The idea that masculinity is in crisis is not new, but it has taken on a new urgency. Maleness itself, not just actual men, is increasingly identified as a source of outward toxicity and inward harm. It drives sexual misconduct, intimate partner violence, online misogyny and workplace bullying, as well as underlying men’s disproportionate rates of suicide, overdose, loneliness and academic underachievement.
Conversations on these fraught topics often point accusingly at the so-called “manosphere,” a group of online communities of men who advocate for a variety of masculinist views, many of them openly misogynistic. Concern over its effects on boys rose to a crescendo earlier this year with the success of the Netflix series Adolescence, whose thirteen-year-old protagonist murders a girl while under its influence.
The British journalist James Bloodworth has written a timely exploration of the manosphere that is both measured and passionate. Lost Boys dials down the outrage and panic without losing its power as critique. It succeeds in humanising the movement — or at least its fringe-dwellers — through a series of personal encounters with the men who inhabit it. Although it doesn’t always avoid the temptations of ridicule, the book provides a three-dimensional understanding of many of them, as well as a clear-eyed recognition that one-dimensional monsters do exist.
Bloodworth’s first experience of the emerging manosphere occurs in 2006. He is a timid twenty-three-year-old taking part in a “pickup artistry” bootcamp to overcome his shyness around women. By his telling, pickup artistry is the primordial globule from which the manosphere grew: a relatively benign community (at least compared to what followed) that had emerged in the days before social media changed and accelerated everything.
Pickup artists were predatory, treating seduction as a game of overcoming resistance. They held demeaning and objectifying views of women, seeing them as interchangeable simpletons unable to resist a formulaic sales pitch. But most of them were not deeply hateful, merely scheming and manipulative. Pickup artistry was more about cultivating skills to be competitive in the romantic marketplace than developing an anti-feminist ideology.
The version of the manosphere that followed was nastier, elevating gender to supreme social importance and promoting a grim view of the sexual economy. Most men are uncompetitive losers, it argued, fooled by conventional ideas of romance, feminine goodness and being the proverbial nice guy. Women, in turn, are status-obsessed and duplicitous, and throw themselves at a small minority of high resource-value winners.
For the enlightened or “red-pilled” man, the task was now not just to perfect a pick-up routine but to see through the façade and embrace a view of the sexual marketplace as a battle zone in which the enemy was also, paradoxically, the object of desire. To that end, he must embody authentic masculinity and come to realise that men, not women, are the truly oppressed class in society.
The much-discussed incel phenomenon reflects a further evolution, Bloodworth shows. Whereas men who swallowed the red pill took up arms in the war of the sexes, “involuntary celibates” left the battle zone altogether. Believing themselves to be forever uncompetitive in the sexual marketplace they withdrew to form “black-pilled” online communities of resentment. In several cases, examined in Lost Boys, their members vented their rage in murderous attacks on women.
Bloodworth is a knowledgeable and self-aware guide through the history of the manosphere, although he largely overlooks the more separatist “men going their own way” wing. He is particularly adept at revealing the ordinary aspirations of the boys and young men who are drawn into it, and how cynical operators and social media algorithms pull them further and further in. Although the manosphere is unquestionably a dark place, Lost Boys shows it is not merely a cesspool of misogyny.
For one thing, although much of the imagery in incel forums is appallingly hateful towards women and girls, bile is spat in all directions. Other men are targets too, reviled for being successful with women, for being contemptibly unsuccessful, or for being excessively obliging to women in the hope of receiving crumbs of favour. The manosphere’s lexicon is rich with terms of abuse to capture these variants and more: chads and chodes, Stacies and Beckies, alphas and betas, simps, cucks, foids and soyboys.
In addition to its linguistic inventiveness, the manosphere is also surprisingly theory-saturated for a community often caricatured as grunting basement-dwellers. Andrew Tate’s view of reality may be simple-minded materialism, all money, escorts and sports cars, but manosphere thought-leaders purvey a range of views, from myths and mysticism to social Darwinism to evolutionary psychology. The common thread is a fondness for binaries and a paranoiac sense that things are not as they seem.
Bloodworth observes the manosphere’s denizens at close quarters, pungent aftershave and all, but he has more to say about its general awfulness than what could be done to defang it. Some of this is rational pessimism: as the cult of assertive masculinity has become mainstreamed in American politics, the prospect of it withering away seems remote. Lost Boys shows how much ideas from the manosphere have become entangled with white nationalism, MAGA, conspiracy theories, and even health and fitness trends.
Part of the problem in deciding how to respond to the manosphere is that its relationship with gender equality remains obscure. Lost Boys is more a zoomed-in characterisation of the manosphere than a broad explanation for it, but Bloodworth suggests that it is driven by grievance over lost privilege. Men are rising up against women because their taken-for-granted pre-eminence has been undermined by egalitarian social trends led by feminism.
If the manosphere feeds on backlash to rising gender equality, then we can expect it to remain strong or gather force as that rise continues. Only by reversing progress could the wind be taken out of its sails by this account. But Bloodworth also implies that greater gender equality is the solution to the manosphere. He laments the findings of a recent report suggesting that progress towards gender equality stagnated or went backwards in 40 per cent of countries from 2019 to 2022. A closer look shows that whereas 12 per cent of countries had regressed, 62 per cent had moved forward: good news for global egalitarians, but precisely the kind of social change likely to trigger a manospherical reaction.
Making sense of the societal trends that fuel the manosphere is one thing, understanding its effects on individuals is another. Bloodworth is good at putting a human face on the people he meets in his travels, but the Lost Boys is somewhat lacking in empathy for the lost. The greedy influencers, poisonous misogynists and unhinged cranks who lead the movement perhaps deserve none at all, but what of their vast, youthful audience? Boys and young men are being led to develop attitudes, beliefs and habits that are unquestionably harmful to others but also harm and stunt their own growth, cruelling their capacity for emotional depth and rewarding relationships.
We can mock the glittering emptiness of Andrew Tate’s vision of the good life and punish the obnoxious behaviour he encourages boys to display towards women and girls. However, as I am sure the author of this insightful and engaging book would agree, we also need to offer boys and young men a better version of masculinity rather than confirm the manosphere’s axiom that society devalues them precisely because they are male. Combatting the attractions of the manosphere is vitally important. Simply condemning it is unlikely to do much good. •
Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere
By James Bloodworth | Atlantic Books | $34.99 | 320 pages
