What we don't talk about when we talk about the manosphere

"All the world's a scam, and all the men and women merely scammers"

Hasan Minhaj has a joke about how he’s part of a generation of men that don’t read books but listen to podcasts, a state of being that results in his buddies texting him alpha male memes about how “hard times make hard men/hard men make good times/good times make soft men, etc.” It’s a good joke. He does a funny voice when he runs through that whole “hard times…” speech and then yells “Sanjay, you’re a software engineer! Why are you texting me like you’re Julius Caesar?”

Man, pray for Sanjay. Pretty sick burn.

I’m roughly the same age as Hasan Minaj. Though I do read books (fewer than I probably should given that my job is “writer”), I definitely listen to too many podcasts, particularly recently. As has been covered in this space previously, while I normally listen to the kind of podcasts that are micro-targeted for noodle-fingered liberal arts graduates who hear a Duolingo ad and think “you know what, maybe I SHOULD learn Danish,” I’ve been spreading my wings into bro-ier content recently. “For research!” I keep yelling at the Youtube algorithm in vain, “don’t get the wrong idea!”

This is not a novel move on my part. Both in the lead-up to the U.S. election and particularly in its aftermath, a cottage-industry of explainers and exegeses has popped up, all of them attempting to translate the Internet’s king-making dudes for the general population. For my money, the best of the bunch has been Jamie Loftus’ series on her 16th Minute of Fame podcast, a strong example of how to consider the guys, but to place them in the context of the world that birthed them and the people (women in particular) whom they impact.

My particular interest in the manosphere is, in turn, pretty similar to many others of my political ilk. The fact that a handful of men have been gifted this much power feels deeply personal. I am both a cis guy trying to figure out my own walk in the world, a father to a boy and a girl, and an anxious bleeding heart. I’m also a writer and organizer, which means that I’m fascinated by human longing. I care about what we’re seeking and failing to find in this world and each other. I care even more about how all that seeking can lead us down many different paths, some of them connective and vibrant, others suffocating and destructive.

While I’ve appreciated existing attempts to explain the manosphere, many of them focus on the text of their message (“what are they saying about Trump? How are they discussing trans people?” etc.), and less on what broader worldview they’re promoting and what about that schema is appealing to millions. And yes, of course the answer is “patriarchy in general, and more specifically patriarchy’s desire to remain unchallenged,” but, importantly, it’s not just that.

What’s it like becoming an amateur manosphere scholar? Well, for one, you find yourself frequently wishing that we had come up with a better term than “manosphere.” Recently, the wilder boys in my daughter’s second-grade class have started calling themselves “the mates,” and I really want that to catch on as a descriptor of All These Microphones Dudes, but it’s probably too niche. The bigger side effect is that once you make this particular anthropological choice, you find yourself spending too much time looking at images you’d rather avoid. I am sorry in advance, but I am referring to the way J.D. Vance sits when he is hanging out with the fellas.

This particular crotch-heavy view of the current Vice President of the United States comes from an interview he did a few months ago with the Nelk Boys, a crew of Canadian-American pranksters turned hard seltzer barons/dude-whispering podcasters. I’m not being snarky by adding the “prankster” honorific; that was and is their primary claim to fame. Credit where credit’s due— previous to my encounter with the Nelks, I couldn’t even imagine the headline “YouTubers called ‘trashy’ for visiting indigenous tribe and giving them vapes,” but we live in a world of rapidly expanding malevolent horizons.

The prankster part is a feature not a bug. The Nelks are the kind of guys whose conception of masculinity leans heavily on hedonistic subversiveness, who want you to know not only that they’ve done some stuff but that they got away with it, bro. Listening to their podcast, I was reminded of just how much the lingua franca of high school boys is performative lying. Lying to girls. Lying to teachers. Lying to strangers. The closest I got to being arrested as a teenager was one time, during halftime at a basketball game, when I tagged along with a couple guys to the nearest Taco Johns. Once there, the other guys devised a profoundly sub-Oceans 11 scheme wherein they’d hide the bucket of complimentary mints next to the cash register so that the… cashier would assume we’d stolen them? And get angry? That was the whole plan, as far as I remember it. Anyway, the cops were called because this immensely corny prank somehow worked in spite of itself (the cashier really did believe that a bunch of stupid teenage boys stole a bunch of mints and then ran away like doofuses). It was all so dumb. I just wanted a bean burrito and some potato olés.

Maybe your high school wasn’t like that. Maybe that was a Montana thing. Maybe the bros in my orbit would have been better behaved if we had a bigger mall. But for me, high school was full of dudes boasting about nonsense like that. Full of sound and faux-rebellion, signaling nothing. The times I joined in, it was out of cowardice and entropy. If I went along this one time, maybe I’d be spared in the future.

Even if you’ve never spent any time with podcasters like the Nelks, you’ve likely encountered this mindset in the wild— the idea that it’s cool to do or say something that you have been told not to do or say, just because. This seems to be the core impetus behind the sudden wave of post-election Trump supporters bragging about their relief at finally being able to call people r****** and f**** again. “What’s the point?” you’d be forgiven for wondering. Even setting aside the cruelty, isn’t that just a tremendously dorky thing for one’s heart to desire? If a genie were to grant you three wishes, would your first one truly be “I want to sound like a bully in an ‘80s teen comedy?” What a waste!

One answer, extremely correct but incomplete, is that this is what social justice backlash looks like in its neediest base state. Another is the broader trap of comparative masculinity— if you say the slurs loudly enough, perhaps fewer will be leveled your way. Speaking as a former accessory to mint-based prankery, I get it.

I suspect there’s more to it than that, though. It isn’t just juvenile nihilism and fear. As I’ve spent more time in the manosphere, I’ve discovered another part of the equation, one that allows uncaring recklesnessness to be deployed not merely as a rad way to live your life, but a moral necessity.

This worldview brought to you by Happy Dad seltzer, whose actual tagline is “football fans don’t drink skinny cans,” which is basically a six word Gender Studies masters thesis.

Back to J.D. Vance’s bro-down with the Nelks. The podcast begins with Vance attempting to prove, despite all outward evidence to the contrary, that he too is a hard partying bad boy. Upon hearing that Vance is 39, one of the Nelks¹ inquires about the planned festivities for his upcoming milestone birthday.

Nelk Boy: “When’s the 40th? What’s good for the 40th?”

Cool Guy Vice President: “August 2nd.”

Second Nelk Boy: “Dang, we’re gonna party!”

Cool Guy Vice President: “Nothing anymore, man. I’ve got people following me around. I can’t do anything anymore…’

This goes on for a little bit. Vance, a hyper-ambitious middle-aged striver straight out of Yale Law’s try-hardiest corridors, implies that he would love to rage in Vegas with his buddies and/or the Nelks, if not for that damned secret service. It’s an unconvincing performance on all counts, but that’s beside the point. One thing that J.D. Vance and I have in common is that I too could never pull off a credible impression of a devil-may-care rager. “No seriously guys, you should have seen me back in the day.” We tell ourselves stories in order to bro.

Just a few minutes after the mutual assurances of rebelliousness, there’s a pivot. No longer discussing their own misbehavior, the discussion switches to supposedly more powerful forces that are also breaking the rules, but not in a cool way. In this particular case, it’s Google, but I’ve heard versions of this “nefarious powers-that-be are ripping you off” conversation on dozens of podcasts now. It’s always a through-the-looking-glass experience, because I agree that the world is rigged, disproportionally by big corporations, but in a very different way than the manosphere would have us believe.

I’ll save you a full play-by play of Vance and the Nelk’s Google conspiracy (it’s about search results being skewed against Trumpers). What’s matters is that they claim that Google is crooked because they’re conniving leftists, but they’ve gotten away with it because the masses have been too guileless to “do their research” and learn the truth.

Fortunately, per Vance, there’s a silver lining here, and it’s to be found in the Nelks— bad boy rebels, but for goodness and justice.

“Google’s still crazy, but now people are watching podcasts like yours– I mean millions of people watching podcasts like yours– so this movement of people thinking for themselves is a much bigger deal.”

Picture of the artist who, quite frankly, hates all the circus, all the madness going on

Once I started noticing this “somebody else is trying to rip you off, so that’s why we need no BS-outlaws like us” schema, I’ve started seeing it everywhere. When the former prankster-turned-boxer Jake Paul made his final case for Trump, his core argument was that “[Trump’s] labeled a ‘felon,’ but remember, the founders of this country were seen as felons… shouldn’t it be argued that the one they’re trying to kill [Trump] is the one we need.” Makes you think, man. Likewise, this past week, when Joe Rogan attempted to defend Elon Musk’s Nazi salute, he argued that, sure, Musk is a wild free spirit, but we all know that “they” are always trying to slander good people by calling them Nazis without evidence. On one hand Musk was railroaded, but also aren’t we lucky that he’s so crazy that he can’t be shamed? Not Rogan’s finest work, but the repetition is the point.

Taken together, it all feels analogous to the old “good guy with a gun” canard. If we are surrounded on all sides by unscrupulous scammers, than we— the nation’s brave, patriotic bad boys— have no choice but to lie, cheat, and steal, but this time for America.

It doesn’t seem coincidental that two of the fastest growing hobbies/obsessions for manosphere-influenced young men are sports gambling and cryptocurrency. At their core, both are adversarial pursuits that pit the user as an outlaw (“a degenerate gambler” or a “hustler”) who wins by outsmarting unseen forces that want to rip him off. Crypto obsessives know a scam is afoot; they just want to be on the take. Likewise, gamblers aren’t dumb. They know that the house always wins, but not if they can somehow avoid playing by the house’s rules.

It’s an extremely seductive worldview. Not only do boys get to be boys, but since the world is full of unscrupulous actors trying to rip us all off, boys being boys aren’t being selfish, they’re our last line of defense. It’s like the old saying. You can’t con a con. Might as well let them run the country.

It’s a sweaty story, full of contradictions and omissions large enough to drive a malfunctioning Cybertruck through. But again, it’s also so surreal, because it’s frustratingly adjacent to the actual truth. The manosphere dudes aren’t wrong that our world leaves so many of us alone and vulnerable to exploitation. They’re lying about who is doing the exploiting (as well as their central role in keeping the grift alive), but it doesn’t surprise me why their approach has found so much resonance. It’s not because masculinity is experiencing its own isolated crisis, it’s because we’re all left rudderless by creaky, top-heavy alienating systems. They’re liars, the manosphere titans, but they aren’t wrong to notice all our collective longing.

There’s so much about this that’s depressing, and I’m sympathetic as to why debates about the manosphere so frequently devolve into zero-sum dichotomies. Should those of us who dream of justice for all pay attention to this ecosystem for the sake of preventing more young men from falling for its charms? Or is doing so just another misguided example of “himpathy,” one more trick to get us to chase good attention after bad?

The more time I spend with the manosphere’s current epistemology of righteous rebellion, the more I believe that’s a false choice. The point is that precious few of us— across lines of gender, race, class, sexual orientation and every other identity marker— experience true loving, accountable community (neighbors who know our names, local political groups helping us make sense of our immediate surroundings, unions serving as a salve against hopelessness in our 9 to 5s, social spaces that accept us unconditionally). That’s precisely the poisoned soil in which distrust and suspicion grows, especially when you add in economic precarity. And while that’s particularly true for those of us who are more likely to buy the lie of individualism (white people, men, etc.), it’s also a universal truth. Grifters and opportunists prosper when trust is low. Liberatory social movements bloom when trust is high.

The terrible news is that there is no simple solution to the manosphere. We don’t make it disappear either through scoffing at it nor treating it with kid gloves. The blessed news is that the same long-term solution that will keep more men from heeding the siren call of the Nelks, Pauls and Rogans is the same one that we all deserve. We don’t need to merely be lectured about our obligation to trust institutions. We need to feel trust in our bones. The kind of trust that doesn’t come from a sly millionaire sneering “listen to me, because I’m the only scoundrel who is on your side” all the way to the bank. The kind of trust that exists because we built it together. The kind of trust that knows your kids’ names. The kind of trust that sees you on your worst days. The kind of trust that speaks the truth: the sun does not rise and set on us alone, but that if we keep showing up, we can be a universe for each other.

End notes:

End notes:

1. While we’re talking about actually building community with each other… that’s the focus of the next round of Barnraisers classes. These ones will be about how to actually build and sustain strong communities. Boy, a bunch of you have signed up already! Great! I hope more of you join us. More info here and registration here. It would be a joy to learn together.

2. These classes are virtual, open to all (regardless of organizing experience), offered at many different times, and free (though donations are appreciated). As I often mention, I can offer them for free (and also offer unlimited free ongoing support to participants) thanks to all of you who support my work with paid subscriptions. Thank you (and for those who can’t help financially, sharing these pieces is a very helpful gift as well).

3. Speaking of paid subscriptions, you may have noticed that I’ve been more likely to default to limiting comments to paid subscribers recently. While part of that is one more thank you to folks who support this space financially, the bigger reason is that I think that more private space has helped make for more vulnerable conversations. The dilemma, though, is that I know that not all who’d like to comment can afford a subscription, so if you’re in that camp feel free to email me at garrett at barnraisersproject.org and I will comp you, no questions asked.

4. I know that our community includes many who have already been impacted by various Federal hiring and grant freezes/DEI witch hunts/other assorted nonsense, as well as individuals who have or will be targeted by immigration raids (either directly or indirectly). If there’s anything we or I can do for you, please let us know. Sending so much love and solidarity.

5. For song of the week, let’s go with one of America’s catchiest scams. “Convoy,” a song that purported to be written by and for outlaw truckers but which was actually performed by a fake artist (“CW McCall”) created for commercials. On one hand, I don’t like lying, nor do I like that this became an anthem of the 2022 Canadian anti-lockdown truckers protest, but I just can’t quit it. “Mercy sakes alive, looks like we’ve got ourselves a convoy.” You tell ‘em, fake trucker C.W. McCall.

The full Song of the Week playlist is available on both Apple Music and Spotify.

Pictured, me in front of my own private manosphere (Jesus and two majestic steeds). Our podcast will drop soon, we’re just trying to score a big vitamin supplement sponsorship.

1. Listen friends, I may be an amateur manosphere scholar, but I have my limits. One of those is that I refuse, on principle, to learn which of the Nelks is which. Out of respect, I won’t make up names for them (I’d probably just go with variations on “Cody”) but I’m a working dad and there are only so many hours in the day. Relatedly, yesterday I recorded a podcast interview and accidentally called them the “Necks,” which I swear was not intentional but also… pretty funny!