Poisonous masculinity and idealized motherhood content material are flooding social media feeds — forcing educators, college students and oldsters to navigate the manosphere.
By Nadra Nittle and Mariel Padilla for The nineteenth
Aarush Santoshi struggled for phrases when a preteen boy approached him on a New Jersey avenue, shoved a cellphone in his face and requested: “What are your thoughts on Andrew Tate?”
The child’s smirk and the actual fact he was recording rattled Santoshi, a highschool junior on the time. Santoshi frightened that the tween considered Tate — an influencer accused of sexual assault and trafficking — as a joke to spring on strangers.
“This kid was engaging with content that promotes blatant misogyny, and he didn’t even realize how harmful it was,” stated Santoshi, now 18 and the nationwide political director of Feminist Era, a youth-led group that opposes authoritarianism. The encounter was a chilling signal of how deeply the “manosphere” — a community of on-line influencers selling male supremacy and far-right ideologies — had infiltrated common tradition.
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The manosphere and parallel traits just like the tradwife (conventional spouse) motion — led by influencers who idealize marriage, motherhood and domesticity — are impacting even socially acutely aware college students who say it’s exhausting to keep away from this content material brimming with poisonous messages about gender. Over a half-dozen college students instructed The nineteenth that after the 2024 election, which noticed the manosphere blamed for younger males’s rightward shift, they observed adjustments of their classmates’ conduct — an uptick in sexist remarks, a way of entitlement to women’ consideration and schadenfreude that yet one more lady misplaced the presidency.
Now, educators, mother and father and advocates are racing to counter the manosphere’s affect by addressing on-line gender dynamics with college students — whereas youth themselves are pushing again via activism, their research and debates with their friends.
Santoshi’s introduction to the manosphere got here by way of YouTube. Fifty-two % of younger males ages 18 to 23 are on that platform, based on 2023 report “The State of American Men” by the nonprofit Equimundo: Heart for Masculinities and Social Justice. In eighth grade, Santoshi found YouTube’s Jubilee channel, which presents discussions between folks with opposing political beliefs.
“One of the topics was men’s rights activists versus feminists, and one person on the men’s rights activist side was a self-proclaimed incel,” Santoshi stated, referring to the time period utilized by males who resent being “involuntarily celibate” — a lot of whom have linked with likeminded people on platforms like Reddit. “He was saying all these objectively horrendous, terrible things about women, very infantilizing, very paternalistic.”
The manosphere — which dates again to the Y2K period, when anti-feminist males started to collect on-line — consists of incels and males’s rights activists who really feel deprived by ladies’s social progress. Additionally concerned are males going their very own manner (identified by MGTOW), who’ve sworn off relationships with ladies; and pick-up artists who manipulate ladies into intercourse. The Equimundo report discovered that almost half of younger males belief no less than one manosphere influencer. They’ve swallowed the “red pill” — a manosphere metaphor for embracing a reactionary and male supremacist worldview.
“Similar to white supremacy, male supremacy can be an extremist ideology or movement in and of itself, but it’s also sort of embedded in American society,” stated Rachael Fugardi, a senior analysis analyst with the Southern Poverty Legislation Heart’s Intelligence Venture, which tracks extremism.
An outgrowth of male supremacy, the manosphere’s risks are too usually downplayed, stated Santoshi, who credited rising up in an egalitarian family with stopping influencers from enthralling him. Lately, his philosophy class at Stanford College mentioned the poisonous masculinity of Elliot Rodger, an incel who died by suicide after his 2014 rampage close to the College of California, Santa Barbara, left six folks useless and 14 injured.
“People think it’s just these influencers who are trying to sell patriarchy to young men,” Santoshi stated of the manosphere. “Elliot Rodger was a case study for what happens when male entitlement, white supremacy and these different entitlement ideologies combine and actually result in political violence.”
The gateway drug to the manosphere: algorithms
The overwhelming majority of younger males stumble onto the manosphere via harmless on-line queries, and algorithms set the lure, defined Geoff Corey, director of Advocates for Youth’s intercourse training mission AMAZE.
“They are looking to make friends, to look better, to win over girls or become better people,” Corey stated. “Then, they discover that it seems like the only people creating content geared towards men are people who give them an easy answer for what they want, and that easy answer somehow leads to trickery, violence, unhealthy behaviors, bottling up emotions.”
A teen would possibly watch “gym-bro” motivational content material or movies on “looksmaxxing” to boost his look, solely to be steered towards posts concerning the pitfalls of being a weak “beta male” as an alternative of a dominant “alpha male.” Earlier than lengthy, the algorithm provides extra of the identical, ensnaring him within the manosphere’s quagmire. Social isolation makes youth extra more likely to get slowed down, based on Equimundo’s report. It discovered 65 % of younger males say nobody is aware of them nicely.
Fugardi stated that algorithms force-feed sexism to younger folks. “So much of this misogynistic content isn’t being searched out,” she stated. Analysis from the UK revealed that 10 % of boys ages 11 to 14 encountered dangerous content material, reminiscent of misogyny and violence, inside 60 seconds of logging on.
Greater than a specific political ideology, boys and younger males are drawn to humor on-line, based on Corey. Comedic content material creators could not peddle poisonous rhetoric initially however merely behave in boneheaded ways in which rack up web page views. They go on to advertise all the pieces from excessive diets to polarizing politics.
Sam Dyer, a latest graduate of Case Western Reserve College in Cleveland, Ohio, pointed to the viral health influencer Togi, a beefcake who recorded himself slapping a lady’s bottom in a single video and insulting WNBA followers in one other. Dyer served because the fraternity caucus chair for It’s On Us, a nonprofit that fights campus sexual assault in stark distinction to the manosphere’s rape tradition.
Togi’s content material, which routinely mentions steroids and betting, is basically humorous, Dyer stated, however that doesn’t imply the influencer’s followers view him as a joke. “He just constantly records his lifestyle, which seems to be a lot of drugs and a lot of gambling and drinking and working out,” Dyer stated. Given the Pew Analysis Heart’s discovering that 43 % of teenage boys really feel strain to be bodily sturdy, it’s no thriller why health influencers resonate with them.
As a fan of the Final Preventing Championship, which promotes blended martial arts matches, Dyer can also be conversant in Joe Rogan, a former commentator for the game. Now host of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” the podcaster is linked to the manosphere as a result of he leans into gender essentialism and conspiracy theories, a spotlight of the motion. Rogan welcomed Donald Trump to his present in October however reportedly refused to make preparations for Kamala Harris to seem, occurring to endorse Trump for president.
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Arguably no manosphere chief is as polarizing as Tate, whose prominence on social media has made him exhausting to disregard, Dyer stated. Extra younger males ages 18 to 23 (20 %) belief Tate than rival manosphere figures like Rogan and Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist, based on the Equimundo report. The usually shirtless influencer’s misogynistic posts — referring to childfree ladies as “miserable stupid bitches” and suggesting that girls should “take some degree of responsibility” to avert rape — have seen him banned on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram. Nonetheless, his content material has unfold like butter, discovering followers in younger viewers just like the president’s son Barron Trump.
Tate emerged as a manosphere chief, Dyer contends, as a result of his social media posts appealed to broad audiences. “He would gamble, he did kickboxing, so there were a variety of ways that he could interact with various people’s internet feeds,” Dyer stated. “That became a way for people to get exposed to his more radical ideologies, especially towards women.”
Efficiency artwork or propaganda: the impression of tradwives
Simply as younger males wrestle with the manosphere, younger ladies are confronted with male supremacy via the tradwife development.
Tradwife influencers like Nara Smith, who movies herself cooking in expertly utilized make-up and flawlessly coiffed hair, insist they’re merely sharing their ardour for homemaking. A lot of Smith’s followers regard her content material as efficiency artwork. Her meal-prep wardrobe options dreamy blues and cherry reds in sequins, chiffon and pretend fur — all whereas she whips up snacks like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, bread included, completely from scratch.
Tradwife critics, in the meantime, argue that influencers like Smith, Hannah Neeleman and Estee Williams are anti-feminist since marrying younger and having gaggles of youngsters look like conditions to the life-style.
“Male supremacy appeals to women as well. And, of course, the white supremacist project demands the participation of White women in the production of White babies,” stated Pasha Dashtgard, director of analysis on the Polarization and Extremism Analysis and Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American College. The tradwife motion “is for men,” he confused. “It’s not for women. It’s cosplaying what men think would be the ideal woman.”
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Tradwife and manosphere influencers talk that marriage and kids aren’t non-obligatory, based on their detractors and a few of their impressionable teen viewers.
“The manosphere — I think that is just such nonsense,” stated Sreshta Erravelli, 17, who lately completed eleventh grade in New Albany, Ohio. “I can speak for so many girls I’ve talked to that it is really promoting just the worst culture ever for so many guys. Then, when you couple that with the whole tradwives trend, it’s definitely hard to reconcile both things at the same time.”
Boys study to be rugged alpha males from the manosphere, whereas women study to cater to males from tradwives, Erravelli has noticed. Moderately than educate that rejection is part of life, the manosphere hyperlinks rejection to weak point, inflicting boys to lash out when women don’t reciprocate their emotions, she stated. “You’re calling girls weird names just because she didn’t give you her number the first 20 times you asked.”
Through the rollout to the 2024 election, the gender divide amongst Erravelli’s classmates turned clear. A few of them argued {that a} lady shouldn’t be president, an perspective that displays the manosphere’s chauvinism.
“When it came down to kids who were in favor of Trump, I think that they were definitely a little too gleeful about the fact that it was a man winning over a woman, which is just so weird to say in 2025,” she stated. “It was just a conversation of, ‘Why are you so happy that a woman lost?’”
Whereas the manosphere elicits discomfort, she and her pals joke about Nara Smith at any time when they cook dinner. Threaded via their humor, although, is uncertainty regarding what tradwives signify about ladies’s roles in society.
“It’s like, ‘Oh, you don’t know how to make your own butter at home. How are you gonna run a house?’” Erravelli stated. “It’s kind of funny to look at this all from the perspective of a teenage girl. You get told not everything you see on the internet is real, and that’s true. But when you see that these ‘trends’ are just totally affecting everyone you know, it’s kind of hard to believe that they’re not.”
The instructor serving to college students counter the web’s gender cues
Some educators like Jessica Berg are serving to college students navigate poisonous web tradition. Her gender research class at Rock Ridge Excessive Faculty in Virginia covers all the pieces from historical civilizations to the present-day backlash in opposition to feminism to assist college students perceive how patriarchy turned the norm. As a part of the course, college students study digital misogyny and the tradwife development.
Berg launched the course after the 2016 election, when college students stored asking her why Hillary Clinton, broadly thought of one of the vital certified presidential candidates in historical past, misplaced the race to a person who had by no means held public workplace. Since then, she’s seen a resurgence of sexism. Fifty-five % of younger males agree that “men have it harder than women” and slightly below half agree that feminism has bettered the nation, the Equimundo report discovered. Berg suspects the manosphere bears some duty for misogyny’s development. After the 2024 election, far-right influencer Nick Fuentes’ submit mocking ladies’s reproductive rights — “Your body, my choice” — unfold amongst college students. “Young males were texting that, DMing it, posting it to young women,” Berg stated.
Nick Fuentes, far-right activist, holds a rally in Nov. 2020 in Lansing, Mich.
Her class teaches college students, principally women, to problem sexist messaging. Blessing Amuga, certainly one of her college students, confronted a male acquaintance who claimed ladies have been “too emotional” to be president. “That doesn’t even make sense,” Amuga stated of that sexist stereotype. She went on to level out how Trump, who has misplaced his cool in workplace on a number of events, helps insurance policies which might be actively dangerous to ladies, together with controlling ladies’s our bodies. His insurance policies reinforce “the idea that men should control what you do, what you eat, how you act,” Amuga instructed him.
Her classmate Isabella Hasbun observed boys parroting Trump’s insults towards Kamala Harris, mirroring the manosphere’s misogyny. “Them seeing a White man calling a Black woman dumb and saying that she has no qualifications just enhances their own [preconceived] thoughts,” stated Hasbun, a latest Rock Ridge graduate, like Amuga.
Hasbun has seen extra tradwives on her TikTok feed than manosphere influencers. She questions anybody who suggests she ought to spend her time cooking at dwelling. Of them, she wonders: “What are you doing with your life?”
Rianna Abdelhamid, who additionally took Berg’s class, stated home life is ok for ladies who take pleasure in it. “But not everybody is like that,” she stated. To these anticipating her to be a tradwife, she provided three phrases: “No, thank you.”
It’s the manosphere, although, that Hasbun objects to most. “That is the worst type of man you will ever find,” she stated of the development’s followers. Submit-election, she’s confronted repeated harassment from boys, she stated, recalling a gaggle of them circling the automobile she and a pal have been in at a drive-thru — “thinking that they had the privilege of actually talking to us.”
Being in Berg’s class has empowered Hasbun and her classmates to advocate for ladies, and, in flip, themselves. Abdelhamid now speaks up as an alternative of staying silent when she’s involved about sexism. Hasbun has grown extra assured. When she has a disagreement associated to gender, she trusts her perspective: “I’m well aware of what’s actually happening instead of just basing my opinion on what some random dude on TikTok said.”
Is there an antidote to the pink tablet?
Influenced by social media, younger folks could not solely slip into the manosphere however change into radicalized to the purpose of performing extremist acts. As analysis director at PERIL, Dashtgard designs instruments, guides and sources to impede that pipeline utilizing a public well being method.
“We work with all levels of civil society — teachers, parents, faith leaders, small business owners, any kind of trusted adult in the life of a child,” Dashtgard stated. “We want to help understand the nature of radicalization and what they can do in order to disrupt that.”
PERIL, in partnership with the Southern Poverty Legislation Heart, launched a information final 12 months referred to as “Not Just a Joke.” The objective, Dashtgard stated, is to arm the general public with the information wanted to acknowledge radicalization earlier than it happens and interact youth with out condemning or humiliating them. These sources, if distributed, can change into a preventative mannequin scalable in communities nationally.
Fugardi, of the SPLC’s Intelligence Venture, stated social media platforms may present one other avenue for options.
“We should be looking for social media companies to do more as they’ve grown in influence in our society,” she stated. “We should have high expectations for them to not just enforce their own rules [around content moderation], but also to release transparency reports about how they’re protecting young people over prioritizing profit.”
The AMAZE mission, which posts animated intercourse ed movies to YouTube and different platforms, presents youth with options to the manosphere’s messaging about manhood — together with its framing of points like relationships and sexuality. By Equimundo’s Hyperlink Up Lab — a hub that enables organizations to check totally different digital methods to supply younger males with wholesome methods to pursue belonging — AMAZE consults with youth on the supplies it develops for the net.
“We have videos on the stuff that a sex educator might cover in class, but we also try to answer a question that a young person is really searching for,” Corey stated. “One of our most popular videos is ‘Does Penis Size Matter?’ That is not going to be in the health education curriculum, but it is what someone is searching for, and we create animated, funny content about that.” Within the fall, AMAZE plans to launch a video on looksmaxxing, a harmful development linked to steroid use and do-it-yourself physique modification that feeds off teen boys’ insecurities about their physiques, jawlines and even their hair.
Julie Scelfo, founding father of the grassroots group Moms In opposition to Media Habit, urges caregivers to co-view content material with children. Examine their browser historical past, and in the event that they repeat sexist concepts, ask the place they heard them.
“If your kid is exposed to Andrew Tate-type influencers, it’s critical to have conversations about who he is and what you think about the messages that he’s espousing,” she stated.
Early discussions about poisonous content material are key. As soon as youth enter school, they’ve already absorbed gender constructs, Corey stated.
“AMAZE is unique in the sex ed space in that we offer health education, relationship education, puberty education that is targeted towards adolescents because we think that’s when they actually start developing their opinions and their views on the world.”
So, for that child who confronted Aarush Santoshi, there’s nonetheless time. Dad and mom have extra sway than influencers, Corey contends — in the event that they act earlier than dangerous ideologies take root.
