Mansplaining the manosphere

There’s even a name for it now: the manosphere. An online network of like-minded idiots who flock together, whether it be in sweat lodges or on Twitch streams, around what they feel are urgent issues of masculinity and what it means to be real men. What really unites them, though, is that they are misogynists who believe in the supremacy of men over women, despite their very immediate access to a wealth of empirical evidence to the contrary.

They’re a poisonous bunch, operating mostly on various digital-media platforms. Their influence has grown massively in recent years, especially among boys, young men, dim-witted oligarchs, and corrupt politicians. The most nauseating of the subgroups are the incels, those self-diagnosed “involuntary celibates” who believe that they are entitled to relationships and sex, which are somehow being withheld from them. Even worse, they believe that they are entitled to whine about it on an ongoing basis. They apparently haven’t worked out that nobody finds a whining ninny attractive.

Another wacky subset of the manosphere is the “Men Going Their Own Way” mob, who encourage men to break off relationships with women. This is because women are inherently crazy and toxic, and their feminism, as the manoclowns call any philosophy that dares to suggest men shouldn’t rule the world, is dangerous to real men. The only way for endangered men to survive is by minimising interactions with women, and preferably to have none at all. It’s sweet that they’re pretending that they have a choice, I’m sure you’ll agree.

As laughable as it is, the whineosphere (a much more accurate name than manosphere) can produce some very violent consequences. For some incels, for instance, to really successfully cut yourself off from women you need to kill them. There have been mass shootings, extreme online harassment of women, and just basic glorification of violence against women. Ordinarily, I’d poke exasperated fun at these poor oppressed men, trusting that their inability to breed will cause them to remove themselves from the evolutionary gene pool. I know, I know. That’s a really stupid strategy but, honestly, it’s difficult to take the whineosphere’s griping seriously. Except that now it’s moved into the social and political mainstream.

I know what you’re thinking. Why should I care? If you are in a forest of men mansplaining to men, does anyone even hear the mansplaining? Unfortunately, there’s an entire industry set up to make sure that the manosphere’s toxic ideology reaches everyone in the world. It’s become an even more serious threat now that it’s being amplified by Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, the three Horse’s Arses of the Algorithmic Apocalypse, and their Big Daddy Donald Trump.

Alas, Trump’s presidency, and the campaigning leading up to it, has legitimised and amplified the manosphere. He’s courted the manosphere’s whiners-in-chief, to the extent of even intervening diplomatically with Romania to get Andrew and Tristan Tate’s travel bans lifted. Never mind that the brothers were being detained on charges including rape, human trafficking, and money laundering. Alpha males have to stick together.

Trump’s alpha-male schtick, attacking feminism and insulting women, has made the manosphere a mainstream force in the US and, by unhappy geopolitical extension, the world. Which is one of the reasons that the tech bros who control the platforms where the manosphere lives all turned up on coronation day to kiss The Donald’s ring. I leave you to decide which ring we’re talking about.

To emphasise the scale of reach here: we’re talking Musk’s X; Bezos’s Amazon and Twitch; and Zuckerberg’s Meta, Facebook, and Instagram. And you can add Google’s evil algorithms to that mix, too. That’s a very large part of the world we’re talking about. It’s not just their personal actions — like Zuckerberg’s contention that business culture needs to “regrow its manhood” or Musk’s reinstatement and promotion of accounts that spew hate speech and misogyny — that promote the manosphere ideology. The platforms’ algorithms amplify the clickbait themes of oppressed masculinity and help both its professional populists and its gimcrack grifters reach ever-growing audiences.

It’s never been a better time to be a man who self-identifies as oppressed. Never mind that liberating feeling of being able to justify sexism, racism, xenophobia, and beating your wife — or “the good old days”, to use the technical term — the opportunities to turn a quick rand are flowing. And you’ll see this in South Africa’s own plagiarised version of the manosphere, which is active and influential, and just what a country with rampant gender-based violence needs.

We can’t just laugh it off, as hilariously pathetic as it is.

From the June edition of Wanted, 2025