacist in itself, it is probably allied with male supremacism.

Also of concern to the authors are psychotherapists who prefer treatment options for boys that “eschew structural analyses of power, insist on immutable sex differences and claim that encouraging boys to express emotion is treating them as ‘defective girls.’” In other words, there are therapists out there who refuse to affirm the idea that masculinity is a damaging “construct.”

The Experts’ Crisis of Relevance

Ultimately, the authors’ determination to condemn men and women for pursuing their individual interests betrays a deep frustration on the part of these and other academics.

The simple truth is that it is galling for gender studies experts to recognize that millions of men and women are more interested in what “unqualified but highly influential entrepreneurs” in the manosphere are offering than what the academics themselves have to offer, and their angry frustration is palpable in every line.

Most online academic presentations are rarely viewed more than a few dozen or hundred times and often receive tepid or negative responses (see here, here, and here). Most academic publications are read near-exclusively by newly hired professors and graduate students in the field, those under pressure to accrue citations for their own conformist treatises. Academics such as these manosphere authors make an easy, secure salary to fulminate against male supremacism, but almost nobody freely chooses to read their fear-mongering verbiage.

Masculinity Experts to the Rescue

After thousands of words condemning right-wingers, Christian conservatives, incels, exercise therapists, MGTOW advocates, alternative health promoters, lovers of women, proponents of Stoicism, black traditionalists, trad wives, self-help gurus, wellness influencers, men’s rights advocates, and traditionalists of various stripes, the manosphere researchers conclude by recognizing the need to engage with these reprobates to lead them out of their extremism and into the community of the acceptable: “The scale of the problem calls for urgent educational interventions in both gender equality and critical digital media literacy.”

Men’s resistance to feminist indoctrination may be overcome, they suggest, with more indoctrination, perhaps more effectively carried out as a result of “a deeper understanding of boys’ and men’s motivations for joining and leaving such misogynist groups.”

How one is to engage with people for whom one holds such undisguised contempt is not addressed in the paper; there seems little chance that the “deeper understanding” might involve empathizing with and recognizing truth in manosphere concerns.

Hard on the heels of the call for “educational intervention” comes the predictable resort to censorship: “Against this context, the regulation of online platforms must be brought to the fore.” If you can’t win through the strength of your ideas, get Big Daddy government to silence those who disagree.

Despite their educational status, large salaries, and unfettered access to hundreds of thousands of young people every year, gender studies academics likely know they can’t defeat the manosphere except by shutting it down. Given their inability and unwillingness to empathize with those whose beliefs differ from their own, censorship will likely remain the option they endorse and, if they can, enforce in the years to come.

“Mapping the Neo-Manosphere(s)” strongly suggests that gender studies academics need to confront their own anxieties and irrational hatreds before they turn their attention to others.