Your bag is empty.
When people ask me what my job is, I’m not always sure what to say. My go-to line is that I write about “guys doing weird stuff on the Internet.” I think that’s a pretty good umbrella for this column and my reporting on looksmaxxing, penis enlargement, get-rich-quick schemes, and other things of that nature.
“So you write about the manosphere,” they often say.
Well, that depends. Which manosphere are you talking about?
Last week, I wrote about how the fall of Andrew Tate is going to affect the manosphere. My view is that it will simply grow new, nastier heads to replace Tate, and we should resist the temptation to consider the whole thing over. My column found some traction on r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates, a community trying to “address various issues that disproportionately affect males” while “reducing inequality through social change”; specifically, though, it is opposed to perceived overreaches of feminism. The Redditors in this sub all disagreed with my use of “manosphere.” The Left Wing Male Advocates decried the word as a “convenient boogeyman” for feminists, used to malign “men’s rights, fathers’ rights, and criticism of feminism.” Another wrote, “I’d like for people that talk about the manosphere to properly define it for once.”
I agree. So I’ll try. In my mind and in this column, I used it to specifically mean the influencers who played the Ye song “Heil Hitler” in a Miami nightclub in January 2026, namely, Andrew Tate, Tristan Tate, Nick Fuentes, Sneako, Myron Gaines, Clavicular, and Justin Waller. I called this group the “manosphere” largely for lack of a better term, and because I figured people would understand who I meant.
That was a mistake. After years of reckless overuse, the word is functionally meaningless. The definition changes for everyone who uses it, and for many, it means “men with a microphone that I dislike.”
This was not always the case. When the term “manosphere” was coined in 2009, it responded to two distinct phenomena. First was the blogosphere, the interconnected web of bloggers and readers that formed online in the Aughts. It seems impossibly quaint by modern standards, like discussing politics in the agora or handing out pamphlets in Boston Common. This was an information ecosystem that moved slower and enabled real conversation compared to the short-form informational hellscape we exist in now. Second was the rise of coherent, novel forms of male thought that emerged online at the same time. Incels, Men Going Their Own Way, and Pick-Up Artists were radical, shocking new identities. In the mid 2010s, multiple mass shootings were committed by men subscribed to those ideologies. “Manosphere” emerged as a useful shorthand to describe one of the most consequential social movements of Web 2.0.
The modern manosphere simply represents the evolution of those phenomena. Tate’s “pimping” courses are partially derived from pick-up artistry. Sneako and Nick Fuentes’s views on women and marriage owe a debt to Men Going Their Own Way. Some commenters wondered why Clavicular is included in the manosphere. But his looksmaxxing techniques were created by committed incels, and he is probably the single most popular intellectual inheritor of that movement. The real manosphere still exists, whether or not the word means anything.
Unfortunately, the Left Wing Male Advocates are themselves contributing to the dilution of the term. (I don’t mean to pick on them specifically; I’m just highlighting them as a subset of the broader community of less-pilled men looking for solutions to their issues.) One commenter went so far as to call the manosphere the “portion of the internet that talks about men’s issues.” That is the same erroneous thinking that led Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, and Theo Von to be lumped in with the manosphere during the 2024 election. By that definition, r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates itself and my column are part of the manosphere. Danny McBride’s new short story collection about middle-aged, frustrated fathers would be the manosphere, as would Zach Baron’s GQ article about how his life changed after having a second son. Does that feel accurate to you? Of course not.
Men must talk to men about being men if we are to make progress as men. To that end, we should reject an expansive definition of the manosphere, particularly one that includes us. I applaud the people in that subreddit for highlighting that there are unseen dangers and unsolved problems facing men today. As one commenter put it, “Widespread misandry, feminized education, discrimination in jobs, no hopes of dating and family, being unappreciated, unwanted, these push boys to the manosphere looking for solutions desperately.” I want to talk about this stuff, just as you do and millions of men and boys do too.
The fact is, we need to. Men and boys are suffering, falling behind, and reacting to a changing world in strange, often harmful ways. Right now, we’ve ceded that terrain to racists and accused rapists trying to get rich quick off screen-addicted children. Countering the manosphere is that much harder if we pretend like it doesn’t exist.
