Over the past couple of years, Andrew Tate, a kickboxer from Britain, has emerged as an online star for disaffected, often highly misogynist young men. Starting as a professional kickboxer, he became an online celebrity after making repeated highly misogynistic statements. By 2022 Tate was the most Google searched figure in the world, promoting misogynist, pro- traditional masculinity, ideas to millions of young men. Tate made much of his money and fame through an online webcam business, one which in 2023 then resulted in him and his brother being charged in Romania with rape and human trafficking.
Tate has become a figurehead for a disparate community called the ‘manosphere’ – a collection of blogs, forums, and social media channels dedicated to ‘men’s interests’ and anti-feminism. The Manosphere is made up of a range of different groups, including men’s rights activists, who argue that men are discriminated against in society; pick-up artists and the seduction industry, which teaches men manipulative techniques to pick up women; incels, who believe that due to a range of genetic traits they are unable to obtain romantic or sexual relationships with women; and men going their own way (MGTOW), which consists of (often divorced) men who are so angry at women that they decide to avoid sexual and romantic relationships entirely (Lyons, 2017: 8). Some of these men – in particular Incels – have gone so far to undertake violent misogynistic attacks, such the Isla Vista killings in 2014, where Elliot Rodger killed six people, and the Toronto van attack in 2018, where Alek Minassian killed 11.
My book, The Male Complaint, studies this growing community, asking, why are millions of men rushing to these communities, and what can we do about it?
The Manosphere Is Us
Policy makers, the media, researchers, and even the broader public have all become increasingly concerned about the Manosphere, and for good reason. Yet, I think the debates surrounding this community is failing women, these men and our broader community.
Probably the most common way people talk about the manosphere is to label them ‘bad men’. They are talked about as ‘basement dwelling losers’, or as Hillary Clinton once famously called Donald Trump supporters, ‘deplorables’. If not this, then the manosphere is blamed on ‘toxic masculinity’ - the idea that there are a range of ‘toxic’ masculine traits, such as violence, aggression, and competitiveness, which, when they become the key focus of male identity, can result in violence and other problematic behaviours.
These approaches, which often look down at Manosphere men, is anything but helpful. It assumes an inherent ‘badness’ of Manosphere men, which is both incorrect (misogyny is a social disease), but also leads us nowhere. If Manosphere men are just inherent losers or misogynists, then there’s nothing we can do except to chastise them, or maybe lock them up.
While more useful, toxic masculinity, has become over-used to the point where it has lost all value. While not inherent in the term itself, the way toxic masculinity is used often assumes that toxic masculine traits are somehow inherent within men and in turn unchanging. Moreover, toxic masculinity treats the manosphere as a social ‘sickness’ that can simply be solved by changed attitudes. This, however, is too simplistic. As Michael Salter argues, ‘the problem with a crusade against toxic masculinity is that in targeting culture as the enemy, it risks overlooking the real-life conditions and forces that sustain culture’.
It is in looking at these ‘real-life conditions’ that my book – The Male Complaint - studies members of the manosphere differently. I do not excuse the violence that comes from the manosphere and am heavily critical of those leaders of the community who promote and perpetuate it. But at the same time, I argue that misogyny and violence do not come from nowhere, and that we therefore must seek to understand the causes of it if we are to do anything about it.
Alienated Young Men: The Male Complaint
We need to do better than this. The alienated men of the Manosphere, even the violent ones, are not an aberration, or even that radical. Instead, they are symptoms of the society that they and we live in. They are not monsters, or in fact very different to many of us, and the problems they experience, and pose, are society’s problems. In fact, as I’ll continue to argue, the Manosphere is quite banal.
Here, I’m borrowing from Hannah Arendt’s concept of the ‘banality of evil’. In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Arendt reported on the war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi operative who was responsible for organising the transportation of millions of people to various concentration camps during WWII. Attending Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem Arendt expected to find the face of evil. Instead, she found him to be an ordinary, bland, bureaucrat, who was “neither perverted nor sadistic”, but instead “terrifyingly normal”. His main motive, she argued, was not evil, but instead to diligently advance his career. I don’t go into debate about whether Eichmann was evil or not. Some have argued that Arendt either missed, or didn’t have access, to important facts about Eichmann that points to his commitment to Nazi ideology. However, her point is still useful. Sometimes evil and violent ideas become so embedded within our society that they become the norm; a standard that becomes so mainstream that everyone – even the boring bureaucrat – become a part of that machine. The people participating in these movements are often not an aberration. Instead, they can be banal, boring, individuals, just like the bloke next door. They are often, like all of us, just trying to find a way through, a way to succeed in our everyday life. Like Arendt argues with Eichmann, I argue that Manosphere participants are banal men, often seeking survival (in an awful way) in an increasingly difficult world.
It is this seeking of survival that is so key to understanding the Manosphere. Men, as with everyone, are facing a significantly changing and increasingly complex and uncertain world in the 21st Century. We’re all facing crises of inequality, economic insecurity, housing, climate change, mental health, and more.
Different men have responded to these crises in different ways. The likes of Andrew Tate have very successfully sought ways to profit off this crisis, selling men the fantasy, often at exuberant prices, that if they follow their ideas, they will be able to escape the crisis and even thrive in it.
The majority, however, seek places and communities to understand, exist, and survive. The Manosphere is an example of what theorists describe as an “intimate public”.
Intimate publics refer to groups who bond over a shared worldview and “emotional knowledge”. Individuals come together both through connections to ideas as well as through a collective feeling about their position in the world. They reject politics, believing they can change the world through the sheer force of their community and the feeling behind it. Intimate publics exist throughout our community, and this idea can be used to describe groups across the political spectrum. In their research, Lauren Berlant argued that the first intimate public was comprised of (primarily white) American women, who used texts such as romantic novels to create a collective complaint about their lives.
The Manosphere acts similar. It creates a space where men can share grievances and create connection over these grievances – forming The Male Complaint. While not always rational, nor well-founded, the male complaint provides a strong drawcard for some men, binding them together through a collective identity and sense of purpose.
In thinking about the Manosphere in this way I am not aiming to reduce the impact of the bigotry and misogyny these men perpetuate. Bigotry and misogyny is never inconsequential and we must do everything we can to stop it. However, the misogyny of the Manosphere is not new. Manosphere men repeat tropes and ideas that have, sadly, existed for centuries, with the community using women as scapegoats for the problems facing our world. We are in another iteration of a “battle of the sexes”, with some men joining a side and fighting hard. Manosphere men do so because it is the only way they see themselves surviving, and maybe even thriving.
Looking at the Manosphere in this way is essential if we want to understand and do something about the community. If we treat the Manosphere, and particularly the men within it, as an aberration that is different and distinct from the rest of the world, then we are absolving ourselves, or more importantly our leaders and mainstream institutions, from any of the blame. This is a huge mistake. The manosphere hasn’t just arisen out of thin air, instead it is a response both to the ideologies, and failures of, our modern institutions – specifically late-stage capitalist neoliberalism. My core aim in The Male Complaint, therefore, is to try and understand where the misogyny of the Manosphere comes from. It is only in understanding these communities that we can figure out the causes and tackle them. As Rachel O’Neill writes: “unless we accept the idea that some men just hate women – that misogyny really is an immovable force – then we need to understand what draws men to the Manosphere.”
This is what I aim to do in The Male Complaint.
Dr Simon Copland is an honorary fellow at The Australian National University. His expertise is in the manosphere, masculinity and online extremism.
Find Simon's book here.