The market failure beneath the manosphere

Confronting the misogyny and get-rich-quick schemes of influencers means talking openly to young men about success

Simon van Teutem

Last month, in a television studio, I met a young man named Davey Verbeek. Davey is 22. He had recently gone viral for telling a woman on the Dutch First Dates that she would never earn more than him. “I don’t think you have those ambitions,” he informed her. “You just want to do your nails, put on your make-up. You just want to be a woman.” Someone had to go on TV and debate him. That someone, it turned out, was me: a 28-year-old liberal with centrist-dad potential.

The clip had promised a raging misogynist. What I encountered was a boy whose insecurity and ambition were fighting over control of his face. Davey’s dad died young. What he wants now, more than anything, is to give his own children what that death has taken from him: a strong father figure at the centre of things, providing and steadying, the man of the house.

This innocent ambition had curdled into something else entirely: a search for a “tradwife” and contempt for a woman he barely knew.

What took him from one to the other is the manosphere, the sprawling online ecosystem of influencers who have built profit-making careers telling boys the world is rigged against them. The manosphere has two unifying elements: escaping the so-called matrix, a worldview that tells you your role as a man is already fixed and the system has you under its thumb; and the corruption of modern society by feminism.

On social media, the older brother has been franchised. Influencers dispense tips on money, politics, women, fitness, nutrition, entrepreneurship, even faith

The most visible feature of the manosphere is the subordination of women. Is the appeal, then, fundamentally ideological, downstream of a broader conservative turn in the tide? The data suggests otherwise. American young men are significantly less likely to identify as conservative than their elders, with 68 per cent in one recent poll disagreeing with the idea that society would benefit from a return to traditional gender roles. Young people of both sexes are more liberal than ever.

Whatever the indicator you look at in the World Values Survey — women in political leadership, abortion, homosexuality — the long-run trend across western democracies is the same: young men aged 18 to 29 are becoming less conservative. This is quite the narrative violation in the manosphere debate, where the dominant framing treats the whole phenomenon as the visible tip of a deeper ideological shift.

It is tempting, then, to treat the manosphere instead as rage-bait: hate speech sprinkled with six-packs and cryptocurrency, engineered for a digital ecosystem that rewards provocation. This explains why boys pause mid-scroll. It doesn’t explain, however, why 31 per cent of young men in the US told pollsters they looked up to the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate, or why Davey defends him as a man with good “core values”.

I propose a different explanation. Strip away the misogyny, the supplements, the snarling podcasts, and what remains is a disarmingly simple promise: you can make something of yourself. Yes, the manosphere is ideological but its core appeal is about agency, about giving young men a navigable path through a world that grades them hard on success but offers them little guidance on how to achieve it.

In polite society, talking too openly about success is not quite the done thing. This is understandable, but it also creates a vacuum. And a crude, extractive definition will always find buyers among young men who cannot get their answer elsewhere.

There is a moment, somewhere between puberty and adulthood, when something ignites in many young men: an almost physical conviction that you have to make something of yourself. Earn money, get fit and, perhaps most pressingly, become “high-value” on the dating market.

I recognised it in friends, in classmates, in boys I shared a single cigarette with outside clubs. I felt it myself. It arrived alongside the first cold suspicion that nobody is going to do this for you, and that the clock, for the first time, is actually running.

Developmental psychologists call this phase emerging adulthood, the years between 18 and 29, a window of identity exploration haunted by a sensation of being perpetually in between. It is when the big questions land with their full weight. Who am I? What do I want? What am I worth?

For young men, the stakes of these questions feel punishing. Some are discovering that the script they were handed doesn’t match the economy waiting for them. Rising graduate joblessness is mainly affecting men.

The consequences extend beyond whether you shop at Waitrose or Lidl: across 24 countries and 1.8mn online daters, according to one study by Peter K Jonason and Andrew G Thomas, a man’s income and education improve his romantic prospects nearly two and a half times more than the same credentials do for a woman.

We have done a great job of telling boys and young men what not to do, say or be, but a lousy job of offering a positive vision

Seventy-one per cent of young British men said they believed the man should be the primary breadwinner in a 2022 poll commissioned by Starling Bank; in the US, roughly equal majorities of men and women agree that a man needs to provide to be a good partner. You do not have to celebrate these facts to take them seriously.

Of course, such expectations are not fixed, as the psychologist Cordelia Fine has illustrated in books such as Testosterone Rex. In the US, where there is no statutory paid maternity leave and substantial pay gaps persist, it is hardly surprising that men and women alike believe a man should be the provider. But when the Tsimané people of Bolivia were asked what they looked for in a partner, good character and food production came top for both sexes. “There is no timeless, historically invariant, deeply biologically rooted universal way men are,” Fine told me.

But telling a young man that the pressure he feels is socially constructed does not make it less real, any more than explaining the physics of a wall makes it easier to walk through.

In an economic system built on meritocratic assumptions, where failure lands hard on men’s material security, dating prospects and their sense of self, there is a strong appetite for a definition of success and a map towards it.

When I was a teenager, the questions that occupied me could be taken to an older brother or a friend’s brother. They sometimes gave terrible advice (I wouldn’t personally recommend strawpedoing a bottle of Petrikov to anyone). But they were not making money off our insecurities.

That has changed. British teenagers report spending more than three and a half hours a day on their phones, and self-reported figures notoriously undercount. On social media, the older brother has been franchised. Influencers dispense tips on money, politics, women, fitness, nutrition, entrepreneurship, even faith.

Their business model runs in two steps. First, locate the insecurity beneath the ambition, deepen it and attach it to a scapegoat: immigrants, political elites and especially women. Women make a uniquely convenient target, as girls now outperform boys in almost every western school system. They are the ones whose attention most men crave and whose rejection lands as a verdict on their self-worth. Second, explain that there is a way out, but you have to get your wallet out first. Buy my course, and the money, six-pack and girls will follow.

It is a masterclass in manufactured dependency: convince someone he is worthless, then position yourself as the only person who can tell him otherwise. As a man, says one participant in Louis Theroux’s documentary Inside the Manosphere, “you’re born without value . . . you have to work for every penny.” He is thanking his idol, influencer Justin Waller, who tells him he loves him, and there is nothing he cannot achieve. “We’re in this together.”

The modern information infrastructure smoothly connects the demand to the supply. Researchers at Dublin City University created 10 blank smartphones registered as male teenagers, five on TikTok and five on YouTube Shorts, with no history, likes or prior searches. Within 23 minutes, all of them were being served misogynistic content they had never looked for. After two to three hours, more than three-quarters of everything the algorithm recommended was manosphere material.

But here’s the puzzle at the centre of the market: much of the advice is awful. The manosphere bros are selling vaporous cryptocurrency schemes, bogus supplements and relationship advice that family lawyers are now citing in divorce filings. Boys are easy prey; according to the Federal Trade Commission, younger adults are four times as likely to lose money as a result of an investment scam.

In his documentary, Theroux puts £500 into one influencer’s investment fund and loses most of it. The influencer in question is Harrison Sullivan, 24, who lives in Marbella, has 300,000 Instagram followers, and introduces a female acquaintance as his dishwasher.

Harrison has always been a salesman, he says. He knew he would never have built this audience by being reasonable. When Theroux asks why he doesn’t simply try to be a good person, he doesn’t hesitate: “I’m not living for other people. I’m living for myself.”

The success of manosphere influencers is harmful to the women and minority groups they scapegoat, and also to the men who buy in. Which raises the question: where is the competition?

Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, put it to me this way: “We have done a great job of telling boys and young men what not to do, say or be, but a lousy job of offering a positive vision of modern masculinity. We’ve given them a long list of don’ts, very few do’s, and then blamed them for looking elsewhere. It’s our fault, not theirs.”

At school, we learnt about Pythagoras’s theorem and the Treaty of Versailles, neither of which proved especially useful outside a debating society. Nobody told us how to approach a girl, how to build a network or what success actually meant.

There is a reason for that silence. Success, examined closely, is an uncomfortable subject for anyone who takes seriously how much of it is unearned. Before your first breath, your genes have already set margins for your height, your hair, your metabolism and your predisposition to anxiety.

​Nurture fills in the rest: whether someone read to you at night, how often your parents fought at the dinner table, which school you go to, what friends you make. Underneath, philosophers have spent millennia disagreeing about whether we have free will at all.

Stack all of that up, and there is precious little room left for autonomous choice. So: talk about success? No thank you. That mostly signals a blind spot the size of your privilege.

The manosphere wins simply because it shows up, because a crude map beats no map. It’s ultimately about demand and supply

This logic is defensible in a university dining hall. As a message to the generation that actually has to go out and live in this system, it is the worst pep talk in history.

It is also, without anyone intending it, the precise worldview the manosphere claims to be fighting: the matrix, the system that tells you your role is fixed and your agency an illusion. “We’re born to just accept what society gives us,” says one Andrew Tate fan. “What he promotes is refusing that.”

Religious communities, sports coaches, teachers (politicians, at present, perhaps less so): all present and dispense wisdom about the good life. What they share, however, is a certain reluctance to name what success looks like for a young man, and to say plainly how it is achieved. The manosphere has no such reluctance.

Many young men are intensely competitive, and there is nothing wrong with that. The question is simply what that drive gets aimed at.

The manosphere is not uniquely well-positioned to reach people such as Davey. It wins simply because it shows up, because a crude map beats no map. It’s ultimately about demand and supply. That is the market failure beneath the manosphere.

If this captures the appeal of the manosphere, then the way to beat it is to offer boys an alternative story about male success, about what it means to win and how to get there. Let me offer one.

The lives I find most impressive share a single feature: the person has found a way to make their own flourishing and someone else’s point in the same direction. What they share is the understanding that individual ambition and collective benefit are not at war.

Think of the company founder who builds something that solves a real problem, and whose wealth is inseparable from the value created for others; the doctor who chose the ward over making PowerPoints; the teacher who is remembered 30 years later because he made a teenager believe in himself at a pivotal moment.

Make money, absolutely, money buys freedom and security. But for a teenager, the most reliable path there starts in school. In the UK, the earnings of those with a degree from a top-ranked university average around £50,000 a year five years after graduation. Hustlers University, Tate’s online educational platform, has yet to publish comparable data.

Get strong; sport is one of the best things available to a young man, but don’t collapse into gym-bro narcissism. Have sex, explore, but let your interest extend beyond your own experience, or you will spend your life performing intimacy instead of having it.

Of course, most of this advice applies equally to young women. But the manosphere speaks directly to boys as boys, and polite society does not. That asymmetry is itself part of the market failure.

Naming what winning looks like, though, is only half the job; the other half is being willing to call losers by their name. Someone who moves to Dubai purely for tax purposes after a lifetime of publicly funded schools, roads and doctors, for example; or who encourages teenagers to raid their piggy banks to buy into their pyramid schemes.

The aesthetic seals it: the apartments these influencers exhibit, all LED strips, black furniture and brand-logo cushions, look like the VIP lounge of an energy drink brand. I’d expect to be asked for two-factor authentication before sitting down. The tenants are, with rare exceptions, miserable in the ways that matter.

Disagree with my definition, by all means. That’s exactly the point: the conversation about what winning looks like for a generation of boys is the one we should have been having for years. But we’ve left it to people with a financial interest in keeping the answer narrow and extractive.

After the broadcast, Davey and I kept talking. He had seen through more than I expected. The pyramid schemes irritated him, as did the hollow bravado. When I said that few people seemed to offer an alternative answer to the questions boys are wrestling with, and that this was a market failure more than a culture war, he raised his eyebrows. “Maybe we have more in common than we think,” he said. I have been turning that sentence over ever since.

Rather than being primarily about ideology, the manosphere is a contest over who gets to define success for a generation of boys actively searching for an answer. Young men in a capitalist society understand perfectly well that they will pay the price if they have no answer to what success means and how to get there.

The manosphere gets at least one thing right: this demand is real and will not go away. The “red pill” it sells (don’t just accept the hand you’re dealt) contains a kernel that is not wrong. The problem is that it then uses it to sell shortcuts that don’t work and views that harm women.

Wordsworth wrote that the child is father of the man; whoever reaches the child first stamps everything that follows. The boy who lost his father became the man at the centre of a national debate about sexism. The manosphere had reached Davey; we hadn’t.

Simon van Teutem is a writer for De Correspondent and a PhD candidate in politics at the University of Oxford. He is the author of a book published in the Netherlands, ‘The Bermuda Triangle of Talent: How Our Brightest Minds Get Lost in Meaningless Jobs’

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