Felix* remembers feeling lost when he first got drawn into watching videos by anti-feminist men’s rights influencers on YouTube. ‘I’ve never had a girlfriend,’ he says, ‘never had any success with women. Never known how to fix it. Things like “being myself” didn’t work. So I wanted answers.’
For Felix, who is 27, those answers arrived with the discovery of the ‘manosphere’ – a collection of websites, blogs, and online forums promoting masculinity, misogyny and opposition to feminism. Communities within this network include men’s rights activists (MRAs); incels (short for ‘involuntary celibates’); Men Going Their Own Way (male separatists); ‘pick-up artists’; fathers’ rights groups; and ‘passport bros’ – men from the Global North angling for ‘traditional’ and ‘submissive’ wives from Brazil, Ghana, the Philippines and other Global South countries. The rise of Andrew Tate, a British-American men’s rights influencer and self-proclaimed ‘success coach’ who was arrested in December 2022 as part of a human trafficking and rape investigation, has once again propelled misogynistic subcultures into mainstream consciousness, including among young boys. A recent poll in the UK found that 21 per cent of 16 to 17-year-olds were more likely to know who Tate was than Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.1
A slippery slope
Tate’s followers are told that they can Tate is just one in a long line of influencers who’ve made a name for themselves spreading extreme ideas about masculinity on the internet. For Felix, it was the British YouTuber Hamza who initially lured him into this online world with content that offered an explanation for his loneliness. In one video titled ‘Women are clueless to male loneliness’, Hamza says: ‘It’s a hard pill for men to swallow when they realize just how many options women have compared to themselves.’ He then describes a scenario in which ‘unattractive’ women on dating apps still get ‘50 to 100 times more matches than you do’, adding that ‘men’s standards have become so low. Why? Because loneliness is at an all time high. ‘Felix ended up abandoning dating altogether. ‘I stopped giving a shit about chasing after women and relationships,’ he says. ‘If that’s what dating is meant to be, I don’t want it. I’d rather be single and alone.’ Eventually, he recognized that the movement wasn’t actually doing what it professed to do – make men feel more emotionally ful-filled. Felix now describes himself as a ‘red pill sceptic’ who realized the impact so-called MRA influencers were having on his self-esteem and wellbeing. ‘I just sort of looked at myself one day and wondered why I was letting some person online make me feel bitter about an entire gender,’ he says.
