What the Manosphere Reveals About Us

In the midst of the shock and outrage around Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary ‘Inside the Manosphere’, I’ve been finding myself somewhere slightly different – sitting with both sadness and a deep-seated unease somewhere in the pit of my stomach. The exposé was not, in truth, such a shock to me. I had looked into Andrew Tate a little while back, when one of my sons happened to mention his name.

As I watched Theroux interview the men and women in that world, something began to take shape – a kind of four-part Venn diagram made up of gender politics, economic context, technology, and what I can only describe as a collective crisis of accountability. And what it stirred in me, more than outrage, was a desire to understand the pain and confusion being so nakedly embodied on screen. The trauma, even. As I sit with this discomfort, though, something else is beginning to emerge – a clarity rooted in compassion. And with it, a quiet determination to stay connected to that clarity; to keep working to embody what I believe is needed to shift things – in myself first, trusting that everything we do ultimately has an impact, even when we can’t see it.

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How does such a world come about? What goes into the making of it? These are the reflections I want to try to set out here.

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I. The broken promise

The first circle of the diagram is socio-economic. We are currently living inside a system in which most jobs are neither fulfilling nor sufficient to afford us a decent quality of life or any real sense of freedom – as a result, both genders, as was clear from the documentary, are looking outside of it. Understandably so.

The industrial revolution promised to free us from manual labour – to give us more time, more autonomy, more space for what actually matters. The same promise was made again with the internet, with mobile technology: that these tools would liberate us. The stark reality is that we are working harder and longer hours, for a reduced quality of life. The gap between the promise and the lived experience is vast. My baby boomer parents were probably the last generation to live a good, healthy life on one middle income, raising two children in the process. We ate well, travelled, lived in modest but comfortable homes. My sister and I had a very active musical life and we were exposed to all that art culture had to offer. Now, that same income would buy a very different quality of life: certainly not the travelling or the music lessons that were such a formative part of our childhood.

This is the gap that the manosphere steps into. It promises what the system no longer delivers except at the very top: freedom, abundance, power, purpose. Both men and women in that world are, in their own way, looking for an exit from a life that has failed to offer what they were told it would. That is worth sitting with before we rush to judgment.

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II. The collective crisis of accountability

The second circle is harder to name, because it asks something of all of us.

I remember standing outside my sons’ school some years ago, walking into a conversation between a group of mothers. Their children had been coming home using the F word, and when questioned, had said they’d heard it from a little boy in the class – let’s call him Alby – whose family was going through a great deal and required support of all kinds. The mothers were expressing outrage, talking about marching in to demand the teacher control him.

I eventually interrupted, suggesting that perhaps this was an opportunity – to teach our children at home about language, to explain to them why Alby might be using that word, and to encourage them to show him some compassion. To understand, also, that a teacher with thirty children might not have the capacity to “control” one struggling child.

The mothers looked at me blankly, as if I had spoken in a foreign tongue.

For what it’s worth, I have always taught my own children that swear words are to be used only in very specific ways – the main rule being that they should never, ever be spoken in anger. I’ve given them space to experiment with language among their peers, and even occasionally with me, so that I can flag if a word carries other offences they might not have considered – homophobic, misogynistic, or simply unkind. We have talked about how context can make something funny or appropriate, and where it becomes inappropriate and crosses into disrespect. I have only had to call them out a handful of times. It has never been a problem anywhere.

That memory stays with me because it captures something I keep noticing – a collective and systemic drift toward what I can only call victim consciousness. A deeply embedded sense that what happens to us is always something done to us. That we are passengers in our own lives, entitled to demand that others manage the discomfort that life inevitably brings.

It shows up in obvious ways – in how readily we reach for litigation, in an overprotective state that has gradually relieved us of the very friction that builds resilience. It shows up in education, which has with the best of intentions begun to prioritise protection from difficulty over the development of the capacity to navigate it. And it shows up, more subtly, in our relationship with health. I want to be careful here – there is real suffering that requires real support, and the advances of modern medicine are not to be dismissed. But somewhere along the way, a cultural message took hold: that our physical and mental states are things that happen to us, to be fixed from the outside in. The pill, the diagnosis, the protocol – these have their place. What concerns me is when they become a substitute for the slower, harder work of understanding what our bodies and minds are actually trying to tell us.

The manosphere, in its own distorted way, is responding to something in all of this. Its ‘Shut up and nut up’ ethic is a grotesque overcorrection – but it is a response, nonetheless, and worth paying attention to.

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III. The colonisation of attention

The third circle is perhaps the most insidious, because it operates beneath conscious awareness. Our technology is not neutral. It is not a tool we pick up and put down. Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Alok Kanojia, in conversation with Mel Robbins, describes how these platforms are quite deliberately engineered to colonise our attention – to activate the brain’s dopamine circuitry and keep us returning, scrolling, consuming. The algorithms are not incidental. They are designed. And what they are designed to do is exploit the very human propensity for distraction and avoidance of discomfort.

What strikes me about this is less the addiction itself – troubling as it is – and more what gets crowded out. Dr. Kanojia makes the point that when we use technology to suppress an uncomfortable feeling, the brain simply doesn’t process it. And over time, we lose the very capacity to sit with ourselves – to be still, to follow a thought to its end, to feel what we actually feel – in the absence of stimuli.

I hear it from friends navigating the dating world – how often someone they’ve been seeing will simply stop responding. No conversation, no explanation. Just silence. I can only conclude that we have somewhere along the way lost the capacity to sit with the discomfort of a difficult conversation, to find the words for an ending, to stay present with another person’s potential pain.

These are not small losses. They are the conditions for an inner life, and the prerequisites for deeper presence and connection, for the continuous expansion of the self and deepening wisdom.

And what has been displaced in the process is perhaps the most concerning loss of all.

Community. Craft. Religious and contemplative practice. The long, slow work of knowing oneself through relationship with others. These were never perfect containers – but they were containers. They held people inside something larger than their own immediate appetites. In their absence, and with no compelling alternative, the manosphere moves in. It offers belonging, identity, a clear set of rules. It offers, above all, the ‘comfort’ of not having to look inward at all.

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IV. The unfinished conversation

The fourth circle is the most delicate, and the most painful – and I say that as a woman who has lived through its fault lines.

After hundreds of years of oppression, feminism was a necessary and vital phase: women collectively rising up to be recognised, to claim ground that had always been ours by right. The #MeToo movement was similarly crucial – a long-overdue acknowledgement of our victimisation, a collective act of speaking what had for so long gone unnamed.

But I would argue that we have not yet stepped into the next phase. And that next phase is a necessary one, if we want to live in genuine peace and partnership with men.

NB: I speak from a specific context here – one of relative freedom. I hold in mind, as I write, the many women for whom the questions I am raising are a luxury their circumstances do not yet permit.

We have not yet, as a collective, got far enough into our own power – into our desire, our agency, our clarity about what we actually want – to be able to articulate it. We have been, rightly and necessarily, clear about what we don’t want. But the affirmative vision – who we are when we are fully sovereign, what we want from men, from partnership, from the world – that has not yet found its full voice.

I speak from experience here – painful experience. In my own long-term relationships I have had to reckon, slowly and uncomfortably, with something difficult: that the ways in which I was being treated were simultaneously a choice on my partners’ part, and a reflection of my own unexamined shadows. Both things were true at once. The harm was real and not my fault. And I was, in ways I couldn’t yet see, participating in making it possible. Recognising this kind of relational dynamic does not remove responsibility from the person causing harm. It simply acknowledges that relationships are fields in which unconscious patterns interact. Recognising this kind of relational dynamic does not remove responsibility from the person causing harm. It simply acknowledges that relationships are fields in which unconscious patterns interact.

I believe something related may be happening collectively. The manosphere does not exist because women have failed. It exists in a field that all of us – men and women – have helped to create and sustain, through our wounds, our unconscious patterns, our unfinished work on ourselves. That is not a comfortable thing to say. But it may be a necessary one.

And so men are feeling the rejection. A very real, very necessary rejection – but one that arrives without a map for what comes next. That rejection creates confusion, pain, and activates deep trauma responses. The defensive reaction – a return to a masculinity that is not just outdated but chillingly caricatured – is, I think, a wound speaking. A child on the playground saying: fine, I didn’t want to play with you anyway.

That is what I felt in my stomach watching that documentary. The women, visibly uncertain of themselves. The men, moving through the world from a core wound. Both suffering, craving connection and finding only provocative performance in the other.

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Where do we go from here?

I am left with more questions than answers. And I find I am at peace with that, for now.

What I do know is this: I am raising two boys. And I am so grateful that I am able to have these conversations with them – that this documentary, of all things, has become a kind of gift. A rich trove of material for the conversations that matter most: about values, about who they want to be, about how they want to move through the world, what impact they want to have and what sort of people they want to build their lives alongside.

Compassionate understanding of how the manosphere has come about does not excuse it. But I hope it is the first step towards something more useful than outrage – a way through, a means to comprehend how we might be unwittingly contributing to it and how we might become a force for change, rather than simply standing in judgement.