How the manosphere contributes to men’s violence against women

The manosphere contributes to violence against women by men both within and outside the manosphere. The manosphere is a diverse online ecosystem of anti-feminist and male supremacist communities, influencers, and platforms. Its efforts feed into men’s violence against women by promoting patriarchal ideologies and gender relations, promoting violence-supportive beliefs and myths, and attacking and undermining violence prevention efforts.  Some manosphere participants themselves engage in acts of violence against women, including ‘everyday’ domestic and sexual violence, organised attacks on feminist advocates and female public figures, and acts of mass violence.

Let’s start with the men within the manosphere. 

  • It is very well documented that both domestic violence and sexual violence by men against women are driven in part by patriarchal ideologies of gender, including ‘hostile masculinity’ (based in hostility towards and mistrust of women), and patriarchal social relations, including men’s dominance over women in economic, political, cultural and interpersonal domains (Flood, Brown, Dembele, & Mills, 2023). 
  • The manosphere centres on patriarchal ideologies of gender, and it normalises, minimises or even celebrates violence against women. Therefore, the manosphere is likely to sustain and increase the perpetration of violence against women by the men who come to participate in it (Silva, Capellan, Schmuhl, & Mills, 2021, p. 4).
  • Manosphere ideologies and discourses are characterised by pervasive sexism and women-hating, as a series of studies have documented (Åkerlund, 2026; Farrell, Fernandez, Novotny, & Alani, 2019; Ging, 2017; Gotell & Dutton, 2016; Hunte, 2019; Krendel, 2020; Lilly, 2016; Marwick & Caplan, 2018; Nicholas & Agius, 2018; Ribeiro et al., 2020; Van Valkenburgh, 2018). For example, analysis of 389,189 posts on two manosphere message boards, The Red Pill and Incel, finds that manosphere participants endorse hostile and suspicious attitudes towards women, sexual dominance, and sexual entitlement, all of which increase their likelihood of perpetrating sexual violence against women (Vallerga & Zurbriggen, 2022). In addition, among manosphere networks, there has been an overall shift towards more extreme communities characterised by more intense misogyny (Ribeiro et al., 2021).
  • There is direct evidence that entering and participating in manosphere communities radicalises people online. In a study among 12.7 Reddit users engaged in discussion of feminism, joining a manosphere community resulted in significant increases in seven of eight possible traits associated with radicalisation: fixation on a particular cause, a sense of grievance, a desire for power and influence over others, anger, a negative outlook, and toxicity. Increases in radicalisation also were associated with interactions with elite manosphere members and with receiving acts of social acceptance from other manosphere participants (Habib, Srinivasan, & Nithyanand, 2022)
  • The vast majority of violence against women by men in the manosphere is likely to involve everyday, ‘garden variety’ violence by manosphere men against their wives, girlfriends, female friends, and other women, rather than mass killings of women. This includes ‘pick up artist’ men’s sexual coercion of women, which overlaps with ‘normal’ heterosexual coercion by men outside the manosphere, but also a wide range of other everyday acts of violence and abuse. 
  • There has been no systematic examination of violence perpetration by manosphere participants. However;
    • Manosphere networks also include both perpetration and encouragement of sexual violence. Studies of manosphere communities document both disclosures of perpetrating sexual violence and users describing or encouraging sexual assault perpetration both offline and in digital spaces (including harassment, threats, and sharing of non-consensual intimate images) (PettyJohn, Nason, Cary, & Graves, 2026).
    • There are anecdotal reports from women of male intimate partners becoming abusive after engaging with manosphere content (Nicholas, Clark, Agius, & Cook, 2024; Thorburn, 2023).
  • Manosphere participants’ violence against women also takes the form of organised campaigns of online harassment and abuse directed at feminist advocates and commentators (Ging, 2023).
  • Finally, some participants in the manosphere perpetrate acts of mass violence against women and others. There have been a series of such incidents perpetrated by manosphere and anti-feminist men (see the Appendix below). These incidents highlight how anti-feminist ideologies can escalate into acts of mass violence, often fueled by misogyny, perceived male victimhood, and resentment toward women’s societal advancements. Manosphere acts of violence against women also can be explained in terms of the ‘radical nihilism’ of some manosphere networks: some manosphere participants feel anger and loss and disconnection from the world, their ‘red pill’ adherence means that they reject societal values, and this nihilism culminates for some in rage and resentment and acts of violence (Copland, 2025). (In addition, there are links between men’s acts of violence against women and their perpetration of other forms of violence such as mass shootings. In an analysis of all mass shootings in the USA over 2014-2019, 59.1% of mass shootings were domestic violence-related. In 68.2% of mass shootings, the perpetrator either killed at least one partner or family member or had a history of domestic violence (Geller, Booty, & Crifasi, 2021).)

Recent scholarship is beginning to extend insights regarding the interrelationships between masculinity, misogyny, and men’s violence in the manosphere. A quantitative UK study finds that forms of ‘private’ violence (intimate partner violence, stalking, sexual harassment, and sexual assault) and ‘public violence’ have a common psychology among men, in misogynistic beliefs, collective narcissism (a belief that men are exceptional and entitled to special recognition and privileged treatment but this is not sufficiently recognized by others), revengefulness, and extreme adherence to stereotypical masculine gender roles (Rottweiler, Clemmow, & Gill, 2025). 

At the same time, a recent study finds that there is significant variation among the sub-groups in the manosphere in their potential for violence, the likely type of violence, and their degree of political advocacy, and that this is shaped by two factors (Barnes & Karim, 2025). The first is communitarianism, the extent to which the manosphere group shows group cohesion, solidarity, and a shared collective identity. The second is the extent of participants’ romantic and sexual interaction with women. In particular:

  • Groups with low communitarianism and low interaction (such as Incels and MGTOW) are more likely than other groups to engage in lone-actor violence.
  • Groups with low communitarianism and high interaction (such as PUAs) are more likely to perpetrate private violence, such as sexual assault, driven by competition and sexual goals.
  • Groups with high communitarianism and low interaction (such as MRAs) are more likely to take part in coordinated online harassment (Barnes & Karim, 2025).

The manosphere’s impacts on MVAW in wider society

The manosphere contributes also contributes to men’s violence against women in wider society in other ways. Manosphere advocates’ negative influence on violence against women, and domestic and sexual violence more broadly, includes:

  • Promoting rigid, patriarchal models of masculinity, ideologies of hostile sexism, and family and community relations based on male dominance, all of which are implicated in men’s perpetration of violence against women;
  • Weakening community awareness of the scope and severity of men’s violence against women, through their fanatical dissemination of the myth that domestic violence is gender-symmetrical;
  • Diminishing the sympathy, support, and credulity given to victims of violence, through their enthusiastic promotion of the myth that women routinely make false accusations of violence;
  • Undermining the legal and institutional protections afforded to victims, and the sanctions placed on perpetrators, through their attacks on these processes and systems;
  • Weakening violence prevention organisations and movements, through collective mobilisation, online and offline attacks, legal action, and media advocacy;
  • Defending and advocating for perpetrators of domestic and sexual violence (by asserting that the allegations they face are universally or routinely false) and publicly attacking victim-survivors.

There is direct evidence of the impact of pro-patriarchal social influencers on attitudes towards gender: 

  • Two recent experimental studies find that being exposed to anti-feminist manfluencer content increases men’s attitudinal misogyny. In studies manipulating young men’s exposure to fictional manfluencer content, young men exposed to such content adopted more misogynistic attitudes compared to a control group (Renström & Bäck, 2024). (Misogyny was operationalised in the first study in terms of a mistrust in women, measured by agreement with the notion that women often make false allegations of violence, and in the second study by four items from a misogyny scale.)

There is also evidence of links between manosphere ideologies and men’s perpetration of domestic and sexual violence, at least from qualitative research:

  • Men who use domestic and family violence often express arguments and emotional logics that align with and draw on manosphere ideologies, according to a study among the frontline staff who work with male perpetrators (Nicholas et al., 2024). 
  • There has been an increase in boys’ and young men’s sexual harassment, sexist abuse, and physical and verbal intimidation of female teachers in Australian schools, informed and inspired by manosphere ideologies and influencers such as Andrew Tate, according to recent qualitative research (Wescott, Roberts, & Zhao, 2024). While sexist and abusive behaviour by boys and young men against female students and staff has long been part of schools, female teachers report a noticeable shift in boys’ behaviour and attitudes towards women and girls that they attribute to manosphere advocates’ influence (Roberts & Wescott, 2024).

Resources and further reading on the manosphere and 'men's rights'

References

Åkerlund, M. (2026). ‘Rape Isn’t Real, and If It Is, Foids Deserve It’: The Complex and Contradictory Articulations of Rape and Gender-Based Hate Among Incels. Social Media+ Society, 12(1), 20563051261419384. 

Barnes, M. J., & Karim, S. M. (2025). The Manosphere and Politics. Comparative Political Studies, 0(0), 00104140241312095. doi:10.1177/00104140241312095

Copland, S. J. (2025). The male complaint: The manosphere and misogyny online: John Wiley & Sons.

Farrell, T., Fernandez, M., Novotny, J., & Alani, H. (2019). Exploring Misogyny across the Manosphere in Reddit. Paper presented at the WebSci ‘19 Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Web Science. 

Flood, M., Brown, C., Dembele, L., & Mills, K. (2023). Who uses domestic, family, and sexual violence, how, and why? The State of Knowledge Report on Violence Perpetration. Retrieved from Brisbane: 

Geller, L. B., Booty, M., & Crifasi, C. K. (2021). The role of domestic violence in fatal mass shootings in the United States, 2014–2019. Injury Epidemiology, 8(1), 38. doi:10.1186/s40621-021-00330-0

Ging, D. (2017). Alphas, Betas, and Incels: Theorizing the Masculinities of the Manosphere. Men and Masculinities, 1-20. doi:10.1177/1097184x17706401

Ging, D. (2023). Tactics of hate: Toxic “creativity” in anti-feminist men’s rights politics. In K. Boyle & S. Berridge (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Gender, Media and Violence (pp. 348-357): Routledge.

Gotell, L., & Dutton, E. (2016). Sexual Violence in the ‘Manosphere’: Antifeminist Men’s Rights Discourses on Rape. 2016, 5(2), 16. doi:10.5204/ijcjsd.v5i2.310

Habib, H., Srinivasan, P., & Nithyanand, R. (2022). Making a Radical Misogynist: How online social engagement with the Manosphere influences traits of radicalization. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 6(CSCW2), 1-28. 

Hunte, Z. (2019). ‘Female Nature, Cucks, and Simps’: Understanding Men Going Their Own Way as part of the Manosphere. In.

Krendel, A. (2020). The men and women, guys and girls of the ‘manosphere’: A corpus-assisted discourse approach. Discourse & Society, 31(6), 607-630. 

Lilly, M. (2016). ‘The World is Not a Safe Place for Men’: The Representational Politics of the Manosphere. Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa, 

Marwick, A. E., & Caplan, R. (2018). Drinking male tears: language, the manosphere, and networked harassment. Feminist Media Studies, 18(4), 543-559. doi:10.1080/14680777.2018.1450568

Nicholas, L., & Agius, C. (2018). # Notallmen,# Menenism, Manospheres and Unsafe Spaces: Overt and Subtle Masculinism in Anti-”PC” Discourse. In The Persistence of Global Masculinism (pp. 31-59): Springer.

Nicholas, L., Clark, S., Agius, C., & Cook, K. (2024). Antifeminist, manosphere and right-wing extremist sentiment among men who use domestic and family violence: masculinism, misinformation, and the justificatory logics of violence. NORMA, 1-20. 

PettyJohn, M. E., Nason, J., Cary, K. M., & Graves, C. (2026). Mobilization of Sexual Violence within the Manosphere: A Mixed Methods Systematic Review. The Journal of Sex Research, 1-29. doi:10.1080/00224499.2026.2670470

Renström, E. A., & Bäck, H. (2024). Manfluencers and Young Men’s Misogynistic Attitudes: The Role of Perceived Threats to Men’s Status. Sex Roles, 90(12), 1787-1806. 

Ribeiro, M. H., Blackburn, J., Bradlyn, B., De Cristofaro, E., Stringhini, G., Long, S., . . . Zannettou, S. (2020). From Pick-Up Artists to Incels: A Data-Driven Sketch of the Manosphere. arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.07600. 

Ribeiro, M. H., Blackburn, J., Bradlyn, B., De Cristofaro, E., Stringhini, G., Long, S., . . . Zannettou, S. (2021). The evolution of the manosphere across the web. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the international AAAI conference on web and social media.

Roberts, S., & Wescott, S. (2024). To quell the problem, we must name the problem: the role of social media ‘manfluencers’ in boys’ sexist behaviours in school settings. Educational and Developmental Psychologist, 1-4. doi:10.1080/20590776.2024.2329083

Rottweiler, B., Clemmow, C., & Gill, P. (2025). A Common Psychology of Male Violence? Assessing the Effects of Misogyny on Intentions to Engage in Violent Extremism, Interpersonal Violence and Support for Violence against Women. Terrorism and Political Violence, 37(3), 287-312. 

Silva, J. R., Capellan, J. A., Schmuhl, M. A., & Mills, C. E. (2021). Gender-Based Mass Shootings: An Examination of Attacks Motivated by Grievances Against Women. Violence Against Women, 27(12-13), 2163-2186. doi:10.1177/1077801220981154

Thorburn, J. (2023). The (de-)radical(-ising) potential of r/IncelExit and r/ExRedPill. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 26(3), 464-471. doi:10.1177/13675494231153900

Vallerga, M., & Zurbriggen, E. L. (2022). Hegemonic masculinities in the ‘Manosphere’: A thematic analysis of beliefs about men and women on The Red Pill and Incel. Analyses of social issues and public policy, 22(2), 602-625. 

Van Valkenburgh, S. P. (2018). Digesting the Red Pill: Masculinity and Neoliberalism in the Manosphere. Men and Masculinities, 1097184X18816118. 

Wescott, S., Roberts, S., & Zhao, X. (2024). The problem of anti-feminist ‘manfluencer’ Andrew Tate in Australian schools: women teachers’ experiences of resurgent male supremacy. Gender and Education, 36(2), 167-182. doi:10.1080/09540253.2023.2292622

 

Appendix: Incidents of mass violence by individuals with manosphere participation and/or anti-feminist ideologies

École Polytechnique Massacre (1989, Montreal, Canada)

  • Marc Lépine killed 14 women and injured 10 others at the École Polytechnique engineering school. He explicitly stated that he was “fighting feminism” and blamed feminists for ruining his life. In a note, he expressed resentment toward women gaining societal advantages and aligned his beliefs with anti-feminist ideologies.

Luby’s Cafeteria Shooting (1991, Texas, USA)

  • A man killed 23 people in an attack where most victims were women. Survivors noted that he specifically targeted women during the shooting. He had expressed hostility toward women beforehand, referring to them as “female vipers”.

Collier Township Gym Shooting (2009, Pennsylvania, USA)

  • A man shot 12 women at a gym, killing three. He had written extensively about his resentment toward women for rejecting him romantically and sexually. His blog posts included misogynistic rants blaming women for his loneliness.

Isla Vista Attack (2014, California, USA)

  • Elliot Rodger killed six people and injured 14 others in a rampage motivated by his hatred of women and frustration over perceived sexual rejection. He left behind a manifesto detailing his belief that women were responsible for his suffering. This attack has since inspired other perpetrators within incel and anti-feminist communities.

Toronto van attack (2018, Toronto, Canada)

  • A man deliberately drove a rented van into pedestrians, killing ten people and injuring sixteen others. Shortly before the attack, he posted on Facebook announcing that the "Incel Rebellion" had begun and praising the Isla Vista attacker. The attack is widely recognised as the first large-scale act of violence explicitly claimed in the name of the incel movement

Tallahassee Yoga Studio Shooting (2018, Florida, USA)

  • A man with a history of misogyny and violent fantasies killed two women and injured four others at a yoga studio. He identified with the Isla Vista attacker (Elliot Rodger) and shared incel-related views. His writings revealed deep hatred toward women, people of color, and LGBTQ individuals.

Toronto Spa Machete Attack (2020, Toronto, Canada)

  • A 17-year-old boy entered a massage spa and fatally stabbed one woman while injuring another employee. Canadian authorities charged the attack as an act of terrorism motivated by incel ideology, making it the first case in which incel ideology was formally recognised as a terrorist motive in a criminal prosecution.

Judge Esther Salas Targeted Shooting (2020, New Jersey, USA)

  • A self-described “anti-feminist” attacked the family of federal Judge Esther Salas, killing her son and injuring her husband. The attacker had a history of misogynistic online posts and targeted Salas due to her role in a case in which he was involved.

Plymouth Shooting (2021, Plymouth, England)

  • A man shot and killed five people, including his mother and a three-year-old girl, before taking his own life. He had consumed incel content online, discussed the "blackpill" worldview, and expressed misogynistic beliefs alongside feelings of hopelessness and social isolation. Investigations concluded that incel ideology formed part of a broader constellation of grievances that contributed to the attack.