Essay Series 5.2: The Manosphere desires, hates, and abuses women.

According to a United Nations report on violence against women, a network of online communities forms the “manosphere.” These communities include chat groups, forum discussions, and blogs. The manosphere opposes women’s rights and considers men to be victims and at a disadvantage compared to women.

The manosphere denigrates and dehumanizes women. It also lies about gender equality and violence against women and girls.³³⁷ Examples of dehumanizing women include the manosphere’s terms for women. They include foids (female humanoids), roasties (a derogatory term for women’s genitalia), and holes.³³⁸

This network of communities got its start in internet and online forums in the late 1900s and early 2000s and has been spreading hatred of women ever since. Researchers examined five subreddits in the manosphere and identified hundreds of thousands of followers.³³⁹

Four main groups comprise the manosphere: incels, men’s rights activists (MRAs), pickup artists (PUAs), and men going their own way (MGTOW).³⁴⁰

Femcels and Incels

Femcels and incels both consider themselves to be unattractive and unable to have interactions with men or women, respectively. Femcels tend to focus on improving their looks and commiserating with one another. Incels tend to direct their frustration and anger toward harming women and to focus on “looksmaxxing.” This means incels try to improve their looks to gain desirability in the sexual marketplace.³⁴¹

A queer woman started Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project in 1997. She coined the term “incel.” Her original definition included anybody of any gender who was lonely, had little sexual experience, or wasn’t in a relationship. Men took over this term and linked it to denigration of women, harmful masculinity, and, in many cases, white supremacy.³⁴² Incels have focused on men’s rage and gained media attention, even though women started a benign movement involving commiseration.³⁴³ This situation seems to be yet another case of men appropriating women’s work.

Femcels are women who consider themselves victims of society’s emphasis on the importance of women’s looks. They feel lonely and excluded from romance and sexual interaction. However, they aren’t given nearly the same attention as incels. Rather, femcel communities suffer from trolling and attack because the manosphere believes that any woman can have sex if she wants it.³⁴⁴

Incel refers to involuntarily celibate men. Most of them are middle-income-class White men under the age of 30 who consider themselves to be unattractive to women.³⁴⁵ Incels believe they are entitled to use women’s bodies for their own pleasure. Some incels advocate making rape legal, creating concentration camps for women, mandating government-sponsored girlfriends, enforcing monogamy, or wiping out the sexually attractive “alpha” men and women.³⁴⁶ Recently, incels have been advocating pedophilia because underage and preteen girls are supposedly “pure” in that they haven’t had sexual contact and are easy to control.³⁴⁷

Incels discuss assaulting, harassing, and stalking women, and they have been linked to mass murders of them.³⁴⁸ When incels become violent, they are terrorists. Women die, and some in the manosphere idolize them. In 2014, in California, Elliot Rodger killed six people, plus himself, and injured 14 due to his rage about women rejecting him socially. He released a manifesto detailing his reasoning.³⁴⁹ Rodger has become a hero in the incel community. His terrorism has sparked other attacks. Please see essay 5.5 for more information.

It isn't possible to accurately size the incel community. However, Laura Bates of the Everyday Sexism Project, based on her research from 2018-2020, says that a conservative estimate is that there are tens of thousands of incel community members.³⁵⁰ There are many more readers and viewers of incel teachings.

The incel community is strongly linked with the alt-right, which is a network of loosely connected leaders, movements, online communities, and groups that are ultraconservative White supremacists or nationalists. In general, the alt-right believes that White culture is under attack and is experiencing discrimination due to recognition of multiple cultures and political correctness. According to this movement, men are supposed to have sex, reproduce, and dominate women. Women should lose any choice over their lives and focus their activities on sex and having babies. The alt-right would force abortions on women of color.³⁵¹

Men’s Rights Activists

The men’s rights activists say that men don’t control society. Men are supposedly the true victims of sexism and discrimination. Men’s rights activists focus on disparaging and attacking women. Most groups in this community are openly misogynistic and believe that feminism has ruined the world for men. In their view, women subjugate men.³⁵² Some of these groups were founded during the Women’s Liberation Movement, and others have emerged and grown over time.

One of the MRA’s leaders, Paul Elam, claimed that women engage in as much domestic violence as men, encouraged men to beat women, and told them to make women clean up after the beating. He said that only men are responsible for any progress humanity has made and that women who dress provocatively are asking to be raped.³⁵³

The best known and most influential of the MRA’s websites is “A Voice for Men,” which claimed 13,000 members worldwide and 250,000 posts in the 2018-2020 time period. A men’s rights group on Reddit claimed 250,000 members with comments daily in the hundreds or thousands. Men’s rights activists engage in online harassment of women who dare to criticize them.³⁵⁴

Men’s rights activists do identify some important problems, such as job safety, inadequate mental health services, and parental rights. While these are societal problems, the activists blame women.³⁵⁵

PickUp Artists

Pickup artists (PUA) have created an industry devoted to teaching men how to seduce or pickup women through classes and online forums. The first PUA forum began in 1994. This community believes there is a sexual marketplace where everyone has a value based on their looks, wealth, age, and social class. PUA ideology is that women supposedly control this system and 80 percent of them compete for the top 20 percent of men. So, the bottom 20 percent of women are left for the bottom 80 percent of men.³⁵⁶

This community’s leaders say that men can improve their sexual market value by using mind games, improving their looks, and earning more money. One example of a mind game is “negging,” which involves giving backhanded compliments to make women feel insecure. Other techniques include “kino escalation” (touching women more and more intimately) and “going caveman” (becoming aggressively sexual). Some leaders even dehumanize women by describing them as dogs to train and as all holes (ears to listen, mouth to talk, and vaginas to elicit male orgasms).³⁵⁷

Pickup artists believe they are entitled to use women’s bodies for sex and they learn how to sexually harass women and disregard the idea of a woman’s consent to sex. Many in the PUA community post personal accounts describing sexually assaulting women. However, few of them are banned online and few are prosecuted for their crimes.³⁵⁸

Pickup artists’ teachings comprise an international industry that was valued at about $100 million in the period 2018-2020. At that time, Real Social Dynamics had one of the biggest PUA companies with a website that had 142,000 members and a YouTube channel with 100,000 subscribers. This community has also offered boot camps costing hundreds or thousands of dollars and personal trainers with a veneer of public acceptability.³⁵⁹

Men Going Their Own Way

Men going their own way (MGTOW) see women as the problem. Rather than murdering or sexually assaulting them, this community chooses to avoid relationships with women. They go “monk” (abstinence from sex) or use the services of sex workers to get their needs fulfilled. They are self-imposed exiles who hate the government because they believe women control it.³⁶⁰

A central concern of the MGTOW community is false rape allegations, which allies them with men’s rights activists. According to MGTOW, women are an immediate threat to all men and use false rape or domestic violence allegations to damage men, steal their money, or get them thrown in jail. Men in this community also fear being contaminated by women’s supposed mediocrity.³⁶¹

In the 2018-2020 period, the MGTOW subreddit claimed 100,000 subscribers. The related website claimed 33,000 members and 50,000 conversation topics. The site had 25 video channels with 730,000 followers and 130 million views. A Google search for MGTOW vloggers (video blogs) had 2 million results compared to 150,000 for incels in the 2018-2020 time period.³⁶²

Spread of the Manosphere

Laura Bates of the Everyday Sexism Project gathered her data about the reach of incels, men’s rights activists, pickup artists, and men going their own way from 2018-2020. A more recent and even more alarming study comes from the Movember Institute (a men’s health organization). The study shows that the manosphere has become a part of many young men’s lives. A 2024 survey in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia questioned a nationally representative sample of 1000 young men aged 16-25 in each country. The findings were that about two-thirds of the young men regularly engaged with the manosphere. These young men:

1. Saw the manosphere as entertaining and followed some of the influencers’ advice.

1. Reported poorer mental health and more adherence to traditional masculine stereotypes, like stoicism.

1. Held negative views of women.³⁶³

In addition to spreading their misogyny to young men, the manosphere also participates in trolling attacks on women across the world who dare to speak out against misogyny or report it publicly. A survey of 640 women from 119 countries found that more than 70 percent of these human rights defenders, activists, journalists, and media workers have experienced online violence as a result of their work. Online violence includes harassment, abuse, targeted surveillance, image- and video-based abuse, doxxing, hate speech, disinformation, or threats. Forty-one percent of these women experienced offline attacks, abuse, or harassment.³⁶⁴ These attacks use fear to try to silence women who dare to speak up about misogyny.

Reflections

Before doing the research for Essay Series 5, I had thought that the manosphere was a fringe minority of men. It wasn’t until after I met a couple of men within the last few years who spouted misogynistic lies that I realized I needed to learn more about this movement.

I found out two things. First, the manosphere has hundreds of thousands of members and many millions of views of their various websites, YouTube channels, and Reddit pages (i.e. subreddits). Second, the manosphere is frightening because it promotes hate and abuse of women. Some of these misogynists kill women. Others advocate forcing women into concentration camps, rape, sex work, pregnancy, sterilization, and submission to men. These tactics echo those of Nazi Germany.

Young people live much of their lives online, where teenage boys and young men can easily find the manosphere. Much of the time it’s presented on YouTube, which has algorithms that keep people watching videos by providing more and more provocative content. The more people watch videos, the more revenue YouTube gains from advertising.³⁶⁵

People in power, mainstream media, and social media platforms need to stand up and call out the horrors of the manosphere and restrict it to the extent possible. Parents, schools, and other trusted sources need to teach children about its evils. This is important for people of any political persuasion who oppose violence against women. Leaders need to ensure that those in the manosphere who are committing crimes are prosecuted.

How do you think the manosphere has affected you or your community?