The Manosphere and Our Boys: What It's Teaching Them, What We Can Do
The ManFlu | Exploring Gender Dynamics, Partnerships & Raising Boys Who Care
Lucy McAfee explores the manosphere—the online ecosystem shaping boys' views on masculinity, relationships, and self-worth—using Netflix's '
Key takeaways
- Boys can be exposed to manosphere content within 26 minutes of viewing benign online material like fitness or gaming videos.
- The core danger lies in the idea that men are born without intrinsic value, which fuels a toxic cycle of performance-based worth tied to money, strength, and female attention.
Main topics
- The manosphere as an algorithm-driven online ecosystem
- Influence of digital content on boys' development
Notable quotes
"Life as a man, you're born without value."
Conclusion
While we can't control every message our boys encounter online, we can
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:00) Welcome to the man flu, where the flu is just the metaphor. We're not here to hand out tissues. We're here to challenge the cultural norms that keep relationships off balance. I'm Lucy McAfee. I've spent years studying how gender dynamics play out at home. And as a wife and boy mom, I'm living them too. Each week we dig into the old scripts and unspoken rules that often go unquestioned, but still end up running the show. in our marriages, and in how we are raising our kids. You'll hear perspectives from researchers, thinkers, and parents, and leave with one small shift to try with your family. Speaker 1 (0:39) Hi everyone, this is Lucy. Welcome back to the Man Flu Podcast. This week I've got a solo episode for you. Lately I've noticed that a lot of topics we focus on here are also showing up in novels, scripted series, documentaries, and just generally in pop culture. So today I'm going to tackle one of them, the manosphere. When I started thinking about this topic for an episode, I wondered if it had already been covered to death. or if it just felt that way because of my algorithm. So I mentioned the idea to a few friends, including some fellow boy moms, and I pretty much got my answer. Blink stares. They hadn't even heard the term. And honestly, I get it. We all have to be choosy with what little time we actually get to use those damn streaming services we pay for. And often half of it is spent just trying to figure out what we want to watch. So unless this conversation has made its way into your feed, you might not know that the whole world exists. In this episode, I'm going to break down what the Manosphere is, use some of the recent coverage as our way into it, look at what the research tells us, and talk about why it matters for those of us raising boys. Let's start with Adolescence, a four-part limited series that Netflix released in March of last year. The story opens in the early morning hours with police in tactical gear, breaking down the front door of a family home. They rush upstairs and pull a 13-year-old boy named Jamie out of bed. He appears confused and is so terrified that he wets himself. We soon learn that he is being arrested for the murder of a girl from his school. From those opening minutes, Jamie looked so young. And I think that's part of what makes this series so unsettling. You're looking at this frightened child while also slowly beginning to understand what he has done. I'm not going to give away every detail, but it becomes clear pretty quickly that this isn't only a story about one terrible act. It's also about trying to understand how a child that young could arrive at that point. and about the online world surrounding him that the adults in his life didn't fully understand. The series gives us this heartbreaking fictional look at a very young boy absorbing messages about girls, rejection, masculinity, power, and his own worth. And we watch the devastation spread through Jamie's family, his school, his classmates, and the broader community around them. The series received a ton of attention. It won eight Emmys and then four Golden Globes. But underneath all the awards and attention was this really painful message. Jamie's only 13 years old. And while his story is fictional, the online world influencing him is very real. And we got a closer look at that online world this past March when Netflix released Louis Theroux's documentary Inside the Manosphere. Where adolescents showed us a dramatized version of what this messaging can do, the documentary takes us directly to some of the men creating and spreading it. Theroux spends time with several men who have built huge online followings by offering their versions of what it means to be a successful man. Some of them may be unfamiliar to you. Others, like the Tate brothers, Andrew and Tristan, have become much more recognizable. But before we get into what these men are actually saying, let's back up and define the term manosphere for those of you who are new to this. The Merriam-Webster definition is a network of websites, online forums, and other digital media typically characterized by anti-feminist and misogynistic views and the promotion of ultra-conservative models of masculinity. So in English, the manosphere isn't one of those websites or organized groups that your son has to go searching for and join. It's a broad online world. made up of influencers, podcasts, videos, social media accounts, and online communities aimed primarily at men and boys. There are different groups within it, men's rights activists, pickup artists, men who call themselves incels, which I'll explain more in a minute, and influencers offering their own take on what men and masculinity should look like. They don't all believe exactly the same things. And the content in it isn't always obviously hateful. A lot of it starts with advice that can sound pretty positive. Get in shape, work hard, stop making excuses, take responsibility for your life. And to be clear, I don't have a problem with telling boys to work hard, take care of themselves, or build confidence. The problem is what can get woven into that advice and how quickly boys can be led from one to the other. One study created TikTok and YouTube accounts posing as teenage boys and found that even those viewing ordinary content like fitness, sports, and gaming were served manosphere content within 26 minutes. So what begins as pretty harmless self-improvement advice can quickly become an entry point into much more harmful ideas about women, power, and a man's place in the world. So back to that term incel, it's short for involuntary celibate. It generally refers to men who want romantic or sexual relationships, but feel unable to have them. And in some of these online communities, that loneliness and rejection turn into resentment and blame directed at women. You'll also hear a lot about being red pilled in this space. Now this whole pill deal was borrowed from The Matrix. I personally never got into those movies, so if you didn't either, here's a little overview. In the movie, the main character Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, is offered a choice. He can take the blue pill and return to the life he knows without realizing that the world around him is an illusion. Or he can take the red pill and wake up to the truth. In the manosphere, being red-pilled has become shorthand for supposedly waking up to the truth about men and women. And the truth they claim to reveal is that feminism has lied to us, women now hold all the power, society discriminates against men, and traditional male dominance is the natural order of things. And this is also where distrust of mainstream media and institutions starts to become part of the whole belief system. If you disagree with what these influences are saying, that isn't