Sphere of Influence

Claire Sullivan ’25 willingly agreed to enter the manosphere. As part of her Smith degree in the study of women and gender, she created a special studies project exploring the origins, philosophies, and potential solutions to the loose online ecosystem known for its misogyny, anti-feminism, and hypermasculinity. Manosphere podcasters and social media influencers on YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, Rumble, and other forums espouse male supremacy and traditional gender roles. They sometimes add racism, antisemitism, and homophobia into the mix. 

For Sullivan, the anonymous messaging board 4chan is the hub of the manosphere and “the root of all evil on the internet.” Along with pornography, she says, “Every word that you’ve ever been told is politically incorrect is fair game” on 4chan. “There is a kind of self-pity” among 4chan users, “but also a deep anger at the world and a belief in hidden systems running the world.”  

Sullivan originally planned to write a thesis on the manosphere, but ultimately opted to do a shorter special project because immersing herself in this dark region of the web was so dispiriting. “The entire point of the manosphere,” she says, “is to feel hate, sadness, and like the world is attacking you—to validate this perspective that everything is bad.” 

The manosphere’s most notorious member may be British American influencer Andrew Tate, who has said that wives “belong” to their husbands and has written that women should “bare [sic] some responsibility” for being raped. He and his brother, Tristan Tate, will stand trial in Britain on charges of sexual violence, including rape, assault, and human trafficking. Romania is investigating whether the Tate brothers trafficked more than 30 women. The Tates are also under investigation in the United States. 

Other infamous names in the network include white supremacist and antisemite Nick Fuentes, whose America First podcast has been banned on Spotify as hate speech, and Myron Gaines, co-host of the misogynistic Fresh and Fit Podcast, author of Why Women Deserve Less, and a defender of Hitler. While not as extreme, Joe Rogan, host of The Joe Rogan Experience—the nation’s most popular podcast—is often considered part of the “mainstream” portion of the manosphere for his hypermasculine tone. So is comedian Theo Von and his This Past Weekend podcast, and Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist, media personality, and podcaster who espouses controversial views on gender roles. 

Whether the manosphere is reflecting contemporary American culture, influencing it, or both, the results are troubling. In a 2025 survey by GQ magazine of 1,929 American men, 68% said they worry that children are exposed to harmful ideas about male behavior. Among younger men, 43% under age 35 said they often feel lonely, compared to 35% over 35. The younger group is 21% more likely to associate dominance with masculinity compared to their older peers, and 32% of them said they feel pressure to act more masculine in relationships.

Men’s media use is also striking. While 69% of respondents said they listen to podcasts, 8% would be uncomfortable watching or listening to their favorite podcast or streamer with their partner or spouse. Twenty-three percent said they never read newspapers or news sites.

The sentiments expressed in the manosphere aren’t new. “Back in the ’80s, when Fatal Attraction was filling cineplexes, I remember watching with horror as the male moviegoers cheered Michael Douglas’s attempts to drown his jilted dalliance in the bathtub. But other than yelling ‘Bitch!’ in the dark, these guys were on their own,” recalls Susan Faludi, author of 2006’s Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women and former Joan Leiman Jacobson Visiting Nonfiction Writer in Residence at Smith. 

“Now they have the manosphere, which amplifies their voices while fueling their rage by feeding them lies about female dominance,” Faludi wrote in an email. 

Some experts might trace the origins of the manosphere to Kathy Sierra’s experience in 2007. A game developer and blogger, she spoke publicly about the need to pay attention to online hate and harassment. Misogynists responded with death threats and an image of her next to a noose. Another early sign of online hostility to women was the treatment of gynecologists who provide abortions. The so-called Nuremberg Files website published their names and addresses in one of the first cases of doxing, accompanied by graphic images and text linking them to Nazis. 

For Soraya Chemaly, director and co-founder of the Women’s Media Center Speech Project—a nonprofit co-founded by Gloria Steinem ’56—the manosphere intensified between 2009 and 2013. “Twitter in some ways supercharged that, but truly its origins were in 4chan, 8chan, Reddit—places where large communities of men could aggregate, talk, and vent their frustrations,” says Chemaly, author of All We Want Is Everything: How We Dismantle Male Supremacy. 

From there, an online harassment campaign against feminism and diversity in video game culture, dubbed Gamergate, showed the power of online organizing. “From 2014 to the election in 2024, you can really see the straight-line trajectory from Gamergate to QAnon,” Chemaly says. Young American men from 2020 turned sharply rightward politically compared to young women and to their peers in other nations, she notes. 

Some manosphere adherents are incels, a term frequently defined as boys and men who believe they can’t attract women and blame women for that and other failures. The Netflix drama series Adolescence, about a 13-year-old boy accused of killing a female classmate, introduced that phenomenon to a wider audience. Incels believe that 80% of women are attracted to only 20% of men, an often-quoted statistic in manosphere culture. 

That theory leads to manosphere fixations on wealth, self-improvement, and fitness, with corresponding products and paid programs to become more masculine. “Certain spheres of incel communities promote really extreme body modification to attract or trap women,” Sullivan says. She points to mewing, an “exercise” popularized on TikTok to develop a more chiseled jawline, which appeals to teenage and even middle school boys. Other facets of the manosphere include Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a separatist, supremacist movement of heterosexual men “who have chosen to remove themselves from the perceived toxicity of women.” So-called pickup artists, who rely on coercive strategies to manipulate women for heterosexual sex, make up another community. 

It doesn’t take long for social media algorithms to serve manosphere content to American teens. A Dublin City University study, originally reported in The New York Times, created accounts for fake 16-year-old boys. It found that in under nine minutes, TikTok suggested entries into the manosphere, soon leading to anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQ+ content once the initial videos were viewed. “Much of this content rails against equality and promotes the submission of women,” the researchers wrote. YouTube Shorts—short-form content on the platform—offered equally potent content designed to trigger viewers’ insecurities. 

Gaming also continues to be a powerful pathway to the manosphere, according to Carrie Baker, Sylvia Dlugasch Bauman Chair of American Studies and a professor in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender. When a young man plays violent, addictive video games and communicates solely with other players for hours on end, Baker says, it’s tough for friends or family to provide any moderating influence. 

“I think [gamers] are often lonely, they’re often insecure, they feel like misfits. And in this gaming world, they can feel powerful. They can feel like they have a community,” Baker says. The pandemic pushed everyone to be online, but some young men essentially stayed there as their primary way of interacting with the world.

The manosphere grew in influence as a reaction to women’s advancement. Women have made strides in education and the workforce, both in the United States and around the world. At best, the manosphere scoffs at those achievements; at worst, it seeks an end to them.  

Yet it isn’t a social movement on its own, argues Nancy Whittier, Sophia Smith Professor and professor of sociology. “It doesn’t necessarily, as a collective, take action offline, but it certainly influences individuals and groups that might be taking action,” says Whittier, who studies gender and social movements. “It helps to change the broader culture. It stretches the limits of what’s socially acceptable to say, and then that makes certain things possible politically too.” 

Some observers consider the manosphere a backlash to the #MeToo movement against sexual abuse and harassment. First founded in 2006 by activist Tarana Burke, #MeToo became part of the cultural conversation again in 2017, sparked by accusations against now-convicted felon Harvey Weinstein. 

Faludi offers a surprising perspective on the ties between #MeToo and the manosphere: “The conventional wisdom is that the #MeToo movement unleashed the current torrent of male rage. While no doubt #MeToo fanned the flames—as did decades of eroding wages and declining occupational opportunities for men without advanced degrees—the prime force driving the fury is a visually dominated, consumption-driven economy, made leagues worse by social media, which has turned ‘masculinity’ into an ornamental commodity.” 

“Manhood has become the male version of eye candy, proven in marketplace terms, by appearance, popularity, celebrity,” Faludi says. “Manhood is judged by how much you’re seen, not what you do. And performing rage is a highly effective way to draw eyeballs.” 

The manosphere has grown more powerful because of social media algorithms that reward fury, fear, and other strong emotions to keep viewers engaged. Social media helps people find others like themselves, for better or worse. There have always been angry, disaffected young men, but now they can find and understand themselves as a cohort, according to Timothy Recuber, department chair of sociology at Smith and a sociologist whose research focuses on mass media, digital culture, and emotions. Young men can come to believe that their unhappiness is due to social movements beyond their control, such as feminism, rather than their own behavior. 

Had the internet not existed, there would still be pushback to feminism in the 21st century, but it might be less potent. “The internet creates conditions for this stuff to gain power and cultural relevance quicker or more intensely than it would have if we could envision a world without the internet,” Recuber says. 

The effects play out in the political environment. Manosphere proponents have been credited with mobilizing young men to vote in the 2024 election, including those who were apolitical and hadn’t voted before. According to exit poll data from NBC News, among voters aged 18 to 29, men were more likely than women to vote for Donald Trump. 

The manosphere isn’t limited to white men in the United States. An American Black manosphere has developed, along with versions in other countries. “There’s an English-language–dominant component of the manosphere, but its core ideas are a lingua franca,” or common language, says Chemaly, of the Women’s Media Center. “We live in a patriarchal world. That has great appeal to economically anxious, aggrieved men who feel their status is falling. They cannot succeed. Capitalism is kind of crumbling. What are they going to do? In every continent, you can find a variation.” 

The corresponding “womanosphere” is known for its celebration of “trad wives” and an emphasis on homemaking skills, having children, and supporting one’s husband. If you don’t have a “provider man” yet, these experts will show you how to land one. Some womanosphere proponents explicitly describe feminism as anti-male and anti-family.

Could feminist equivalents to the manosphere counter its toxic ideas? Smith sources suggested there won’t be one or even a dozen online heroines who alone can lessen the manosphere’s impact. The manosphere gained its power by being outrageous, which is not a model others would do well to copy. Funding for feminist media outlets is also limited. 

Beyond that, Smith experts believe an online counteroffensive isn’t the answer. It will take many people speaking out, developing face-to-face relationships, getting involved in organizations that promote the kind of world people want to live in, and building communities that aren’t online. 

One success of the manosphere is that it helps its followers feel they are not alone. The percentage of young Americans with depression has doubled since 2017, a September 2025 Gallup poll found. It climbed from 13% in 2017 to 26.7% in 2025. Loneliness; global issues such as climate change; a difficult job market; and rising costs for groceries, housing, and health care may all contribute. It can be a comfort for men in the manosphere to blame women, immigrants, or other groups for forces that feel beyond their control. 

Chemaly says developing relationships with kids, teens, and young men is a way that anyone can act on their own to build a healthier country. Talk with teens in your circle—and listen to them—about the manosphere’s effects. They can know far more about online culture than adults. “Some of them are experiencing what I can only describe as a midlife crisis—only they’re 19,” she says.

Recuber says parents need to check what their young children and teens are watching. He finds that his 12-year-old son, like many tweens, prefers watching YouTube videos over half-hour television shows. Recuber talks with him about influencers to avoid, an important step even for kids raised with strong values. “There’s all kinds of algorithms that are deciding to serve your kid all kinds of content,” he says. “You can’t really know why, and they don’t know why they’re getting served it, either.” 

Combating the manosphere will also take societal changes, Recuber says. Income disparities make many people feel shut out. As of late 2024, the top 10% of Americans controlled about 67% of the wealth, according to the “State of U.S. Household Wealth” report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. “That’s a really hard thing to grapple with, and it doesn’t seem to have any easy answers, because neither political party really addresses it very much,” he says. He wants to see “a real expansion of the social safety net and a real boom in all kinds of different jobs, and jobs that pay living wages, where people just aren’t worried about feeling precarious. I think that would take care of a lot of things, and we haven’t tried it. We haven’t had that in a long time.”  

Another key change would be for feminism to highlight its benefits for men, Faludi argues. “The tendency now, when faced with male regression on the gender front, is to attack in kind—to trash men online, as men online have trashed women. This gets us nowhere,” she emphasizes. “Feminism once made a robust case for women’s liberation being men’s liberation. That argument is rarely expressed these days, and it needs to be, because it is, in fact, the reality. Men are as trapped in gender molds as women. The expectations placed on men are as stultifying and punishing as the ones placed on women. Feminism, by freeing us all from these traps, is good for men.” 

The manosphere has risen quickly, but hasn’t always been influential. “It wasn’t that long ago that surveys of young men found them to be more supportive of a range of feminist and social justice causes than their elders,” Faludi says. “None of this is written in stone. There’s always hope, but only if we can find our way out of the soul-deadening, bloodlust-inducing echo chamber of virtual existence and begin to seek pragmatic solutions that make life better for real people in the real world.”  

For Sullivan, the Smith graduate who is now pursuing a master’s degree in library science at Aberystwyth University in Wales, “truly talking to one another, making time to see each other as fully human, is deeply important.” Smith is one place that can foster a strong community, she says. Sullivan has experienced “the global force of Smithies” and finds solace in connecting with a group of women with similar experiences, values, and drive.

Andrea Cooper ’83 has written for NationalGeographic.com, SmithsonianMag.com, The Washington Post, and many other websites and publications.