The great masculinity con

In June, the Reuters Institute published research suggesting that personality-based news dissemination was on the rise. The podcaster Joe Rogan, a leading figure in what has been termed the manosphere – “a loosely affiliated network of masculinist websites, blogs and online forums”, according to Lost Boys, a new book on the subject by James Bloodworth – now brings the news to about a fifth of the Americans sampled by Reuters.

I listened to Rogan’s show, The Joe Rogan Experience, on the day this research was published. We weren’t three minutes in when Rogan, relaxed and reasonable-sounding, warned listeners about “people” who might push back against “podcasts [that] get extraordinary amounts of attention... They don’t like that. They don’t like that there’s this unique distribution network.”

You are probably not cut out for the manosphere if, upon hearing mention of a obstructive, shadowy “they”, your interest drifts. Bloodworth isn’t cut out for the manosphere. I knew we shared this affinity from his choice of epigraph, a little grenade of a line by CS Lewis: “Only by being terrible do they avoid being comic.”

Bloodworth, a British journalist, has written a thoughtful study, exploring the manosphere in its various manifestations, as media space, political movement, pyramid scheme. Much of his book is given over to the kingly weirdos who loathe or fear women, and who have given the same sack of old grumbles, hang-ups and prejudices a light, Reddit-era shake. He sometimes has to step back from his own narrative, blinking as if to clear his head of stupidity-migraines induced by have-a-go geneticists, conspiracy theorists, and all manner of newsletter-addled marks.

Bloodworth might have ended up as one of them. In the 2000s, he spent a weekend trying to learn how to seduce women. He was motivated, he writes, by the sort of crushed, clammy male anxieties that these days, like it or not, we must try much harder to understand. Face to face with women, he says: “I would clam up and shut down out of some lingering fear of being rejected. Even outside of a romantic context I was afraid of raising my voice or taking up space in the world. Men hadn’t played a particularly impressive role in my life and I was, on some level at least, ashamed of my masculinity.”

As memoir, this is brave, clear and necessary writing, explaining the wobbly starting place from which so many young men go tumbling into bitterness and isolation.

Bloodworth does not last long on his how-to-get-laid course, bailing out around the time his tutor tells him: “Your organ is a spear.” He observes that the manosphere encourages men to sever themselves from tenderness, and also a sense of irony. At some point between 2006 and 2018, when he started work on Lost Boys, Bloodworth decided to fill in the gaps, tracking events from his aborted indoctrination through to the present day. The result is a steady, smart, sometimes agonising account of the rising influence of the manosphere. He recounts the brutishness of “Gamergate” in 2014, Jordan Peterson’s emergence as a cultural commentator, and the rise of the influential Reddit forum /r/TheRedPill, with its love of “zombie statistics” about female behaviour.

Lost Boys can be a relentless, depressing read, a little like being trapped on a folding chair in some hotel conference room, listening to a manicured guru explain how he got his sports car, or a supermodel’s phone number, or the power of telepathy. But Bloodworth livens and humanises his reporting with incidental humour, insight, as well as sympathy where it’s due.

He is good at explaining what bred what. Gamergate, for instance – a campaign of harassment against women in the video game industry – was one of the first explosions of organised online misogyny. It “contained in embryo form some of the features of an ascendant right-wing populism, a style of discourse meant to disorientate rather than persuade”. Really, the manosphere has to be a little disorientating because, inspected with any clarity of mind, the whole thing starts to look compromised indeed.

Through close reporting, Bloodworth tracks a couple of ground-level manos as they make some curious explorations in the community. Nick, an older subject, has only just been persuaded of one set of needs (drop a few percentages of body fat, listen to more audiobooks on 1.5x speed, “find a quality girl to spend time with”) when he abruptly upgrades his ambitions: “Now he wanted a ‘rotation’: a micro-harem of women who would share him between themselves and never demand exclusivity.” Alex, a schoolboy, is quicker to see the con behind the bragging. “They will say, ‘This is how you stop being a beta soy boy, now buy my course or you’re useless.’”

The brazen are making a buck off the bewildered, as usual. Bloodworth writes: “So the gurus continued to beat a familiar drum, warning their impressionable male audiences that it was effectively over for them, romantically speaking, unless they took decisive action.”

Above all, the manosphere is a marketplace, selling car leathery flavours of love potions, snake oils, power pills. As sure as populism follows recession, when spirits sink, opportunists flourish: “It added up to a relentless diet of fear porn.”

Attending a manosphere rally in Florida in 2023, Bloodworth hears a speaker boast about all the school-age boys becoming fans of Andrew Tate, one of the manosphere’s most self-regarding and (I think) dangerous high priests. Tate – who faces charges in the UK for offences including rape and human trafficking – preaches a doctrine of taking, dominating, distrusting. In 2023, as Bloodworth notes, nearly a quarter of British boys between 13 and 15 claimed to hold a positive view of the influencer.

If the manosphere has two breakthrough acts, one is Tate, the other is Trump. You get an early whiff of Trump’s coming when Bloodworth is in attendance at another male-empowerment bazaar. He notes with acuity: “Despite paying for a course dedicated to meeting more women, not all of the students seem to enjoy their real-life company. They want to be admired by other men, and women are indispensable to that.”

By the end of the book, Trump is stumping for re-election on The Joe Rogan Experience, selling himself to the podcaster’s 11m listeners, about 8m or 9m of whom are male. From a mess of message-board manifestos and dog-eared Peterson paperbacks, the manosphere’s Caesar is ascendant again. There’s no more laughing, no more claiming headaches and looking away.

In a lovely piece of biographical writing, Bloodworth describes what it was like to try to pull away from his juvenile frustration around masculinity. He had a stepfather “for whom I was never quite tough or manly enough”. He says: “You want to get out from under it, to escape the despotic pressure to conform to a rigid ideal you feel no affinity for. And yet when you do manage to prise yourself out from under it, you notice that the feelings of inadequacy haven’t gone away.”

President Manosphere will eventually be deposed. The investors on Manosphere Street and the tech barons of Manosphere Valley will adopt other philosophies, as soon as it enriches them to do so. I wonder, though, how long the sense of grievance they have seeded will hang around.

On the day in June the Reuters study appeared, traditional newspapers and media outlets ran stories about Trump-backed missile strikes, Trump-born budget cuts, a Trump-enriching crypto bill.

On Rogan’s podcast, they discussed efforts to engineer the return of the dire wolf, an extinct animal that played a role in the fantasy series Game of Thrones. Rogan revealed that he had recently visited a dire wolf farm.

“The mane that they have. It’s really incredible,” he said.

Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere by James Bloodworth is published by Atlantic Books (£14.99). Order a copy from observershop.co.uk to receive a 10% discount. Delivery charges apply

Photograph depicts James Bloodworth during the Men of Action mentorship in Las Vegas, which he joined as part of his research for the book