Surviving the Manosphere

In the tense opening sequence of the four-part Netflix drama Adolescence, armed police break down the door of a small row house in an unnamed northern English town. It is the home of the Miller family, and the police have come to arrest thirteen-year-old Jamie on suspicion of murder. The camera keeps us close to the experience of the terrified family—the boy who wets himself at the sight of weapons being pointed at him, the bewildered parents outraged that police officers are rifling through their possessions. As Jamie is bundled into a police van, the sound of his rapid breathing is amplified. It is a brutal scene, and we are guided toward the possibility that this is a miscarriage of justice: the frightened child could not possibly be guilty of such a heinous crime.

The police officers and other officials are portrayed as phlegmatic and more or less decent. “Have you had your breakfast, son?” inquires the booking sergeant as Jamie is processed into custody. Again, we remain close to the boy’s experience, as the gruff voice becomes muffled and the camera drifts, letting us understand that he’s finding it hard to concentrate. His parents and older sister arrive at the police station. His dad, Eddie—played by Stephen Graham, one of the show’s creators—is helpless and anguished, unable to protect Jamie from what appears to be a monstrous injustice. As they sit in an interrogation room, Eddie asks the most important question: “Did you do it?” Jamie shakes his head.

The initial interview unfolds over fifteen minutes of screen time. Eddie, sitting in as Jamie’s “appropriate adult,” discovers that his son has posted pictures of models on Instagram, with what the lead detective characterizes as “a series of comments and innuendos which seem pretty aggressive.” “How do you feel about women?” the boy is asked. He shrugs. He’s shown a picture of a sneaker that he admits is like a pair he owns. Does he know a girl named Katie Leonard? We realize that Eddie was not aware of Jamie’s online life. Katie, a student at Jamie’s school, has been found dead in a parking lot, stabbed seven times. Finally the detectives produce CCTV footage showing definitively that Jamie is the perpetrator. He is seen approaching the girl and attacking her.

There is no room for doubt. The detectives and the solicitor leave father and son alone. Jamie begins to cry. Eddie is stunned. In a particularly wrenching moment, Jamie tries to hug him and he flinches. “What have you done?” he sobs. Then his paternal instincts kick in, and he embraces his son. Owen Cooper, who had no previous acting experience, plays Jamie with a combination of fragility and rage. This exchange with the equally powerful Graham carries an almost unbearable weight of grief.

Each of the four episodes of Adolescence unfolds in a single unbroken take. The cinematographer, Matthew Lewis, and the director, Philip Barantini, used a small camera on a gimbal that could be passed between operators and sometimes clipped to a drone, so the viewer is taken seamlessly in and out of rooms, through windows, and at one point up in the air over the crime scene to survey the entire landscape in which the drama is unfolding. The single-take structure feels fluid and seamless, complementing Jack Thorne’s solid, unflashy writing and emphasizing its humanity and naturalism.

The second episode picks up the story three days after the murder, leaving Jamie’s family to focus on the school. Detectives have arrived to interview students, hoping to understand Jamie’s motive and to track down the murder weapon, which has not been found. The lead police investigator, Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters), sends a voice message to his own teenage son, warning him that he’s outside and will probably have to come into his class. We begin to understand how the consequences of the crime are rippling through the community. School staff members discuss calls they’ve received from worried parents and complain that they’re now expected to be “security guards and social workers.” Katie’s best friend, Jade, reacts aggressively to the investigators, outraged that she’s being asked to “talk bad” about her friend.

We see a school that’s stretched to the limit, in which some teachers are apathetic and cynical while others struggle to help their vulnerable charges. At the core of this episode is a private conversation between Bascombe and his son, Adam, who explains a series of emojis that the victim and her friends had posted on Jamie’s Instagram in the weeks before her murder. “Red pill is like I see the truth. It’s a call to action by the manosphere.” The “100” emoji, mostly used to signify total agreement, is glossed as a reference to the “80 to 20 rule,” the idea that 80 percent of women are attracted to 20 percent of men, leaving the rest as a sexual underclass. “You must trick them,” explains Adam. “You’ll never get them in a normal way.” It emerges that Katie was bullying Jamie, accusing him of being an incel. “Does any of this Instagram stuff affect you?” asks Bascombe. “I’m on Insta,” says Adam, “but I don’t post.”

This scene has generated a lot of commentary, with mainstream publications like the Daily Mail and Cosmopolitan breathlessly informing their readers that the show has revealed a “secret code” used by adolescents. Younger and more online viewers have been skeptical, suggesting that Adam’s explanation has only an oblique relationship to reality. “Seems like parent rage-bait,” wrote one Reddit user. The coverage bears more than a passing resemblance to previous moral panics about the younger generation, notably around texting and other forms of Internet culture. Regardless of its accuracy, Adam’s explanation efficiently signals the fear that propels the plot of Adolescence—that teenage boys are being exposed to a toxic and highly misogynistic online world that is almost invisible to their parents.

Although Adolescence is powerful and well made, it’s distressing and far from easy to watch, so it is surprising to discover that it’s now the second most popular English-language Netflix show ever, overtaking crowd-pleasing entertainments like Bridgerton and Stranger Things. (Only the Addams Family spin-off Wednesday has more views.) Intense public concern about the online radicalization of young men may be one reason for its enormous reach. As traditional forms of masculine socialization (home, school, faith groups, and formal associations like sports teams and youth groups) are replaced or subverted by online culture, attention has begun to focus on the influences—and influencers—molding the next generation of men.

In the show one of the teachers asks the detectives what an incel is. “The involuntary celibate stuff,” she is told. “The Andrew Tate shite.” Tate, a former MMA fighter and accused sex trafficker, is the only actual manosphere influencer named in Adolescence. Famous for his exhortations to dominate and control women, he stands in for a vast and varied cosmos of Internet creators who make content that is consumed by young men, on subjects ranging from fitness to cars, personal finance, sports, and gambling. Jamie, it is implied, has internalized the message of Tate and other influencers that women are inferior, and this warped view of human relationships is in some way to blame for his crime.

Tate is far from alone in promoting a deeply misogynistic worldview. A popular YouTube format pits a single male host (or sometimes a crew) against a larger number of young female guests, who are berated for their sexual behavior and used as punch lines for jokes. The format is exemplified by the Fresh and Fit podcast, hosted by Walter Weekes and Myron Gaines. Fresh and Fit bills itself as “the #1 men’s self improvement podcast in the WORLD! We provide the TRUTH to men on females, finances, and fitness.” Alongside interviews about crypto and creatine, videos can be found with titles like “Myron Exposed The DOWNFALL Of Women With VIRAL Clip!” and “How Women Try To USE Men As Their Plan B!” Like many manosphere creators, they appear to be committed Trump supporters. When they’re bored of sexual politics, viewers can also watch a street debate hosted by Gaines, a former ICE agent, called “Deport Them ALL. No ‘Juan’ Is Above The Law. Change My Mind.”

The confluence of crypto, fitness, right-wing populism, and misogyny is not accidental. This is a culture that sees all human relations as forms of hypercapitalist competition, a zero-sum game in which some must be losers for others to be winners. A concept that circulates widely in the manosphere is “sexual market value” (SMV), a composite score based on physical attractiveness, financial resources, and other factors. For men this includes ambition and social status, for women youth and fidelity. Underlying some of this is a popularized evolutionary psychology that asserts that many social outcomes are the result of “hardwired” biological factors. A guest on Fresh and Fit, the author of a book titled The Rational Male, displays a chart showing male and female SMV as bell curves. The peak age for women is twenty-three, for men around thirty-eight.

“That ten year span” between eighteen and twenty-eight, he explains, “is a crucial time in a woman’s life. That is when she’s most able to optimize the alpha fucks side of hypergamy.” Gaines agrees: “She’s in the strongest negotiating position to optimize her options.” “Everything past that,” explains the guest, “from twenty-eight all the way till she’s in the grave? All of that is spent on the beta bucks side of things. That’s where she’s looking for long-term security.” Central to SMV theory is the idea that for women there is a tradeoff between “alpha fucks” and “beta bucks.” Women, the thinking goes, prefer sex with alpha males but will use reliable “beta” males for financial security.

The third episode of Adolescence takes place seven months after the murder; it is an extraordinary two-hander between Cooper and Erin Doherty, who plays Briony Ariston, a child psychologist visiting Jamie to make a pretrial assessment. It’s Briony’s fifth and final visit, and she has established a relationship with the boy. Away from his family, we see a different side of him, sly, intelligent, sarcastic, and boiling with barely controlled anger. Asked to describe his father and grandfather, he answers simply, “Men.” He’s angered by the demand to talk about what masculinity means to him: “It just feels like a trick.” Later he lies, claiming to have had sexual experiences he’s only fantasized about, including with Katie, his victim.

Eventually he explodes, throwing a chair and standing threateningly over Briony. In the face of all the evidence, he denies that he killed Katie but admits to asking her out. She was going through a period of unpopularity. “Everyone was calling her slag, you know, or flat,” he says. “I thought that when she was, like, that weak, she might like me.” Even then he was rebuffed, and it is suggested that this humiliation led him to violence. Finally Briony, who has maintained her professional calm, begins to find it hard to hide her disgust. She tells Jamie that she has completed her work, so this will be their last meeting. He finds this impossible to accept. “Do you like me?” he asks desperately. “What did you think about me, then?” Eventually his rage takes over again, and he is forcibly removed.

That plaintive question, “Do you like me?,” underlies almost all manosphere discourse. The 80/20 rule mentioned in Adolescence is a vulgarization of the Pareto principle, initially formulated through the observation that 80 percent of the land in Italy was owned by 20 percent of its people. This distribution has been shown to be roughly generalizable across a large class of phenomena—as a rule of thumb, 80 percent of consequences come from 20 percent of causes. Eighty percent of health care costs are incurred by 20 percent of patients, 80 percent of computer crashes are caused by 20 percent of bugs, and so on. Men who accept the SMV concept and do not consider themselves to be in the upper 20 percent of the distribution can experience feelings of profound hopelessness. In the 2000s notorious online communities such as /r9k/ and MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) spawned incel culture, made up of men bitter about what they saw as their permanent exclusion from sexual community. This has led to a number of mass shootings and other violent incidents, as incels indulge their sense of grievance against women, often randomly chosen as representatives of a class that had rejected them.

A more widespread male reaction to fear of rejection is the drive to self-optimize. The psychologist and conservative activist Jordan Peterson has gained a huge following through his homilies urging young men to buck up and tidy their rooms. Elsewhere SMV and other kinds of spurious metrication, reminiscent of nineteenth-century anthropometry, have given rise to the “looksmaxxing” subculture, in which young men swap tips to improve their facial attractiveness, using everything from skin care products to painful jaw exercises and extreme plastic surgery. I recently tested a version of ChatGPT that specializes in looksmaxxing advice. It offered to rate a picture of me based on “facial harmony and symmetry; jawline, cheekbones, and chin structure; skin quality; eye region and brow area; hairline and overall potential.”

Rating me 6.8 (“above average, solid base with clear room for enhancement”), it offered some compliments but warned that I was “slightly soft around the mandible area” and could benefit from “mewing daily to engage your maxilla and strengthen jawline projection.” Mewing is an unproven technique for improving facial structure named after John Mew, a British orthodontist who was stripped of his license by the General Dental Council for promoting his method. It involves pressing the tongue to the roof of the mouth for extended periods of time. Other popular methods to get a stronger jawline include “thumb pulling” (hooking the thumbs under the palate to promote “forward growth”), biting on towels, and even “bone smashing,” which involves striking the face with a hammer. Some users have reportedly been advised to undergo surgical procedures. At a time when gender-affirming care for trans people is under attack, it seems notable that cis men are seeking gender affirmation in unprecedented numbers.

The final episode of Adolescence takes place on Eddie Miller’s fiftieth birthday, a few weeks before Jamie is due to go to trial. Eddie’s wife, Manda (Christine Tremarco), is making him a fried breakfast, and they seem to be doing well, until they discover that someone has spray-painted a misspelled “NONSE” across the side of his van. It becomes apparent that this is only the latest in a series of attacks. Eddie tries to “get back the day,” planning a family outing. After all, “we’ve done nothing wrong, have we?” The question lingers in the air. What responsibility do the Miller parents bear for the actions of their son? At the hardware store, looking for something to remove the spray paint, Eddie is assisted by a young conspiracy theorist who recognizes him, telling him that he believes Jamie is innocent and Katie’s death was staged. The encounter sends Eddie into a tailspin, and when he sees one of the boys who tagged his van, he grabs him by the collar and throws him to the ground.

The women who love Eddie—his wife and daughter—cower in fear as he throws a can of blue paint at his van, chaotically trying to cover up the graffiti. Later Jamie calls from detention to say that he is going to plead guilty. At home Eddie and Manda talk about what went wrong in their family. There is, we discover, an inheritance of violence. Eddie’s father beat him. “I just wanted to be better,” Eddie says, “but am I?” Both parents recognize that they made a mistake in allowing Jamie unsupervised use of a computer. They should have been more involved in his life. The drama ends with Eddie upstairs in Jamie’s bedroom. With the boy gone, he tucks a teddy bear in to bed. “I’m sorry son. I should have done better,” he sobs.

Masculinity and its discontents are at the heart of the culture war that now drives politics across the developed world. In a common conservative narrative, young men (in particular young white men) are a despised and persecuted group, floundering in a world of feminized authority in which their traditional skills and strengths are no longer valued. Whatever grain of truth there may be in this (proponents point to the decline of blue-collar jobs, low test scores, and high suicide rates), it is undoubtedly the case that young men also form the vanguard of an aggressively resurgent patriarchy that seeks to return women and girls to a state of sexual and social subordination. Much of the discourse around masculinity seems driven by ressentiment, the sour grapes of a caste unable to accept that its superiority is no longer taken for granted and that it must compete in a world whose conditions are not rigged in its favor. The Trump administration has paid attention and is doing everything in its power to reinstate the old order.

One frequently proposed solution to the “crisis of masculinity” is a return to tradition. Boys should be formally initiated into manhood, with its qualities of strength and self-sacrifice, and shown how to use their masculine authority in a positive or controlled way. The “men’s movement” that arose in response to second-wave feminism tried to excavate an archetypal masculinity from fairy tales and folklore, an approach exemplified by Robert Bly’s Iron John (1990), which used one of the tales collected by the Brothers Grimm to provide a “hero’s journey” narrative about coming to full masculine self-presence. In a more farcical mode, the Männerbund campiness of the Proud Boys might also be understood in this light. Their anthem, taken from the musical Aladdin, is an address to a mother, promising to make her “proud of [her] boy.” They have an absurd initiation ritual in which the pledge is pummeled while he tries to remember the names of breakfast cereals. To rise through the ranks they have to engage in street fights and refrain from masturbation.

Even if beating up leftists in a Fred Perry shirt or beating your chest in a sweat lodge doesn’t seem like a functional solution to the problems of contemporary masculinity, the desires these activities purport to fulfill—for purpose and sociability—should still be taken seriously. The online world of twenty-first-century young men is a loveless wilderness of “zero trust” interactions and constant hustle. It’s a milieu that venerates the successful huckster, the alpha male who can get one over on others, whether by rug-pulling crypto rivals or tricking a woman into having sex. It’s a place where the weak go to the wall, where only a mental “grindset” and relentless self-optimization will keep your head above water. In the churn of online gambling, AI agents, drop-shipping scams, biohacking, e-sports, and meme coins, the winner will be the most ruthless exploiter, the one who can maxx most effectively, grabbing resources and leaving the losers—the “sub 5” scoring betas, the worn-out OnlyFans models who stupidly wasted their best years—in the dust. A nine-to-five is for suckers. The man who discovers “one simple trick” will be victorious. It is a bleak and lonely place, and no one feels that more than teenage boys.