How These Men Left the Manosphere — and Why Some May Never

SvetaZi

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All names have been changed in this story.

When Maisie first met Danny, she remembers that he had an infectious laugh and a love for music. They went to museums together and listened to live jazz and fell in love. But by the time they broke up after four years together, Maisie says Danny was convinced that feminism had ruined his life, that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and that he could (and should) survive eating only chicken, rice, and broccoli.

Like so many other young men, Maisie says that Danny fell into the manosphere: an online world of ultra-right wing influencers like Andrew Tate and Myron Gaines who broadcast misogynistic, racist views that ascribe to an extremely conservative gender role ideology. In the manosphere, there are many absolute truths: women are inherently worth less than men and need to be manipulated and steered into making the correct choices; real masculinity is in crisis and only a return to strict gender roles will solve it; and men are unfairly blamed for all of society’s ills, leaving the world ripe for a men’s rights movement similar to what feminism has done for women. The mascot for the manosphere, Andrew Tate, believes that women belong at home, are a man’s property, and shouldn’t be able to drive. And an unknowable amount of young men are following this rhetoric through sites like Reddit, 4chan, and YouTube. But once they fall down the rabbit hole of the manosphere, is there any getting out?

For some boys and men, the manosphere becomes an all consuming ideology, one that they don't want to leave behind because it offers them community, affirms their worldview, and assures them that they are better than other people for seeing the truth. But others, in time, do shed their toxic beliefs, reentering the real world, where men don't own women. Even others, though, end up in a sort of muddled mix where they believe they’ve left the manosphere but they still put faith in the toxic beliefs it instilled.

Through their four-year relationship, Danny became more and more entrenched in the manosphere and began sharing his views with Maisie, she says. Those included that women shouldn’t work because they can’t emotionally handle it and that she should allow him to choose who she votes for. Maisie says that Danny entered the manosphere through the realm of self-help, which Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a sociology professor at American University who specializes in extremism, says is “a great example of how radicalization works.”

“On the surface, it’s all under the guise of self-help, dating and relationships, looks-maxxing,” Miller-Idriss says. Once they’ve entered the community looking for help, the “dialogue, tone, and tenor changes,” with the blame for any of their issues belonging at the feet of women and the feminist movement. Young men can be drawn in through something as simple as looking for workout plans or a good cologne, Miller-Idriss says. That’s how it was with Danny – he started with Jordan Petersen videos on how to break big tasks into smaller ones and by the time Maisie ended her relationship with him, she says he was screaming at her that feminism was taking over the world and ruining everything.

Despite his problematic views, it wasn’t easy for Maisie to break up with Danny. When it was good, it was really good, and she remembers who he was before he became engulfed in the manosphere. But she couldn’t take it anymore and had to leave him. “I had to acknowledge that he’s just gone,” she says. “It’s really just acknowledging that the person I knew doesn’t exist anymore. And that hurts.”

While Maisie let go of the idea that Danny might shed his toxic beliefs, Eddie actually did extract himself from the manosphere.

When he was in high school, Eddie adopted what he calls an “edgy teen persona.” He was pulled into the manosphere through conspiracy theories – specifically the debunked theory that the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a false flag shooting. “I think that’s how they get you,” he says. “It feels like there’s something bigger going on and you know about it [and] not everyone does.” From there, it was a quick journey to replacement theory, a far-right conspiracy that posits elites are attempting to replace white citizens with nonwhite immigrants. In the message boards and forums he frequented, it was accepted that men were superior to women.

“It feels like there’s something bigger going on and you know about it [and] not everyone does.”

But, Eddie no longer believes in these hateful conspiracy theories, so what changed? How did Eddie go from a teenager who hated women and posted memes about Sandy Hook conspiracy theories to a young man who sees his past behavior as “cringe” and “not who I want to be”? Part of it, he says, is just that he grew up; another part of it is that he has strong female role models in his life. He has a sister who’s in medical school and a mom who is successful in corporate America and took over the breadwinning role when Eddie’s dad got sick. And, Eddie says, he realized that his mentality that women were below him wasn’t helping him get a girlfriend, but actually hindering possible progress. If he could help other families try to get their sons and brothers out of the manosphere, he would tell him to “support these people through it. If someone at any point had came to me and was like, you’re a horrible person, you’re a shit human being, you shouldn’t be thinking these things that [I viewed as] objectively true at the time, I think that just would have shoved me further away.”

Research conducted by the International Centre for the Prevention of Crime backs up his assertion, finding that an “empathetic, understanding, and open-minded approach” works best. “The more you shame people for what they’re espousing, the more they’re driven underground deeper into online communities who welcome them with open arms and say, ‘this is where you belong. If those people don’t understand you, they’re just a bunch of triggered snowflakes or whatever,’” Miller-Idriss says. Another tactic, she says, is to point out the commercialization of the manosphere in which everything is for sale including courses, supplements, and crypto-currencies. Pointing out the profit motive of these influencers can be effective, Miller-Idriss says.

That’s part of what got Tom out of the manosphere, which he says he fell into when he was 27, after leaving the Army and finding himself “stuck trying to look for work consistently, having basically no social support, having no options other than to just work, pay bills, work, pay bills, in an increasingly difficult world to do that.” He was lonely, he says, and the influencers he followed had some pretty good talking points, he thought: men were more affected by things like incarceration rates, workplace death and injury rates, and mental health and no one was taking it seriously.

“The more you shame people for what they’re espousing, the more they’re driven underground deeper into online communities who welcome them with open arms."

Pasha Dashtgard, an assistant professor at the Polarization & Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, says this is a common entry point. “They start their conversations with, ‘men are in crisis and no one’s talking about it. It’s like, that’s true, men are in crisis and we should be talking about it… [but] that opens up, ideologically, the door for them to be like ‘and now, here are the solutions’ and it’s this horrible, toxic nonsense.” But after after a couple months in the manosphere, Tom realized that, while men’s health is a serious subject, he wouldn’t find the answers he was looking for in the manosphere, which was overrun by what he calls “grifters, frauds, or sort of religious zealots.” Now, Tom says he doesn’t actively use the label ‘feminist’ but “considers it part of my worldview.”

Men like Tom and Eddie seem to have escaped the manosphere, awakening to a more realistic and less hateful worldview. Others, like Danny, are still enmeshed in that world. But there’s another class of manosphere participants, as illustrated by Frank.

In a Reddit post, Frank details his descent into what he called the “foxbrained manosphere” (referring to the subreddit in which he posted, r/FoxBrained, which bills itself as a “support group for people who struggle with family and friends who have succumbed to the paranoia, xenophobia, and hatred pushed by Fox News and other extreme right wing sites”). He was pulled in by the idea of the pick-up artist, manipulations and tips on how to get women to sleep with you. From there, Frank fell further into the manosphere. Then, Frank describes what he calls his “awakening,” which happened in 2020 with the Black Lives Matter protests. “A switch came on in my mind and concluded ‘Black people were right all along,’” Frank writes in his Reddit post.

But in an interview for this story, Frank parrots the very talking points he claims to have left behind, describing what he learned in the manosphere about how to “be forward sexually” and “escalate” a possible hook-up situation. He doesn’t want to play mind games with women, like manosphere heroes suggest. But, he says he did learn that it’s possible to be too concerned with consent and “it’s okay to put some force of will into what you’re doing.” He doesn’t want to be combative, he says, but instead, practice a "radical honesty that shows this is who I am.”

I push back as Frank details his apparent departure from the manosphere, telling him that it sounds like he still subscribes to many of the views he says he left behind. What’s different, Frank says, is that he no longer believes that his job as a man is to keep a woman in line. He no longer believes that he should use classical conditioning — a term you’re most likely familiar with when applied to dogs — on women, even though he knows he can.

“I just found that,” he says, “it’s very toxic.”

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue